Open Heart

Six

Lazar received special permission, apparently on medical grounds, to meet us in the arrival lounge immediately after passport control. Even before his wife and daughter noticed him, I saw his stocky, broad-shouldered figure in a wet raincoat standing next to the guard at the end of the barrier, anxiously inspecting the people walking past him as if he really doubted our ability to get home without him. Next to him, his long hair soaking wet and a distracted expression on his face, which resembled his father’s, stood Lazar’s son, whom his mother hurried to gather lovingly to her bosom, as if he were the dangerously ill child who had to be brought back home. But Lazar had no intention of allowing anyone to waste time on hugs and kisses. He handed his son a big black umbrella and instructed him to lead his sister, draped in a raincoat, straight to the car, while he himself hurried to seize an empty cart and began to collect the luggage. “Wait till you see the storm raging outside — you’ll wish you were back in India,” he warned us. “Was it really necessary for you to get back in such a hurry?” his wife asked him, her tone still showing vestiges of her anger at having been left alone for twenty-four hours. “Not only necessary but essential,” he replied with a triumphant smile, and when he saw me looking at him somberly, he reassured me cheerfully, “Don’t worry, your parents are here too, waiting for you outside.”

“My parents?” I was astonished. “What on earth for?” Lazar seemed taken aback. “What for? I don’t know — so that you won’t have to go home by yourself in the rain, I suppose. My secretary got hold of them on the phone this morning, and they promised to be here to take you back to Jerusalem.” But I didn’t want to go to Jerusalem now, even though I had left my Honda there; I wanted to remain in Tel Aviv so as to report back to the hospital at the crack of dawn. Lazar had kept his promise; the whole trip had lasted only two weeks, and here, next to the luggage conveyor turning emptily on its axis, the length of our absence shrank to its natural proportions. Nevertheless, I was afraid that significant changes to my disadvantage had taken place in the meantime. “Did you have time to tell Hishin about what happened?” I asked, dying to know if Hishin had already been told about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “No,” said Lazar, with his arm around his wife’s shoulder, as if he still had to appease her. “Hishin’s not here, he took off for Paris a few days ago. That’s why he didn’t want to come with us himself. He kept the real reason from us. Never mind, we managed very well without him.” He smiled at us complacently, as if the medical responsibility had been shared equally among the three of us. He seemed elated now. The meeting with the group of donors had been a success. I saw that underneath his raincoat he was elegantly dressed in a suit and tie. His wife started to fawn on him, the abandonment of yesterday suddenly forgiven. I looked at her and found myself blushing. She looked tired but happy to be back home. Had I really fallen a little bit in love with her, I wondered, or was it all some strange hallucination?

But there was no time to go on thinking about it, because the luggage started arriving, and soon it would be time to say good-bye. My suitcase, which had already been separated from theirs on the plane, turned up first, and Lazar saw no reason to keep me waiting. “You still have to drive to Jerusalem — you’d better get moving,” he said firmly, and while I was still wondering how to say good-bye to them, he remembered something and grabbed hold of my suitcase. “Just a minute, let’s free you of the silly shoe box we dumped on you before you go.” To my surprise, Dori tried to stop him. “It’s not important, not now, don’t trouble him with that now, his parents are waiting for him. He’ll give it back when he’s got time.” But Lazar could see no reason why I should have to drag his wife’s shoes to Jerusalem and back. “It won’t take more than half a minute,” he said, and he helped me to undo the straps and open the suitcase, and without even waiting for me to assist him, he inserted his hands as delicately as an experienced surgeon into my belongings and quickly extracted the cardboard box, which I had carefully avoided opening throughout the trip. He said, “There you are, no trouble at all,” and smiled good-bye. “Then I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow,” I said in an effort to keep the thread of a connection between us. “At the hospital?” Lazar seemed puzzled, as if this weren’t the place where we both worked, but he immediately remembered and said, “Of course.”

“Then I won’t see him again?” said his wife, examining me with surprise but not with sorrow. Locks of her long hair had fallen onto her face and neck, her makeup had faded during the flight, and under the white neon light, her wrinkles were once more revealed. She didn’t know how to say good-bye to me, and a sweet wave of pain trembled inside me. “The photographs,” I stammered in embarrassment, and my face began to burn as if I were playing some trick on them. “The pictures I took of you are still in my camera. When they’re ready, I’ll bring them.” Lazar and his wife remembered the snapshots and exclaimed happily, “Right, our pictures!”

“Yes,” I promised, “maybe I’ll bring them around to your place, because I should check up on my patient anyway and see how she’s getting along.”

And perhaps because of the promise that we would meet again we parted casually, as we had parted from time to time in India, without shaking hands or embracing. Still I refused even to wonder whether Dori had been touched by a spark of that absurd nocturnal fantasy of falling in love, which would no doubt vanish as soon as I got through customs and emerged into the night, where the stormy rain and hail had gathered the people loyally waiting into a dense huddle under the scant protection of the shelter — a huddle that still managed to display the traditional Israeli enthusiasm, embracing every returning citizen of the state as if his absence warranted a gentle hand to guide him home. This at any rate was apparently the attitude of my parents, who had waited for an hour at two different observation posts in order not to miss me when I came out. My mother spotted me first, and we had to go to some trouble to find my father, who was standing calmly under his umbrella in the pouring rain, after giving up his place under the shelter with his natural gentlemanliness to two elderly women who had been reduced to hopeless despair by the storm. “You look well,” said my mother as we followed my father in the dark to the parking lot, trying to shelter me under her little umbrella. “You’re a little thinner, but you look happy. So you weren’t disappointed by our India.” My mother was always afraid of disappointments and disillusionments that might come my way, afraid of those states of emptiness that threaten to overwhelm the young. Consequently, as the person who had encouraged me to accompany the Lazars on the trip to India, which she felt entitled to call “ours” because of her uncle’s memories, she was on tenterhooks to know how I had managed. And although I hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything of substance, she sensed that I had returned satisfied. If not the rain, which forced us to step carefully between the puddles of water, she might have sensed something of my feelings for Dori as well, and of the pain of parting which had already started to bubble inside me.

My mother thought that I should do the driving as the storm gathered force around us, but my father refused to forfeit his place at the wheel. “It will be all right,” he reassured her. “I know the road, it’s plain sailing,” and she had to make do with seating me beside him to guard against possible mistakes on his part. He took off his coat, cleaned his glasses, and as usual overheated the engine. He hadn’t yet spoken to me. Only after he had brought us calmly and carefully out of the parking lot into the heart of the storm, and turned onto the main road, did he turn his face to me at last. He looked at me affectionately and said, “So, it was a success.”

“A success?” I said, startled. “In what sense?”

“In the sense that you had to prove yourself,” my father replied in his characteristically calm tone. “Lazar’s secretary said that you had performed the correct medical procedure and saved the situation over there.” I quickly turned my head to my mother, who was sitting in the backseat. She did not seem pleased that my father had blurted out the story, stealing my thunder, so to speak. However, happiness surged up in me. Had Lazar already managed to tell one of the professors about the tests in Calcutta and the blood transfusion in Varanasi, and was that how the news had traveled to the administrative office? Or had he said something in all innocence to his secretary, and she, full of goodwill but without really understanding anything, had sung my praises to my parents when she called to tell them when the plane was due to arrive? I would find all that out tomorrow, I said to myself, but in the meantime my father, who was eager to hear every detail, and in the right order, was already forcing me to describe the medical part of the trip from both the practical and the theoretical point of view. He drank in my explanations thirstily. He possessed the virtue of being able to learn something from everyone, which was why he was such a silent man and such a profound listener. Now, as he sat erect and slightly back from the wheel, silently contemplating, like an objective judge, the concerted efforts of the car, the wipers, the headlights, the windshield, and the road itself as they battled the savage storm threatening to drive us off the road, he wanted to learn from my lips the full extent of the salvation I had brought to the Lazars. He was afraid that the modesty he attributed to me, which he regarded as an unfortunate inheritance he himself had bequeathed to me, would make me belittle the importance of my achievement. Likewise, he had still not resigned himself to the fact that the second resident had been given the longed-for post we had all been hoping for. My mother too listened in silence. From time to time she slipped in a brief question, ultimately succeeding in picking up my lack of enthusiasm for Einat, for whom she had cherished secret hopes. She was trying to hear the inner story, which I was attempting to disguise as I spoke. In the end she blurted, “You keep saying Lazar’s wife, Lazar’s wife, but what’s her name?”

“Her name’s Dorit, but her husband calls her Dori,” I replied, and a sweet pain gripped me. “And what did you call her?” my mother stubbornly demanded. “Me?” I wondered momentarily why she was so insistent, staring wearily at the road which loomed up through the rain. “I called her Dori too in the end,” I admitted. “And what kind of a woman is she?” my mother kept on. “A spoiled woman,” I answered at once. “In the beginning she made a big fuss about the hotels.” And I closed my eyes in exhaustion, seeing the plump little woman advancing along the alleys of Varanasi with her slow, pampered walk, stepping carefully in the mud and smiling absentmindedly at the Indians crowding around her. And a wave of warmth suddenly engulfed me and almost choked me.

And I realized at that moment that I had to be careful when I was talking to my mother, because she sometimes succeeded in seeing into my soul with astonishing accuracy, and she was liable to sense something of the strange feeling I had brought back with me from the trip, and it was only natural that this feeling would offend and upset her and give rise to the wish to do something to nip this ridiculous infatuation in the bud. If that was the right word for my thoughts about this woman, which now included a lust that I was just becoming aware of, sitting cozily next to my father as we drove through the night from Lydda to Jerusalem. I looked at the road climbing between the hills, from which the rain and mist had cleared, giving way to lightly falling snowflakes. It would be a shame, I said to myself, if my mother had to suffer even for an instant because of a feeling that was absurd and hopeless by its very nature. It would be better not to talk too much about the trip to India, in case I unintentionally let slip some hint that would embarrass us all unnecessarily. Accordingly, I suggested to my father, who was a little offended, that I take his place by the wheel, because the airy flakes were turning the journey home into an adventure that might become dangerous. And in fact the light, shining flakes, which had begun flying through the air a few miles after Sha’ar-Hagai, turned into a heavy snowfall as we approached the city, and for the next two days I was stuck in Jerusalem, because my parents, who generally trusted my driving, implored me not to return to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle on the snowy roads. Since I felt a great weariness rising in me, the fruit of the unexpected excitements of the trip to India, I agreed to settle down again in the old bedroom of my childhood and relax into a delicious sensation that had nothing to do with food and drink — for my mother had never distinguished herself as a cook — but with the silent stirrings of a ghostly British presence in the apartment, which gave me the feeling that even when I was lying in bed that I was participating in an old black-and-white family movie full of stable, kindly values, whose happy, moral conclusion was guaranteed in advance. Thus, hidden at home, surrounded by a blanket of snow, I tried to cool and perhaps even to kill my infatuation with Lazar’s smiling round-limbed wife, and I tried to stop thinking about her, so that here, in the faithful room of my childhood and youth, she would sink into the depths of the darkness, dragged down by the weight of her years.

But the smiling middle-aged woman refused to sink, and blended instead with the familiar furniture and curtains of the room to which I had been brought at the age of two, when my parents moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv because of my father’s government job. And so I escaped into sleep, careful not to leave traces of my lust on the spotless sheets provided by my mother, who marveled together with my father at my sudden craving for sleep. They had grown accustomed to seeing me as a serious student who burned the midnight oil, a hard worker who got up early in the morning, and more recently as a doctor on call, capable of going without sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch. “You’re taking us back to your days in boot camp,” said my mother with a slightly worried air when I entered the dim old kitchen at twilight after sleeping the whole afternoon, feeling a pang of intense longing for the bright colors of the Indian temples. “It’s the soporific effect of the snow,” explained my father, in English, and he got up to give me my old place at the table, which he had taken for himself when I left home. “Yes, yes, you sit in your place,” he insisted when I tried to refuse, at the same time checking on my mother as she poured my tea and set it before me with a slice of crumb cake, on which I immediately spread a layer of jam to take away the dry, slightly moldy taste, which had depressed me even as a child.

“While you were asleep, your father went to town and had the photographs you took in India developed,” my mother said with a slightly embarrassed air as she handed me two envelopes crammed with pictures. “My photographs?” I turned to my father almost with a yell, refusing to believe that this quiet, aristocratic man had stolen into my room on his own initiative and taken the two rolls of film lying next to my bed while I was sleeping. In fact, it turned out that the initiative was my mother’s — she had gone into my room to check if I was warm enough, noticed the two rolls of film, and sent my father to have them developed in the center of town. She must have wanted to find out more about the trip to India, since I was too busy sleeping and too preoccupied with my thoughts to tell her. I suppose she can sense that something happened to me over there, I thought, hanging my head and avoiding her eyes, but even her native intelligence would never dare to imagine what had really happened. “Don’t you want to see how your pictures came out?” she wondered, as I went on gripping the two envelopes tightly in my hand. “But they’re not all mine,” I explained quickly. “Some of them are the Lazars’, I lent them the camera when they went on a trip to the Taj Mahal.” My parents were astounded to hear that the Lazars had gone off together and left me by myself with their sick daughter, and even after I told them that it had been my idea to send them to see the Taj Mahal, they went on criticizing the Lazars for accepting my offer, though they were proud of my generosity. “Well, why don’t you show them to us already, and tell us all about them,” said my mother as she stretched out an eager hand for the envelopes. “Of course,” I said, “but I thought you’d already looked at them.” And a little panic took hold of me at the thought of confronting her image here, in my parent’s sad kitchen, and I stood up at once and put my cup and plate in the sink and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth again, and when I returned the kitchen was flooded with light and the table was covered with colored pictures glowing with India’s reddish brown light, and already from a distance I saw her figure, which had miraculously managed to insert itself in more pictures than I would have imagined possible, and not only those taken by Lazar at the Taj Mahal. Was it her innate serenity and automatic smile that enabled her, in spite of her abundant plumpness, to look so natural and photogenic in every picture, even when she was surrounded by Indians in rags or sitting on a rickety bench in the twilight next to the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? My father passed one picture after another before his eyes and requested detailed explanations, but my mother fell silent, and a new pallor covered her cheeks. “She certainly likes having her picture taken,” she said at last, and there was a note of complaint in her voice. “Who?” I asked innocently. “Lazar’s wife — or what do you call her?” My mother kept her head lowered, as if she were afraid of meeting my eyes. “It’s her husband, it’s Lazar. I lent him my camera,” I said in self-justification, my voice muffled by the wave of excitement that surged up in me again at the sight of the woman strewn in bright glossy squares all over our gray kitchen table.

That evening the snowstorm intensified, but I went anyway to visit Eyal, a childhood friend who had studied medicine with me, and who was on call tonight in Hadassah Hospital, where he was doing his residency in pediatrics, after having been turned down by the surgical department. We sat in a little room with pictures of children stuck up on the walls, surrounded by the racket of sick children running up and down the corridor pursued by their harassed parents. We drank tepid tea from plastic cups and as usual compared conditions in our respective hospitals before discussing anything else. Then he asked me about my trip to India, of which he had already heard about from my mother, and at the sight of his friendly eyes fixed on mine, I felt an impulse to tell him immediately about the most important thing that had happened to me on the trip. I thought that Eyal, who had been living with his widowed mother for the past few years, would understand better than most people. But at the last moment I stopped myself. I had plenty of time; this wasn’t the right moment. And I began telling him about the medical aspects of the trip. He was very impressed by the night flight to Calcutta with the blood and urine samples, but seemed doubtful about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “I hope that in your enthusiasm you didn’t infect the mother with the daughter’s virus,” he said with a smile. “Nonsense,” I replied, “how could I have infected her? I was careful to place her higher than the patient too.”

“That doesn’t make much difference,” he said knowingly, “but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. The main thing is for you not to lose touch with this Lazar — and don’t take any money from him, so he’ll remain in your debt and maybe he’ll influence Hishin to let you have another year in his department.” While Eyal was showering me with practical advice, he was urgently summoned to the emergency room to examine a young boy who had tried to kill himself. It was late, but I was curious to see how they would manage the case. The patient was about thirteen, tall for his age, jerking violently under the hands of the nurses brutally pumping his stomach. Since I was wearing civilian clothes, they took me for his brother or some other relative and kept ordering me out of the little treatment cubicle. In the end I decided to leave in spite of my curiosity. Eyal, who had thought that I was going to spend the night keeping him company, suggested that I postpone my return to Tel Aviv and come to lunch at his house the next day. I hesitated. The commotion of the Hadassah emergency room made me homesick for my own hospital. But Eyal began urging me through the curtain separating us, holding on firmly to the arm of the boy, who had already begun spewing out the sleeping pills through the thick tube which had been inserted into his stomach. “Come on, you have to come — I’ve got an amazing story for you.”

“What story?” I asked suspiciously, unwilling to commit myself. “You won’t believe it, but I’m getting married,” he announced loudly and shamelessly to the frightened, unhappy people filling the emergency room.

The road from Ein Kerem back to town was very clear now; the crowns of snow on the branches of the trees and the rocks at the roadside lent a new magic to the night, and I was cheered by the thought that after lunch tomorrow, in exchange for the story of the wedding, I might gather the courage to tell Eyal about my own unexpected falling in love. Why not? If not Eyal, who would be able to understand me? My mother was waiting up for me, sitting in the dark in the living room in her old woolen robe. “It’s because of the snow, only because of the snow on the roads,” she apologized, and immediately got up to make us a cup of tea. “I already had tea with Eyal in the hospital,” I announced, and made for my room, refusing to linger and risk a nocturnal interrogation. And as she retired, disappointed, to her bedroom, I caught a glimpse through the door of my parents’ beds standing in an L-shape under the two moonlit windows. “You won’t believe it, Mother,” I blurted out in a whisper, “Eyal’s getting married.”

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” she cried. “It’s high time. For his friends too.” And my father poked his head out of the blankets and chuckled. “You’re opening a battlefront in the middle of the night.” But my mother had already calmed down, and she only asked curiously about the bride. “I didn’t have a chance to hear,” I said, “but tomorrow I’m going there for lunch, and maybe I’ll even see her.”

“So you’re staying tomorrow too,” said my mother with a certain relief. Even if I wasn’t getting married, at least I was staying with them for one more day.

When we were both students at the hospital, I often ate at Eyal’s place, because we preferred studying in his house, which was big and quiet. His mother, who lived alone, didn’t like being by herself in the house at night, and she would cook up tasty meals to ensure that we always studied there. She was a sad woman, with some of her former beauty left, and she liked talking to me in English, since she was hoping to find work in the tourist bureau. From time to time she received visits from middle-aged men, but she refused to become involved with any of them. Now the two of them sat looking politely at the photographs of my trip. “A pretty girl, but obviously neurotic,” Eyal said, dismissing Einat. “I doubt if she’s worth investing in.” He went on to study Lazar’s broad face with evident enjoyment. “It’s obvious,” he pronounced, “that he’s a strong man, but also friendly and humane. If you’ve already become close to him and his family, it would be a shame to lose that.”

“His wife’s very nice too,” I said suddenly, and felt myself blushing. Eyal examined the snapshots again. “Yes, she’s always smiling,” he agreed. “You can see at once that she’s pleased with herself.” I was so delighted by these perceptive words that I wanted to go on talking about her. But his sad mother, who had grown very fat lately, didn’t want to leave us alone together. “Are you glad that Eyal’s getting married?” I asked her carefully. “She’s overjoyed,” Eyal answered for her. His mother said nothing, and after a pause she asked if we were ready for lunch. Eyal suggested that we wait for his girlfriend, who was due to arrive soon.

But his mother said the food would get cold, and in a surly tone, which I had never heard her use before, she demanded that we eat right away. And then, when we sat down opposite each other at the elegantly laid table and she disappeared into the kitchen, I lowered my eyes and said with a miserable smile, “You’re suddenly getting married, and I, I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I’ve suddenly fallen in love with a married woman.”

“A married woman?” Eyal’s little eyes filled with a sly smile, which showed that my frank statement hadn’t taken him by surprise. “Yes, a married woman.” I nodded my head sadly. “Don’t tell me that you’re talking about the director’s wife,” Eyal said, looking at me with a pitying smile. “Lazar’s wife?” I laughed in astonishment. “What an idea!” And I immediately went on, “Can you really see me falling in love with a woman twenty years older than me?” But Eyal did not seem put out by my indignant protests. He shrugged his shoulders and went on smiling. “I didn’t mean anything — it doesn’t matter. It’s just that I saw you couldn’t stop taking pictures of her, and besides, she really does look nice. But it doesn’t matter. If not her, then who have you fallen in love with? And what’s more important, who’s she married to?” But at this point his mother returned and set two bowls of soup carefully before us, after which she sat down beside us and placed her beautiful white hands on the table. “Aren’t you eating with us?” I asked her sympathetically. “No,” she said hesitantly, “I’m not hungry,” and her face, which was turned to her son, grew very red. Eyal reached out, laid his hand gently on her shoulder, and said affectionately, “Yes, Mother has to watch her weight.”

Toward the end of the meal, when the bride-to-be, Hadas — a vivacious, good-natured girl, with a fresh, wholesome look about her — arrived and shook the snowflakes gracefully off her hair, Eyal’s mother retired at last to her room and left us alone. I made up my mind not to say any more to Eyal, who immediately began questioning me again about the “married woman,” who had apparently sparked his imagination. Hadas, who radiated goodwill toward me, was surprisingly well informed about my trip to India. It turned out that the shaven-headed girl, Michaela, who had brought the news of the hepatitis to the Lazars and whom I had taken at first for a boy, was from the same kibbutz as Hadas. I stood up suddenly, though I had planned to leave, as if thrown off balance by the excitement caused by the discovery of this unexpected coincidence. I wondered whether I should go to Eyal’s mother’s room to say good-bye and thank her for her hospitality or leave her to rest. Eyal, maybe eager for me to leave, stood up and said, “So, Benjy, don’t say it’s too far for you to come to Ein Zohar for our wedding.”

“Have you already set a date?”

“Of course,” they chorused, and they told me the exact date and made sure that I wrote it down in my calendar, and that no night shift in the world would prevent me from being there. Then Eyal insisted that I go in and say good-bye to his mother, who was so fond of me; why not give her a little pleasure? I followed him cautiously into the large, dim room, where we had played when we were children and where she was lying, large and very white, covered only by a sheet, which revealed how much weight she had put on in the past year. “Benjy wants to say good-bye to you,” whispered Eyal, gently waking her up. “Yes, I wanted to say good-bye to you,” I said, “and also to thank you for the meal, which was even more delicious than usual.” But she didn’t smile at me, she only nodded her head and said, “Give my regards to your parents, and don’t forget to come to Eyal’s wedding. It’s important for you to be there, not only for our sakes but also for yours.”

“I’ll be there, I promise,” I said, and to reinforce my promise I put both my hands together over my heart in the Indian salutation.

I had every intention of going to the wedding. Eyal had been my best friend since we had been in school, after all. But in truth, I also held out hope that the boyish Michaela, a friend of Eyal and his future bride’s, might be there, and perhaps through her I’d be able to make indirect contact with Einat, and through her with her parents, in case my connection with Lazar proved shortlived. As I strolled down the Jerusalem street, marveling at the great heaps of snow piled up along the sidewalks, the pleasant feeling did not leave me, nor did the mild envy I felt at Eyal’s approaching marriage, nor the thought that any hopes of my own in that direction would have to be postponed for the time being owing to my feelings for Lazar’s wife. Nothing could stop me from wishing to let myself go on falling into the abyss of the sweet new feeling. I got home and told my parents, who were waiting for me with their usual eagerness, that the roads were now free of snow and there was nothing to prevent me from returning to Tel Aviv; they knew very well that I had to get back to the hospital in order to fight for the continuation of my residency in the surgical department. My father suddenly burst out with uncharacteristic vehemence, “Why do they leave it up to Professor Hishin to decide by himself who to keep on in the department and who not to keep on? In these matters there are always hidden motives at work, and perhaps precisely — listen to me for a minute before you jump in with a ready retort — perhaps precisely because you’re so hardworking and dedicated he wants to push you out. Why don’t they let other people in the department decide? It’s not only nimble fingers that count, but also loyalty and dedication, like you’ve given the hospital over the past year. Why don’t they remember that?” It was hard for me to hear my father talking like this, perhaps because I felt the same smarting injustice. “But, Dad,” I said, trying to calm him down, “you’re talking as if it’s the only hospital in the world. I can find a place at another hospital in Tel Aviv.”

“Not on the same level as the one you’re at now,” he pronounced, and he was right. “So maybe I’ll come back to Jerusalem,” I said. “To Jerusalem?” said my father in disgust. “You’re thinking of returning to Jerusalem and perhaps coming back to live at home? Then you’ll really never get married.” I burst into strange laughter. It had never occurred to me that my father too was worried by my single state. Now my mother broke her glum silence. “Don’t keep him,” she scolded my father. “It gets dark quickly. He should leave while it’s still light.” But my father grabbed hold of my shoulder. “Listen to me, Benjy, you fight for your place. Now you’ve got allies with influence in the hospital — Lazar and his wife.”

“What’s his wife got to do with it?” I asked in pretended surprise. “What has she got to do with the hospital?”

“She’s got something to do with Lazar,” my father insisted, “and he might be able to provide an additional post in the surgical department for you. He saw what a good doctor you are if not for you, they would still be stuck in India with a dying girl.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “you’re exaggerating. All I did was perform a simple blood transfusion.”

“I don’t interfere in matters I’m not an expert in,” said my father, “but listen to me. They haven’t paid you anything yet?”

“Not yet,” I said apologetically. “They didn’t have a chance; we said good-bye at the airport.”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” explained my father. “They don’t have to pay you. All they have to do is keep in touch and help you stay on at the hospital, so that you can stay in Tel Aviv, a town with a bit of life in it, at least.” And he turned a wonderful, tired smile on me, illuminated by the bright blue of his eyes, trying to soften his words, because he knew very well that all his anger stemmed from his dream of returning, when he retired, from his Jerusalem exile to live near me in Tel Aviv.

My mother looked out the window and raised her eyes worriedly to the sky, as if to keep the blue expanse from clouding up. “If you’ve made up your mind to go back today, then you should start now,” she urged me, using her common sense. I went into my room and saw that my bags were ready, crammed with freshly laundered clothes and underclothes, and peeping out of one of them I saw a tin of the Scottish shortbread I had loved as a child, which my mother continued to ply me with even though I had lost my taste for it long ago. I hadn’t brought a single thing back from India for myself, apart from the accursed infatuation which continued to preoccupy me even here, in the shadowy room of my childhood. I put it on, and although my parents didn’t like me to wear my crash helmet in the house, I put on the black helmet and fastened the strap, pulled on my old leather gloves, and went to start my Honda, it started with the first kick, emitted a spurt of bluish smoke, and was ready to go, as if my prolonged absence, the cold, and the snow made no difference to it and its clean white streamlined body were unaffected by external circumstances. I strapped the knapsacks to the pillion and covered them with canvas. My father stood by my side in a light flannel shirt, admiring the motorcycle. My mother stood behind him, shivering under her shawl. “Call us when you arrive,” she said before I lowered the transparent visor over my eyes and revved the engine, and she went inside — but my father stayed where he was, unwilling to miss a single detail of the maneuvers that led me slowly along the sidewalk, against the direction of the traffic in the one-way street, and took me quickly and efficiently onto the main road.

