Open Heart

Eleven

But I didn’t get married in the Arava. My wedding took place in a small hall in the middle of downtown Jerusalem. In spite of the pleasant memory of the kibbutz wedding, my parents could see no logical reason for dragging their guests, some of whom came from England especially for the ceremony, to a kibbutz in the middle of the desert. Michaela’s parents, who were separated and who had left the kibbutz many years before, did not have the same emotional ties to their old home as Michaela did, and since they were unable to share the expense of the wedding, they gave my parents a free hand to choose the site as they saw fit. In fact, they seemed somewhat indifferent to their daughter’s wedding, for even though Michaela was not as young as I had imagined — she was just a few months older than I was — her parents were not upset by her remaining single, either because they thought that a girl as independent as Michaela did not need a husband to look after her, or because they believed that the moment she decided to marry she would have no problem finding a candidate. Accordingly, when I was presented to them, separately, as their future son-in-law, I was disappointed to see that they both accepted me very naturally and were not in the least impressed by the fact that the man standing before them was a certified physician with a secure future ahead of him, as if their Michaela could go up to anyone she liked and command him, Marry me! Although in this case it was the other way around: I had asked Michaela to marry me, and she had not refused, perhaps in accordance with the gentle Buddhist philosophy that we were not two souls entering into an eternal bond but only two flowing rivers, each secure in the depth and independence of its own current, and would not be endangered if our waters intermingled slightly.

This was how Michaela explained her consent to my proposal of marriage, a proposal that was made even before I had anticipated making it. Although I got in touch with her two days after Eyal’s wedding, I had no idea that things would happen so fast. Perhaps because I wasn’t in love with her but felt only a deep affection and esteem for her, everything took place that much more quickly. Only three months after Eyal’s wedding, to be exact, I too was standing under the chuppah, with Eyal, Hadas, and Amnon looking on in astonishment or perhaps amusement at the young, ultra-Orthodox rabbi who had been sent by the local rabbinate to sanctify our marriage, and who did so at great length and with exceptional thoroughness, as if to overcome some vague, nagging doubt regarding the nature of the union before him. But of course he couldn’t have known that Michaela was three months pregnant, because I didn’t know it myself until the day after the wedding, when she told me that she was carrying our child in her womb and asked me simply what I wanted — to keep the baby or abort it? Even though I thought I had come to know Michaela in the months before the wedding, I was surprised by this concealment, in spite of the logical and moral grounds she gave for it. Michaela wanted our decision to get married to be taken in complete freedom, untainted by any calculations. “And if I hadn’t been in such a hurry, or if I hadn’t wanted to get married at all?” I asked my new wife. “What would you have done then?” She thought for a moment and answered honestly, “I would probably have had the baby by myself, because it’s not her fault that I didn’t take any precautions with you that night on the cliff.”

She insisted that this was when it had happened, that she had become pregnant during our first meeting in the Arava — as if it were important to her to create life in the place where she herself had been born and for which she still felt love and nostalgia. Was it only wishful thinking? I think not, for when we made love three days after Eyal’s wedding I made sure that she was taking precautions, and added precautions of my own. Because even if Michaela seemed to me the ideal partner in a marriage which would on the one hand give my mistress the protection she required and on the other hand grant me the freedom to satisfy my lust, I certainly had no intention of trying to trap her into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy, a trick that no longer works for women, let alone for men. But when she told me the day after the wedding about the secret buried inside her and explained her reasons for concealing it from me, I realized again that I had not been mistaken in my choice, even though I was a little angry with her for endangering the fetus, and perhaps herself too, by riding behind me on the motorcycle, in which she had delighted from the first moment. For Michaela had turned out to be fearless; if she had any hidden fears I had not yet discovered them. On the first Friday night, when I went to pick her up at the rented apartment that she shared with two other people in the south of the city, I saw by the way she strapped the helmet around her chin how delighted she was at the idea of riding on the Honda. She looked cute in the big crash helmet, which emphasized her huge, luminous eyes. She didn’t put her arms around me but crossed them on her chest, and remarked in surprise at how slowly I was driving. When we reached my apartment, she seemed in no hurry to take the helmet off and spent a long time looking at herself in the mirror, enjoying her new reflection, until I was finally forced to take it off myself. The fact that we had already made love relieved me of having to calculate my every move, but our experience was not yet rich enough to enable us to interpret each other’s body language with any kind of precision, with the result that she mistook my struggles to get the helmet off her head as impatience to get her into bed. She responded by hugging my head, closing her eyes, and stroking and kissing me, swaying unsteadily and almost losing her balance, until I had to pick her up and carry her to the bed, which for some reason I still thought of as the granny’s bed, though it was not the only item in the apartment that belonged to her.

I enjoyed our lovemaking less this time, though it lasted longer, and I even remember feeling slightly giddy at one point. The bright light in the bedroom, too, which we left on, was unkind to the boniness of the naked limbs moving restlessly beneath me, in contrast to the soft, pampered white flesh of the plump middle-aged woman who had lain serenely on the same bed not too long before. Michaela also uttered two brief cries when she came, which reminded me of a throttled bird and disturbed me, because I thought I might have hurt her. But in spite of my slight disappointment, my good opinion of her remained unchanged, and after we dressed and sat down to drink coffee and eat the cake I had bought especially for her, I found myself gazing appreciatively again into her big, intensely blue eyes, which radiated belief and trust in her fellow human beings, as long as they didn’t pretend to be what they were not. She began to ask me about my work in the hospital and my new job as an anesthetist in the private hospital in Herzliah. After that she wanted to know if I could identify various exotic diseases she had encountered during her three months on the Calcutta sidewalks. She had an original way of describing the patients and their diseases, mixing descriptions of physical symptoms with penetrating psychological insights of her own in such a lively and vivid way that my living room was soon peopled by the pavement-dwellers of Calcutta in all their colorful misery. As a doctor I was pleased to see that she did not shrink from illness, and this added to her value in my eyes. “It’s a pity you didn’t study medicine,” I said, and she agreed with me. Yes, sometimes she thought she would like to be a doctor, but how could she go to medical school when she hadn’t even graduated from high school?

The information that she had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade gave me a pang, especially since I knew that my mother would soon find out and, along with my father, would be disappointed. I had meant to ask her to come with me on a trip to Jerusalem one day the following week and to introduce her to them. But I made an effort not to show the faintest sign of disappointment or to make any disparaging comments about the fact that she was now working as a waitress in a café in the center of town. Since her return from India she had been having trouble finding her place in the world, perhaps because of the longing that was still gnawing at her, and perhaps also because the return from India had been forced on her. “Forced?” I asked curiously. “Surely you’re not saying that you came back just because you wanted to tell Einat’s parents about her illness?”

“Not only that,” she admitted honestly. She had been down to her last rupee, and she didn’t have the guts to get involved in something that was beneath her dignity. “Like what?” I asked anxiously, but it turned out that all she meant was begging — an occupation that fit the kind of philosophy she had been flirting with in India. I smiled in relief, even though I had no doubt that she had lived with men in the past, a fact betrayed by the lightness of her touch with me, the naturalness of the way she stood up to clear the dirty dishes from the table and wash them in the sink. I didn’t try to stop her; just the opposite. Let her feel like the mistress of the house, I thought, even though she didn’t like my new apartment. She couldn’t understand why a young man like me would want to rent such a gray, respectable apartment, with an entire closet still full of an old woman’s clothes. “Did they reduce the rent at least?” she asked as she stood in front of the sink, with that inexplicable hostility toward the Lazars in her voice again. “Maybe,” I said, and told her what I was paying. The sum seemed high to Michaela, who didn’t think it revealed any special consideration for the man who had served them so faithfully. “But you can see a bit of the sea from here,” I said in praise of the apartment, and described the red ray of light that fell into the sink at sunset. “You’ll always enjoy washing the dishes here,” I said with a smile. “You think I’ll come here especially to wash your dishes?” she said ironically. “Not especially,” I replied quietly, “only when you’re here,” and I brushed her neck with my lips. Her big eyes shone and she closed them for a moment, groping for the marble counter with a cup full of soapsuds in her hand. Again she wound her arms around my head and began kissing me, and by the intensity of her embrace I understood that she wanted to make love again and that she believed it was in my power to give her what she wanted. I did my best not to disappoint her, although this time I refused to go back to the bedroom and get undressed, and insisted on doing it impromptu in the kitchen, which turned out to be big enough to accommodate our lovemaking, but only just, with things clattering around us and at a certain stage in the proceedings the soapy cup falling into the sink and smashing to smithereens. Although I didn’t manage to come myself, I had the satisfaction of seeing Michaela come again, this time without crying out but with a deep sigh. “Do you love me?” I dared to ask her when her eyes opened. She thought for a moment. “Just as much as you love me,” she said in the end, seriously and without smiling; and this was the policy she adopted from then on — measuring and suiting her feelings to mine, that is to say, to my declarations about my feelings, for I was careful from the outset to keep my love for Lazar’s wife a secret from her, afraid that even in the eyes of so liberated and free a spirit as Michaela my infatuation would seem weird, or perhaps even medieval.

After midnight, although an unexpected spring rain had begun to fall, she put the big helmet on her head again and climbed happily onto the motorcycle. She could have stayed the night, of course, but I didn’t suggest it. In spite of my sincere desire to speed things up between us, I preferred, after two consecutive bouts of lovemaking, to spend the night alone in my big bed and put my thoughts in order. When I got back I collected the pieces of the broken cup from the sink and put them into a plastic bag, not because I thought the cup could be mended but because it was part of a set and I didn’t want to throw it away without first getting the landlady’s permission. I got in touch with Michaela the next day even though I knew she worked all day Saturday in the café. I wanted to arrange a couple of dates for the week after, and especially to make a firm date for our trip to Jerusalem together. I was afraid that the longing for India of which she spoke so frequently and the grayness of her life in Tel Aviv might overwhelm her, and she might give in to a sudden impulse to take off for the Far East. If I didn’t want to lose her, I thought, I would have to keep in constant touch. But since I was now working a couple of night shifts a week at the Magen-David-Adom station in the south of the city in addition to the private work in the Herzliah hospital, the possibilities for meeting her were limited. I therefore persuaded her to come to the first-aid station after her work at the café to keep me company, and to accompany me on house visits, which she enjoyed very much, since they reminded her of her days in Calcutta. At first the patients and their families were confused by her appearance as she came in behind me like some visitor from outer space, her helmet tucked under her arm, her great eyes beaming signals from an enchanted world. But since I’d immediately introduce her as a nurse (and sometimes she’d even help me conduct the examinations), they quickly got used to her presence. And she too, to my delight, began to get used to me. “Do you like me?” I would ask, testing her. “Just as much as you like me,” she would answer immediately, an enigmatic smile passing like an imperceptible ripple over her blank face. But she stopped complaining about her longing for India, as if some of it had been absorbed by our relationship, and some by the sheer fact of my work. I had no doubt that she was attracted to the medical side of my identity, and perhaps this was the secret reason why she had been so eager to meet me at Eyal’s wedding. She reminded me of my father in the way she cross-examined me about diseases and symptoms, sometimes even from the back of the motorcycle, in order to understand the vague and tenuous border between sickness and health. And exactly as with my father, she had a pure intellectual curiosity, with no desire to identify personal aches and pains or to draw conclusions about her own body, which seemed sturdy enough, and had preserved the Indian tan I had already noticed on that first brief meeting in the Lazars’ living room, when I had mistaken her for a young boy. In fact, this impression of a slight spiritual affinity between Michaela and my father was reinforced by the common language they found on our very first visit to my parents’ home, just ten days after Eyal’s wedding, which we all still remembered as possessing a spiritual power whose nature we did not really understand.

The visit to my parents was important to me, since I wanted to get a sense of their reaction to Michaela before I made any fateful decisions. If I had known that she was pregnant, however, a fact she was still ignorant of herself, I would certainly not have taken her on the motorcycle but tried to catch one of the last buses to Jerusalem instead. Friday was always the busiest day for surgery in the Herzliah hospital, since on Fridays the surgeons in the big hospitals abandon their public patients to the care of their relatives and take time off for private operations, which sometimes last until after the beginning of the Sabbath. And indeed, by the time I examined the pupils of the last patient and wrapped him in heated sheets to make up for the heat he had lost during surgery, there was nothing left of the waves visible from the windows but faint lines of foam trembling in the dusk. Nevertheless, in spite of how late it was, I had no intention of giving up the visit to Jerusalem, and I called my parents and told them that we would be late and they should not wait for us with dinner — advice they ignored in the hope that we would not be as delayed as I thought, and in fact we left before too long. Michaela was soon ready, and I raced the Honda until it flew over the road, not only because of the lateness of the hour but also because I knew that Michaela delighted in speed and expected me to satisfy her desire. At eight o’clock, with the beginning momentum of the ascent at Sha’ar-Hagai, the road suddenly opened up in front of us, and a full moon rising between the mountains began to sail our way, occasionally dipping behind the cypresses and pines, which gave off a fragrance in the spring air that accompanied us all the way to my parents’ house. My father, listening for the sound of the motorcycle, heard it entering the street and came out onto the steps to meet us. I noticed that he was struck, perhaps even startled, by Michaela’s enormous eyes. But I knew that their blueness, like the color of his own eyes, would have a reassuring effect on him, and indeed, he immediately began to pay careful attention to her, taking her helmet and chivalrously helping her remove her army jacket, and he began chattering vivaciously, this quiet man, as he did so. My mother was more circumspect, examining my face to see what I expected of her on this visit I had imposed on them.

That night, in my old room, Michaela insisted on making love with me — a project that seemed to me not only superfluous but also dangerous, since my mother slept lightly, and presumably her sleep was especially troubled after Michaela’s total candor at dinner about her lack of any steady occupation over the past few years. It appeared that the only thing she had done in recent months with any point or meaning was her work with the sidewalk doctors in Calcutta. And for some reason she also took the first opportunity she found to announce to my parents her failure to graduate from high school, without indicating any ambitions to complete her education in the foreseeable future. Even though she radiated her usual confidence and independence, which did not detract from her gentle good manners, I knew that my mother would be upset by the conversation, and that after my father had fallen asleep she would wander restlessly around the house, and I thought it unfair of Michaela to insist on making love in these inconvenient circumstances when the next night we would have my apartment in Tel Aviv to ourselves. “The wine your father kept on giving me is making me horny,” she apologized, and she began stroking and kissing my stomach. But I stubbornly refused. “Why?” she said in surprise. “I can come without screaming,” she assured me. But I didn’t trust her, because recently she had been screaming and moaning a lot, and although I was already used to it, I didn’t want my mother hearing even a faint, smothered echo of her cries. In her unsatisfied lust Michaela went on tossing and turning in my narrow childhood bed long after I had already fallen asleep, with the result that she was still sound asleep in the morning when I sat down to breakfast with my parents, who expected me now to tell them my intentions, if in fact I had already clarified them to myself. But what could I tell them? I could hardly hint at my true passion for Lazar’s wife, which went on obsessing me even here, in the cool spring air of Jerusalem, with the scent of roses rising from its gardens. I could hardly tell my parents that the marriage I was contemplating with increasing seriousness was also a means of providing the impossible woman who still filled my thoughts with a shield against me.

