Open Heart

One

The incision was ready for stitching now. The anesthetist slipped the mask impatiently from his face, and as if the big respirator with its changing, flickering numbers were no longer enough for him, he stood up, gently took the still hand to feel the living pulse, smiled affectionately at the naked sleeping woman, and winked at me. But I ignored his wink, because my eyes were fixed on Professor Hishin, to see if he would finish the suturing himself or ask one of us to take over. I felt a tremor in my heart. I knew I was going to be passed over again, and my rival, the second resident, was going to be given the job. With a pang I watched the movements of the scrub nurse as she wiped away the last drops of blood from the long straight cut gaping in the woman’s stomach. I could have scored an easy success, I thought bitterly, by completing the operation with a really elegant suture. But it didn’t look as if Hishin was about to hand over the job to anyone. Even though he had been at work for three straight hours, he now rummaged, with the same supreme concentration with which he had begun the operation, through the pile of needles to find what he wanted. Finally he found the right needle and returned it angrily to the nurse to be sterilized again. Did he really owe it to this woman to sew her up with his own hands? Or perhaps there had been some under-the-table payment? I withdrew a little from the operating table, consoling myself with the thought that this time I had been spared humiliation at least, even though the other resident, who had also apparently grasped the surgeon’s intention to perform the suturing himself, maintained his alert stance beside the open abdomen.

At this point there was a stir next to the big door, and a curly mane of gray hair together with an excitedly waving hand appeared at one of the portholes. The anesthetist recognized the man and hurried to open the door. But now, having invaded the wing without a doctor’s gown or mask, the man seemed at least to hesitate before entering the operating room itself and called out from the doorway in a lively, confident voice, “Haven’t you finished yet?” The surgeon glanced over his shoulder, gave him a friendly wave, and said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He bent over the operating table again, but after a few minutes stopped and started looking around. His eyes met mine, and he seemed about to say something to me, but then the scrub nurse, who always knew how to read her master’s mind, sensed his hesitation and said softly but firmly, “There’s no problem, Professor Hishin, Dr. Vardi can finish up.” The surgeon immediately nodded in agreement, handed the needle to the resident standing next to him, and issued final instructions to the nurses. He pulled off his mask with a vigorous movement, held out his hands to the young nurse, who removed his gloves, and before disappearing from the room repeated, “If there are any problems, I’ll be with Lazar in administration.”

I turned to the operating table, choking back my anger and envy so that they wouldn’t burst out in a look or gesture. That’s it then, I thought in despair. If the women are on his side too, there’s no doubt which of us will be chosen to stay on in the department and which will have to begin wandering from hospital to hospital looking for a job at the end of the month. This is clearly the end of my career in the surgical department. But I took up my position calmly next to my colleague, who had already exchanged the needle Hishin handed him for another one; I was ready to share in the responsibility for the last stage of the operation, watching the incision close rapidly under his strong, dexterous fingers. If the incision had been in my hands, I would have tried to suture it more neatly, not to mar by so much as a millimeter the original contours of the pale female stomach, which suddenly aroused a profound compassion in me. And already the anesthestist Dr. Nakash, was getting ready for the “landing,” as he called it, preparing to take out the tubes, removing the infusion needle from the vein, humming merrily and keeping a constant watch on the surgeon’s hands, waiting for permission to return the patient to normal breathing. Still absorbed in the insult to me, I felt the touch of a light hand. A young nurse who had quietly entered the room told me in a whisper that the head of the department was waiting for me in Lazar’s office. “Now?” I hesitated. And the other resident, who had overheard the whisper, urged me, “Go, go, don’t worry, I’ll finish up here myself.”

Without removing my mask, I hurried out of the shining darkness of the operating room and past the laughter of the doctors and nurses in the tearoom, released the press-button of the big door sealing off the wing, and emerged into the waiting room, which was bathed in afternoon sunlight. When I stopped to take off my mask, a young man and an elderly woman immediately recognized and approached me. “How is she? How is she?”

“She’s fine.” I smiled. “The operation’s over, they’ll bring her out soon.”

“But how is she? How is she?” they persisted. “She’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, she’s been born again.” I myself was surprised by the phrase — the operation hadn’t been at all dangerous — and I turned away from them and continued on my way, still in my pale green bloodstained surgical gown, the mask hanging around my neck, the cap on my head, rustling the sterile plastic shoe covers. Catching the stares following me here and there, I went up in the elevator to the big lobby and turned into the administrative wing, where I had never been invited before, and finally gave my name to one of the secretaries. She inquired in a friendly way as to my preferences in coffee and led me through an imposing empty conference lounge into a large, curtained, and very uninstitutionally furnished room — a sofa and armchairs, well-tended plants in big pots. The head of the department, Professor Hishin, was lounging in one of the armchairs, going through some papers. He gave me a quick, friendly smile and said to the hospital director, who was standing next to him, “Here he is, the ideal man for you.”

Mr. Lazar shook my hand firmly and very warmly and introduced himself, while Hishin gave me encouraging looks, ignoring the wounding way he had slighted me previously and hinting to me discreetly to take off my cap and remove the plastic covers from my shoes. “The operation’s over,” he said in his faint Hungarian accent, his eyes twinkling with that tireless irony of his, “and even you can rest now.” As I removed the plastic covers and crammed the cap into my pocket, Hishin began telling Lazar the story of my life, with which he was quite familiar, to my surprise. Mr. Lazar continued examining me with burning eyes, as if his fate depended on me. Finally, Hishin finished by saying, “Even though he’s dressed as a surgeon, don’t make any mistake, he’s first and foremost an excellent internist. That’s his real strength, and the only reason he insists on remaining in our department is because he believes, completely wrongly, that what lies at the pinnacle of medicine is a butcher’s knife.” As he spoke he waved an imaginary knife in his hand and cut off his head. Then he gave a friendly laugh — as if to soften the final blow he had just delivered to my future in the surgical department — reached out his hand, placed it on my knee, and asked gently, in a tone of unprecedented intimacy, “Have you ever been to India?”

“India?” I asked in astonishment. “India? Why India, of all places?” But Hishin laughed, enjoying his little surprise. “Yes, India. Lazar’s looking for a doctor to accompany him on a little trip to India.”

“To India?” I exclaimed again, still unable to take it in. “Yes, yes, to India. There’s a certain sick young woman who needs a doctor to accompany her home to Israel, and she happens to be in India.”

“Sick with what?” I asked immediately. “Nothing terrible,” said Hishin reassuringly, “but a little tricky nevertheless. Acute hepatitis, apparently B, which got a little out of hand and led to deterioration. And even though her condition seems to have stabilized, we all decided that it would be best to bring the young lady home as soon as possible. With all due respect to Indian medicine, we can still give her the best care here.”

“But who is she? Who is this woman?” I asked with rising petulance. “She’s my daughter.” The administrative director finally broke his silence. “She left on a tour of the Far East six months ago, and last month she caught this jaundice, and she had to be hospitalized in a town called Gaya, in East India, somewhere between Calcutta and New Delhi. At first she apparently didn’t want to worry us and she tried to keep it a secret, but a friend who was with her there came home two days ago and brought us a letter with a few details about her illness. Even though everyone’s assured us that there’s no danger, I want her home before any complications set in. We thought it would be a good idea to take a doctor along. It shouldn’t take more than twelve days, maximum two weeks, and that’s only because she’s stuck out there in Gaya, which is a little off the beaten track as far as trains and flights are concerned. To tell you the truth, I tried at first to entice your professor, who’s never been to India and could have done with a rest, but you know him as well as I do, he’s always too busy — and if he has got any time to spare, he prefers to go to Europe, not to Asia. But he promised to provide us with an ideal substitute.”

Ideal for what, I asked myself gloomily, to drag a girl with hepatitis around India on dilapidated old trains? But I held my tongue and turned to look at the secretary, who came into the room with a story about someone who had been waiting a long time to see the director. “Just don’t move,” commanded Lazar, “I’ll get rid of him in a minute,” and he disappeared, leaving the Hishin and me facing each other. I knew that Hishin had already sensed my disappointment and resentment of this strange proposal, because he suddenly rose to his feet and stood towering over me and started talking to me gently. “Look, I can see that you’re not enthusiastic about the idea of suddenly dashing off to India like this, but in your place I’d accept the offer. Not only for the sake of an interesting free trip to a place you might never have the chance to go to again, but for the opportunity to get to know the man himself. Lazar is someone who can help you if you want to go on working at this hospital, in internal medicine or any other department. The hospital is run from this room, and Lazar holds the reins. Apart from which, he also happens to be a nice, decent man. So listen to me and don’t turn him down. You should go. What have you got to lose? Even if all you get out of it is a pleasant adventure. And besides, there’s not much to do for hepatitis. I don’t believe the young lady has managed to do any real harm to her liver or kidneys, but even if she has, it’s not the end of the world — the body will heal itself in the end. All you have to do is watch out for sudden hemorrhages, prevent the glucose level from falling, and of course keep her from becoming febrile. I’ll collect a few good articles on the subject for you, and tomorrow we’ll consult Professor Levine from internal medicine. Hepatitis is his baby — he knows everything there is to know about it, including things nobody needs to know. And we’ll put together a nice little kit for you as well, so you’ll be ready for anything that might crop up. And another thing, you can say good-bye to them in Europe if you like and take a vacation. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw your file — in the whole year you’ve been with us you’ve only taken one day’s leave.”

So he can’t wait to get rid of me, I thought miserably. He can’t even wait one more month till the end of my trial year. It was unbelievable. And then Lazar came back. “Well?” he asked with a broad executive smile. “It’s agreed?” But Hishin immediately and sensibly slowed him down. “Just a minute, Lazar, what is this? A man has the right to think things over.”

“Of course, of course,” replied Lazar, and glanced at his watch. “But till when? There are so many technical arrangements to make, and I planned on leaving the day after tomorrow, to catch the Tuesday flight from Rome.” But he must have sensed the threat of refusal in my continuing silence, since he stopped pressuring me and invited me to his home that evening to talk over the details and to give me time to make up my mind. It would have been churlish to refuse the invitation, and besides, I felt that these two assertive men wouldn’t allow me to start resisting them now. As I was making my way out of the room, address and directions in hand, Lazar called after me, “Wait a minute. I forgot to ask, are you married?” When I shook my head, his spirits immediately soared; he turned to Hishin with raised eyebrows and asked, “In that case, what has he got to think about?” and the two of them laughed good-humoredly.

The afternoon turned very rainy, and as I hurried from bed to bed in the intensive care unit, battling to stop a sudden hemorrhage in the young woman who had been operated on that morning, I made up my mind to refuse. If it was only for the sake of some weird trip to India that I had suddenly become ideal in the eyes of the head of the department, why should I give up the last month of rounds to which I was entitled? Every day I was learning new and fascinating things, every minute in the operating room thrilled me, even if I was only watching. What could I possibly gain from a sudden trip to India in the middle of winter? But as dusk descended and I arrived at my apartment wet and tired, prepared to call Lazar and give my decision, I had second thoughts. Why insult a man who might be useful to me one day? The least I could do was listen politely to the details before finally turning him down. I hurried to take a shower and change my clothes. At eight o’clock I rode north to an apartment block standing in a broad avenue of oak trees rustling in the wind and the rain. I covered my motorcycle with its tarpaulin, but when I saw that the rain was coming down harder I changed my mind and dragged it under the foundation pillars of the building. On the top floor, in a large, elegant apartment, I was impatiently greeted by Lazar, dressed in a loose red flannel shirt which made him look bulkier and older. “But how could I have forgotten to tell you to bring your passport?” he greeted me plaintively. “Is it valid? When was the last time you went abroad?” The last time I had been abroad had been two years earlier, on a short trip to Europe after graduating from medical school. I didn’t have the faintest idea whether my passport was still valid, and I tried with an embarrassed smile to fend off his enthusiasm and to indicate that although I had kept the appointment, I was still very undecided and had come only to hear him out again and think it over. “What’s there to think about?” cried Lazar in astonishment and a kind of childish anger. “But if you insist, come and see where I want to take you, and don’t panic; even if it looks like the end of the world on the map, we can make it there and back in two weeks, and even take in a few sights on the way, because I don’t want to turn the trip into one long via dolorosa either.” And he pulled me into a large, attractive living room. A boy of about seventeen in a pale blue school uniform shirt, very like his father except that his hair was long and soft, immediately stood up and left the room.

On a low glass table lay a large open atlas, with photo albums and travel guides scattered around it. “You’re not the only one who was taken by surprise,” Lazar apologized. “It fell on us like a bolt out of the blue when that girl knocked on the door yesterday with the letter. But first come and see where we’re going. Here’s New Delhi, here’s Bombay, here’s Calcutta, a kind of triangle, and here’s Gaya, a remote but holy town surrounded by temples. Tomorrow I’m going to Jerusalem to meet someone who spent several months there a few years ago, and after that I’ll have a clearer picture of what to expect. But just a minute, before we go any further let me introduce you to my wife.”

A woman walked into the room, a plump brunette of about forty-five, of medium height, her hair gathered into a rather untidy knot on top of her head, her eyes flashing me a frank, vivid smile behind her glasses. I stood up and her husband introduced me to her. She nodded affably and immediately sat down opposite me with a regal movement, crossing long legs that didn’t match the heaviness of her arms and shoulders, and began watching her husband, who went on drawing lines on the map of India and calculating times. As I tried to follow the route he was mapping out I sensed her appraising me, and when I looked up at her, her eyes suddenly lit up again in the same warm, lively, generous smile, and she nodded her head slightly in a gesture of approval. Then, as if she sensed my gnawing doubts, she suddenly interrupted her husband and addressed me directly. “Do you really think you’ll be able to leave your work at the hospital and go abroad for more than two weeks?” Her husband, who was very put out by this question, answered crossly in my place. “First of all, why do you already say more than two weeks? Where do you get that from? It’ll be less. I have to be back on the Sunday after next, don’t forget. And second, why shouldn’t he be able to leave the hospital? He can leave it for as long as he likes. Hishin gave him carte blanche — he can take it as leave due to him, if he likes, or as ordinary working days and we’ll find a way to make them up.” But his wife immediately protested. “Why at the expense of his leave? Why should he sacrifice his vacation for us?” And again she looked directly at me, and said in a clear, firm voice, which did not suit her plump, soft looks, “Please find out what payment you’re entitled to for your services on a trip like this. We will gladly compensate you for your efforts.”

Suddenly I felt stifled in the elegant, spacious apartment. The two middle-aged people sitting opposite me looked powerful and influential. “It’s not a question of money”—I began to blush—“and it really is true that I’ve got a lot of leave coming, but if I go away now, even for two weeks, it’s as if I’ve already finished my trial year in surgery, and I don’t want to miss a single day there.”

“In the surgical department?” asked the woman.

“Yes,” I replied, “I started in surgery, and that’s where I want to continue.”

“In surgery?” said the woman, looking at her husband in surprise. “We thought you were transferring to internal medicine or some other department, because Hishin told us that you weren’t going to continue in surgery.” A tremor of real pain passed through me on hearing the final verdict on my future spoken so casually by this strange woman. It wasn’t even a question of a position being available, I now realized, but a clear professional judgment against me. And Hishin’s tall figure seemed to loom up behind the woman, who never stopped examining me with her smiling eyes. “Who said I wanted to be an internist?” I burst into a bitter snort of laughter. “Even if Hishin has reservations, I’m still not giving up surgery. There are other hospitals, if not in Israel then abroad — England, for instance — and you can get excellent experience there too.”

“England?” repeated Mrs. Lazar, and her friendly smile disappeared. “Yes. My parents came here from England, I’m a British citizen, and I won’t have any problems doing my residency there.” Lazar, who was uninterested in the argument between me and his wife, suddenly beamed. “So I was right. I saw in your file that your parents were born in England, and I wondered if you were a British citizen too. That will help you on the trip to India. I suppose your English is perfect.”

“Perfect? I wouldn’t say so,” I said coldly, again trying to rebuff the single-minded enthusiasm of the man. “I was born and educated here, and my English is the same as everybody else’s — in other words, far from perfect. I usually speak Hebrew to my parents too, but of course, since I often hear them speaking English to each other, I’m fluent — not perfect, but fluent.” Lazar appeared more than satisfied with fluency and gave me a smile of undisguised gratification; it seemed that nothing could now detract from my virtues as a candidate for the trip to India, and he turned to his wife and raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? You haven’t offered our guest anything to drink! We’ve been talking so much we’ve forgotten our duties as hosts.” But the woman made no move to rise from the sofa. Instead she smiled at her husband and said, “Why don’t you make us some strong Turkish coffee? We’re all exhausted.”

Lazar jumped to his feet. “You don’t object to Turkish coffee?” His wife turned to me, as if to dare me to object; then she took out a slender cigarette and lit it. When her husband disappeared into the kitchen, her eyes flashed again with the same bright smile, and she leaned toward me and began talking intimately in her soft but very clear voice. “I feel that you’re still having doubts. That’s natural. Because really, why should anybody be ready to drop everything from one day to the next and go to India? And if you feel that we’re trying to put pressure on you and it offends you, you’re absolutely right. But try to understand that we’re upset too. We have to bring our daughter home quickly; the disease — as you know better than I do — is exhausting and debilitating. According to the girl who brought the letter, her condition has already deteriorated, and everyone who’s been consulted strongly recommends taking a qualified doctor with us. Before you arrived, Hishin phoned and warned us not to let you wriggle out of it, because in his opinion you’re the ideal candidate.”

“Ideal again.” I interrupted her with an angry laugh that welled up inside me. “Hishin’s exaggerating. In what sense ideal? Ideal for what? Maybe, as your husband said, because of my British passport.” The woman laughed in surprise. “Of course not! Naturally, it won’t hurt to have a British passport in India, but that’s not what Hishin meant, he’s really very fond of you. He spoke of your quiet manner, your friendliness, your excellent clinical perception, and especially of your deep concern for your patients.” She spoke warmly, passionately, her words clear and eloquent, but I was aware of a certain hypocrisy and exaggeration too. It was impossible to tell if Hishin had actually heaped all that praise on my head or if she was inventing compliments to seduce me. I lowered my eyes, but I didn’t know how to stop her. In the end I let my hands fall wearily to my sides and asked, “How old is she, this girl of yours?”

“Girl?” The mother laughed. “She’s not a girl. She’s twenty-five years old. She has spent two years studying at the university. Here, this is a picture she sent two months ago, before she got sick.” She picked up an envelope of coarse green paper, from which she extracted two snapshots of a young woman with a pretty, delicate face. In one of them the woman was standing alone against the background of a vast river in which naked figures were crouching, and in the second she was near the entrance of a building which looked like an Indian temple, a boy and a girl on either side of her, their arms wrapped around her.

When I got home I decided, in spite of the late hour, to phone my parents in Jerusalem and ask their opinion. To my surprise, both my mother, who was still awake, and my father, who was awakened by the ringing phone, thought that I should on no account turn down such a proposal from the head of the hospital. “He’s only the administrative director,” I kept explaining, but my father was adamant. “All the more so,” he insisted, beginning to speak English in his sleepiness. “Those are the people with the real power, because they’re permanent fixtures, and the others come and go around them. Even your Professor Hishin might disappear one fine day for one reason or another, and it won’t do you any harm to have the support of the administrative head of the hospital in the future.”

“That’s not the way things work, Dad,” I complained wearily. “It’s not so simple.” But my parents were resolute in their enthusiasm. “Just don’t be in such a hurry to refuse — the hospital’s not running away, and you’ve worked so hard this year that you deserve a vacation.”

“In India?” I said sarcastically. “What kind of a vacation can I have there?” But now my mother began praising the country. She had an uncle who had served there between the two world wars, and she remembered that he was in love with India and never stopped describing its charms. “That was a completely different India,” I said, trying to cool her ardor, but she persevered: “Nothing in the world ever becomes completely different, and it was once full of magic and beauty — something must have remained, and for such a short trip it will be quite enough.” I was surprised by my parents’ reaction. I had assumed that their constant anxiety would make them try to talk me out of the idea, and instead they were joining in the pressure to make me go. “I can’t see what kind of vacation I’ll have on a trip like this,” I grumbled into the phone, “and I don’t need a vacation now, either. My work at the hospital’s so fascinating I don’t want to miss a single day. In any case, I’ll think it over tonight. I promised to give them a final answer tomorrow morning.” I tried to put an end to the conversation. But my parents wouldn’t let me go. “Even if the idea of the trip doesn’t attract you at the moment,” argued my father, “people here are asking for your help — it’s an opportunity to do a good deed.”

“A good deed?” I laughed. “There’s no question of a good deed here — they want to pay me a fee for the trip. It’s got nothing to do with good deeds, and anyway, why me? They’ve got the whole hospital at their disposal; they could easily find some other doctor to go with them and bring their daughter back for them.”

But of this I was not certain. When I had promised the Lazars a final answer early in the morning, they had repeated that if I refused, they wouldn’t have time to find and persuade another suitable doctor from the hospital.

“This is a chance for you to experience another world and refresh yourself,” said my mother. Recently she and my father had been worried about how absorbed I was in my work, fearing that I was in danger of becoming a slave to it.

“Another world? Perhaps,” I replied heavily, pulling the telephone onto my lap and falling exhausted onto my bed, “but will I be able to refresh myself there?” My parents were silent, as if I had finally succeeded in conveying to them across the distance that separated us the full weight of my weariness. “When would you have to leave?” my mother asked gently. “Right away.” I closed my eyes and covered myself with the blanket. “They want to fly to Rome the day after tomorrow.”

“The day after tomorrow?” repeated my astonished mother, who had not realized the urgency of the trip. “What did you think? It’s serious. There’s a very sick girl out there. Who knows what really happened to her? That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, it’s not exactly a pleasure trip.” And suddenly I felt the pressure lifting on the other end of the line. “In that case, we really should think twice. Perhaps you’re right. We’ll all sleep on it, and talk again in the morning.” Now I was sorry that I had called them. I knew that their short night’s sleep would be even shorter tonight, because of their inexhaustible appetite for discussing me and my plans. In the first place I was their only child. Now, more than ever, I’d begun to worry them as an icicle of lonely bachelorhood had begun to grow inside me. I was only twenty-nine years old, but I noted with pity their attempts to steer me toward a life outside the hospital walls, prompted in part by their guilt for having put so much pressure on me to devote myself to my studies. And sure enough, early the next morning when I called, my father said, “We stayed up all night thinking about the trip to India, and we’ve changed our minds. It will only exhaust you, and you don’t need to go.” But to their astonishment I told them that only half an hour before I had agreed to go, and asked them to find my British passport and take down a good suitcase for me.

Instead of pleasure and satisfaction, I now heard only tension and anxiety in their voices, as if all that talk the night before had referred not to an actual journey but to a theoretical one. Was it because of them that I had changed my mind? my mother wanted to know. I reassured them that I had thought it over again myself and decided that I should go. Then I gave them the unpleasant news that Hishin preferred the other resident to me. Who knew, maybe his hands really were better than mine. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Hishin prefers the other resident to you?” my father said incredulously. “How can that be possible, Benjy?” And my heart contracted painfully at their certain disappointment. “You’d be surprised at how possible it can be,” I said with deliberate lightheartedness. “Never mind, it’s not so terrible, and actually this might be a good time to go somewhere far away, where I can think about what to do next.” The truth was that I actually felt relieved, as if something had been liberated inside me. From the minute I had agreed to join the Lazars, at six-thirty in the morning, it was as if the excitement of the journey had swept the anger and the envy out of my heart. Lazar’s wife had answered the phone, and for a moment I failed to recognize her voice, which was younger and fresher than she had seemed the night before, and although she did not seem surprised by my decision — as if she had known that I would come around — she thanked me repeatedly, and asked me if I was quite sure. But then her husband lost patience and snatched the phone from her and began shooting out instructions with terrific efficiency. He was going to Jerusalem to meet some India expert at the Foreign Office and to get letters of recommendation and introduction, leaving his wife and me to conclude the necessary arrangements. “And what about the hospital?” I asked. “They’re still expecting me in the operating room this morning — there are operations scheduled.” But Lazar was unequivocal. As far as the hospital was concerned, I could leave it to him; it was his turf, and Hishin had given his express consent. “No,” he rebuked me firmly, “from this minute on, please stop thinking about the hospital and devote yourself exclusively to making arrangements for the trip. Time is short. This afternoon we’ll find time to sit down with the doctors and the head pharmacist and discuss the medical aspects. All that’s no problem. The main thing — I almost forgot to ask — is your Israeli passport valid?”

No, my Israeli passport wasn’t valid. I had checked it the night before. Lazar gave me instructions on how to get to his wife’s office in the center of town. His wife, a lawyer by profession and a partner in a big law firm, would take care of it. I barely recognized her when she came out of her office to meet me, dressed in black, wearing high heels, her face made up. Again she thanked me for my decision, with a friendliness that struck me as artificial and exaggerated. I handed her my passport, and she immediately passed it to one of the girls sitting in the frenetic front office. Then, she took out her checkbook, signed a number of blank checks, which she gave me, and said, “Here, this is Hannah, who’s going to devote herself to you this morning and get you ready for the trip.” In the travel agency, surrounded by posters of glorious tourist sites, I sensed a sudden joyful wanderlust burgeoning inside me. Two of the travel agents put themselves at our service to speed things up. First of all, they informed Hannah and me that travelers to India had to present certificates of vaccination against cholera and malaria to obtain a visa, and told us not to forget to tell Lazar and his wife. “His wife?” I asked in surprise. “Why his wife?” But the travel agents’ records clearly showed that the previous afternoon Mrs. Lazar had asked them to book her on a flight too, with an open ticket. “She probably wasn’t sure if I’d agree to go,” I tried to explain, “and so she asked you to get a ticket for her just to be on the safe side.”

“You may be right,” they replied politely, “but don’t forget to tell her about the vaccinations anyhow.” It was then I sensed the first shadow falling on the happiness that had just begun to awaken in me. I had been imagining a vigorous, perhaps even rather adventurous expedition undertaken by two men, who in spite of an age difference of twenty years might still be able to enjoy the kind of fine friendship that grows up in a small army reserve unit. But if Lazar’s wife was going to tag along, I reflected in concern, mightn’t the whole thing turn into a tedious, leaden trip with a couple of middle-aged parents?

But could I still back out? I wondered, sitting late that morning opposite a bank clerk and waiting for the foreign currency, my now valid passport in the slim, strong hands of Hannah, who had spent the morning leading me efficiently from office to office and organizing everything for me as if I suffered from some kind of handicap. Why on earth was Lazar’s wife going? Was it really out of concern for her daughter’s health, or did the situation require the strengthening of a parental delegation for some reason? I still hoped that Mrs. Lazar would decide not to go at the last minute. I didn’t like her constant concern and warm smiles. She could only be a drag on the speed and ease of our travels, I thought as I parted with her office clerk, taking back my passport and rejecting, with some mortification, her offer to accompany me to the Health Service to receive the necessary vaccinations, and perhaps to pay for them too.

I mounted my Honda and rode to the place, where I found the door of the vaccination room sealed shut because of a nurses’ strike. As I wandered around the corridor looking for a solution, I was recognized by an old friend from medical school, who had dropped out in his fourth year because of an involvement with a girl he later married and who was now working here as the medical secretary of the district physician. He bounded gleefully toward me, and when he heard about the trip to India, he was very much in favor of it. I told him that I would be paid a fee on top of my travel expenses, and he became so excited that he slapped me on the back in congratulations and said with undisguised envy, “You’re a clever bastard, a quiet, clever bastard. And you’re a lucky bastard too — you always have been. What wouldn’t I give to change places with you?” Immediately, he rushed off to find the key, ushered me into the nurses’ room, opened a big glass cupboard, pointed at the rows of rainbow-colored vaccine bottles, and said jokingly, “Our bar is at your service, sir. You can be vaccinated here against any disease you like, the weirdest and most wonderful diseases you ever heard of.” And while I studied the exotic labels on the little bottles, he took a sterile syringe out of a drawer and offered to inject me himself; he was two-thirds a doctor, after all. “You’re not afraid of me?” he cried with incomprehensible hilarity, waving the syringe in his hand. But I suddenly drew back; the empty room filled me with an inexplicable anxiety, as if I missed the reassuring presence of reliable nurses, whose quiet and careful movements always calmed me. “No,” I said, “you’ll only hurt me. Give me the syringes and I’ll find someone to do it for me at the hospital. Just stamp the certificate.” And he gave in unwillingly. He found a yellow vaccination certificate, stamped it, and began dragging out a long, boring conversation, trying to recall the names of erstwhile fellow-students, wallowing in nostalgia for his wasted student days, inviting me to go and have a cup of coffee. When we got to the dreary little cafeteria and sat among the indolent government clerks, next to a big window which raindrops were beginning to streak, I thought about the exhausting day ahead of me and how I was going to find time to say good-bye to my parents. I listened absent-mindedly, with uncharacteristic passivity, to my companion justifying his academic failures with all kinds of tortuous arguments and complaining about the unfairness of his teachers. Finally I pulled myself together, cut the conversation short, and stood up, saying, “Listen, I really have to run. Let’s go back to your ‘bar’ for a minute.” We returned to the vaccination room, where I opened the cupboard myself and collected additional bottles of vaccine against cholera and malaria and also against hepatitis. I added a few syringes in sterile wrappings and asked my companions to stamp two more vaccination certificates without filling in the names. He agreed generously to all my requests, but in the end he couldn’t resist saying somewhat sourly, “I see the travel bug has really bitten you hard.”