You’d better drive carefully, I admonished myself at the first turn on the descent from Jerusalem, as the Honda went into a serious skid on an invisible layer of ice on the road. I immediately reined in the fast, powerful engine, shifted to second gear, and with a muffled roaring sound rode slowly down the middle of the road, slowing the cars behind me, whose drivers felt confident on the snow-free road and even had the nerve to honk at me. But I had no intention of picking up speed, and raised my visor so I had a better view of the slippery black pavement. As I proceeded at this leisurely pace, I noticed the coppery Jerusalem light, which the white snow had shot through with noble shades of purple. At first I thought that this light was given off by the snow-covered rocks at the side of the road, but when I raised my eyes and saw that the horizon of the white mountains all around was full of the same strange light, I felt as if the heavy snowfall had penetrated the very soul of the city, and for a moment I was seized by anxiety and I slowed down even more, as if this new light had it in its power to rob me of control over my bike. In the next lane the drivers passing me were looking at me uncomprehendingly and even angrily, as if the fear I was betraying by my slow driving were not only incompatible with my heavy black crash helmet but also objectively unjustified. Even on the broad, majestic three-lane ascent to the Castel, which was entirely mantled in snow, I did not increase my speed much and only went into third gear, although the Honda was easily capable of flying up the hill in fifth and devouring the distance in a single roar. The strange light suffusing the familiar coppery pink of Jerusalem with such a sad, mysterious hue was still preoccupying me so much that I did not want to hasten its inevitable loss in the abundant stream of clear, cheerful light that would come pouring in from the open western horizon when I passed the summit.

But the horizon of the plain, which first appears as a solemn promise at the summit of the Castel, then it gradually disappears again on the steep descent separating the new stone houses of Abu Gosh from the springs of Aqua Bella, was now stained not only by the big round sun going down in the west but by the blue lights of police cars surrounding a huge, showy motorcycle that had crashed on the road and the large white helmet lying next to it. Drivers slowed down and turned their heads, trying to figure out from the exact position of the helmet what was left of the life of the wretched rider, who was already being borne toward the awesome Jerusalem light. And now the cars behind me and next to me expected me to slow down even more on the dangerous multilane descent. But I stayed in third gear as I sailed down to the little valley of Abu Gosh, thinking not of the motorcyclist but of myself. If it had been me, would Lazar’s wife — whom I still hesitated to call Dori to myself — remember me and my name, let’s say in one or two years’ time, when the trip to India was already forgotten?

But could a journey like that be forgotten? I wondered, as the Honda began eagerly devouring the short, straight ascent that divided the blue-branched pomegranate orchards of Abu Gosh from the white houses of an Arab village whose name I had never succeeded in learning, and which still looked to me like a Jewish settlement onto which the minaret of a mosque had been grafted. After all, India wasn’t Europe or America, buried in identical airports and brightly lit avenues of churches and giant department stores. Could the golden Varanasi, with the sweetish smoke of its dead, or the temples of Bodhgaya, with their statues of animals and birds, be forgotten just like that? And was this woman, whose nickname I tried to whisper against the wind, doomed to go on remembering the journey to India even when she was an old woman in her nursing-home bed? What a pity that she would not be able to add to this memory, which from now on would become absolute, the strange passion that the young doctor accompanying them had conceived for her, a passion which gave an unexpected sexual value to a woman approaching her fiftieth year. Strange, I thought to myself as the motorcycle began picking up speed on the pleasant curves of the Sha’ar-Hagai road and I had to lower the plastic visor against the stinging, pine-scented wind, strange that I still didn’t know the date of her birth, even though her passport had lain open more than once before my eyes.

And thus, full of tender thoughts of love in spite of the savage roaring of my motorcycle behind my back, I emerged in fifth gear from Sha’ar-Hagai into the Ayalon Valley, crossing the last border of Jerusalem, which had steeped me in rest but also in enforced idleness, with a feeling of relief. Before I could enjoy the orchards and broad fields, and the large water reservoir which had recently been built here, a first quiet flash of lightning appeared on the horizon, which was the greenish color of a computer screen, signaling a warning that the big cloud floating merrily toward me like a dirigible, ignited by the rosy glow of the setting sun, was already preparing to burst not into fire but with water. I had to hurry, I said to myself, and increased my speed to over sixty-five miles an hour, noticing too late the police car parked on the other side, which caught me in its radar trap. The blue light began to blink and the car started to move, which forced me, even before the policeman decided on his policy, to shoot up to a hundred and sixty and disabuse him of even the glimmer of a hope of catching up with me. And at a really wild speed, foreign to my nature and also to my values, I ate up in a few minutes the twelve miles separating the Trappist monastery from the interchange leading to the airport, the thought of the passenger terminal filling me with intense longings, and by side roads and detours I entered the heart of Tel Aviv, which seemed to me, in spite of the nagging, miserable rain, full of a secret new promise.

Once home, with my bags crouching in the middle of the room like a couple of wild, wet animals, I phoned Lazar’s house immediately. It wasn’t only my right, I thought, but also my duty to check up on my patient, who to my surprise answered the phone herself and sounded more confused and lost in her own home than she had in India. But perhaps thanks to the trust I had inspired in her on our first meeting, when she was lying on a sleeping bag in the Bodhgaya monastery, she soon bucked up and shed her listlessness, and gave me a few details about her physical condition, at least insofar as she understood it. The head of internal medicine at the hospital, Professor Levine, had come to see her the previous morning and had wanted to hospitalize her immediately in his ward, but her parents had decided to wait for their friend Hishin, who had returned from Paris this morning. Hishin had come straight from the airport, given her a long examination, and recommended that she remain at home, even though her temperature had gone up again. Her temperature had gone up? I was profoundly disappointed, because I had presumed that the blood transfusion would also eliminate the liver infection, which was apparently the cause of the ongoing dysfunction in the immune system. “Did you tell Hishin about what happened in India?” I asked. “Of course,” replied Einat. “My mother and father told him everything.”

“And what did he say?” I inquired anxiously. She thought for a minute, and then said, “He said that the main thing was that it turned out all right.”

“What turned out all right?” I sneered, offended, but Einat was unable to explain Professor Hishin’s meaning, and so — with a pounding heart, tightening my grip on the receiver — I dared to ask to speak to her mother for a minute. But her parents weren’t at home. Lazar’s wife had gone to work after Hishin’s visit, and Lazar had gone out on errands shortly before I phoned. “And you’re at home alone?” I said in a tone that surprised even me by its anger. “Yes,” she said, presumably also taken aback by my inexplicable rage. When she saw that I had fallen into a strange silence, she asked if I wanted her father to call me when he got back. “No, it doesn’t matter,” I said quickly, “I’ll see him tomorrow at the hospital.” I hung up, undid the buttons of my leather jacket, threw it onto the floor, and immediately phoned the surgical department, to get hold of Hishin and hear from him directly what he thought of the blood transfusion. But it transpired that Hishin, who had only just arrived, had gone to the internal medicine ward to talk to Levine. “What for?” I asked anxiously. But the nurse didn’t know. “What did you come back in such a hurry for?” asked my rival-friend, the other resident, grabbing the phone from the nurse. “We all thought that you would take advantage of the trip to do a little sightseeing on your own.” He sounded friendly. Had he heard something from Hishin about the transfusion I had performed in Varanasi? He wanted to hear my first impressions of India, but I didn’t have the patience to talk about my trip, and I asked him what had happened in the department during my two weeks’ absence, inquiring about one patient after the other, mentioning their names, which I remembered perfectly, and asking about the results of the operations at which I had been present. He was surprised by my detailed questions, but he tried to answer them as fully as possible. Then I suddenly remembered the woman who had been lying on the operating table when Lazar came to call Hishin to his office. “How is she? How is she?” I asked in unaccountable agitation. “You sewed her up yourself.” He sounded slightly embarrassed when he replied, “She died of an internal hemorrhage a day or two after you left.”

“An internal hemorrhage?” I repeated, suddenly struck by real sorrow for the young woman, and for her husband and her mother, who had been waiting outside the door of the ward. “Why should she have hemorhaged?” I went on with a twinge of anger. “I remember every minute of that operation, I haven’t forgotten anything, I thought about it again in India — it was a simple benign operation.”

“Yes,” he confirmed in his deep voice, “that was our mistake. We thought it was a simple operation, but it wasn’t simple. The bleeding flooded and infected everything, and Hishin still hasn’t discovered the source.”

“And what about the postmortem?” I demanded.

“Nothing clear, a complete mystery.”

“Mystery?” I pounced in scorn and despair, as if he were personally responsible for this death. “What mystery? To call something a mystery, you don’t have to be a doctor.”

Seven

Has the time already come to consider marriage? If so, the author responsible for imposing the ideal of marriage on this chapter will have to begin melting the hard gray shell of bachelorhood in which he has wrapped his hero, who at this hour of wintry dawn is skillfully and responsibly maneuvering his motorcycle through the stream of Tel Aviv traffic, casting occasional sidelong glances at a woman sitting behind the wheel of her car and smoking a cigarette, no longer in the normal wish to enjoy the sight of a pretty face but in the new hope of encountering a familiar one.

But how will it come about, a marriage, which can sometimes be seen as an easy and self-evident thing, with a natural flow of its own, but is also liable to be difficult, demanding, and recalcitrant? It may, with the same justice, be called an unnatural and even absurd act, like two big, strong birds led on a chain by the rather irritable and myopic character who appeared as a mystery in the first part of this book and has turned, in the second part, into marriage without losing any of his original and delightful mysteriousness, or his nasty habit of paying brief, unexpected nocturnal calls in the guise of an ancient, forgotten relative, appearing suddenly from the bedroom closet, dragging behind him two predatory birds, who may appear to be stepping tamely and obediently in his wake but on closer inspection turn out to have been bound together.

“Maybe you should free them and let them fly?” we suggest with friendly compassion. “Free them?” he replies in surprise, in disappointment, even in annoyance, and tightens the chain in his hand. “How can that be possible? They’re married.” “Married?” We can’t help bursting into short peals of merry laughter in the silence of the night, bending down slightly to observe the curious couple standing in happy indifference, their tails touching. “In what sense?” We burst into laughter again. But we’re too late, and we can no longer obtain an answer to the question which our rash laughter has rendered superfluous, for the pair now draw themselves up gravely, shedding a golden feather, and with a silent, crooked gait they continue on their way, dragging the mystery of their marriage behind them, its deep purpose, its anxious bond, its dumb loyalty, its achievements, and its frustrations. Now the mystery passes before us, stern-faced and sad-eyed, bowed beneath the weight of a responsibility which is not always comprehensible, which is not always justified, and the chain wrapped around his hand trembles and chimes like a little bell.

When I arrived at the ward, Hishin was already doing his rounds. At first he seemed to be trying to avoid me, and he slipped into his office, and then he changed his mind and emerged and came at me from behind and embraced me warmly. “I heard all about it,” he said in a loud whisper. “A great success — I’m proud of my choice. I saw Einat too, and examined her thoroughly, and I’m with you a hundred percent. Not only in the diagnosis, but also in the emergency blood transfusion. I told the Lazars, it was the brilliant idea of a doctor whose insight is deeper than the sharpest knife. And if there’s a slightly different opinion, like that of my good friend Levine, who regards the transfusion as a frivolous and superfluous procedure on your part, take no notice — he’s a strange, proud man who thinks he invented hepatitis. Don’t be upset by what he says to you — he’s already said he wants to talk to you. Listen to him patiently, nod your head politely, but know that I’m behind your idea, especially from the psychological point of view, and as I’ve often told you, psychology is no less important than the knife in your hand,” and he gaily brandished an imaginary knife. But I wasn’t interested in hearing again about his belief in psychology. I wanted to clarify immediately whether behind that sly, jocular manner he really did support my blood transfusion, because I still thought with strange longing about the thin, transparent tube silently pumping the blood between the two beds in Varanasi while crowds streamed into the Ganges below. “But what’s Professor Levine’s problem?” I asked in despair, and before he could reply, I rapidly and angrily hurled the test results at him, all of which I still knew by heart. The two transaminases which rose from 40 to a 180 and to nearly a 158; the bilirubin level of nearly 30; the suspected damage to the coagulatory system. “Where’s my mistake?” I demanded. But Hishin was already waving his hands impatiently. “Please, my friend, don’t try to convince me, I’m already convinced, altogether I’m your greatest fan.” And he winked at me and at the nurse standing next to us, and joined his hands on his heart in a new, Indian gesture, which astounded me with its cunning. “I beg you, don’t start throwing those numbers at me now — I’ve never really understood what they tell us about the state of the liver. That’s what we’ve got Professor Levine for, he’s the one who understands the liver, I only cut it up.” He burst into laughter and hugged me again. “No, Dr. Rubin, don’t waste your energy, because I really am a great fan of yours, otherwise I wouldn’t have sent you to India, and I’m glad to know that others have now joined me in my good opinion.”

I knew at once whom he meant, and the feeling of happiness was so sudden and overwhelming that the blood rushed to my face. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. But now Hishin decided to talk, and with the same speed with which he made his initial precise, elegant incisions, he seized me by the shoulder, dismissed the nurse, and led me into his office. He shut the door and seated me on a chair and said, “What do you think, that I don’t know what’s eating you all the time? But what can I do? There’s only one position available in the department, and I have to choose between the two of you, and it’s a very difficult choice, because you’ve each got a lot of virtues and only a few shortcomings. Lazar and his wife have also asked me if you’re going to continue as a resident with us.”

“Lazar and his wife? Why his wife?” I muttered, but the thought that she had shown an interest in my future at the hospital sent a powerful thrill through me. “Why did you tell them about me?” I asked in offended innocence. “But they were the ones who asked,” Hishin justified himself. “They both wanted to know what your chances in the department were, and I saw that it pained them to hear that I hadn’t chosen you, so I said to Lazar, you dare complain? The number of positions available are up to you; give me another position and I’ll keep him on for another year, even though”—and he raised an admonishing finger—“it’s not really his natural place. He’ll be an excellent doctor, but his true aptitude is in his soul, not his hands. Not because his hands aren’t good, but because he thinks too much before he cuts or stitches, and in the meantime time passes, and time in an operation isn’t just very precious but also very dangerous. So why insist on playing with knives when his feeling, his deep understanding, his bright ideas are needed elsewhere? So we both decided to speak to Professor Levine about you, because there’s a place for a substitute doctor for six months in his department. In the meantime take that, hang around there for a while and learn what you can — you’ll always find someone, if it’s really so important to you, to take you back to the operating table. But for God’s sake, get the business of that blood transfusion you performed in India out of the way first. Go and tell him why you thought it was necessary, so he won’t agitate himself for nothing, because he’s not a well man.”

And thus the final clarification of my position in the surgical department was concluded. There were only two weeks of the trial year left, and I tried to get the most out of them and not to miss a single operation. Sometimes I would stay in the hospital in the evening, after my shift was over, just on the off-chance that I might be able to take part in an emergency operation and look deep inside the human body again before my enforced banishment from surgery began. And now that I was about to leave, everyone was generous. From time to time I was allowed to finish minor sutures by myself, or even to begin primary incisions. And I did it well, or at least I thought so. Senior doctors in the department, who knew that I was soon leaving, nodded their heads in satisfaction, and Hishin himself would say, “Very good, excellent stitching, what a pity you’re leaving us,” and wink at me. But we never had a real talk. Once, when we were standing and waiting in the operating room for the results of the lab tests, he asked me to tell him about India, but I answered with deliberate dryness and blandness, and then he said nastily to the nurses busy with the instruments, “What do you think of Dr. Rubin? We sent him to India and he keeps all his experiences to himself. You could show us a few pictures, at least. The Lazars were at my place yesterday and they complained that you were still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip.”

Indeed, I was still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip, including the ones of Lazar and his wife. The pictures were lying on the little table next to my bed, and I would often look at the two of them, study the way they stood together in front of different views of the Taj Mahal, which I was now sorry I had missed owing to my exaggerated generosity. Again and again I examined her face and her body and the way she stood and the way she managed to smile spontaneously in all the pictures, and in my heart I insisted on calling her “my love.” I knew that if I gave the photos to Lazar, I would run the risk of finally parting from them, whereas I was busy racking my brains all the time for ways to renew my contact with Lazar, in order to reach her through him. The idea of secretly developing pictures of her by herself and keeping them struck me as immoral, even though I imagined that in the end I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation, at least with regard to one picture in which she looked particularly charming in the reddish brown Indian light. I wondered what they had in mind regarding the financial arrangements between us. Were they going to give me a fee or not? At the beginning of the month I received my full salary from the hospital, and I saw that there was no mention on the slip of a vacation or absence from work. As if the journey to India had taken place only in my imagination. Had the administrative head of the hospital issued secret instructions to the financial department to ignore my absence, or had it simply not been brought to their attention? For the time being I didn’t go to Lazar to ask him about it, so I wouldn’t have to remind him of the remuneration his wife had promised me in our telephone conversation on the eve of the trip. The knapsack with the medical kit was still in my apartment too, and for a few days I wondered what I should do with it. It occurred to me to confiscate it as compensation for my trouble, but I was afraid that Dr. Hessing, the head pharmacist, who had prepared it with such loving care, was still waiting for it. Finally I decided to hand it back to him personally, and to my surprise he was disappointed that I had seen fit to drag it back from India with me instead of donating it to some institution there, as he had suggested. “We were in an emergency situation there up to the last minute,” I explained to him. “I didn’t know whether I might need it until we were actually on our way home, and I could hardly leave it standing in the middle of the airport.”

“I would simply have written the word “Israel” and the name of our hospital on it and left it with one of the airport guards,” said the pharmacist regretfully. And he unpacked the drugs and dressings and threw them all away without even looking at them, and put the instruments into an old cardboard box. I wanted to say something to him about the resourcefulness and imagination with which he had prepared the kit, and tell him about how I had used it, but he was already shaking his head at me with a certain hostility, as if I had spoiled his intention of taking advantage of our trip to make a private gesture of humanity toward the true sufferers of this world.

After this I made up my mind to give the photos to Lazar, and thanks to the good education I had received at home, I refrained at the last moment from duplicating for myself even one of the pictures in which she was alone and contented myself with the more distant family photos I had taken in Bodhgaya. If I was to liberate myself from the thoughts enslaving me to this woman, I warned myself, it had better be sooner than later, and a good, clear picture like the one in which she was standing and smiling (albeit only a faint smile) with the entire Taj Mahal floating miraculously behind her head, shining in the rosy light, would only delay the desired liberation. Although three weeks had already passed since I had seen her, things kept on happening to complicate my feelings toward her. For example, there had been Hishin’s casual remark about how it wasn’t only Lazar who took an interest in my future in the hospital, and the sudden suspicion, idiotic but persistent, that Hishin too was secretly in love with her. Thus, in the afternoon of one of my last days in the surgical department, I went to the administrative wing to give Lazar the photos, to ask about the welfare of my patient, and at the same time to give my regards to his wife. But the secretary, who immediately recognized me and remembered my name and greeted me with genuine heartiness, informed me regretfully that Lazar had just left his office for his lunch break. A devil must have gotten into me, for just as I was, still in my white coat, I hurried to catch up with him or, more accurately, to follow him.

For I was sure that he was on his way to meet the woman I persisted in secretly calling “my love.” He didn’t like leaving her alone, I thought with anxiety and a spurt of lust, which hastened my steps and sharpened my senses so that I was soon able to identify the big head with the mane of curly gray hair in the distance, among the people streaming toward the hospital parking lot. And as I walked I took off my white coat, which I bundled into the Honda’s black box. I took out the crash helmet and quickly put it on, and although I didn’t have my leather jacket with me and it was quite cold outside, I started the motorcycle. Since I knew the make of Lazar’s car, which we had discussed on the long train journey from New Delhi to Varanasi, I was able to identify it as it pulled out of its reserved parking place. From the movies I was familiar with the advantages of pursuing an automobile on a motorcycle, but I had never considered the absolute advantage of the helmet visor, which allowed the pursuer to tail the target so closely as to be almost intimate. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and Lazar’s car wove confidently and cleverly among the traffic, aiming for the center of town and the street where Lazar’s wife’s office was. There was no parking, and he had to leave his car on the sidewalk, apologizing to the owner of the store whose display window he blocked, and wait for his wife there. She finally came out, after a few minutes of waiting which seemed interminable to me too as I sat at a little distance on my Honda, getting damp from the fine drizzle filling the air. When I saw her hurrying on her high heels, this middle-aged woman in a short skirt — perhaps too short for her age — draped in the velvety blue tunic that she had taken all the way to India but hardly worn at all, her plump face laughing, a bundle of office files tucked under her heavy arm, insisting on opening an umbrella to protect her bare head during the short distance between the office door and the car, I realized that there was no mistake about it, it wasn’t a delusion or a mirage: I was really in love with her.

I could have stopped my pursuit then, got off my bike and taken shelter in one of the building entrances until the rain stopped, and then returned to the hospital; or I could have approached them as if it were an accidental meeting, given them the envelope with the photos, said a few words holding out a promise for the future, and gone away. But instead I remained on the bike in my light jacket, masked by my helmet, and waited for them to start off so I could go on following them — this time from a greater distance, for I was afraid of her turning around. I rode behind them, saw them stop at a bakery, and watched her go in and come out with a rectangular white box tied up with a blue ribbon, which reminded me of the shoe box I had voluntarily stored in my suitcase. From there they continued to a fruit-and-vegetable stall, where they stopped after an apparent argument, and an Arab youth came out and loaded bursting bags into the car. So they’re still cultivating their round bellies, I thought sarcastically, and although I was already soaking wet I kept on their tail, because I wanted to see them with my own eyes arrive at their apartment in Chen Avenue, get out of the car, help each other carry the bags and boxes, and disappear through the big glass door. So she won’t be left alone during her lunch break, I thought, and I felt a kind of relief.

But I didn’t hand over the photographs that day, even though Lazar returned to his office at four o’clock. And I didn’t take them to him the next day either, but set off to follow him again, to see if this time too he would be careful not to leave his wife alone at home during her lunch break. It was pouring, and instead of the short skirt and high heels she was wearing boots and tight trousers, and a black cape which gave her a new profile. How is this going to end? I scolded myself in despair, returning to the hospital drenched to the skin after they had disappeared into the door of their apartment building. It was my last day in the surgical department, and since nothing had yet been agreed with Professor Levine, who had been absent for two weeks with some mysterious disease, I felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, up in the air, without a patron or a framework. I therefore decided that in the afternoon, when Lazar returned, I would go to his office and give him the photographs and ask him one or two questions about the rights of a temporary, substitute doctor. But this time, although the secretary, Miss Kolby, was friendly, she was unable to find any free time in his tight schedule of afternoon appointments. Only when darkness fell, as I was going from bed to bed on a private final round of farewells — without telling any of the patients that this was my last visit, because I didn’t want them to feel abandoned or betrayed during the long, hard night ahead of them — did the secretary phone the ward to look for me and tell me that Lazar had finally finished all his appointments and that he would be very glad to see me in his office.

Once more I found myself in the large, elegant room with its flowered curtains and flourishing plants, which now, at this late hour, looked very different from all the doctors’ offices in the hospital, like some cozy domestic interior, protected from all the diseases, the smells, the drugs, and the medical instruments, remote too from all the paperwork, the forms and the files, as if it were not the center from which the hospital was run but a refuge in which to escape it. Lazar sat behind his vast desk, his curly head, which had served as an effective signpost among the heads of the Indian crowds, wagging against the high back of his executive chair as he conducted an animated conversation with Miss Kolby, his devoted thirty-five-year-old secretary, who was standing beside him. “Aha!” he cried in friendly rebuke. “At last! Where did you disappear to?”

“I disappeared?” I repeated with a surprised smile, for during the past three weeks it had seemed to me that he and his wife had been my constant companions by day and by night. “I’ve been here all the time, in the hospital.” “I know you’ve been here,” he said with genuine friendliness, “but we haven’t seen you. Dori is already convinced that you must have taken offense at something, because ever since we parted at the airport you’ve shown no sign of life.”

“But I phoned one evening,” I protested, filled with joy at this new proof of her interest. “Didn’t Einat tell you? She said that Hishin and Professor Levine had already seen her, and I understood that I didn’t have anything to worry about anymore.”

“You’ve still got something to worry about.” Lazar laughed jovially. “But I’m not talking about Einati, even though she’s not completely out of the woods yet, and Levine, who wanted to hospitalize her in his ward and run further tests on her, is sick himself. No, I mean you should worry about yourself, because we’ve still got some outstanding business to clear up between us.”

“Business?” I asked innocently. He folded his hands on the desk and looked right at me. “The fee we owe you for the journey to India.”

“There’s no need for any fee,” I said immediately, and lowered my eyes so that he wouldn’t sense any hesitation in them. Lazar tried to insist and I repeated firmly, “I don’t want you to pay me anything.” I looked into the bright, penetrating eyes of his secretary, who was still standing next to us. “The trip was payment enough.” And then I felt a pang, not only because of the payment, which I had finally waived, but also because of the brevity and haste of the trip. “I only came to bring you these,” I added weakly, holding out the envelope with the photographs. “Ah, our pictures,” he cried happily, and snatched the envelope from my hand and took out the photographs, which he glanced at rapidly, smiling and immediately passing them on to the secretary, who took them reverently and studied them slowly and thoroughly. “Dori always comes out wonderfully in photos,” she said in an intimate, familiar way. “Yes,” Lazar agreed with a sigh, “that’s because she’s serene inside herself, not like me. And that always makes the lines sharp and clear,” and he nodded his head at me as if to apologize for having to praise his wife in front of strangers. “But how much do I owe you for the pictures?” He whipped out his wallet. “Nonsense,” I said, shrinking. “Why nonsense?” he protested. “I can’t let you refuse everything here. Tell me how much they cost or I won’t take them.” And he took out a fifty-shekel note and put it on the desk. With my heart aching at the thought of parting from the pictures, I shook my head firmly and explained that my parents had paid for the two rolls of film to be developed. “It’s a present from them, to both of you.” This persuaded him to accept the photographs without paying for them. “A present from your parents?” he repeated, as if to obtain my confirmation. “Mind you don’t forget to thank them,” and he made haste to return the money to his pocket, and turned to his secretary. “Dori’ll be thrilled to get them — she loves photographs, and now we’ll have something to remind us of the trip, which, believe me, we’ve already forgotten completely.” Then he glanced at his watch and said with an air of surprise, “But she should have been here by now.” When he saw me beginning to edge toward the door — and maybe he also sensed my inner turmoil — he stood up to stop me. “Wait a minute and say hello to her. She asked about you.” I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past seven. My last hour in the surgical department was already over. “I don’t know.” I hesitated. “I still have to get back to the ward.”

‘The ward?” exclaimed Lazar. “But today is your last day there!”