So, before they had a chance to question me, I asked them to tell me their impressions of Michaela. As I had supposed, my father, who for some reason jumped in to answer first, saw no shortcomings in her, but only her virtues. “She’s fine. She’s just fine. She’ll be a great help to you,” he stated with a confidence unusual for him in such matters. “And she doesn’t seem spoiled either, in spite of her delicacy,” he added, and suddenly blushed. To my surprise, my mother too spoke of her in a positive spirit. “I agree. Perhaps because she’s looking for something that isn’t clear to her, she still hasn’t found her place in the world, and she really is a bit of a drifter. But I’m sure that as soon as she has a baby she’ll settle down and be a good mother.” Strange that my mother should have immediately pounced on something that was still unthinkable to me, even though on that Saturday morning it was already a substantial fact, to the extent that a two-week-old embryo can be called substantial, in the womb of the woman sleeping in the bed where I had passed so many years of my life. Three months later, after our wedding — when I told my parents about the pregnancy and reminded my mother of her words, and exclaimed at her intuition — she dismissed my exclamations at once. “Intuition had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply, “I didn’t suspect anything then,” and there was a note of annoyance in her voice, because even though she may have tried to understand Michaela’s reasons for hiding her pregnancy from me, she could not help feeling that we had behaved irresponsibly toward the baby. “Not only you and your feelings exist in the world. A baby is a human being too.” And it struck me as strange that she too, like Michaela, spoke about a tiny three-month-old fetus as if it were a complete, finished being. Yet the truth is that my mother was right. Michaela really had endangered the fetus by constantly riding behind me on the motorcycle and egging me on to recklessly increase my speed. If she had confided in me as soon as she found out that she was pregnant, a month and a half after we met, I would have forbidden her to ride on the motorcycle, and perhaps even exchanged the bike for a car, which I eventually did.

But until we finally parted from my beloved Honda we spent a lot of time racing around on it, especially after I hinted at my intention to ask her to marry me, and soon. This happened on our return from our second visit to Jerusalem, early on a Saturday morning, in the middle of the journey, at a roadside diner near the airport where we had made it a habit to stop. She was sitting opposite the big mirror behind the counter, her head encased in the black crash helmet, emphasizing the radiance of her eyes and artificially enlarging her face, which even in her own opinion was too small and thin for such big eyes. She was not surprised at my proposal; maybe she had already sensed that she had made a favorable impression on my parents, in spite of her failure to graduate from high school, her lack of a profession, and her obscure longing for the Far East. An inner sense told her that my reasons for wanting to get married were not strictly connected to her and that they were perhaps not even entirely clear to me myself, but the air of mystery and the sense of something ambiguous suddenly emanating from a person as rational as I was only added to my attraction in her eyes. I kissed her on her forehead, feeling the hard helmet between my hands, and I wanted to add the words “I love you,” but I couldn’t get them out of my mouth, and I said something more general: “There’s love between us.” This was really a more correct and appropriate formulation, because this love, although it was for another and impossible woman, was lying between us on the table like a rich and flavorful dish, which she too was entitled to taste. She listened to me attentively, thought for a while, and then said, “If you really want to get married so soon, I’ve got no objections. I feel good with you. Even though I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry — is it suddenly hard for you to be by yourself? But if we get married, it will only be on condition that you don’t prevent me from going back to India for another visit, not too long but not very short either. The best thing would be if you came with me, but if you can’t come with me, promise me that you won’t prevent me from going, and if we already have a child, then you or your parents will take care of her, because otherwise I’ll have to drag her with me to India.” I don’t know why I suddenly felt such a burst of joy that I couldn’t control myself, but I put my face to hers, lightly removed the helmet from her head, and planted a long kiss on and in her mouth, in full view of the few people sitting in the diner at that early Sabbath hour, who looked at us affectionately and encouragingly and seemed relieved that the heavy helmet had been removed at last from the young woman’s head.

After that Michaela added another condition to her first: she wanted a small, modest wedding, with only members of the family present. And it was precisely this simple and natural condition, which I agreed with on principle, that gave rise to problems and complications. When I informed my parents of it, their spirits fell, and at first they sank into a grim silence. After a few days they both, each in their own way, began to voice protests about the restrictions imposed by Michaela. As the parents of an only child, they felt not only entitled but also obligated to hold a big wedding reception to which they could invite all their friends and acquaintances and reciprocate for all the similar invitations they themselves had received over the course of their lives. Furthermore, they felt not only a duty but also a desire to take advantage of my wedding to pressure their English relatives to visit Israel at last. I could not help feeling the justice of their arguments, and I asked Michaela to reconsider, but she suddenly revealed an unexpected streak of stubbornness in a nature that up to now had appeared so free and easy in its Buddhist equanimity. A fierce, almost violent stubbornness. She refused to withdraw her opposition to a big wedding. Weddings in big rented halls revolted her, and she stayed away from the weddings of her best friends if they were held in such places. She didn’t really like going to the quiet, pleasant weddings at Ein Zohar either, because there were always too many people, and she had only gone to Eyal and Hadas’s wedding because she wanted to meet me after hearing about the trip to India from Einat. After I realized that I couldn’t budge her, I tried to convince my parents to be content with a large family party, perhaps at the home of one of our wealthier relatives in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. But my parents were offended by this suggestion and showed no readiness to compromise. I began to act as a kind of messenger between them and Michaela, and I would go and eat supper at the café where she worked before my night shifts, simply to try to persuade her to change her mind. Then my parents asked my permission to try to persuade Michaela themselves, and they traveled down to Tel Aviv to meet her without me especially for this purpose. But she refused to be persuaded, as if all her doubts about the marriage were now focused on the question of whether the wedding would be a big affair or a family occasion. At one point in the discussion she even spoke rudely to my parents, and then burst into tears. My parents were alarmed and gave in. My heart ached to see their misery. They were modest people, not at all ostentatious, and if they were fighting for a big wedding it was only in order to both share and reciprocate the many invitations to family affairs they had received. Even though they knew that most of our English relations would not come, they still wanted to let them know that here in Israel they hadn’t been forgotten, and at the same time to announce in public that the lengthy bachelorhood of their only son had come to an end. But Michaela’s tears upset me too, since she was not at all an emotional type, and if she had burst into tears in front of my parents it meant that something else was troubling her. Perhaps she was having second thoughts about the hasty wedding she suddenly found herself in the middle of, which in the depths of her heart she sensed had hidden, ulterior motives that she could not identify. The mysteriousness surrounding my behavior made me more attractive to her, but it had also begun to confuse her. In spite of her inner freedom and fatalistic view of life, her serenity and confidence were showing cracks. I went and bought a book about Indian religion and philosophy and began to read it, hoping to come closer to her way of thinking and compensate her for my lack of love.

In the meantime my parents’ pleas had an effect, and two days after their meeting she called them on her own initiative and said that she would agree to expand the scope of the wedding, which from now on was defined as “medium-sized,” on condition that she herself approved of the reception hall. Since the hall had to be medium-sized, the selection was not particularly wide, and from the uninspiring possibilities available, Michaela, who was becoming more alienated from me with each passing day, chose a smallish place in an old hotel in the middle of downtown Jerusalem. The entrance to the hotel was ugly, but the hall itself was attractive and well cared for, full of lush green plants, and the hotel owners boasted of their excellent catering. After Michaela had given her approval, we rode back to Tel Aviv on the motorcycle, stopping as usual at our favorite diner near the airport. She was tense, a little sad; this time she immediately removed her helmet, without flirting with her reflection in the big mirror. Even though I didn’t know that she had received the results of her pregnancy test two days before, I could feel her new tension, which came not only from the depressing appearance of the hotel but also from her decision to conceal the fact of her pregnancy from me so that we would be free to cancel the wedding at the last minute if for any reason we chose to do so. Maybe this was what she was hoping for in her unconscious mind, whose workings I tried to follow with interest and concern, feeling that I was conducting my own silent, separate dialogue with it.

The invitations were finally printed, with English facing the Hebrew, and my parents hurried to send a batch of them off to England, to give the family there time to prepare for the trip. Then we sat down to draw up a list of the local guests. My parents kept strictly to their promise to Michaela, careful not to exceed the limits of a medium-sized wedding. I noticed that my mother’s attitude to Michaela had changed as a result of her violent outburst and sudden tears in the Tel Aviv café; she was beginning to treat her with a mixture of apprehension and pity. The problem, of course, was who to exclude from the wedding, and who to invite on the assumption that they would not come. My father prepared three lists of possible guests. First, they asked me for the names of people I thought were “essential.” I wrote down Eyal and Hadas, Eyal’s mother, Amnon without his parents, two good friends from my army days, and two more from medical school. I added Dr. Nakash and his wife, whom I had never met, hesitated for a moment over Hishin and decided to leave him out, and confidently added Lazar and his wife, and of course Einat, thanks to whose illness I had met Michaela. My mother smiled sourly. “It’s funny that we’re not allowed to invite good neighbors, people we’ve been living next door to for so many years, while two total strangers like the Lazars will suddenly be our guests.” “Not yours,” I said, reacting sharply, “mine. Why not? I have my own reasons for inviting them. But don’t worry, they won’t come.” “Yes they will,” said my mother, confusing my father, who was poised to put them down on the list of guests who wouldn’t attend. In my heart of hearts I knew that my mother was right. Lazar’s wife wouldn’t forgo the chance of seeing me standing under the chuppah, not only because of the desire she might feel for me but also because she knew that I was marrying for her sake too.

And if she didn’t know, I reflected, I would have to let her know. With this aim in view, I would have to find a way deliver the invitation to her in person. About the wedding itself she must have heard from Einat, with whom Michaela was still in touch and whom she had even invited to a party to mark the end of her single state. I was a little excited at the idea of meeting Einat again, since I had not seen her since our return from India. “At least you had no trouble finding the apartment,” I said when I greeted her at the door and gave her a little hug. She smiled in embarrassment and blushed. Could she have seen me as something more than her physician during the time we spent together in India? She had put on a little weight, and the signs of the hepatitis had vanished, together with all traces of the Indian suntan, which Michaela still had. Now she looked healthy and very cute. She was wearing wide-bottomed black trousers and a white silk blouse with a richly embroidered little red bolero over it. Green earrings, the color of her eyes, dangled from her ears. She was shy, but also a little amused at being in her grandmother’s apartment, now taken over by strangers. When she was a schoolgirl, she said, she had often come here straight from school to have lunch with her grandmother and do her homework, and sometimes she had stayed over, sleeping on the couch in the living room. “Were you comfortable sleeping all night on that narrow couch?” I asked. “Why narrow?” said Einat in surprise. “It only takes a minute to convert it into a big bed.” The fact that the plain old couch could easily be turned into a large bed had escaped my notice, and if not for Einat I might never have noticed it. Despite Michaela’s protests, I moved the chairs and the coffee table aside, and Einat showed me the hidden lever that raised the couch and converted it into a large, comfortable bed, with an old sheet still spread over it and the long-forgotten summer pajamas of the child Einat. “You see, it’s a good thing you came,” I said to her affectionately. “You discovered your pajamas and we discovered an extra bed. When your mother handed over the apartment to me, she forgot to show me the mysteries of the magic sofa.”

“My mother,” said Einat in a sneering, hostile tone, “hardly knows what she’s got in her own bedroom.” And suddenly, without warning, I felt my face flushing and my throat choking up, as if the mere mention of my beloved’s bedroom were enough to conjure up a flickering but very vivid memory of her heavy white body and pampered little feet, before which I had knelt in the bedroom next door, from which Michaela now emerged with a plastic bag for the forgotten pajamas to give to Einat, who was standing and smiling to herself in blissful ignorance of what was going on inside me.

In the meantime more guests knocked at the door, and I quickly returned the sofa to its original state. Two “Indian” friends of Michaela’s and Einat’s arrived. Both of them had recently returned from India after spending more than a year there, and Michaela pounced on them to hear details about new places and especially to hear news of acquaintances, Israelis and others, who had been or were still wandering around the country. Suddenly the great subcontinent was transformed into an almost intimate place, like some big kibbutz full of private corners and friendly people — until I felt that my own short trip to India had not taken place on solid ground at all but in a distant, floating daydream. Accordingly, I sat silently and listened, occasionally asking a brief question. I found it strange that Einat participated in the conversation enthusiastically, mentioning places and people as if she too had been a big heroine and not a poor sick girl whose mother and father had had to come and rescue her and take her home. I could not take my eyes off her. She was attractive in her way, but there was nothing in her movements or gestures which reminded me of her mother. Her face was different, bearing more of a resemblance to her father’s, but more delicate and very fair. Had her liver really emerged unscathed? I wondered suddenly, and congratulated myself on still remembering the results of her transaminases levels. There were a number of medical questions on the tip of my tongue, but I repressed them, not wanting to appear in the role of the doctor this evening. In the meantime one of Michaela’s “Indian” friends noticed my prolonged silence and suggested changing the subject. “But it’s his own fault,” Michaela smilingly protested. “He could have stayed a little longer and not gone home like a good little boy with Einat’s parents. It won’t do him any harm to hear a few stories — maybe it will whet his appetite to go back again with me.” But then the doorbell rang, and Amnon, who had found a guard to take his place for a few hours, came in with a bottle of red wine, followed by another two couples who had come to strengthen our spirits in anticipation of our marriage, and behind them a few gate-crashers, and the apartment was soon “as crowded as the Calcutta train station,” as I said with a smile to the “Indian” friends. But nobody heard me, for the group had already broken up, and some people had went into my bedroom to sprawl out on the grandmother’s big bed. Einat too went into the bedroom, slipped off her shoes and her pretty bolero, and lay down on the bed with the others. I sat down next to her and managed to speak to her quietly in the middle of the din, asking her first about her grandmother, and enjoying with her the thought of how the old lady would react to what was going on in her apartment now; then I proceeded to questions about her parents, casually collecting new items of information about her mother and tactfully prodding her to reconstruct her feelings and sensations from the moment we first met in the monastery in Bodhgaya. Her replies were hesitant at first, but they gradually began to pour out freely and eagerly. Her face glowed prettily in the dim, shadowy light. She too considered the blood transfusion in the pilgrims’ hostel as the turning point in her illness. Her mother agreed with her, and even her father had stopped belittling the decision lately, though he was still a little angry at my hysteria in the airport, when I had forced the stopover in Varanasi.

“Hysteria?” I was astounded to hear this word coming so naturally out of her mouth. “Are you serious? Did I seem hysterical to you?”

“Yes,” said Einat, and on seeing my offended expression she added, “A little. But you were right. It’s just that when my father makes up his mind to do something, it’s hard to budge him. You’d have to have been hysterical to interrupt the flight to New Delhi.” But I remained flabbergasted. Nobody had ever called me hysterical before. I had always been well known for my supreme rationality. I had, in fact, been accused of being phlegmatic at times by various women I had dated. Had I really shown signs of hysteria at the Varanasi airport? If so, perhaps they could be considered portents of what had happened four nights later in the hotel in Rome, when I suddenly realized I was in love with the heavy woman who only a few weeks ago had been lying next to me on this big bed, where a bunch of giggling strangers were now sprawling, giving off a faint smell of sweat as they talked softly to each other and looked benevolently at me and Einat. Einat sat with her legs crossed, small and withdrawn into herself, nervously folding the bedspread between her fingers, staring at me intently as if she wanted to say something to me, and finally saying it: “You know, I’m very happy about you and Michaela getting married, I even feel a little responsible for it.”