Indeed, I was already burning with travel fever, a dull, somewhat sullen fever, and when I reached the hospital on my motorcycle, wet from the rain, I felt alienated from the place that I had served so lovingly and faithfully for the past year. In spite of the nurses’ strike, which had been declared that morning, everything seemed to be functioning normally, and I hurried to the ward only to find no doctors present — just the usual shift of nurses, who seemed surprised to see me. “You?” They giggled archly. “Hishin’s been telling everybody that you’re already winging your way to India.” I put on my white coat, with the name “Benjamin Rubin” embroidered in red on the pocket, and went to look for Hishin, but he, it appeared, had been urgently summoned to the operating room. The young woman he had operated on the day before had developed complications. My first impulse was to hurry there after him, but I knew that the other resident, my rival-friend, would be there too and I might have to face rejection or be painfully ignored again before saying good-bye. Accordingly, I decided to let it go and to pay a little private visit to the patients in the ward instead. However, the senior nurse, a noble-spirited woman of about sixty, who was sitting in her corner dressed in ordinary clothes in order to express her solidarity with the strike without actually striking herself, stood up and stopped me: “What do you need to make rounds for, Dr. Rubin? You’ve got a long, difficult journey — you should go home and get ready. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything for you here.” What she said made sense, and I was so touched by her sympathetic tone that I couldn’t resist putting my arm around her and giving her a little hug before I slipped off my coat. Without another word, I took two little bottles of vaccine out of my pocket and asked her to give me the shots, which she did with such a light touch that I didn’t even feel the prick. I threw my coat in the laundry bin and set off for administration to look for Lazar. In the office the girls recognized me immediately, even without my coat, and greeted me in a friendly, respectful manner, saying, “Here’s Dr. Rubin, the volunteer doctor.” They called the head secretary, Miss Kolby, who said that Lazar had phoned a number of times from Jerusalem to ask about me. “He’s still in the Foreign Office, looking for India experts?” I exclaimed in surprise. But it turned out that he was in the Treasury, not about the trip to India, but about the nurses’ strike. However, he had still found time to instruct the head pharmacist of the hospital to put together a kit with the appropriate medical equipment, and also to remind Hishin to prepare a medical brief for me. In the meantime his wife’s office had left the message that my ticket was ready. So there was nothing to worry about. “Is his wife really coming with us?” I asked the secretary in a tone of annoyance, and I saw her hesitate, as if taking refuge in uncertainty, perhaps for fear of antagonizing me and giving rise to some new resistance. For a moment it crossed my mind that because of the nurses’ strike Lazar might have to stay behind, and his wife was getting ready to go in his place, and instead of having a male traveling companion I would have to negotiate the complicated routes of India with two women, one of them middle-aged and the other very sick.

I ordered the secretary to get my mother on the phone, so that I could prepare her for the possibility that I might not be able to get there before evening. My mother, who thought that I was already on my way to Jerusalem, was not upset but instead tried to calm me down. “Never mind, Benjy, don’t worry; you’ll sleep at home tonight, and we’ll drive you to the airport tomorrow. I’ve already told your father to take a day off.”

Now I was impatient. I had already agreed to travel to a completely foreign and remote world the next day — so why was I still hanging around the hospital, which suddenly seemed gloomy and stifling? I hurried to the surgical ward to look for Hishin and get the article about hepatitis from him, but since I wasn’t wearing my coat the new guard outside the entrance failed to recognize me and refused to let me in. On a bench in the corridor I again saw the two relatives of the young woman who had been operated on the day before. They recognized me but for some reason ignored me, as if they too had already realized how weak my position was here and how false my promise about the patient’s rebirth had been. I wanted to go up to them and ask them how she was, but I stopped myself. In the space of one day I had become superfluous here. I decided not to wait and made my way to the office of the head pharmacist, Dr. Hessing, a bald old German Jew, who immediately dropped everything and led me into one of the cubicles in the depths of the storage area, where he showed me a large knapsack. He immediately opened it to display the wealth and variety of the medical equipment it contained and the snugness and efficiency with which it had all been packed — drugs, ampules and syringes, thermometer and sphygmomanometer, stethoscope and test tubes, scissors and little scalpels, and of course infusion sets; like an entire miniature hospital. Maybe the pharmacist had been so generous because his budget depended more than that of any other department of the hospital on the personal whims of the administrative director. But at the sight of the overflowing knapsack, my spirits fell. “Why do I have to drag all this with me?” I protested. “I’m not going on a climbing expedition to the Himalayas.” I demanded that he take out some of the equipment, but he stubbornly refused to remove a single item from the kit, which he had evidently prepared with loving care. “Take it,” he coaxed me. “Don’t be foolish, who knows what you might need there. You’re going to one of the filthiest places in the world, and if you decide you don’t need something once you’re there, you can always give it away.”

And so, carrying the knapsack, I returned to the surgical ward to look once more for Hishin. To my surprise, the operation was still going on. Something’s gone wrong there, I thought to myself, trying not to meet the eyes of the woman’s relatives, who were still sitting on their bench in the growing darkness, rigid with anxiety. Now nobody stopped me at the entrance to the ward, and with the knapsack on my back I stood outside the big door of the operating room, in exactly the same spot where Lazar had stood waving his hand, and through the same porthole I saw the same team as the day before; only I was missing. The other resident’s back was bent in a tense and supple arch next to Professor Hishin, who I guessed by his movements was struggling to solve a serious problem deep in the woman’s guts. All I could make out from the porthole was her delicate white feet, shining out from under the sheet at the end of the table. Nobody noticed me, apart from Dr. Nakash, who hurriedly whispered something to Hishin. Hishin immediately raised his eyes and waved, and a few minutes later he came out to me, the scalpel in his hand, his gown covered with bloodstains, looking tired and upset. Before I could open my mouth, he silenced me and said in his ironic Hungarian accent, “Yes, yes, forgive me, I know I’m keeping you waiting, but you can see for yourself, I’m not taking part in an orgy here.” And I knew immediately that for the past hour he had been battling against death itself, because whenever he felt death near he would refer in one way or another to sex. I felt a pang because I was not participating in the dramatic battle taking place on the operating table, not even as an onlooker. “What’s going on in there?” I asked accusingly. “Why did you have to operate on her again?” But Hishin waved his bloody hand in my face, refusing to talk about the operation, and with unaccountable emotion he put his arm around me and hugged me and said, “Never mind, don’t worry about it. Just some stubborn woman who keeps on hemorrhaging from unexpected places. But you stop worrying, you have to keep your head clear for the journey. You have no idea how grateful Lazar is to me on your account. They’ve fallen in love with you already, him and his wife. So what do you need now? Ah, you want to know what to do about our hepatitis? As a matter of fact, nothing. Yes, yes, sorry, I forgot to bring the article. But it doesn’t matter. I see you’ve already been given equipment and drugs. And the truth is, there isn’t much to be done in these cases. Just reassure them all psychologically. Everything’s psychological nowadays, isn’t that what everyone says? Soon we’ll be able to do without surgery too. So don’t worry, you won’t have much to do. I told you, hepatitis is a self-limited disease.”

When I left the hospital, I looked up at the sky to see what to expect on the way to Jerusalem and whether I should take my Honda. How had I got mixed up in this crazy journey? Suddenly I wanted to hurry home to my parents, so that they could cosset me with warmth and concern and help me to get ready for the trip, which I now felt approaching at a gallop. At my small apartment I quickly washed the dishes in the sink, made the bed, and packed clothes, underwear, socks, and toiletries in a sturdy old suitcase. I disconnected the electricity, shut the water, and phoned my landlady to tell her I was going abroad. Then I tied the suitcase and the knapsack onto the pillion of the Honda and drove to the Lazars’ apartment to arrange for our meeting at the airport and to get my ticket, as well as the dollars that had been withdrawn from the bank in my name but had been pocketed by Mrs. Lazar’s little clerk. In the spacious apartment, now glowing with the rosy light of sunset, the preparations for the journey were evident: a suitcase lay next to the door, and by its side was an open bag. “Here you are at last,” cried Lazar from the living room. “We’ve been asking ourselves where you disappeared to!”

“I disappeared?” I asked, insulted. “In what sense did I disappear?”

“Never mind, never mind,” said his wife, emerging immediately from the living room in a velvet jump suit. I could already see that she had an overpowering desire to be present everywhere, and she looked different to me, maybe younger but also uglier, short and thick, her hair a little rumpled, her face pale, and the radiant smile in her eyes faded behind the lenses of her glasses. “Don’t pay any attention,” she said. “Lazar’s always worrying, he thrives on worry, you’ll have to get used to it, but come in Dr….” She paused then, uncertain of how to address me. “Call me Benjamin, or Benjy, if you like.”

“May we really call you that? Benjy? Good. Then come in and sit down. We’ve got Michaela here, Einat’s friend who brought us the letter. Come and hear what she has to say about Gaya and the hospital there.” But I declined the invitation. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s late and I’m in a hurry to get to Jerusalem to say good-bye to my parents and organize my packing.”

“And will you sleep there tonight?” asked Lazar in a disappointed tone. “What a pity. We thought of asking you to sleep here, so that we could all go straight to the airport early tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “my parents will get me there in time.” But Lazar was evidently unable to stop worrying, and he immediately ran to fetch a pencil and paper to write down my address and phone number in Jerusalem, while his wife — I was still asking myself whether she was coming on the trip or not — urged me again to come into the living room. “My mother’s here with us, and she’s eager to meet you.”

“Your mother?” I said in confusion. “All right, just for a minute,” and I entered the living room, where I stood amazed at the view of the roofs of Tel Aviv spreading out in every direction before me. When I was here the night before, the curtains had been drawn and I hadn’t guessed what a commanding position the penthouse occupied. On the sofa sat a frail old woman in a dark wool suit, and next to her a boy dressed for some reason in a white cotton dress. But when I went closer I saw that it was a sunburned young woman whose shaven head threw her big light eyes powerfully into relief. “Mother,” said Lazar’s wife in a slightly raised voice, “this is Dr. Rubin, the doctor who’s volunteered to accompany us to India. You wanted to meet him.” The old lady immediately held out her hand to me and nodded, and a very faint echo of her daughter’s automatic radiant smile flickered for a moment in her eyes. Now I could no longer restrain myself. The possibility of Mrs. Lazar joining us began preying on my mind more disturbingly than ever, and while I inclined my head toward the young woman with the shaven head, who discreetly made room for me at her side, I turned to Lazar’s wife with uncontrollable annoyance and said, “Excuse me, I don’t understand. Are you coming with us?” But Lazar cut in before she could reply. “It hasn’t been settled yet; we’ll decide tonight. But why do you ask?”

“I just wanted to know,” I mumbled, looking at his wife, who was no longer smiling at all, although her head turned with an almost imperceptible, slightly threatening movement in her husband’s direction. And then, against my will, I sat down in the place vacated for me by the shaven-headed woman, who gazed at me curiously, as if to take my measure with one look. With the sofa cushions around me still fragrant with warmth, I reached out to take the cup of tea that the grandmother had poured, and through the big window I watched the great, silent fan of an approaching rainstorm spreading over the horizon of the sea. It was then I felt a certain annoyance and anger. I had to get going; my mother and father were waiting for me. What was I doing sitting there like a member of the family? As if I wouldn’t be seeing more than enough of them for the next couple of weeks, whether I liked it or not. I stood up quickly, without tasting the tea, without even saying a word to the slight young woman, whose ostentatious Indianness made me anxious, but also newly eager for the journey. “Did you have a chance to get the two vaccinations for the visa?” I remembered to ask my host on the way to the door. “What vaccinations?” asked the astonished Lazar, who was sure that he had everything connected with the journey under control. It turned out that his wife had forgotten to tell him. “How could you have forgotten?” he cried in despair. “Where are we going to find someone to vaccinate us in Rome?” But when he heard that I had brought the vaccines and sterile syringes with me, as well as two stamped vaccination certificates, and that I had them all in my pocket, he recovered immediately. “You’re the best,” he said, and gave me a hug. “You’re the best; now I understand why Hishin was so determined to have you.” He demanded to be vaccinated on the spot and led me to their bedroom, which was also elegant and spacious. There he removed his shirt, exposing his hairy arms and heavy back, closed his eyes, and made a face in anticipation of the prick of the needle. Outside the big window next to the double bed, on which lay a large suitcase surrounded by scattered items of clothing, the sheet of rain sailed slowly eastward in the glow of the setting sun. “Don’t make such a face,” laughed his wife, coming into the room with cotton wool and alcohol while I filled the syringes, “it’s not an operation.” And she stood next to me, watching carefully. When I finished vaccinating her husband, he put on his shirt and prepared to accompany me to the door. “What about me?” she said in offended surprise. “Shouldn’t we wait and see what we decide tonight?” said her husband tenderly. “Why be in such a hurry to get shots you may not need?” She flushed deeply, her face darkened, and she turned to me sharply and demanded to be vaccinated too. First she tried to roll up her sleeve, but her arm was too thick and she couldn’t get the sleeve past the elbow. She went up to the door and half closed it, as if to hide herself, then slipped off the upper part of her jump suit and stood there in her bra, revealing very round breasts and heavy shoulders spattered here and there with large freckles, and smiling with charming shyness. I hurried to give her the shots, and she thanked me with a nod and pulled on the top of her jump suit. It was then I knew for sure that she was indeed coming to India with us, and my heart tightened. What had I let myself in for here? I said good-bye to her and went down to the street with Lazar, who had decided to transfer the medical kit to his car. The spreading rain now darkened the city and a fine mist sprayed the air. Lazar took the knapsack from me and examined the big motorcycle curiously. “Are you really going to ride that to Jerusalem in this rain?” he asked, with fatherly concern mingled with admiration. When I was sitting on the Honda, with my foot in position to start it, something stopped me. I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Excuse me,” I said, “I understand that your wife is coming with us.” Lazar moved his head in an unclear gesture. “But why?” I asked in a kind of quiet despair. “Two escorts are already more than enough, in my opinion. Why three?” Lazar smiled and said nothing. But I was determined to pursue the matter. Perhaps I would succeed in persuading him at the last minute to stop his wife from coming. “Is there some special reason that she has to be there — something I don’t know yet?” I asked. “No, nothing like that,” replied Lazar. “She just wants to come along.”

“But why?” I insisted, with a bitterness whose intensity I couldn’t understand myself. He looked straight at me, as if he were paying attention to me for the first time, trying to make up his mind if he could trust me, and then he spread out his hands and smiled in embarrassment. “It’s just that she doesn’t like being separated from me, she doesn’t like being left alone.” And when he saw that I was still determined not to understand, he smiled at me again with a kind of sly satisfaction. “Yes, she’s a woman who’s incapable of staying by herself.”

Two

Is it possible to bring up the word “Mystery” yet? Or is it still too early even to think of it? For none of the characters moving at this wintry dawn hour from east or west toward the airport knows how thoughts of mystery are born, let alone what it is made of, and how it flows. Not even the great India awaiting them can stimulate thoughts of mystery, for it is not yet a differentdimension of being in their eyes, only a place they wish to reach quickly and efficiently, in order to collect a sick young woman and bring her carefully home. And that sickly yellowness, clouding the whites of her eyes and surrounding the greenishirises, flickering between the gray sheets in the little room in the monastery on the outskirts of Bodhgaya, can that ignite a spark of mystery? No, certainly not. Because in the imaginations of the people now dragging their suitcases through the departure lounge, that sickly yellowness toward which they are directing their steps holds no portent of mystery, it is only the symptom of a disease, which has a name and is described in books and articles, and which, according to Professor Hishin, is self-limited, even if the return journey holds a turning point, where it will hover desperately between life and death. But even in that terriblecrisis there is no mystery, and now it stands still in the time and place appointed for it, among wicker furniture smeared with bright purple paint, waiting for the precise moment of time, which always arrives with an astonishing simplicity and naturalness.

In other words, the sense of mystery is still as quiescent as the point of the pencil delicately poised on the white sheet of paper between the characters. Or the travelers and their escorts, who are sleepy and somewhat excited in the departures hall, sending tentative signals to each other in the tired smiles of resignation with which they answer the predictable questions of the girl carryingout the security check, who is dressed in a spotless white shirt with a tag fastened to its pocket with a safety pin. A drama student in the evenings, she interrogates them one after the other, in a dry, monotonous voice, about the contents of their luggage. But their detailed replies do not save them, in the end, from opening their suitcases and exposing their personal belongings to each other, and handing over the big medical knapsack too, which astonishes one and all with the wealth and variety of its contents, the sheen of its instruments, until it seems that disaster and disease will be sucked into it willy-nilly. And the morning mists that pursued the young doctor and his parents on their way from Jerusalem filter into the great hall, hovering over the keys of the computers which eject the boarding passes, and the white-haired parents now hand over their only son, even if he is already twenty-nine years old, to the care of another pair of parents, total strangers, but faithful to the solidarity of parenthood as a self-evident human value. Perhaps it is precisely here, in this act of handing over, that the mystery originates. But if so, where does it lead?

It leads nowhere, for that is its nature. It has no direction, for the goal disappears once the cause has been forgotten. And in the tireless turning of the earth the ancient mystery suddenly appears among us, like a forgotten relative let out of a mental institution on a short vacation, despite its continuing delusion that the earth is eternally still, and every hour is sufficient unto itself, and nothingin the universe is ever lost; and after it comes to visit us, and sits among us pale and emaciated, and sets forth its fantastic views, it suddenly stands up, careful not to spill the tea we have placed before it, and begins wandering like a sleepwalker between our bedrooms, to meet people and events concluded long ago.

And so, even if a drop of mystery has fallen here, there is still no one capable of sensing it. Certainly not the young doctor’s father, Mr. Rubin, a tall English Jew wearing an old felt hat purchased five years before on a trip to Manchester, the city of his birth, who has been listening for some time in profound and patient silence to the lively explanations of the hospital director, whose hands, now that his luggage is sailing away on the conveyorbelt, are free to sketch the map of India over and over in the air, pointing out the possibilities of various alternative routes, while his plump little wife, dressed in a loose blue tunic, her eyes no doubt already smiling behind her big sunglasses, listens calmly to the polite small talk of Mrs. Rubin, a lean, bony EnglishJewess, who steps ahead of her toward the guard, who in a moment will separate with a gesture of his hand the passengers and the people seeing them off, but who will not be able to separate the common thought, new and pleasant, that has begun spinning itself secretly — yes,secretly and without a word — be tween the two middle-aged women, each of whom is now imaginingto herself a possible love story between the young doctor- son, who still sees the journey as something that has been forced upon him, and the sick daughter, waiting thousands of miles away in a state of total debilitation.

To my great relief my seat on the plane was not next to the Lazars, but several rows distant from them. If they had arranged it that way on purpose, I thought, it was an encouraging sign. They too wanted to avoid excessive intimacy, which would make us get on each other’s nerves right at the beginning of the trip. And indeed, for the first three hours of the flight I saw them only once, on my way to the toilet. They were sitting in the last row, in the smokers’ section; their breakfast trays had not yet been removed, but the curtain on the window was drawn. Lazar’s wife was sleeping, the dark glasses clutched in her fist, her head buried in the chest of her husband, who was studying some papers. My parents, who were only a little older than they were, would never have dared to display such intimacy in public. I intended to slip past without their noticing me, but Lazar took off his gold-rimmed reading glasses and asked me affably if I had managed to sleep. “I didn’t even try,” I replied immediately. “I’ve decided to tire myself out in anticipation of the flight to New Delhi tonight.” I could see that this practical answer was to his liking. “Do you find it difficult to fall asleep in the air too?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “So you’re like me,” he pronounced happily, as if he had found an ally. “I’ve never been able to sleep on a plane. We’ll see what happens tonight.” His wife raised her head; without her glasses her eyes looked red and puffy with sleep, but they immediately lit up in that mechanical, indiscriminate smile of hers. “What nice parents you have,” she said unhesitatingly, as if she had just seen them in her dreams. “Yes,” I nodded in agreement, and added without knowing why, “They’re not hysterical.” But she understood. “That’s right,” she said. “Your mother told me that they actually encouraged you to make the trip with us.”

“Yes, India has apparently kept its charms for Englishmen of the older generation.”

“You won’t be sorry you came with us,” she said soothingly, as if she still felt that she had to overcome the vestiges of my resistance. “You’ll see.” I didn’t answer, only smiled faintly. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her about the foreign currency the girl from her office had withdrawn from the bank in my name and for some reason pocketed herself, but I restrained myself and continued on my way to the toilet.

We reached Rome at eleven o’clock in the morning, and had about ten hours until the night flight to New Delhi. During these ten hours we had to get our visas for India, and Lazar decided that we should drag our luggage with us in order not to lose precious time, so that we wouldn’t have to come back to the airport in case of any delay with the visas, should we miss our flight and have to sleep over in Rome. But his wife was in favor of leaving the luggage at the airport so that we could get around more freely. They immediately plunged into a heated argument, which Lazar, with his practical pessimism, seemed on the point of winning, but suddenly, without any warning, she gained the upper hand, and the three of us went to look for the baggage check. We walked up and down corridors, confused by misleading directions, with Lazar grumbling at his wife all the time, “You see what a mess you’ve gotten us into now?” until in the end she stopped smiling and hissed, “Stop whining, get a hold of yourself,” and he shut up. Finally we found the place, which seemed to be located in a very out-of-the-way spot, but when we remarked on this to the baggage handler, he protested indignantly and pointed to the nearby elevator, which reached the heart of the airport. Once more we were obliged to undergo the tedious process of opening our luggage and having it inspected, and I was forced to contemplate for the second time their intimate belongings — far too many, in my opinion, for a short trip with a serious purpose to a poor country. Lazar collected the claim tickets and we emerged unburdened into a large plaza to look for a cab. His wife smiled happily, and said with a note of self-congratulation, without any animosity, “There you are — now we can move freely.” But although Lazar too seemed pleased, he didn’t want to admit it. “We’ve wasted the whole morning on the luggage, and who knows if those Indians go back to work at all after their lunch break.” But it transpired that the Indians worked without a break. When we arrived at the consulate building, which was surrounded by shrubs and ornamental trees, we found a long line of waiting Indians, and we lost no time in joining it. But Lazar soon expressed doubts as to the purpose of the line and wandered off to make inquiries, returning to announce triumphantly that we were in the wrong line: this one was only for Indians, the line for foreigners was around the back. And indeed, behind the building, in a little annex, we found an office with only a few European youths waiting in front of it. Lazar took my two passports, deliberating whether to present the Indians with the Israeli one or the British one, which seemed to interest him greatly, for he kept turning the pages to see how it was organized. In the end he gave it back to me, saying that we had better not present them with a passport that we would not know how to defend if it turned out to have flaws we had not noticed, and handed the three Israeli passports to the quiet, dark-skinned clerk, who refused even to look at them without the airline tickets and vaccination certificates. Lazar whipped out these documents, which he had ready, and smiled modestly. As a bureaucrat himself, he knew how much damage and delay could be caused by one recalcitrant official at a pivotal point. But the official wasn’t in the least hostile. The visas were quickly stamped, and we returned to the Roman street with eight free hours in front of us.

It was one o’clock, and Lazar’s wife, whom he called Dori, announced with a gleam in her eye that before anything else we had to find a good restaurant. But although I too was very hungry I decided that if I didn’t set limits right away, I would soon begin to find the pressure unbearable. I therefore informed them that I preferred to do without lunch at the moment and would wander around by myself instead, slightly stressing the words “by myself.” They were taken aback. “Aren’t you hungry?” asked Lazar with fatherly concern. “That’s not the point,” I an swered frankly. “I just don’t want to waste any time. I’ve never been in Rome before, and I want to look around a bit on my own.” Again I gently stressed the words “on my own.” His wife’s automatic smile suddenly vanished. Her face grew grave, and she touched her husband’s sleeve lightly, as if to warn him. But Lazar didn’t feel her touch. “Just a minute,” he cried in alarm. “Where do you want to go, and where will we meet?”

“Where will we meet?” I thought aloud. “At the airport, of course. I’ve got my ticket, and if you’ll be so good as to give me back my passport and the claim checks for my suitcase and knapsack, I’ll go straight to the airport in time for the flight.” Lazar was still upset by this sudden independent plan. “Just a minute,” he cried, “where in the airport? And why the airport? You saw how complicated it is there. Perhaps we should meet somewhere in town, at least, so we don’t lose each other just before the flight.” But his wife, who had grasped my clear intention of drawing a definite line between us, hastened to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. Why not? We’ll meet when we board the plane. What’s the problem?” And he was obliged to take my passport as well as the checks for my suitcase and the medical knapsack out of his pocket, asking as he unwillingly did so, “But where do you want to go in Rome? In what direction?”

“I don’t have a direction, I don’t know yet,” I replied, careful not to mention any specific place in case they found a way to join me after all. And then I saw a flicker of offense in his eyes, but he suppressed it immediately, and confined himself to asking me if I had enough money. “No, I’ve got hardly any money,” I answered quickly, and directed a look of silent rebuke at his wife. “The girl from the office withdrew my foreign currency from the bank yesterday, but then she took it with her.” Mrs. Lazar blushed. Lazar took her purse from her and rummaged in it for the envelope with the money. He counted the bills, reflected, and gave me half, two hundred dollars, and then changed his mind and added another hundred, saying, “You see, it’s a good thing I asked you. But I don’t understand,” he said, confronting his wife, “why she didn’t give him the money, and how come you didn’t notice it was there. Didn’t you even look in the envelope she gave you?” But before she could reply he dismissed it with an impatient “Never mind, never mind,” and turned to me. “Let’s not waste any more time. But you see, it’s a good thing that I’m something of a worrier, otherwise you would have gone off without any money, and if you got lost we would all be in a real mess. And from now on, please don’t be shy with us, tell us if anything’s bothering you or if you need anything, and that way there won’t be any misunderstandings. Now, where are you thinking of going?” He seemed determined to get it out of me, and I said without thinking, “Since I’m here, I may as well pay a short visit to the Vatican,” and the two of them chorused in evident relief, “An excellent idea.”