“You know that too?” I cried in genuine admiration. “And even smaller and less significant details too,” said Lazar with a sigh, and closed his eyes in agreeable weariness. “That’s what I’m here for. I also know, for example, that Professor Levine might employ you as a substitute in his department until June.” “July,” I said, trying weakly to correct him. “No, only until June,” he stated decisively. “The position’s only available until June. But what does it matter — June, July, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime we’ll have to wait until he gets better, because he insists on clarifying some little thing with you.” “Clarifying?” I whispered. “It’s no big deal,” said Lazar dismissively. “Didn’t Hishin tell you? He’s bothered by the blood transfusion you gave Einat.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard, but I don’t understand what bothers him about it.”

“I don’t understand what his problem is either. Hishin didn’t get it either. So you’ll have to talk to him yourself and explain exactly what your intention was. He’s a fair man, but impatient.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked. “Something or other,” said Lazar, smiling faintly to himself. “But what exactly?” I persisted, consumed with curiosity about my future employer’s mysterious disease. Lazar exchanged a glance with his secretary, who apparently knew the secret of Levine’s disease but warned Lazar with a look not to reveal it to me. “Never mind, never mind.” He waved his hand to silence me, and all of a sudden he cocked his head in a gesture of profound attention. “Here comes Dori, I can hear her footsteps.” Neither I nor the secretary, who also inclined her head slightly, could hear any footsteps — on the contrary, the silence in the wing only seemed to deepen. But Lazar insisted that he could hear his wife’s footsteps in the distance, by virtue of the strong bond between them, which had upset and excited me during the trip to India. And sure enough, we soon heard the sound of footsteps, soft but self-confident, and joy flooded me as I discovered that I too was able to recognize them. She hesitated slightly outside the door of the next room, but then advanced briskly toward the door of her husband’s office, which she opened quietly but without any hesitation, smiling her warm smile. She entered the room, dragging her left foot slightly and definitely surprised to see me, but greeted the secretary with an affectionate hug and kiss before she turned to me and asked, repeating her husband’s formula, in the same tone of mild rebuke, “What have you been up to? Where did you disappear to?”

“Where did you disappear to?” Lazar interrupted her angrily. “What took you so long? You said you’d be here by six and it’s already twenty past seven!” “Don’t get excited.” A tender smile spread over her plump face. “You can’t tell me you didn’t have plenty to keep you busy in the meantime.”

“That’s not the point,” he said petulantly. But he was obviously pleased by her answer, and he stood up to collect his belongings. “Tomorrow I’ve got a crazy day. But look at the nice present we’ve got for you here.” He handed her the photographs, which she snatched from him with a childish cry of delight, and still without meeting my eyes, she slipped her cape off her shoulders and said enthusiastically, “And we thought that we must have overexposed the film by mistake.” She immediately opened her umbrella to dry in a corner of the room, sat down calmly in the armchair between the two giant plants, took off her glasses, and began to examine the pictures one by one, at the same time gladly accepting the secretary’s offer of a cup of tea and overcoming Lazar’s objections that they were in a hurry to get home with a smiling protest: “Just a minute, let me me relax for a minute, I’m freezing to death.” The secretary, who seemed happy to wait on her, now turned politely to me to ask me if I would join them, and although I was already standing poised on one foot, ready and perhaps also eager to leave, I couldn’t refuse, and suddenly I felt the full power of the hypnotic mystery riveting me to this woman, clumsy in her winter clothes, her freckled face flushed, her bun coming unraveled again, crossing her legs, which the black boots made even longer, and studying with open enjoyment and occasional soft laughter the pictures of herself and her husband on the trip, which according to him they had already almost forgotten.

The quick-thinking secretary, who judging by her bare fingers and the time she had on her hands was presumably single, brought in a tray with three cups of tea and slices of a cream cake left over from some private party in the administrative wing. Lazar’s wife thanked her in her usual enthusiastic and exaggerated style. “You’ve saved my life, I’m completely parched. All afternoon I’ve been running around with my mother making arrangements for an old-age home.”

“Your mother’s going into an old-age home?” the secretary asked in surprise. “Why? I met her in a café a month ago and she looked wonderful.”

“Yes,” said Dori complacently, as if she were personally responsible for her mother’s appearance, “she’s just fine, she manages by herself, but when we were in India she heard that a place had become available in an old-age home she had put her name down for a few years ago. We’d almost forgotten about it, because nobody seems to die there, and even though she’s independent and she could go on living alone in her apartment, she’s afraid to lose her place there. What can I do? We have to respect their wishes.” She turned her face to me, as if surprised by my silent presence, and in the almost intimate tone which had come into being among the three of us in the last days of the trip, she repeated the question I had not yet answered: “Well, what have you been up to?” When she saw that I was groping for an answer, as if I weren’t sure what she had in mind, she went on to ask companionably, “Have you recovered from our trip yet?” Although I was gratified by her use of the word “our,” I was still unable to come up with a graceful reply, and I stammered awkwardly, “In what sense?”

“In what sense?” she repeated, perplexed by my pedantic question. “I don’t know … You looked a little sad and depressed at the end.”

“Depressed?” I whispered, completely taken aback, and somewhat hurt by the fact that my secret love had transmitted not warmth but depression. But I was nevertheless pleased that she took an interest in my moods. “Sad?” I smiled at her with faint irony. “Why sad?” Her eyes immediately looked around for her husband, to have her feelings confirmed. But he had lost patience with this idle chatter, and after clearing the papers and files off his desk and snapping his briefcase shut, he stood up and ostentatiously switched off his desk lamp and sent a look of open hostility in the direction of his wife, who was still eating her slice of cake. “We thought you were sad,” continued Dori, “because of losing your place in Hishin’s department.” Lazar, who was already putting on his short khaki raincoat and briskly pulling a funny fur hat onto his head, interrupted confidently, “Don’t worry, we’ve found him a temporary job in Levine’s department.”

“The internal medicine department?” said his wife enthusiastically, and turned to me: “Well, are you pleased?”

“Yes,” Lazar answered for me, “why shouldn’t he be pleased? You heard for yourself what Hishin said about him all the time: he’s a born internist, and he’ll be able to do a good job there.” And when he saw that his wife was still slowly sipping her tea, he said impatiently, “Come on, Dori, you’ve had enough, we have to get home.”

But she went on sipping the last drops of tea in her cup, as if intent on stressing her independence and showing that she could be satisfied with herself and cope very well with the world around her, as long as she wasn’t left alone. Finally she stood up slowly, draped the long black cape negligently around her shoulders, took a blue scarf out of her pocket and then a sheet of paper, which she held out to the secretary, who appeared to hesitate between her natural loyalty to Lazar and her admiration for his wife. And Dori gave her a friendly smile and asked, “Do you think I could leave this medical report for my mother’s old-age home with you for Professor Levine to fill in? I’ll phone him this evening and explain.”

“It will have to wait,” Lazar intervened, with what sounded like a note of malicious satisfaction in his voice. “Levine isn’t here. He’s sick.”

“Levine’s sick again?” cried his wife, who judging by the faint alarm in her voice apparently knew the secret of his mysterious disease. “So what will we do? We have to return the questionnaire the day after tomorrow.”

“Nothing terrible will happen if your mother goes to the Health Service doctor for once,” said Lazar firmly. “She pays her dues every month and she never goes near the place.”

“Out of the question!” His wife dismissed this possibility angrily, turning to the secretary for support. “How can she go by herself to the Health Service? And who will she see there? She hasn’t seen a doctor there for years.” But Lazar seemed too tired after a hard day’s work to deal with this problem, and he grabbed his wife’s umbrella, collected the empty cups and put them on the tray, quickly cramming the remains of his wife’s cream cake into his mouth as he did so, and hurried toward the door, where I was waiting for an opportunity to take my leave. “Perhaps some other doctor in the internal medicine department could do it instead of Professor Levine,” suggested the secretary carefully. “I can’t ask anyone to do it,” snapped Lazar. “This isn’t my private hospital, and the doctors aren’t my servants. Levine is a friend of mine, and he looks after her mother out of friendship. Nothing terrible will happen,” he said, turning to his wife again, still in a faintly spiteful tone, “if your mother goes to the Health Service for once. It won’t kill her.” And he switched off the light in the room, even though the two women were still in it; and I, having already advanced into the illuminated secretaries’ office, looked back and saw the heavy shadow on the wall, trapped between the shadows of the foliage of the two big plants, and once again my heart was struck with bafflement at this inexplicable attraction, and still I hesitated, waiting for the right moment to say good-bye without making it final. They were leaving through the brightly lit office cubicles, stepping between computers and gray-covered typewriters, and I waited politely for her to pass me. To my surprise, I smelled the sharp, sweet scent of the perfume she had bought at the airport when we arrived at New Delhi, where she had asked our opinion of it. Now she was listening to the secretary telling her some long, complicated, personal story which Lazar had apparently already heard during the course of the day, and I went on trailing behind them — a young doctor whose position in the hospital may have deteriorated recently, but whose participation in the trip to India nevertheless gave him the status of a kind of distant member of the family, if not in the eyes of the devoted secretary — to whom it had not even occurred, for example, to propose me as a substitute for Dr. Levine, to spare that nice grandmother the misery of going to the Health Service the next day in the pouring rain and waiting for hours in line in order to coax a medical certificate out of some rigid bureaucrat of a doctor. But as we were standing in the corridor, about to say good-bye, my heart suddenly pounded with joy at the thought that I didn’t need any favors from the secretary: I could offer my services myself, and thus wind a flimsy thread — for I was well aware of the flimsiness of all these threads — around this impossible woman.

And so, just before parting from them in the dimly lit main corridor, I stopped and in simple, straightforward words offered them my help in filling out the medical report required by the old people’s home. I saw Dori’s eyes shine, although she said nothing, waiting for Lazar to respond first. He seemed to hesitate, unwilling to owe me yet another favor, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You really mean it? That’s a wonderful idea. And you’ll be free tomorrow, too.” But he immediately added a condition to the wonderful idea, that this time I would accept a proper fee for my services, not like the trip to India, which in the end I had given them as a present. At this his wife was very surprised. “How come we didn’t pay him?” She turned to her husband indignantly. “He refused to take it,” cried Lazar angrily. “Go on, you tell her yourself.”

“That’s not right,” she went on, working herself up to the kind of tantrum I knew she was capable of throwing. “That’s not right,” she repeated. “We can’t possibly let it all come off his vacation.”

“It hasn’t come off his vacation,” replied Lazar in embarrassment. “It’s been left as if he were at the hospital all those two weeks. For the time being. Until we decide what to do.”

“But that’s impossible,” she scolded her husband, “and it’s illegal too.” All of a sudden, amused and excited by their agitated exchange, I leaned toward her, and in the yellowish light of the corridor I looked straight through her glasses into her brown eyes, around which her automatic smile had etched many little lines. “Madame Solicitor,” I said in a new, humorous, familiar tone, which no doubt surprised them as well as me, “what’s illegal here? Friendship? Here”—I took hold of the slender hand of the secretary, who seemed delighted by the spirit of levity which had seized hold of me, and reproached the two Lazars—“she can bear witness before any committee of inquiry that not only didn’t I obtain any benefits from the director or his wife, but on the contrary, they haven’t renewed my residency in the surgical department, and they’re barely allowing me to be a temporary substitute in the internal medicine department.” I took a little prescription pad out of my pocket and jotted down my telephone number, in case they had lost it or even thrown it away, and took Dori’s mother’s address and phone number from them, and we arranged that the next day, early in the morning, we would set a time for my visit. “I’ll try to be there with you,” she promised. “Highly desirable,” I said promptly. And they thanked me warmly once more, their arms already groping for each other next to the revolving door, from which they emerged together, wrapped up like a pair of clumsy bears, into the thick, heavy rain flooding the illuminated plaza.

A new thread had unexpectedly been tied, I thought with satisfaction, to reinforce the Indian connection, which had weakened and would soon have snapped. And now that the scalpel had been forcibly removed from my hand and I had been transformed into an internist against my will, I could become their family doctor and treat their sore throats, blood pressure, hot flashes, mysterious stomachaches, perhaps even give them advice on questions of weight, and at the same time feed the fever of this strange, impossible love in my fantasies until it died down of its own accord, as I was sure it would. But as soon as she disappeared from view, short and awkward, trying to hold her umbrella over her husband as he hurried to their car, I felt the strange yearning again. Was what I felt for her, in the last analysis, simple lust? Yes, I felt lust, but it wasn’t simple and direct, for I had no desire to undress her in my fantasies, and no need to either, because for a long time I had had an intimate, vague, but nevertheless satisfying sense of her body, which had been acquired not only in the enforced closeness of the trip itself but even before that, in the big bedroom of their apartment in Tel Aviv, when she insisted on my inoculating her, and I took in at a glance her large but shapely breasts, scattered with unusually large moles; and it was these brown moles, rather than the breasts themselves, that I would repeatedly conjure up before me when I was seized with the desire to be engulfed by her innermost being.

I turned back in the direction of the surgical ward to say my final farewells to whoever happened to be there, to collect my few belongings, and to throw my coat into the laundry bag, even though it had my name embroidered on its pocket. And again I began to wonder what I was going to do about my growing attraction to this woman, which was beginning to make me look ridiculous even in my own eyes. Did I really want to conquer her in my fantasies? Perhaps all I wanted from her was the right inspiration, to guide me in identifying the young woman I wanted to fall in love with, the one my parents were dying for me to marry. Perhaps all I really wanted was a certain closeness, which would give me a more accurate idea of the young woman she had once been; to sketch by means of the big beauty spots scattered over her arms and shoulders, as if they were signposts, the figure that had once been slimmer and younger, borne on long legs in its kittenish walk. Then I would have a more accurate picture of the type of woman I wanted to spend my life with. My parents thought that my dedication to my work and my devotion to my patients robbed me of my erotic powers. But this was not the case. Even after twenty-four hours of a grueling shift at the hospital, when I came home exhausted, I could ejaculate quantities of semen in the hot shower which I frequently took half asleep. The problem wasn’t my erotic powers but my inability to recognize the girls I should have fallen in love with. Because when I came across old girlfriends with whom I had had pleasant but noncommittal relations in the past, and in the meantime they had married or moved somewhere else — and I discovered that since we had last met they had grown not only more beautiful but more intelligent and mature — the pang of loss was especially painful, since I knew that I hadn’t missed my chance through arrogance or emotional sterility but through a kind of lethargy, not physical but spiritual, whose source was apparently my increasing ability not only to satisfy myself in solitude but also to enjoy it. And here I had encountered a woman who was my absolute opposite; whose inability to stay at home by herself, without her husband by her side, was not only ridiculous and annoying but wildly attractive.

The next morning I woke up at dawn, even though I was completely at liberty to sleep late, in a way I had not experienced since graduating from high school. Not only didn’t I have to go to work, I didn’t have any work to go to, at least not until Professor Levine recovered and conducted his medical clarification with me. And so I forced myself to rest, and decided not to shave, and not even to take off my pajamas, and to stay in bed until she phoned. At first I didn’t care if the phone call didn’t come for a while, because that would prolong the pleasure of waiting, and also because I had immersed myself again in A Brief History of Time; although I had nearly given up on it in the last days in India, where the atmosphere was not at all suited to scientific books of this nature, I had decided that I had to pit myself against a few of its utterly obscure chapters again. After all, it was a popular book, or so it said on the cover at least, and even though the study of medicine is only on the fringes of pure science, it was inconceivable that a science graduate from the Hebrew University High School should be incapable of understanding the mysteries of the big bang and the black holes of the expanding universe. I thus snuggled down under my blanket and abandoned myself to the pleasures of cosmic freedom, which were particularly enjoyable in view of the heavy rain steadily pouring down on the world outside, and hardly noticed that the phone call was taking longer and longer to come. It was nearly three o’clock before I concluded that she had decided to dispense with my services and that the flimsy line I had cast over her had been snapped even before I had given it a single tug. Nevertheless, I refrained from leaving the apartment, even to buy a carton of milk and fresh cream cheese. Nor did I go down to the ground floor to pay the landlady the money I owed her for cleaning the stairs. Instead I turned up the heat in the room and took off my pajama top.

As dusk descended, I began to have various interesting thoughts of my own about the fate of the universe, whose future — when it would contract again into a particle with zero radius and infinite density, at the opposite pole to the big bang — concerned Hawking, although he seemed unable to construct a clear and convincing theory about it. Still the telephone did not ring, but I refused to call her and demean myself in front of them, as if I needed this connection more than they did. I switched on the hot water heater in the bathroom, but I hesitated to take a shower in case the phone rang and I failed to hear it. And when I saw that the day was drawing to a close and it would soon be night, I decided to forgo my daily shave. It had been a day of complete physical rest and clear spiritual pleasure, and now, as I sat down to eat the supper I had prepared, I felt that I had finally succeeded in overcoming the matter of Hawking’s black holes, both logically and emotionally, and I contemplated his elderly child’s face as it looked out from the cover of his book, full of trust in the ability of the intelligent layman to understand him. Only as night fell, after the nine o’clock news on television, when sadness crept into my soul, did I decide to phone the old granny directly and introduce myself.

Not only did she immediately recognize my name, but it turned out that she too had been waiting all day, dressed and ready in her apartment, because Lazar’s wife had incorrectly assumed that I had taken her address and phone number in order to get in touch with the old woman directly and arrange a time that suited everybody for the visit. And even though they had spoken to each other during the course of the day, Lazar’s wife had prevented her from calling me, on the grounds that I was a very reliable person, and if I didn’t call it must be because I was unable to make it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I repeated several times to the old lady, who firmly rejected any manifestation of guilt on my part and was only angry with her daughter for misleading us both. “Never mind that, when can we meet?” I interrupted her apologies enthusiastically, as if we were talking about a romantic date rather than a doctor’s visit. “Whenever you like.” The old lady laughed happily. “I haven’t got any other rendezvous.”

“Tomorrow morning?” I suggested immediately. “Yes, tomorrow morning’s fine, or tomorrow afternoon, whenever it suits you — even this evening, if you like.”

“This evening?” I repeated in surprise. “But it’s already night.”

“Not yet,” the old lady protested. “The news has just finished, and there are still plenty of programs to see.” I hesitated for a moment, and then agreed. “Just give me time to get organized,” I requested. “It’s twenty to ten now. I’ll be at your place by half past ten.”

“You’ll find me here even if you come later,” she reassured me jokingly, “and in the meantime I’ll phone Dorit. Maybe she’ll want to come too.”

“Yes, I think that would be a very good idea,” I said, and went quickly to take a shower.

In spite of my haste, I arrived later than ten-thirty; while I had spent the day in bed reading about the expanding universe, a number of the central arteries of Tel Aviv had turned into real lakes, in whose murky yellow waters I had no desire to dip my motorcycle or wet the instrument bag my parents had given me in honor of my graduation from medical school. Accordingly, I chained the Honda to the post of a taxi rank and took a cab to Grizim Street, one of the little streets in the north of the city which despite their proximity to busy main roads are themselves quiet, with pretty, comfortable houses. Lazar’s wife had not yet arrived. “But she’s coming,” promised her mother, who was quite elderly but, unlike Dori, very slim. She was wearing a tailored gray wool suit, and warm slippers on her feet. The centrally heated house was scrupulously neat, although the furniture was old. On a low table next to the couch, a tea service and dishes of candies and nuts were waiting, perhaps since morning. “We won’t wait for her,” I announced, and I requested the medical questionnaire required by the old-age home, which was packed with questions and demands. I sat myself down at the table and began asking her about herself and her childhood diseases, in order to fill in the first, more trivial items. Then I hurried to remove my sphygmomanometer from my bag, but before I could wrap the cuff around her frail arm the old lady admitted, or perhaps simply recalled, that she sometimes had peaks of high blood pressure, reaching levels of over 200—the systolic — and 110—the diastolic. “We’ll soon see,” I said, and measured her blood pressure a number of times, one after the other. It changed every time I measured it, but the average was a little high. “Are you excited now?” I asked gently. She blushed, thought for a minute, said, “Perhaps,” and smiled with a faint echo of her daughter’s enigmatic smile. I asked her to show me the pills prescribed by Professor Levine, which she didn’t like taking regularly because they made her sleepy and depressed. Indeed, they included a powerful sedative used in the emergency room. “Maybe I’ll give you something gentler instead,” I suggested, “but in the meantime you must take it regularly. Even a half or a quarter of a tablet a day is sufficient — the main thing is the regularity.” I stood up and went to the kitchen and fetched a big knife to show her how easily the tablet could be divided into four. As I was returning to the living room a key turned in the front door, which opened to admit Lazar’s wife wrapped in her cape, her hair wet from the rain, wearing the black velvet jumpsuit which I remembered from my second visit to their house. She was also wearing clunky white running shoes. She was pale and not made up, and when she saw the knife in my hand she raised her finger threateningly and said in a mock-serious tone, “I hope you’re not about to operate on my mother. I don’t want any more misunderstandings between us.”

I stayed there until after midnight. We spoke about aches and pains, illnesses and eating habits. I checked the old lady’s medicine chest and recommended a few changes, which I wrote down on the prescription pad my parents had once had printed for me, with their Jerusalem address under my name. Then I asked her to take off her white silk blouse so that I could auscultate her lungs and heart with my stethoscope. Dori helped me clear the cushions off the sofa and settle her mother comfortably on it so that I could examine the abdominal organs. Her skin was very withered, but washed with scented soap, and at a superficial glance her body looked more like her granddaughter’s body than her daughter’s. The map of her beauty spots was completely different. Dori stood next to me, looking at my hands palpating her mother’s stomach. Was she too remembering the dim chamber in the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? I wanted to ask her, but I restrained myself. Finally I completed my examination and sat down to fill in the questionnaire with scrupulous care. In general the grandmother’s health was fine, but it seemed to me that Professor Levine was keeping her on an excessively rigid medication regime. His approach was more appropriate to recent hospital cases than to ordinary patients who led normal lives. As a consequence she occasionally suffered from severe constipation. I suggested ways of obtaining relief and reduced her medication. My long day of rest had made me exceptionally lucid and eloquent, and when midnight approached and my job was done, I agreed to have tea with the two women, who did not seem in a hurry, even though Lazar had already phoned his wife twice. Was he too incapable of staying at home by himself?

The night into which I now emerged was not the same night in which I had arrived. In the new clarity flowing from the star-spangled sky, diamond drops slid separately down the the windshield of Dori’s car. Dori drove me to the post where I had chained my motorbike, teasing me about the lake of yellow water that I been afraid to cross, which had in the meantime drained completely. “What do you need a motorcycle for in the first place?” For some reason this question seemed to me too personal, and I felt unable to give her a satisfactory reply. I expressed my admiration for her mother and asked her what she intended to do with the apartment. Would she sell it? “No,” she replied, driving slowly but with no consideration for the other drivers on the road, “in the beginning we’ll only rent it, so my mother can always go back there if the experiment with the old-age home doesn’t work out.”

“Have you found somebody to rent it yet?” I asked softly. “No.” She shook her head wearily. “So far we haven’t even thought about it.”

“The reason I ask,” I kept on, “is because I’m looking for an apartment.” She gave me a quick glance which seemed to hold a mild suspicion of hidden motives. “How much are you paying now?” she asked. I told her. “That’s not much,” she stated, with justice — the rent I paid was definitely low. Now she fixed her eyes on me. I noticed an incipient double chin blurring her jaw-line. “We’ll want more than that for my mother’s apartment,” she warned me. “I don’t care,” I said calmly, with my eyes focused on the road, as if I were the one driving the car, “not only because it would be nice to think of you as my landlady, but also, who knows, I might get married soon, and then there’d be someone to help me pay the rent.” And then I saw the smile disappear completely, for the first time, from her eyes, which widened as her face turned a little red in the headlights of an approaching car. “You’re getting married?” she asked softly, as if marriage weren’t a possibility for me at all. “Not exactly, not yet,” I replied with a mysterious smile, full of love and sympathy for her. “I mean, there isn’t even a candidate yet, but I feel that she’s already marked, even if she isn’t yet aware of my existence.”

Eight

But in fact, how do marriages come about? Why should two separate creatures wish to tie themselves to each other with one chain, however slender and delicate? Is it the mystery — which in the dead of night smuggles a schoolgirl in a pale blue uniform with a badge pinned to her heart into the house, where she sits bowed over her books and workbooks at the kitchen table, waiting for an empty bed — is it the mystery which clouds their minds and ties them to each other, in order to turn itself into their subject, their willing slave, seeking to take responsibility for something that may prove too much for its powers?

Here they are, sailing serenely down the river while the hidden chain joining them underneath the water is slowly covered with rust, like a film. And even when they step onto the green land and begin combing methodically for invisible seeds and grubs, their free and natural gait still disguises the fixed distance between them, strictly maintained by the figure which has taken off its cracked metal-framed glasses and settled down with its eyes closed on a little mound of hay next to the river, exposing its weak chest to the warm spring sun.

Do they know how to fly too? And who will take care that in the air too they remain unseparated? The pair approaches us; a solemn creature thrusts a long, black, glistening neck toward us, and a one-eyed stare — whether it belongs to a male or a female, we will never know — pierces us. And before the answer we await is given to us, a beak as big and strong as a sword stabs the weak chest which the mystery has abandoned to the warm spring sun, and four great gray wings are opened and stretched as far as they will go, and with one mighty flap they fly high into the sky, to tear whatever held them together to tatters.

I raced back home, cleaving the clear night air with the roar of my motorcycle, which as always was infected by the excitement inside me; I had thrown this woman another thread, which if it indeed lassoed her would not easily be undone. If I were a tenant, the connection between us would no longer depend on occasional medical matters or chance encounters in the hospital, nor would it depend on the wishes or the presence of Lazar; it would be based on a clear legal contract, which she herself would probably draw up, and would include not only payments, promissory notes, and deposits, but also a regular correspondence, municipal taxes, broken boilers, leaking pipes, and perhaps even complaints by neighbors, if I decided to throw a party for my friends, for example. In short, a new and independent bond, which would override the memories of the trip to India and its weakening aftermath, and for the sake of a bond like this it would be worth paying a higher rent and doing night shifts at the MADA First Aid Station, as I’d done in my student days, to make ends meet. After all, I would have more time now, for the enthusiasm and devotion that had tied me to Hishin and his department would not be necessary in the internal medicine department, if indeed Professor Levine agreed to take me on after he recovered from his mysterious disease and we resolved whatever issues lingered between us over the blood transfusion.