“Of course,” I laughingly agreed, “it’s all your fault. You were our secret matchmaker.” And after a pause I added, “And your parents too.”

“My parents?” she said, startled. “How come?”

“Perhaps they infected me with the virus of their relationship — there’s such a special bond between them.” She laughed, an unpleasant, spiteful laugh. Suddenly I was afraid that she would tell her father that I had called his love a virus. I had to watch the words that came out of my mouth more carefully. “Do they know that I’m getting married?” She shrugged her shoulders; she had left home a few weeks before to live in a rented room. “I’ll have to invite them,” I said. “Why should you?” she asked sadly. “Because they deserve it,” I replied shortly, and her face fell, as if I now had taken away whatever little happiness I had given her.

I still didn’t know if my decision to give Dori the invitation personally stemmed from a sincere desire to have her and her husband at my wedding, or whether it was just an excuse to see her face to face again, so that I could say to her, You see, I’m a serious man who keeps his promises; I’m going to get married to protect you from this wild, impossible passion that sets my thoughts on fire, but also so that you’ll permit me to be with you from time to time and to lay my head on your soft, round belly. But I didn’t want to turn up at her office without warning and be squeezed in like a beggar between one client and the next, so I called her to ask for an appointment. I sensed a slight hesitation in her voice, but also excitement and happiness. She knew, of course, about my marriage, and perhaps she also understood its significance without my having to tell her, but when I suggested that we meet in the apartment, she immediately said in alarm, “No, no, not there.” We arranged to meet at her office, after working hours, when the secretaries had already left and the offices of some of her colleagues were already dark. She wasn’t alone in her room when I arrived, but with a young couple who were discussing some criminal matter with her, and I sat behind the half-open door and listened to her patiently holding forth in her clear voice. I felt my muscles stretching delicately with the sweet pain of the lust beginning to stir inside my body. This time I restrained myself from bringing a gift, in order not to alarm her again, and when her clients left and she went on sitting silently in the room, I got up and knocked softly on the door, and without waiting for an invitation I went inside, ducking my head so she wouldn’t see the violent blush spreading over my cheeks.

Was she blushing too? It was hard to tell, for I found her busy making rapid repairs to her makeup. She certainly looked embarrassed, although not too embarrassed to flash me her famous smile, which I now realized how much I loved. The time that had passed since our last meeting in this room made things harder rather than easier. But she was so much older than me that even if I had wanted to, I could not have saved her from the duty of rescuing us both from our embarrassment and guiding us into an exchange that would consist of more than empty evasions. I saw her hesitate for a moment, uncertain whether to stand up and come toward me, but in the end she remained seated, perhaps to hide the elegant suit which I wanted to believe she had worn for me, or at least for our meeting. Without waiting any longer, I held out the invitation, and she took it with an exclamation of delight that might have seemed exaggerated or even false if I hadn’t known in my heart that it was sincere. She really did hope that my marriage would free her from me. She raised the invitation to her eyes to read it slowly and thoroughly, first in the Hebrew version and then, according to the gentle movement of her eyes, in English too. I examined her carefully. She seemed to have dyed her hair recently, for it was much redder. There were two little pimples on her neck, whose creases seemed to have deepened in the weeks since I had kissed it, and her face was a little swollen; perhaps she had her period, or maybe she was taking hormones. Again I confirmed what I already knew: no one would call her a beautiful woman, but nevertheless I was trembling with desire. She couldn’t put the invitation down; she read it again and again, and asked me exactly where the hotel was in Jerusalem, and after I had described the place to her, she wanted to know why we hadn’t looked for a more attractive place, outside town. I explained Michaela’s objections to a big wedding and said that there was no point in holding a small-scale affair out of the city. This explanation appeared to satisfy her, and she smiled and asked, “Is this a genuine invitation or only a diplomatic one?”

“Absolutely genuine,” I said quickly. “In that case,” she said, “we’ll try to come. Why not? I’m really happy for you, and for Michaela too, who still seems a little mysterious to me even though she’s been to our house a number of times, maybe because of those astonishing eyes of hers. But Einati always speaks well of her. And she deserves a good husband like you — it was thanks to her that we got to Einati in time.”

“And thanks to her that I met you too,” I quickly added. She looked pleased, smiled, and held out her plump, freckled hand in a friendly gesture. I bent over and kissed her fingers, and to my surprise she didn’t pull her hand away but only laughed and said in a whisper, “Be careful, Lazar’s on his way to fetch me.” But the light touch of my lips on her fingers aroused me so much that I had to press my knees together to suppress the silent stirring of my erection, which may have also been provoked by the agreeable thought that she couldn’t trust herself alone with me, and that was why she had asked Lazar to pick her up at the office this evening. “According to our contract,” I said with a smile, “I have to ask your permission to bring another tenant into the apartment.”

“Really?” She laughed in surprise, as if she herself hadn’t drawn up the contract. “You have to ask my permission? Then I give it.” And her face suddenly grew grave, and she added, “But when you have a baby, we’ll have to see what my mother says.” And for a moment it seemed to me that she expected me to ask her about her mother’s health, so that she could boast about the vivacious old lady, but I had no intention of wasting time on such questions or on empty wisecracks about babies — I knew that Lazar was on his way, and I didn’t want him to come in before I had said a single real word about the pain of my continuing longing for her. As for the baby, I had no way of knowing that the hypothetical baby she was talking about was already real in Michaela’s womb.

I stood up abruptly and went toward her, and in a weak, imploring whisper I asked, “But what about you?” She moved back in her black executive chair and looked up at me with a panic in her eyes that I had never seen there before. Before she could reply, I added in despair, “Because in spite of all this”—I waved at the invitation lying open on the desk—“I think about you all the time.” Then the panic vanished from her eyes and the smile returned. “Never mind,” she said soothingly. “I think about you too. Never mind. Nobody dies from thinking.”

“Are you sure?” I said in confusion, flooded with happiness, and I bent down to kiss her, but she flung out her hand and gripped me by the shoulder to stop me. “Have you told anyone about me?” she asked anxiously. “No, nobody,” I replied. “Then please don’t, if you want to go on seeing me.”

“But why on earth should I tell anybody? Who would I tell?” I said indignantly. And then the hand holding me at bay fell from my shoulder and I could bring my face close to hers and smell her perfume, and kiss her quickly too, and all this was more than I had hoped for from this meeting, even though she protested, rising quickly from her seat on her high heels and pushing me firmly away. “Do you want to wait here for Lazar?” she asked me now in a mischievous tone. “Because he wants to see you.”

“Does he know that I’m here?” I asked, extremely taken aback. “Of course,” she replied in a matter-of-fact voice. I felt too happy and excited to meet Lazar then, and I said good-bye quickly and rushed out into the street, which was already growing dark.

But then I stopped, because I wanted to make sure that he would come, that he wouldn’t forget she mustn’t be left alone in this deserted place rapidly being absorbed into the darkness of the spring evening. I hid behind the trunk of an old tree covered with white blossoms until I saw his car, which I recognized from a distance by its headlights, entering the little side street and driving slowly, looking for a parking space. In the end he gave up the attempt and parked on the sidewalk, and instead of the door bursting open immediately, as usual, a few seconds passed before he got out, with an unfamiliar heaviness that didn’t suit him, and suddenly I felt a surge of intense curiosity, and I asked myself, What does he want of me? All of a sudden my fear of meeting him fell away, as if the existence of Michaela by my side gave me a new strength and status to face him.

Twelve

Is it permissible to begin to reflect on death? For then we will have to seek the secret door through which it can be smuggled into the soul, so the soul can grow accustomed to its silent presence, as if it were a little statuette brought into the house as an innocent gift or an ill-considered acquisition and irresponsibly set down in an intimate place, let’s say on a little bedside table, with a lace doily underneath it, and all this without anyone imagining that what appears to be an innocent inanimate object might suddenly rouse itself one night, kick away the lace doily, and with a swift, stealthy movement choke the astonished soul to death.

Otherwise, how will death be accomplished, with a bevy of doctors determined, in spite of disagreements between them, to fight against it with the most sophisticated instruments and the most efficient drugs at their command? So we will have to find our forgotten old relation again, that ancient retired fellow on leave from a lunatic asylum, the skinny black-clad mystery with the wire glasses on his nose, and prevail on him to sit down beside us and finally drink his tea, which has long since grown cold, and expound to us his fantastic views on the earth, which is eternally still and in which every hour is final and sufficient unto itself. And thus to lull our terror of the death bundled into the inside pocket of his coat in the form of a little bronze statuette.

But at the last minute, although I was only a few steps away from him, I gave up the idea, because I was afraid he would smell his wife’s perfume, which I firmly believed was still clinging to me; and also because I knew that he would ask me to go inside with him, in order not to leave her alone there, and I didn’t want to confuse her by suddenly reappearing at his side. If he had something to say to me, he would find an opportunity to say it at my wedding, for now I was sure that they would both be there, a thought which filled me with joy. For the first time, though, I felt a kind of jealousy of him, as I returned to my hiding place behind the old Tel Aviv tree and watched them opening the doors of the car and getting into it as they talked with that deep and marvelous intimacy they shared. Even total strangers like my mother noticed their connection and wondered at it when they appeared, because of Lazar’s restless efficiency, among the first guests at the wedding, and stood close together, somewhat embarrassed, in the hall of the old Jerusalem hotel, which was decorated with fresh flowers that Michaela had chosen in order to cover up the faintly musty smell. They came without Einat, who arrived later by herself with a fancily wrapped present. The next day, when we opened the gifts and it turned out to be a little clay statuette with many outstretched arms, Michaela was overcome with excitement, and she cried out and covered her face with her hands. When she took her hands away I saw that her cheeks were burning and her eyes were damp. It appeared that a holy man in Calcutta had sold them both identical statuettes, which they had greatly admired. Since Einat knew that Michaela had lost hers on the way back to Israel, she had decided to make her a present of her own statuette. In contrast, the gift brought by Einat’s parents — a turquoise bedspread, which made my heart skip a beat — was not at all to Michaela’s liking, and she went back to the store and exchanged it for a big cushion. I kept quiet, not wishing to give her any grounds for suspicion.

In general, Michaela was inclined to exchange most of the presents we received, as if by doing so she could wipe out the memory of the wedding, which went on oppressing her for a long time to come, because in the end it turned out to be a very crowded affair, perhaps precisely because of my parents’ sincere efforts to hold a medium-sized wedding in a medium-sized hall. Many of the guests my father had listed categorically as guests who wouldn’t come, did come, among them, to our amazement, a number of relations from England, who saw my wedding as a good reason to visit Israel. My mother’s sister and my father’s sister had naturally been invited to stay with my parents, together with their husbands, and my parents gave them their bedroom and of course my old room, which made it impossible for Michaela and me to get ready for the wedding there. So that we would not arrive at the ceremony directly from Tel Aviv, sweaty and crumpled, Eyal, who saw himself correctly as the catalyst for this marriage, offered us the use of his mother’s house before and after the wedding. His mother was delighted to have us, and after serving a rich and delicious lunch, she told us to go and lie down in Eyal’s old room, where I adamantly refused to make love to Michaela, who I had already noticed was always particularly turned on in strange places. On no account was I prepared to risk embarrassing Eyal’s mother, who did not go to her room to rest but sat racking her brains for a way to make Michaela’s simple white dress more festive. In the end she succeeded in persuading Michaela to take two heavy antique silver brooches which she produced from the depths of her jewel box, and with the addition of some artificial flowers the dress became, if not more elegant, at least more original. But in spite of all these efforts to improve Michaela’s dress, which she also ironed twice, Eyal’s mother was secretly planning to avoid the wedding reception. When Michaela’s parents arrived, as planned, to take us to the hairdresser’s, and from there to the wedding, she stopped me from going with them on the grounds that it was not right for the bride and groom to arrive at the wedding together, and suggested that I remain with her and go later with Eyal and Hadas. This sounded reasonable to me, especially since I had no desire to get involved in possible tensions between Michaela’s divorced parents, about whose quarrels I had already heard sensational stories. I therefore stayed to wait for Eyal, and in the meantime joined his mother for a drink of bitter-tasting herb tea, which glowed with a dull red color in the Jerusalem summer light, the sweet light of the long vacations of my childhood. She was still wrapped in a light bathrobe, her hair untidy and her face not made up. When I asked her tactfully when she was going to get dressed, she realized that I understood her intentions, and with a strange expression on her face, both sad and imploring, she said, “Let me off, Benjy, I beg you. I haven’t been feeling well for several days now, and I’m afraid I’ll feel suffocated there. I know that hotel — there are a lot of stairs to climb there too. Let me off, Benjy, and don’t be offended. You know how much I love you.” I began to stammer something about my parents being disappointed, but she dismissed that. “They won’t miss me. And if they do”—she smiled slyly to herself—“tell them that you gave me an exemption on medical grounds. It’s wonderful that you and Eyal are both real doctors now. I remember the two of you as if it were yesterday, such sweet little boys, playing doctor and turning the whole house into a hospital, and making us lie down in bed and close our eyes and groan so that you could examine us and cure us with medicines and bandages.” Suddenly she laughed happily, and a wave of warmth engulfed me at the dim but real memory of the two tiny boys bending over the big, beautiful woman, dusting her feet with white powder and wrapping them in bandages. The memory was so deep inside me that I had to close my eyes to bring it up. Then I looked silently at the very heavy woman drawing the edges of her bathrobe together with a slightly mechanical movement. She interpreted my silence as consent, tilted her head to listen, and said happily, “They’re here,” and as she went to open the door, she suddenly said, “Your Michaela is a very independent girl. Do you really love her?”

“I think so.” I smiled, surprised at the question. “Then love, Benjy, and don’t think too much,” and she opened the door before Eyal had time to turn his key. He and Hadas were dressed up, their hair still wet from the shower. After they had embraced me and examined me from all sides, they both insisted that I put on a tie, at least in honor of my English guests. At first I refused, but finally I gave in, and together the four of us went to his mother’s bedroom to choose a tie from the collection left by his father.

Despite the overcrowding in the hall, my wedding was a good-humored affair. The refreshments also, although I didn’t taste them myself, must have been excellent, because long after the wedding my parents reported proudly on the compliments they were still receiving from the guests. The guests on Michaela’s side, while few in number, were pleasant and polite and mixed well with the many guests invited by my family. Our British relations too turned out to be not only polite but also good-humored and cheerful, and their Scottish accents added a little amusement to their presence among us. Dr. Nakash, who arrived early with his wife — who was also very thin and dark, although a little less ugly than her husband — quickly made use of his oriental good manners and fluent English to make friends with our guests from abroad, and soon introduced Lazar and his wife to his new acquaintances. Although I was very pleased to see the Lazars, I had intended to ignore them until after the ceremony, which was delayed because Michaela was late, but in the constant stream of people pressing forward to congratulate me, I suddenly found myself standing in front of them. Since going to bed with his wife I had not been face to face with Lazar, and despite the friends and relations surrounding me and protecting me, I trembled violently when he threw his arms around my neck. Our trip to India, and especially our sleeping together in the train compartment on the way to Varanasi, had evidently entitled him in his own eyes to an intimacy which included the right to bestow sudden embraces without any warning. “Thank you for coming, thank you for coming,” I stammered with my head bowed, not daring to look directly at the woman, whose smile was evidently capable of overcoming any embarrassment or shame. Lazar handed me their gift and immediately told me in his practical way how to exchange it. While I was thanking him and trying to guess what was inside the big soft parcel, my mother’s sister from Glasgow, who had undertaken to collect the presents, hurried up to relieve me of it. In order to overcome my embarrassment, I introduced her to the Lazars, and she, who took an intense interest in every detail of my life, not only identified them instantly, but announced heartily, “Oh, we’ve all been dying to meet you — this wedding is partly your doing, isn’t it?”