And I, bound by my promise, set out to look for the Vatican, even though I knew that we would see plenty of holy places in India, and according to Lazar the town of Gaya itself was full of ancient temples. But at least I would have something in my recent memory to compare with all that, I thought to myself, maybe even a subject to talk to them about. As soon as I got off the bus at St. Peter’s Square, I found a mobile pizza stand and bought two hot little pizzas and ate them standing up, taking shelter from the raindrops under a convenient awning. In spite of the gray light, I wanted a photograph of myself against the background of the famous gray dome. I noticed a group of elderly tourists nearby, standing under a canopy of umbrellas and listening to the explanations of a tour guide who was wrapped up tight in a raincoat. Judging by their unperturbed attitude to the rain, and also by the battered felt hat — like my father’s — which one of them wore, I guessed that they were English, and I was drawn to them. I took advantage of a momentary pause in the guide’s lecture and asked one of the women, whose gray head was wrapped in a big woolen scarf, to take a photo of me in front of the dome in two different poses. After she returned the camera, she explained that they were a group of pensioners from England on a European tour, as I had guessed, and for most of them it was their first time abroad. When I told her that I was flying to India that very evening, to a remote town in the east of the subcontinent, to bring a sick young woman home to Israel, her eyes lit up with curiosity, and for a moment she didn’t want to let me go. At first I thought that it was the idea of my imminent flight to India which appealed to her, but it quickly transpired that it was the idea of a young doctor flying to the ends of the earth to heal a sick person that caused her excitement. She called her friends to tell them about me and my rescue mission, and one of the old men immediately stepped forward to say that he had served in India himself and was very willing to tell us all about it. The young Italian guide, too, nodded at me affectionately and invited me to join the group for the rest of their tour of the Vatican, and although I was afraid that joining this geriatric group would eat up the few hours I had to spare until the flight — for I had already noted the extreme slowness of their pace — I thought it might force me to take Hishin’s advice and split off from the Lazars on the way back from India, in order to spend a day or two sightseeing in Rome. And this way I’d have at least finished the Vatican. Which was, indeed, exactly what I felt when I parted from the English pensioners in the big, empty square at half-past five in the evening, in the darkness and the rain, my mind crammed with historical explanations and detailed descriptions. At first I thought of going straight to the airport and getting rid of my hunger there, for I guessed that Lazar would be there early, and even though we had agreed to meet between seven and eight, he would soon begin to worry about me. But on second thought I decided that for the sake of our future travel, I had better start getting him used to trusting my reliability, and I wanted, too, to enjoy my last hours away from this couple, with whom I would undoubtedly be forced into ever closer proximity. I therefore sat down in a modest restaurant on the corner of one of the streets leading out of the Vatican and ate a full meal, which did not prevent me from arriving, complete with suitcase and medical kit, at our charter-flight counter two full minutes before the deadline agreed to with Mr. Lazar.

In the distance I could already see his grayish mane sticking up between the brightly colored saris. The two of them sat side by side next to their two suitcases and newly acquired parcels, among the colorful crowd of passengers gathering near our flight counter, which had not yet opened. Lazar was very pleased by my punctuality, even though he had no cause for concern, because it had already been announced that our flight would be two hours late. He made room for me next to him and asked me to put my luggage with theirs. “From now on we should stick together,” he declared, in case I might be contemplating some new adventure. His wife inquired about my visit to the Vatican. They themselves had not seen anything of particular importance, only strolled along some beautiful streets and bought essential presents. “Do you have to bring back presents even from a trip like this?” I asked in surprise. “Why not?” asked Mrs. Lazar with a smile, and a somewhat reprimanding look which was apparently directed at her husband too, who explained that she still suffered from the old Israeli guilt at the very fact of leaving the country, which had to be covered up by expensive gifts for those left behind. “Guilt?” I persisted. “For this trip?”

“For every trip,” his wife said quickly, turning to her husband and adding, “Perhaps we should buy something to eat, sandwiches and snacks. Who knows what kind of meal they’ll serve on this peculiar flight, if they serve one at all.” He immediately rose to his feet, but she got up quickly too, saying, “I’ll come with you.” This woman really can’t be alone, I thought, smiling to myself. “We’re a little past the age for these charter flights,” apologized Lazar, who seemed put out by the character of the crowd gathering around us, which consisted mainly of teenagers with huge backpacks. His wife offered to bring me something from the buffet too, but I politely declined. “I’ve already eaten a full meal,” I said, “and I think it will last me until we reach India.” I suggested that they go and sit down in the cafeteria and eat a decent meal, while I stayed behind and looked after the baggage. I had already noticed that they suffered from a chronic anxiety about remaining hungry, and that they were constantly sucking candy or chewing gum. And indeed, they were both obviously overweight, although Mrs. Lazar was more disciplined about the way she carried herself and succeeded to some extent in disguising the roundness of her belly. They quickly vanished, and I put a couple of parcels on the chairs they had vacated to keep their seats for them. In the meantime the commotion about the delay increased, although someone from the airline had arrived at the counter and started negotiating with problematic passengers.

Suddenly, through the display window of a small, fancy shoe boutique opposite me, I saw her silhouette. Sitting on a little armchair in her skirt and blouse, stretching one long leg toward the gentleman who was lightly supporting her foot in order to demonstrate the virtues of the dainty shoe to Lazar. He examined it closely and compared it with another shoe he was holding in his hand. A pale green light, faintly reminiscent of the lighting in an operating room at home, shone from the little display window and lent an air of secrecy to the picture of the plump woman stretching her long legs out to the two men. Passersby stopped to look. They were really a strange couple, these two, caught up in their pleasures to the last moment, seemingly indifferent to the difficult journey awaiting them, and perhaps even to thoughts of the condition in which they would find their sick daughter. When the flight was announced over the loudspeaker at last, they hurried up excitedly, carrying wrapped sandwiches in a bag and two cardboard shoeboxes. “The shoes here are so cheap that it’s hard to resist the temptation,” explained Lazar, “and they’re so beautiful too.” He went on apologizing while his silent wife, who seemed embarrassed at his apologies, opened the two suitcases, the contents of which I was already becoming only too familiar with, and stacked the Roman purchases one on top of the other, trying to leave the shoes in their boxes. But Lazar immediately jumped up in protest. “You’ll burst the bag with those idiotic boxes,” he warned her. But she refused to give in. We both watched hostilely as she stubbornly tried to cram the shoeboxes into the suitcases. One of them disappeared into the depths of the case, but the other rebelled. It seemed that she would be obliged to give up and bury the naked shoes among the clothes, and then, I don’t know why, I suddenly felt a strange compassion for this middle-aged woman’s childish disappointment, and I offered her my suitcase as a temporary lodging place for her new shoes. Lazar still objected, and started scolding her for her stubbornness. “Why on earth do you have to drag that damned shoebox all the way to India and back?” But his wife didn’t even look at him. She raised her head, shook her collapsing hairdo out of her eyes, and looked at me with a flushed face, not even troubling to smile her familiar smile: “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

On the flight to New Delhi, which took off at eleven o’clock at night, I read a few pages of Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time, which my father had bought at Ben Gurion Airport when he discovered I didn’t have anything to read, then sunk into a deep sleep, the sleep I had been looking forward to since morning and for whose sake I had been tiring myself out all day long. It fell on me sooner than I had imagined, but it was also shorter than I would have wished. When I woke up after three hours, with my seat belt still fastened, I didn’t know where I was, and for a moment I imagined that I was on night duty in the hospital. It was very dark in the plane, and the passengers were all asleep, sprawling in the seats and also lying in the aisles, as if they had been struck down by a sudden plague. Beyond the swaying wing of the plane I tried to discover in the darkness of the sky the first hints of dawn, which by my calculation should have appeared long ago if the plane had followed a logical course. Now I saw that Lazar or his wife had visited me in my sleep, for one of the sandwiches they had bought at the airport, in addition to a large bar of Italian chocolate, was stuck in the pocket of the seat in front of me. They must have noticed that I had missed my supper when I fell so swiftly and soundly asleep. I wrapped myself in a blanket and greedily devoured the sandwich and the entire bar of chocolate, delighted at this welcome manifestation of their concern. And suddenly I was seized by the desire to see them both, or at least to know where they were sitting, but I decided to wait until dawn, which I was sure was about to break soon.

I didn’t have to wait long, and in the pale golden light I stood up and went to look for them. But I had a hard time finding them. Indian children lay huddled together in the aisles, as if in solidarity with their little friends sleeping on the sidewalks at home. The number of passengers seemed far larger than the number of seats, but nevertheless, it felt strange to me that I was unable to discover the whereabouts of the two Lazars, as if something had gone wrong with my sense of reality during my deep sleep. The plane began to sway in the wind, and Indian flight attendants emerged and instructed the passengers to return to their seats and fasten their belts, with the result that the aisles were gradually vacated, and here and there blankets which had been hung during the night to create sleeping nooks were taken down and hidden corners exposed. I returned to my seat, wondering if the Lazars had for some reason been seated apart and I had been mistaken in searching for them together, but I immediately dismissed this impossible thought. My parents, if unable to find seats side by side in waiting rooms or buses, would sit down separately without any hesitation, but not these two. When the wind died down and the passengers were released from their seat belts, I suddenly saw Lazar’s gray mane looming up in the front of the plane, and then I remembered that I had sometimes come across him in the hospital during the past year, but without knowing who he was. He started advancing down the aisle, and when he reached me he bent down and said in a tone of mild complaint, “You slept and slept and slept,” as if my sleep had somehow deprived the rest of the world of theirs. “And you?” I asked. He ran his fingers through his curly hair, closed his eyes wearily, and answered in a strangely complacent tone, “Me? Hardly ten minutes. I told you, I’m a lost cause, I’ve never been able to sleep in something over which I have no control.” “And Dori?” I asked, blushing slightly at my inadvertent use of this pet name but reassuring myself with the thought that it would have been strange to go on saying “your wife” after twenty-four intensive hours of their company. He laughed. “Oh, all she needs is something soft to put her head on and somebody to keep watch in the background, and she sleeps like a lamb.” And he suddenly leaned right over me to look out the window. “Where are we now?” I asked him. “Don’t ask,” he laughed. “Probably flying over some crazy country like Iran.” There was a silence, after which he couldn’t resist saying, “I hope you found the sandwich and the chocolate we left for you. We saw that you missed supper.”

“Yes, yes, it was great. I wanted to thank you, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Listen,” he said with a suddenly serious expression, “it doesn’t matter if you can’t find us in the plane, but what will happen if you lose us in India? We’ll have to lay down a few rules for keeping contact. In the meantime, you should know our private whistle, which has stood us in good stead ever since our honeymoon.” He whistled it a few times so that it would stick in my head.

On a soft and hazy afternoon we landed in India, and for a moment I had the feeling that we were entering not a living reality but a vast screen on which a Technicolor movie about India was being projected. Already I found myself squeezed against the two of them, next to the knapsack with the medical supplies and the suitcases, which looked clumsy and almost superfluous in the small space of the ancient cab and in the face of the Indian poverty bombarding us through the car windows in a whirlwind of color. Lazar’s face was pressed against my shoulder, very tired and wrinkled under the stubble of his beard, while the plump and lively face of his wife was made up and scented and radiant with childish excitement. Every few minutes she broke into loud cries of admiration, exhorting me and her husband to look at all kinds of passing Indians who seemed to her worthy of special attention. But Lazar refused to raise his head. Worn out, his eyes closed, he grumbled, “Enough, Dori, not now, I haven’t got the strength, we’ll have plenty of time to look later,” while I actually tried to respond to her cries, despite their annoying loudness and enthusiasm, and turned to see where she was pointing, repeating a silly sentence that I couldn’t get out of my head: “I feel as if it’s not real yet, as if it’s only some English movie about India, and we’ve become a little English ourselves.” And she smiled at me kindly, as if I were a child trying to be original. But when we reached the hotel recommended by the travel agency, within the walls of the old city, her enthusiasm suddenly plummeted, which confirmed my objections to her joining us. Although the hotel was quite ancient, neither I nor Lazar could see anything wrong with spending the night there. But as we neared the reception desk, her face fell and she began whispering to her husband, demanding to see the rooms before we handed over our passports. Lazar grumbled at first but finally gave in to her, and they left me in the lobby with the luggage and went up to examine the rooms. On their return the argument between them seemed to have grown sharper. Her face was flushed and determined, and he looked very annoyed indeed. “I don’t understand,” he repeated, “I simply don’t understand. It’s for one night, at the most two. I haven’t slept for thirty hours, I’m falling off my feet, and all I want is a simple bed. That’s all. Where are we going to find a better hotel now?” But she gripped his arm tightly in an angry, distraught gesture, as if she wanted to shut him up, and sent me an automatic smile when she saw me looking at her, perhaps in order to shut me up too. “One night is worth something in life too,” she said, rebuking her husband, and she gave me a reproachful look as well, even though I hadn’t said a word.

We had no alternative but to leave the hotel, and the minute we hit the street two Indian boys pounced on us, relieved us of the knapsack and suitcases, and led us to see other hotels. And since we now felt light and liberated after the long, cramped flight, and the weather was soft and mild, we walked as if floating on air to not one but five hotels. The travel agent’s warning that we were due to arrive in India at the height of the pilgrim season proved true. The hotels Mrs. Lazar approved of were full, and the hotels which could take us were rejected by this impossible woman, who went up by herself to “smell the rooms,” as her husband remarked with a helpless smile, in which to my astonishment I also sensed a hidden admiration. And thus we wandered around the streets of the old city in the company of the two boys, who were enthusiastically prepared to lead us farther and farther, until after an hour of searching we finally found a hotel which was “at least possible,” and whose prices turned out to be no higher than those of the ones that had been rejected. Our two rooms were next to each other, quite small but clean, or at least colorful. The windows were draped in curtains of pale green silk, like saris, and there were heavy chains of bright yellow wilted flowers hanging over the beds. After a day and a half I was really alone at last, and the welcome solitude wrapped me in its sweetness. It was already four-thirty in the afternoon, and I wondered whether I was too tired to do anything but take a shower and get into bed or whether I should go out now, before it got dark, into the new world beyond the door. In the end hunger gained the upper hand, and since Lazar and his wife had uncharacteristically failed to mention their plans for our next meal, I decided to go out and get something to eat on my own. I wasn’t sure how frugal I needed to be since the financial arrangements between us had not yet been finalized. All I had to go on was the vague and general statement of intent made by Lazar’s wife on the first evening in their apartment. The arguments over the choice of the hotel, which was situated in a far from elegant quarter, indicated that in spite of her indignant protests, expense was a factor to be taken into account, at least as far as Lazar was concerned. It wasn’t going to be a luxury trip. And indeed, why should it be?

There was no restaurant in the hotel, only a small, dim bar in which a few guests in white turbans and old-fashioned European suits sat paging through newspapers and conversing quietly in English, as if they were actually Britons who had been left behind when the Empire was abandoned and whom the years had darkened into old Indians. I changed a hundred dollars into rupees at the reception desk and emerged into a little street full of soft, dry sunlight, still clad in the thin skin of the English identity in which I had been pleasantly and secretly wrapped since landing in India. Unwilling to station myself, like an avid Israeli tourist, in front of the trays heaped up on the many food stalls, in order to nibble something sticky and mysterious, I decided to go back to the first, rejected hotel, where I had caught a glimpse of a large restaurant. I succeeded in retracing our footsteps with surprising ease, and entered the restaurant, where I examined the food lying on the tables before choosing the dish I fancied, a portion of roast meat buried in a thick black chapati resting on a large yellowish leaf. My hunger satisfied, I felt an urge to go upstairs and take a look at one of the rooms, to see what Mrs. Lazar had found so offensive. An Indian servant took me up to the second floor to show me the only vacant room left in the hotel, possibly the same room they had shown her. It was, in fact, a spacious room, with a view of a large, reddish fortress in the distance. I concentrated on the details, trying to see them through her eyes and understand what had put her off. The bed was large and covered with a gray blanket, clean but torn at the edges. One of the walls bore long thin stains, as if someone had thrown a drink at it. I took a step into the room in order to smell it. The Indian smiled at my side. I couldn’t smell a thing, apart from a faint, sweetish whiff of mold. What, then, had made her recoil? I wondered, thinking of the pampered woman with a new and unfamiliar anger.

I left the room, but instead of returning to our hotel, although I was tired and sticky, I set out for the fort I had just seen through the window. I didn’t want to waste a minute of my time in this fascinating place. We had already been told at the airport that we would have to travel from New Delhi to Gaya by train or bus, since at this time of year, with so many people on the move, we had no chance of getting onto a plane, or even perhaps of obtaining an air-conditioned compartment on the train. I assumed that Lazar, in a hurry to get back to Israel for his important meeting, would not want to hang around in New Delhi, and in spite of his promise about the fine sights we would see on the way, he would probably insist on setting out tomorrow, or at the most the day after tomorrow, in order to reach our destination as quickly as possible. And since I had a feeling that we would find the hepatitis patient in a worse state than her parents imagined and that from the minute we arrived I would have to be at her beck and call, because practical people like the Lazars didn’t drag a doctor to the ends of the earth at their own expense for nothing, I had better make the most of every chance I got to take in whatever I could of the magic of this place, which was already beginning to draw me to it.

And so much the better, I reflected, that I was sticky and dirty from the journey; it would make me freer in my first contact with the reality of India, which seemed to be flowing and pouring and thickening around me like colorful lava; while at the same time my secret English identity would protect me from getting into trouble. And so, after writing down the name of the hotel on a piece of paper, I allowed myself to roam the filthy, crowded streets at will, proceeding slowly and steadily in the direction of the reddish stone fortress. By twists and turns, without asking anyone the way, I finally reached my goal, and discovered that my attraction to it had not been in vain. A wall stretched for hundreds of yards in the same reddish color which had initially caught my eye, and to which the light of the setting sun had now added a special charm. For a moment I searched for English tourists again, so that I could join them and rub up against the sounds of my parents’ language. But the only people standing at the gate were a few hesitant Indians, who were being urged by the guards to go in quickly before they shut the fort, which was indeed, with surprising simplicity, called the Red Fort. Although it was too late for a comprehensive tour I went in, almost the last to do so. I passed through an arcade of elegant shops selling antiquities and souvenirs, and from there to several exquisite little pavilions, particularly the one called the Painted Palace, which were already growing dark in the gathering dusk and which had been almost deserted by the tourists. I was still trying as hard as I could to feel like the hero of a movie with definite values and a clear plot, as if this were the only way to give some meaning to the trip that had been suddenly forced on me and to console me for the loss of my prospects in Hishin’s department at the hospital.

When I emerged from the gates of the fort with the last of the tourists, my soul stirred by the little I had managed to see, the sun had already set, darkness was rapidly falling, and there was a new chill, accompanied by soft raindrops, in the air, apparently coming from the direction of the broad river which I had glimpsed from one of the windows in the fort. I thought that it was the Ganges, until the guide corrected me and said that it was called the Yamuna, and it only joined the Ganges at a distance of some six hundred miles from here. And even though my weariness had hardened into what felt like an extra organ inside me, I told myself that if I had already come so far and enjoyed so much, I should go and see the river too, for even if it wasn’t the famous Ganges, it would have some spiritual significance which could teach me something new. Because by tomorrow evening my independent ramblings would all too quickly end, and I would be sitting in a bus or a train, squeezed between Lazar and his wife, with their anxiety about their sick daughter growing more overpowering the closer we got to the hospital. I continued eastward in the direction of the river in spite of the encroaching darkness. With my father’s sturdy old windbreaker to protect me from the cold and occasional snatches of English, local or otherwise, rising from the darkness to encourage me, I began making my way through rows of wretched hovels whose inhabitants seemed quite friendly, or at least not actively hostile.

In spite of the chill and the fine drizzle, the animated voices of women doing their washing or even bathing rose from the river, and from time to time the bobbing light of a lamp revealed their lively movements. I stood there for a long time in the fragrant rain, until I heard a long-drawn-out hoot and a very long illuminated train moved out of a nearby station and began crossing the river on an invisible bridge, as if it were floating between heaven and earth before sinking into the black horizon. At that moment I made up my mind to reconcile myself to this enforced journey and to stop inwardly protesting against Hishin for giving in to Lazar’s manipulations, and I allowed my profound weariness to turn me in the direction of my waiting bed, festooned with its chain of yellow, slightly wilting marigolds.

But who could have guessed that the heavy darkness had fallen not only on the river and its environs but on large sectors of the old city as well, despite the streetlights scattered here and there, whose dim light only succeeded in blurring the landmarks I had memorized in order to lead me back? I thus had no alternative but to repeat the name of the first, rejected hotel to passersby, who were usually full of goodwill but also confusing and misleading. To my dismay, I found myself recognizing shops and stalls which I had already passed, until I realized that I had been going around in circles without anyone’s warning me that the streets here went around a square and led nowhere. I immediately lost all confidence in the directions I had been given and began accosting people lying on the sidewalks and demanding explanations, even if I had to wake them up. Somehow I eventually found my way to the rejected hotel, which to my surprise was brightly lit and full of the sounds of music and singing because of a wedding celebration, which I stood and watched for a while as if spellbound. From there I remembered the way to our hotel, which looked dark and silent.

I hurried up to the second floor, wondering whether the Lazars were angry with me for having disappeared for so long without even warning them, or whether they had already resigned themselves to the fact that they had no control over me or right to expect anything of me, except for the performance of my medical duties when the time came. But if I came in for a mild reprimand, I decided, I would bow my head and accept it in silence. After entering my room and discovering that it had no electric light but only an oil lamp, which had been brought in my absence and suspended over my bed, I hurried out again and knocked lightly on the door of the Lazars’ room, to announce my return and hear what they had seen and done in the meantime. Lazar opened the door, tousled with sleep, barefoot, short and clumsy in old-fashioned flannel pajamas, his eyes red and narrowed. Their room was smaller than mine, strewn with their clothing and possessions, and illuminated by a soft, weak light coming from the oil lamp hidden under their bed, which was not much larger than mine and which held the outline of Mrs. Lazar, curled up in a blanket with only her little feet sticking out. Her capacity for sleep was apparently as great as her capacity for smiling, I thought, again with a strange anger. And in fact, it transpired that no sooner had I left them than they had both fallen into a prodigious sleep, ignoring the great Indian city about them, and accordingly they had not even been aware of my absence. I couldn’t contain myself, and standing on the threshold like an excited child, I told Lazar about the Red Fort, the little palaces, and the river too. He listened with his head bowed, swaying slightly. The true master of our great hospital, according to Hishin, stood before me now like a weak, bewildered old man. But I went on whispering nevertheless, and as I did so I saw two smiling eyes shining brightly from the outline on the bed. “I see that you enjoyed yourself,” Lazar finally stated. “It’s a good thing you didn’t wait for us. I don’t know what made us collapse like this,” he began to apologize, “but it was stronger than we were. Don’t forget we spent a few sleepless nights even before the journey. Ever since that girl brought us the letter, we’ve both begun coming apart at the seams, even if we don’t look it.”

He accompanied me to my room and obtained two sleeping pills. Then he told me with his characteristic practicality and foresight that he was determined not to let sleep slip away from him, in order to charge his batteries for the arduous journey still ahead of us. And indeed, when he knocked at my door and woke me up at ten o’clock the next morning, I noticed immediately that the limp exhaustion of the night before had been replaced by an energetic wakefulness. He apologized for waking me up, but explained that there were a few “urgent administrative matters.” At ten o’clock that night we were continuing our journey on the night train to Varanasi. A long journey of seventeen hours. And we had to vacate our rooms at noon and leave our luggage downstairs. “So we’re leaving tonight?” I asked in disappointment, even though I knew that his eagerness to reach his sick daughter quickly and get her and himself back to Israel as soon as possible would outweigh any promises made in his living room. Regrets welled up in me, for I had planned to go back to the river and see it in daylight, and also to visit a few places which had caught my interest when I walked past them in the dark. But it seemed that we had no alternative; it was impossible to get seats on a plane for the next two weeks, and even the express train, on which we had pinned our hopes in Israel, was full. It was only by the greatest ingenuity that he had succeeded in reserving us seats on a train that was slightly slower and less luxurious but reliable and reasonably comfortable, for otherwise, who knows, we might have been forced to rattle our bones in a dilapidated old bus as if we were characters in an adventure movie. “Yes, that’s the long and the short of it,” he apologized again, but actually he looked rather pleased with himself and his ability to cope with administrative difficulties, even in India. “We’ve arrived at the height of the internal tourist season in India. But we didn’t choose the timing of this trip, it chose us. At least there’s one thing in our favor — the weather’s fine, and we don’t have to worry about savage monsoons coming down on our heads.”

His wife emerged in sunglasses, ready to go out. She had changed the blue tunic for a colorful Indian scarf, which she had purchased that morning and immediately draped round her shoulders. On her feet she wore flat walking shoes, which made her look short and clumsy. When she saw me at the door of my room, she put her hands together and bowed her head mischievously in the Indian greeting and said, “We owe you our thanks for the Red Fort. After your stories last night we ran to see it this morning, and it really is exquisite.”

Lazar rummaged in his pockets, took out my train ticket, and said, “Here, you’d better keep it yourself.” Then he took out a pen and wrote the name of the station on the back of the ticket, and said that we should meet at the hotel at eight o’clock before leaving for the station together. “Eight o’clock?” his wife protested. “Why so early? The train leaves at ten. We’ll never get back from that place everyone says you should see at sunset. Why don’t we meet at the train station? He’s already proved himself.”

I felt a sudden surge of resentment at the way she was calmly laying down the law. I fingered the stubble of my two-day beard and said with a provocative smile, “And if we do get separated? What happens then?”

“But why should we get separated?” she asked in genuine surprise, this woman who was only here with us because she couldn’t bear being left alone. But Lazar immediately backed me up. “You’re right, everything’s possible, and if you really do get lost here, there isn’t even anyone to inform.” He rapidly wrote down the address of the hospital in Gaya on a piece of paper. “It’s over a thousand miles from here,” he said, smiling, “but at least it’s a clear and definite address. I’ve already given you money and paid for your room in the hotel. And tonight we’ll meet here, just as I said, at eight.” He turned to his wife with a frown. “You always think you can play with time. But not now. So we’ll all be back here by eight. And until then you’re free,” he added, turning back to me. “I see you like to roam around by yourself. Just see that you don’t get into trouble. And we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”

But they still didn’t leave. Now they were waiting in the corridor for a dark, very delicate boy who came to take their luggage down, and I slowly closed my door on them. In spite of my tiredness, I didn’t go back to bed but immediately began to shave, and suddenly the thought flashed across my mind, Yes, those were the right words exactly. This overweight couple was really beginning to get on my nerves, though I didn’t yet know how or why. Maybe I’m too sensitive, I said to myself, but something about the strong, deep bond shining between them, slipping to and fro with sly efficiency between Lazar’s dry, practical concern and his wife’s warm, phony charm, with her sudden, superfluous smiles, was beginning to irritate me profoundly. In spite of their openness, they weren’t frank with me, and I didn’t know what was going on in their heads, which undoubtedly worked like one constantly coordinated head. I still didn’t even know something as simple and straightforward as how much they were going to pay me for the trip. It was hard to tell what their real attitude to money was, their calculations between themselves and their calculations regarding me. And wasn’t there something strange about the fact that they were both here and dragging a doctor with them? Surely one person would have been enough to bring this sick daughter home? Suddenly it struck me that they were a little afraid of the meeting with their daughter and they had brought me along as a kind of go-between. Had Lazar been telling me the truth outside his house when he said that his wife couldn’t be without him? And if so, in what sense? It was insane. I could already sense the powerful nature of this smoothly oiled conjugality, which was only a little younger than the one between my parents, but how different they were. It would never occur to my father in a million years to take my mother’s hand like that and squeeze it in order to make her stop talking. My father would never embarrass a strange young man watching them like that. But perhaps, I said to myself as I lathered my face for the third time in anticipation of the long journey beginning tonight, perhaps I really was too sensitive, without cause, perhaps because in my heart of hearts I was still lamenting this trip imposed on me by Professor Hishin, who at this early morning hour in Israel I could see stepping, fresh and cocky, into the operating room, where the nurses, together with the anesthetist and the second resident, are waiting for him. I could even imagine Hishin’s jokes, as he teases the patient lying on the stretcher, sedated, and pale with fear, ready for the “takeoff.” Perhaps he even makes a few ironic remarks to the operating team about me and the fantastic trip he has graciously bestowed on me, although he and all the rest of them know very well that all I ever wanted was to stay at his side, next to the operating table, looking and looking deep inside the human body, in the hope that one day the knife would be placed in my hand.

Three

Is it possible to bring up the word “Mystery” yet? Or perhaps as of now it can only be thought of? For our three characters (three? for the time being)are not seeking mystery; the relative stability of their personalities, the reasonable rationality of their thinking, has set before them a well-lit goal and a clear road to reach it. And if they only remain free of the tyranny of the imagination, of its arbitrariness, they will arrive by their own powers at the simple heart of the matter and return safely to their homes, after parting from each other without acrimony or pain.

For what will they gain from a mystery that leads nowhere? And this young doctor, a rather reflective and solitary hero, abruptly cutoffthree days agofrom ProfessorHishin’s surgical department, which has filled his life for the past year and on which he pinned his hopes for the future, is now, owing to the sudden trip to India, left without even the possibility of any other hope to cling to. He finishes shaving, washes his face, and begins packing in a mood of sullen resentment. But before he finally parts from the dim room where the colorful silk curtains are still drawn and prepares himself for a dayof intensive sightseeing — so that he will not be shamed by friends and acquaintances at home for having traveled all the way to New Delhi and failed to see the things you have to see there — he goesto check that the door is locked, quickly takes off all his clothes and lies down naked on the bed, and masturbates heavily and without recourse to fantasy, in order to feel freer and lighter for the long journey ahead, since he knows that the next bed offered him by his purposivecompanions will be very far away.