But would she want to rent me the apartment after what I had said? If she was thinking about that sentence now, it must be causing her a lot of confusion, and I doubted if she would tell Lazar, who was probably waiting up in bed. It was hard to imagine that after she explained why she was so late and described the thorough medical examination I had given her mother, she would add with a mysterious smile, “Guess what, I already have a tenant for Mother’s apartment.” Even if there were no secrets between them, not even concerning something as obscure and ambiguous as my parting words, it was inconceivable that Lazar would have remained under the blanket, looking out from the sleepy slits of his eyes. No, he would sit up, rumpling the bedclothes still further, as I had seen him do on the first night in New Delhi when I had peeped into their room, and exclaim, “Really? He wants that apartment? How come? He really likes it?” imagining instead that all I really wanted was to keep up the connection with him, hoping he could influence Hishin to change his mind. Lazar probably thought that I considered him all-powerful in the hospital, whereas I knew that even if he could do something, he would never interfere in professional appointments, precisely to save his clout for more important things. Then she would undo her bun, loosen her tresses, take off her glasses and put them on the bedside table, and stick her head through the neck of the nightgown spotted with sprigs of pale yellow flowers. She’d sit down to rub cream into her long naked legs and massage her bare feet, utterly rejecting her husband’s interpretation in her heart, because she would have already felt that it was she I meant, only she, and in the midst of the astonishment flooding her, perhaps a little wave of pity for me would well up too, as if now she understood that something had upset my balance during the trip we took to India together. Therefore, she’d decide to keep her counsel and not to tell her husband anything about what had passed between us, but to let him go on lying under the blanket, the tired slits of his eyes turning into two little sparks, and she’d prick up her ears to listen to Einat, who was still dragging out the last of her hepatitis and who had now awakened and gone into the kitchen. Then she’d slip in next to her husband, tickle him a little, and say, “Wait, wait, don’t go to sleep yet, give me a hug, warm me up,” and she’d put two cold little feet onto his warm thighs.

But I was pleased with myself and with the first clear sign of the emotion that I had succeeded in conveying to this woman. Although I knew it was all hopeless and absurd — and even if it had a chance, it wouldn’t lead anywhere — I still refused to crush my love with my own hands but wanted this woman, who had appeared after long years of emotional desolation, of lovelessness, to crush it herself, with the same charm with which she crushed those long cigarettes of hers, which Lazar regarded with hostility and sometimes with outright protest. Therefore I said to myself, You have to rent that apartment, come what may. And since I found it difficult to go to sleep anyway after my day of deep rest, and the view from my window showed clearly that the storm was finally over, I could not resist putting on my leather coat and helmet and riding at a leisurely pace back to the street and the building where I already saw myself as a tenant. In the dark I inspected the neighborhood and the shops, and figured out whether I would be able to park the Honda under the building’s pillars. I was pleased by everything I saw, including the short distance from the apartment to the sea, which I covered in a few minutes as I drove right down to the beach, where I stood for a long time opposite the waves breaking enthusiastically on the shore, still faithful to the storm which had disappeared without a trace.

Now a period of uncertainty began. In the personnel department of the hospital I was registered as an employee on vacation, but in actual fact I was up in the air, waiting for Professor Levine to recover from an illness whose nature suddenly seemed suspect. The secretary of the department and also the nurses put me off with vague replies on the telephone, until I decided to go to the hospital myself and have lunch in the staff cafeteria in order to bump into someone from internal medicine who would be able to shed some light on the situation. At first I thought of dropping into the surgical ward and retrieving the coat with my name embroidered on it before it disappeared, as personal possessions had a way of disappearing in the hospital. But at the last minute I changed my mind, because I didn’t want to bump into Hishin or any of the other doctors, who would ask me questions about my unclear future. So I entered the cafeteria without my white coat, wearing my black leather jacket and holding my crash helmet in my hand. As soon as I walked in I saw Hishin sitting over the remains of his meal with other doctors and nurses from the department, smoking, arguing, and gesticulating. I tried to keep out of sight and took my tray to the opposite corner, where I looked for a familiar face from the internal medicine department. But I couldn’t see any internists I knew. I sat down at a little table that was still covered with what was left of someone else’s meal, and for the first time I found myself feeling faintly nauseated by the hospital smell rising from the food in front of me. The cafeteria, which I had always regarded as a pleasant refuge, now seemed to me, after the quiet days I had spent in my apartment, noisy and ugly. I left most of the food on my plate, and slowly ate the pink pudding which I had always enjoyed. Suddenly a hand came down on my shoulder, and even before turning my head I knew by the lightness of its touch that it belonged to Hishin. He was standing over me with his entire team, even the old anesthetist Dr. Nakash, all in the green uniforms of the operating room. They looked pleased with themselves, as if they had just successfully concluded a complicated operation. “What’s the matter with you? Are you boycotting us?” he asked gently, bending down and looking at me with pitying, sympathetic eyes. And before I could reply, he shook his head sadly and said, “Don’t be angry with everyone because of me. They’re not to blame.” Now I realized that it had been a mistake to ignore them and sit by myself. “And you are to blame?” I decided to adopt a tone of indignant protest and honest surprise. “You’re quite wrong. I’ve got no complaints. The trip to India turned out to be fantastic. Why should I be angry with you when I know that you’ve got my best interests at heart?” I looked straight into his eyes. He was taken aback by my words; in spite of the seriousness and sincerity of my tone, he was sure that they hid a subtle sarcasm he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He looked around at his team, trying to read my intention on their faces, but they all looked away, as embarrassed as he was. Then he apparently decided to take my words at face value, and placed his hand lightly on my shoulder again, nodded his head, and took off with the rest of them, except for the anesthetist, who wanted to talk to me. Dr. Nakash was a man of about sixty-five, thin and bony, whose white hair, clustered around his bald pate, becomingly contrasted the darkness of his complexion. In India I had seen quite a few people who reminded me of Nakash, which gave me a feeling of sympathic closeness with him. Hishin respected him and preferred to work with him, even though he was not the most senior of the anesthetists. “Nakash doesn’t always understand what’s going on in the operation,” Hishin would say behind his back, “but he’s always alert, even in ten-hour operations. And that’s the most important thing. Because the patient abandons himself not to the hands of his surgeon but to the hands of his anesthetist.”

Now Nakash asked me when I was starting work in internal medicine. I told him that I was waiting for Professor Levine to recover. “Isn’t he out of there yet?” said Nakash in surprise. “Out of where?” I asked, and Nakash revealed with complete naturalness the secret that up to now everyone had succeeded in keeping from me: “They clean his head out,” he said in his direct, simple way, “and he comes out fresh and new, until he gets depressed and commits himself again. What can he do? His patients depress him, and he can’t cut them open like Hishin does.” After that he asked me if I was interested in having work as his assistant in operations at a private hospital. Lately they had been very strict about the anesthetist having an assistant. The pay was strictly by the hour, without all the extras and under-the-counter payments, but the fee was high, tax-free, and unambiguous. “But I have no training as an anesthetist,” I said, surprised. Nakash insisted, though, that the art of anesthesiology was not beyond my understanding; the technical side was simple and could be quickly learned, and the main thing was not to abandon the patient, to think of his soul and not only of his breathing.

While the surgeon and his team concentrate on a small part of the patient, he explained, only the anesthetist is thinking all the time of the patient as a whole, not as a collection of parts. The anesthetist is the real internist, no matter how much the surgeon pokes around in the patient’s innermost organs. “And you,” Nakash added, concluding his little speech, which surprised me by its eloquence, “want to be an internist.”

“Want? Not exactly,” I said with a bitter smile. “I haven’t got a choice.”

“I thought you were being sincere when you admitted that Hishin made the right decision. Believe me, Benjy, I’ve been through a lot of surgeons in my time. Who knows them as I do? And I’m telling you, I’ve seen you at work, and it’s not for you. Your scalpel hesitates, because it thinks too much. Not because you’re inexperienced, but because you’re too responsible. And in surgery too much responsibility is fatal. You have to take a risk; to cut a person up and still tell him it’s good for him, you have to be partly a charlatan and partly a gambler. Look at Hishin — who, by the way, also performs private operations sometimes, so you’ll be able to stand next to him in the operating room again, if you miss it so much.” The offer was so tempting that I didn’t even ask for time to think it over, and said immediately yes. Nakash was not surprised. “I knew you’d like the idea, and anyway you’re at loose ends until Professor Levine gets out and finds time to cross-examine you about that blood transfusion you performed in India. He’s a difficult customer; he’s always trying to depress his colleagues in the department, and when he doesn’t succeed he gets depressed himself. So if I were you, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to fall into his hands.” I wrote down Nakash’s phone number at home, and he wrote down mine. “But it’s only temporary,” I warned him. “I’m moving into a new apartment soon.”

That evening I informed my landlady, according to the agreement between us, that I intended to leave at the end of the month. She was very sorry. I knew that I was a highly desirable tenant in her eyes; the fact that I was a doctor apparently filled her with confidence, even though she had never consulted me on personal problems up to now, but only on general medical questions. “May I know why you’re leaving?” she couldn’t resist asking. “I need a change,” I said, with an honesty I immediately regretted, for I saw a shadow of pain cross her sharp face. “But what change?” she insisted, inexplicably angry. “A change.” I stubbornly repeated the word, which I may have chosen by mistake but was now stuck with. “Just a change.” I lowered my head and went away without any further discussion. That same evening when I phoned my parents to tell them about Nakash’s offer, I couldn’t resist telling them about my plans to rent Lazar’s mother-in-law’s apartment as well. They were immediately worried. The idea of transforming the Lazars into my landlords struck them as a very bad one. “Why go and complicate your relations with Lazar now, after having won him over on the trip to India?” said my mother crossly. “But I’ll be reliable as a tenant too,” I argued, “and besides, it’s not exactly with him, but with his wife.”

“That makes it even worse,” my mother burst out vehemently, trying as hard as she could to dissuade me from the idea. “If you break something in the apartment, or if you demand money for repairs, she’ll complain about you, and that will count against you at the hospital too. And believe me,” she added with unexpected venom, “she knows how to look out for number one. Anyway, you should never mix business with friendship.” My father lectured me too. “I don’t understand,” he began in his quiet voice, which revealed signs of emotion. “Are you trying to get a quid pro quo for what you did for them in India?”

“Certainly not,” I retorted angrily. “I’ll pay more for that apartment than I’m paying now.”

“You’ll pay more?” said my father in astonishment. “How much?” When they heard that no rent had yet been agreed on, their disapproval increased. And then a kind of cry of protest burst out of me: “My dear mother and father, I’m twenty-nine years old — do me a favor and trust me to decide what’s best for me!” This outburst silenced them. It wasn’t really fair of me, because in fact they always trusted me, and their anger with me this time stemmed only from the fact that I had confused them by hiding my real motives. I immediately took pity on them. I didn’t know how to appease them without getting further embroiled in lies. “I need a change,” I said gently. “I saw the apartment by chance and I liked it. It’s close to the sea, it’s on a nice quiet street. I won’t make problems with Lazar or his wife. You know me.” They listened attentively, trying to accept my inexplicable decision because of their love and respect for me. “The fact that you want a change,” said my mother finally, “is all to the good, because you definitely need one. Just be careful it’s not more of a change than you bargained for.”

When a week went by without any sign from Lazar’s wife, I wondered anxiously if I had been in too much of a hurry to announce the change in my life. Had she forgotten me, or, on the contrary, had she decided to beware of me? I knew that her mother had already moved into the old folks’ home. I had called her there myself to ask if the new dosage had indeed given her the hoped-for relief. She was very excited by the telephone call and happy to talk to me. Her chronic constipation had indeed been relieved, perhaps not only because of the change in her medication but thanks to the peace and quiet of her new home, which she spoke of admiringly, inviting me to come and visit her there. “Do you know,” I said to her in the end, “that I’m going to rent your apartment?” To my astonishment, she knew nothing about it. Her daughter hadn’t said anything. So, I said to myself, it’s a good thing I talked to the old lady. Now I can expect a clear sign one way or the other. If Dori has changed her mind, or found some other tenant, then okay, that’s it, let her go ahead and crush my love. In the meantime my landlady had found a couple to rent my apartment, whom she agreed to let in without consulting me, to take preliminary measurements. One day she stopped me on the stairs and demanded coldly that I move out before the end of the month.

I was in an embarrassing predicament. Was I now going to be thrown out into the street because of a bizarre and abstract infatuation which had no point or purpose? Finally, I mustered my courage and called Dori to ask her where I stood and what I could hope for. The secretary put me through without asking me to identify myself. Dori picked up the receiver and held it in her hand while carrying on a lively conversation with someone for whom I suddenly felt a faint pang of jealousy. Her voice was loud and enthusiastic, full of confidence and authority. When I identified myself, I could tell she was confused. So, I said to myself, a spark or two has already escaped to her. “There’s been another misunderstanding,” I began jokingly, “and I’m going to be out in the street with my goods and chattels starting next week.” Then I sensed her relief. She no longer had to hesitate about letting me use the apartment as a means of ensnaring her. The situation in which I had landed myself, which I described in terms that were no more than accurate, forced her not only to accept me as a tenant but even to apologize for not getting in touch with me sooner. “The apartment’s not ready. There’re still a lot of things we don’t know what to do with.”

“Never mind,” I reassured her, “you can leave them there. I don’t need a lot of room.” After some waffling on her part, we arranged to meet in the apartment on Tuesday afternoon, when her office was shut, so that she could see what had to be removed and what could be left there, and of course to finalize the terms of the lease. When I put the receiver down, I wondered whether she would bring Lazar with her or come alone.

She was waiting alone for me in the apartment. Behind the door I heard soft classical music mingling with the pleasant sound of running water. I knocked, two light taps, because I didn’t want to press the bell, whose jarring noise I remembered from my first visit. She opened the door with a somber, serious expression on her face, wearing high heels and with a bright red apron cinched around her waist. Her hands were covered with soap. “You’ve complicated things for me,” she complained, her face flushing slightly. “Look at all the things I have to do here for you now.” Her direct, aggressive tone startled me; I was unprepared for it. Her eyes too, which had not yet flashed a single smile, looked hard behind the lenses of her glasses. “But what’s there to do?” I began stammering stupidly, trying to defend myself and perhaps also to dismiss her complaint as I stepped weakly into the apartment, in which I immediately felt a change even though I had only been there for a few hours the first time. The apartment was still neat and tidy, but the coziness and brightness that had prevailed on the evening I had examined her mother were gone. Perhaps it was the removal of the embroidered cloths from the little tables next to the sofa and the disappearance of the crystal and silver goblets which had stood behind the glass in the dark sideboard, or perhaps because the big family portraits had been removed from the walls. The curtains were open, and the view from the window consisted exclusively of rooftops, without a single scrap of sea between them. There was no visible sign of the apartment’s proximity to the beach, which had made me so happy on that evening. However, I quickly overcame my disappointment as I glanced around and saw how the rays of the setting sun were transmuted into a golden powder, which made the whole interior glow sweetly. On the white marble counter in the kitchen stood a row of delicate long-stemmed goblets crowned with soapsuds. The possibility that she was washing them for me, and not in order to store them, touched me profoundly. For a moment there was an embarrassing silence. My eyes avoided staring too obviously at her straight legs clad in honey-colored silk stockings. She still looked annoyed to me, perhaps somewhat humiliated by the dishwashing that had been forced upon her. “We thought we’d prepared everything,” she said, “but there’s still a lot left to organize here.”

“How long has your mother been living here?” I inquired in a friendly tone. “Not long. Seven years. Since my father died. But she loved this apartment. And she invested a lot in it. It’s a shame; she could have stayed here for a few years longer. I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that she won’t be living here anymore. That’s why I wasn’t in a hurry to get in touch with you. I hoped that she would change her mind and come back. But now you’ve forced me to hand it over.” The surprising admission that she had actually surrendered to my demands flooded me with such a strong and unexpected wave of pleasure that I had to bow my head and close my eyes, which she interpreted as a sign that she had offended me. “If your mother changes her mind and wants to come back, I’ll move out immediately,” I said gallantly, in an attempt to make myself into an even more desirable tenant. But she shook her head firmly. “There won’t be any need for that. Don’t worry. So far she’s very happy there.” And then I couldn’t resist saying, “I know,” and proceeded to tell her about the telephone conversation. She listened in silence. A pleasant smile hovered on her lips, but her eyes were fixed in a hard, suspicious expression, as if intent on assessing the precise degree of danger posed by my determination to invade her life.

Meanwhile the apartment was growing dark and the golden powder was losing its glow, fading into shadowy hieroglyphics on dull yellow parchment. She dropped onto the sofa at my side and crossed her legs. Her little double chin sagged. From a shabby cardboard file containing telephone, gas, and electricity bills, she took out a sheet of paper with a few words written on it, and said despairingly, “I have to make an inventory of the contents of the apartment for the contract between us. And I don’t have any idea where to begin. We’ve never rented an apartment to strangers before. Some people write down everything, including closets and sinks, but you’re not planning to remove the furniture and sell it, are you? Or dismantle the lavatory and the sink, right?” She spoke without humor, and I shook my head solemnly in reply. I was hypnotized by the rapidly darkening room. “So we’ll just list the really important things,” she suggested, “the carpet and the more valuable dishes, and one or two pictures. And we’ll write down the number on the electricity meter, and get the phone company to read the phone meter, and that will more or less cover everything. As for the clothing and stuff of my mother’s that she left here — are you sure you don’t mind? At least come and look at the space we’ve left for you and see if it’ll be enough.” She stood up, but to my surprise she didn’t switch on the light in the apartment, which was growing darker from minute to minute, not only because of the fading light outside but because of the darkness welling up inside the apartment itself. Between the kitchen and the bathroom, from an alcove where the brooms and mops were standing, a fresh, dense darkness was steadily flowing and gradually spreading into the two rooms. When I followed her into her mother’s bedroom I noticed that the glass goblets, from which the soapsuds had disappeared, were shining on the white marble with a ruby-colored radiance. The window above the sink was set in the wall at just the right angle to catch the rays of the setting sun. I wanted to draw her attention to this little discovery of mine, but she was already standing next to her mother’s double bed, which was covered with a red bedspread and piled with fat cushions with flowery covers, and opening the doors of two empty closets to show me the space already at my disposal. Then, with a gesture of resignation, she opened the two full closets too. In one of them I saw gray suits, all alike, hanging, and in the other I found myself standing, as in a familiar dream, in front of stacks of white shoe boxes, in which various objects had no doubt been stored. “There’s plenty of room,” I said in a whisper behind her broad back, in an attempt to reassure her. “Don’t worry, we’ll clear it all away. Just give us a little time to breathe,” she said in a hoarse voice, looking at me again with that suspicious, hostile look, which, far from discouraging me, turned me on so much that my penis began to swell. If only I could talk to her now about some shared memory from our trip to India, I thought quickly, I might be able to lighten the atmosphere a little. But the lust boiling inside me paralyzed me. Only now I realized that the darkness she insisted on preserving in the apartment was flattering to her. For I no longer saw the creases in her neck, nor the wrinkles around her eyes, and even her little paunch had disappeared, leaving only the impression of a mature, ripe woman. Maybe she wants to seduce me? I asked myself when I saw her turning back in the direction of the living room, where a new stream of light, pouring out of the tatters of a flimsy cloud, was now struggling against the darkness. “Now we have to talk about the rent.” She sighed and dropped heavily onto the sofa, crossing one long leg over the other while the silent battle between light and darkness raging in the room drew delicate pale golden arabesques on her stockings. The only thing I’m going to get out of falling in love with this woman, I thought anxiously to myself, is an exorbitant rent that comes from the lack of experience of a new landlady. “What figure did you have in mind?” she asked me unexpectedly. “Me?” I laughed. “I don’t have any figure in mind. But don’t worry, you’ve already warned me that the rent will be higher than what I’m paying now.”

“Yes.” She smiled to herself in satisfaction. “I already warned you. Even though I’ve already forgotten what it was.” I told her the sum. She remembered and looked slightly disappointed, sunk in thought, her face appearing and disappearing in the darkness flowing from the bedroom and coming to join the darkness in the living room. “If we add ten percent to your present rent — would that be fair?” She asked me in her clear voice, which always contained a natural assertiveness. “I still feel guilty that you didn’t get anything for the trip to India.”

“But I did,” I protested, bitterly but also with a feeling of inner satisfaction, since I had feared a far higher rent. “The trip itself, and meeting the two of you. And now this apartment. And you,” I added softly, “as my landlady.” She didn’t answer, only withdrew into the protection of the darkness that she had gone to so much trouble to surround us with, perhaps precisely because of an embarrassing moment like this. I didn’t know what to do with it either, except to let it sink into her soul like a little warning from me, like the warning she had given me about the rent, which she had raised by just ten percent. I didn’t dare add anything to clarify my feelings, I only knew that in the silence now filling the room, the tension stemming from the age difference between us was slowly, and for the first time, melting, and the fact that she was apparently only nine years younger than my mother and ten years younger than my father, and her daughter was only four years younger than me, had lost its power.

This too could be the meaning of A Brief History of Time, I reflected as she finally stood up and went to the kitchen to switch on the light, illuminating the living room only indirectly. Without looking at me and without smiling, she announced that tomorrow or the next day, she would prepare a standard lease in her office, and she wrote down my ID number in a little notebook and asked me to get my parents to sign a guarantee, and we agreed that I would call her tomorrow or the next day to set a date for signing the contract and handing over the key. In the meantime, she promised, her maid would come to clean the apartment for me. “Do you by any chance remember where the valve is that connects the apartment to the water main?” I asked when I was already standing at the door, and a faint tremor of anxiety ran through me at the thought that I was leaving her alone. She tried to remember, going to look for it first under the kitchen sink and then in the bathroom, but she couldn’t find the valve, which as in all old apartments was apparently hidden in some unexpected place. “I’ll ask my mother; perhaps she knows. And if not, Lazar will find it,” she said, and she flashed me one of her automatic smiles, impossible to read, and thus we parted without any response on my part, apart from uttering the word “wonderful,” which was all I had to attach this woman to me until our next meeting — at which, I vowed to myself as I slowly rode my motorcycle through the bustling, wintry Tel Aviv evening, I would definitely confess my feelings.

I knew that I should put the confession off until after the lease was signed; otherwise I might be left without an apartment. And even though my current landlady kept putting pressure on me to leave, I was in no hurry to contact my beloved. This time I wouldn’t make things easy for her, I told myself. If she wanted to nip everything that had begun between us in the bud, all she had to do was tell her secretary to summon me to the office in her absence, in order to sign the lease and take the key. If she didn’t want any further contact with me, if she saw my falling in love with her as something absurd and superfluous, all she had to do was keep away, or set Lazar on me, on the pretext that only he was capable of showing me the plumbing.

But after a few days she called me, and with a new friendliness and none of the hostility she had shown at our previous meeting, she asked me how I was and whether I was enjoying my enforced leisure; she knew, of course, that Professor Levine had not yet recovered from his depression. “If only we had known that you would have to sit here twiddling your thumbs”—a merry laugh came from the other end of the line—“we would have left you to wander around India. Because of us, you didn’t even get to see the Taj Mahal.”

“Right,” I responded immediately, overjoyed that the trip to India had cropped up at last, and turned into a common memory. “Because of your husband’s efficiency, the trip passed as quickly as a dream. And that’s a shame, because I know I’ll never go back there.”

“Don’t say that,” she protested quickly. “How do you know? You’re still so young.” I didn’t answer this, as I had no intention of being dragged into a discussion of my youth at this point, after having convinced myself that the age difference between us had dissolved of its own accord in the darkness of her mother’s apartment. She now asked me, in a voice that contained an unfamiliar anxiety, if I was in a hurry to move into the apartment or if I could wait until Tuesday, when lawyers’ offices were closed in the afternoon, since she wanted to sign the lease in the apartment so that she could show me not only the whereabouts of the water shut-off valve, but also how to use the stove and the microwave oven, and so that we could go over the inventory that her mother had prepared, and then we could sign the contract at our leisure like civilized human beings. After all, who more than she understood that business deals between friends were always open to misunderstandings and mistaken interpretations. “Will your mother be there too?” A doubt crept into my heart. “If you want her to come too, to explain how to use the household appliances better than I can, I’ll try to bring her,” she answered naturally and composedly. “No, no.” I hurriedly dismissed the idea, aware of the eagerness in my voice. “Why drag her all the way there? It will only upset her to see the apartment at sixes and sevens.”

Even though the suggestion to meet at the apartment for the signing came from her, I was sure that nothing was going to happen between us. She was a mature, realistic woman, basking in the love and admiration of her husband, and apparently of others too. Even if she enjoyed the attentions of a young man, it would never occur to her to think that he had actually fallen in love with her, for a woman who had been dining on a rich feast of love all her life would have forgotten what the obsessive hunger of being in love felt like. Moreover, despite the encouraging smiles she flashed at her reflection in the mirror, she was well aware of the folds of flesh around her waist. Nor did she fail to see the deep creases in her neck, and the blotches on her skin when her makeup faded. And even if she still felt complacent about her straight, slender legs, she wouldn’t be able to understand why a young and not bad-looking man like myself, a man at his peak, would suddenly fall in love with her. It would never occur to her that it was precisely her hidden weakness, which her husband had innocently revealed to me, had incited my interest and lust. Nevertheless, I prepared myself for the meeting with a feeling that it would be fateful for me. I decided to wear the checked shirt that I had been wearing when I performed the blood transfusion in Varanasi, even though it was nothing special and faded from many washings, for I hoped that it would give rise, even if only in her subconscious, to the memory of that mysterious hour when I had directed the flow of blood between the two women, and produce some sympathy for me after I delivered my confession, which I knew could only be humiliating and idiotic.

I was determined to unburden myself, and I only hoped that, as before, the apartment would remain shrouded in that golden, dusky darkness which softens, in the natural melancholy of the dying day, everything that is ridiculous and grotesque from the human point of view. But toward afternoon the sky darkened and a hard rain began flooding the town. And I knew that the twilight would be enjoyed only by those flying westward above the clouds, while I would be obliged to stammer my confession in the full glare of the electric lights. Nevertheless, I remained resolute, even though when I knocked on the door I prayed for a moment that Lazar would be there to protect her, and perhaps to protect me too from my imminent humiliation. But there was silence behind the door. She had not yet arrived. After a few minutes I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Was I too beginning to identify her footsteps from a distance, like her husband? She was late, but alone, confident in her ability to deal with me by herself. Her face was covered with a heavy layer of makeup, but the clothes she was wearing were not in the least attractive. On the contrary, they made her look short and clumsy. She had long black boots on her legs, and her body was covered by the black velvet jumpsuit whose sleeves she hadn’t been able to roll up when I gave her the vaccination shots. She was brisk and businesslike, and no longer hostile, as on the previous occasion. “It’s a good thing you came early.” She smiled and opened the door. And I knew there was no longer any need to appease her for my precipitousness. Instead, it seemed that she was already very satisfied with the quiet and undemanding tenant who had forced himself on her. “Isn’t Lazar coming?” I asked. “No, he’s busy today,” she replied, and moved an empty suitcase standing in her way in the passage leading to the bedroom. “But he was here yesterday and insisted on emptying out another closet for you, to give you more room. Come and see how how hard he worked for you,” and with a flourish she flung the closet door open to show me how ingeniously Lazar had succeeded in making all the shoe boxes disappear. But he had not been allowed to touch the gray suits, which were still hanging in the other closet. “You shouldn’t have made such an effort,” I said amicably. “The space was quite enough for me.”