“Our doing?” repeated Lazar in bewilderment, tilting his head to grasp the meaning hidden behind her thick Scottish accent. But my aunt was not in the least put out. She hugged me affectionately and continued. “He met Michaela at your place, didn’t he? And that made up for the position he lost at the hospital because of the trip to India.” Extremely agitated, I tried to correct her, but Lazar gripped my hand to calm me and bent over my big-mouthed, tactless aunt again and asked her to repeat her words, which I could see had offended him and gotten me into trouble. “He hasn’t lost his position yet,” he said in his simple English, but with the confident smile of a director whose power lay in knowing things that other people didn’t know — including his wife, who turned to him now with a worried expression. “What do you mean?” I asked him in English, to avoid offending my aunt, who didn’t know Hebrew. “First get married,” continued Lazar in English, pointing to the very serious young rabbi who had just entered the hall, “and afterward you’ll get another present.” Then turned to my aunt, who was looking at him admiringly. “Don’t worry, we’re taking care of him.”

Despite the arrival of the rabbi, the ceremony was delayed a little longer, because Michaela was held up by her parents, who had been leading each other astray in the streets of Jerusalem. But it was worth waiting for her. The hairdresser’s work had a stunning effect: her face seemed to have grown bigger, her hair was darker and full of new curls, and her enormous, shining eyes were now in proportion to the rest of her head. She looked really beautiful, and her few friends and relations, who so far had been swallowed up by our guests, hurried to hug and kiss her. But the grave young rabbi sent by the rabbinate was already waiting under the canopy erected by the hotel waiters. In my opinion and that of my father, he was much too rigid and long-winded and did not take the spirit of his audience into account. He forced the independent Michaela, of all people, to circle me seven times. His sermon on the meaning and importance of marriage was complicated and full of references to Cabalist sages nobody had heard of. Worst of all, there wasn’t a drop of humor in it; he made none of the jokes usually made on such occasions, and for a moment it even seemed that he regarded our marriage as something dangerous, which he had to warn us against. But it turned out that this fanatical Jerusalem rabbi, who annoyed a lot of people with his dry, severe style, pleased Michaela. She did not find the ceremony too long, and the fact that she was obliged to circle me seven times did not cause her any feelings of humiliation but excited her with its exoticism. From the day she had left India she had been thirsty for ritual, and since she had already outgrown, in her words, the childish stage of shallow, petulant protest at every mild manifestation of religious coercion, real or imaginary, she enjoyed connecting the mystery she found in our marriage ceremony with all those rites and rituals she had come across in the streets of India. Her pregnancy, however, she did not include in the mystery of our marriage, and she spoke about it in a rational and logical way. It was just twenty-four hours after the wedding when she told me that she was pregnant, as we sat half naked, taking a sunset dip in the heavy water of the Dead Sea. We were staying at the same new hotel my parents had enjoyed so much after Eyal’s wedding; they generously gave us “a few days of honeymoon” there, with all our meals, in addition to their wedding gift. Michaela took most of the blame for our carelessness that night in the desert, and therefore, she repeated, if I decided that this baby was too sudden and too soon, she was perfectly willing to have an abortion. She attached no significance to life at this early stage. She had already had two abortions, and as I could see for myself, no harm had been done. “But it could have been,” the doctor in me immediately whispered, overcoming for a moment the astonishment of the new husband, whose head was spinning at the speed with which his freedom was shrinking, and all because of his impossible love for another woman. I don’t know how and why Michaela had found out the sex of the fetus after discovering the fact of its existence. But I think that because she spoke of it as “she,” a girl baby and not an anonymous fetus, I immediately decided against an abortion. It was clear to me too that Michaela had behaved toward me with true morality, in spite of the complications she had created. Now she also repeated her intention of taking another trip to India, and there was no doubt that a baby would delay these plans, or at least complicate them, and that a secret abortion six weeks before, when she had found out about it, would have suited her better. But since she didn’t want to deceive me, for the baby belonged to me as well, she did not terminate the pregnancy, and she didn’t tell me of its existence so that I would not feel in any way constrained to marry her.

I saw this now with absolute clarity, a clarity which was emphasized by the silence and stillness of the desert evening; we were almost alone on the beach in this sweltering summer season. I was excited by the news but also somewhat sad. Michaela’s concealment of her pregnancy seemed to me more moral than my own concealment of my impossible infatuation, whose chances of realization seemed even dimmer now, in light of what she had just told me. I felt that I had to make some gesture in honor of the baby, and I bent my head to plant a kiss on Michaela’s hard, flat stomach. I licked her navel, and when I saw that nobody was watching I lifted the bottom half of her bikini and went on probing with my tongue toward the place where the baby would emerge when its time came. But Michaela’s skin was so salty from the water of the Dead Sea that it burned my tongue; besides, I didn’t want to arouse her now and make us both restless before supper. I only said laughingly, “So what do you think? We’ll have to call her Ayelet, because we made her at Eyal’s wedding!” But Michaela already had another name ready, more significant and compelling, with a special meaning for her. Shiva, the Destroyer; Shiva, which in Hebrew means “return”—a name connected with the person who had brought us together not only in a technical but also in a deeper sense, Einat, whose gift Michaela had brought with her to the Dead Sea shore to fortify her on her honeymoon.

I found Einat standing sadly and absentmindedly next to her parents, with the gift-wrapped package in her hand, only after the ceremony was over, when I began making my way through the crush in search of her father, to hear what he had to say to me. Dori was surrounded by a number of my parents’ friends, standing with overflowing plates in their hands. She herself had not yet eaten anything but was smoking one of her slender cigarettes, in spite of the press of people around her, her eyes sparkling and flashing. I warmly embraced Einat, who gave me a gentle, hesitant hug and immediately asked for Michaela, because she wanted to give her the gift, which she firmly announced was “for Michaela, not for you,” with her own hands. “Okay, okay.” I raised my hands in laughing submission. “But why aren’t you eating anything?” I added in the tone of an offended host. “Would you like me to bring you something?” But Einat refused my offer and said in embarrassment, “No, why should you? You’ve already looked after me enough. I’ll get something myself. It looks very good.” Indeed, everyone praised the catering. Lazar returned again and again to the buffet, thrusting through the crowd with his head lowered in order to refill his plate with roast beef, which seemed particularly to his taste, while Nakash and his wife, thin and hungry, never moved from the buffet area in case they missed one of the new dishes which kept arriving from the kitchen. Even my shy father, in spite of all the friends and relations surrounding him, kept finding excuses to return to the buffet and praise the headwaiter for the excellent food, ready to be seduced by new offers. Toward the end of the wedding, when the hall began to empty out, Michaela, who had not tasted anything up to then, also succumbed to an attack of voracious hunger. She sat in a corner with her parents and their respective spouses and sent her little brother to fill and refill her plate with leftovers. My mother had refrained from eating in order to be able to give her undivided attention to her guests, and throughout the reception she had not held even one small plate of food in her hands, but my loyal young aunt from Glasgow had not forgotten her older sister, and from time to time she would squeeze through the crowd with a forkful of “something delicious” and press it on my mother, who at first refused in embarrassment but in the end opened her mouth like an obedient baby to swallow the tidbit and join in the universal chorus of praise. It seemed that only Dori and I ate nothing. Dori may have wanted to eat, but she was too proud to push and shove with everyone else around the buffet, and by the time Lazar finally took pity on her and returned from one of his forays with an extra plate for her, she was so hungry that her fork slipped from her eager fingers and fell to the floor. She stood there smiling with a plate full of food in her hands, waiting for someone to bring her a new fork, until one of the waiters, thinking that she had finished eating, discreetly relieved her of her plate. But I had not even approached the buffet, or accepted any of the hors d’oevres from the waiters circulating with big trays, and with complete indifference, even nausea, I watched my friends and relations diving into the spread. A great joy was welling up inside me, wave after wave; the joy of my parents, their excitement at the presence of their beloved relations who had come especially from Britain; my own joy in my good friends who had surrounded me under the chuppah, and in Michaela, who looked so beautiful, and of course in the secret and thrilling presence of the woman I loved, standing on her long straight legs and looking at me from across the room with her laughing eyes, and on top of all this Lazar’s surprising offer, which suddenly held out the hope that I could return to the hospital via a back door which led through England.

This door was connected with an agreement between our hospital and a London hospital, St. Bernadine’s, whose medical and administrative director, an elderly gentile called Sir Geoffrey, had visited Israel a few years before and fallen in love with the country. He had donated medical equipment and drugs to our hospital, and books to the library, and in order to strengthen the connection further he had persuaded Lazar to agree to an exchange of physicians between the two hospitals. In this framework, an English doctor had recently begun work in Professor Levine’s internal medicine department, where he had been very successfully absorbed, and our own Dr. Samuel had been about to travel to London with his family to take the place of that doctor. But there had been a hitch at the last minute, for in spite of his assurances, the director of the London hospital had failed to obtain a work permit for the Israeli doctor so that he could be paid a full salary, and to the director’s shame and regret, he had been about to bring his doctor back to England, having failed to keep his end of the bargain. But the sharp-witted Lazar remembered my British passport from the Indian consulate in Rome, and he immediately said to himself, Dr. Rubin is the ideal man for the job! It couldn’t have come at a better time; it will fall into his lap like a gift from heaven — the possibility of working in a hospital that may be a little old-fashioned but is nevertheless a very decent place, and under the supervision of a director who’ll be like a second father to him. And even though the whole exchange was only a matter of ten months, it would still be on behalf of our hospital in Israel, and it would be as if I had come back to it — albeit through a back door, but one which was nevertheless real enough from the bureaucratic point of view. And who could tell, and without making any promises — because even God would be foolhardy to make promises in the State of Israel — perhaps on my return from England a place would be found for me here, in one of the departments.

“But which one?” I asked, beside myself with excitement. “Which one?” repeated Lazar with a forgiving smile, nodding his head at my mother and father, who were approaching us from two different directions, as if they had sensed that important things were being said. “It’s too soon to say. We’ll see. When we know who’s staying and who’s leaving,” and here Lazar turned affably to my parents, to tell them about the offer he had just made me. My inquisitive young aunt, who saw my parents listening with deep attention, came hurrying up to take part in the conversation, which changed its language to English. My aunt asked the name and location of the hospital, but since she lived in Scotland the name of the area meant nothing to her, and other relations, better acquainted with London, were called in to help. A relative I did not know came up, a tall, very thin man dressed in black, with small metal-framed glasses whose thick bifocal lenses gave his long, pale face a strange expression, and this man, who had no connection with medicine, knew so many details about the hospital, which was in the northeastern part of London, that I wondered if he had been a long-term patient there. The term “a little old-fashioned,” which Lazar had used to describe the place, turned out to be a typical piece of Israeli ignorance; it was an ancient institution, a historical monument which had been founded way back in the Middle Ages, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Some of its wings were still housed in very old buildings, while others had been rebuilt. My two aunts were thrilled by the news, sure that my parents would not be able to stay away once Michaela and I were there and that they would soon see them again. And Dori, who was standing not far off, nodding as she listened to someone explaining something to her, watched the little group clustered around Lazar and me, and blushed deeply and uncharacteristically when my mother approached her to thank her too, for some reason, for her husband’s clever and generous idea.

But had the idea really come from Lazar, who wanted to save his English colleague from an embarrassing situation and at the same time give me a consolation prize and a little hope, or had it actually come from her, because she was afraid and wanted to get rid of me after seeing how quickly I had fulfilled her implicit request to turn myself into a married and therefore more possible lover? Maybe she had had nothing to do with it, and Lazar himself had dimly sensed my feelings for his wife and wanted unconsciously to get me out of the way. All these thoughts were still running around inside my head when I said good-bye to the last of the guests, but I could not share them with anybody, including, of course, Michaela, who heard about Lazar’s offer only after the wedding was over, late that night in Eyal’s mother’s house. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of bringing back a doggie bag with some of the delicacies served at the wedding, to compensate her for what she had missed, and also to quiet the pangs of hunger that now assailed me, until Eyal’s mother, who had already gone to bed, got up to make me a salad and an omelet in spite of my protests and apologies. Only then did I tell them about Lazar’s offer for me to leave within the month for a year’s exchange at a hospital in London. Eyal’s mother was pleased for us, but in Michaela the proposal lit a veritable fire of enthusiasm. Her weariness vanished and her spirits soared, not only at the idea of going abroad but also because of England’s connection with India. And so when we went to bed in Eyal’s old bedroom, which still contained some of his childhood toys, Michaela’s passion flared, as if the strangeness of the house awaiting us in London had combined with the strangeness of Eyal’s room to double her desire. There was no way I could withstand this double desire, especially on our wedding night, but since I was afraid of embarrassing Eyal’s mother, who for some reason was still roaming around the house, with the noise of our lovemaking, I kept my lips pressed to Michaela’s and inserted my tongue in her mouth to stifle or at least muffle any possible cries or moans during our prolonged intercourse.

But the next night, in the hotel next to the Dead Sea, so seductive in its strangeness, I decided to resist Michaela’s tireless lust. I did not want to subject our little English embryo to any additional jolting after all the jolting she had already suffered on the back of the motorcycle and was still to suffer on our approaching trip to England. We both already thought of the baby as an English baby par excellence, with the British citizenship she would inherit from me reinforced by her birth on English soil. Michaela couldn’t stop talking about the trip, and since she had been suffering from a mild depression over the past few months due to the loss of her freedom — first by the premature return from India, over which she was still grieving, and then by our hasty marriage, which was now compounded by the baby, who however sweet and good she was would still tighten the collar around Michaela’s neck — it was no wonder that the trip seemed to her like an escape hatch to — who knows — those magical and radiant realms, whose fascination I could hardly guess at, for I had flitted past them like distant lightning. In contrast to Michaela, I was more confused than excited by Lazar’s unexpected offer. First, because it meant a separation from the woman I could not get out of my thoughts. And even though I knew how narrow the scope of my hopes in that direction was, I also knew that I could always get on my motorcycle at the appropriate time and within a few minutes take up my position in the entrance to one of the buildings next to her house or her office, to watch her going in or coming out, smiling and pleased with herself, stepping lightly, apart from that slight pampered dragging of her left foot. And I hadn’t had enough of her mother’s apartment yet either, which still held the memory of the marvelous pleasure I had enjoyed on the day I signed the lease, which I didn’t know whether to continue or to cancel. Michaela, who had taken an instant dislike to the apartment, wanted us to cancel the lease, so that we could leave for England with a clean slate. She wanted to pack our things in crates and leave them in a warehouse next to the harbor, where her stepfather worked. “They can stay there till we come back,” she said, and added suddenly with a mischievous smile, “if we come back.” It was no problem for her, of course, because all her possessions could easily be packed in one not very large crate. But I refused to store all the clothes, furniture, books, and other possessions I had accumulated over the course of my life in a dubious warehouse next to the beach, and I couldn’t impose them on my parents either. Nor did I want to give up the connection with my landlady, for whose sake I had rented the apartment in the first place. So I suggested to my friend Amnon that he come and live in the apartment and look after our things until we returned, in exchange for a percentage of the rent. To my surprise he agreed, even though the apartment was far from his place of work, and it was hard to find parking there too. Ever since I had started going out with Michaela, Amnon had strengthened his ties with me, because Michaela had more patience with him than I did, and when I went out in the late afternoon to assist Dr. Nakash at the Herzliah hospital, she would invite him to come and have supper with her before going to his night watchman’s job. His doctoral thesis was still stuck in the same place, and there were moments when I blamed myself and my confused speech that night on the way from Jericho to Jerusalem, about the relationship between matter and spirit, for his plight, as if my words had actually penetrated his mind and begun to disturb him in spite of the contempt and skepticism with which he had greeted them at the time. Perhaps my philosophical speech had merged in his mind, too, with the warning I had given him that same night about my intention to get married. And when he realized some time later that I was talking about Michaela — whom he liked so much that I suspected he had fallen a little bit in love with her, without admitting it to himself, for his loyalty to me was absolute — my theoretical speculations had joined with her erotic attractions, and he began paying frequent visits to our apartment in order to talk to me, and especially to Michaela, about the way in which matter could be transformed into spirit. I was already getting tired of him, but Michaela had a limitless capacity to sit and listen to him, and to cloud the issue still further by embroidering my own disorganized and primitive theory with all kinds of mystical mumbo-jumbo she had brought back from India.