But the young doctor had no hidden desire to imagine this bed as in any sense mysterious, even though as he emerged from the hotel, erect and slightly dizzy, straight into the heart of the rosy Indian light floating over the streets stinking with stunning, colorful humanity, a twinge of anxiety entered his soul, whereas the day before, in these very same streets, even in the darkness of night, he had felt quite relaxed. Because the English movie in which he imagined that he was taking part in order to protect himself had completely vanished during the night, and now he was exposed without any barriers to the alien and powerful reality. And this anxiety was so new and sudden to the doctor that he stopped the first available rickshaw, even though it was drawn by a bicycle and not a motorcycle, and threw himself onto the soft seat, and said, Take me first to Humayun’s Tomb. And the rider-driver, a serious Indian of about fifty who wore dark glasses and spoke better English than his passenger, turned out to be an excellent tour guide and spent the rest of the day guiding the young tourist intelligently and efficiently about the city, so that he would see not only the sights the guidebooks defined as not to be missed but also those listed as optional Thus, after they had visited Humayun’s Tomb, the Qutab Minar complex, and even the National Museum, and after the guide had noted that his tourist was not a dawdler but looked quickly and walked briskly, he suggested that the tourist pay a visit, perhaps in his capacity as a doctor, to a unique site — a hospital for birds, not far from the Red Fort. There, on the second floor, in a dimly lit room, opposite stinking cages in which lay sick and wounded birds — some of them with their legs in splints, among them crushed and mangy birds of prey who would suddenly shriek horribly — the doctor’s anxiety deepened, until his soul trembled and he asked to leave. “What a crazy idea,”he argued outside, but when he saw his guide’s disappointment, he corrected himself and said, “Maybe the idea of a birds’ hospital is original, but shouldn’t human suffering come first?”

And then the guide removed his dark glasses, revealing slightly bloodshot eyes, and spoke of the reincarnation of souls, and the doctor secretly clenched his fists and bowed his head in silence, and after the guide concluded, he paid him the exact sum agreed on between them and sent him away without a tip, and instead of going down to the river again to see it in daylight, as he had planned, he turned slowly, feeling rather depressed, in the directionof the hotel. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and the softness of the fading light was suffused with unfamiliar scents. By now he was already in possession of a map of Delhi, and he could find his way without having to ask anyone directions. He sat down in a restaurant and looked at the throng streaming past, and to his astonishment, among the many tourists hesuddenlyrecognized Lazar and his wife, who was still wrapped in the morning’s Indian scarf, walking past him at a distance of a few paces away, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and vanishing into a shop that sold textiles and rugs. How strange, he thought, to bump into them of all people in a city of millions, in this little alley of all places. How strange, he repeated to himself, quickly gulping down his tea, waiting for the moment when they would emerge and he would go up to them to dispel his gloom with her smile, and to compare what they had managed to see today with what he had seen, and to find out if there was some additional sightseeing obligation that he might fulfill in his last hours in Delhi. But they didn’t come out of the shop. The cup stood empty before him, he had already paid the waiter, and he smiled to himself at the insatiable lust for shopping displayed by this fat middle-aged couple. In the end he went to look for them in the shop. But they weren’t there, even though the shop was not a large one and there did not appear to be any other way out. Here was a riddle: suddenly they appear and then they disappearagain? This story is beginning to get mysterious, he whisperedto himself, not yet pronouncing the word itself but only its adjective.

He reached the hotel at seven, a whole hour early; he figured they must have emerged from the shop and slipped out of his sight when he was paying the waiter and checking his change. He positioned himself on a soft leather sofa in a corner of the lobby not far from the reception desk, with his suitcase and knapsack next to him. Now he could survey the guests going in and out at his ease, paying special attention to the Indian women, never mind their age, in an attempt to discover the point at which a Westerner, with a rather shy sexuality, like his own, could connectwith them. And then he thought of his parents, and he decidedto call them, not because they would be worried, but simplyin order to hear the reassuring sound of their voices, for they too were to some extent responsible for his being here. But the reception clerk was unable to put through a direct international call from the hotel phone, and told him to go to a post office some distance away. The young doctor had no desire to forfeit the sofa he had taken over and decided to postpone the phone call. It was already eight o’clock, and the duskhad deepened, but the Lazars had not yet appeared. He felt no anxiety or anger, but only a gentle wonder. The street visible through the hotel entrance did not sink into silence and darkness as it had the night before, but took on a festive appearance; many new oil lamps were brought into the hotel lobby, and people walked past in festive attire. With a strange pleasure he said to himself, those two are crazy, their daughter needs them, she’s lying sick hundredsof miles away from here, and they’re strolling around and enjoying themselves like a couple of provincial tourists, looking for bargains among the Indian shmattes. But at nine o’clock he realized that something really had gone wrong. He remembered Lazar’sslogan, “So we won’t get on each other’s nerves,” but still he felt no bitterness or anger, only a sense of profound wonder. His return ticket to Israel was in his wallet; he had all the documents he needed with him. If they really disappeared, he would be his own boss again, and he would even be at liberty to go home.

At five past nine he picked up his luggage, left a message at the desk, and took a rickshaw to the train station. Perhaps they would make it at the last minute, even without their luggage. But from the minute he entered the heart of the storm in the old station — wherethe quintessence of travel fever raged in its purest, most hectic form, flooding the place in a dim yellowish light full of smoke and smells, swarming and groaning in the cars crammed with people, which belched out and sucked in bundles and mattresses from every possible opening — the doctor felt the last vestige of hope of finding the couple draining out of him. Nevertheless, he resolutely elbowed his way through the crowd, passing from platform to platform and finally reaching the right train, and the exact compartment, which turned out to be handsome and modern, with the air-conditioning lending a European chill to the air. The four seats looked comfortable, ready to be converted into narrow bunks for the night. The dark, opaque windows turned the travel fever of the station into a scene on a television screen. Was he going to wind up traveling into the depths of India on his own and against his will in order to meet a sick and unknown woman for an undefined medical purpose? he asked himself with the mild irony he had inherited from his Englishfather. And the wonder and loneliness he had been feeling all day welled up in him with a new intensity and washed away the remnants of his anger and disappointment. Now his soul was flooded with a sweet wave of mystery.

This is not yet the mystery itself, but only its sweetness, which has now been born not from the external reality existing outside the dark window but from the inner depths of this young doctor himself, who was introduced by Professor Hishin to his friend as the ideal person for the journey. For only the superficial eye of a tourist would seek to find mystery in the Indian train, for instance, which suddenly begins puffing and moving slightly to and fro, presumably in order to take on additional cars, toward which tall Tibetan monks in orange robes hurry, gently but firmly rebuffing obstreperous beggars, some of them real lepers with amputated limbs, thrusting themselves between the legs of porters carrying enormous bundles of rolled-up mattresses for a group of merry pilgrims passing along the platform. Delicate women flit among the throngs like moths, an intelligent third eye shining in the center of their foreheads and guarding them from bumping into Sikhs with wild black beards and carrying daggers, who are obliged — even they — to impatiently circumvent the solitarywhite cow which has innocently found its way into the stationand is now nibbling the sparse grass growing next to the platform, indifferent to the savage looks of the lean, half-naked Indians clambering over the cars and struggling with the train officials, who are trying to force them down from the roof of one of the ancient trains, where they are strapping their bundles and themselves between the iron railings and settling down for the night.

No, in all this feverish activity in the old train station of Delhi the young doctor sees no mystery, nor even the faintest shadow of its sweetness. He sits quiet and still, five minutes before the train departs, in the right compartment on the right seat (he has repeatedly checked and asked), his suitcase and medical kit on the shelf above his head. In this serenity, which is almost joyful, submitting to the task to which an invisible hand has appointed him, a clear and genuine sign comes to him, and he cannot resist whispering to himself, as the train starts slowly gliding from its place, It’s not possible, they really have disappeared, those two, and it’sa real mystery. And now a thin-facedold Indian nodsto him as he enters the compartment, dressed in a light-colored Europeansuit spotted with ancient stains and carrying a shabby little suitcase in his hand, and makes him a little bow, careful to avoid the cup of tea that the train steward placed on the tray a few minutes before. He sits down shyly, takes a pair of cheap metal glasses with one cracked lens out of his pocket, and opens a Hindi newspaper. And anyone who now hears the ineffable word whispered naturally and spontaneously in his ear is finally at liberty to put it carefully down on the paper in front of him.

Two or three minutes after the train left the yellowish hell of the station and, as if suspended in the air, began crossing the pitch-black river, the door of the compartment shook with a violent knock, which so alarmed the Indian passenger that the newspaper fell from his hands. Through the little round window in the door I saw Lazar’s familiar gray mane again, and I hurried to open it and found both of them squeezed into the passage with their two suitcases. Lazar’s face was gray with exhaustion, and his eyes guiltily evaded mine. Even before stowing the suitcases on the racks, he admitted his failure. First of all he clasped my shoulders, then he clutched his head between his hands and began shaking it. “I don’t know what happened to us,” he said despairingly, “I don’t understand how we could have lost our way like that.” But his wife burst into loud, uninhibited peals of relieved laughter, astonishing the elderly Indian, who now folded his newspaper and put his cracked glasses away in his pocket in order to gaze at this boisterous woman. Her topknot had unraveled completely and her hair was falling onto her flushed, heavy face, from which all traces of makeup had vanished. They had apparently suffered an hour of extreme anxiety and were now overjoyed at having found me. Lazar kept on apologizing; as someone who knew how to blame others, he now seemed eager to take the blame upon himself, but also to explain exactly how and where they had gone wrong and to apologize again for the worry they had caused me. It turned out that they too had tried to call Israel, but nobody had warned them about the length of time it would take until the connection was made. “Enough already, what does it matter?” his wife interrupted him, annoyed by his repeated apologies. “The doctor wasn’t worried, believe me. He would have gone on ahead and we would have arrived a day later. I’ve already told you, he’s not the type to get lost.” She said this in a gentle but slightly mocking tone, and began combing her hair in front of the little mirror in the corner of the compartment, smiling at Lazar indulgently as she did so. When she had finished combing her hair, she bestowed a warm smile on the old Indian too, who hadn’t taken his eyes off her, picked up the cup of tea standing on the tray by her seat, and started to sip it with her eyes closed. Only now did Lazar begin to calm down. He started rearranging the luggage on the racks, tugging and pushing, and a little while later, when the steward brought us the ready-packed meals included in the price of our tickets, he sat down and ate heartily.

In the meantime his wife was already discreetly questioning the Indian about the purpose of his trip, and he responded willingly in reasonable English and also gave her his card. He was an official in a government department in New Delhi who had recently retired and was on his way for the first time in his life to Varanasi, in order to bathe in the Ganges before he died and to take part in the cremation rites for his eldest brother whose body would be taken there from the south by his sister-in-law and nephews. Every time he pronounced the words “before I die,” Mrs. Lazar’s eyes lost their smile and her face clouded, as if she refused to countenance his thoughts of death even by listening to them. But she was wrong; the thought of death only gave the old Indian pleasure. Since nothing in the universe was ever lost, all that was left for him to do was to ensure his rebirth in more advantageous conditions, which he was now about to do by bathing in the holy river.

“Unbelievable — this man is actually convinced that someone is going to bring him back to life again after he dies!” Lazar exclaimed in Hebrew, his hunger satisfied and a good-humored smile on his face, which was still gray and exhausted. His breathing sounded heavy, and for a moment I was afraid that his heart wasn’t functioning normally. The Indian passenger fell silent, as if he sensed that he was being made fun of. Outside it was already completely dark, there was no light to signal any passing reality, and for a moment it seemed as if the train were standing still, even though its wheels were turning. Soon the Indian was listening with interest to Lazar’s wife as she explained the purpose of our trip. He did not seem surprised to hear that three people had come specially from Israel to take the sick girl home. Perhaps she has sunk into Nirvana, he said, absolutely seriously, and it will take much strength to pull her out of it. Toward midnight a young boy came to remove the dirty dishes, to pour tea, to distribute blankets, and to help us convert our seats into bunk beds. Lazar’s wife and I climbed into the upper bunks, and Lazar and the Indian lay down in the lower ones. We switched off the light and covered ourselves with our blankets, but I was afraid I would not be able to fall asleep with so many people surrounding me. Strangely enough, the presence of the old Indian official below me seemed to reassure me. My face touched the dark blanket. I strained my eyes until I began to make out the outlines of the reality beyond the window — poor peasant houses and desolate dirt roads. Here and there I thought I could see a man plowing in the fields, and I asked myself whether a new day had already begun for him or the old one had not yet ended. From time to time the train slowed down at little country stations, gliding silently past the shadowy, blanket-wrapped figures that crouched next to the tracks and avidly examined the passing train. Lazar’s wife fell asleep immediately and began to snore, but Lazar was still tossing and turning on his narrow bunk. Every now and then he got up and put his hand on his wife to stop her snoring, but his touch only succeeded in interrupting her snores for a few minutes, after which they began welling up again, gently but strongly. Finally he woke her up. “Dori,” he whispered firmly, “Dori, you’re disturbing everybody.” She woke up, raised herself slightly, looked around in confusion, saw me, nodded at her husband as if agreeing with what he had said, and sank back into a deep sleep, carrying me off with her.

Lazar was clearly as resistant to sleep in trains as he was in planes. When I woke up at dawn, stunned by the clamor of the wheels, which my deep sleep had succeeded in suppressing, I saw him sitting heavily on his low bunk, sad and lonely without his smiling wife at his side. The moment he sensed that I had opened my eyes, he tried to latch on to me. Although I would have been happy to go on snuggling into my warm, narrow bunk, I felt his distress and climbed down to talk to him. It transpired that he had spent most of the night sitting up in bed or prowling around the train. He had even managed to wash and shave. He was too tense to fall asleep, or even to read. Worry about the state in which he would find his daughter was eating him up, and he was preoccupied too by interrupted business at the hospital. I took the opportunity to ask him about his work, and he responded willingly, but suggested we continue our conversation in the corridor. There was no need to disturb those who always managed to sleep in spite of everything, he said with a smile, and I didn’t know if he was referring to his wife or if he also had in mind the old Indian, who had curled up into a little white ball on half his bunk, as if rehearsing the fetal position in anticipation of his rebirth. In the corridor of the train, which was now racing through reddish hills, I began interrogating Lazar about the hospital, discovering through his administrative point of view new and surprising things even about the surgical department, which I thought I knew so well. Although he was not familiar with the professional medical aspects of our work, he had a surprisingly good grasp of the way the department was organized, and he was astonishingly well informed about the personal lives of the doctors and nurses. He had something to tell me about everyone whose name I mentioned, and was quick to express an opinion or assessment of them as well. Sometimes he added a story about a power struggle which had ended in success or failure. I suppose he knows all about me too, I thought to myself, and perhaps he even has an opinion of my abilities, which he got from people whom I would never have imagined took the trouble to think about me, but he’s too discreet to drop me a hint. I asked him about plans for the future, hoping to hear of new openings, but he sighed and began throwing out figures about budget cuts, which were doubly painful in the light of his desire to expand by constructing buildings with two operating rooms and up-to-the-minute laboratories, for example, whose future location he sketched in the air with broad movements.

In the meantime the first light of morning broke in the hazy sky, and a large round sun rose from an unexpected direction. Thus the day of the long journey to Varanasi began, in the glow of dirt roads, huts, and villages slipping slowly past the dark windows and the radiant, aromatic dimness of the big stations where we suddenly stopped among trains of various kinds and colors with droves of passengers getting in and out. During the few minutes of the stop, Lazar would sometimes hurry out to the stalls crowding the platform and bring us sweets or chapatis or bottles of unfamiliar effervescent drinks. His wife, if she didn’t join him, would stand at the window so as not to let him out of her sight. I had noticed their craving for sweet things in Rome, and even in India they hesitate suck and chew all kinds of candies whose names the Indian passenger taught them to pronounce. He himself had already changed his spotted old suit for a kind of white robe, which gave rise to a pleasant, intimate feeling, and indeed he was soon deep in conversation with Lazar’s wife, who seemed amused by his views on life and the world, but who was careful to question him in a tactful, friendly manner. This won him over to such an extent that he soon opened his little suitcase, took out an old deck of cards illustrated with all kinds of gaudy gods and demigods, and tried to teach us a kind of Indian poker, whose peculiar rules made her laugh so merrily that it seemed she had completely forgotten the purpose of our journey.

In the afternoon the Ganges appeared in all its vastness, flowing slowly not far from the train tracks, and the Indian’s dark face glowed in the abundant yellow light. Overcome with awe of the holiness flowing next to him, he stopped playing cards and chatting to Lazar’s wife, rose to his feet full of power and vitality, and retired to the corridor to sink into meditation opposite the holy river. But while the Indian was evidently growing stronger in anticipation of the baptism awaiting him, the sleepless Lazar was growing weaker; his eyes kept closing, his head nodded, fell, and jerked up again. “Try to lie down and rest for a while, don’t be so obstinate,” his wife urged him, but he was unable to let go of his tension: “It’s too late to sleep, we’ll be there soon.” Finally she succeeded in persuading him to take off his shoes and lie down on the seat, and even to overcome his embarrassment at my presence and lay his head on her round stomach, while she held his head firmly between her hands as if to absorb his anxiety into herself. And it worked, for after a few minutes of vacillating and grumbling, Lazar plunged into a deep sleep, his breathing very relaxed, as if he had fallen out under the hands of a practiced anesthetist. His wife tried to engage me in conversation, but I stopped her. “We shouldn’t disturb him,” I whispered, “now that he has finally fallen asleep.” My reaction surprised her, and for the first time I noticed an offended blush spreading over her cheeks, as the faint down covering them glinted in the sunlight. But she obediently took off her glasses and closed her eyes, and an hour later, when the train slowed down in preparation for its ceremonious entry into the last smoke-shrouded station and Lazar emerged from the abyss of his sleep, he discovered that his wife had fallen asleep with him.

The elderly Indian passenger, who had been so friendly and talkative during the long journey, had now become estranged and remote in anticipation of its ending. His relatives, dressed in white as he was, were already waiting for him on the crowded platform, and they immediately swallowed him up without a trace. The three of us were left staring, dumb and paralyzed. The crowds we had seen on the streets of New Delhi looked sparse and quiet compared to this one. We were obliged to stick close to each other and hang on tightly to our suitcases, which seemed to have taken on a life of their own as they jerked about in the frenzied crowd. We had to stop at Varanasi to make our connection to Gaya, but we had had no idea how many tourists and pilgrims would be engulfing this major attraction at the height of the tourist season. While Lazar was haggling with a lively, dwarfish porter who had attached himself to us, one of the Lazars’ two suitcases was carried away by the crowd. At first Lazar gave way to despair and seemed on the point of tears. But then he recovered and plunged into the crowd, pushing and shoving in search of the thief, refusing to resign himself to the loss even though his wife was already trying to comfort him. In the end they left me in a corner in charge of the cart piled with the rest of the luggage while they set out with the dwarf to search for the suitcase. Again I found it ridiculous that they had to do everything together.

But perhaps precisely because of this, they succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, fishing the suitcase out of the stormy sea of people into which it had been swept, not stolen, and loaded by mistake onto another porter’s cart. Now it reposed on the back of the diminutive porter, dusty and battered, as if in the short time of its disappearance it had traveled across an entire continent. And the same thing, it seemed to me, had happened to us. New Delhi had given us the illusion that we understood the rules of India, but in Varanasi we were all gripped by a feeling of anxiety, and Lazar, whose deep sleep on the stomach of his wife had restored his alertness and vigor, instructed me in no uncertain terms to stick closely to him and not to start dreaming now; for indeed, with astonishing perceptiveness, he had caught me in the kind of dreaminess that sometimes took hold of me in the hospital at dawn, after a night on call, when I crossed the borderline into a new working day. “But what makes you think that he wants to dream now?” said his wife in surprise. “The dream is what’s happening here around us.” But Lazar didn’t answer her, because at that moment it seemed to him that one of the suitcases was about to fall off the cart racing ahead of us, and he rushed forward to catch it, only to trip and fall onto the platform himself. He sprang up immediately, an expression of wounded pride on his face, and also of offense, as his wife exploded into merry peals of laughter, which continued as she asked him if he had hurt himself while helping him dust off his clothes. “It’s not a dream, it’s madness,” he said, smiling at himself. “What’s going on here is total madness. Let’s get out of this station at least.” But the madness was waiting for us outside the station too, in the seething streets of the dusty, humid city, where the air was full of sweetish, colorful, unfamiliar stench. Without waiting for instructions, the porter hurried ahead, accompanied now by a flock of barefoot children, who stretched out filthy little hands to finger the smooth leather of the suitcases. “But where is he rushing to, that crazy little dwarf?” asked Lazar in astonishment. “To the hotel,” replied his wife. “The hotel?” echoed the bewildered Lazar. “What hotel?”

“He told me about a nice hotel overlooking the river, with a view of the bathing ghats the man in the train told us about.”

“But what hotel, Dori?” repeated Lazar in alarm, unable to believe that his wife had already come to an agreement with the little porter. “A hotel in the old city,” she replied, “next to the river.”

“Have you lost your mind, to follow a character like that to some hotel in the old city in the middle of all the muck? What’s come over you? I don’t understand.”

But his wife was unperturbed by this outburst. “What harm can it do to try? We’ve got plenty of time. The Indian in the train said it’s the only place to find a hotel, and since we’re stuck here, at least we’ll be able to watch their ceremonies from the window.”

“What window?” cried Lazar. “No, no, Dori, we’re not running from one hotel to the next to smell the rooms this time. No,” he announced firmly, “it’s out of the question, Dori. We’re not starting to look for a hotel in the old city; even here, in the new city, it’s barely tolerable. We’ll find a decent, civilized hotel — we’re completely exhausted already, and I don’t care how much it costs,” and he hurried forward to catch up with the porter.

The little man tried to argue, but in vain. He appealed to Lazar’s wife, as if she had made him a definite promise, but Lazar cut through his pleas with a wave of his hand, and the porter, no doubt disappointed at the loss of his commission, his feelings hurt by the broken promise, turned back and began trudging through the streets until he brought us to a very fine hotel, which met with general approbation but had only one vacant room. Since Lazar had no intention of allowing us to split up in Varanasi, we set out to look for another hotel, but there were no vacancies anywhere, until we reached a brand-new hotel called Ganga Mata, which had rooms but must have been very expensive, for I saw Lazar hesitating, in spite of his previous declaration that expense was no object. In the end, however, while his wife maintained a serene silence, he said, “Never mind, it’s only for one night,” and signaled the porter to hand over the luggage to the splendidly uniformed doormen. But then I saw his wife hold out her hand to stop the porter and grab hold of her husband’s arm. “You’re so obstinate. If we’re only here for one night, why should we stay at an ordinary hotel, just like thousands of other hotels all over the world? This porter knows about a special hotel, overlooking the river. Why shouldn’t we try it?” she said very gently and persuasively. And Lazar raised his hand hesitantly, as if to stop the doormen, who had already taken down two suitcases, and then laid it on his head with a curious gesture, as if to show the pain of his thoughts. “You decide,” continued his wife, “not because of the money, because of the view.” And suddenly, without any warning, Lazar gave in, announcing as he did so, “It’s your responsibility, Dori. If you don’t like the hotel there, don’t you dare say you want to come back here.” But his wife made no promises. “Trust my intuition,” she said. “This porter knows where he’s taking us. And besides, why shouldn’t we wander around a bit? You don’t have to carry anything. It’s still early in the day — we have time. And you’re not so tired now. You had a really good sleep in the train.”

The little porter, who had been following their conversation intently and guessed which way the wind was blowing even before anything was said, became filled with happiness and energy and began pulling the suitcases out of the hands of the elegant doormen and replacing them on his cart. And I said to myself, I’m nothing but a piece of luggage here myself, or a child. It doesn’t even occur to them to ask me what I think; maybe I’m very tired and I’d rather stay in this hotel. I returned the smile beamed in my direction with a sullen look, and hoisted the medical knapsack wearily onto my back as if to say, What choice do I have, I’m just a hired hand here. I saw that my sullen look had upset Lazar’s wife, and as we set off she turned to me and said, “Perhaps you would have preferred to stay here?”

“What does it matter what I prefer?” I replied with a bitter smile. “I have no say in the matter.” And I saw that this domineering woman was hurt, as I had intended her to be. She blushed. “Why do you say that?” She spoke in an offended tone. “Everybody says you should be close to the river — that’s where all the rites take place. And since we’re here for such a short time, we should be close to the main thing, or at least in a position to get a good view.”

But before reaching the River Ganges, with the view of the heavy, gray ghats lapped by its waters, we had to make our way through winding alleys so narrow and jammed with people that our agile porter had to leave his cart in one of the little shops and hire two of the barefoot children who had been following us ever since we left the train station to help him carry our luggage. It was almost four o’clock, and there was a chill in the air, which took on a pinkish tinge. A steady procession of pilgrims, singing and playing on musical instruments, streamed purposefully toward the river, and scattered among them were young backpackers, rubbing shoulders with us on the right and the left and sometimes even smiling at me in a friendly, inviting way, as if I were one of them, for they had no way of knowing that the pack on my back was filled with medical supplies and that I was not free like them but tied to two heavy, middle-aged people in travel-creased gray clothes. Lazar looked tense and worried, jostling and being jostled as he hurried a few steps ahead of us in order not to lose contact with the band of children hot on the heels of the dwarf, who because of their smallness sometimes vanished completely in the crowd. The river was apparently close, for the dust of the alley turned muddy and the crowd tightened around us. From time to time a slender dark hand would touch my shoulder, asking me to make way for a corpse wrapped in white or yellow winding sheets, which would be carried past, raised up on steady hands, until it seemed to be floating of its own accord over the sea of heads surrounding us. I stole a look at Lazar’s wife, who was trailing behind us, picking her way fastidiously between the sewage canals and the slippery cowpats, slow but light in her low-heeled shoes, looking unsmilingly at the corpses floating through the alley to be burned on the banks of the river. She must be regretting her obstinacy now, I thought, and perhaps because she noticed the mocking smile on my face, she stopped for a moment, wiped the indiscriminating smile off hers, and called out to her husband to slow down. But Lazar was too intent on not losing the porters, who were now crossing courtyards, passing alcoves concealing gaudily painted statues and wild-haired ascetics, and finally leading us into a back alley where a very old but rather attractive country house stood, surrounded by dusty trees with tiny vegetable gardens planted between them. At the entrance to the house, which was decorated with dark little statues that were nothing but variations on male sexual organs painted red and black, at which Lazar stared in nervous amusement, a small group of Indians clustered, apparently waiting for the dwarfish porter and the new guests he was bringing from the train station. Without asking our permission, they rapidly sent the children on their way, took the suitcases, nimbly relieved me of the knapsack, and led us up three flights of stairs covered with a torn old carpet, passing rooms full of people on the way. On the third floor they ushered us into a big, dim room carpeted with colorful straw mats and containing two very large beds, a closet, and wicker chairs, and without losing a moment, they flung open a curtain and took us out onto a little balcony full of flower pots, which in the eyes of our hosts was the justification for our coming and the fulfillment of the promise made by the porter on the station platform. And who indeed could have imagined that we would emerge from that labyrinth of narrow, winding alleys to stand before this rich, spacious view, open from horizon to horizon, with the great Ganges flowing through its heart, glittering in the reddening light of the approaching evening.

Lazar’s wife uttered a cry of admiration and praised the view enthusiastically to the Indians. Lazar leaned silently on the balustrade, sighed, and smiled faintly to himself. Suddenly I understood his wife’s hidden power, and why he had been prepared to give up the new hotel so easily. He had a deep faith in her intuitions about people, and since she believed in the little porter and his promises to lead us to a high place overlooking the river, he gave in to her. And perhaps the fact that he would be saving a considerable sum of money had something to do with it too, for I had already noticed that in spite of the emergency that had precipitated the journey, he was not indifferent to its cost. A great deal of money had already been spent, and there was no knowing how much more would be needed on the way back, when the patient would be with us. It would be impossible to drag her through narrow alleys to a simple hotel, however unique the view from the balcony — which Lazar’s wife continued to praise extravagantly, to the delight of the hotel owners.