“Now,” said Lazar’s wife firmly, “but how do you know what will happen in the future?” Her eyes twinkled in a smile, perhaps alluding to the marriage I had promised, and she led me into the kitchen to show me a few old electric appliances, which had been dug out of the depths of the kitchen cupboards and were now displayed on the marble counter, decked out in brightly colored covers. But when she tried to tell me how they worked, according to the explanations dictated by her mother, I saw that she was totally at sea. When she began pressing the different buttons, I realized her charming, pampered helplessness, which touched me so profoundly that I could no longer control myself and laid my hand on her little, freckled one to stop her. “It’ll be all right,” I reassured her. “I’ll work it out myself. And if I have any problems, I can always get in touch with your mother directly.” Then we entered the living room, to go over the detailed list her mother had insisted on drawing up in her large but almost illegible handwriting, and to try to work out how much the written words matched the actual furnishings of the apartment. After that I read through the lease, which was full of dire warnings and threats to the tenant. But maybe, I reassured myself, this was the standard form in use in Dori’s office. Everything was ready except for my parents’ signature on the guarantee, which she agreed to wait for until the following week. I signed the two copies of the contract, and as she requested I wrote twelve postdated checks for all the months of the coming year, so that we would not have to bother each other with additional meetings. She put the checks into her bag without inspecting them and took out two keys, which she placed on the table. Now she was relaxed and at peace with herself, and she lit a slender cigarette, gave me a soft look, and asked, “Have we forgotten anything, or is that all?”

There could have been no better opening than this for my declaration of love, which had been turning around inside me for several days. And without hesitating or stammering, dropping my head slightly so as to avoid meeting her eyes, I began unburdening myself confidently and fluently to this woman who was only a little younger than my mother. “I know that what I am about to say will seem absurd to you, because it seems absurd and strange to me too, but it’s still true. If you’ve sensed it already, you may as well hear it straight and tell me what to do with it, because ever since we returned from India I’ve been tiptoeing around you and trying to tie you to me with flimsy threads that keep on breaking. And even though you haven’t done anything to encourage me, you haven’t rejected my attempts to bind you to me either, like this apartment, which I only rented so as to have something to attach you to me, so I wouldn’t lose you altogether.” I still hadn’t raised my head to look at her, because I was afraid that the faint smile in her eyes would throw me off my speech, whose tone seemed just right to me, manly but also touching. “I have to tell you, I don’t know what’s happened to me.” I went on with my head bowed. “That last night in the hotel in Rome, after Lazar left, I fell head over heels in love with you, against all logic, and to my complete surprise, because I’ve never fallen in love with a woman older than me before. Please don’t protest the use of these words, let me tell you that I protest them too, and try to dismiss them all the time, but even if we dismiss the words, the condition won’t go away, and it fills my thoughts all day long. And I wonder if I have to fight it and eradicate it from my heart. In other words, is this an immoral love, like that of a grown man who falls in love with a little girl?” For a moment I fell silent, unable to go on talking in my excitement at having succeeded in unburdening myself of the words which had been weighing on my heart for so many days. But I couldn’t go on hanging my head and staring at the carpet, which I noticed was a little ragged at the edges — a fact that maybe should have been mentioned in the inventory — and so I raised eyes full of despair to the woman curled up in the corner of the sofa like a soft black velvet ball, whose automatic smile had completely disappeared from her eyes, and who in a gesture I had never seen before had her fist pressed to her mouth, not in amazement or ridicule but in profound attention, which encouraged me to go on talking. “I ask myself if you and Lazar wanted me to accompany you to India not just because I am a doctor but because in the depth of your hearts you hoped that I might fall in love with Einat, as in the plot of some well-intentioned British movie. But reality is a different, incredible movie, and instead of falling in love with the sick young woman you offered me, I fell in love with her mother, and I really wasn’t looking for another mother, because the one I’ve already got is perfectly good. Dori, please don’t try to explain my screwed-up psychology to me. It may be screwed up, but not here. Here there’s something else entirely, which I call, if you don’t mind, mystery. Yes, mystery, a word I’ve always fought against and that I now find myself enslaved to. And you know what? My heart told me what I was letting myself in for, because the minute I heard that you were coming with us to India, I felt so pressured that I almost decided to change my mind about going.”

Maybe this was the right moment to get up and leave her, in goodwill, in friendship, putting my hands together Indian fashion in the middle of my face. I expected nothing of her. But the contract had been signed, the keys had been handed over, and in the apartment where we were sitting, I was the host and she was the guest — and you can’t get up and leave a guest to her own devices. So I sat petrified in my place, listening to the rain dripping slowly outside and the strong wind trying unsuccessfully to blow it away. She still hadn’t said anything. Was she stunned, or had she been prepared for my confession? Perhaps she was surprised in spite of being prepared, for she went on sitting curled up in the corner of the couch, her fist still pressed against her mouth as if to protect herself from some galloping, inexorable catastrophe. Her plump face was tense and burning, but behind the lenses of her glasses her eyes were full of serenity, if not profound satisfaction. In the end a radiant smile broke through the barriers of her resistance. She took her fist from her mouth and loosened her fingers into a light wave, as if beckoning an obedient pupil or a beloved pet, and whispered, “Come here.” I rose immediately to my feet and approached the corner of the couch, but I didn’t wait to hear what she wanted, because I knew what I wanted, and I bent down, took her by the shoulders, and raised her to me. Just don’t hesitate now, I said to myself. And without asking permission, with the same movement by which I had lifted her to her feet, I began passing my lips over her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, and stroking her soft, creased neck. She began breathing heavily, struggling and trying to push me away, to say something. But I didn’t let her talk; I pressed my lips hard against hers, smelling the faint aroma of the cigarette she had recently smoked, and gave her a long, eager kiss, until I felt her hand pulling my hair. “This isn’t right,” she murmured, trying to push me gently away. “It doesn’t make sense, it’s just silly.” But I only tightened my embrace, because I knew that if physical contact was broken off now, the magic would be dispelled. Nothing had actually happened yet. I had to gather my courage to touch the body itself, to take hold of a few memories for the empty days ahead. I was desperate to hold her round breasts, which I knew were more substantial than any I had ever touched before. With desperate, childish determination I tried to pull off her velvet top, excited by the thought of glimpsing again the map of beauty spots scattered over her pure white shoulders and arms. But my hand, carried away by its own momentum, drove on, seeking a first contact with that beautiful, plump stomach. And when I touched it, I was flooded by a strong sensation of pleasure and satisfaction. Between my fingers I felt the glow of a cushion of natural warmth, which I had been seeking for years in order to lay my forehead or cheek upon it and melt the iceberg accumulating within me.

Then, though she had been the one to call me to her, I felt that it was up to me to give her the absolute advantage of the beloved over the lover. I let go of her and with lightning-swift movement took off my shoes and socks, rapidly removed the rest of my clothes, and, indifferent to the cold and before she had time to protest, I stood before her as naked as the day I was born, like a man about to step into a long-sought-after river. I wanted her to see me as I was, and to see that I had no shame before her, so that she could decide whether my love and desire were worthy of her. And despite the astonishment that seized her at the sight of my unfamiliar body, or at my suddenly offering myself to her, I saw her fears dissipate as they were absorbed into her rising desire. But she held up her hand in a quick, nervous gesture. “Not here, not here,” she said emphatically, and walked slowly to her mother’s bedroom. There she absentmindedly swept my black crash helmet off the bed, where it had for some reason been forgotten when we were examining the closets. Then, sunk in reflection, she cast a backward glance at me as I walked naked behind her, and as if afraid that I might try to undress her myself, she raised her hand in a plea which still contained some hidden anger, and said, “No, please, let me.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly and with difficulty removed her long boots, after which she hesitantly and awkwardly undid a few hidden buttons on her unyielding jumpsuit, and began working her head through the narrow opening, emerging flushed, with her hair disheveled, still full of deep shame at the situation imposed on her by my sudden nakedness. With a strange obedience, like a good, loyal wife, she took off her bra, removed her panties, and lay down on the bed, resting her head on a cushion that was still covered with the grandmother’s floral cushion cover. Now she was displayed before me like the heavy naked women in art books, posed before baskets of fruit in their dark, shadowy reproductions. But the look she sent me was neither submissive nor indifferent. Still perturbed and even angry, as if I were some inexperienced young animal, she raised her hand again to warn me: “No scratches or bites.” I bowed my head compliantly, and full of love, I knelt down next to the bed and began to kiss her plump little foot, in which I discovered a dimple like the one on her face. I immediately sensed that these opening kisses were very pleasing to her, but I was afraid that in my eagerness I might come too quickly, and I stopped myself and stood up to remove the glasses from her eyes, and lowered myself carefully onto her, suddenly aware of a coolness in every limb I touched except for that plump, pampered stomach, which radiated a steady, powerful warmth, as if it possessed an independent source of heat. I kissed her again on her mouth, and on her big breasts, and I laid my forehead and cheek on the roundness of her belly. I still had no idea why she had given in to me so easily, but I suddenly felt that she was losing patience with my love games and was not prepared to let me dawdle any longer, for a confident hand was already grasping my penis, to guide it to the place that was no less on fire than I was.

She was the fourth woman I had been to bed with, but she was the only one who gave me the feeling that I was guiding a great sailing ship into a deep-water harbor. In contrast to the others, who alarmed me with sudden cries and deep sighs, throughout our lovemaking she did not utter a single sound; even her breathing remained quiet and gentle, as if the surprise at her acquiescence blocked any wish for a more intense pleasure. It turned out that this was the first time she had ever cheated on Lazar. This was a fact she felt she had to confide in me the moment she freed herself from my arms and stood up hastily to put on her clothes. I believed her, and in the pride that filled my heart there was also some sadness for what had happened to her. In order to prove to her that she could always trust me, I didn’t go to look for my clothes, which were lying on the floor in the other room, but remained naked, sitting on the bed with my legs crossed. “You’re like that crazy German pilot who went up in a light plane, penetrated all the radar screens, and landed in Red Square in Moscow,” she said suddenly, with a slightly resentful smile, gathering her hair into a bun on top of her head. “I don’t understand how you succeeded in penetrating the inner sanctum of my respectable married life.” Did she really expect an answer from me? I thought as I drew in my head between my shoulders and held my tongue, afraid to say something that she might interpret as contemptuous of her and Lazar’s marriage, the beauty of which I had observed at close quarters during our trip and whose secret I had wished to crack by touching her body. She pulled her boots onto her long, slender legs, and when the telephone suddenly rang she said in a matter-of-fact voice, without a trace of anxiety, “That must be Lazar,” and she hurried into the next room. She didn’t shut the door behind her, although she spoke in a very low voice. But I had no desire to overhear their conversation as I sat on a corner of the bed alone and naked, like a fakir leaning against a temple wall, and contemplated the darkness spreading through the bedroom of the old lady who might be sitting and drinking tea in her old-age home at this minute, with no idea of what had just happened on her bed. Then she came back, stepping briskly, with her coat on and her face made up. “It wasn’t Lazar,” she said with a serious expression. “It was a friend of my mother’s. You’ll have to be prepared to take calls from her friends, and give them her number at the home. Which I don’t have to give you, since you already know it.”

“But what’s going to happen to us?” I asked in a tone of despair, suddenly feeling that there was no heavy gold chain here but only the thinnest of threads, which was liable to snap at any moment. “Nothing will happen to us,” she answered seriously. “Forget it. It was an episode. You know that it’s total madness for me. There’s no future in it. You can afford it, you’re still free — I can’t. You’re a bachelor, and a bachelor is much more dangerous than a married man.” I kept quiet, because I sensed that whatever she said now had no power, for if I had begun it — only I could end it. But my heart contracted in pain for her, and I couldn’t help reaching out to her. She hesitated, thinking that my lust had overcome me again, and then she gave in and took my hand. “Are you surprised I fell in love with you?” I asked her. She thought for a moment, her head slightly bent at a charming angle, and then said, “Yes. It’s strange and it’s superfluous. Even though I’ve heard of similar things happening to people I know. But you’re so young, really — what do you need a woman like me for? Tell me, aren’t you cold sitting there like that?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to get dressed yet and lose the smell of your body.” She blushed, but the smile didn’t leave her eyes, and she came closer and lightly kissed my eyes and stroked my hair. “If the phone rings now, you don’t have to answer. But if you pick it up by mistake and it’s Lazar, tell him I left a long time ago, and be very careful not to give me away, or we’ll both be in trouble.”

As soon as she left I began to miss her. I unwillingly left the empty bed, and in the darkness that had descended on the apartment I went to gather my clothes, still lying in a heap on the carpet, and discovered to my delight, between the roofs and the ugly TV antennas, a modest blue strip of the nearby sea, which I had already given up hope of seeing from here. The fragrance of her perfume lingered on my hands, and I raised them to my face to smell them. The telephone rang, and I knew at once that it was Lazar, looking for his wife. I said to myself, So what, what do I have to fear? I picked up the receiver, and his voice sounded as close and concrete as if he were standing on the other side of the wall. “She’s already left,” I said quickly, before he even asked about her. “So you finished everything you had to do?” he asked. “I think so.” I hesitated, not wanting him to think that from now on they could forget about me completely. “And did she show you that valve you were looking for, or did she forget about it in the end?”

“She forgot about it, of course,” I said with a faint sigh, laughing with him at her absentmindedness. He immediately explained to me where to find the valve, which really was hidden in an illogical place. Suddenly I was seized with anxiety. With my free hand I began hurriedly putting on my clothes, as if he could see my nakedness through the telephone. Behind the wall, in the next apartment, there was a sound of footsteps, and a shiver ran through me, as if his ghost were haunting me while his voice kept me talking. Fear and remorse welled up in me for what I had done to him, and I wanted to put the phone down. But Lazar was friendly, and with his natural sensitivity he sensed my embarrassment and wanted to calm me. “Tell me the truth,” he dared to ask, “are you angry with me?”

“Angry?” I choked on the word. “Why on earth should I be angry with you?”

“How should I know? Maybe you think I could have persuaded Hishin to keep you on in the surgical department. But believe me, I can’t interfere in such matters, and I haven’t got any pull where appointments are concerned.”

“I know, I know.” I hurried to reassure him. “And I’ve never been angry with you. Just the opposite.” But Lazar was not yet satisfied. “Anyway, tomorrow you’ll meet Professor Levine, and he may agree to give you the temporary residency in his department.”

“Tomorrow I’m meeting Levine?” I said in astonishment. “Has he recovered at last?” Now it was Lazar’s turn to be surprised. “But how come Dori didn’t tell you? I told her to tell you that you’ve got an appointment to see him tomorrow morning. She forgot that too? What’s the matter with her today?”

Nine

And after they have torn to shreds and smashed to smithereens everything that bound them together, the couple makes haste to part from one another, and with the wild leap of an arrow shot from a mighty bow each of them soars into the depths of the radiant void, to retrieve the freedom stolen from them and to prove that they have always been worthy of it. And it has never been so precious as now, with cool breezes swirling around and caressing their wings, guiding the erstwhile pair gently to the place where each of them wishes to be all by itself, and to gain this end they are prepared to forgo the age-old route marked out by the flames of flying dinosaurs, to reject the safety and warmth of migrating flocks crossing oceans with the help of tried and true ancient codes, and to allow chance winds to carry them to a place where they will never meet the mate from whom they have at last succeeded in separating themselves.

From time to time the bird lands to recover its strength, by the side of a river or in a yellow field, dipping its beak into the fresh water, and with tiny steps it circles in an imaginary ring around the mate who was and is no more, delighting in its absolute absence. But still that pale green eye — whether it is male or female is impossible to tell — calmly inspects its immediate surroundings, to make sure that no one is lurking there to take it by surprise. But there are no surprises, only a peasant plodding heavily between the plowed furrows with a long irrigation pipe on his shoulder, and a little girl in a school uniform with a heavy satchel on her back returning home along a brown footpath. Even if a tiny snake tries to surprise it in the low grass, the snake will be snatched up immediately in an agile beak and disappear.

And so it continues to wander, landing from time to time on a roof or an electricity pole, dipping its head into a fragrant puddle to fish up a red worm or a trembling gnat, but all the time it keeps its eyes open, to see if someone who was once part of its soul is flapping its wings on the edge of the horizon. For it still does not believe that solitude has truly been restored to it, and that its dead freedom has been resurrected. And so, when the day fades, despite the heaviness it feels in its wings, it soars strongly up into the sky again, to find a west wind which will carry it to the desert, for only there, it believes, will it be able to find a real refuge. It crosses into the twilight at a low altitude, gliding slowly over the pale emptiness in the red evening light. Then, with the same willpower with which it and its mate tore the mystery that joined them, it goes on flying for hours on end over the absolute darkness, occasionally disturbed by the hot breath of a beast of prey. At midnight, tired and content, it permits itself at long last to plummet to a solitary tree or bush in the heart of the plain, there to passionately embrace the freedom which has been fully restored. But immediately it knows that the gleam which greets it in the midst of the foliage is not a firefly or a splinter of broken glass — it is the open eye of its mate, which has been trying to escape it all day long, with the mystery close behind.

Even after the conversation with Lazar was over and the receiver had been replaced on the cradle, my sense of alarm did not fade, for I realized that I had penetrated the intimate nature not only of his wife but also of Lazar himself, who was so deeply attached to her. I also knew that what had just happened between us, even if she really succeeded in keeping it an isolated episode, would not liberate me from her but instead would only increase my attraction to her. My feet were already carrying me, half dressed, back to the bedroom, to throw myself yearningly onto the love-bed, which from this moment became my own personal bed, and to imagine my face buried once more in the powerful heat of that solid white stomach. I pulled the uncovered pink comforter which the granny had left me over my head, and in the total darkness I thought sorrowfully about how my chances for marriage, which my parents had hoped for, and which I had wanted too, were receding from me. When I woke up a few hours later and remembered what I had managed to accomplish, my heart flooded with joy. I put the two pairs of keys to the apartment in my pocket and went outside, because I couldn’t contain the sense of wonder by myself and wanted to share it with the reality outside of me, which had turned into a wet and empty night. I got onto my motorcycle and rode around the streets for a while, and then I went back to my old apartment, to spend the rest of the night there; and it was a good thing I did, because early in the morning someone from the internal medicine department phoned to summon me to an urgent meeting with Professor Levine. Was it Lazar and Hishin, I wondered, who had urged him out of guilt to lose no time in holding the interview, or was that blood transfusion of mine still bothering him, and now that he had recovered he was in a hurry to confront me with his arguments? With this in mind, I asked to put the interview off till noon and decided to spend the intervening hours in the hospital library, reading everything in the medical computer about hepatitis. I also looked up the article by Professor Levine himself, the one I was supposed to have read before leaving for India, which Hishin had forgotten to give me, but it wasn’t there — perhaps Hishin hadn’t brought it back yet. In spite of everything I read in the library that morning, I had no idea what direction Levine’s attack would come from. On a piece of paper I wrote down in clear figures the exact values of the results of the blood tests in Calcutta, which I still knew by heart. If I had wanted to I could have made the results a bit more drastic, in order to justify myself even further, but anything like that was so foreign to my nature that the thought was banished as soon as it appeared. At midday, armed with freshly honed facts, I entered Levine’s office, which looked smaller and gloomier than Hishin’s, perhaps because it was so untidy and crammed with books and papers. To my surprise he greeted me with a friendly smile and locked the door so we would not be disturbed. He rolled his chair to the front of his desk and placed it close to mine, as if he intended not just to talk to me, but to perform an internal examination on me with his own hands.

“I understand, Dr. Rubin,” he began, speaking quietly and so slowly that I had wondered whether he was still under the influence of psychiatric drugs — maybe anaphranil — or whether this was his normal way of speaking, “that we have a patient in common.”

“A patient in common?” I repeated, baffled, until I suddenly remembered. “Of course, the granny.”

“The granny?” He looked confused. “Sorry.” I blushed hotly. “I must have been influenced by Mrs. Lazar; I just signed a contract with her yesterday to rent her mother’s apartment.” And I burst into a short, embarrassed laugh, which was evidently superfluous in his eyes, for he did not join in, or even smile, but began to examine me with curiosity and even concern, as if I had surprised him with some shrewd and practical aspect of my character for which he was not prepared. “In any case,” he continued, “I spoke to our patient about you this morning, and she appears mostly satisfied with the service you performed for her, just a little anxious about the changes you made in the medication I prescribed for her. And while I failed to understand exactly the nature of the changes you wished to make, I reassured her that it was all right. If the new regime recommended by Dr. Rubin helps you, I told her, we’ll all be happy; and if it doesn’t, it’s no tragedy either — as long as he doesn’t intend to give you a sudden blood transfusion, you have nothing to fear from him.” At last a faint smile crossed his face, though he had a somewhat suffering look. I nodded my head with a smile, ignoring the heavy hint about the transfusion, since I was eager to explain why I had wanted to change the old lady’s medication first. But I immediately understood that he wasn’t interested in hearing my thoughts on the question of the medication but wished to go straight to the matter of my candidacy for the position that had become available in his department. First of all, to my surprise, he questioned me about my medical studies in Jerusalem, especially the first year, and he even wrote down on a piece of paper details of the general courses I had taken in the natural sciences, chemistry, and physics. Then he questioned me in detail about my experience as a doctor in the army. In the end he asked about the experience I had acquired during the past year in the hospital, both in the operating room and in the surgical ward. And he asked me a number of times why I thought Hishin had chosen the other resident instead of me. I tried to answer all his questions not only thoroughly but also openly and honestly, being careful only, despite his attempts to draw me out, not to criticize Hishin, who I knew was a friend of his in spite of the competition between them. But I said nothing about Dr. Nakash’s offer of private work as his assistant, since I didn’t want him to think that I would have anything to distract me. Finally his questions came to an end, and he crossed his hands on his chest and sank into a long and gloomy silence. For a moment he raised his big blue eyes to me as if he were about to say something, but then he changed his mind and lowered his head, pressing his fingertips to his forehead as if in some kind of conflict. I understood that he was hesitating or even embarrassed to broach the subject of the blood transfusion, perhaps because he didn’t want to spoil the good impression I had made on him up to now, especially since I had come with the recommendation of the administrative director, who turned a blind eye to his regular absences from work on psychiatric grounds. I felt a burgeoning pity for this bleak, unhappy man, who was the same age as Hishin but looked so much older and wearier. I wanted to help him unburden himself of his doubts, and if he attacked me, I would have the opportunity to defend my action, which after my visit to the library seemed to me brilliant in its simplicity. Accordingly, when he seemed about to stand up and put an end to the interview, I said in a soft but self-confident voice, “I’ve been told, Professor Levine, that you have some reservations about the blood transfusion I performed on Lazar’s daughter in India, and I would very much like, if you’re interested and if you still have a little time, to explain what I did.” I saw that I had hit a bull’s-eye. First he blushed; then he recovered, raised his head, and unfolded his hands, his eyes lit up in astonishment at my openness and courage, and he began to speak with a new excitement in his voice. “To tell you the truth, Dr. Rubin, I had decided not to mention the incident, but since you’ve brought it up, I really would like to hear how you justify the blood transfusion you performed over there, which was not only completely unnecessary but also irresponsible and perhaps even dangerous.” I had not expected such a vigorous attack, but I resolved to keep calm and continued quietly: “But why not a transfusion? There was a real danger of internal hemorrhage. In less than twenty-four hours there were three severe nosebleeds. I also got very poor results on her liver functions. Just a moment — excuse me, have you seen the data?”

“This may come as a surprise to you, Dr. Rubin, but the data are of no importance whatsoever here,” he replied immediately, in a tone that was beginning to sound threatening. “Of course I’ve seen them. Here they are,” and he whipped a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and spread it out in front of me. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of the gray Indian paper with the curly logo which I had brought from Calcutta. I wondered where it had disappeared to, and now I knew. Lazar and his wife had kept it to show to their professor friends, to check up on me behind my back and see if my panic in Varanasi was justified. “But why aren’t the data important?” I was no longer calm, and sensed that the attack was about to come from a completely unexpected direction. “If there were such high values of liver damage, if the transaminases rose to levels of a hundred and eighty and a hundred and fifty-eight, it’s clear that the clotting factors were also impaired. And I’m not even talking about the bilirubin, which reached nearly thirty. So why not strengthen the poor girl with some fresh, safe plasma, from someone as close as her mother, to help her overcome the bleeding? And the fact is, after my transfusion the bleeding stopped.”

“It stopped on its own, not because of you.” Professor Levine flung these words at me heatedly. “The clotting factors, which you thought you were giving her in your transfusion, are enzymes, not blood cells, and they behave completely differently in a transfusion. They’re absorbed and disappear — they’re ineffective unless they’re diluted in a special serum to bind them and prevent them from dissolving. But this, my friend, not even your excellent teachers in Jerusalem could have taught you, and you simply couldn’t have known. I don’t blame you, as Professor Hishin has already confessed that he forgot to give you my article, which I prepared specially for you, because I anticipated such complications with bleeding. But, Dr. Rubin, I do blame you for so recklessly endangering the mother, whom you could have infected with the daughter’s virus. When they told me in their innocence how you put off the return flight to New Delhi in order to perform a blood transfusion in that city of the dead of theirs, whose name I’ve forgotten, I was careful not to say a word to betray my horror at what you’d done. It’s a miracle that nothing happened. Sometimes God protects people from their doctors. But still, I asked myself, is this young man simply an idiot, who never learned the ABCs of performing a blood transfusion, or did he perhaps have some hidden purpose beyond my comprehension? And then, when I was asked to consider you for a temporary residency in my department, I thought at first, no, not him, I don’t even want to hear his name. But Lazar, and his secretary too, and even your Professor Hishin began putting pressure on me, and other people, objective people, said that you were really a conscientious young man, reliable and modest, and I must say, this is my impression too. So, Dr. Rubin, if you want to join our department, even on a temporary basis, I suggest that you spend the coming week in the library boning up on a few elementary laws of physics, such as the law of equilibrium, and consulting a biology textbook about the movement of viruses and how they multiply in the bloodstream, with particular attention to viruses B and C, which are interesting in themselves, and come back to me next week or the week after. There’s no hurry — come back and we’ll discuss it, so that you’ll understand for once and for all what a catastrophe you could have brought down on a perfectly healthy woman we’re all fond of, for the sake of your pointless theatrics.”