I had no doubt whatsoever that we would return at the end of the year. Otherwise I might lose the secret back door through which, according to Lazar and his bureaucratic metaphor, I had already returned to the hospital. He also promised to come and visit us during our year in England. “That would be wonderful,” I said with genuine delight. “We’ll be happy to put you up, or both of you, if Dori comes with you.”

“Of course she’ll come,” said Lazar immediately. “If she insisted on going along to India, do you think she won’t insist on coming to England? You’ve already seen for yourself how hard it is for her to stay by herself.” Indeed I had, and the thought of a possible meeting in England gave me the confidence to notify Dr. Nakash that I was resigning from the remunerative work as his assistant anesthetist. To his credit, Nakash encouraged me to go. “Try to gain experience in anesthesiology there, together with your work in internal medicine,” he advised me. “The subjects are connected. It may be an old hospital with obsolete equipment, but you’ll always find someone unexpected whom you can learn something from.” My parents were of course delighted at our approaching trip to England, in spite of the separation; but when I told them, in Michaela’s absence, about the expected birth in six months’ time, and tried, not without difficulty, to convince them that I myself had been ignorant of the pregnancy until after the wedding, because Michaela hadn’t wanted to influence my decision to marry her, they were flabbergasted, as if they had only now grasped the wild side of Michaela’s nature, in addition to the ethical and independent aspects of her character. But their joy at being grandparents soon asserted itself and overcame everything else. They immediately decided to postpone their visit to England. Instead of arriving in three months’ time, in the autumn, they would arrive in the middle of winter, for the birth, and they would also stay longer than they had originally planned. The idea that their granddaughter would be born in the land of their birth amused them, but also excited them. “It will be as if we returned to England,” said my father, turning red with pleasure and embarrassment at the curious thought. “Exactly,” I laughed. “Shiva. Return. That’s exactly the name Michaela wants to give the baby, not because of you but because of its Indian sound.”

Michaela, flushed from the long walk she had taken to give me a chance to be alone with my parents, came in and gave us a deep, proud, triumphant look. My father couldn’t resist hugging and kissing her as soon as she came in, forgetting his shyness now that a part of his own flesh and blood was inside her. My mother too went up to embrace her, even though I knew that she was secretly upset by Michaela’s deception. The speed of my transformation from a stubborn bachelor to the father of a child seemed to her unwise, and perhaps too much for me to cope with. But the news flooded her with joy nevertheless. I told Michaela that I had already confided the strange name she wanted to give the baby to my parents, and she was insulted and protested indignantly, “It’s not strange at all. That’s what we’re going to call her, Shiva, whether with a vav or a beth we’ll decide later,” and she explained to my parents the mythological meaning of the god Shiva, the Destroyer, and how he complemented the god Brahma, the Creator, and Vishnu, the Preserver. My parents smiled. “Don’t argue about it now, it’s silly. There’s plenty of time to decide. You’ll change your minds a thousand times,” they said, but I already felt that this would be my daughter’s name, and all I could do now was fight for it to be spelled with a beth and not with a vav, like the Indian god, whose name I remembered calling out to the barefoot boatman rowing me out between the ghats of Varanasi. Meanwhile we had to hide the fact of Michaela’s pregnancy from Lazar so he would not relax his pressure on his English colleague to find her a part-time job, not for fear that she would be bored in London, since Michaela always found something to interest her, but to supplement my salary, which would, it transpired, be extremely modest, since it would be calculated according to the shekel salary I would have received if I had remained at the hospital.

But it was too late to change our minds, or even to grumble. We were both young, and our needs were modest. My parents, though, after telephone consultations with the family in England, decided to break into a savings account and give us some cash to tide us over until I received my first paycheck. With the money from the sale of the motorcycle we bought the plane tickets and good winter clothes, and the remainder we deposited in my bank account to cover the postdated checks for my share of the rent. In the plane Michaela was exuberant; leaving Israel had made her spirits soar, even though we were sailing west and not east. She believed that India was spiritually and intellectually closer to England than it was to Israel. I, in contrast, sat next to her in the doldrums, nervous and anxious about the future. Ever since my mysterious infatuation with Dori had begun, my life had been flowing along a crooked, winding course, because of the contradictory and ambivalent signals I received from the impossible object of my desire. Now I was being swept far away from her, and apart from Lazar’s promise that they might come for a short visit to England, I had nothing to hang on to. And it was supposed to be all for her: the hasty marriage, the rented apartment, even the growing dependence on Lazar and his schemes. I thought again of all the people putting themselves out for me, especially my parents, who knew nothing of my real motives. It would have been more honest to confess to them and ease my conscience. I looked at Michaela, whose great clear eyes reflected the radiant blue sky shining above the clouds. If I suddenly told her that I had fallen in love with Lazar’s wife, what would she say? Would the broad, magnanimous spirit of her Hindu or Buddhist beliefs calm and soothe the pain of this passion and absorb it into the common stream of our marriage?

Because this was how Michaela defined marriage: it was a “common stream,” and that’s all it was. In the framework of such a tolerant definition, even a sudden confession of the kind I had in mind was entitled to be carried along on the current, like an uprooted tree trunk. But I decided to hold my peace. Nor, in fact, did I have anything to confess, for in the hectic month since our marriage I had had no contact with Dori except for one telephone call, in which I had asked her if we could sublet the apartment to Amnon until we returned from England. About the expected birth I said nothing, not only because I was afraid she might not want to continue the lease, which was intended for a single tenant and not an expanding family, but also because I didn’t want to draw attention to my sexual life with Michaela and give her an excuse for breaking off relations with me — as if our marriage were a mere formality. And indeed, although I could hear people going in and out of her office, she was very friendly, and her joyful, tender voice filled me with such lust that when I put the receiver down I felt drops of moisture on my penis, as if it were weeping. She too, like my parents’ friends, recalled the wedding as an exceptionally enjoyable occasion, perhaps because of the high spirits of our family from Scotland. Even the strictness of the young rabbi, whose beauty she remarked on, did not seem to her annoying or out of place. “It’s a good thing to be serious about the world sometimes,” she said, and her laughter flooded the receiver. Then she praised me for taking up her husband’s offer and admitted that she had had something to do with it. It was her legal mind that had remembered my English passport when Lazar told her about the complications they had run into with the exchange program in London. “Maybe you just wanted to get rid of me?” I asked in suspense, but without anger. She laughed again. “Maybe I did. But is it possible? I see that you’re putting your friend into the apartment to make sure it’s there when you come back.”

It was true that thoughts of the return to Israel were already occupying my mind during our first few hours in London, where we disembarked into a gray, rainy day. The idea that from now on, because of the unfamiliarity of our surroundings, I would have to cling more closely to Michaela added a disturbing note. Sir Geoffrey himself came to meet us at the airport. He was a rather elderly red-haired Englishman who had remained stubbornly loyal and devoted to Israel in spite of its unpopular policies. It was difficult at first to understand what he was saying, partly because he swallowed his words and partly because of their subtle, often baffling irony. I wondered how Lazar, with his primitive English, had succeeded in establishing such friendly relations with him. Although he was the administrative head of the hospital, he did not seem to enjoy Lazar’s absolute authority. His executive style was apparently more diffident and hesitant. For example, when we arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t even find a janitor to help us with our suitcases, and he dragged one of them with his own hands into the guest room, which was attached to one of the hospital departments and had been allocated to us for the first week of our stay, until we found a flat. For a moment, when we saw a nurses’ station with an old respirator standing next to it at the end of the corridor, we thought that Sir Geoffrey intended to hospitalize us, but as soon as we entered the room itself the hospital was forgotten. It was a charming, old-fashioned room, with a kind of canopy of green material over the high bedstead to make sleep sweeter and more secure. In days gone by the room had been occupied by the nobles and aristocrats among the patients, but it was now used by the hospital’s guests, especially those who came for short stays, to conduct seminars or supervise complicated treatments.

A dark-skinned old nurse came in to offer us a cup of tea. We were happy to accept, especially since the forms Sir Geoffrey had brought with him still lacked a number of administrative details, which he was anxious to fill in with our help. He examined my British passport carefully and then turned to the notarized translation of our marriage certificate, stamped and sealed with a red wax rose, to extract the details, which he needed to establish Michaela’s status and obtain British citizenship for her, or at least the right to reside in the country and be legally employed. She herself was completely at ease. She took off her shoes and lay down on one of the little sofas in the room, fixing her wonderful, shining eyes with great goodwill on Sir Geoffrey, who would no doubt have been astonished at the ferocity of the lust aroused in this strange young woman by the cold, dim, foreign room — a lust that would oblige me, travel-weary and slightly depressed as I was, to perform my conjugal duties as soon as he left the room. But in the meantime the tea was brought, and in honor of England I decided to drink it as my parents did, with milk. After Sir Geoffrey had finished filling in the forms and folded them up and screwed on the top of his fountain pen, I began to question him about the different departments in the hospital, especially the surgical department, and I told him about my experience as a surgeon, and recently also as an anesthetist, and asked him hesitantly whether I might be able to take part in an operation from time to time. “Yes,” Sir Geoffrey replied. Lazar had spoken to him on the phone a couple of days before and told him about the true professional inclinations of the young doctor from Israel, and had also asked him if it would be possible to find a part-time job for his wife, and Sir Geoffrey had begun work right away to fulfill his friend’s request. But although the head of the internal medicine department had been willing to do without the services of the Israeli doctor, the head of surgery had no room for another doctor. The emergency room, however, would be happy to have an extra pair of hands, and there too, of course, emergency operations were performed, which were sometimes no less complex than those performed in the surgical department itself. If that was what I really wanted, there was nothing to prevent me from joining their team, either as a surgeon or as an anesthetist, as I wished.

“So he can be a little happy at last,” said Michaela in English, in a quiet but mildly rebuking tone, and she went on to explain to Sir Geoffrey how passionately I wanted to stand next to the operating table. Though her English was very basic, she spoke in a correct British accent, which she must have picked up in India, and without a trace of an Israeli accent. Sir Geoffrey listened to her with undisguised interest, apparently spellbound by her great, shining eyes, which added a note of brilliance to the dull gray light in the big room. I was still marveling at Lazar’s phone call. Was it simply one more sign of his kindheartedness and concern, or had the hand of my beloved been secretly at work here, to seduce me by means of my surgical ambitions into prolonging my stay in England, or at least to remove any thoughts of an early return? Indeed, I may not have been as happy as Michaela expected yet, but I was definitely pleased and full of hope. The thought that I would soon be allowed to hold a scalpel in my hand and to cut into living flesh in an atmosphere of quiet English politeness, without being exposed to the mocking scrutiny of Hishin or the jealous looks of my rival, excited me so much that I was too late to step in and prevent Michaela from unhesitatingly accepting Sir Geoffrey’s offer of a job as a glorified cleaning lady in the little chapel attached to the hospital. The idea of Michaela’s doing physical work during her pregnancy, and what’s more in a church attached to the hospital where I was working as a doctor, was not at all to my liking, but I held my tongue in order not to embarrass her in front of Sir Geoffrey, who at long last took his leave of us, very pleased with himself at having met the needs of the Israelis he so admired with such unprecedented speed and efficiency.

I began to unpack the suitcase we had prepared in advance with everything we would need for the transition period, until we found a suitable apartment. Michaela took the Indian statue that Einat had given her out of her knapsack and put it on a little shelf above the bed, where she saluted it with a bow. Then she suggested that we lie down to rest for a while on the big bed before we finished unpacking. But I didn’t feel tired, and I didn’t want our clothes to become even more wrinkled in the suitcase. She took off her sweater and her socks and undid the buttons of her jeans to relieve the pressure on her stomach, which according to her had already begun to swell a little. Then she sprawled out on the bed, waiting for me to finish putting our things away in the capacious wardrobes and join her. Her eyelids began to droop, and I knew that she was charging her batteries with the lust radiated by the big, strange room. But I didn’t feel the faintest desire for sex. I was tired from the journey and excited by the surgical prospects that had opened out before me. “I can’t now, Michaela,” I announced when I saw her stretching out her arms to me with her eyes closed. But she didn’t give up, and with her usual shamelessness she got up, took off all her clothes, lay down again, naked and shivering on the bedspread, which didn’t look very clean to me, and said, “Then come and warm me up at least — are you capable of that?” And even though I had no wish to warm her up, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings either, especially since I knew how important it was to her to make love in new places, as a sure way of dispelling anxiety and domesticating the unknown. But when I went to make sure that the door was properly shut, I saw that it didn’t have a lock or a key but only a slender chain, which made it possible for others to open it slightly and peep in — perhaps to prevent the patients or the medical staff from using the room for illegitimate purposes. “Can’t we leave it now?” I said imploringly, afraid not only of an unexpected visitor but also of a cry or moan which might alarm any patients wandering around in the corridor. But Michaela refused to leave it. She was burning with desire. “Don’t be such a coward,” she said, and pulled me down next to her, taking my head firmly between her hands and placing it first between her breasts and then on her belly, and finally between her legs, so that my tongue could give her the pleasure my prick was too weak to provide. And then there was a light knock at the door, which opened as far as the chain would permit to reveal for a second the blushing face of Sir Geoffrey, who had forgotten to give us the list of apartments for rent in the area which his secretary had drawn up for us. He was too embarrassed even to apologize, and left the list stuck on the door. But later that evening, when we met for supper in the hospital dining room, he seemed even friendlier than before, as if the scene that had flashed before his startled eyes had only confirmed his view of the dynamic, energetic nature of the typical Israeli.