But it was only now that they realized we needed two rooms. The little porter had taken us for a family, perhaps imagining me to be their son on holiday with his parents. Even now, when they heard that I was only a doctor accompanying the Lazars to Gaya, they couldn’t understand why we needed another room. They would bring another bed right away, and set up a screen in the middle of the big room. Lazar looked at me. I could have refused immediately, but I wanted him to be the one to demand another room. The thought of spending the whole night in the same room with them seemed too much to cope with. They too seemed uneasy at the idea. “No,” said Lazar, “we’ll take another little room for him.” But it appeared that all the rooms in the inn were full, and the only solution was to put me up in a kind of shed next to the building used as a dormitory for backpackers and solitary pilgrims. Suddenly I felt very bitter toward Lazar’s wife, who had dragged us here, but I said nothing and picked up the knapsack, since I would rather sleep in the shed than share their intimacy. But she, feeling guilty and embarrassed, objected vehemently. The idea that they would remain here, with the spectacular view of the sacred river, while I was relegated to a kind of dormitory seemed to her so unjust that she began coaxing me to stay with them. “What does it matter? It’s a big room, we won’t take up a lot of space, they’ll bring a screen. Why should you miss the view of the river and the ghats? That’s what we came here for in the first place. I don’t like to think of you down there alone.”

“I don’t mind being alone,” I said, with a faintly contemptuous smile, but she didn’t understand what I was getting at and continued enthusiastically. “Once in a lifetime you get to see something this amazing. The room’s not important — it’s what you can see from it, the wonderful view, the river, the ghats, the pilgrims, and the night falling. Why should you sleep in some mean, wretched place? You deserve better.” And then she suddenly added, “Why should it bother you? Last night all three of us slept squashed up with the Indian in one little compartment.”

Lazar remained silent and gloomy, also apparently angry at his wife for complicating things. But she appealed to him helplessly to persuade me, touching his hand lightly to convey her request. And Lazar said quietly, “He’ll decide for himself where he wants to sleep, what do you want of his life?” And she said, “It’s not fair for him to sleep downstairs with all the vagabonds.” And suddenly, without warning — her conscience must have really been bothering her — she threatened that we would have to go and look for a new hotel unless I agreed to share their room. Now Lazar gave me a despairing look. “Why shouldn’t you sleep up here with us, really? There’s no problem as far as we’re concerned, if you don’t mind. We’re leaving tomorrow morning, and the air’s better up here, and there’s such a special view.” His eyes were hollow, and his skin looked so gray that for a moment I felt concerned about his health again. In the meantime the Indians had decided for us, and two boys with gleaming white smiles brought in a folding bed and a red screen decorated with paintings of snakes, and without further ado Lazar’s wife indicated a place next to the window, where they opened the bed and set up the screen, and only then did she turn to me and say, “Put your suitcase behind the screen. Don’t worry, we’ll be quiet as mice, you won’t even know we’re here.”

I gave in. The view from the little balcony with its flower pots was so stunning and exhilarating after the long cramped train trip that I couldn’t bring myself to refuse the offer to remain in the room with them, especially since I knew Lazar’s wife wouldn’t give up until she’d searched all the nearby hotels for a decent room for me, and I felt sorry for the exhausted Lazar. But even though I had to sleep with them that night, I didn’t have to stay now and sit behind the screen on the folding bed until they had undressed and bathed, being careful not to expose themselves to my eyes. Though my clothes were also damp and sticky from the journey and the walk through the alleys and I too would have liked to wash and change, I immediately announced that I was going out for a little walk, to see the pilgrims dipping in the river and perhaps, before it got dark, the cremation rites at the famous “burning ghats” referred to in the guidebook. Lazar, who had already taken off his shoes and shirt and was busy massaging his big stomach, said with a tired smile, “Even though you’ve already proved that you’re not the one who gets lost and we are, please do me a favor and watch where you’re going, because there aren’t even any streets here, it’s all one big confusion, and if you get lost here you might as well be reborn as somebody else, because you’ll never find your way back.” And we all burst out laughing in a spirit of reconciliation, and we even forgave the stubbornness. I agreed to return by a certain time, as if the Lazars were my parents. When I went down into the little garden in front of the inn and looked at the maze of passages and courtyards surrounding me, for a moment I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. I decided to find someone, a boy or a girl, to guide me. Under one of the trees I saw the little porter sitting with his friends and eating his supper, and although his English was almost nonexistent, I asked him to lead me to the river, because he had already impressed me, not only with the enterprise that had attracted Lazar’s wife but also with his delicacy and tact. I knew that he would return me safely to the inn, which for a reason I could not explain suddenly tugged at my heart.

Indeed, he led me nimbly to the riverbank and to a ghat he called Lalita. There we descended many broken steps, making our way through the strong smells and colors of the pilgrims, Brahmins, and beggars. And then, without even asking me, the porter installed me in a boat which already contained two young Scandinavian backpackers, and we embarked for the center of the river to observe the rites from the sacred water. We saw women in saris descending the steps slowly and gracefully, cupping their hair in their hands and dipping it in the water, and half-naked men diving deep into the river and disappearing for a long time before they reemerged, purified. In the distance, all along the riverbank, we saw many more ghats teeming with pilgrims, all performing their religious duties in a tumultuous silence. And then, in the gathering dusk, loudspeakers began hoarsely chanting long prayers, and many of the bathers came out of the water and stood on the riverbank or the steps to pray and perform complicated yoga exercises. The boatman abandoned his oars and kneeled down to pray while the boat was swept toward the next ghat, where spirals of white smoke rose from a big red funeral pyre. The two tourists and I sat riveted by the sight of the boatman sunk in his prayers while the boat changed direction and floated aimlessly into the middle of the river, and now we could see that while one bank was teeming with people and activity, densely strewn with ghats and temples, the opposite bank was empty and abandoned, with nary a house or a human figure to be seen, evaporating into the void of the sky as if all that crowded holiness dissolved in the middle of the river and turned into nothingness. When the chanting finally stopped, the boatman rose from his knees and picked up the oars with a dreamy look in his eyes. I said to him in a friendly tone, “Shiva,” because I had read in Lazar’s guidebook that Varanasi was the city of the god Shiva, the Destroyer. His dark face immediately filled with interest, and he nodded his head, but corrected me: “Vishvanath,” and, dropping the oars, he spread out his arms to embrace the whole of the universe. “Vishvanath,” he repeated, as if to stress that this name was bigger and more important than that of Shiva. Gently placing my finger between my eyes to signify the place of the third eye, I repeated softly, “Shiva, Shiva?” while the two Scandinavians stared. But the boatman stood his ground, even though he seemed pleased by my knowledge. He corrected me again—“Triambaka, Triambaka”—and repeated, “Vishvanath, Vishvanath.” When he saw that I was disappointed by these names, however, he eventually acquiesced and said with a sly smile, “Also Shiva, also Shiva.”

When darkness fell, the little porter took me to one of the ghats where bodies of the dead were burned. First I saw how people threw flowers and sweets into a well; then, from a little distance, for the dwarf warned me not to go too close, I stood for a long time watching a body burn on a funeral pyre while the members of the family sat in a circle and chatted quietly. I waited until the fire went out, and in the dark, by the light of a torch, the family stood up and slowly circled the ashes, and one of them cracked the skull to liberate the soul into the river, and they gathered up the ashes to sprinkle them on the water. Only then was I able to return to our inn, which was already mostly shrouded in darkness. I gave the porter a few rupees and he put his hands together in thanks, but he did not leave me, for he was afraid that I would go to the wrong room, so he led me up the pitch-dark steps until I was standing in front of the door to our room. I knocked lightly to announce my return, but when there was no reply, I carefully opened the door. The room was dark and the big beds were empty. The Lazars appeared to have moved them closer together in my absence. On the balcony I made out the two heavy silhouettes. When I approached, I found them in their bathrobes, their hair still wet from the shower. All that was left of the spectacular view was deep, empty darkness; the temples and the ghats had completely vanished, and only a few solitary torches still burned on the banks of the Ganges, with mysterious shadows stirring around them. Next to the Lazars stood a stool covered with an embroidered cloth, with plates holding the remains of their supper. They did not notice my arrival, for they were deep in a conversation. I knocked lightly on the balcony door, and they both immediately turned their heads, smiling and very pleased to see me, like parents who had awaited their son. It turned out that in all this time they had not left the room but remained by themselves on the little balcony, content with the distant, general view. “You’ve been sitting on the balcony all this time?” I marveled. “We’re not as young as we used to be,” said Lazar complacently, “and this balcony is an experience in itself.” He was in a good mood, and he seemed pleased with me too, for succeeding again in not getting lost. His wife invited me to sit down beside them and tell them about my experiences on the river, but Lazar stood up and asked if I had had anything to eat. For a minute I couldn’t remember, since I felt no hunger, but when I replied in the negative he urged his wife to get up and clear away their leftovers. “We thought of leaving something for you,” he apologized, “but we know you prefer eating alone.” His wife said, “Never mind, we’ll go down now and get something for him. What would you like to eat?”

“What would I like?” I repeated. “What have they got here?” And when they tried to tell me I interrupted them and said, “It doesn’t matter, just something light, whatever you bring. I’m really not hungry, I don’t know why.”

“Maybe the soul of an Indian fakir has already been incarnated in your body and from now on you’ll be satisfied with a starvation diet,” Lazar said with a chuckle, still diverted by the idea of reincarnation, which now, given the total darkness and the soft Indian tumult rising from the courtyard, seemed to me correct, even if impossible.

They both said at once, “Go and get washed, and we’ll go downstairs and get you something to eat. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but it’s Friday night,” and they went out to allow me to get undressed and wash myself in peace and quiet. In some strange way I didn’t feel dirty and sticky, even though my trousers had got wet in the river and cow dung had stuck to my shoes; it was as if the boat trip had dipped me in the river too, and the long contemplation of the cremation and the cracking of the blazing skull had purified me with a sense of profound mystery, which had made me forget my hunger and reconciled me to the dirt. But I didn’t want to embarrass the Lazars. I washed myself quickly in cold water before they came back. I had a long wait before they returned with a basket of fruit and candies and fresh-smelling chapatis, as well as a big bowl of steaming rice mixed with pieces of boiled mutton; and strangely enough it was Lazar, not his wife, who encouraged and coaxed me to eat, with a tender, absurdly fatherly air, trying to arouse my lost appetite and insisting on adding more and more to my plate, as if the whole great hospital in his charge had now been narrowed down to a single person, on whom he could focus the full strength of his control and concern. His wife sat opposite me, her stomach swelling, her long legs crossed, smoking a slender cigarette and examining me. When I described the cracking of the skull in order to liberate the soul, her face twisted in dismay. “How terrible — why did you look?” But Lazar understood me. “It sounds fascinating, I wish we could have seen it ourselves,” he said, as if he were actually sorry we were leaving the next morning by train for Gaya. “Tomorrow?”

“We should have stayed in New Delhi and insisted on getting a direct flight. That’s what we should have done,” said his wife. “So what do you say?” she asked, as if I had a say in anything that went on here, and she threw the burning cigarette butt over the balustrade. Lazar jumped up to reproach her. “Dori, are you crazy? There are people down there, you’ll burn somebody.”

“People don’t burn so easily.” She laughed, but at the sight of my gloomy face she said gently, “I see that you’re disappointed.” Her glasses glinted in the dark. “A little,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, I understand. But still, it seems to me,” I stammered, “for your own sake, you should have come down to the river, because from the balcony you can’t feel what you feel on the river, inside the thing itself.”

“But what is the thing itself?” She sat up with a strange anger. “Burning corpses?”

“No,” I answered her, “there’s something very strong here. It’s hard to explain. Something very ancient — not like historical ruins in Israel, it’s not historical, it’s real. If you go down, you’ll feel that what’s happening here, the purification rites and the cremations, has been going on for thousands of years, as if that’s the way it’s been forever …” Now a different smile crossed her face, not the automatic one but a thoughtful smile, as if she were wondering not about what I had said but about me. I felt that I had made a mistake in exposing my feelings to them, and in so doing giving them, especially her, permission to invade my privacy, now that she had talked me into sharing a room with them, something my parents had never done. And in order to stop her I decided not to give her another opportunity to interrogate me but instead to ask her about their sick daughter, about whom nothing had been said up to now, as if we had a kind of tacit agreement not to talk about her. Had she ever suffered from any serious illnesses in the past? I asked. Had she ever been hospitalized?

When the time came to go to bed, we moved the screen between us and I lay down in my pajamas on the folding bed, which was very narrow, intended for a skinny Indian with a wish to mortify himself during his sleep. They made some noise, presumably pushing the beds closer together, and in the end they switched off the little light, and she called out suddenly, “Good night,” and her husband said, “Shh, he’s already asleep.” But I answered in a weak voice, “Good night,” suddenly afraid that they might make love in the middle of the night. On the balcony they had seemed close and loving and attracted to one another. And even though I said to myself, They wouldn’t do that to me, I remained agitated, and I began tossing and turning in the dark on my narrow bed, until a soft rhythmic snoring reached my ears, and I knew that they were her snores, which I remembered from the train. I waited for him to stop her, but he just got up and went to drink a glass of water and out onto the balcony. Before he returned I fell asleep, but only for a few hours, since a band of musicians passed very close to the inn just before dawn, beating drums and clashing cymbals. One of them broke into song, and when the music faded away I knew that the Lazars too had woken up. Suddenly I heard Mrs. Lazar whispering to her husband in a surprisingly childish, pampered voice, which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable of, “Do you love me?” and he replied with a strange decisiveness, “No.” But she did not seem upset, and in the same soft, wheedling tone she continued, “Then you should.”

“Why?” he replied in affected astonishment.

“Because.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m nice.”

“But you’re terribly obstinate,” he said sternly.

“I’m not terrible at all,” she answered archly, but he insisted, “Yes, you’re terribly obstinate. You talked us into this room, and the poor boy has to sleep here next to us like a dog.”

“Why a dog?” Now she was taken aback, but she didn’t lose her self-confidence. “What kind of a way is that to talk? Can’t you see that he’s perfectly happy and pleased to be with us, even though he’s a cold type who doesn’t show his feelings?”

“Shh … Shh!” Lazar suddenly seemed nervous. “He can hear us.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “The way those youngsters sleep, nothing wakes them. Come and hold me. Let’s go to sleep — I’m afraid of what’s waiting for us tomorrow.” They must have started kissing, or so I assumed, and I immediately turned over in bed in order to stop them, and they evidently heard something, because the rustling stopped at once, and soon her faint snoring rose again. It suddenly stopped, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. And after a long time I got up and walked barefoot, careful not to look, past the two beds, which were indeed a little closer together and bathed in the light of the huge moon slowly rising over the far bank, desolate and a little frightening, of the Ganges.

In the morning they woke me ruthlessly and pressed me to eat my breakfast, which was already laid on the balcony table. Their suitcases were packed, and they had also managed to go down to the river at dawn to see the pilgrims taking their first dip. Soon two elderly Indians arrived to take our luggage, loaded it onto a pushcart downstairs, and led us to the train station through a flood of fresh pilgrims, who had apparently arrived on the night trains and were now on their way to the river. Again I had the feeling that I was in a very ancient place, as if precisely here, in this muddy swarm of humanity, between the large cows stubbornly stuck in the middle of the alleys, the world had been created, or at least begun to bubble. When we entered the frenzied station, I spotted as if by magic the diminutive porter of the previous day in the distance, a suitcase on his back as he led two elderly female tourists in big straw hats, probably to the room we had just vacated. I could not resist the impulse to rush up to him and say good-bye. To my surprise, Lazar’s wife hurried after me. The little porter was so moved by our gesture that he removed the suitcase from his back and almost knelt in the middle of the dung and the mud, putting his hands together in the Indian greeting and pleading with us in the little English at his command, “Come back to Varanasi. You didn’t see anything.”

On the train traveling east we shared our compartment, this time with two brothers in white suits who were returning home to Calcutta after cremating their father’s body. At ten o’clock in the morning, after the train left the station, they presented Lazar and me with their cards, and when we saw that one of them was a doctor, Lazar quickly told them about the object of our journey and asked if they knew anything about the hospital in Gaya. Immediately filled with interest and curiosity, they began showering us with advice and ideas. They had never seen the hospital in Gaya, but they knew by hearsay that it was small and poorly equipped, for it sometimes sent specimens to the private laboratory the Calcutta doctor was connected with a consultant and a partner. Accordingly, they advised us to take Einat as quickly as possible to the big hospital in Calcutta, where everything was more reliable. At this point Lazar informed them that I too was a doctor, that we had brought medical equipment with us, and that we had no intention of wandering between Indian hospitals but were going to take the girl home to Israel as quickly as possible. This idea seemed to them basically sound, and they wished us luck and asked if they could peep at our equipment. Now that we were approaching the patient, Lazar too was curious to know what we were bringing to save his daughter, so I opened the knapsack and displayed its contents, explaining what everything was. The Indians listened attentively, as if eager to learn from me, and Lazar took each instrument and examined it carefully, questioning me as to how it worked, as if he believed that by mastering such details he could penetrate his hospital more deeply and strengthen his control over it. His wife sat in absent-minded silence, her liveliness and gaiety extinguished, as if the approaching meeting with her daughter filled her with dread. I measured Lazar’s blood pressure, at his request, and found it to be very high, 170 over 110, but I didn’t want to upset him before the meeting with his daughter and gave him lower numbers. The Indian doctor asked for the sphygmomanometer and measured his own and his brother’s blood pressure repeatedly and at length, but since I didn’t ask for the results, he saw no reason to tell me what they were.

When we got off the train at the Gaya station that afternoon and said good-bye to the two Indians — who presented us with their cards again and reminded us that they would be waiting for us in Calcutta if we needed them — we felt that the last part of the trip had passed comfortably enough, and congratulated ourselves on the ease with which we had reached the point that had seemed so remote when we looked at the map lying on Lazar’s living room table. “So this is Gaya. What a hole …” muttered Lazar as we stood outside the station, contemplating the strange, absolutely un-Indian emptiness around us. All around us were low yellow hills, and the earth was dry and hard. An apathetic porter approached us slowly, but when he heard where we wanted to go he drew back and beckoned to a more energetic friend, who took us to the hospital, which was a rather small three-story building plastered with pale brown clay. “You go in, and I’ll wait outside with the luggage,” I said to the Lazars, “and don’t tell them you brought a doctor, or you’ll make the medical staff nervous.” Lazar looked at me sharply and said, “You’re right. Quite right. Very good thinking.” And when I saw his wife’s face, rather pale, tired, and ugly, without any makeup, dark glasses covering her unsmiling eyes, I added, “And don’t be frightened if she’s yellow or even greenish — it’s hepatitis, and the color isn’t dangerous.” They nodded their thanks and went inside. I sat down on the ground next to a ruined fountain, leaned against one of the suitcases, and prepared myself for a long wait. Well, I thought, I’m on duty at last — if I had a time card here, I’d have to get it punched. But fifteen minutes later they emerged from the hospital in a state of extreme agitation. It appeared that their daughter was no longer there; the week before she had been transferred to Bodhgaya, about ten miles from Gaya, since there was no reason to keep her in the hospital any longer, whether because her condition had improved or the opposite neither of them had managed to understand.

In a panic they hailed a passing auto-rickshaw, and we hurried to Bodhgaya over a rough country road winding through soft fields. A sweet breeze caressed our faces, and in the distance, at the end of the plain, poised gently and motionlessly on the horizon, a big yellow Indian sun refused to sink. In just half an hour we were at Bodhgaya, which turned out to be a pleasant religious retreat full of leafy trees, with a broad dirt road leading from one Buddhist monastery to the next. There were no tourists or backpackers to be seen. We seemed to be the only Westerners in the place, but we had no difficulty in finding the right monastery, luxuriant entrance where green creepers twined around a big door. We were welcomed by several Thai monks, who were expecting us and even looking forward to our coming, since the telegram sent to the hospital from Israel had been attached to the patient as a kind of guarantee that she was not anonymous and somebody would soon come to claim her. Here too I stopped in the courtyard and suggested that I should wait outside with the luggage while the Lazars went in, but Lazar’s wife insisted that I go in with them, as if she couldn’t face meeting her sick daughter without a doctor on hand to calm her. So we went in with all our luggage, since Lazar was unwilling to part from it even in a Buddhist monastery, and we were led through corridors decorated with tattered carpets and statuettes of gods into a dim chamber strewn with big backpacks and rolled-up sleeping bags. Two Japanese girls who were sitting next to a gas burner and drinking tea stood up as soon as we entered the room and stayed in the corner bowing their heads politely and respectfully. The patient, a blonde with cropped hair, lay exhausted in a fetal position on a sleeping bag covered with a gray sheet, a mosquito net folded at her side. Her skin was dry and as green as the bark of a tree, and there was a grubby bandage on her right leg. Her parents went up and knelt down next to her, talking in low voices, stroking her hands and cheeks, trying to joke, but taking care not to kiss her. Lazar’s wife tried to flash her automatic smile in order to cheer her daughter up, but in the circumstances her would-be cheerful gesture came out as a strange grimace. The girl was silent and remote, and for a moment she seemed angry with her parents, either because they had come late or because they had come at all. And then I saw the despairing looks as Lazar and his wife turned mutely to me and invited me, the doctor, to approach. I stepped up and bent down next to the patient. Her father introduced me by my full name, and the girl turned her pale green face, whose features I immediately saw to be pure and fine, toward me. Even though I was a stranger to her, she tried to give me the smile she had withheld from her parents. And the flickering light green irises, drowning in the dark yellow, almost orange whites of her eyes, were very like the eyes not of her mother or father but of her grandmother, who had been sitting in their living room and longing, according to Mrs. Lazar, to meet me.

Four

Is it time to speak of falling in love? For the lover is not yet aware of his state, although in the middle of the night it steals in and clutches his heart and he wakes up stirred to the depths, as if falling in love is only a new dominance and not also a servitude which is liable to drag anyone who persists in it to his doom. Already he can’t go back to sleep, and in his happiness he has to get out of bed, still not believing that it has actually happened to him, and, dazed and heavy, he propels his agitated being through the dark rooms of the house, trying to understand what it is that has shattered his sleep. And there in the kitchen, next to the dining table, he discovers her — a strange little girl, left in his house without his knowledge by one of the neighbors, or perhaps the cleaning lady, and forgotten there. Still wearing her school uniform, with a simple childish badge pinned to her chest with a safety pin, she bends over her books in the faint light of the moon and a streetlight, merging and filtering together through the window bars, and does her homework. He whispers to himself, somewhat ironically, It can’t be possible that this has really happened to me, that I’ve simply fallen in love; I know hardly anything about her. But he goes on advancing soundlessly toward the back of the girl, who has been waiting in his heart and who now ignores him and continues bending over an old, ink-stained atlas, a chewed-up pencil between her teeth. And already he is gazing breathlessly at the back of her neck, which is pure and stalklike but also rich in mature delights as it descends into the school-uniform shirt, which after a long day of study is still sweet and fresh. Only when he clenches his fists, careful not to touch her, does she turn to look at him, and with a brisk, simple movement she tosses her curly head, and her serious, beautiful face shows no surprise at the stealthy approach of the silent intruder with the knife twisting in his heart.

Even as the pain stuns his heart he tries to reassure himself. It isn’t serious, it’s a midnight madness, it will pass, it’s already passing, it’s a bizarre, absurd, superfluous, almost criminal, and also hopeless infatuation, in a minute someone will come and take her away. But the little girl gives him a frank, open smile that does not suit her tender years, as if in the few seconds he stood behind her and lusted after her neck she grew up and understood — understood so much that he panics and tries to cover up his sudden infatuation. He bends coolly over the open atlas, leafs through an exercise book, and asks in pretend irritation, “Haven’t you finished yet? Do you have any problems? It’s late. Why don’t you leave it now?” Her pure face grows even purer, and she places her little hand freely on his pajama sleeve and says, “Shh … he’s here.” And in the long corridor between the dark rooms of the house, the funny old glasses glitter on the nose of the mystery, that skinny, humorless mental patient who is still stubbornly seeking people and events that came to an end long ago.

Still without touching her, judging only by the way she lay limply curled on the gray sheet in the corner of the room, I concluded that the young woman’s clinical condition was not good and that she may, in Hishin’s words, have “managed to do herself real liver damage.” I had already noticed how she was hugging herself with both arms, and how with weak but incessant movement she kept scratching and rubbing herself, a classic symptom of accumulated bile salts penetrating the skin. But I smiled, trying not to reveal to her parents, who were standing right behind me, any sign of anxiety or panic. I knew too that there was no point in undressing her now, in front of her parents and the Japanese backpackers, and trying to auscultate her heart and lungs. Obviously I had to perform a blood count and sedimentation rate quickly and obtain the exact bilirubin and glucose levels and liver functions. I had to see the color of her urine and have it tested right away. In the meantime I bent over her on my knees and covered her forehead lightly with my hand to feel her temperature, which seemed worryingly high, and I put my other hand onto her cropped blond head, wondering momentarily whom she had inherited this blondness from, for both Lazar and his wife had dark hair. Then I slid my hand down to her nape and her neck, to feel if there was any swelling in the neck or the thyroid gland, and at the same time I asked her the kinds of meaningless routine questions I usually asked patients in order to gain their confidence and encourage them to reveal, even if unintentionally, additional truths about themselves.

I was glad to see that despite her weakness she seemed eager to cooperate with me, for my main fear when I had begun this trip had been that I would find her so far gone in that she would be completely apathetic, or even resist my efforts to arrive at an exact diagnosis of her condition and take the right steps to bring her home quickly. In contrast to the resistance she seemed to show toward her parents, she answered my questions willingly, if hesitantly, and recalled how it had all begun and what she had felt and where it had hurt most, and she was even able to describe the changing color of her urine since then, and of course what hurt her now, apart from this itchiness that was driving her crazy — for which I was prepared, because after Hishin had forgotten to bring me the articles he had promised, I had managed to read up on the disease in an old English medical encyclopedia I found in my parents’ house the night before we left, where the itch was particularly vividly described. “Apart from the itch, what is giving you pain?” I pressed her to go on complaining to her heart’s content, and she did so, and although I noticed that she was confusing symptoms associated with the disease with independent symptoms, such as pains in her legs and a heavy feeling in her back, I said nothing and just nodded my head in agreement with everything she said, still stroking her neck, where I felt a slight swelling in the trachea. Perhaps, I thought, the swelling was natural to her, and I dropped my hand in order not to confuse myself with superfluous speculations before I obtained the results of the crucial tests, which had to be given and rushed to the hospital in Gaya immediately. But I couldn’t forget the remark made by the Indian doctor in the train, about the unreliability of the laboratory in the Gaya hospital. It was a pity we’d met him, I reflected bitterly, because if we had to start checking up on how reliabile the Indian laboratories were, we would never finish. But I immediately suppressed this idle thought. Even if Hishin had exaggerated my qualities greatly, mainly in order to get his friends off his back, he was well acquainted with my scrupulous thoroughness, and he had trusted it to guide me without making any mistakes that might eventually be discovered in the hospital in Tel Aviv, where malicious professors and sycophantic doctors would lick their lips over them. I was only too familiar with the fact that in medicine everybody always has to have the last word: what should have been done, what shouldn’t have been done, and what did more harm than good.

But I knew that here I was in sole charge, and I had to make an immediate decision. Even though it seemed strange to me for a moment that the director of a big, modern hospital, with the best medical minds at his disposal, should be standing here anxiously with his wife in a dark little chamber in a Buddhist monastery at the end of the world, completely dependent on the professional opinion of an inexperienced young resident, who had not yet examined the patient properly but only touched her lightly on the forehead to feel her temperature and felt her neck a little, I stood up to announce my decision.

“We have to perform some essential tests immediately,” I explained, “so we’ll know where we are and where we’re going. Even though her condition’s not great, she can be moved. But before that we have to find out a few things, such as the bilirubin and glucose levels, in order to learn how much damage has already been done to the liver. But there’s no need to return her to the hospital; we can obtain the samples on the spot and take them to Gaya. In the meantime, I suggest we find a better room and move her into it. She shouldn’t be left in this squalor.”