Now I remembered with a chill how my friend Eyal had spontaneously reacted in exactly the same way when I told him about the blood transfusion in Jerusalem. I could hardly suspect Eyal of inventing things for the sole purpose of tripping me up. So what was the truth of the matter? Had I really been so wrong? A shiver ran down my spine at the thought that Dori might believe I had done something reckless to endanger her health, and lose confidence in me as a doctor. But I also knew that I must on no account get into an argument now with this neurotic man. I had better behave in my best “Anglo-Saxon” manner, as my father proudly called it, and avoid a dispute, and not even confront him about the mortifying expression “your pointless theatrics.” I rose to my feet, my face burning, humiliated to the depths of my soul, and parted from him with hardly a word, or a promise either. Turning by mistake into the internal medicine ward and walking down the corridor between the rooms, where most of the patients were middle-aged or old and where my eyes suddenly flooded with tears, I thought to myself, No, it’s impossible, he’s wrong, his fears are imaginary, but I’ll never be able to prove to him how absurd his arguments are, because all he wants is to depress me, like Dr. Nakash said — yes, Nakash knows him, all right. And suddenly I felt a powerful desire to see Dr. Nakash, so that he would give me, in his simple, straightforward way, a foothold in the world, because now I felt that I had been finally banished from the hospital which up to a few months ago I was sure would become my true and final place in life. I looked for Nakash in the recovery room, but there I was told that he was in the operating room. Still, I didn’t want to give up the idea of seeing him, and I slipped into the wing. Through the window in the door I saw my friends from the surgical department standing there in their green gowns, and Dr. Nakash, dark and skinny, in a short white coat, his head close to the head of the patient. He soon noticed me and sent me a friendly wave, as a sign that I should wait for him. After a few minutes he came out to me. I told him about my meeting with Levine, including the vicious remark about my “pointless theatrics.” He wasn’t surprised; he only smiled and cursed under his breath. “I told you. He’s a difficult man — all he wants to do is depress you without giving you anything in return. Leave him alone. You don’t need him. Tomorrow night we’ve got a big private operation, and at the end of the month two more long, serious operations. I’ve recommended you to other anesthetists too. Don’t worry, Benjy, you won’t starve, you’ll specialize in anesthesiology, and you won’t regret it, because even if you go back to surgery in the end, it will give you a big advantage over your anesthetists. You’ll be able to get more out of them.”

He returned to the operating room to sit at the patient’s head while I hurried out of the hospital, which for the first time since I had started working there had become intolerable to me. Above all, I didn’t want to bump into anyone I knew from the medical staff and have to justify myself to him. Who could have imagined two months ago, when I stood in the big office between the two strongest, most influential men at the hospital, who saw me as the “ideal man” for the job and succeeded in persuading me to go to India, that things would turn out like this, that in this whole great hospital there was no room for me now, not even a temporary post, and that of all the hopes I’d cherished in the past year, all I’d be left with was a bizarre, impossible infatuation, which would now only make me suffer more? For if it had remained an abstract fantasy, as it had been until yesterday, it might still have been possible to extricate myself gradually, but now that my body had miraculously touched hers, I had committed not only my soul but also my body, which had been seared with pleasure, to go on and prove to myself that it was no passing episode, as she had announced with such confidence while she was quickly putting on her clothes. Because if I was the one who had started, only I could stop. And I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want to stop.

So I said to myself as I stepped out into the big parking lot and the strong but sweet light of a brilliant winter’s day. I walked over to my motorcycle, which I had recently taken to inserting between the cars of the directors, under their exclusive carport, not only in order to protect it from the rain but also in order to peek into Lazar’s car to see if Dori had forgotten anything of hers there. I kicked off and rode quickly out of the hospital grounds, but at the first traffic light, while I was waiting at a red light, I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellowish building with smoke spiraling out of its two tall chimneys, and suddenly it seemed to me that it was not I who was leaving the hospital but the hospital that was sailing away from me like some great ship, embarking with its doctors and patients on a journey full of new storms and adventures, which I had been found unworthy of participating in. Professor Levine was right — he had put his finger on something; mental illness sharpened the senses. It was true, there had been something a little theatrical about my actions in Varanasi. There was always something faintly theatrical in the contact between a doctor and his patient, because it was only through acting that you could overcome a total stranger’s natural embarrassment at getting undressed in front of you so that you could look into his mouth, feel his stomach, listen to his heart, and finger his sexual organs. But in the hotel in Varanasi, next to the purple-lacquered wicker chairs, it hadn’t only been a theatrical show, it had been the beginning of falling in love, a love that I now had to make sure didn’t die, didn’t turn into a passing episode.

When I arrived at my old apartment, I found the door open and strange suitcases standing in the hall and the landlady hurrying behind me to inform me that the new tenants were already moving in, because they had nowhere else to go and they couldn’t wait any longer. Since I had promised to vacate the apartment early, and if my new apartment was ready, why should I delay? I had no reason to delay, but no wish to start packing up my possessions either, which turned out to be more numerous than I had imagined, in front of this couple, fresh out of the army, quiet and in love, who began following me around and inserting themselves softly and insistently into every shelf I cleared. My motorcycle was of course no help in transporting my stuff, and I phoned Amnon, a childhood friend from Jerusalem who was busy writing his Ph.D. in the physics and astronomy department of Tel Aviv University, and supporting himself by working as a night watchman in a big canning plant in the south of the city. At night he had an old pickup truck at his disposal, and I asked him to use it to transport my belongings to the new apartment where I had already been to bed, but not to sleep. I had to wait until late in the evening, when his shift began, and in the meantime the young couple began to push me discreetly but firmly out of the apartment. At first we agreed that I would clear one room for them, where they could put their stuff until I cleared out the rest of the apartment. And at first they confined themselves to the room, giggling in undertones as they put things away in the closets and even hung pictures on the walls. But toward evening, when they saw that I was still hanging around, they grew impatient, and began wandering around the apartment, going into the kitchen to cook themselves supper, and the girl went into the bathroom to take a shower. They were a symbiotic couple, and kept up an incessant communication between them. Even when the girl was in the shower the boy kept going into the bathroom to give her things or get things from her. In the end Amnon called and announced that he would arrive within half an hour. I began taking down the suitcases, blankets, and cushions, and the young couple immediately volunteered to take down the cardboard boxes with my books and kitchen utensils. And even when I was sitting downstairs with all my possessions around me, waiting for Amnon and his pickup, they went on searching the apartment and bringing down all kinds of dirty and forgotten belongings of mine which I had left behind. It was highly disagreeable to have to part in such unseemly haste from my first Tel Aviv apartment, of which I was very fond, and where I had enjoyed a certain quiet and solitude, and which also preserved the memory of my initial excitement at the hospital, when I would reconstruct the operating table on the kitchen table and practice with a knife and fork and pieces of string, trying to imitate Hishin’s quiet, rapid movements.

Amnon arrived very late and found me sitting on the sidewalk covered with a blanket, surrounded by my possessions like a deported refugee. But I couldn’t be angry with him, since I knew that he was abandoning his watchman’s post for my sake. We quickly loaded everything onto the open truck, and I got onto my motorcycle and rode in front to show him the way. At the new place we unloaded everything onto the sidewalk, and Amnon drove away. “You still have to explain to me what Hawking’s problem is with the first three seconds of the big bang,” I said before he left. I knew he liked having me ask him questions about astrophysics, so that he could give me a long lecture while I sat and listened like a disciple at the feet of the master. He had been stuck on his Ph.D. for several years now, even though he devoted all his energies to it, and his friends were loath to ask him about it in case a note of incredulity crept into their voices. “Whenever you like — you know I’m all in favor of your taking a break from your quackery and learning a little real science,” he said affably. He asked for my new phone number, but I found that I had suddenly forgotten it, so I promised that I would call him that very night and give it to him. But in the new apartment the phone was dead. The thought that my parents had probably been trying to get in touch with me all evening and wondering where I had disappeared to began to worry me. During the past few weeks I had noted a new note of concern in their voices, and there was no reason to add to their anxiety. But what had happened to the telephone? No one had touched it since last night. For a moment it occurred to me that Dori had garbled her message to the phone company when she asked for an interim reading of the meter and had caused them to disconnect the phone by mistake. It was late, and the apartment was alarmingly full of my possessions. Now I had the feeling that it was actually smaller than the apartment I had left, and the closet full of the granny’s gray suits suddenly annoyed me. But above all, it upset me that I wouldn’t be able to keep my promise to call Amnon, and he would wait in vain in his cold watchman’s hut and think that I was trying to get out of meeting him after taking advantage of him and his truck. I left my belongings piled up on the floor and went out to look for a pay phone in order to call him and make a date. As I searched for a phone I thought about the obscurity of those first three seconds of the big bang, encountered by Hawking and others, and in which, according to Hawking’s own admission, the theory itself collapsed, owing to its inability to explain how the entire cosmos, compressed into a particle whose density was infinite and whose radius was zero, had begun to expand with such speed. Physics was helpless with regard to these three seconds, for they were simply outside physics. This was the point of transition from spirit to matter. In other words, how could matter shrink back into the single particle from which it was born? Spirit would do it, and not by magic but in a slow and gradual process. In fact, it had already begun. Take the airplane, for example. It compressed matter, canceled distance, and what was the airplane if not a smallish bit of matter in which an enormous amount of spirit had been invested — that is, laws and thought?

When I finally found a phone, I was too tired to engage Amnon in any of my theories and simply asked him to notify the phone company of the problem, and gave him my new number, which I had written down on my identity card. And then, in spite of the lateness of the hour, I phoned my parents, who I thought would be worrying about my sudden disappearance, but it turned out that they were sleeping soundly, without a care in the world, for when they had phoned my new apartment in the afternoon, a recorded voice had informed them that the phone was temporarily disconnected.

“It must be my new landlady’s fault,” I said immediately, laughing but annoyed. “Instead of asking for a simple reading of the meter, she must have confused the issue somehow, and they disconnected the phone. Terrific. Now what am I going to do?” But my mother calmed me down; she had an inexplicable faith in government agencies, perhaps because my father worked for one of them. “They’ll connect it again in the morning, and in any case we won’t need it tomorrow, because we’re coming to Tel Aviv to sign the guarantee for you and help you organize things in your new place.” Suddenly I felt uncomfortable about their coming so soon to my new apartment, where my lovemaking with my landlady still lingered in the air. I was also sure that my mother wouldn’t approve of the apartment, which she had been hostile toward from the outset. And even if she restrained herself and didn’t say anything against it, she wouldn’t be able to resist questioning me about my real reasons for making this sudden change. “No, don’t come tomorrow,” I said quickly. “The guarantee can wait. I’ve given her enough postdated checks. Don’t come, I won’t have enough time to spend with you tomorrow. And tomorrow night I’m taking part in a private operation with Dr. Nakash, who’s taken me on as his assistant, and I’ll have to go in early to check out the anesthetizing equipment and begin to learn the subject. Why come in the middle of all the mess? Give me a chance to fix things up a bit. Besides, it makes more sense for me to come to Jerusalem on Friday to see you, and I’ll bring the guarantee with me so you can sign it there.” I concluded on a pleading note, and now there was a silence on the other end of the line. There was no doubt that they were disappointed, especially my father, who had probably planned the visit to Tel Aviv in detail. But my promise to come to Jerusalem for the weekend tipped the scales, and they gave in. “So tomorrow you’ll be operating again,” said my father, suddenly coming to life. “You see, nothing’s been lost. They want you in the operating room again.”

“It’s only an operation for the surgeon, Dad. For me it’s just putting someone to sleep and waking him up again,” I said in despair, looking at a young woman wrapped in a winter coat, standing a few steps away in the empty street.

I said nothing to them about my interview with Professor Levine, not wanting to cause them any more grief. I would have to accustom them gradually to the idea that I was out of the hospital. I hurried back to the apartment, and although I had had a difficult, confusing day, I didn’t feel tired and immediately began to tackle the task of arranging my possessions in their new places. It turned out that in addition to the granny’s closet, the Lazars had forgotten to empty the two little bedside cupboards, which contained mainly documents, old letters, and photograph albums. At first I didn’t know if I had the right to empty them on my own initiative, but the thought of having two family archives stuffed with letters and photographs and documents belonging to complete strangers weighing on my sleep at night was too much for me. After some hesitation, I decided to cram everything into some empty shoe boxes I found on the balcony, which I pushed between the gray suits in the granny’s closet. At first I thought of keeping one photograph album out, for on paging through it I had found a number of ancient photographs of Dori as a young soldier, a law student, with Lazar and without him, holding a baby in her arms, always smiling, attractive and shapely, a young woman of my own age. But in the end I put it away with the others. I felt alien and hostile toward these photographs. I couldn’t connect with her past; nothing here belonged to me, nor did I need it to fire my imagination and fuel my love. I wanted her the way I knew her now, plump, middle-aged, mature, pampered but sure of herself. Until the small hours of the night I was busy putting my things away and cleaning the apartment. I hung my pictures up on the nails which had remained in the walls, not wanting to disturb the silence with the banging of a hammer. Finally I took a shower and made the bed with the clean, fragrant sheets that had apparently been left for my use, and with the disconnected telephone ensuring that no one would disturb me, I sank into a deep, prolonged sleep, with the result that I arrived alert and clearheaded at the private hospital on the Herzliah beach for the operation which began at twilight the next day and lasted until dawn.

It was complicated and dangerous brain surgery, performed by a surgeon of about thirty-five, a visiting professor from America, assisted by a local man, a well-known retired surgeon from our own hospital, who had worked with Dr. Nakash in the past and presumably trusted him to handle the particularly complex anesthesia procedure. For the first time I saw Nakash losing a little of his natural serenity and inner confidence. He was flushed and excited, and after introducing me to the visiting surgeon and his personal assistant, he began addressing me in English, and asked me to answer him in kind, so that we would fit into the linguistic ambience of the place, which from the moment of my arrival had impressed me with its pleasantness. In contrast to the operating rooms I had known up to then, which were always cold, windowless, isolated from the world, buried in the heart of the hospital like the engine room of a submarine, here we entered an operating room that was bright and cozy, behind whose attractive drapes were windows through which an almost pastoral view was visible, with people walking calmly along a well-tended seaside promenade. The instruments were newer than those in our hospital, smaller in their dimensions, light and pleasant to hold. And in the middle of all this was the large shaved skull of a handsome, sturdy man of about fifty-five. Since the days of my anatomy lessons I had not seen a human skull held between forceps and gradually opened up, layer after layer, sawed by the hand of an artist to expose the whitish brain pulsing with its minute capillaries, whose delicate balance between stillness and vitality Nakash was controlling from behind a state-of-the-art anesthesia machine full of little monitors displaying changing numbers. And so the long night began, during the course of which I learned how to stand rooted to the spot for hours at a time in order to follow the movement of the respirator, and especially the changing values of the oxygen concentration, the level of expired carbon dioxide, the volume of air pumped into the lungs, and of course the heartbeats, the systemic blood pressure, the venous pressure, and the state of hydration in the body — all of which make up the drama of anesthesiology, particularly in brain surgery, where the slightest twitch or cough on the part of the patient can cause the exposed brain to bulge.

“If you’re getting bored,” Nakash whispered to me in the middle of the night in his heavily accented Iraqi Hebrew, “think of yourself as the pilot of the soul, who has to ensure that it glides painlessly through the void of sleep without being jolted or shocked, without falling. But also to make sure that it doesn’t soar too high and slip inadvertently into the next world.” I had heard him speak like this about his role before, but now, in the depths of the night, a little groggy after long hours of intent concentration on the changing monitors of the anesthesia machine, with the skull and brain not actually before my eyes but only flickering grayly on the suspended video screen, I felt that his words were true. I had turned from a doctor into a pilot or a navigator, surrounded by nurses, who looked like well-groomed stewardesses in this private hospital, coming in every now and then to draw a little blood to measure the potassium and sodium levels, or to pour cocktails of pentothal or morphine into the suspended infusion bags, with special additions concocted by Nakash to ensure the tranquillity of the “instrument flight.” And for the first time I saw this work, for all its boredom and frustration, as something that possessed spiritual significance, for the thought and attention of the anesthetist were addressed not to the body, not to the matter, not to the greenish tumor which the two surgeons at our side were battling to extract from the depths of the brain, but to the soul, which I suddenly felt was truly in my hands, in its silence and, who knows, perhaps also in its dreams.

When the operation was over we saw that dawn had already stolen through the folds of the drapes. The two surgeons and the nurses left the room, and the patient was wheeled into the recovery room. Nakash sat next to him for a while and then went to see to the arrangements for us to be paid, leaving me to wait for the “landing”—in other words, to watch the respirator for the first signs that the patient was beginning to breathe independently. I now felt no tiredness. I parted the curtains and let my eyes wander from the respirator to the sunrise painting the sea in soft pastel colors. My hands were clean, without any blood or smell of drugs, without the warmth of the depths of the human body, which I was used to feeling on my fingers after an operation, even if I had played a very minor role in it. And although I hadn’t even seen the tumor with my own eyes before it was sent for the biopsy, I felt a sense of profound satisfaction, as if I had truly taken part in the battle. I went up to the patient and raised his eyelids, as I had observed Nakash doing to his patients, but without knowing what exactly I wanted to see there. A new, very pretty nurse, who hadn’t been present during the operation, came into the room and sat down next to me and said, “Dr. Nakash sent me to take over from you, so that you can go and sign for the fee.” I didn’t want to leave the patient; I felt that I wanted to see for myself how the undercarriage of the soul touched the solid ground of the body. The nurse’s frank reference to the financial arrangements between myself and the hospital jarred me. But I was new here and I didn’t want to step out of line. I thus went to the secretary’s office, where a check for eight hundred shekels was waiting for me, together with an elegantly printed page setting out the details of the fee and the various deductions. Nakash examined my check and asked if everything was all right. Then he sent me home. “I’ll see that our patient lands safely,” he said with a smile. I went to the changing rooms, and even though I had not been soiled by the operation, I couldn’t resist the magnificent facilities, and I took a long shower. Then I dressed, tucked my crash helmet under my arm, and prepared to leave the hospital, but before doing so I couldn’t help going into the recovery room to see if the landing was over. It was, and the patient was now alone. Nakash had disappeared. The beautiful nurse was gone too. The anesthesia machine had been wheeled into a corner of the room. The soul had returned to the body. The patient was breathing by himself.

I reached my apartment without any problems, leaving behind me rows of despairing cars struggling to enter Tel Aviv. The check was in my pocket, about a quarter of my monthly salary at the hospital. Now I thought about Dori. Should I wait until my parents had signed the guarantee, or should I try to make contact without any actual pretext for doing so? Children in school uniforms were coming down the stairs. Neighbors examined me suspiciously when they saw me standing in my black leather jacket and crash helmet, opening the door to my apartment, but no one dared to say anything to me. I made myself a big breakfast, and then I let down the blinds and prepared for a sweet sleep without any disturbances, not even the chance ringing of the phone. But while I was fast asleep the line was reconnected, and at one o’clock in the afternoon the phone rang insistently. It was my mother, who was glad to see that her efforts on my behalf with the phone company had borne fruit and who asked me when I intended to arrive the next day. “Early,” I said immediately, because I knew that I had to compensate them for missing their visit to Tel Aviv. And indeed, I arrived in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon before my father came home from work and told my mother about the interview with Professor Levine and my final banishment from the hospital. At first she listened in silence. Whenever I was involved in a quarrel, she was always careful not to get carried away and blame the other party, and even when it was clear to her that they were in the wrong and had treated me unjustly, she would examine what it was in me and my behavior that had caused them to wrong me. Now, too, she tried to interrogate me tactfully but insistently — was I sure that the blood transfusion had been essential? And how had I felt when I was performing it? I felt sorry for her. She was groping in the dark, looking for something that she could never have imagined was actually there. But I was afraid that she might discover something, so I deliberately increased the darkness in which she was floundering. In the end my father arrived. I wanted to spare him the bad news for a while, but my mother immediately told him. At first he turned a little pale, then he recovered and listened with unseemly gratification to Dr. Nakash’s pithy definitions of Professor Levine’s mental illness. The fact that Hishin had not challenged the transfusion appeared to him to confirm my innocence of any wrongdoing, and he seemed satisfied. He was also very impressed by my descriptions of the private hospital in Herzliah, and was amazed at the high fee I had received for one night’s work. “Dealing with the soul is more important and expensive than dealing only with the body,” I said with a smile, “because in the end the legal responsibility falls on the anesthetist. If something happens to the patient, who will they blame? Who’ll have the strength to open up the stomach or the brain again to poke around in there and decide what was cut right or wrong?” My mother sank into a profound silence and gave me a searching look. I felt that for some reason she was dissatisfied with me, but I also knew that she was incapable of putting her finger on the precise source of her complaints.

When my father and I finally finished chatting about the salaries of doctors and possible complications in surgery, my mother held out a white envelope with my name written on it, which contained an invitation to Eyal’s wedding, which was to take place in three weeks’ time in Kibbutz Ein Zohar in the Arava. My parents had received a separate invitation, and Eyal himself had called to urge them to come. His mother had joined in the request, and even Hadas had taken the receiver and added a few friendly words. It seemed that it was important to them for my parents, who had known Eyal since he was a child, to be at the wedding. “You’re not thinking of traveling all the way to the Arava?” I asked in surprise, but it turned out that they had already promised Eyal they would go, and that they intended to drive down in their own car, for after the wedding they intended to continue on to one of the spa hotels on the banks of the Dead Sea and spend a few days there. Their disappointment at the cancellation of the visit to Tel Aviv had apparently only intensified their hunger for travel, for instead of waiting to consult me about their plans, as they usually did, they had arranged it all themselves, and even reserved rooms in a hotel. “What will you do at a wedding for young people on a kibbutz?” I asked with a faint smile. “Why on earth should you travel all the way there, and in the old car on top of everything?” But my mother was determined to go. Eyal had asked them to be present at his wedding, and they didn’t want to hurt his feelings. They remembered him hanging around in our house, and there had been times, especially after his father committed suicide, when they had considered him almost a second son. And besides, they had every intention of enjoying the wedding, the trip to the desert, the kibbutz. I would join them in Jerusalem, or they would come and pick me up in Tel Aviv, and we would drive down together to the Arava, and after the kibbutz we would all go to the hotel on the banks of the Dead Sea. They had already booked a room for me, and really, why shouldn’t I take a few days’ vacation? But I didn’t want to meet my old friends with my parents hovering at my elbow, and I immediately rejected their invitation to join them at the Dead Sea, even for one night. I did my best to discourage the whole idea, and told them that they would have to reach the Arava under their own steam, because I intended to ride down on my motorcycle in order to be free to return to Tel Aviv without having to depend on anyone else. “But you have no commitments to the hospital anymore,” my mother said, offended by my refusal to accompany them on their holiday. “I have other commitments,” I said, without explaining. They were very disappointed by my negative reaction to their plans, especially my mother, who was not enthusiastic about traveling alone on the desert roads and was afraid that my father would get lost, since he had a habit of misreading road maps and was too proud to stop and ask for directions. But when I saw that all the obstacles I put in their way would not deter them from keeping their promise to Eyal, I softened a little and promised to meet them at the exit from Beersheba and ride in front of them to the kibbutz, and also to guide them to their hotel later that night. At this my mother relaxed, and we passed a pleasant Shabbat together. I described the complicated brain surgery again at length, and told them about the new feelings I had experienced as an anesthetist. I also reminisced about India, and this time I was more generous with my stories about Calcutta and the ghats of Varanasi, but I hardly mentioned the Lazars. I didn’t say anything about the guarantee either, and it was only on Saturday afternoon, before I set out for Tel Aviv, while my mother was taking a nap, that I got my father to sign it, quickly adding my mother’s signature myself.

I pocketed the signed guarantee with the feeling that I had succeeded in lassoing Dori from a distance with one more slender thread. But how absurd, I thought in despair, that after my daring confession, and after I had succeeded in going to bed with her, I should still feel as if I were standing at the starting point, needing some unimportant piece of paper as an excuse for meeting her. I knew that if I called her on the phone I would give her an opening to evade me, even if she wasn’t yet sure herself of what she really wanted. If it was true that this was the first time she had been unfaithful to her husband — and I knew just how deeply she was attached to him — she must surely be full of remorse and self-reproach at what she had done, even if she was a little bit in love with me or felt at least some longing for what had happened between us. Accordingly, I must on no account give her the chance to break off the connection between us before we met again, a meeting I decided to effect by the simple means of walking confidently into her office, like an old client who didn’t need an appointment to be granted an interview, however brief. And even though I suspected that she might be startled to see me, I was sure that she would soon realize that my only motive in surprising her in her office was to show her that she could trust me completely, just as I had taken off all my clothes and placed myself at her disposal, giving her the choice to do whatever she wanted with me. Yes, I would meet her on her own territory, where she was protected from any improper gesture or word that might escape me, but I was doing it not just to calm any fears of harassment but also in order to show her that my intentions were not only sexual but deeper than that, as if the guarantee I had come to give her was also a testimony to her tenant’s good character. Perhaps precisely because of the significance I attached to my sudden entry into her office, I put it off, even though I had plenty of time on my hands now to haunt the little streets around her building, or to watch her strenuous maneuvers to get in or out of a forbidden parking place — I still delayed my entry, still hesitated to insert myself between one client and the next, to hand over the guarantee and relinquish the sweet thread of hope I held in my hand. Until one day when she appeared in a dream I had in the middle of the day, for now that my time was my own I had gotten into the habit of taking long, deep naps in the afternoon. In my dream she was standing and talking in her friendly, affectionate way to Hishin, who was lying, apparently as a joke, on one of the beds in the ward. And this simple dream for some reason agitated me so much that the same day, late in the afternoon, I bought a brightly colored Indian silk scarf which I found in a little knickknack shop in Basle Street, and I walked straight into her office and asked the dark-haired secretary, who remembered me from the morning when we ran around organizing things for the trip, and greeted me warmly, to let me in to see her for a minute as soon as she was free. But as it happened she was already free, and I went in and shut the door behind me and sat down opposite her, without waiting for her permission, and with lowered eyes I handed her the guarantee with my parents’ signatures on it and said, “Here’s the guarantee you asked for.”

Her eyes lit up in her usual smile, and she seemed quite calm, as if she had been expecting this sudden intrusion, and at that moment I didn’t know if she was calm because she was sure that what had happened between us was only a passing episode and it was all over now, or the opposite — she had become calm on seeing that I had not taken her words seriously and that I was bringing her the guarantee in person because I didn’t want to give her up. She took the guarantee and folded it as if she were about to tear it in half, but then hesitated and stopped herself, as if the lawyer in her were warning her of unpleasant eventualities in the future. But then she changed her mind again and tore it into shreds, which she dropped into the wastepaper basket, saying as she did so, “Never mind, I trust you.” Then she raised her laughing eyes to me and said, “So how are you? Have you recovered?” She blushed slightly, afraid perhaps of what I was about to say, and I said innocently, “From what?” and she said, “You know. From something that is quite impossible and will never happen again.” I kept quiet, afraid that my rising lust would cloud the wits I needed for this confrontation, but I looked straight at her. She was wearing a gray suit like the ones hanging in her mother’s closet. Her bun was beginning to come loose, and locks of hair had fallen onto her neck. The shade of her hair was darker than I remembered from the week before, and I wondered whether she had dyed it again or whether the light in the room was deceiving me. Her makeup, too, had faded during the day, exposing the cute freckles on her cheekbones. Her breasts looked smaller now, outlined separately under her white blouse. And behind the desk I caught a glimpse of the pampered little paunch. She certainly wasn’t beautiful, I thought to myself, and a vague memory of my afternoon dream crossed my mind. But she had a warmth and liveliness and directness that I badly needed now, and if she insisted on thinking that it was over between us, she had every right to do so, for I had not yet succeeded in convincing her that only the one who had started it had the right to end it. And then, in a gloomy silence, I took the gift-wrapped scarf out of my pocket and put it in front of her on the desk, whispering hoarsely, “I got this for you. Maybe because it reminds me of India. I don’t know.” She was now stunned and overcome with agitation, as if neither my declaration of love nor my standing naked before her had persuaded her of the seriousness of my intentions as much as this little scarf. She closed her eyes tight, and then she pressed her fist to her mouth again, as if she wanted to hit herself for what she had done to me and to herself. She unwrapped the colored paper and spread the scarf out in silence, and then she smiled distractedly and said, “Tell me, Benjy, what do you really want? I’ll soon be fifty. I don’t understand. What was it there in India that threw you off balance? What happened? True, I made a mistake too. I was flattered by the thought of being desired by such a young man. But that’s all. What can it lead to? It’s impossible. And you know it.”