And in fact we both showed plenty of dynamism and energy in the initial stages of our acclimatization, which succeeded more than we could have hoped, perhaps partly because my correct English accent, which I had been making efforts to improve ever since our arrival by remembering my father’s speech and taking it as an example, inspired the confidence of the real estate agents and the car salesmen. After only two days we found a suitable apartment for a reasonable rent a short distance from the hospital. The apartment consisted of two large, comfortable rooms, enough to accommodate my parents comfortably during the day but not enough for them to settle in. The small secondhand car we bought also seemed clean and in good running order. And even though I was not officially entitled to a parking place in the hospital lot, which was reserved for the senior staff, Michaela, who had established a slightly ironic, good-humored form of communication of her own with Sir Geoffrey, succeeded in getting permission for us to park in the backyard of the little chapel, which freed us from the need to look for parking places — a daunting task, especially at night, when the area was packed with cars. It was mainly Michaela who used the car, and her knowledge of the streets of London became more intimate and precise from day to day. Although I didn’t like the growing proximity between her stomach and the steering wheel as her pregnancy advanced, and I warned her constantly not only to use the seat belt, which she sometimes forgot to do, but also to drive slowly, which was almost an impossibility for her, I had no alternative but to honor her independence and trust her good sense, even when she began haunting the seedy areas inhabited by immigrants from the Far East in an effort to renew contact with her beloved Hindus. I had to rely on her increasingly obvious pregnancy to protect her from harassment. I knew that she had only four months of liberty left until the baby was born, while I myself was being completely swept up in the work at the hospital, which filled me not only with enthusiasm but also with anxiety.

In order to give validity and prestige to the exchange agreement between himself and Lazar, Sir Geoffrey introduced me to all the doctors in the emergency room as an experienced surgeon and anesthetist. My experience as a military doctor also gave me special authority in his eyes. After only one week, before I had time to learn the names and places of the instruments in the little operating room or acquaint myself with the contents of the medicine cabinets, I was summoned to assist at the operation of a small, dark-skinned girl of about ten who had sustained severe stomach injuries in a road accident. Just as the operation was getting started, the senior physician was called to treat another victim of the same accident, who had suffered a heart attack, and without asking any questions, in complete confidence, he gave me the scalpel and asked me to go ahead and conclude the operation, during the course of which it proved necessary to remove the damaged spleen. And so I found myself standing alone in front of the delicate, long-limbed body of a cut and bruised little girl who had just been too vigorously anesthetized and seemed to be losing her pulse. The nurse assisting me was young and seemed inexperienced, but the physician in charge of the anesthesia was an elderly, white-haired woman who inspired my confidence. At first I imagined that there wasn’t enough light in the room, because I couldn’t see everything I wanted to see inside the deep, open stomach. Perhaps the child’s dark skin confused me. But after the nurse tried in vain to increase the light over the operating table, she offered me a little headlamp to strap onto my forehead, like the ones coal miners wear in the movies when they descend into the bowels of the earth. And I felt a little like a miner, bending down and delving into the depths of internal organs which for the first time in my life were my exclusive responsibility.

I immediately discovered that the internal hemorrhaging had not been completely arrested, and I found additional torn blood vessels which had to be reconstructed. I ordered another unit of blood and continued with the operation, which I performed very slowly, waiting for the physician in charge to come back and take the knife from me. But he didn’t come back, and I had to continue alone, admitting to myself that maybe Professor Hishin and Dr. Nakash were right when they said that I thought too much during surgery and this hesitancy made me unsuited to being a surgeon. But here, in the English operating room, I believed that my slowness would be accepted in a more tolerant spirit. For although the pulse was regular again, and the breathing was normal, and the dark, slender body was properly relaxed, I was in the grip of a terrible anxiety that something unexpected and unknown would break out in the course of the operation and kill the child under my hands, bringing disgrace not only to me but also to Lazar and his wife, who had sent me here. And so I slowed down the pace of the operation even further and checked and rechecked every cut, and at a certain stage I even insisted on calling in the X-ray technician to take additional X-rays of the spine. It was already long past midnight, and the white-haired anesthetist had taken her eyes off her instruments in order to stare at me, baffled by my slowness. Perhaps it was only good manners that prevented her from asking me what was going on, for she had every right to do so. The young nurse, however, did not hide her anger, and she flung the instruments huffily and noisily into the sterilizing unit, muttering to herself. But I ignored her, and after sewing up the stomach with small, neat stitches that wouldn’t leave a scar, I finally, after five hours, signaled the anesthetist to begin bringing the child around. I wouldn’t allow her to be removed from the operating room until I had made sure that the words she was mumbling in her peculiar accent made sense, and that there was no brain damage as a result of the operation I had performed from beginning to end all by myself. Without removing my bloodstained gown, I walked behind her bed as it rolled slowly into the emergency room, which at this late hour was completely quiet, and where even the patients who had not yet been sent up to the various wards had fallen asleep. I looked for the senior physician to report to him and discovered that he had retired to his room to rest long before, without even taking the trouble to inquire about the results of the operation he had left in my hands, so great was his trust in the new young doctor. The only signs of life were in the waiting room, where a group of tall, long-limbed Africans greeted me with grateful respect and awe. For them, it turned out, my slowness had been an omen of hope.

Thus I quickly found my place in the work of the hospital, and since I saw that independent operations were likely to come my way in the emergency room, I volunteered to work the evening shift and to be on call at night, to the grateful appreciation of my colleagues, who turned out on the whole to be less ambitious than Israeli doctors. And so I found myself standing in the little operating room attached to the emergency room, sometimes as an anesthetist and sometimes as a surgeon, performing quite complicated surgery on my own, albeit in my own particular way — that is, with the extreme slowness to which the white-haired anesthetist had already grown accustomed; and as for the impatient blond nurse, I got rid of her in favor of a placid, obedient Scottish nurse. At the end of each night, when I saw that nothing more of interest was going to come my way, I would walk home to our nearby apartment and wake Michaela and tell her about my adventures. She would wake up immediately and listen eagerly to everything I had to say, not only because she always liked hearing about medical matters but also because she was happy to see me full of enthusiasm. Her round belly was rising steadily like a little pink hill under the blanket, and sometimes as I spoke I thought I could see a slight movement stirring inside it, proof that the baby too was listening to me. Michaela’s sexual appetite diminished greatly during her last months of pregnancy, both because the strangeness of the little apartment had worn off and because of a peculiar notion she had picked up from a traveler who had returned from India: that intercourse could arouse frustrated desire in the fetus. I didn’t want to get into theological debates with her about the meaning of life and consciousness in embryos, especially since I was not particularly keen just then on making love to her. But the memory of the love I had known on that other stomach, no less large, round, and white, at the beginning of spring in the granny’s apartment, filled my heart with longings so fierce and sweet that I had to avert my head to prevent Michaela from seeing the tears in my eyes.

But Michaela had no desire to notice unexpected tears pooling in her husband’s eyes. She was full of happiness at being in London, delighting in her freedom to roam where she would, meeting people connected with India, and dreaming about another trip there herself. And so when I got into bed after having a long soak in the bath to cleanse my soul of the blood and pus, I would find her fast asleep, preparing herself for her little morning job, her only obligation — sweeping and mopping the floor of the little chapel and tidying the seats for the congregation coming to pray or tourists coming to admire the quaint old building. She was quite satisfied with this simple manual labor, for which she earned a relatively handsome sum, leading me to suspect a hidden subsidy from Sir Geoffrey, to bolster my low salary. She would bring home candle-ends from the chapel too, and light them from time to time to create a festive atmosphere. Sometimes, when I emerged from the bathroom at the gray hour before dawn, I would see that before she had gone back to sleep she had set a half or third of a candle by my bedside, to dispel my loneliness before I too fell asleep, and in fact the flickering light would gradually calm my agitated spirit and lull me to sleep, or at least show me when it was five o’clock in the morning, when I would sometimes call my parents before they went to work, at the reduced nighttime rates. In the beginning I phoned often, because I hadn’t heard anything from Amnon and I was worried about his paying the rent on time. The two-hour time difference between London and Jerusalem ensured that I would always find my parents at home, fresh and alert, ready with news about themselves and the country but mainly eager to hear about what was going on in my life, and how Michaela’s pregnancy was progressing, and if there were any signs of an early birth. They had already reserved their flight and paid for their tickets, and Michaela had undertaken to find them a room near our apartment. Although they were careful not to drag out the telephone conversations that I paid for, they couldn’t resist asking for more information about rooms for rent in the area so they could decide what might suit them. They sounded excited, not only in anticipation of the birth of their grandchild and the meeting with us but also because of the long stay they planned in England, to which they had paid only brief visits since they had emigrated to Israel. They were now going to stay for two whole months; it was as if they were coming home, back to the land of their birth.

Thirteen

Sometimes dust collects on the little statuette, until its original color is dulled. And if nobody comes to wipe it off occasionally with a soft cloth, a skinny spider will finally descend from the ceiling to patiently weave a great complex web of dense transparentthreads around it, like a delicate lacydress — until a sunbeam borne on the breeze floating in from the open window transforms the forgotten statuette into a dusty little girl, her shining dress ruffling softly around her, ready to dance with anyone who asks her.

But who will ask her? Who can forget that death is death, however it disguises itself?

The birth took place on a freezing winter night in our own little apartment, a few hundred yards from the hospital. I still can’t understand how Michaela succeeded in persuading me, and especially my parents, to agree. But were we really persuaded, or did we simply give in to her determination to give birth at home with only a midwife present? For what, indeed, could we do? We couldn’t force her to have the baby in the hospital. “I’m sorry,” she announced with a tolerant smile at the sight of our misgivings, “but it was me, not you, who carried the baby all this time, so I think I have the right to decide where to bring her into the world.” And with these words the argument was closed. Nevertheless, I don’t think we tried hard enough to change her mind, as if we had resigned ourselves to the fact that she had a few private eccentricities that we had to accept in return for her many virtues, which in London took on a very practical aspect. Not only did she find an excellent apartment for my parents at a reasonable rent, with a separate entrance and a little kitchenette, only a few streets away from us — a room attached to a small house surrounded by a little garden, whose owners were away on a long vacation in Italy — but she also prepared a very warm welcome for them when they arrived. Although she was in the middle of her ninth month, she insisted on going to the airport to meet them and from there bringing them back to our house, where a rich repast awaited them, with all kinds of sausages and cheeses that she knew my father liked. She surprised my mother, who was not a big eater, with a dish that had been a favorite of hers as a child — raspberries and cream, something she had picked up from a chance remark made by my Glasgow aunt. The day before they arrived, Michaela made the beds in their room with fresh, spotless linen, and she added an extra pillow to my mother’s bed, which in this room was next to my father’s, so that she could sleep with her head raised, as she did in Jerusalem. And on top of everything else she had borrowed two hot water bottles from her new friend Stephanie, in case the English heating was insufficient for my parents, especially since an intense cold had descended on the whole country in the week of their arrival, at the beginning of January.

This Stephanie, a mature woman from South Africa whom Michaela had met in the neighborhood choir and had become very friendly with, was the source of some of her new ideas, including the idea of giving birth at home with a midwife, which apparently was fashionable then among young women in North London, who besides relying on their own sturdy health were looking for some kind of meaning in the simpler ways of former generations. I knew that Michaela was searching for something; she wanted to experience the birth on a basic, elemental level, and if half the human race was still giving birth at home without making a fuss about it, there really was no reason for me to be concerned. Her pregnancy had been absolutely normal, and she herself was a strong, healthy young woman. She had also participated in a Lamaze course, and she knew what to expect; in case of an emergency the hospital was just around the corner, and I myself was a doctor after all, as Michaela reminded me in a slightly mocking tone, for it amused her that a doctor, and a young one at that, should be prey to fears that would never even occur to a layman. It was true that I had accumulated plenty of experience over the past few months in the little operating room next to the emergency room, but I had never delivered a baby — let alone this particular one, whom I was already calling Shiva to myself, but with a beth, not with a vav. This was my condition for agreeing to the birth at home, and Michaela was forced to accept it, in spite of her protests. “You’re wrong, Benjy,” she said. “Shiva with a vav is more elegant than Shiva with a beth. And it’s also connected to the word shivayon, equality, or even, if you want, to something religious like Shiviti elohim l’negdi, ‘I have set God always before me.’”

“But you mean a completely different god,” I said immediately. “Why different?” she wondered. “It’s always the same god, Benjy. Why can’t you understand? But never mind, let it be with a beth in the meantime, and when she learns to read and write she can decide for herself how to spell her name. In any case, in English it’s the same, and that’s the important thing,” and this concluded the negotiations between us, with an echo of her refusal to go home to Israel after the year was over.

My parents had already heard this echo too, on the way back from the airport, and they remarked on it to me, but their immediate concern was with Michaela’s plan to give birth at home. In the beginning they tried to pressure Michaela tactfully into changing her mind, as they had tried and succeeded in the matter of the size of the wedding. But this time I wasn’t neutral. I felt obligated to stand up for Michaela and reassure my parents — after all, I was a doctor, wasn’t I? And that should count for something. Fortunately, my father’s niece and her pale, thin, bespectacled husband, the one with the slightly mysterious appearance, called as soon as my parents arrived and invited them to dinner and the theater, distracting them to some extent from their anxieties about the approaching birth, which I intended to tell them about only when it was over. This wouldn’t be easy, for they were staying nearby, and in spite of their discretion and promise not to make a nuisance of themselves, they called several times a day. When I received a phone call at six o’clock in the evening from Michaela, who was already a few days overdue, to tell me that her water had broken, I told her not to say anything to my parents and hurried home from the hospital. There I was met by Stephanie, who liked taking part in these private births and who was chiefly responsible for giving Michaela the confidence to go through with it. Michaela was already lying, pale and smiling, on the mattress on my side of the joined twin beds, for her own mattress, soaked with amniotic fluid, had been put in front of the radiator in the next room to dry. I wondered if amniotic fluid had a smell. The first contraction had not come yet, so while we waited I made coffee and sandwiches for Stephanie and myself, but I forbade Michaela to eat, so that she wouldn’t vomit later. Even though Michaela had assured me that the midwife would bring “everything necessary,” I had prepared myself for the delivery by purchasing some polydine disinfectant, something to stop the bleeding, and three shots of Pitocin to accelerate the contractions, at a pharmacy; the Marcaine injections to anesthetize the pelvic nerves, which proved impossible to obtain at a pharmacy, I secretly “borrowed” from the medicine cabinet in the hospital delivery room, in the hope that we wouldn’t have to use them. Prompted by a premonition that something might go wrong and that I should be prepared for any eventuality, without asking permission I put a few simple but essential instruments in my bag, such as forceps, scalpels, long, curved scissors, and needles, and as soon as I got home I threw them all into a pot of boiling water to sterilize them. How strange, I thought, that I should be sitting here in our little kitchen, full of fear and apprehension, watching the bubbling water, when only a stone’s throw away was a hospital with modern operating rooms to which I had free access. If I really loved Michaela, I wondered, would I have given in to her so easily?