A smile now hovered on Lazar’s wife’s face — not the familiar smile, which still confused me by its ready appearance, but a more inward and personal smile, as if she were wondering at the authoritative tone I had suddenly adopted (which, to tell the truth, originated with Professor Hishin, who always used the first-person plural when he came across a patient or the relative of a patient who appealed to him particularly). The two Japanese girls came out of their corner, bent over the gas burner, and offered us some of the pale tea they had brewed. Lazar’s wife hesitated, but Lazar declined the offer, in a hurry to rush off and obey my orders by finding a decent place for us to stay. “You can all wait for me here,” he announced. His wife seemed upset by his urge to depart, quickly stiffened, and said, “Just a minute,” and Lazar said, “What’s the matter?” and she replied, “Perhaps I should come with you.”

“But why?” asked Lazar. “There’s no need.”

But she insisted: “No, I think I should come along to help you.” She was already bending over her daughter to kiss her, and promising, “We’ll be back soon.” Then she turned to me and said, “You stay with her, and if possible start your tests, and we’ll be back right away.” So saying, she went off with her husband, evidently unable to remain alone not only with me but even with her daughter.

Einat was still lying hugging herself with both arms, scratching and rubbing, sending me a quiet look from eyes as yellow as a tiger’s or a hyena’s. But in spite of her obviously poor physical condition, I felt no pessimism, for I knew that I had already gained her confidence by the way I laid my hand on her head and felt her nape and neck. From the minute Hishin told me about her, I had harbored the suspicion that I was being sent to an apathetic patient who had lost the will to recover and might even resist my efforts to help her. But it didn’t look as if the young woman lying here would be able to mobilize any resistance; she was too absorbed in her frenzied scratching, and she was eager too for strange hands to touch her and even to take part indirectly in the frantic scratching. But I didn’t want to hurry to work yet, and although it was beginning to get dark, I first drank the bitter, scalding tea offered by the Japanese girls and asked them to tell me about themselves. They told me that they had arrived in Bodhgaya two days before, directly from Japan, to take an advanced course in meditation in the nearby Japanese monastery, and since there had been no room there they had come here and been given a place to sleep with the sick girl, on condition that they look after her a little. They had tried to take care of her needs without getting infected, and wore cloth masks when they touched her. Yesterday they had taken her into the inner garden of the monastery and fed her the rice gruel that they had cooked for her. But her itch was severe, and the ointments the monks had given her didn’t help, and had I brought some good medicine with me? they asked, as if I had come all the way from Israel to treat an itch. “Maybe,” I said, “we’ll see,” and I opened the knapsack and began emptying its contents onto the blanket they spread out for me, angry with Lazar’s wife for not staying to help me undress her daughter. But the Japanese girls were very helpful; they brought me a big flashlight to supplement the dim light of the bulb, and then they sat Einat up and helped me take off her stained white robe, and supported her thin white back while I knelt and passed the stethoscope inch by inch over her back and chest to auscultate her lungs and see if they were clear and free of liquids, and of course to listen to her heartbeat, which was completely regular. The two girls watched my examination, pleased that somebody had come to relieve them of the responsibility for the patient, who had been entrusted to their charge maybe as a kind of religious test imposed by the monks. I nodded my head in satisfaction and said to my patient, “Everything sounds fine, Einati,” adopting the pet name used by her parents, and then I laid her slowly on her back to feel her abdomen, which was hard and covered with red marks from her incessant scratching. To my surprise, her inflamed liver, which should have been enlarged, appeared to have shrunk so much that it was difficult to palpate in the flat, hard abdomen, as if it had already begun to degenerate. At first I was alarmed, but I immediately said to myself that degeneration couldn’t possibly have occurred only two months after the outbreak of the disease. The gall bladder did seem enlarged, and was apparently also inflamed, for the slightest pressure from my fingers was enough to make Einat scream so loudly that the Japanese girls averted their faces. Footsteps were quickly audible in the corridor, and a shaven-headed monk in a robe the color of the setting sun came hurrying up to discover the cause of the scream, which had echoed through the quiet monastery. He spoke no English, and I asked the Japanese girls to explain that I was a doctor from Israel who had come with the girl’s parents to take her home.

But the monk remained standing in the doorway, as if he were unable to grasp the connection between my words and the scream of pain uttered by the woman lying half naked on the floor. I felt suddenly disheartened at the possibility of losing my patient’s confidence, and rage at Lazar’s wife’s desertion welled up in me for her. I decided to interrupt my clinical examination and postpone the palpation of the spleen and kidneys to another time. I would have plenty of opportunities later, I said to myself, and so I changed the dressing on the wound on Einat’s leg, which seemed to me infected but not serious. I put her stained white robe back on and tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry, it’s only an inflamed gall bladder, which is quite natural in hepatitis.” Among the medications I found a tube of cortisone ointment, which was supposed to relieve the itching, and allowed her to rub it on her arms and abdomen herself, warning her not to expect anything more than temporary relief, since the unexcreted bile salts accumulated under the skin and the itching could be relieved only from inside. But she thanked me gratefully. While she smeared herself with the ointment, assisted by the Japanese girls, I asked one of them to bring the flashlight closer and prepared to draw blood. I have to admit that it gave me a kick to see them all, including the Buddhist monk, frozen in their places as I tightened the rubber tube around Einat’s thin arm, looked for a vein, and gently and slowly extracted a syringe full of blood. Not content with one, I took another one and filled it too. As long as she’s lying here quietly, I thought to myself, I might as well get two — who knows, a test tube can break or become infected; the blood’s flowing now, and who can tell what might happen tomorrow?

Now we waited for the Lazars to return. The monk went away, and one of the Japanese girls took Einat to the toilet with two transparent sterile containers I gave her for a urine sample and if possible a stool as well. I remained with the other girl, and made no bones about asking her for a fresh cup of tea, which she was happy to give me, adding a little dry cake as well. Since she seemed intelligent, I asked her what she was looking for in Bodhgaya, and she told me about a local course in a kind of meditation called Vipassana, whose main feature was abstinence from speech for two weeks. “For that you have to come all the way from Japan?” I asked with a smile. “Couldn’t you keep quiet for two weeks at home?” But it transpired that silence next to the Buddha’s sacred bo tree had a significance that was different from silence anywhere else. Then I asked her to tell me something about the Buddha and what his teachings could mean to a rational, secular man like myself, who had no inclination to mysticism or belief in reincarnation. She tried to explain to me that Buddhism had nothing to do with mysticism but was an attempt to stop the suffering that came from birth, illness, old age, and death, or even the mental suffering incurred by the presence of a hated person or the absence of a loved one. And the way to stop the suffering was to try to become detached and free and thus to attain Nirvana, which was the end of the cycle of rebirths. “Is it really possible to stop the cycle of rebirths?” I inquired with an inner smile, in Hindu irony, and as I asked, Einat returned from the toilet supported by the Japanese girl, who was carefully carrying the two little receptacles, which contained a faintly pink fluid, the color of the tea I had just been drinking. And although my heart froze for a moment at the obviously pathological appearance of the urine, which suggested the presence of blood, I said nothing and betrayed no sign of anxiety. On the contrary, I congratulated Einat on the success of her efforts and took the two little containers and placed them with the test tubes of blood in a padded leather pouch which could be fastened to someone’s belt for safe conveyance during a trip. Good for our head pharmacist, I thought admiringly; I mustn’t forget to praise him for his foresight and ingenuity when I get back. I went on talking to the Japanese girl about the Buddha and his followers, drinking my third cup of tea while Einat dozed in the fetal position, as if the loud cry she had previously produced had calmed her. I was beginning to feel astonished at the procrastination of her parents, and thinking angrily of Lazar’s wife, who even at this difficult hour was no doubt looking for somewhere original to stay.

They finally returned, agitated but also proud of their achievements. Suddenly the room filled with a number of half-naked young Indians, who before our eyes put together two stretchers from bamboo poles and mats, like the ones on which dead bodies were transported to the river. One of them was quickly loaded with our luggage, while the sick girl was carefully lifted onto the other and covered with a floral cloth. In a soft, beautiful twilight hour, our little procession left the Thai monastery with two stretchers held shoulder-high and made its way through the tree-shaded streets of Bodhgaya, passing shacks made of cloth and wood, under the sympathetic gaze of locals and pilgrims. Our destination was a hotel not far from the local river, surrounded by lawns and flower beds, where the Lazars had found a bungalow consisting of three small rooms connected by a passage and a rather dirty kitchenette with a sink and a stove in one corner and a table in the middle, which someone had already heaped with fruit and vegetables, cheeses and chapatis in anticipation of our arrival. For a moment I stood amazed at the transformation of my simple request for a decent room into this massive domestication. Before even asking about the results of the examination I had carried out on their daughter in their absence, both the Lazars burst into a frenzy of organization. Einat was put to bed between clean white sheets in a little room of her own, and Lazar’s wife fussed over her and pampered her and went to fetch a vase of fresh flowers from the hotel manager, while Lazar himself attacked the clutter and disorder with a vengeance, opening the suitcases and putting the clothes away in the closets as if he had forgotten all about his hospital and his promise to conclude the trip in ten or twelve days. It was as if all he wanted was to settle down in this little bungalow in the charming Buddhist village, which in comparison to the Indian reality we had seen up to now was a veritable paradise on earth.

But I still hadn’t opened my suitcase, only put it on the bed in the little room set aside for me. I was uneasy, not only because of the color of Einat’s urine, and the blood, which at first sight looked diseased and saturated with bilirubin, or the enlarged gall bladder, which had made her scream with pain when I touched it, but mainly because of my failure to palpate the liver, as if it had shrunk or degenerated in an alarmingly accelerated process of cell destruction. In which case, I thought, there was a good chance that before long she might develop a sudden internal hemorrhage. The thought terrified me, because if that happened here, in this remote village, all we would be able to do was pray to Buddha. As Lazar stood in the doorway with a strange-looking apron tied around his waist and invited me to come into the kitchen, I pulled myself together and decided to return immediately to Gaya and hand the samples over to the hospital laboratory and at the same time have a look at their equipment, so I would know what would be available to us if we needed it. If, as I feared, the results were bad, it would make no sense to settle down in this funny little bungalow with its dirty little kitchen and big dining table — we should go straight to Calcutta and take her to the hospital recommended by the Indian doctor on the train, so I wouldn’t have to cope with any possible deterioration on my own. Strangely enough, the Lazars did not seem worried; perhaps they had expected to find her in worse condition, or perhaps they had put their faith in Hishin’s pronouncement that in the last analysis hepatitis was a self-limited disease, and accordingly, after collecting their daughter and transferring her to the bungalow, all they sought was rest. The holy village too appeared to have had a calming effect on them, and they seemed perfectly happy to putter about in their little kitchen with its knives and forks and plates and even a pot bubbling on the stove.

I decided to sow a few seeds of anxiety in the cozy domesticity that was taking over here, and, declining to sit down at the laid table, I announced without undue gravity that I felt obliged to go straight to the hospital at Gaya with the samples I had obtained. I placed the ointment to relieve Einat’s incessant itch on the table, between the fruit and the chapatis, and also a few Valium tablets and paracetamol to bring down her temperature, and warned the Lazars not to mask her symptoms by exaggerating the dosage. But I wasn’t sure that I had conveyed my anxiety to them, for Lazar greeted my announcement with astonishment. “Are you sure that it’s really necessary to go to the hospital now, in the dark?”

“I’m positive,” I replied immediately, and added that I might be delayed there until the next morning, because if it turned out that the laboratory was closed at night — something inconceivable in a serious hospital — or even that it couldn’t be trusted to give me reliable results, as the Indian doctor from Calcutta had warned us, I would have to look for another. “But where will you find another one here?” asked Lazar with a smile, surprised at this new, stringent side of my character. “I don’t know, I’ll ask. If I could, I’d go to Calcutta, to that Indian doctor’s private laboratory. I trust him, and we have his address on his card.”

“To Calcutta? Are you mad?” Lazar leapt up as if he’d been bitten. “How will you get there? It’s hell on earth, and it’s hours from here.”

“Yes, it’s far away, but maybe there’s a flight from Gaya.”

“A flight?” repeated the stunned Lazar. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to fly to Calcutta just for those tests?”

“No, of course not,” I stammered. But Lazar wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t understand what’s gotten into you. What exactly are you looking for?”

“Nothing,” I said, “I just want reliable results.”

“Reliable.” He sighed. “Here, of all places?” And when I said nothing he added, “Perhaps we should just let Einati recuperate here for a few days and go straight home, and they’ll do all the necessary tests there.” Now I had to protest, although I was still careful not to worry them too much. “Those tests are important,” I stressed. “If you say no, that’s your right — but then you’ll have to explain to me why you dragged me here with you in the first place.” And Lazar’s wife, who was sitting opposite me with a gray face and slightly untidy hair, wearing a lightweight white blouse which revealed small new freckles on her neck, smoking her slender cigarette in silence, and examining me intently with an expression that I felt radiated a new sympathy toward me, suddenly burst out and said to her husband, softly but firmly, “He’s right. Trust him. And if he wants to fly to Calcutta to get reliable results, why not? We can wait; that’s why we made ourselves comfortable here. Do whatever you think best”—she turned to me—“and we’ll wait here patiently. But have something to eat before you go.”

I sat down at the big table, ate quickly, and stood up immediately to get ready, because I still hoped to return the same night. I removed everything except a few drugs and bandages from the knapsack and filled it with a clean shirt, a sweater, underwear, and toiletries, hung my camera around my neck, and was instantly transformed into a wandering backpacker. I fastened the pouch with the samples onto my belt, and took three hundred dollars from Lazar for expenses. His wife made me sandwiches with the chapatis and put exotic fruits in a brown paper bag for me. Before I left I decided to take another look at my patient. She was sleeping, her beautiful face peaceful, only her hands still clutching each other and making sleepy scratching movements. For a moment I was loath to wake her, now that she had finally found rest in a decent bed, but I didn’t want to leave without taking the opportunity to palpate her organs. Lazar’s wife helped me wake her up and raised the light flannel pajama jacket they had brought from Israel for her. The yellowish chest, the small breasts, and the scratched stomach were again exposed to my fingers, whose special palpation technique had once even aroused the admiration of Hishin himself, who ever since then had called me “the internist.” I could now clearly feel how shrunken the liver was, compared to the enlarged gall bladder and spleen. But I was very careful not to hurt her again, because I wanted to regain her confidence. I concluded my examination and covered the thin body. I still wanted to get a stool specimen from her; it wasn’t essential, I explained to her parents, but if at all possible, it might prove very helpful. Just as I was about to leave, standing in my green windbreaker, Lazar’s wife came out and handed me a little parcel wrapped in newspaper, which I couldn’t resist removing so I could look at the color of the stool. It was suspiciously black, as if it contained occult blood. But I said nothing and wordlessly rewrapped the container, which I enclosed in another receptacle. Lazar and his wife accompanied me outside, where a gaudily painted auto-rickshaw was waiting, hired for me by Lazar, who had already begun to exert his organizational gifts on Indian life. “The driver will be at your disposal all the time. I’ve already paid him there and back, don’t worry,” he said dryly, as if he was angry with me for giving them new grounds for anxiety instead of reassuring them. Leaning against one another, embracing without an embrace, they stood and watched me as I sat down in the open rickshaw, behind the elderly and grave-faced motorcyclist, who was wearing a towering white turban on his head and who immediately began pulling me into the dark night, as if we were orbiting in a black void.

He took me to Gaya by strange shortcuts, dirt roads winding through fields and orchards, and if there were any houses or shacks in the vast, flat plain, I was unaware of them, for their lights were buried deep inside them. Since the sky was shrouded in a dense gray mist and there wasn’t a moon or a single star to be seen, the only sign of life was the white turban floating before me. Nevertheless, I felt quiet and confident as I held tightly to the edges of the swaying seat, the knapsack at my feet, and I was no longer troubled by attempts to decipher the Indian reality. My mind was now occupied by a practical medical reality, at the center of which was the need to diagnose correctly the condition of the sick woman I had left behind, whom I could still see in my imagination, lying in her little room with her parents — who, I now, in the darkness of the night, sensed were afraid of her — tiptoeing around her bed. When the rickshaw began to slow down, I strapped the knapsack onto my back and checked to see that the pouch was snugly fastened to my belt, and the moment we stopped outside the hospital, which I recognized even in the dense darkness, I jumped down and said to the turbaned Indian, “Don’t move from here.” I ran eagerly up the steps: it had been more than a week since I had been in a hospital, and I missed even the smell.

But the smell that greeted me here was utterly different from the familiar one of Lysol and feces, or of drugs and ether, sometimes mingled with the smell of boiled vegetables. And it wasn’t the smell of the dead either, with which I was also familiar, but simply the smell of rot that violently assailed me. I stopped in the doorway, took a large gauze pad out of the knapsack, sprinkled it with iodine, and tied it onto my face with a bandage, like a surgical mask, and then I was able to enter the corridors to look for the laboratory. It was possibly thanks to this orange bandage on my face and not to the fact that I announced myself to be a doctor that someone paid attention to me and led me to the laboratory, which was situated in a courtyard at the back of the hospital, in a big, old hut besieged by silent patients, mainly women squatting on the bare ground with ragged children by their side. There nobody was impressed by my orange-stained mask, and I had to push my way to the head of the line and force my way into the hut, toward a very dark-skinned but noble-looking middle-aged woman, tall and thin as a slab of black marble, dressed in a flimsy rainbow-colored sari, with a big red third eye painted between her eyes. She was the lab supervisor, perhaps a clerk or perhaps a technician, slow in her movements and apparently also very disorganized, because her desk was untidily heaped with dozens of cards and lab results in different colors, among which she rummaged for the test numbers in order to give the results to the people crowding around her. At first she persisted in ignoring me, even though I had already removed the mask and explained that I was a doctor, but at last she turned to me and asked me what I wanted, and when I told her and added that I was prepared to pay double if the tests were done at once, she looked down at me from her towering height and said with a faintly contemptuous expression that a hospital belonging to Buddha, who was also the god of beggars, did not take payment, but if I wanted to make a donation there was a box for this purpose at the main entrance. “Certainly, I’ll make a donation at once,” I promised, and hurried to take the test tubes and containers out of the pouch. At first she recoiled. “Not here,” she said, waving me away, “not here, there’s a special counter. Go and stand in the line.” But finally she gave in and told me to write down which tests I wanted on some hospital notepaper. I wrote it all down, and added a request for liver-function tests; I signed my name and gave the number of my Israeli medical license, and needless to say, I avoided mentioning the fact that until a few days before my patient had been hospitalized in this very hospital, in order not to give rise to any unexpected bureaucratic complications. She glanced at my list, put a big red question mark next to “liver-function tests,” said that she was not sure if they could do them here, casually wrapped the blood and urine samples in the notepaper — without even bothering to secure it with tape or rubber rings — and threw them into a big cardboard box full of dusty test tubes, some empty and others full of strange-colored fluids. I thanked her, but repeated my request to have the tests done as quickly as possible; if necessary, I said, I was willing to step into the laboratory myself and help. “My patient,” I said, “is burning with fever in Bodhgaya, and as soon as we know the results we can begin to treat her.” But then the noble Indian woman suddenly flared up. “Everyone here wants to know, everyone here is waiting, everyone here is sick, everyone was sent by a doctor, nobody comes to have blood tests for fun,” she scolded me angrily, as if I were a boy. Why did I think I was entitled to an answer without waiting my turn? Was it only because the people standing here had darker skins than mine? And with a long, slender hand she waved me contemptuously away.

Without understanding why I felt so deeply insulted by this woman, I had a momentary impulse to ask her to return the samples so that I could take them somewhere more reliable. But I kept quiet. Feeling both mortified and at a loss, because I didn’t know where else to go, nor when to come back for the results, I left the laboratory hut. For some time I hung around in the courtyard, pacing to and fro among the Indians waiting in the dark, peeping through the window at the tired lab technicians sitting crowded together in the dim light, big bottles of serum at their sides, peering through ancient microscopes at the blood and urine samples that had been brought there in little blue glass jars. In the end I got fed up with this aimless hanging around and returned to the place where I had left my rickshaw, but it was now surrounded by many similar vehicles and I couldn’t recognize it. I had to go from one rickshaw to the next and examine the sleepy drivers curled up on their backseats before I found my driver, who, luckily for me, had kept his regal white turban on in his sleep. “Take me to the river,” I instructed him, for from the day I had arrived in India I had found myself drawn to rivers. But the sleepy driver smiled at me with his gaping, ancient, toothless mouth and tried to explain that there was no river in Gaya now. “There’s no river now?” I said in bewilderment. “But there’s a river on the map in the guidebook.” There was a river but there was no water in it, he tried to say, helping me in the meantime onto the seat, still warm from his sleep, covering me with a tattered blanket, and pulling his rickshaw silently out of the heap of rickshaws surrounding it. He drove me to the bank of the river, which was indeed there, where the guidebook said it was, but almost entirely dry, even in this winter season. In the depths of the dry riverbed a fire was burning, and by its shape I guessed it was a funeral pyre. The figures squatting around it in such celestial serenity were presumably the relatives of the dead man, helping to liberate his soul.

I got out of the rickshaw, opened the knapsack, and took out my sweater, for there was a chill in the air, and began carefully descending into the broad, dry riverbed, drawn to something whose nature was not clear to me and with the tall, thin Indian woman’s reprimand still burning inside me. But why did I feel so insulted? I tried to examine myself. What was happening to me? Was I hurt because she had made light of my concern? Lazar and his wife did not appear worried; they did not seem aware of the fact that their daughter was really sick, that she was in real danger, that her disease was not simply going to run its course and cure itself. A wave of pity for the sick girl and her doctor surged up in me, and as I climbed down the bushy bank toward the funeral pyre, little tears stung my eyes. What the hell was this? Why was I really so hurt and angry? Hishin had the right to choose not to keep me in his department, but what right did he, a doctor I had always admired, have to say contemptuously “a self-limited disease”? What did he know, that Hishin? And I trembled as if he were standing before me. But I didn’t stop; I went on advancing between the bushes and over the pebbles lying on the dry bed of the creek, between the rampant wild-flowers, colorless in the dark, picking my way carefully past the sleeping bodies of pilgrims or beggars covered with blankets and cardboard boxes, wiping away the unexpected tears, scoffing at myself for turning into a crybaby, here of all places, in a place that was supposed to make us pampered Westerners calm and humble in the face of real suffering.

The Indians sitting around the fire apparently sensed that I was making my way toward them, and they started getting up to welcome me, but also to prevent me from approaching the pyre and desecrating the sacred rite by my alien presence. Judging by their attire, they were urban Indians of quite a high class, and they behaved with both firmness and tact. They surrounded me, putting their hands together on their chests in the traditional greeting, apparently intent on barring my way. I joined my hands in an imitation of their gesture, to signal my sympathy and good will, and then I felt someone touching me lightly. It was my rickshaw driver, who had secretly followed me to see that I didn’t get into trouble. He spoke favorably of me to the people, but he too tried to prevent me from approaching the pyre, which was burning brightly and cheerfully, as if nothing was lying on top of it. I took the knapsack off my back and sat down on a big, damp boulder. The remnants of the river were gurgling nearby, and the night was cold and misty. Now that the Indians saw I had given up any intention of breaking through to the fire itself and had seated myself to one side, they calmed down, and one of them offered me a cup of scalding tea, perhaps as a sign of thanks for my restraint. I took the cup gratefully, but before I raised it to my lips I saw in astonishment that the body lying wrapped up next to the pyre and waiting to be burned was not yet dead but that of a mortally sick or dying man, who had apparently been dragged here in order to die in the right place. Every now and then someone would bend down to examine him, to stroke him, or to whisper to him, to encourage him with hopes for the waiting fire. Now I understood why they had been so insistent about barring my way. I could no longer drink the tea, and after a while, when the sound of an airplane overhead made all heads turn upward, I quickly poured the yellowish liquid onto the ground. Bright red lights now appeared in the mist, and a large old plane, whose propellers made a pleasant purring sound, came down very low, right over our heads, and continued flying along the riverbed until it landed. The Indians began talking about this night flight from New Delhi, which stopped at Gaya and went on to Patna and Calcutta. “Calcutta?” My excitement flared. They all knew the old plane and spoke affectionately about the night flight, which in an hour or two would take off for Patna and would reach Calcutta at dawn. Without another moment’s hesitation I stood up, returned the empty cup, and said to my driver, who was sitting there in his tall turban, looking pleased with himself and drinking his second cup of tea. “Take me quickly to the airport. I want to go to Calcutta.” “No chance,” he said without budging from his place. “That plane is always full.” But I insisted. The possibility of ascertaining not only the bilirubin level but also which liver functions had been impaired, especially with regard to the glucose level and clotting factors (a deficiency which could cause an internal hemorrhage), was so crucial that it justified an attempt to get to Calcutta, even if Lazar, who had never been there in his life, called it “hell on earth.” I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to take double samples of everything from Einat, so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the tall Indian woman in the laboratory.

The flight was indeed full, just as my rickshaw driver had warned me, but after I had repeatedly explained to the clerks at the airport that I was an English doctor who needed to take urgent medical tests to a laboratory in Calcutta — I even displayed the blood and urine samples as evidence — they agreed to provide me with a little folding seat at the back of the plane, apparently meant for the attendants, whom I paid for the ticket, which seemed very cheap. I gave the rickshaw driver a few rupees and a note to take to the Lazars in Bodhgaya, in which I outlined my plans to take the samples to Calcutta and return the next day, by train or plane, with reliable results. Don’t worry, I concluded ironically, I’ll come back from hell too — you know that I don’t get lost. I added quotation marks to the word “hell,” to show that I was quoting Lazar but also to alleviate my own anxiety, and signed “Yours, Benjamin.” It was almost midnight. I took one of the three large sandwiches Lazar’s wife had prepared out of my knapsack and ate it with relish, and I thought about the two of them and how compatible they were. Even their attitude toward their daughter was the same: a strange, detached compassion, and something like fear of her as well. Would Lazar’s wife also have called Calcutta hell? And what did Lazar know about hell? He must know sinister places in his hospital, like the morgue. Let’s say that Calcutta was hell — the doctor and his brother whom we had met in the train looked perfectly cheerful, and they lived there. And even if the poverty and suffering were worse than anything we had seen up to now, so much the better. On my return to Bodhgaya I would have a certain advantage over the Lazars, which would establish my authority as a doctor if the dire circumstances I feared arose. They were too sure of themselves; the deep bond between them made them smug. And when, after midnight, the propellers turned and the plane took off with an ease that was surprising in view of its age, I saw the takeoff as a sign of the Tightness of my decision and fell asleep at once.

I dreamed that I returned to the bungalow, which was no longer in Bodhgaya but in some other town, still in the east but not in India. The kitchen was much larger than in reality, and the wooden table had given way to the glass table in the Lazars’ living room in Tel Aviv, with other furniture from their apartment too, and also furniture from my parents’ place in Jerusalem. The motorcycle I had left in my parents’ yard stood covered up next to the sink. Only my patient was missing. The Lazars were both sitting sadly at the dining room table, waiting for me to return from Calcutta with the results of the tests, and I suddenly realized that I was very late, and that instead of returning the next day, as I had promised in my note, I had returned after a few weeks, perhaps even months. But they were still waiting for me, faithful to the promise they had given my parents to look after me. Where’s my patient? I asked in boundless distress, and they looked at each other, and Lazar remained seated. His wife stood up and led me to the corner, where a strange little girl was lying wrapped in a gray sheet. He’s arrived, her mother whispered.

With the first signs of light the plane began the descent to fog-enshrouded Calcutta, where solitary lights glittered. The city looked like a huge ancient factory where work had stopped but which still had a cloud of smog hanging over it. Although it was very early in the morning, aimless crowds were already milling around, and the people looked as if they were floating, as if the law of gravity had been abolished here. The thought flashed through my mind that if I wanted a sign that I had indeed descended to the lowest rung of human suffering, this was it. In New Delhi or Varanasi even the beggars and cripples had some kind of direction, but here all direction had been lost, and people were milling around together in a vortex into which I too was soon swept, unable to find my way out. Naked beggars clung to me, leprous and limbless, and it was impossible to shake them off. I was thirsty and tired from the flight, but I vacillated between having something to drink here, in the heart of the commotion, next to maimed and dying people lying next to the walls, and waiting until I reached the city itself. In the end my thirst won and I went over to one of the stalls and asked for tea with milk, the way my English mother made it. I chose two postcards with stamps already printed on them, and took another one of the sandwiches prepared by Lazar’s wife out of my knapsack and ate it standing up while I scribbled a few affectionate words to my parents in my small, neat handwriting, telling them why I was in Calcutta. The stall-keeper showed me where to find the mailbox, which was red and big and very British, inspiring me with confidence that the letter I dropped into it would indeed reach its destination. The other postcard I put away in my pocket, and feeling somewhat recovered, I extricated myself from the human swarm. Without hesitating I chose not a rickshaw but a proper cab, which took me straight to the laboratory whose address was printed on the card.