“Yes, I know,” I admitted somberly, and I went on with miserable stubbornness, “but I’m only asking for one more time.”

“No,” she said immediately and vehemently, without thinking, “there’s no point. Even though it was very sweet for me too. It makes no difference. What will one more time give us? It will only make you want more, and you’ll come back and pester me again. And why not — you’re a free agent, you’ve got no obligations to anyone. You misled me when you asked to rent my mother’s apartment, I believed you when you said that you wanted to get married.”

“But I really do want to get married,” I replied quickly.

The secretary knocked at the door, and without waiting she opened it and came in and announced the name of a client who had just arrived. “Right away,” said Dori, rising from her seat, and carried forward on her high heels, she made for the door, flooding me with a wave of love as she paused by my side. She wanted to say something to me, perhaps to console me, but the client, an elderly, elegantly dressed man who was apparently too agitated to wait, opened the door and stepped into the room without waiting to be asked. She immediately flashed him one of her automatic smiles, and for some reason she introduced me to him, as if to banish any possible suspicion. “This is Dr. Rubin, who’s like a family doctor to us. Please come in and sit down.” The client nodded his head at me distractedly and sat down. She accompanied me to the hallway and said, “I understand that things didn’t work out with Professor Levine.”

“No,” I said, trembling with excitement. “He’s a strange man; I don’t understand him. He claims that I could have infected you with Einat’s hepatitis when I performed the blood transfusion in Varanasi.” She burst into surprised laughter — was she really unaware of Levine’s accusations? “Perhaps you really did infect me,” she said with a slight smile, and turned around and went back into her room, and through the open door I saw her folding the scarf and putting it into one of the drawers of her desk.

At seven o’clock that evening Dr. Nakash phoned me to ask if I could come immediately to the hospital in Herzliah. In an hour’s time an operation was scheduled to begin. It had originally been planned without an assistant anesthetist, in order to reduce the costs to the patient, but the day before Nakash himself had caught a severe cold, and this morning his temperature had risen, and although he had treated himself aggressively during the day, he was still afraid of spreading germs in the operating room, and he wanted me to come and “fly the plane” myself, though he would be right next door to guide and direct me. “Don’t you think it’s too soon to leave me on my own?” I asked in excitement. “No,” answered Nakash confidently, “you’ll be fine. I didn’t choose you by accident. I’ve been watching you in the operating room for a whole year now, and I’ve seen your grasp of internal processes. You understand what anesthesia means. Hishin hit the nail on the head when he praised you that time in the cafeteria. By the way, if you’re missing him, you’ll be able to see him soon, because he’s performing the operation tonight. But for God’s sake, Benjy, get on your horse and get over here as quickly as you can.” My spirits, which were low after the meeting with Dori, began to soar. I jumped onto my motorcycle, and with the resolution of someone on an emergency rescue mission I began to weave boldly through the heavy traffic leaving Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, I arrived at the operating room after the first premedication shot had already been given under Nakash’s supervision. In order to protect his surroundings from his germs he had made himself a strange mask which enveloped his entire head, leaving only two holes for his narrow black eyes. The patient was a woman of about fifty, plump and blue-eyed, whose figure reminded me of Dori’s. She had to have abdominal surgery, the correction of a hiatal hernia and a vagotomy — the kind of operation at which Hishin excelled, in spite of the mystery of the death of the young woman on whom he had operated on the eve of the trip to India. I put on a mask, and with the help of the nurses I began preparing the patient for the operation. Since Nakash was keeping at a distance from us, I myself began talking to the patient, asking her about her feelings and sensations, her husband and children, and in the meantime I exposed her chest in order to auscultate her heart and lungs again, to avoid any unpleasant surprises. From the corridor rose Hishin’s loud laughter, and Nakash signaled me to hurry up. I gave her the first shot of dormicum, smiled at her, placed the mask on her face, and connected her to the anesthesia machine, and felt her body relaxing under my hands; I gave her the first shot of pentothal, to relax her muscles, and inserted the infusion needle for the anesthetic; she lost consciousness, and I immediately felt her soul asking to be liberated and soar; I took hold of the cylinder with both hands and gave her an initial dose of oxygen; then I forced her clamped mouth open and inserted the small iron blade of the laryngoscope to prevent her mouth from closing, and in the narrow beam of light I succeeded in getting an exact view of the pinkish passage to the vocal cords, through which I slowly inserted the tube into her lungs. Then I turned on the respirator. The nurse exposed the round white stomach, cleaned it with alcohol, and drew the line for the incision. Nakash, who was standing behind the door with his face masked, like a white mummy with burning eyes, made a V sign with his fingers and signaled me to clear his field of vision, so that from a distance he could watch the monitors of the anesthesia machine piloting the body which had been abandoned by its soul.

Hishin was still delaying his entry, like a conductor waiting for the members of the orchestra to tune their instruments. But when the nurse came in with the X-rays and placed them like a musical score on the illuminated screen, I sensed his close presence and trembled with excitement, for I knew that Nakash had kept my participation in the operation a secret from him. He came in slowly, tall, smiling, pleased with himself, humming under his breath. The mauve color of his gown and mask, which in this hospital took the place of the standard green, gave him a gay, lighthearted air, as if he had dressed up as somebody else. He stopped and stared in playful surprise at the masked Nakash standing in the corner, and then his eyes met mine, which were fixed on the monitors of the anesthesia machine. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said when he had recovered. “My friend Dr. Rubin! So you’ve abandoned the knife but not the operating room. Very good. A very positive direction. When you left us, I myself thought of advising you to specialize in anesthesiology, but I was afraid you would think I was antagonistic to your great ambitions. But I see that Dr. Nakash has succeeded in persuading you. Congratulations, Nakash, you’ve found the ideal assistant.”

Ten

And then at last, the hard, green, open eye — whether it is male or female is still impossible to tell — begins to flicker and dim, until its anxiety is subdued by sleep. And despite the sorrow and the disappointment, for freedom has eluded them again, the caress of a strange but familiar feather brings comfort in the darkness. And when slender spears of light appear between the bald yellow crags and a purple brush paints the sky, the two are already huddled close together, tangled in the branches of a dry, sturdy bush, waiting for the sun to hammer the sky into a bright, unblinking blue. They have penetrated the heart of the Arava in order to learn the lesson that neither of them is capable of remaining alone.

But since they have broken the chain of marriage which joined them, from now on they are doomed to scratch the desert soil for food and to drink the bitter, salty water of the sea of death. Awed by the fatefulness of their meeting, they reverently circle the torn, bleeding remains of the mystery, which never left them and pursued them relentlessly in order to join them together again. Now the ruined, pitiful remains lie before them on the stones, mangled and exhausted but still twitching, as if they want to fly again or to change their form. A severed arm turns into a black wing, a lost leg into a tail, and cracked eyeglasses into a sharp beak, until the furnace of noon welds all the pieces into one, and a glossy black crow rises from the dry ground and flaps its dark wings.

For some reason, Eyal’s approaching wedding gave rise in me to excitement mingled with a faint anxiety, as if something significant were about to take place. Eyal himself tirelessly drummed up interest in the event by constant consultations about how to increase the numbers of his guests. Since he feared that people would be deterred by the distance and the wedding would be poorly attended, he decided to send out as many invitations as possible, and he kept phoning me to remind him of the names and addresses of forgotten friends from our school days. But even the long list of wedding guests failed to reassure him, and he was constantly on the phone, calling people up to make sure that they weren’t planning a last-minute defection. And perhaps it was only the familiar anxiety of my friend Eyal, who ever since he had lost his father was afraid of being abandoned and rejected, that aroused my excitement and expectation, which were apparently conveyed to my parents too, for not only did they buy a handsome and expensive present for the young couple from all of us, but my mother bought herself a new dress as well, and my father took the car to the garage for a general overhaul. The old car and the long drive were now our main concern, and in order to make the long day’s drive easier on my father and to avoid unnecessary complications with the meeting in Beersheba, my parents arrived in the morning in Tel Aviv, and after visiting an elderly aunt in an old folks’ home, they had lunch with me in a little restaurant and came home with me for a short rest in my new apartment, which to my surprise my mother decided she liked better than the old one in spite of its many disadvantages. “Even though you made a mistake,” she said in her pedagogical way, “it was in the right direction.” I made my bed for them with clean sheets and blankets, and placed a little electric heater in the room. I insisted that they take off their clothes and put on pajamas and take a proper nap, to refresh themselves before the great adventure. At first they were amused by my insistence, which was uncharacteristic of me, but in the end they gave in. And although my mother emerged from the room after fifteen minutes, my father fell into a deep sleep, which lasted so long that it began to worry us both. It was only when I saw him emerging from my bedroom dazed and confused, more exhausted after his sleep than before it, that I suddenly felt a pang of compassion for them both, and I wondered whether I shouldn’t give up the idea of riding down separately on my motorcycle and join them in the car, to help my father with the driving. The problem was the drive from the kibbutz to the hotel on the Dead Sea; I knew that if I left my motorcycle behind, I’d have to drive them there after the wedding, spend the night in the hotel, and take the bus back to Tel Aviv in the morning, a tedious and time-consuming project that I was not prepared to undertake. Especially since I had promised Amnon — who was riding down with his parents, who had also been invited, in a special bus from Jerusalem — to give him a lift back to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle, and during the course of the ride we would finally be able to hold the promised and long-delayed astrophysical debate.

The wedding ceremony was due to begin at half past seven, but Eyal had made us swear to arrive while it was still light so that we could enjoy the long and stunningly beautiful evening. “Don’t miss the desert sunset,” he repeatedly warned us. However, it was not only for the sake of the sunset that our little convoy set out at three o’clock in the afternoon, but in order to soften the harshness of the 150-mile drive ahead of us. My father was on the whole a good driver, but recently he had begun to experience moments of dreaminess while at the wheel, which would have ended in catastrophe if not for my mother’s vigilance. And there was also the question of navigation. Although the road to the kibbutz was straight and uncomplicated, I knew that it was sometimes just these highways, racing automatically ahead, that misled my father, who would wait tensely for the turnoff until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and at some blameless and insignificant junction he would suddenly decide that the time had come and turn the wheel. But this time it had been clearly agreed between us that he would turn off the road only when he received a clear sign from me. I began to drive slowly in front of them, as if they were important guests in a foreign land, leading them through the labyrinth of the Tel Aviv streets and onto the right lane of the expressway, where I allowed myself to put a little distance between us, and even to lose them for a while, only to catch them again in the stream of traffic before the interchange leading to the south, whose broad plains were radiant now in the warm light that flooded the inside of my helmet. Even though it was still officially winter, and the young weather forecasters who had become popular media stars during the months of storms and snow were still nostalgically predicting rain and stormy weather, the warmth of spring had already arrived to comfort fields devastated by floods, lawns shriveled by frost, and trees exhausted by strong winds; even the broad asphalt road seemed to be exuding a delightful springlike fragrance. I couldn’t resist stopping at the side of the road, and like a grim traffic cop I waved my parents down, to tell them to open their windows and breathe in the fresh new air.

I still nursed a certain resentment and anger in the wake of the disappointing confrontation in Dori’s office, but I had not yet given up hope. Still, the determination and decisiveness of her efforts to shake me off had taken me aback. In the beginning I had not hoped for anything, but when she unexpectedly responded to my fervent declaration of love, I realized that I had not suddenly turned into a deluded madman but remained what I always was, a rational, realistic person aspiring to what was within the bounds of possibility. Indeed, reality had proved that even a woman like her, ostensibly so inaccessible, could see me as a possible partner, even though I still didn’t know how or why, whether it was only because of the charm of my youth as such, or also thanks to certain inner qualities of my own, which had been revealed to her in the light of India. If she had sent me packing, it was because she was afraid, and rightly so, that I would be completely swept away by the powerful passion of which she had already experienced a small taste. Maybe I was meant to reconsider in a positive light the casual remark she had made about a bachelor’s being dangerous in an extramarital affair, and precisely now, in this state of violent infatuation, I should break my stubborn bachelorhood, for it was only in this way that I could protect her from myself, as I was protected from her. Perhaps this was cockeyed logic, but it also held out hope. Perhaps I really should get married. This simple thought began to throb inside me, rolling out in front of me on the black asphalt, awakening my blood, and without my being aware of it, I accelerated the speed of the motorcycle until I realized that my parents’ car had disappeared behind me. If they only knew what I was thinking, without of course knowing my secret reason, they would be overjoyed. I knew that they were making this tiring journey to a distant wedding with an expensive gift on the backseat of their car not only to express their affection for Eyal and their joy in his marriage, but also to send a clear signal to their only son, riding ahead of them in a leather jacket and black helmet, about what was really important to them, important above all, and about how his solitude was beginning to alarm them. “Perhaps I really should get married,” I said, addressing myself aloud, and turned onto a dirt road and rode up a little hill, which gave me a clear view not only of the road leading from north to south, but also of the agricultural settlements surrounding the housing projects of Kiryat Gat with a belt of pleasant rusticity — green squares of alfalfa, recently plowed fields of rich, brown earth; even the ugly rows of plastic shone in the bright light of the sun like the heating elements of some gigantic stove. The traffic on the road flowed at a leisurely pace, and some time passed before I caught sight of my mother’s calm face, with a scarf tied around her head to protect her hair from the wind blowing into the open window. In the backseat sat a young hitchhiker, in spite of my warnings to my father — who liked picking up hitchhikers and listening to their views on the world — not to stop on the way, so he wouldn’t disrupt the smooth progress of our little convoy. So they’re enjoying themselves, I said to myself, and I let them pass me and get a little ahead before I started my motorcycle and raced behind them to see that my father didn’t suddenly turn off in the direction of Ashkelon.

At the gas station at the exit from Beersheba we all agreed that the journey up to now had been very easy and pleasant, and there was no doubt that we would arrive on time, and even earlier than we had planned. But after we passed the Yeruham mountain ridge, which was covered with a green down because of the abundant winter rains, and began to go deeper into the desert itself, the sky clouded over, and the warm reddish light in which we had bathed so enjoyably up to now turned murky and yellow. It would be very strange if it suddenly started raining here, I thought, and in fact the clouds over our heads managed to produce no more than a few big, cold drops, but at the same time an east wind began blowing so fiercely that it threatened the balance of the Honda. I had to slow down, and the distance between myself and my parents shrank. From now on I was no longer simply their guide and leader, but I felt as if they too were watching over me, and when the wind increased I let them pass me and rode behind them so the car would break the sudden gusts of wind that buffeted me and made the motorcycle sway violently. My mother kept her head turned, anxiously watching my battle with the wind and making sure that my father didn’t lose me. From time to time she raised her hand in a strange gesture of greeting or encouragement. I had no doubt that she was secretly angry with me for my eccentric insistence on making the long trip on the Honda, but I was also sure that she would control herself and not allow a single word of rebuke or criticism to pass her lips now that the deed was done. And for this self-control I thanked her in my heart, and I waved back at her in a friendly fashion and went on battling with the savage wind. I was sure that at this pace we would only reach the wedding after dark, but when we slowly and carefully inched down the steep thousand-foot descent from the ridge to the Arava junction, I felt the wind subsiding, and immediately after a brief, warm shower, which lasted for a few minutes, gaps appeared in the murky, ugly sky, and fountains of a pure, mysterious, pinkish violet light began to well out of them as if in response to the call of the great sunset which was about to begin far away in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. My parents wanted to give me a chance to rest after my battle with the wind, but I was impatient to cover the remaining thirty miles, believing in my heart of hearts that keeping my promise to arrive at Eyal’s wedding before it got dark would bring me a secret reward. Eyal was waiting anxiously at the kibbutz gate, as if from there he would be able to suck in from a distance any wedding guests who might be deterred at the last minute by the length of the journey. When he saw our little convoy approaching his face lit up, and when we arrived he threw his arms around me and began hugging and kissing me joyfully. But he didn’t look like a happy bridegroom. His face was pale with tension, and there were dark rings under his eyes. “Come and say hello to my mother,” he said immediately, “she’s waiting for you,” and he climbed onto the back of the motorcycle to direct us to a little canyon hidden behind the buildings, where a large lawn surrounded a pool whose still waters reflected with delicate perfection the shadow of the wild crag overhanging them in the evening light. Round white tables were dotted over the lawn like giant mushrooms, but only a few people were scattered around them, gazing pensively at the long-haired youth perched on the diving board with a guitar on his knees. As he plucked the strings, perhaps just tuning them, the slow notes, without the benefit of loudspeakers or amplifiers, enveloped the place in a feeling of pervasive goodwill. And it may have been that feeling above all which prompted my decision, which I made before I left that night, to find someone to marry.

Wearing a white dress, as if she were the bride, Eyal’s mother sat alone in the center of the lawn with a glass of pale yellow juice perched in front of her. Since the last time I had seen her she seemed to have grown even larger, despite the strict diet Eyal had imposed on her, as if she were swollen not with food but with anxiety at his imminent desertion. But I still remembered, even now, her beauty, which had filled me with admiration when I was a child, and her heavy white face, covered with makeup, still preserved its old radiance in my eyes. My parents, though, who had not met her for a few years, hardly recognized her, and when she stood up to hug and kiss them warmly, they were shocked and embarrassed by her appearance. In the meantime Hadas appeared, simply dressed, calm and full of gaiety, and introduced us to her parents, kibbutz members who had not yet changed out of their working clothes and were still busy making the final arrangements for the ceremony. “Eyali’s worried that nobody will come,” said Hadas with a merry laugh, “but they will, and some of them will surprise you too,” and then she disappeared from view. A young woman with big light eyes and curly hair came up to ask us if we wanted anything to drink. My parents wanted their afternoon tea and modestly asked for milk with it, if possible, and while I examined the girl’s face and tried to remember where I had seen it before, I asked for a glass of wine, a request applauded by my mother, who immediately exclaimed, “An excellent idea, we’ll join you as soon as we’ve had our tea.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said to Eyal’s mother, keeping my eyes fixed on the young woman as she went to the bar, “but suddenly I feel excited for Eyal.”

“May your turn be next, Benjy.” She smiled at me lovingly. “You won’t escape.”

“No, he won’t escape,” my father promised her and pointed to two big birds gliding over the jagged red outline of the cliff, which had become sharper and clearer as the sun set. He asked the young woman, who had brought our drinks in the meantime, “Could those be hawks?” But by the time she had placed the cups of tea and glass of wine before us and raised her eyes, the birds had disappeared into one of the many crevices whose black holes were distinctly outlined in the setting sun. And then, like a flash of lightning, I recognized her. “Aren’t you Michaela?” I exclaimed in surprise. She nodded her head. “I thought you wouldn’t be able to recognize me.”

“This is the girl,” I said, introducing her happily to my parents, “who was with Einat in Bodhgaya and brought the Lazars the news of her illness.” My parents nodded in acknowledgment, and Michaela smiled at them and as if to confirm my words she put her two slender hands together, raised them to her face, and bowed her head in a gesture of such grace and charm that a sweet pain pierced my heart. The vision of the Lazars’ large living room flickered inside me, sweeping after it a colorful whirl of scenes from India, among which hovered the warm, vivacious smile of the woman I loved. “How long were you in the Far East?” my father asked her. “Eight months,” replied Michaela. “So long?” exclaimed my mother. “That’s nothing,” said Michaela dismissively. “If I hadn’t run out of money, I would have stayed longer. I’m still eaten up with longing.” “What is it about the Far East that the young find so attractive?” my father wondered. She examined him closely, weighing up her answer. “Everyone’s attracted by something different. I was attracted by the different sense of time. I almost became a Buddhist.” She said this seriously, in a way that was impossible not to respect. The three of us were silent, and then she fixed her big light eyes on me, as if her explicit longing had identified my hidden ones, and in a tone of faint rebuke she added, “We were all really surprised that you came back so quickly.”

“All of you?” I was astonished by this sudden use of the plural. “Who’re all of you?”

“Nobody in particular,” she said, retreating, “just other friends who’re as crazy as I am about the Far East and who heard about your story.”

“My story?” I blushed, suddenly anxious. “What story? I don’t understand.” But now she appeared to hesitate, smiling faintly to herself and turning with my parents to look at the two buses that drew up at the entrance to the canyon, depositing in the soft silence the many wedding guests Eyal had feared would not come.

Already someone was calling to Michaela to come and help with the new arrivals, and she apologized to us, again with that graceful, precise Indian gesture, and disappeared among the people spreading slowly over the lawn, bringing with them from the north the first signs of darkness. Later I learned that she too, like Hadas, was connected to the kibbutz without being a member of it. Even though her parents had left the kibbutz when she was little girl, she still came back sometimes to work as a hired laborer in seasonal jobs, or as a waitress and kitchen-worker at weddings and other functions. I was still disturbed by what she had said and tried at first to keep an eye on her movements, but my attention was soon claimed by forgotten friends from high school and medical school, and also by a couple of well-known professors from Hadassah Hospital, whom Eyal had succeeded in enticing to come to his wedding and on whom he was now dancing attention, to compensate for the rigors of the journey. Eyal seemed calmer, and the sly twinkle had returned to his eyes. He had agreed to holding the wedding on the kibbutz not only to save money but also because of his plans — unrealistic, in my opinion — to leave the hospital one day and come to live in the Arava, to practice a more “meaningful” kind of medicine and also to enjoy the peace and quiet of the place. And indeed, the wedding was unusually quiet. My parents, who were now sipping the wine Michaela had brought them with evident enjoyment, noticed this and remarked on it to me. There was none of the usual noisy music, only the soft strumming of the guitarist, who had already turned into a dark silhouette on the diving board. Nor were there any spoiled, greedy children running around and making a racket. Eyal’s mother had no family left and his father’s relations had cut off contact with her after her husband’s suicide, so most of the guests were members of the kibbutz or friends of the couple, young people, some of who were still single. The young doctors from Hadassah were on their best behavior under the scrutiny of their professors. The only child there, a boy from Jerusalem, sat quietly between his mother and father. He was Amnon’s thirteen-year-old retarded brother, and his parents, like mine, had been invited to the wedding because Eyal had spent a lot of time in their house after his father’s death as well, and he was not the man to forget those who had been good to him in the past. Both my parents and Amnon’s seemed pleased to have been invited to this desert wedding and delighted at their meeting. After telling each other a little about themselves and reminiscing about the forgotten exploits of our childhood, my father tried to find out where Amnon stood in regard to his doctoral thesis, and to my astonishment I saw my mother, who was always careful not to touch my father in public, reach out and squeeze his thigh in the dark, for with her sharp intuition she had already sensed that Amnon’s Ph.D. was stuck far deeper than either he or his parents admitted, and she didn’t want to be the cause of any embarrassment.

My father took the hint and immediately cut short his questions, just as Michaela came up with a large tray and offered us warm pies that smelled of meat. It appeared that the protocol was to serve the main meal before the marriage, so that hunger would not prevent the guests from concentrating on the ceremony itself, which was taken seriously here, and conducted in an original style by two Reform rabbis, one male and one female, who came especially from the settlement of Yahel, near Eilat. I was eager to go on talking to Michaela, to retire with her to some remote corner in order to find out exactly what she had meant by referring to “my story.” Her passionate longing for India, which she had confessed to us, and her intention to return there as soon as she could, also made me want to refresh my own fading memories with her living ones. And without even finishing my pie, which was surprisingly tasty, I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder before she was swallowed up by the crowd of young kibbutzniks, Hadas’s friends, who had just turned up, clean and fresh from the shower after their day’s work. “Excuse me, Michaela,” I said, deliberately addressing her by name, “could I talk to you sometime this evening?” She blushed, as if my weak hold on her shoulder implied some intimacy of which I myself was not yet aware. “Talk? Why not?” she said. “But when?” I pressed her. “When will you be free?” She looked straight at me with her large eyes. “I’m free already,” she replied seriously, unsmiling. “Just let me take the tray back.” And she went to the buffet to return the tray. And the great relief I felt at her response suddenly gave rise, as I stood there surrounded by Eyal’s guests, forgotten childhood friends, to an idea that at first seemed astonishing and reckless but was also thrilling and compelling. If I really had to get married in order to be considered less of a danger in the eyes of the woman I had fallen in love with, maybe a “Buddhist” girl like this one, gentle and flowing, who drifted free as a bird and full of spiritual longings from place to place, would be ideal for me.

She took off her little apron and hung it on the back of a chair, and said with a pleasant smile, “I’m all yours.”

“Then let’s find somewhere quieter,” I said, trying to hint that I wanted to talk to her about something special. She wasn’t surprised by my request, even though the lawn was far from noisy, with people standing and talking quietly, going up to the buffet from time to time to cut themselves additional slices of the delicious pies. At first she led me toward the kibbutz houses, but suddenly she stopped, as if she had thought of a better idea, and retraced her footsteps to the little canyon, where she turned without a word toward the dark side of the cliff, on a mountain path clearly visible between the chalky rocks, yellow in the light of the distant lamps. “Come,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “If you don’t mind climbing a little, we can sit quietly and look down on everybody at the same time, so that we can see when the ceremony begins.” She wasn’t beautiful in my eyes, but very charming and pleasant. Her slim body was too tall and bony for my taste, and her little face seemed too small for her huge eyes, which shone in the light of the rising moon like two blue lamps. I climbed up after her in silence, surprised by her sudden decision to take me up this rocky, winding mountain path which ascended sharply in the utterly deserted landscape where from time to time we heard the rustle of birds startled from their nests and the beating of wings. “Are Buddhists allowed to marry?” The idiotic question burst out accompanied by a light laugh. “They’re allowed everything,” she replied at once, not surprised by my question. “Buddhism isn’t another vicious religion looking for ways to oppress people and frighten them, but a means of alleviating inevitable suffering.” She spoke seriously, and the expression “inevitable suffering” came out of her mouth sincerely and convincingly, evoking a wave of affection and sympathy for her in my heart. “It’s a pity you couldn’t have stayed for a few more days at least in the temples of Bodhgaya,” she went on. “There you would have understood for yourself what I could never succeed in explaining to you.” And once more I heard in her words a rebuke at my failure to take proper advantage of my unexpected mission to India. “But how could I have stayed there?” I justified myself to her as if I were really to blame. “Mr. Lazar was in such a hurry to get back, and I couldn’t leave Einat, who was in bad shape.”

“Yes, she was in bad shape,” she agreed gently, “and if not for you she wouldn’t have made it back home.” The path now turned sharply back on itself, and suddenly we were standing as if suspended in the air above the glittering blue rectangle of the swimming pool surrounded by the wedding guests. We were actually quite close to them, but completely hidden and secluded, absorbed in the story Michaela had called mine but which was actually Einat’s, and which I had no need to draw out of her, for it flowed from her with the same simplicity and directness with which she spoke about everything, making me feel pleasantly calm and relaxed after months of inner conflict and tension.