The midwife had not yet arrived, even though she had said that she was on her way some time ago. Michaela showed no signs of anxiety; she was well prepared and confident that everything would go smoothly. Stephanie and I watched as she greeted the first contraction with the special breathing exercises she had learned, without uttering a sound. In the meantime my parents phoned, and guessed by the tone of my voice that something was happening. I made them swear not to come until I called them, and they promised to wait for my permission — but half an hour later I saw them through the window, walking up and down the street as if they wanted, in spite of the bitter cold, to be close to the scene of the event. They were wearing heavy coats, and from time to time they raised their eyes to our lighted windows. Then they disappeared, into a nearby pub as it turned out, from which they phoned to say that they were close by and if I needed them they could be there in a minute. The midwife, presumably stuck in the busy evening traffic, had still not arrived, and I started to become really worried about what I would do if, God forbid, she didn’t come at all and it proved impossible to transfer Michaela to the hospital against her will. The rate of the contractions increased slightly, but there was still no sign of an opening. Michaela was quiet, she didn’t let out a single moan, and it was a wonder to me that she, who screamed and moaned wildly when we made love, was so restrained in the face of pains so severe that her face went white and she closed her eyes for long stretches at a time. For a moment I felt angry at myself for leaving all the arrangements for the midwife and the delivery to her. But before I took more drastic steps, such as going around to the hospital to fetch someone qualified to help, I decided to bring my parents up to the apartment, not only in order to leave someone more reliable than Stephanie with Michaela, although she seemed quite calm and collected, but also to get encouragement from their presence, and maybe even to get some practical advice from my mother, who had also given birth, even though it had been only once, and thirty years ago at that.

I ran down to the pub to call them. At first I couldn’t find them in the crush, because instead of sitting in a corner, as I expected, they were standing at the bar like veteran customers, drinking beer and holding an animated conversation with a group of Englishmen. When they saw me pushing my way toward them, looking agitated, my father had been having such a pleasant time that he thought it was already over and I had come to give them the news. He hurried to introduce me to his new acquaintances, and the friendliness of their nods led me to understand that here too I had been one of the subjects of his conversation. When we left the pub he complained again, as he had done since his arrival, of my poor English vocabulary and the mistakes I kept making, and offered once more to speak to me in English in order to improve my command of the language. But my mother, who sensed my deep excitement, cut him short: “Not now. Let’s wait for Shiva to be born first.” There was something very agreeable and reassuring in the way she pronounced for the first time the name of the baby who had not yet been born — who was apparently in no hurry to be born, either, judging by the lack of change in Michaela’s dilation. My father, of course, did not go into the bedroom and only looked in politely from the door, but my mother sat down next to the bed and began talking intensely with Michaela and Stephanie, who were becoming increasingly concerned at the failure of the midwife to arrive. Three hours had passed since she had been summoned, and there was no sign of her; and they had both been relying on her, not only medically but spiritually.

And then I understood that I would have to delivery my baby by myself, and taking into account the fact that my hospital was only a stone’s throw away, the situation into which I had been manipulated seemed to me nothing short of scandalous. Michaela sensed my rage and smiled apologetically. Her face was very pale; there were already black rings under her eyes, and I knew that she was in great pain but that she didn’t want to complain, especially after the Lamaze course that she had so faithfully and enthusiastically attended, under the supervision of the very midwife who still hadn’t arrived and whose whereabouts were unknown to the people who answered the phone at her house. I brought the instruments and drugs I had prepared into the bedroom, placed two pillows under her legs to raise them, and without hesitation gave her a shot of Pitocin to speed up the contractions. I had never injected anyone with Pitocin before, but since I had studied the formula in advance and read up on its action I had no qualms about administering it, especially since it was simply a weak solution of a substance I recognized as a muscle contractant. My mother watched me respectfully and nodded encouragingly, confident of the skill and lightness of my hand. Even though she was violently opposed to the idea of having the baby at home, she possessed a marvelous capacity for displaying optimism in the hour of need and putting old disagreements behind her. In order to keep Michaela occupied until the next contraction, she tried to remember details of her own delivery, to which Michaela paid scant attention, for now, under the influence of the injection, the contractions were coming more frequently, but still without any signs of the cervix’s dilating. The baby’s hard skull, too, which I succeeded in palpating in order to ascertain that her head would appear first, was still high up, as if she knew there was no point in approaching the cervix, which was still completely closed. I didn’t want to give Michaela the Marcaine yet, in case it caused a relaxation that would delay the birth. I realized that my anxiety was exaggerated and tried to tell myself that it was no big deal; every ambulance driver delivered a baby at least once or twice during the course of his career, and Michaela was showing impressive powers of endurance. She still had not asked me to give her anything to relieve the pain, and she did whatever I told her to without complaining, as if she were ready to press her guts out and tear herself into pieces as long as I left her in our bedroom and didn’t take her to the hospital.

And when the birth finally came, between six and seven in the morning, after an additional shot slowly but surely encouraged the cervix to begin to open, like a big red rose — and when in the warm intimacy of our bedroom, where at Michaela’s request the lights had been dimmed, the head of our baby, covered with wildly untidy hair, emerged together with the first signs of a gray London dawn — I began to understand, if not to endorse, Michaela’s stubborn insistence on giving birth at home. Especially since the birth was so smooth and easy. The baby perhaps identifying with Michaela, who had not uttered a single groan of pain all night long, only cried very briefly, and stopped as soon as I cut the umbilical cord and gave her to my mother, who wrapped her in a big towel, her hands trembling with an emotion I had not imagined this logical, unsentimental woman capable of. Afterward, when we recalled these moments, I learned that the emotion which made my mother tremble so much that she almost dropped the baby was due not only to the birth of this baby, with its startlingly hairy, almost devilish head, but also to the distant but vivid memory of the loneliness she herself had felt when I was born, a birth she had not known would be her last. I too was strangely moved by the hairy black head emerging from the bleeding womb, precisely because it was the opposite of the shorn head that had misled me into taking Michaela for a boy when I first met her in the Lazars’ living room. As if by some mysterious process a little of my beloved’s long, abundant hair had grown on my baby’s head, which was now resting dark and shining on my pillow while I waited for the placenta to come out so that I could coolly suture the bleeding tears in the vagina with the needles I had brought from the hospital. I stress the word “coolly” here because even Michaela, who was radiant with joy, could guess how much it had affected me to function as a physician at the birth of my own child. But she had no idea of the price I was soon to extract for having been forced to deal so surgically and directly with her blood, womb, and placenta. And when Stephanie, who had been enthralled by my performance throughout the long night, finally invited my father into the bedroom to see his granddaughter, I didn’t wait to observe the reactions of this good man, who had been sitting quietly, wide awake, in the living room all night long, but hurried to the bathroom to wash off what I felt had besmirched the little love I had for my wife.

So profound and intense was the weariness that had accumulated between the four sides of my personality, that had been active during the long night — physician, husband, father, and son — that I dozed off in the warm, scented bathwater and failed to register the belated arrival of the midwife, who turned out to be a tall dark woman, perhaps of oriental extraction, with a haughty air and white hair. It seemed that there was a prosaic explanation for her mysterious absence. As soon as she received our summons she had set out, but a car had run into her as she was crossing the street and injured her ankle, with the result that she had to spend several hours in the police station and the emergency room. Since she didn’t have our telephone number and we weren’t listed in the phone book, she had no way of contacting us. But her conscience wouldn’t let her go straight home from the hospital, and just as she was, limping painfully on a crutch, she came to keep her promise, accompanied by her young daughter, and to see if she was still needed. Although the birth was already over, Michaela and Stephanie were happy to see her and made her sit down on the armchair in the bedroom — first of all, to tell her in detail about how the birth had gone and how the correct breathing she taught had helped overcome the pain, and second, to ask her to examine the baby and express her opinion. They woke the baby up and laid her naked on the lap of the midwife, who examined her thoroughly and also anointed her with a special oil she had brought with her, after which Stephanie put her back in our bed, next to Michaela. The baby still didn’t have a crib of her own. Although Michaela had purchased all the necessary equipment, she had left it all in the department store, in order not to arouse the jealousy of mysterious evil forces until the birth had been safely accomplished. “I don’t believe it,” said my father to Michaela in genuine astonishment. “A rational, liberated woman like you, believing in mysterious evil forces?”

“Of course I don’t want to believe in mysterious forces,” replied Michaela jokingly, “but what can I do if they believe in me?” Stephanie and Michaela praised me to the skies to the midwife, who examined the cervix, praised my stitches, but could not hide her disapproval of the injections I had given Michaela to induce the birth. Why was I in such a hurry? she wanted to know. Nature had a rhythm of its own. If I had not induced the birth, perhaps she would have arrived in time to deliver the baby herself. Who knows whether she was thinking of the fee she had lost or her professional enjoyment, or perhaps of both.

But none of this mattered now. My father’s face was crumpled with fatigue, and my mother asked me to call a taxi for them, because she didn’t want to put me out. But I insisted on driving them home myself, and I went to get the car from its parking place behind the chapel, trying to engrave on my memory the details of the foggy London street, which looked like a set from an old English movie, so that I could tell Shiva when she grew up about the morning of her birth. Outside the garden gate of the pretty house where my parents were staying, my mother, who was still wide awake, suddenly suggested that she would go back to be with Michaela while I snatched a few hours’ sleep on her bed, next to my father. I don’t know if it was the somber expression on my face that worried her, or if she was already missing the new baby, but I refused. Although I could have done with a few hours’ sleep in their pleasant room, surrounded by the bourgeois quiet of the English house, I didn’t know how Michaela would react to my desertion only a few hours after the birth of the baby, and I said good-bye to my parents, who embraced me warmly. I knew that they were very happy now, and the dense fog surrounding us, which reminded them of their childhood, only increased their happiness. They were bursting with pride in my successful delivery of the baby, after all their fears. I too was pleased with myself, and on the way home, as I glided slowly and carefully between the little milk vans, I wondered what to say in the monthly report I sent to Lazar’s secretary about my work in the London hospital. Should I mention the fact that I had delivered the baby by myself at home, which might be interpreted by a certain person as excessive intimacy in my relations with Michaela, or should I simply announce the fact of Shiva’s birth, so that she, the distant and impossible beloved, would know that the way was open for her to renew our sweet and secret relations, now that she was doubly protected against me?

But when I reached home, I thought that perhaps I should have accepted my mother’s offer to go to sleep in their room after all, for Michaela and Stephanie were still deep in animated conversation with the midwife, who in spite of the pain in her ankle was sitting in our bedroom with her daughter, drinking her second or third cup of tea, holding not our baby but the little Indian statuette with its many outflung arms between her hands and speaking now not of births and babies but of life itself, its purpose and meaning, a subject on which I was invited to give my opinion. Stephanie poured me a cup of tea, and I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed, crushed between five women, counting the fingers and toes on my new daughter, who lay next to me blinking her eyes. I discovered that Michaela and Stephanie had good reason for being under the spell of this midwife, who turned out to be an original woman with an eloquent style of speech and strange and diverting ideas. Beyond the practical, competent professional veneer lay a fervent belief in the transmigration of souls, and not necessarily after death but in the midst of the bustle and flow of life. Her idea of the soul was of something flimsier and lighter than the conventional notion, for she removed the heavier parts, such as memory, and left only the anxieties and aspirations, which allowed it to drift slowly around and also to migrate deliberately from place to place and person to person. For example, she said that when her ankle had been injured in the evening and she had been taken to the hospital and realized that she wouldn’t be able to reach us in time, she had sent her soul to enter into those present in this room, especially into me. Hadn’t I felt, she asked me, that I had done things more easily and confidently than I had ever done them in my life before? “Yes, I did feel that,” I admitted honestly. “But if your soul entered into me,” I asked innocently, with an exhausted smile, “where was my soul? Surely I didn’t have two souls inside me last night?”

“It was in me, of course.” The midwife answered my challenge simply and without embarrassment. “I kept it until the birth was over and you returned my soul to me.”

“And how did my soul seem to you?” I went on provocatively. “To tell you the truth, a rather childish soul,” she replied seriously, blushing as if she had disclosed an embarrassing secret. “A childish soul?” I laughed in surprise but also in pique at this unexpected reply. “In what sense childish?”

“In the strange way it falls in love,” she replied. “Falls in love?” I cried in astonishment. “With who?”

“Me, for example,” she replied brazenly, staring at me intently, until her daughter, who had been watching her mother worshipfully all this time, burst into ringing laughter, which immediately infected Michaela and Stephanie too, and in the end also the midwife herself, who stood up and lightly stroked the baby’s hair and then laid her hand on my shoulder to placate me.

But after the three females had at long last left the apartment and Michaela had moved into the living room with the baby to give me a chance to sleep for she herself was still too excited to sleep — I suddenly felt, in the fog of exhaustion buzzing in my brain, that perhaps I really was capable of falling in love with this proud, white-haired midwife, just as I had fallen in love with Dori, who soon appeared to me in a muddled dream; and when I woke up and found myself so far away from her — a man with a little family in a gray London winter — I wanted to weep with longing. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, outside it was drizzling, and in the next room I heard my mother talking excitedly to Michaela, who had not yet closed her eyes and was still elated, perhaps because the crib, bath, and baby carriage had arrived from the department store. The baby already had a corner of her own in the world, and since some small things were still missing, my father had gone out into the rain to procure them. At six o’clock that evening I was able to go to my shift at the hospital knowing that the baby was in the safe hands of Michaela and my parents, and that life at home would soon be back to normal. I hastily replaced the borrowed injections and instruments, very relieved that nobody had noticed their absence. But I was sorry that I couldn’t tell any of my colleagues about the home birth, since I was afraid that it would be seen as a vote of no confidence in the hospital. Nor could I boast of delivering the baby myself, for fear of seeming irresponsible to them. So I kept quiet, and since the freezing cold outside kept the number of patients at a minimum, I was free to bask in an inner glow of self-congratulation at my efficient performance of the night before. After midnight, when my shift ended, I went home and found Michaela sitting and breast-feeding the baby. My parents had only just left, evidently unable to tear themselves away from their sweet granddaughter, and perhaps also unwilling to leave Michaela alone. This was the first time we had been alone together since the birth. “You’ll collapse if you don’t get some sleep,” I said to her gently. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” She smiled at me affectionately. There was no doubt that the birth had strengthened our mutual esteem. Michaela could not help but be impressed by my skill as a doctor, while the memory of how nobly she had borne her pain filled me with respect for her. I don’t know if it crossed her mind that I had refused to give her a sedative or an analgesic not only because I wanted her to be completely lucid during the birth, but also because I secretly wished to avenge myself on her for forcing me to act as her midwife. I had a strange feeling that our growing respect for each other would do nothing to increase the love that was supposed to bring us together, but would have the opposite effect — a feeling reinforced at this midnight hour by my indifference at the sight of her two pear-shaped breasts, which did not give rise to the faintest desire in me, not even to brush one of her nipples with my lips in order to feel what my daughter was feeling now.