The dream I had had on the plane disturbed me but also served me a warning: I must not get lost here. My purpose was to ascertain the liver functions, the two transaminases, the clotting factors, and the glucose levels. I had full confidence in the Indian doctor and his brother. They were connected with the University of Calcutta. But when the cabdriver dropped me outside a regular apartment building in a little alley, without any sign of a medical laboratory, my spirits fell, and I would not release the cabbie until he led me to the doctor’s door. To my surprise, the shabby apartment building, which was only a few stories high, possessed a little elevator, but it was impossible to tell if it was working, for there were a number of people sleeping in it, huddled together like a tangle of black snakes. At this early hour the stairwell too was full of sleeping people. The cabbie immediately removed his sandals and stepped over them barefoot, and I too took off my shoes and tried to glide over them in my socks. In that way we reached my doctor’s flat, where we found a card like the one in my pocket pinned to the door. The cabbie was not content with leading me to the door but went inside to drag the doctor out of bed. The doctor, with only a narrow loincloth on his smooth, slender body, which looked like that of a boy, was not at all surprised to see me standing before him. He cried joyfully, “All the time I’ve been saying to my brother, Dr. Benjamin will have to come to us in the end if he wants to know the truth. But who would have believed that he would come so early?” He laughed and ushered me into a big, dim room full of carpets and ornaments, where two little girls were sleeping on the couch. He removed them quickly to the next room and returned after a few minutes in a pale European suit. He immediately took the samples from me, listened attentively to what I had to say about my patient’s condition and my suspicions, and in a clear firm hand wrote down the particulars of the tests I wanted performed, with which he appeared to be thoroughly familiar. Nothing seemed to him either impossible or superfluous. Finally he stood up and said, “Give me half a day and my brother and I will have all the results ready for you. If you don’t make the afternoon flight, you can always take the five o’clock train, which reaches Gaya at dawn.” He then spread a thin, colorful rug on the couch where the little girls had been sleeping, beat the cushions lightly, and turned them around. He scattered a few joss sticks in an ashy incense bowl, lit them to banish the smells of the night, and said, “You can rest here and even sleep, and return tonight refreshed to the patient for whose sake you came all the way to Calcutta.”

I found myself in a rather pleasant room, with chains of flowers and little statues of gods with elephant and monkey faces. The subtle scent of incense pervaded my senses. There was no sign of hell here. I immediately sat down on the couch in my socks and thought how strange my journey to this place had been, and wondered whether it had really been purely out of concern for my patient or whether I wanted to prove to Hishin what a devoted and determined doctor I was and how far I was prepared to go to obtain all the relevant data about my patient’s condition. I took the second postcard out of my pocket and wrote in a rather lighthearted vein: “Dear Professor Hishin, Regards from Calcutta, which is the lowest of the low as far as human suffering and poverty are concerned. I arrived here alone to obtain a reliable and detailed diagnosis for our patient, whose condition is more worrying than you thought. The Lazars are nice and India is interesting. Yours, the ‘ideal’ man.” I wanted to add, “whom you seduced,” but I stopped myself. What would he understand by it? Even the word “ideal,” which I had put in quotation marks, seemed superfluous. What if he didn’t remember? I put the card in my pocket. It would reach him after I arrived home, so what was the point? I took off my sweater and heard light footsteps behind the door. Did the doctor’s wife know who I was and what I was doing here? But the couch was soft, and I stretched out on it in profound weariness, thinking to myself, This is a little paradise in the midst of the hell which I haven’t yet really felt, and maybe I won’t feel it at all, and in any case I have no intention of boasting about having been in it.

But in spite of my tiredness I couldn’t really fall asleep, but only dozed, because the sleepers on the stairs began to wake up, and the residents tried to chase them away, and the elevator, which had apparently been relieved of its nocturnal refugees, began creaking up and down on its cables, and the doctor’s two little girls opened and shut the door to peek at me, trying to wake me up, until I finally had to invite them in. They hesitated, but in the end came shyly into the room, dressed in their school uniforms, which consisted of flimsy pink saris, with blue ribbons in their hair and satchels on their backs. I tried to get them to talk to me and to amuse them by making funny faces, but they didn’t laugh; maybe they thought my grimaces were natural to a Western face. In the end their mother came to take them to school, but she was hesitant about leaving me alone in the apartment. “In that case, perhaps I should go out and walk around the town a little. Is there a river here?” I asked. And of course there was a river, which was called the Hooghly River, with ghats of its own, and there was a fort here too, called Fort William, which was situated in the beautiful Maidan of Calcutta. It would be a pity not to see the sights, I thought, and said good-bye to my hostess. When I went downstairs I counted the stairs and made a note of their number, so I wouldn’t have any problems finding the right apartment. I went outside and noted landmarks to help me identify the alley too, and walked up and down to practice remembering the location of the building, but when I left it and turned into the main street, I was immediately surrounded by the milling crowds and realized that I was the only foreigner there. I felt suddenly weak, and I remembered my dream. I had to be careful not to go too far, to watch myself, because I had to get back; Lazar’s wife had placed her trust in me. I wasn’t a tourist, I was a doctor on duty, and I had to get back tonight to my patient, whose delicate jaundiced face came into my mind from time to time, accompanied by the meaningless smile flashing in her mother’s eyes. I decided to forgo the river and its ghats, as well as the important fort and the beautiful Maidan, and to confine my movements to a safe, narrow circle, without losing touch with the street. Every half-hour or so I would return and stand in front of the building, and sometimes I would go upstairs and knock on the door to see if the results had already arrived. In one of the nearby streets a building with a big crowd jostling in front of it attracted my attention. At first I thought it was another temple, but when I went closer I saw that it was a big old cinema, covered with colorful posters. On the sidewalk lay an old woman who appeared to be dying, with some lepers sitting next to her looking with burning eyes at the people going into the cinema. Perhaps I had better see India in a movie, I thought. I bought a ticket and entered a big, dark hall with crumbling carvings on its many pillars. Rows of heads greeted my eyes, some of them turbaned and others bare — smooth-shaven, wild, or curly. As I walked in they almost all turned, as if there were something unique and strange about my smell or footsteps. I selected a seat in one of the middle rows, and they all stood up eagerly to let me pass and smiled at me encouragingly. But before long an usher with a badge pinned to his chest arrived and started persuading me to move to another seat, apparently a seat of honor. At first I tried to refuse, but he pointed to the people around me and said, “Bad people, bad people,” and they all smiled at us. Again I tried to refuse, but he insisted, coming all the way down the row and gripping my arm forcibly, pointing once more to the people around me, who never stopped smiling. In the end he led me to an armchair upholstered in red velvet, which had grown pink and stubbly over the years, like the pelt of a mangy old animal. And on the seat which had perhaps known guests more notable than myself, I sat and watched a movie without subtitles, in which a lean young Indian movie star suffered the pangs not of hunger but of love.

When I returned to the apartment at midday, I found not only the little girls and their mother but also the doctor and his brother, waving the results of the tests. My suspicions were right. There was liver damage. The coagulation system was impaired. The bilirubin was very high, nearly thirty. The ALT had risen from 40 to 180, and the AST was also elevated. Hypoglycemia was causing the extreme fatigue. The patient needed an urgent injection of glucose, and perhaps also something to replenish the depleted clotting factors, the simplest thing being a unit of fresh blood. They also showed me results of tests I hadn’t requested. There was no doubt that they had done a thorough job — spent the whole morning running from one laboratory to the next and squeezing the maximum information out of the samples I had given them. Now I had to get back to my patient as quickly as possible; I didn’t have a minute to waste. I took out my wallet and gave them a hundred dollars, a very generous sum, not only in their eyes but in mine. However, I added a condition: that they wouldn’t leave me to get back by myself but would put me on the right train for Gaya, since there was no hope of getting on a flight. They were astonished and delighted by the fee and promised to make a generous donation to charity with part of it, and they said that of course they would put me on a good train to Gaya, but first they wanted to know if I had seen anything of Calcutta. “Very little,” I replied. “It’s a rough place, but it’s not hell on earth.” They burst into hearty laughter, but insisted that parts of the city were indeed hellish, as if being a hell on earth constituted a major tourist attraction they were reluctant to give up. On the way to the train station they would show me places that would really depress me, but on condition that I first sit down to feast. I wasn’t hungry, and my anxiety for my patient was beginning to overwhelm me, but I couldn’t refuse the blandishments of my genial hosts. In the meantime a lot of little dishes arrived, full of every possible kind of food in a variety of original shapes and colors. The doctor and his brother sat down next to me with the little girls in their arms, and they all watched to make sure that I didn’t miss tasting a single dish. I soon felt full and slightly nauseated. The grave looks of the dark little girls added to my anxiety. I stood up and announced apologetically that the results of the tests had deprived me of my peace of mind. “I beg you, my friends, in the name of God, let’s go, and if you want to show me something on the way, maybe you can drop me next to the river, because I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but ever since I arrived in India I’ve been drawn to rivers as if I’ve fallen in love with them.” Although they were sorry at the interruption of the feast, they quickly did as I asked and took me to the Maidan, a vast green expanse overlooking the river, at the northern end of which stood a tall column, where they took a photograph of me with my camera and posed for me to take one of them. But I wasn’t satisfied with looking at the river, I wanted to go right down to the water. They took me down, and when they saw me suddenly bending over and dipping my fingers in the chilly water, they bowed their heads in gratification. This private and independent dip reinforced their opinion that I was worthy of seeing hell from within, and not only from the window of a speeding car but very slowly, in a man-drawn rickshaw, through terrible alleys full of vast piles of stinking garbage, in some of which decaying human beings were crawling, dying from the moment they were born, cast-off humans twitching like broken insects squashed beneath a giant boot. For an entire hour they led me through streets that had apparently once been pleasant and civilized, in which fine houses had once stood, and that now looked as if they had been ravaged by a terrible leprosy, and the pain was even greater because of the vestiges of beauty that were still evident. And so we advanced in the clear winter sunshine, I in the slow rickshaw and my two bearded escorts in their white suits walking beside me, occasionally taking a coin out of their pocket and placing it in the palm of a dying man or a child, seemingly pleased by my interest. “Could hell be worse?” they asked, turning to me in the end with a strangely triumphant expression as we entered the station.

Although the train trip lasted nine hours, I couldn’t sleep a wink. The sights of Calcutta mingled with the gnawing anxiety about Einat had turned into a single entity weighing on my heart. In the end, when sleepiness almost overcame me, I went and stood in the corridor, afraid that Gaya might slip past in the night. After midnight I was ejected onto the platform, which looked like the last station at the end of the world, and picked my way carefully through the rickshaws standing outside in the hope of finding the rickshaw driver with the white turban, but he wasn’t there. Another, younger driver took me to Bodhgaya on a country road winding through pleasant hills outlined by a slender crescent moon. The hotel by the river was closed and dark, and for a moment I forgot where the entrance to our little bungalow was. On my last legs, I walked around the building, and for the first time on this trip I felt my composure collapse, and a painful, unfamiliar sob escaped my lips. Would I really have to stay outside all night in the chill rising from the river, just because I wanted to be ideal not only in the eyes of the Lazars but in my own eyes too? I sat down under one of the large trees to recover, and remembered I still had one sandwich left, which I ate in order to ward off sleep. Then I stood up, heartened as if by a glass of good wine, and walked around the grounds again until I recognized the bungalow. I knocked lightly and the door opened at once. It was Dori, without her glasses, her hair loose, in a thin nightgown that outlined her full body and her big, firm breasts. I saw that her slippers had high heels. At first she seemed about to bestow only one of her automatic eye-smiles on me, but her emotions got the better of her and she spread out her arms and embraced me with forbidden warmth. For a moment we lingered in the gloomy kitchen, where dirty pots stood on the stove, but Lazar immediately appeared and gripped my head in a powerful embrace of both anger and deep affection. “What’s the matter with you? Where did you disappear to? In a little while we would have left without you! Just don’t tell me that you took those tests all the way to Calcutta!”

“Didn’t you get my note?” I questioned him with a strange pride. “Was it really necessary to go all the way there?” said Lazar as if he hadn’t heard me. “Yes, it was necessary,” I replied with a new firmness. “I got all the results possible in a reliable form, and now I know where we stand.”

“Where?” asked Lazar, who seemed offended by the way I had spoken. “In a minute,” I said. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Just let me check on Einat first.” And just as I was, without washing my hands, I went into the room where a yellow light illuminated the sick girl, who was still scratching herself in her restless sleep and who had no idea of the dangerous time bomb ticking inside her. I crouched down by her bed and laid my hand on her forehead. The fever was the same as before. Lazar and his wife looked at me impatiently. Her condition in the past twenty-four hours had not been encouraging, and now I had come back with the results of the tests and I was bending over her in such concern. I have to worry them, I said to myself, otherwise they won’t cooperate with me; otherwise the authority I’m going to need here will be compromised. I held her limp wrist to take her pulse. Her green eyes opened wide in her thin, beautiful face, but she didn’t smile like her mother. “Well?” said Lazar, irritated by my performance. “In a minute. Just let me wash my hands,” I said, and went into the kitchen. Lazar’s wife handed me a towel and soap, and I smiled at them, turned to Lazar, and said, “As far as Calcutta’s concerned, you were right. But there are good people there, and you won’t believe it, I actually saw a movie.”

Five

But even supposing that he has really fallen in love, what can he do about it? he says to himself with a gloomy smile, his eyes caressing the supple back of the little girl bending over the atlas and gnawing her pencil She has to belong to somebody, he reassures himself, somebody who will come to fetch her. But the thought that the little girl has been abandoned in his kitchen goes on percolating in him, and with a new and pleasant lust, which can still, he believes, be controlled, he lays his hand lightly on her slender shoulder, in order to encourage her. He leans over the tablecloth spread out in front of him in its blue, green, and yellow, sweetly reading the names of towns and countries, and says to her in a tone of mild rebuke, “But what else is there to look for here, if this is the place?” And he lays his finger on a greenish stain crossed by the blue lines of rivers and announces firmly, “There, that’s the right answer. That’s enough studying now — it’s late.” And while a sharp little knife twists in his heart, he closes the atlas and the workbook, opens the safety pin, and removes the school badge from the pocket of her blouse, feeling at the tips of his fingers the outlines of the childish breast, and now he has to ask himself what she’s feeling, and what she’s capable of understanding, and if he can kiss her without endangering himself.

He plucks up the courage to lay still lips on her forehead, listening to the lonely noise of the refrigerator in the silence of the night, and he goes on, kissing her eyes, licking the tip of her earlobe, and says to himself, So far and no further, otherwise you’re doomed. But the little girl doesn’t sense his desperation; she closes her eyes wearily and opens her mouth wide in a little yawn, until he can’t stop himself and pokes his burning tongue into the pink mouth, to lick the residue of candies sucked during the day. But this can’t possibly be love, he explains to himself, only a momentary, passing infatuation. Will she understand? His hand clutches her between her legs, and suddenly he swings her up to the ceiling, feeling the lightness of her childish body, so that she can enjoy gliding through the air after such a long day of study. And he believes that this strenuous effort to amuse her will prove the purity of his intentions.

But to his annoyance he feels the lust rising in her light little body as it swings through the air, for otherwise why, instead of bursting into uninhibited childish laughter, is she closing her eyes, and parting her lips in a soft spasm of pleasure, and growing heavy in his hands, and dropping down and wrapping her slender arms around his neck, and kissing him warmly, blinding him with her curls? Can it be possible, he asks himself in surprise, for such a little girl to possess lust? And very gently he lays her on the big kitchen table, and in his mind a new thought flashes. Perhaps she is sick, perhaps she is dying, and this will be the last happiness he can give her. How can he withhold it from her? And he steps back, takes off her sneakers and her white socks, which in the depths of this marvelous night, after the long day of study, have inexplicably preserved their freshness. Breathlessly, he bends down and cups two plump feet in his hands to warm them with light kisses, even though they need no warming, for they are blazing with lust. And even if she isn’t dying yet, he goes on reflecting painfully, perhaps she is an orphan who is about to be sent away into some distant exile, and it is the place of her exile that she is seeking in the ink-stained atlas. And so he carefully removes the pale blue blouse, noticing the little moles sweetly spotting her shoulder next to the straps of the childish white undershirt, which is all that is covering her now, and he says to himself, who could blame me now if I just washed her with soap and water before she goes to sleep? But the delicate navel, opening in front of him like a third eye, casts him into confusion, and he turns around in despair to look for help.

But is there really any help to be had from the lean and serious mystery, which finally emerges from his hiding place behind the old refrigerator humming in its loneliness, and puts on his cheap metal glasses, one of whose lenses is cracked from top to bottom, the better to see with his somber, humorless gaze the disheveled little girl sprawled out on the table, who — the would-be lover now realizes in his despair — is apparently his delinquent little daughter, who waits at the end of the school day next to the gate of the mental institution, in case he is released, and then she can trail behind and accompany him on his sudden visits, which are all subject to the same obsession: that the earth stands still, and every hour is eternal and sufficient unto itself, and nothing is ever lost

After washing my hands well, I injected my sleepy patient with 100 cc’s of glucose, because if there was real liver damage, even normal functioning of the alpha cells in the pancreas would fail to produce enough glucose to overcome the deficiency. The change was rapid, almost dramatic, and before long there was a marked improvement in Einat’s mood. She got out of bed and, yellow and emaciated, joined us at the kitchen table, where Lazar and his wife had already prepared a surprisingly lavish midnight feast. At first I wanted to tell them frankly about my concern over the findings I had brought back from Calcutta, centering above all on the coagulopathy, which might cause sudden internal hemorrhage. But a soft and wondering look from Einat, as if she had only just been struck by the actuality of my presence next to her parents, held me back. In any case, I assumed that in spite of his rich hospital experience, Lazar would not be able to understand the subtleties of organic processes, especially those associated with the coagulation system, which are somewhat obscure even to us doctors. I therefore buried my concern for the time being, and in spite of my exhaustion I tried to sample the food on the heaped plate set before me by Lazar. His wife’s eyes kept beaming at me, as if to let me know that not only was she happy at my safe return, but she also understood and perhaps even approved of my trip to Calcutta. Lazar hastened to announce that he too had not been idle in the meantime, and he already had an almost complete outline for our return journey: the day after tomorrow a flight from Gaya to Varanasi, and from there, after a wait at the airport, on to New Delhi, in the hope of getting onto the direct flight to Rome on Thursday, and from Rome the Friday afternoon El Al flight to Israel. He and his wife had managed to get all this worked out at the travel agency they had found in Gaya, which luckily possessed a fax. “You went to Gaya with him?” I asked, turning to Dori, unable to believe that her inability to be alone had led her once again to desert her sick daughter. “Only for two or three hours,” she answered quickly, blushing slightly in embarrassment, as if she had heard the underlying rebuke in my words, “and we left a nice Indian maid we found in the hotel with Einat.”

“I’m exhausted,” I announced, narrowing my burning eyes, and I began getting out of my chair and propelling myself toward my bed before I collapsed on the big table itself. The two of them jumped up, alarmed by the intensity of the fatigue that had suddenly overtaken me, and rushed to support me, and they must have helped me to undress and take off my shoes as well, because when I woke up twelve hours later — buttoned up in my pajamas, wrapped in a white blanket, with reddish light strewn around me like pomegranate pips, signaling with its pleasantness the last hour of the afternoon — I didn’t remember having done these things myself.

But I did remember Lazar’s wife laughing long and loud, either because of my sudden collapse into their arms or because of my objections to their undressing me. Now it was quiet in the dark little bungalow. The two Lazars were absent, and their sick daughter, and also perhaps her doctor, had been left in the care of a gentle Indian girl in a blue sari, who when she saw me getting out of bed stood up straight in my honor and put her hands together in the traditional greeting. In reasonable English she told me that Lazar and his wife had gone to Gaya to arrange for our flights. I felt strangely insulted: it hadn’t occurred to them to consult the doctor they had brought all this way, as if one shot of glucose were enough to solve the whole problem. I dressed and shaved quickly before going in to examine my patient, whose limpness told me that her condition had deteriorated again even before I reached her bedside. I was accompanied by the Indian girl, who did not realize that I was a doctor and apparently took me for a family relation. The effect of the glucose shot had been short-lived. Einat’s temperature had risen, and her skin was even yellower than before. But even more worrying was the possibility that she had not passed a good amount of urine for several days. I began questioning her as I changed the dressing on her leg, and she answered rather vaguely: the hepatitis had already lasted a month, and the borders between health and sickness had grown hazy. I helped her to take off her shift and asked her to lie on her back, so that I could feel not only her shrunken liver but also her kidneys, which were a little enlarged. The Indian girl watched me curiously as I avoided touching her exposed breasts, which in comparison to her skinny body were actually rather full. I had already heard young doctors complaining about the harmful effects on their sexuality of intimate contact with sick women, and although I myself had nothing to complain of in this regard, I did not take their complaints lightly; and here in Bodhgaya, in this cool, bare room, the strong presence of the attractive Indian girl standing behind me merged with the enjoyable sensation passing through my hands kneading Einat’s bare stomach, and I felt a faint flare-up of lust. I reminded myself to masturbate tonight when I went to bed, before we began the long trip home the next day — a trip I still considered rash, and perhaps even dangerous. Given with the blood profile I had brought back from Calcutta, the correct procedure would have been to keep my patient in bed for a few days, until I was sure that there was no chance of relapse and that she was on the road to recovery.

“Your parents are in a hurry to get home,” I said to her while I gave her another shot of glucose, but I refrained from saying anything about my opinion of this haste. “Yes,” replied Einat weakly, as if she too were afraid of starting off. “Daddy has to be back at work on Sunday.”

“But why?” I inquired. She didn’t know, or else she didn’t want to give me a clear answer, as if she had no desire to be her parents’ interpreter. I therefore decided to forget about satisfying my curiosity, and suggested a short walk outside. “I know you feel weak,” I said to her, “but if your parents insist on leaving tomorrow, you might as well take your first step home this evening, in the open air and without any pressure.” A timid smile crossed her face, hesitant, a little agonized, quick to efface itself under the pressure of some inner anxiety. At first she wasn’t interested, but then she agreed and got up, swaying on her feet. She didn’t know whether to change the long white Indian shift she wore as a kind of robe. In the end she decided to keep it on, adding a faded jean jacket, which emphasized the yellowish tinge of the whites of her eyes. I slung my camera over my shoulder and asked the Indian girl to accompany us so we could get back safely if we got lost, although there was actually no danger in this calm, tranquil place, which in spite of its simplicity I still insisted on thinking of as a kind of little paradise, perhaps because of the eternal sun, immense but soft and ripe, poised motionless on the flat horizon.

And in its yellow light I first posed the two young women next to the little golden gate in the stone wall surrounding the Buddha’s sacred bo tree, which was festooned with strips of colored cloth. Then I asked the Indian girl to photograph Einat and me in the same place. But when I asked Einat to take a photo of the Indian girl and me next to the nearby lotus pond, I noticed the camera trembling in her hands, and I immediately took it away from her and asked a passing Oriental pilgrim to photograph the three of us. This is what paradise must look like, I kept thinking as I lightly supported my patient, giddy from the walk I had imposed on her after she had spent so many days in bed. “Look how steeped in spirituality everything is here,” I said encouragingly, and pointed to the flourishing gardens surrounding the big Tibetan monastery farther down the road. “This is what paradise must be like, full of spirituality. It’s intended for the soul, not the body, after all.” And again I took my camera out of its case and asked passersby to photograph us at various points along the road that wound among the different Buddhist monasteries, each of them belonging to a different nation. “After I die, perhaps my soul will peep into the photograph album and remember where to fly to,” I said in English to the Indian girl, but my joke did not raise the ghost of a smile. On the contrary — she bowed her head and confirmed that it was right and proper for a young man like me to start thinking seriously about his death. “It’s really a shame that your parents insist on leaving tomorrow,” I repeated to Einat, who said nothing. “If your father’s in such a hurry,” I added gently, “let him go alone, and we’ll stay for a few days, until you feel better.” But she maintained her strange silence. Was the idea of her parents’ separating for even a few days impossible for her to contemplate, I wondered, or was her debilitation making her apathetic? But precisely because I wanted to go on interrogating her about her parents, I refrained from pressing her for an immediate answer, especially since in the distance, at the end of the broad road, it was already possible to see the dumpy figures of Lazar and his wife, trailing a pinkish light from the river behind them and picking their way gingerly through a big crowd of young backpackers who had just arrived from Gaya. Presumably they had been told at the hotel that we had gone out for a walk, and they had come hurrying to find us. “I’m suddenly beginning to like India,” I announced to the Indian girl, feeling that “like” was a temporary word, until I found a better one, to describe the strange sensation of freedom that was welling up in me. Then I noticed the blood beginning to flow from Einat’s nostrils, without her being aware of it at first. I not only put my arm around her, I even swung her up in the air to seat her on a stone wall, with her head thrown back and resting carefully on my knee as I sat beside her, using my handkerchief to soak up the stream of blood, which was a small but clear sign of the correctness of my medical intuition. So, I said to myself, it is too early to start the trip home.

But it was already too late to change anything. Lazar and his wife had come back from Gaya with plane tickets for all of us for the next morning, and Lazar reacted with considerable annoyance to the sight of the blood-soaked handkerchief. “What on earth made you go out for a walk?”

“If you want to leave tomorrow morning,” I replied in a tone that I knew contained both complaint and rebuke, “she has to get accustomed to the open air.” But only his wife was aware of the rebuke. Lazar, looking at his daughter, who was beginning to raise her head, was even more determined to leave for home before things got worse. “Never mind,” he said, as if he were the expert here, “it’s only a little nosebleed, and it’s already stopped. Let’s go back to the hotel — we have to eat and start packing.” I took my camera out of its case again and snapped the three of them a couple of times. Then I called the Indian girl to join them and I took a photo of the four of them, and after that I asked Lazar to take one of the four of us, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I took the camera again and posed him and his wife opposite the soft sun, and took a picture of the two of them by themselves. “We might as well finish the film,” I said. “The light’s so pretty now and the place is gorgeous, and tomorrow we’ll be on ugly roads.” Lazar looked too tired to take any further part in my sudden lust for photography, but Dori cooperated gladly. It was evident that she liked having her photograph taken. There was suddenly something captivating about this middle-aged woman — in the way she drew herself up to her full height, crossed her long legs, tried to pull in her protruding stomach, and then looked straight at the camera and shot out smile after smile, even before the button was pressed. And for the first time on this journey I felt a slight pang of regret and longing. I had come so far but seen so little. Would I be able to come back here one day?

Although I guessed that the sudden bleeding was related to Einat’s general weakness, and perhaps also to the onset of her period — as sometimes happens, but usually with young girls — I couldn’t avoid the nagging thought that there might be a small hemorrhage somewhere which refused to stop because of the coagulopathy caused by the viral hepatitis. So I didn’t take my eyes off Einat, who was now leaning on the Indian girl. Lazar’s wife supported her too, and the three of them walked slowly behind Lazar, who hurried in the direction of the hotel. Who could tell what other surprises she had in store for me on the way home? I thought to myself, adopting the cynical tone beloved of Hishin, who sometimes talked about his patients as if they were cunning opponents whose only aim was to trip him up. And while I quickly changed the film in the camera and insisted on snapping one more shot of the four of them outside the entrance to our hotel, which was now suffused in a strange purple-yellow twilight, like a huge bruise remaining after the sun refused to set, I also inquired casually, and without explaining why, about Lazar’s and Dori’s blood types. I had guessed right: the only possible donor if an emergency arose would be Lazar’s wife.