She had met Einat with two other Israelis in the street in Calcutta, when Einat, still stunned by the sights, was at the beginning of her trip. Michaela, in contrast, was already an old India hand, after traveling extensively in central India and spending three months in Calcutta, where she had joined volunteer French and Swiss doctors offering free medical services at improvised sidewalk clinics. She had helped these “sidewalk doctors,” as they called themselves, in return for two meals a day and a place to sleep. This was how she had met Einat, on the sidewalk, when Einat came to ask for a dressing for a wound on her leg. Michaela had immediately sensed that Einat was in need of her help, that she was very frightened and upset by her encounter with Calcutta, and perhaps even regretted coming to India. But she also realized that Einat’s panic was something that she shared with all those who sensed that beyond the poverty and ugliness there was a spiritual power that could suck them in, especially those whose sense of identity was tenuous, who felt unable to achieve their ambitions, and who were always quick to look for a way of escape. And indeed, Einat soon persuaded her two friends to escape from Calcutta and go to Nepal in order to immerse themselves in the glorious scenery of the Himalayas. But after two weeks, to Michaela’s astonishment, Einat returned to Calcutta alone and came to look for her. That was how their friendship began. At first Einat worked with Michaela in the service of the “sidewalk doctors,” but she soon abandoned the work and joined some other young people who were traveling to Bodhgaya to take the course on Vipassana meditation, not because she was really interested in Buddhism but because she was one of those people who are more interested in escaping than in seeking. “And you?” I asked Michaela sharply. “Me?” She reflected for a while, trying to answer honestly. “I think that I’m actually more of a seeker than an escapist, but I may be wrong.”

Now I caught sight of my parents. They were standing and talking to the professors from Jerusalem, glancing around from time to time, presumably looking for me. Amnon stood not far from them, gesticulating excitedly as he spoke to two girls we had known in high school, while his little brother lay on the lawn trying to dismantle a sprinkler. Eyal and Hadas were nowhere to be seen; they were probably getting ready for the ceremony. But Eyal’s mother was still sitting where we had found her when we arrived, frozen like a spectacular white statue, a plate of food lying untouched in front of her. Every now and then she raised her eyes to the little crevice where we were sitting, as if she had noticed something. Suddenly low singing rose from a corner of the lawn, where a small group of men and women from the kibbutz were standing holding sheets of music in their hands. “They’re beginning,” said Michaela. “Should we go down?”

“No, why?” I said unwillingly. “If you don’t mind, we can stay and watch the wedding from up here. I’m impatient to hear the rest of your story, especially the part where I come into it. Before you said that Einat was running away, but what from, exactly?”

“What from?” Michaela was surprised at the question. “First of all, from her parents, but maybe from other things too.”

“From her parents?” I repeated in mock surprise, full of curiosity and excitement, hoping to hear something I didn’t know about Lazar and his wife. “In what sense?”

“You should know in what sense,” she broke in quickly. “You spent two weeks in their pockets, didn’t you?”

“You could say so,” I replied calmly, determined to draw her into an attack on them so that I could defend both the woman I loved and her husband. “But they seemed a very nice couple to me, perhaps a little too attached to one another, in an exaggerated, even pathetic way — the wife, for instance, can hardly bear to be separated from her husband, to be on her own even for a little while. But that’s all.”

“That may be all for you,” said Michaela with inexplicable anger, “but it’s evidently too much for someone who has to live with them, like Einat, and be suffocated by that insane symbiosis of theirs. Sometimes I think that if they hadn’t taken you with them to India, they wouldn’t have succeeded in bringing her back alive. She would have died in their arms on the way back home.”

“Died in their arms?” I repeated this dramatic phrase in astonishment, wondering at the profound, if unclear, antagonism toward Lazar and his wife in her words. “You’re exaggerating, Michaela. It isn’t so easy to die, you know.”

The singing below increased in volume, and the simple but unfamiliar tunes became richer and more complex. Two couples dressed in light blue outfits approached the center of the lawn, carrying the chuppah. They inserted the poles into the sockets prepared for them and unfurled the large, richly embroidered canopy, which was big enough for a number of couples to stand beneath at once. After it had been erected, the little choir rose and approached it, singing loudly, as if to encourage the couple, who were embarking on a daring and courageous enterprise, with their optimistic song. And then, from either side of the lawn, the two rabbis appeared, wrapped in prayer shawls; they bowed slightly, with a certain irony, to each other, and they too entered the canopy, while a pretty young girl stepped onto the diving board, walked to the edge, and with a regal gesture invited Eyal and Hadas to come forward and get married.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be pretty ridiculous,” I said to Michaela. “Why?” she protested. “I’ve seen this ceremony before; it always strikes me as beautiful and genuine. If I ever got married, this is how I’d like to do it.” And she went very red, as if alarmed by the words that had slipped out of her mouth. But it was precisely this delicate and sudden blush, which was incompatible with the logical and even somewhat dry tone she had adopted up to now, that touched my heart, and I couldn’t resist reaching out and letting my hand rest gently on her curls. “Tell me,” I said, “the first time I saw you, at the Lazars’, just after you came back from India, your hair was completely shaved — for a minute I even thought you were a boy. So how did your hair grow so quickly?” I saw that she made no attempt to free her head but instead kept it very still, as if to wait and see what the intentions of the hand resting on it were. “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “Apparently it doesn’t know how to do anything else. But look — see how they’re leading Eyal.” And he was really being led, dressed all in white, by two escorts, who were gripping him firmly on either side as he glided between them. One of them was Hadas’s father, and the other, to my surprise, was Professor Shalev, the head of pediatrics at Hadassah, whom Eyal had chosen to fill the place of his father. How clever and cunning of him, I thought to myself after the three of them disappeared under the canopy. Making his boss feel emotionally responsible for him certainly won’t do him any harm when his permanent position comes up for discussion. From the other side of the lawn, escorted by her mother and a woman who was a stranger to me, Hadas approached, walking with a gliding motion in her floor-length white bridal gown. Eyal’s mother apparently didn’t have the strength or the will to lead her daughter-in-law into the canopy, and was still sitting in the same place, pensive, set apart from everyone else, raising her eyes in our direction from time to time as if she really were watching us. And then all of a sudden the lights went out, and someone asked the wedding guests to stand up. Two strong beams of light were shone onto the canopy, brilliantly illuminating the rich colors and shapes of its embroidery. The water in the swimming pool, which had been swallowed up in the darkness, began to glimmer. A profound silence descended, in which it was possible to hear the beating wings of the night birds wheeling in the canyon above us.

“Now we won’t see anything from here,” whispered Michaela in disappointment, and leaned forward in an attempt to see what was happening under the radiant canopy spread out beneath us. Through the opening of her white blouse I caught a glimpse of small, strong breasts projecting freely from her long, lean body. I thought of my parents standing down there with the rest of the guests, enjoying the ceremony but perhaps asking themselves when it would be their turn to lead me under the chuppah. At this moment I wanted to grant their wish and be swallowed up, like Eyal, under a bright canopy like this one, to stand opposite a young woman and listen to the kind of thing now being said by the pair of invisible young rabbis, whose warm words of encouragement rose into the silence of the night. “Actually, I think it’s nicer to watch from up here,” I whispered to Michaela, who had given up on seeing what was going on under the canopy and was sitting by herself, clasping her knees to her chest. “I wanted to see them both from close up” she said, without annoyance but with an acceptance that apparently stemmed not only from her Buddhism, but also from a basic attitude of cool, clear-sighted serenity, which, I suddenly felt, might not only accommodate the strange love in which I was trapped but also appease its pain. “I’m sorry if I’ve kept you up here,” I apologized, in the polite British way to which I was accustomed at home, “but we still haven’t reached the end of the story you promised to tell me. What, if anything, did Einat tell you about me?” A faint smile crossed Michaela’s lips, very different from the one that had captured my heart, not in the least automatic, not brimming over in all directions, but very skeptical, and at the same time kind. And while the marriage ceremony below us reached its climax, she told me that Einat had known nothing about her parents’ plan to descend on her in India and take her home. Someone who had arrived in Calcutta from Bodhgaya had told Michaela about a young Israeli woman lying in the Thai monastery there, very ill with hepatitis. Michaela recognized Einat from the description, and since she assumed that Einat had been infected by one of the people treated in the sidewalk clinic while she was working in Calcutta, she felt morally responsible and went down to Bodhgaya herself to look after her. When she found Einat lying there in her dark little room, yellow and despairing, suffering and scratching, she decided that her parents should be informed so they would come themselves or send someone to get her, but Einat refused to give her the address, as if she wanted to sink even deeper into her illness and wallow in it, perhaps because she was sure that in the end she would get over it by herself. But Michaela was afraid that if she left her there, her condition might deteriorate; she had already noticed her friend’s hidden desire to flirt with death in Calcutta, and therefore, in spite of her belief that everyone was responsible for his own fate, she decided to move up her own departure from India and insisted on getting a letter from Einat to her parents. As soon as she arrived home she hurried to the Lazars’ apartment in Tel Aviv to warn them about their daughter’s condition. But when Einat saw her parents walking into her little room two weeks later, she was not only astonished at the fact that they had made the long, difficult journey for her sake, but also dismayed, since she had no doubt that they would not agree to stay there quietly and look after her till she recovered but would insist instead on dragging her back to Israel with them. Apparently, when she saw a strange young doctor coming in behind them, who dispensed with asking all kinds of irritating questions and knelt down silently beside her to examine her, slowly and thoroughly, her spirits rose, because she immediately felt that she could trust herself to his hands.

“Yes, and so she could!” This sentence may have sounded arrogant, but genuine emotion gripped me as I remembered the dark alcove, the sleeping bag crumpled in the corner, and the two astounded Japanese girls crouching over their little gas burner. “And did she by any chance tell you too about the blood transfusion I gave her in Varanasi?” I asked Michaela eagerly, for there was something in the way she spoke which made me hope that by means of her story I might be able to dispel the mist that still clung not only to my actions but also to my character during the trip to India. “Of course, she told me all about it,” said Michaela. “She claims you saved her life.” I was very moved. I wanted to keep quiet and let these wonderful words sink slowly into my soul, but I couldn’t control myself, and I asked her hesitantly, “And you? How does it seem to you? Like the truth or like an illusion?” She wasn’t surprised by my strange question. A faint smile wrinkled her face, which wasn’t in the least beautiful, but whose great, shining eyes held out a promise of something that was stronger than beauty. “I think you really did save her,” she replied simply, unhesitatingly, and generously, and then I couldn’t control myself any longer, and in great excitement I leaned over and took her in my arms, embracing her warmly with those same hands that Einat had found so trustworthy, careful however not to speak a word of love, in order not to desecrate the true love I bore for that other woman. I contented myself with saying sincerely, “I like you. I like you very, very much,” and taking her curly head between my hands I carefully placed my lips on her eyes. But she, with a movement whose naturalness belied a lot of experience, slid her lips up to mine and drew a real, prolonged kiss out of me, while below us the singing died down, the lawn was flooded with light again, and cries of “Mazel tov!” greeted the couple emerging from under the canopy.

Now we had to hurry back. But the kiss that had taken place between us seemed to have glued us to each other, and we had hardly begun to descend the path winding down the dark side of the rock when Michaela stopped and invited me into a kind of little alcove or cave. And in the bitter-herb smell of the dry desert soil I encountered no difficulties in removing her white blouse and exposing to the cold moonlight her two little breasts, which I rubbed my face between, not only to feel their comforting softness but perhaps also to smell what remained of the strong Indianness buried inside her. But I immediately realized that her rich experience of men, and the steady honesty of her way of thinking, would not allow me to be content with a dreamy head buried between cool breasts, for her long, rather hard legs were already coiled around my body in a tight grip, pushing me gently onto the dry ground and demanding what a man is expected to provide once he begins rubbing his head between a woman’s breasts. So we began to make love, quickly, without great passion but also without suffering or embarrassment, without the words of love which belonged to someone else, with a tenderness and generosity which ensured that we would both enjoy ourselves and also come, quickly and together, and of course silently, for she knew as well as I did that not only my parents but many friends, both hers and mine, were within hearing distance.

“Do you believe in the reincarnation of souls?” I suddenly asked her softly when she had finished putting on her clothes and brushing the dry grass off her hair and turned in the dark toward the path to return me to my parents. She stopped immediately, as surprised as I had hoped she would be. “The reincarnation of souls?” She fixed me with her big eyes, in which a new glint of rebuke had appeared. “I wouldn’t have expected you to talk like that.”

“Why not?” I asked curiously.

“Because I would have thought a doctor would know.”

“Know what?” I asked in confusion.

“That there’s no such thing as a soul,” she answered quickly.

“There’s no such thing as a soul?” I was amused but also a little alarmed by the vehemence of her words.

“Of course not,” she said with a new note of impatience in her voice. “The soul is only a figment of the imagination of people who need the idea of having something permanent and unchanging inside themselves, which they have to worry about and keep on stroking and petting.” There was something delightful and captivating now in her annoyance, and I therefore kept on at her as we went down the path. “So what is reincarnated then, if it isn’t the soul? Isn’t there anything that passes from one person to another?” She was silent for a moment, examining me to see if I was mocking her or speaking seriously, and then she started explaining that what was reincarnated was only a bundle of inclinations and aptitudes which underwent constant changes, for human beings weren’t permanent, they were just chains of events that repeated themselves, because the energy they used, the energy that was necessary for any material or spiritual action, was not consumed but released at the end of these actions, and then reused. And thus actions or events which had taken place in the past returned in a different guise. Something new in her personality, attractive but also somewhat dogmatic, was revealed to me in the way she delivered her opinions to the accompaniment of strong, decisive gestures. She was so carried away that she paid no attention when we entered the illuminated area, and the guests standing around with little cups of aromatic coffee and glasses of wine eyed us speculatively as we stepped onto the lawn together, probably wondering where we had been secluding ourselves during the wedding ceremony. We parted without a word, by mutual consent, and went off in different directions to mingle with our friends. And suddenly Eyal was in front of me in his white wedding clothes, and I embraced him emotionally. “But where did you disappear to?” he asked in an aggrieved tone. “Michaela took me up the cliff to watch the ceremony from above,” I informed him. The sly smile glinted in his eyes again, as if he already knew exactly what had been going on above his head during his wedding ceremony. “So she caught you in the end.”

“Caught me?” I said in a puzzled tone. But Eyal persisted. “She asked Hadas a week ago if you were coming to the wedding, and she only decided to come herself when we promised her that you would be here.” I was amazed by this news and eager to get more details out of him, but my parents had already noticed me and they now came hurrying up, afraid that I would disappear again. “Where have you been?” asked my father, his cheeks very flushed from the wine. I told them that I had been watching the wedding ceremony from the edge of the cliff with Michaela. My mother stood there silently, her eyes flickering over my face. Can she really tell from the expression on my face, I wondered, what I’ve just been doing with Michaela? “The ceremony was very nice,” I said. “At first I was afraid it was going to be ridiculous, but in the end it was even moving.” They both confirmed my feelings. They were very pleased that they had traveled down to the heart of the desert. It would give them something to talk about for years to come. But they were also eager to get started. Although it was only nine o’clock, the journey to the Dead Sea was liable to take more than an hour and a half, and they were accustomed to going to bed at ten. I went to call Amnon, who was supposed to be coming with us. At first it was difficult to pry him away from the excited conversations he was still busy conducting with old friends, but in the end he agreed to come. We began saying our good-byes, and I of course went to look for Michaela. For a moment I thought she had disappeared, but I soon caught sight of her, sitting at a table by herself and eating hungrily.

Should I tell her before we left, I wondered as I watched her gulping wine from a big glass, not to dismiss the soul so lightly, or should I leave this adolescent argument open till our next meeting? That there would be one, I had no doubt. This girl possessed certain qualities that suited me to the core. Not only the easygoing, carefree lightness she radiated, but also that air of self-containment, the way she had held back, even though she was expecting me, and waited for me to come to her. Yes, I definitely liked her, I thought to myself; even the way she sat alone, eating so heartily, pleased me. She could be the perfect mate for me, precisely because I didn’t want to and couldn’t fall in love with her, since I was still in love with the woman I had successfully turned into my landlady. This being the case, why should I argue with her and try to persuade her of the existence of the soul, when her view of the world would lead her to give me the freedom I wanted — a free marriage, to banish my landlady’s fears that I would overwhelm her with my lust? I went up to say good-bye to her. She did not seem embarrassed, but just the opposite: she looked straight into my face. “You must be hungry too,” she said with a smile, and pointed to the brimming plate in front of her. “Yes, I’m hungry, but my parents are in a hurry to leave.” And suddenly I couldn’t resist adding, “But as far as the soul is concerned, the argument isn’t over yet. Because, you know, I’m on the other side of the operating table now. Not a surgeon anymore, but an anesthetist. And to be an anesthetist you have to believe in the possibility of freeing the soul from the body and bringing it safely back again.”

“So you’ve turned into an anesthetist?” she asked calmly, taking a big sip of her wine and trying to grasp the significance of the change, since the world of medicine was not completely strange to her after three months with the sidewalk doctors of Calcutta. “Yes,” I replied, and again I couldn’t resist adding a phrase I thought would please her, “putting those who’ve never been awake to sleep.” She registered the message and smiled a somewhat suspicious, bitter little smile, very unlike the wholehearted, generous one that had already captured my heart. We exchanged telephone numbers and arranged to get in touch at the end of the week in Tel Aviv. When I said good-bye to her, I saw my mother standing a little way off and watching us.

Before we set out I decided to offer a little ride to Amnon’s retarded brother, who was standing and looking at the Honda with an admiring expression on his face. I put my helmet on his head and rode slowly between the houses of the kibbutz. He was very excited and frightened, and held on to me tightly from behind. His parents thanked me warmly. When we left the illuminated area of the kibbutz for the Arava road, we realized how much light was pouring from the moon, which had risen an hour before from the direction of the Jordan River, enabling us to get up to a good speed on the ruler-straight road. After thirty minutes we had already reached the Arava junction, and after another twenty we passed the white potash works of Sodom, where we slowed down a little on the winding road next to the Dead Sea, not just to enjoy the magnificent contours of the mountains of Edom in the bright moonlight but mainly in order not to miss my parents’ hotel, which turned out to be a new, recently opened place set a little apart from the others. It was a quarter past ten when Amnon succeeded in making out the little signpost directing us onto a dirt road, and we found the hotel in darkness. Since my parents had notified the hotel that they would be arriving late, the reception clerk was not surprised to see them, although he was somewhat startled at the sight of the black-helmeted motorcyclist carrying their luggage. “Perhaps we can find a room for you and Amnon to spend the night here,” my mother suggested. Amnon received this proposal gladly. He was worn out after the tiring day, which had come directly on top of his night job, and he liked the idea of spending the whole night going over his experiences at the wedding with me. But I refused. I was impatient to get back to my apartment and be by myself, to digest everything that had happened and to think about Michaela and the role she might play in my life. “Don’t worry,” I said to my parents, “it’s a very clear night, and the Honda’s running perfectly. The two of us will take care of each other,” a beloved phrase of my father’s which I always added when I went out at night with a friend. We had black coffee in the hotel lobby, and I bought a small bar of chocolate from one of the vending machines to appease my gnawing hunger. I took a spare helmet out of the black box at the back of the motorcycle for Amnon, and we started off. Meanwhile the moon had disappeared on its westward wanderings, and the sky was now full of an astonishing abundance of stars. The coastal road leading to the Jericho junction was completely deserted, and we could ride right down the middle, as if it were our private road. From the way that Amnon was clutching my waist I could sense his alarm as I kept gaining speed, but after a while he began to relax and lifted his head up to enjoy the journey. The rocky mass of Masada soon appeared on our left, looking in the stillness of the night like an ancient aircraft carrier which had risen from the depths of the sea. A few minutes later the lights on the fence of Kibbutz Ein Geddi appeared, and the buildings of the field school above the creek of Arugoth. The road began climbing steeply to the top of the cliff, and it was all I could do to restrain the motorcycle from flying off it in my enthusiasm at the sight of the steely expanse of the Dead Sea spread out below us. And then came the descent to the shores of the sea, as we coasted past Mizpeh Shalem to a stretch of straight, level road where the motorcycle could easily hit ninety miles an hour. We didn’t even notice the turnoff to the Ein Feshka hot springs, and if not for the curve in the road after the Qumran caves we might have raced past them too without even noticing their existence. Only the imposing silhouette of the abandoned old hotel looming up on the Kalya shore told us that we were about to take our leave of the lowest place in the world. And then the Almagor junction was upon us, its green signs pointing us to the west, to the mild ascent leading to the city of our common childhood, Jerusalem.

“But when are we going to get a chance to discuss your astrophysical theory, Benjy?” Amnon yelled despairingly into my ear, realizing that at the speed I was going he would soon find himself on the sidewalk outside his house in Tel Aviv, before he had had a chance to rescue me from my ridiculous mistakes about A Brief History of Time. “You’re right,” I shouted back. “I thought we could go and sit in the Atara or some other café in downtown Jerusalem, but perhaps it’s already too late for that — Jerusalem’s not Tel Aviv. So why don’t I just stop somewhere along the road? Maybe the open sky will help me to explain my ideas.” And after Mitzpeh Jericho, in a place called the Mishor Adumim, I left the main road and drove up a short dirt track leading to something halfway between a tree and a bush stuck on top of a little hill, over which the heavens were spread out like a brilliant canopy, infinite but also intimate, gathering even the distant spires of Jerusalem into its folds. I took off my helmet and prepared to expound to my friend in the stillness of the night the theory that had been elaborating itself in my brain over the past few weeks. But first I had to warn him not to interrupt me, however strange my words might sound to him, for new ideas always seemed ridiculous at first. He snickered to himself and sat down on the ground. For some reason he didn’t take off his helmet, and he looked like an absentminded space traveler who had arrived here from some other planet. There was a rustle in the branches of the tree next to us, apparently made by birds we had startled from their sleep.

“Hawking himself admits,” I began, “that he has two unsolved problems, the problem of the beginning and the problem of the end, which are of course not separate from each other. The first problem is connected to Guth’s theory about the inflationary expansion, during which the universe expanded at a rapidly increasing rate in the first split seconds after the big bang. And the second problem is what’s going to happen to the universe in the end. Hawking denies the possibility that the universe will go on slowly expanding forever, since the force of gravity, which I was surprised to read is the weakest of all the forces of nature, but which is also strong because it has no antithesis, will increase in the expanding universe until the gravity and the expansion balance each other and the universe stops expanding. But in this case we have to ask, where’s the symmetry between the dramatic, mysterious, incomprehensible beginning of the big bang, which from a point of zero size but also of infinite density, gave birth to this whole tremendous universe — between that and what will remain in the end, a kind of static universe without any movement, in which a perfect and absolute balance between gravity and expansion will pertain? What’s the connection between the beginning and the end? This is what I ask myself. Are you with me?” He nodded hesitantly. Presumably he was already dying to correct me, but he restrained himself. “It simply doesn’t make sense for there to be a beginning that has no identity or connection with the end. Because that would mean that there was a beginning to time and there was some intention in this beginning, and they’ll still say there’s a God too, which Hawking categorically denies. And in the last chapter he says that we have to assume that just as the universe began with a big bang, it will end in a big crunch, with complete contraction and collapse, and then there’ll be a connection between the beginning and the end, which will turn into the beginning again, for this is the only conceivable cycle.” A worried, suspicious expression now appeared on Amnon’s face, as if he felt that his friend was beginning to say things that were completely illogical, and even childish. But I hurried on, to forestall him until I came to my main point. “In brief, what I want you to think about, because it’s possible that there a lot of things I don’t understand here, is that the shrinking of the universe will not take place according to the physical laws of expansion and gravity, which Hawking and the others have a problem with, but will be accomplished by the human spirit, because spirit isn’t something alien to the universe. Even the first minute particle, which possessed zero volume but infinite density, and from which the big bang began — you yourselves say that not only all the material possibilities we see before us were inherent in it, but also all the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In short everything, including ourselves as biological entities, and of course our thoughts too, and our feelings, in other words the whole human spirit, was inherent in that point of departure. And therefore it’s this spirit which will shrink the universe back to the original starting point, which was, in the last resort, what? If Hawking himself says that it was like a particle whose volume was zero but whose density was infinite, what’s that? Matter? No, only spirit, or what I call spirit.”

“I don’t understand exactly what you mean by spirit,” Amnon began to stammer. “You know very well what I mean, and don’t start splitting hairs with me now,” I said angrily. “Spirit. Thought. What we’re doing now. What you do in your lab, what you do at your desk. Searching for the law, for the principle behind things. Take this motorcycle — it’s built of matter but it has a spirit too, which succeeds in raising this piece of iron from its place and making it race over the road in opposition to the laws of gravity and moving it from place to place in opposition to the laws of distance. And so on and so forth. Nuclear power too, which can explode something and turn it into nothing, into pure energy. And one day we’ll have the power to explode a star, or bring it closer, or to destroy an entire galaxy. To make human beings smaller, scale them down into a more compact, more durable model, maybe change a few parts — a tiny transistor instead of a heart to supervise the circulation of the blood, and maybe one day in the future we’ll be able to get rid of that too and leave only the brain, and reduce even that to a kind of computer chip which will carry out all its functions, and later on do away with individual distinctions, because there’s no need for so many people. A human principle is enough, with everybody’s thoughts connected to one pool, and so matter will gradually shrink until it turns into spirit — in other words, until it turns the entire universe into the point from which it all began, where density was infinite and the space-time curve was infinite, which is an attribute not of matter but of spirit. Doesn’t that sound simple to you?” Amnon finally removed his helmet and began to scratch his curly head. He seemed to have lost touch with what I was saying, which probably sounded like a lot of literary hot air to him. “What you say may be interesting, it may even be possible,” he said tactfully, but without any real enthusiasm, obviously disappointed in my words, which he did not even consider worth arguing with. “But believe me, Benjy, it’s not relevant to anything said by Hawking or the others. What you’re saying is mysticism, and the fact that you’re a good doctor makes no difference. I’ve always said that medicine isn’t a science.” And suddenly my enthusiasm for my ideas, and for the debate about them, disappeared. “You may be right,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t matter.” And after a pause I added, “It was a nice wedding. I usually hate weddings, but this one was so quiet and pleasant, I wouldn’t mind getting married there myself.” Then I felt an urge to confess to him, to share something of my life with him in exchange for the disappointment I had caused him with my childish theory. “And maybe I really will get married soon,” I added. “You hear me, Amnon? Seriously. I’m warning you, I may get married very soon, and you may have to come down to the Arava again for my wedding.” He sat on the ground, tired, his head bowed, without looking at me or taking what I said too seriously, his eyes fixed on a big black crow that had suddenly appeared among the branches of the tree, where it sat with its head cocked, staring at us so intently with its black eyes that it was impossible to tell if it was afraid of us or, on the contrary, was about to dart down and attack us.