In the night I tossed and turned in my little room. I was still angry at the decision to leave in the morning. Was it only the insult of not being consulted that was bothering me? Maybe it was the nagging thought that I was about to return home without a job, and even though I had spent a whole week, twenty-four hours a day, with the administrative director, I still had nothing to show for it, and it was very much in the air that on my return I would have to start looking, without much hope, for a residency in the surgical department of another hospital. When I realized that I wasn’t going to fall asleep, I got out of bed and began to pack. I switched on the light and started putting the medical equipment back into the knapsack, carefully examining every item as I did so. The pharmacist was a genius; he had thought of everything. And the imagination, precision, and economy of his preparations had a particular radiance shining next to me in the silence of the night. I made a mental note to express my appreciation as soon as I got back, as I folded everything up and packed it in the knapsack, trying to remember exactly where each item fit. In the end, even though a red glow was already beginning to appear between the palm and coconut trees, I decided to try to snatch a couple of hours of sleep before the journey, and from a little glass jar with three words written on its label in the pharmacist’s handwriting—“Effective Sleeping Pill”—I fished out a smooth blue capsule and swallowed it.

The pill was so effective that Lazar had to shake me several times before he succeeded in rousing me, and his wife, who was busy cleaning the kitchen as industriously as if it were a friend’s borrowed apartment, flashed me a look which seemed to express astonishment at my voracious capacity for sleep. “I didn’t sleep all night,” I explained spreading out my hands apologetically to them, but Lazar wasn’t interested in apologies, he wanted rapid organization. Three swollen suitcases stood ready — two older bags and one new one, which had swallowed up their daughter’s sleeping bag, backpack, and other possessions. Einat herself was sitting on a chair outside, very pale, wearing the simple flowered dress and red cloth hat that her mother had brought from Israel — a sad and pensive tourist, carrying away only the hepatitis B virus, testimony to the fact that her independent backpacking trip to the stormy, colorful subcontinent had ended in failure, requiring an emergency rescue by Mommy and Daddy. Without examining her again before leaving, I hurriedly dressed and ate the sandwiches prepared by Lazar’s wife, who for a moment also seemed uncertain of the wisdom of starting off on the return journey so soon. But at this point the rickshaw driver in the white turban arrived, and when he saw me he came hurrying up to shake my hand enthusiastically, adding a little bow to express his satisfaction at my safe return from Calcutta. This time he had brought a bigger rickshaw, which easily took the four of us and our luggage aboard, and transported us rapidly to the dirty little airport in Gaya, which the light of day stripped of its mystery.

The flight from Gaya to Varanasi was not long, and the plane did not climb to any great altitude; nevertheless, a spurt of blood burst out of Einat’s nose again. I was absorbed in the window, sleepily watching, with a mixture of depression and admiration, a silvery flash apparently emanating from our plane, which streaked ahead of us, gliding over the fields and roads, vanishing into woods and canals and little lakes, then unexpectedly appearing again, darting quick and silver over another part of the landscape. Lazar’s wife was sitting in a window seat two rows in front of me, and during the flight I noticed her bun unraveling. Suddenly Lazar rose from his seat, a blood-soaked towel in his hand. I jumped up, but when he saw me he signaled me to sit down again. I ignored him and hurried over to them. Einat was lying with her head on her mother’s lap. “It’s stopped,” Lazar announced immediately, as if to send me away, but his wife looked uncertain. Her automatic smile had vanished. “What is it?” she asked me in real anxiety. “It’s probably weakness from the hepatitis,” I said without thinking, “and maybe a result of the change in atmospheric pressure too. Let’s change places for a minute,” I suggested to Lazar, sitting down in the seat next to his wife and looking straight into Einat’s eyes. She raised her head to me; she seemed a little pale, but mainly unhappy. In spite of the inconvenience to Lazar, I insisted on remaining next to the two women until the landing, which from the window was spectacular and startlingly beautiful. The plane circled over the two banks of the Ganges, the deserted east bank and the swarming west one; then it began gliding past, temple after temple, ghat after ghat, rocking in the air over the tiny black figures as if it too wished to bathe in the holiness of the golden river. I began talking to Einat, to distract her. Had she ever been in Varanasi? I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s a pity your father’s in such a hurry,” I said, “otherwise we could have squeezed in another day here. The little we saw when we were here only whetted my appetite for more,” and I smiled at her with the automatic smile of her mother, whose eyes were fixed on my face in profound concern.

It reminded me of those times in the operating room when we noticed that the glint of irony usually present in Professor Hishin’s eyes had vanished. We had to stop; it was my responsibility. This new thought began to torture me as we sat with our suitcases and knapsack in a dirty corner of the Varanasi airport, surrounded by Indian children who had come to stare at me and my patient, leaning against me with her eyes closed, too exhausted even to look at the big basket a few feet away, from which rose the alert head of a large snake. We had three hours to kill before the flight to New Delhi, and although Lazar and his wife had brought sandwiches and bottles of soft drinks from Bodhgaya, they made their usual tour of the shops, returning from these expeditions with a relatively clean-looking pastry or a glass of hot tea. I took my patient’s hand in mine to feel her pulse. It was rapid, a hundred per minute, and then, in the absurd despair of a doctor whom nobody believes, I found myself praying that she would begin bleeding again, because this was my only chance of asserting my authority and putting a stop to the dangerous journey, which Lazar and his wife were conducting with such feverish zeal. “Do you feel nauseous?” I asked. She thought a little and then nodded her head. “Then come along with me and let’s get it up.” I helped her to stand and led her into a corner, where I held her shoulders and gently pressed on her abdomen. She didn’t vomit much, but blood was evident. Wherever it was coming from, there was no doubt that the damage to the clotting factors was exacerbating the bleeding. I led Einat back to her seat and told her to lie down across my seat, after which I went to stand guard over her vomit, to make sure that nobody effaced the telltale signs until her parents returned and saw with their own eyes. At that point I was finally able to confront them quietly but firmly: “I’m sorry, but it’s impossible to continue to New Delhi. She has to have a blood transfusion immediately. You’re in too much of a hurry to get home, and you’re putting her at risk unnecessarily.”

Lazar was flabbergasted. But I stood my ground, and in the quiet, firm tone that has powerful effects on patients and their families, I insisted that we could not continue our flight, that we had to reach some decent hotel — perhaps the Ganges, where we had almost stayed last time — and there, in a quiet atmosphere and hygienic conditions, I would give Einat a blood transfusion, which would require complete bed rest for twenty-four hours for proper recovery. “Of course,” I continued, “we could put her in a local hospital. But even without the problem of dirty needles and contaminated blood supplies you’d have to be insane to hospitalize anyone in this ‘Eternal City,’ where nobody cares about anything but reincarnation and cremation.” Lazar still tried to protest. “Let’s go as far as New Delhi, at least,” he begged. “It’s only a two-hour flight. We can stop there — because who knows when we’ll be able to get onto another flight, and traveling sixteen hours by train will be more dangerous for her than postponing the blood transfusion for a few hours.”

“No,” I stated quietly, “it would be more dangerous to postpone the blood transfusion,” and I looked directly at his wife. But when she remained silent, as if unwilling to come out on my side, I raised my hands in a dramatic gesture, as if a hidden pistol were pointing at my head, and, closely surrounded by a ring of Indians who had gathered to see the little drama taking place in their midst, I burst out a tone of pain and grievance which surprised even me with its intensity, “Okay, she’s your daughter, but just explain one thing to me — why did you drag me here with you?”

Perhaps it was these words that defeated Lazar’s wife, who now threw her weight decisively onto my side, until Lazar too gave in and immediately began organizing the postponement of our flight, looking for porters, and thinking about a suitable hotel. And then Einat fainted and fell to the ground, and for the first time I was overwhelmed by a real fear that she was going to slip out of our hands. Passersby helped to lift her up; the characteristic Indian expertise in carrying the sick and dying soon proved most helpful as we were provided with a stretcher improvised from a blanket and two bamboo poles, and with a great hullabaloo we were led out of the airport building. A ramshackle minibus took us on board and with un-Indian speed covered the twelve miles between the airport and the town. We soon reached the Ganges Hotel, and although Einat had already recovered from her faint, the managers apparently thought it best to isolate us from the other guests, and instead of showing us into the hotel itself, they led us to an annex in the rear, a kind of pilgrims’ lodge, where they installed us in two simple but very clean rooms furnished with wicker furniture lacquered a bright purple. After washing my hands and face and taking the extra precaution of putting on a little surgical mask, I turned quickly to my medical kit to collect everything I would need for the blood transfusion, which I had decided to perform as an emergency procedure, as described in the first aid manuals of the Magen-David-Adom station where I had worked night shifts while I was in medical school. In other words, a direct transfusion, where I would have to approximate the amount. I asked Lazar to push two beds together and lay the two women side by side, and Lazar helped me to take off their shoes and undo their belts. I measured their blood pressures, which were good, both about 130 over 80, and asked Lazar’s wife, who was studying me with a rather ironic expression, to take off her glasses. “Why?” she asked in surprise. “It’s not important,” I said in embarrassment. “I just thought you might be more comfortable that way,” and without insisting I found the vein for the intravenous line on Einat’s slender wrist and connected it to the small infusion set. When the needle went in she let out a sharp cry of pain, and I immediately stroked her head and apologized, even though I knew that with the thinness of her arm and the irritated state of her skin the pain was unavoidable. I passed the tube over the table lamp standing between the two beds and began looking for her mother’s vein, which was buried in the plumpness of her flesh. I tied a rubber tube around her upper arm, and since I felt no fear emanating from her, I found it easy to plunge my syringe quickly and painlessly deep into the vein. As the blood began slowly pumping out and I noted the time on my watch, she smiled at me and began joking lightheartedly. I asked Lazar, who was prowling around me not like the head of a hospital in which complicated operations were performed day and night but like a frightened husband and father, to raise his wife a little and prop her back against the pillow, to allow the blood to flow unimpeded between her arm and her daughter’s according to the law of equilibrium. His wife’s hair had come loose and partly covered her face. She tried to encourage her daughter, who was lying with her eyes closed and an expression of pain on her face, as if the blood flowing into her hurt her. Now there was a long silence. Lazar was still examining my actions with a mixture of anxiety and suspicion. Was I keeping an eye on the amount of blood? he suddenly asked in a whisper. I nodded my head. I knew that everything I did here was being registered in his sharp mind, down to the last detail, and that when we got home he would waste no time in asking Hishin and the rest of “his” professors if it had really been necessary to perform the blood transfusion so urgently and to cancel the flight. But I was calm and sure of myself, ready not only to justify the urgent transfusion to all the professors in the hospital but also to demand the respect due to me for my diagnosis and ingenuity in a medical emergency. They had wanted the ideal man for the trip — I suddenly felt a surge of elation — and they had found him!

After the transfusion of approximately 450 cc’s of blood, according to my estimation, I removed the intravenous line from Lazar’s wife’s vein, applied alcohol to the spot, and gently folded her arm. Again she smiled sweetly at me. If not for Lazar’s needless haste in catching the tube, not a single drop of blood would have been spilled in vain, but he was careless, and a bit of his wife’s blood splashed onto my clothes. “Never mind,” I said, and disconnected the tube from the infusion line in the wrist of my patient, who had calmed down and slipped into a doze, which I wanted to turn into a real sleep. I therefore took a Hartman’s infusion bag, hung it from a nail in the wall, connected it to the infusion line which had just been thirstily and efficiently drinking in the blood, and went over to the window to draw the curtain and darken the room. But before I did so I stood still for a moment and relished the golden moment to the full. “And now we all need a rest,” I said, facing them, “especially you, Dori,” and I blushed, for this was the first time since the beginning of the trip that I had addressed her directly by her husband’s pet name for her. But they both smiled at me affectionately, and Lazar put his arm around me in a conciliatory gesture. “You need a rest too,” he said, but I was as alert and full of vitality as if I myself had received a blood transfusion. I packed the instruments in the knapsack and put it in the other room, and since I knew that the pair of them were perpetually hungry, I offered to look after our patient while they went to have lunch, and then, if everything seemed to be going smoothly, I would go down to eat myself, and perhaps have a look at a nearby museum.

But I knew that I wouldn’t be going to look at any museum. It was the Ganges River and the swarming steps leading down to it and the vast, mysterious, dark brown temples which I hadn’t managed to see before that called me. After eating a late lunch by myself in the hotel restaurant, encouraged by the clear signs of recovery in Einat — who, after absorbing the entire contents of the infusion bag, woke up and even tasted a bit of the food her parents brought her — I allowed myself to go out to the river before darkness fell. A warm, fine rain sifted through the air, and a stench rose from the town like incense. Who could have guessed that I would return here, I mused, as once more I made my way through the narrow alleys and the tireless, endless crowd until I reached the riverbank, which in spite of the rain was full of bathers. I hired a boat by myself and asked the boatman to row me to the southern ghats, so that I could view the great temples from the heart of the river. The dusky air merged with the river and the boat glided calmly over the water, but I did not succeed in drinking in the mystery. I was still preoccupied with all that had just passed: the argument at the airport with Lazar, the sudden faint, and especially the successful blood transfusion, which had been so elegantly performed. The smile that had gleamed from his wife’s eyes as I took her blood now floated pleasantly through my thoughts. It seemed that I had succeeded in impressing them, and when we returned to Israel, as the cunning Hishin had hinted, Lazar might be able to help me stay on at the hospital. But I soon realized that it wasn’t Lazar I was thinking of but his wife, who couldn’t stay by herself. And in the final analysis, I thought with satisfaction, it was a good thing she had joined us; how would I have found a suitable donor in the eternal crowd? And who would have helped me persuade Lazar to interrupt the journey?

As illuminated launches sailed past us and our little boat rocked in their wake, I began thinking affectionately of Einat too. How sad for it to end like this, a trip that perhaps was intended to be more than just a trip, a little rebellion or an escape. And in bringing me along, hadn’t Lazar and his wife had some hidden intention to put her in touch with a young doctor, an “ideal man”? She was only four years younger than I was, but she seemed a little bit of a lost soul; why hadn’t she even finished her B.A.? The oarsman called out to me to look at the ghats we were passing. Sensitively he had noticed that I was preoccupied with irrelevant thoughts. I smiled my thanks and raised my eyes to the brown stone temples. Vishvanath, I said softly, getting the name right this time, Vishvanath, and the oarsman’s face lit up and he immediately put his hands together in a gesture of acknowledgment. But the magic had somehow been dispelled, and at the end of the tour of the ghats, when we returned to the bank, I did not linger but hurried back to the hotel, stopping on the way at a small telephone booth, next to which a number of backpackers were clustered. To my surprise I got through right away to my parents, who were overjoyed to be awakened from their sleep by the sound of my voice. We’re already on our way back, I announced, and everything’s going well. And I told them briefly about the day’s events.

Outside the door to our rooms I heard loud voices, and when I entered I found the two parents sitting on the purple wicker chairs and arguing with my patient, who was sitting up in bed, very yellow and scratching but wide awake. Lazar was in high spirits, having succeeded after strenuous efforts in getting four tickets on the plane to New Delhi the next night. He still hoped to be able to change the flight from New Delhi to Rome that we had missed because of the stop in Varanasi for one the day after, so that we would be in time for the El Al flight home on Friday. I had finally learned the reason for his haste. He had an important meeting with a delegation of big donors from abroad, whom he had persuaded to devote their Sunday morning to our hospital. “You wanted a twenty-four-hour recovery period, and now you’ve got thirty hours until the flight,” he said aggressively, as if the recovery were meant for me instead of his daughter. But I only smiled. His face was very gray, his little eyes were sunken, and if I had been as close to him as Hishin was, I would have hospitalized him for a few days in the internal medicine department for a comprehensive checkup. But his wife was apparently used to the grayish hue of his face, as were the many doctors with whom he came into daily contact. It was still early for bed, and for a moment I was loath to part from them; I didn’t know if they intended to move the patient into my room, or if Lazar intended to move in with me for the night. In the end Lazar asked me to help him move one of the beds from my room into theirs. What did you think, I said to myself with an inner smile, that his wife would agree to spend a night without him?

At eight the next evening we arrived in New Delhi, where Lazar was in for a bitter disappointment. There was only one seat left on the Thursday morning flight to Rome. And flying home via some other European city would mean forfeiting the tickets, which had cost a lot of money. “Why don’t you take the available seat and fly back alone?” I asked Lazar, who seemed plunged in despair. “The three of us could fly to Rome on Friday and get a flight home on Sunday or Monday.” He looked at me but didn’t react, and then he glanced at his wife, whose eyes were fixed anxiously on his face, with no trace of her usual smile. “That’s impossible,” he blurted out in the end, exchanging another glance with his wife, who stared at me tensely, ready to reject any additional suggestions. So we had no option but to ride into New Delhi, which after Varanasi, Calcutta, and Gaya looked like a normal, civilized city. With uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, the Lazars let the rickshaw driver take us to a big modern hotel, with large and apparently very expensive rooms. And once again the three of them had to crowd into one room, while I was sent to the floor above, to a room that was not large but very pleasant and grand in its own way. For the first time on the journey, I felt the kind of mild, vague guilt toward them that I sometimes feel toward my parents when I think that they are doing without on my account. Accordingly, I went downstairs and knocked on their door, and despite the lateness of the hour and the disorder of the room, they welcomed me in like a member of the family and listened in surprise to my offer to look after our patient the next day by myself, so that they could take advantage of our enforced stay in New Delhi and go on a tour to Agra, 125 miles away, to see the Taj Mahal. “How will you face your friends if you come back from India without having seen the Taj Mahal?” I said with a smile, and offered to let them take my camera with them. “And how will you?” laughed his wife, whose hostility toward me had vanished without a trace. “I’m still young,” I said tactlessly. “I’ll return here one day.” To my surprise they accepted my offer, as if they were entitled to some form of compensation from me, and early in the morning they set out in a tour bus to see the mausoleum built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, while I spent most of the day with Einat, sitting in the armchair or lying on her parents’ bed and trying to read A Brief History of Time, although I didn’t understand much. The blood transfusion I had given her turned out to have been vital; for one thing, the sudden nosebleeds had completely ceased. However, she was still febrile and exhausted by the relentless itching caused by the accumulated bile salts. She hadn’t slept properly for weeks, and she kept dozing off as I changed the dressing on the wound on her leg, which looked much better. When she roused from her sleep, I showered her with questions, first about her trip to India, and then about her experiences in the hospital in Gaya, which she answered briefly but frankly. In the boredom of the lengthening hours, I began questioning her about things unconnected with her illness — first about her traveling companions, especially the shaven-headed Michaela, with the huge light eyes, who had brought the news of her illness to her parents, and then, as if I were about to become her family doctor, I began slipping in little questions about the family, asking about her younger brother and her charming grandmother. Then I questioned her eagerly about her parents, of whom she was obviously not too fond, and asked whether there was any truth in the strange complaint her father had made to me, that his wife was incapable of staying by herself.

When dusk began to fall, Lazar and his wife showed up at last, full of impressions from their day. Lazar returned my camera and thanked me for the idea of taking the trip. In addition to the sweetmeats and silk scarves they had bought for themselves, they had brought me a present, a model of the Taj Mahal the size of a small foot, made of pink marble. Lazar’s wife described the sights they had seen enthusiastically. Lazar too appeared relaxed, amused by the strange Indians he had encountered on the way, as if he had only now begun to wonder about their true nature. His face had acquired a tan during the day and no longer had its sickly gray tinge. They were about to order a big meal for the four of us to be brought up to the room, but I suddenly felt trapped and restless and got up to go out for a walk and say my good-bye to India. As I had done ten days before, I began walking around the dark streets of New Delhi, this time in a more affluent district, mingling and moving easily with the crowd whose bodies had a strangely ethereal quality in the darkness. And suddenly I sensed that in spite of my youthful boast to the Lazars, I would never return to India. As long as I lived, I would never see the wonderful Taj Mahal which they had both seen today, and this strange certainty began pressing sorrowfully inside me.

I went into a fabric shop for the first time since I’d arrived in India, to buy something for my parents. Entering the fragrant darkness, which rustled with flowered fabrics, I thought of my parents’ two very separate beds and wondered if they would consent to having anything so bold and blazing in their bedroom. In the end I bought two lengths of brightly colored cloth which seemed to me suitable for bedcovers; I wanted to go on and buy something else as well, because everything was so amazingly cheap, but suddenly I was fed up with wandering around alone and decided to go back to the hotel and chat for a while with Lazar and his wife; maybe she too would thank me for the enjoyable day I had given her. When I got back they had apparently gone to bed, for there was no sound in their room, not even a crack of light under the door. There was nothing left to do but go up to bed myself, and as on the last night in Bodhgaya, I tossed and turned for hours in search of sleep, which usually came to me the minute I put my head on the pillow.

We arrived in Rome in the afternoon, and of course we missed the El Al plane, that always left exactly on time so it would reach Israel before the beginning of the Sabbath. We had to wait until Sunday, but Lazar had not yet given up hope of arriving in time for his important meeting. No sooner had we settled into a big old-fashioned hotel in Via dei Coronari than he went off, to his wife’s obvious annoyance, to find a cheap flight that would get him back to Israel the next day. When I returned to the hotel in the evening, after strolling around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, I found the two of them in the hotel lobby, a new sadness on his wife’s face. It appeared that in spite of his age, he had succeeded in getting himself onto a cheap student flight that left early the next afternoon and arrived in Tel Aviv via Athens late on Saturday evening. Delighted with his own ingenuity, he now tried to appease his wife, who saw the whole thing as vanity and caprice on the part of a man who believed that he was indispensable. The next day at noon we said good-bye to him. He seemed tense, and adopted a slightly mocking air toward his wife, who to my surprise looked really upset, as if what was at stake were not a parting for twenty-four hours but total desertion. Although I was standing next to them he embraced her and kissed her again and again, smiling as if he were secretly enjoying the anxiety that stemmed from some deep and obscure source within her, and over which she had no control. Then he turned to me, as if I were a member of the family, and said, “Take care of her until tomorrow.” I saw that these innocent and half-joking words intensified her anger and her stress, and she immediately extricated herself from his embrace, gave him a little push, and said, “Go on, go, and be careful on the way and phone the minute you get home.”

For a moment I felt a desire to try and calm the childish anxiety of this middle-aged woman, who was only nine years younger than my mother yet so strangely bound to her husband, who seemed conversely unable to tear himself away from her. But as soon as he was gone, before I had a chance to think of something suitable to say, her eyes gleamed with that smile again, as if her pride would not allow her to look miserable in my presence. She asked me if I had any plans, and when I hesitated, she asked if I would be kind enough to stay with Einat for a little while, because she had to go and have her hair done, since she too had to go straight back to the office on Monday. For a moment I was flabbergasted. I had baby-sat for them for an entire day in New Delhi, and now she had the nerve to expect me to stay stuck in the hotel again, as if I really were their hired hand, even though nothing had yet been said about the fee due to me for the trip. Her confident assumption that she would be returning to work on Monday, too, with the mental image it brought back to me of the self-assured woman in the short black dress and the high heels who had greeted me with such aplomb in her legal office, infuriated me. And who was going to take care of Einat on Monday, and take her to have the tests she still needed? Did they mean to turn me into their family doctor and nursemaid? But before I could say anything, I saw that my silence had been taken for consent, and she turned away and disappeared around the corner, as if she knew exactly where she was going. I returned unwillingly to my room and picked up my book, no longer interested in questioning Einat. Then I knocked lightly on her door, but there was no answer. I knocked again, and called her name, but there was dead silence on the other side of the door, and for the first time since meeting her I felt real panic. I hurried to the reception desk, introduced myself and explained my connection with the Lazars, and asked them to open the door. At first they refused, but I insisted, and eventually I was able, with the help of my doctor’s ID, to infect them with my alarm. But when the bellboy attempted to open the door with the master key, it transpired that a key was stuck in the lock on the inside of the door, and the door refused to open. We banged on it, but there was no reply. I tried to reassure myself that Einat’s condition had already shown signs of steady improvement after the blood transfusion; she was even strong enough for me to think of giving her a whole diuretic pill later in the afternoon to accelerate her kidney functions, since I was still worried by the small amount of urine she passed. But by now the Italians were panicking, and they began to talk excitedly among themselves. In the end a solution was found. Another young bellboy, who looked like a North African, was summoned, and he immediately entered the adjacent room and with the agility of a monkey succeeded in entering the Lazars’ room through the window. When he opened the door and let us into the room, we found Einat sound asleep — after many sleepless nights she had finally succeeded in falling into a deep, restful sleep.

“Everything’s okay, everything’s okay,” I reassured the disappointed Italians, who were anticipating a big drama and didn’t want to go away. I sat down next to my patient; even her hands, which hadn’t stopped their incessant scratching since we arrived in Bodhgaya, were now lying quite still on the bed. I lit a small lamp and began once more to read Hawking’s book, which according to the blurb on the cover had already been bought by millions of readers, who had no doubt thought, like me, that they were about to have the secrets of the universe explained to them, only to discover that these secrets were extremely difficult and complicated, and above all, controversial. Nevertheless, I went on reading, turning pages and skipping to more comprehensible passages and thinking crossly of Lazar’s wife. Even though my presence at the bedside of my sleeping patient was not really necessary I didn’t budge, in part because I wanted to see how she would apologize to me when she finally returned. And when she walked into the room with her elegantly styled hair, her face made up, her hands full of parcels, her high heels tapping, blushing at her lateness, I felt not anger but a strange, frightening happiness, which flooded me as if I were in love.

My face turned red and I immediately sat up in the armchair. She would never be able to guess, not even in her wildest dreams … All she did was apologize, and apologize again. She hadn’t thought that I would still be sitting next to Einat, who for some reason woke up as soon as her mother entered the room, assumed a suffering expression, and began voraciously scratching herself again. When I told Lazar’s wife about Einat’s long sleep, she looked worried and asked me to examine her again. I therefore went to fetch my stethoscope and sphygmomanometer, and palpated Einat’s flat stomach, trying to feel the damaged liver. There did not seem to be any change for the worse; the kidneys still seemed somewhat enlarged, but I decided against intervening at this stage with any additional medication, and left them after agreeing to come back to the room later for dinner. Outside it was raining, and the display windows of the European shops which had taken the place of the Indian temples gleamed with colored lights. I walked along the sidewalks, getting wet, amazed at my sudden new feeling for this impossible older woman. It’s completely idiotic, I scolded myself, but nevertheless I soon retraced my steps and returned to the hotel, went up to my room to shower, put on the shirt I had washed in Bodhgaya, and joined the two women for an excellent Italian meal. In spite of my excitement, I tried to joke with Einat, whose deep sleep had brought a fresh, rosy color to her cheeks. Her mother laughed a lot all evening, and when the phone rang and Lazar announced his safe arrival, she sounded loving and tender and not at all angry. She asked him about the flight and assured him that all was well with us. They spoke for a long time, as if they weren’t going to meet again in less than twenty-four hours. I looked at her legs, which for most of the trip had been hidden by slacks. They were youthful and very shapely, but the overflowing belly and full arms spoiled her appearance. Nevertheless my excitement persisted, not without the accompaniment of an inner nervousness, and I stayed with them longer than they expected me to.

In the middle of the night I woke up, opened the closet, stood in front of the mirror, and examined my reflection in the dark. I suddenly whispered her name, Dori, Dori, as if by the mere act of whispering her name I was exorcising her or secretly taking possession of her. This is too weird, this is insane, I chided myself. The room was heated to boiling point, and in spite of the high ceiling I felt stifled. I got dressed and went downstairs to see if I could get a glass of milk. But it was two o’clock in the morning, and the hotel bar was still and silent. Even the reception clerk — perhaps the same one who had helped me to break into the Lazars’ room that afternoon — was asleep on a bed hidden behind the desk. I wandered around the big, dark dining room, where the tables were already laid for breakfast, and before going back upstairs I opened the door into the kitchen, as I was in the habit of doing when I was on call in the hospital at night, in the hope of finding something there. And indeed, the big kitchen was not in total darkness. In its recesses a faint light flickered redly on great copper saucepans, and I heard low laughter. I advanced past the neat tables and gleaming sinks. Next to a big dining table I saw three people sitting and talking in a foreign language, not Italian, eating soup from pottery bowls decorated with pink flowers. They were foreign workers, perhaps refugees. One of them immediately rose from his seat and asked me what I wanted, in Italian and with a friendly expression on his face. “Milk,” I said in English, and I laid a heavy hand on my stomach, to signal the burning pain of my sudden fall into love, while with my other hand I raised an imaginary glass to my lips and drank it to the dregs. He understood at once, repeated my request to his guests in their language, and went to the refrigerator to pour me a glass of milk. Then I saw that next to the giant fridge, whose motor was humming like a small plane’s, sat a little girl with a waiflike appearance, looking at the screen of a small television set. And next to her a thin bespectacled man with a very sickly appearance sat paging through a school workbook.