During the following week Michaela gradually made up for the hours of lost sleep and prepared herself efficiently to return to her normal life, especially her exploration of London. My mother and father were always at her disposal as baby-sitters, but she was unwilling to rely too much on their help, both because she wanted them to enjoy their vacation, which was coming to an end in two or three weeks, and because we had to start managing without them. She hung a baby sling on her stomach, which had already returned to its normal size, and in it she deposited Shiva, who felt as snug and comfortable there as a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. And thus, one week after giving birth, Michaela was already able to return to her little cleaning job in the chapel, with the baby riding on her stomach, and also to visit old friends from India who were now living in East London. Her natural self-confidence began to rub off on the baby, who seemed to be growing to resemble her mother spiritually, for not only did she suffer being dragged around London in silence, she appeared to actually enjoy it. It was still too early to tell whom she resembled physically, in spite of my parents’ suggestions. She didn’t look like me, and she hadn’t inherited Michaela’s stunning eyes either. One afternoon when I was alone in the house with her, something about her slightly flattened skull and narrow eyes put me in mind of the pale and faintly mysterious figure of our non-Jewish English relation, the husband of my father’s niece, who was very friendly to my parents. One Sunday afternoon, for instance, he and his wife saw fit to invite all our English relatives to a little party in honor of the baby’s birth; one of the guests was my energetic aunt from Glasgow, who did her best to persuade my parents to go and spend a week with her in Scotland before they returned to Israel. In spite of her love for her younger sister, my mother hesitated, mostly because she was unwilling to part from the baby, though she wouldn’t admit it. In the meantime, we discovered the existence of a semiofficial nursery attached to the pediatric department at the hospital, for the children of the staff. The nursery was not intended for babies as young as Shiva, but Michaela succeeded in persuading the nurse in charge to take her from time to time for a little while. And so my parents were able accept my aunt’s insistent invitation after all with a clear conscience and conclude their successful visit to Britain with a return to the scenes of my mother’s Scottish childhood.

I encouraged them to go, they and my aunt would enjoy it but because I had heard from Sir Geoffrey that Lazar and his wife were about to arrive in London, and I did not want my mother to see the feverish excitement that gripped me as soon as I heard this news. Although Sir Geoffrey said nothing about Dori, I knew that she would never let Lazar go on a trip to London without her. I even told myself that it was because of her imminent arrival that she had failed to acknowledge the announcement of Shiva’s birth, which I had appended to my monthly progress report to Lazar’s secretary. I asked Sir Geoffrey about the agenda for Lazar’s visit, which turned out to be packed with meetings and events, since Lazar intended to set up a Society of Friends of our hospital in London. I therefore offered myself as an additional escort, perhaps to take care of Mrs. Lazar, if she came, and prevent her from being bored. “She doesn’t look like a lady who’s easily bored,” laughed Sir Geoffrey, who remembered her from a visit two years before, hanging on to her husband’s arm, smiling and pleased with herself. It was obvious that he liked her, and I had to fight for the right to go and pick them up at the airport, which inconvenienced Michaela, who had to give up her yoga class in South Kensington in order to stay at home with the baby. Shiva, I reminded her, had a slight cold. She didn’t protest, although she mocked the practical motives behind my willingness to be of service to the Lazars, and also wondered whether our little Morris would be able to hold “those two fatties” and their luggage. I was already resigned to the fact that Einat had passed on her hostility toward her parents to Michaela, perhaps in their days together in Calcutta, and I didn’t bother to respond. My thoughts strayed to the moment when Dori and Lazar would discover me waiting for them at the gate, and to how surprised they would be to see me, although in fact they were used to seeing me in airports.

But as things turned out, Lazar recognized me before I spotted them and immediately embraced me. His wife did not blush with surprise at the sudden meeting either, and, radiant as usual, she held out her arms for a hug with a naturalness that astonished me, and kissed me on both cheeks. And even though I knew it was only a friendly kiss, the result of her excitement at the flight and the landing, and the same kind of reception Sir Geoffrey would have received if he had come to meet them, I couldn’t control the violent trembling that took hold of me, as if this simple, smiling kiss, bestowed on me so naturally by my beloved in the presence of her husband, held out the promise of something real and significant occurring in the course of this visit, which began in the soft light of a welcoming London sky. It was presumably these thoughts running through my head, and not her presence at my side, looking for a place to put her long legs in the cramped space of the little car, which caused me to get lost on the way from the airport to their hotel, to the annoyance of Lazar, who was tired and in a hurry as usual. “You were better at finding your way in New Delhi,” he remarked sarcastically, sitting in the backseat squeezed next to a suitcase that didn’t fit into the trunk, looking at the unfamiliar London streets, which he was sure he would have negotiated more successfully than I was, if he had been sitting at the steering wheel in my place. When we finally reached the hotel and I took the second suitcase out of the trunk, I suddenly recognized it as one of those that had accompanied us to India, and with a mysterious feeling of inexplicable joy I bent down to stroke the slightly shabby leather, which still seemed to be covered with the reddish yellow dust of the dirt roads next to the temples of Bodhgaya. Lazar wanted to open this suitcase in the hotel lobby, to take out the gift they had brought for the baby, but Dori stopped him. “Later, there’s plenty of time. We’ll give it to the baby herself,” she said, and asked about Shiva’s unusual name. When I explained why Michaela had chosen the name, she seemed stirred and excited, immediately grasping the deep Indian connection, which included her too. I wanted to tell them my reservations about calling my daughter after a god who wanted to destroy the entire universe, and my preference for a more modest Israeli context and for the spelling of the Hebrew word “return,” but it seemed too complicated to explain to two tired people eager to go up to their room and rest after their journey.

When I got home, Michaela wasn’t there. In spite of the baby’s cold she had decided to take her out. I was annoyed with her for ignoring my medical diagnosis, and I even saw it as a little act of revenge for what she saw as my exaggerated and superfluous favors to the Lazars. The truth was that in spite of the skill I had displayed in delivering the baby, Michaela refused to allow me to extend my medical authority to her. “As far as she’s concerned, you’re only her father, not her doctor,” she warned me in the commanding tone she could sometimes use. It was obviously important to her not to give me any advantage as far as responsibility for the baby’s welfare was concerned, and in principle she was right. But I was afraid that wandering around in the cold might make the baby develop an infection and keep us at home now, exactly when I wanted to be as free as possible to cultivate my relations with the woman who, from the moment I had set eyes on her again, I knew I could not give up — could not and would not. Giving her up, even in my thoughts, might damage a vital artery that was sustaining me and giving me strength to cope with Michaela and the baby and even with my parents, who had recently become soft and sentimental, hanging on my every word and doing everything I told them to. And I didn’t need much to sustain the obsession that haunted me day and night: all I needed was an occasional smile from her to give me the courage to go into her office again and confess my love with a boldness and desperation that would cause her not only astonishment and remorse but mainly admiration of herself for sending a young man like me into a state of such tender confusion. And that was liable to fire her with a different passion from the kind aroused in her by her devoted husband, who kissed and caressed her without stopping.

But when Michaela returned with the baby, who was healthy and rosy from the walk in the wintry air, without a trace of the morning’s cold, I had to admire the maternal instinct that had so confidently and accurately diagnosed the superficiality of the sniffles that I had thought so important. And again I realized how right my mother had been the first time I brought Michaela home, when she predicted that the moment Michaela had a child she would stop looking for herself and find her proper place in the world, so much so that even her lack of a high school diploma wouldn’t matter. She seemed so attractive to me now, as she competently changed the baby’s diaper and began breastfeeding her, that I hinted at the possibility of a quick session in bed before I had to go to my night shift at the hospital; perhaps it would help to relieve the lust I already felt for the woman who had just arrived in the country, whom we would have to invite to tea soon, with her husband, so that they could have a look at the baby and give her the present they had brought — and give me the opportunity to put out a few feelers about plans for my return to the hospital in Israel, in order to make sure that the English door really led back home and wasn’t locked behind us. But Michaela wasn’t at all interested. Her friend the midwife recommended refraining from full sexual intercourse for three months after the birth, in order to give all the tears time to mend and allow everything to settle down again after the shock. Although I couldn’t really argue with the midwife’s logic, I remained so full of tension that I couldn’t sleep after my night shift, so I went back to the hospital early in the afternoon. I left Shiva at the nursery and walked up and down outside Sir Geoffrey’s office, hoping to bump into the Lazars. And so I did. I easily recognized Dori’s confident steps in the distance, and soon after that her eyes were imploring me anxiously, for she realized that I was hanging around in the corridor outside Sir Geoffrey’s office in order to meet her again. If it hadn’t occurred to me on the spur of the moment to ask her to come and see Shiva, she would no doubt have followed her husband like a little puppy dog into his meeting with Sir Geoffrey, who intended, as Lazar had already told me the day before, to offer the Tel Aviv hospital used dialysis and anesthesia equipment from the English hospital’s surplus stock for next to nothing. I saw immediately that the invitation to come and see the baby attracted her, and Lazar, who wanted to examine the offer in depth and make sure that Sir Geoffrey’s good intentions wouldn’t lead to more trouble than the equipment was worth, encouraged her to go with me. “But why not, Dori? Go and see the baby, and if Benjy has the time, perhaps he’ll take you to see St. Paul’s Cathedral, which you wanted to see today. I’m afraid that it’s going to take a long time here, and after that I have to meet the man who’s organizing the evening for the Friends.”

“And when will you see the baby?” she cried in a scandalized tone, as if it were a duty or a pleasure that couldn’t be missed. But I, thrilled at the opportunity to be alone with her, which had come my way so easily, hastily reassured them on this score. “You’ll still have plenty of opportunities to see the baby,” I repeatedly promised Lazar, who didn’t seem in the least enthusiastic, and we arranged that I would bring Dori back to Sir Geoffrey’s office in two hours’ time. Thus, by an unexpected coincidence, she was suddenly in my charge, albeit for only two hours, but in a place completely unfamiliar to her, wrapped in the blue velvet tunic I remembered from India, which apparently belonged to the category of clothes that could be worn anywhere. With her high heels drumming a sure and steady rhythm, she began to walk beside me — a plump, ripe, middle-aged woman, who by the time I reached her age might have already departed from this world. This new thought filled me not only with sadness but also with a tender pleasure. In a friendly way, but maintaining a discreet distance, as if we had never lain together naked, I began to ask her about her mother and how she was getting on in the old folks’ home, a subject I knew she enjoyed talking about and one that I felt hinted at the intimacy between us as well. When we went quietly into the nursery and I received permission to take Dori into the babies’ room for a minute, I wasn’t satisfied with pointing out Shiva’s crib to her, but I woke the baby up and put her in Dori’s arms, so that she would hold something that was part of my flesh and blood.

She hugged the baby very warmly, uttering cries of excitement and delight, which to the nurse standing next to us no doubt sounded phony and exaggerated but which I knew were genuine. Shiva’s abundant hair amused Dori greatly, and she clasped the hairy little head to her bosom and refused to part with her, until I had to intervene tactfully and return the wide-awake baby to her crib. I was so moved by Dori’s enthusiasm that I couldn’t restrain myself, and as I led her through a side door into the hospital’s bustling emergency entrance, I told her the entire story of my successful delivery of the baby in our bedroom, in detail. The automatic smile in her eyes was now mixed with immense curiosity. She was delighted with my story. In fact, she seemed so absorbed that instead of taking her to St. Paul’s, as I had offered, and risking bringing her back late to the meeting with her husband, I suggested that we take advantage of the rare warmth of the sun and go on strolling around the streets in the vicinity of the hospital, and perhaps venture a little farther, into the nicer neighborhood where my parents’ room was situated. Suddenly I wanted to know what this fussy woman who had dragged us from one hotel to another in India until she found one that lived up to her expectations would think of the pretty place Michaela had found for my parents, which she might want to consider for herself during a future London vacation. And since the keys to the garden gate and to the room had been attached to my key ring since I had said good-bye to my parents at the train station a few days before, we would have no problem getting in.

Behind the small house, which stood in a well-tended garden, was a separate gate leading past beds of roses to my parents’ room. There were little bells hanging on the gate, which were evidently intended to give the landlords a measure of control over the comings and goings of their tenants. But they were superfluous now, since the owners of the house were in Italy. After the bells had stopped ringing, I opened the door of the room, which was very dark, and invited Dori to peep inside. Although the windows and curtains had been closed for several days, there was a pleasant smell in the room, a combination of the odor of the floor polish and the lingering ambience of my parents, some of whose familiar clothes were still hanging in the closet. Perhaps because of this ambience, Dori hesitated at first to enter the large, attractive room, but when I insisted on showing it off to her and proving how reasonable the rent was in view of its many virtues, she agreed to follow me into the little kitchenette too, and even into the tiny bathroom, which I knew my mother had left clean and tidy. It was cold in the room. There was a coin-operated gas heater which I wanted to turn on, and I also wanted to draw the curtain so that she could see the pretty garden through the window, but she stopped me with a gesture, sat down on an armchair in the dim light, like that time in her mother’s apartment, and stretched her legs out in front of her. All of a sudden I felt a surge of lust, together with profound anxiety. A whole year had already passed, and I didn’t know how to go on from here. Was I supposed to declare my love to her again? In the meantime, I offered her a cup of tea, since I knew my parents kept no coffee in the room. Looking surprised but smiling gloriously, she agreed to this strange offer, perhaps because she too wanted a chance to examine her feelings. But when I came back into the room after switching on the electric kettle and putting the tea bags in the cups, I found her standing impatiently, as if she had just grasped how odd, and even perverse, it would be to spend the little time we had left before returning to the hospital sitting and drinking tea in my parents’ dark, closed room. She expressed a wish, which seemed to me rather reckless and childish, to see the rooms in the rest of the house. I glanced at my watch; we had thirty or forty minutes left before we had to leave to keep our appointment with Lazar, which I was determined to be on time for so as not to give him any grounds for suspicion. Did she realize, I wondered feverishly, that we would never find a better place than this in which to make love with perfect anonymity and secrecy, or was she put off by the idea of making love on my parents’ pushed-together beds? I began to feel the lust churning in the pit of my stomach, but I followed her into a long, narrow passage that led into a dark and surprisingly large sitting room, where all the furniture — armchairs, sofas, and cabinets — was covered with white sheets. I wanted to switch on the light, but the electricity appeared to be disconnected in this part of the house. I thought this would be enough to discourage her from continuing her explorations, but her curiosity knew no bounds, and smiling to herself, without asking my permission as the representative of the subtenants in this house, she went on and opened a wooden door leading to a charming little study paneled in reddish wood, which opened into another passage that led into a room that was unexpectedly light, for one of the curtains was open. The meager daylight streaming in through the window looked bright and strong in contrast to the darkness shrouding the rest of the house. This fine, big bedroom was different in its light, modern style from the other rooms, and it was immediately clear that it had taken the fancy of my companion, for she began to scrutinize it with an inquisitive, proprietary eye, and suddenly pulled the sheet off the bed, disclosing a handsome floral bedspread in various shades of green.

True, it would have been more becoming and more decent to make love on my parents’ bed and not to desecrate the room of a couple of strangers vacationing in Italy in complete ignorance of my existence. But I was afraid that if I took Dori back to my parents’ room she might regret her impulse, and by the time I succeeded in seducing her we would have to leave. Without wasting time on declarations of love, I went up to her in resolute silence, and put my arms around her and kissed her and felt the heaviness of her body again. This time too she refused to let me take off a single item of her clothing, as if this would undercut her liberty and independence, and as on the first time she waited until I was standing before her naked in the freezing room before she got undressed and lay down on the green bedspread, which in her eyes was evidently not only more beautiful than the plain white sheet but also cleaner. She waited with her eyes closed for me to finish covering with passionate kisses her sweet, full stomach, which had grown even rounder since the last time, as if she were hoarding secrets there in a slow, endless pregnancy. But when I tried to move down to her crotch, she stopped me with a light tug at my hair and pulled me up to lie with her properly, taking hold of my penis and trying to put it inside her with an unclear anger, perhaps because its tip was already covered with a delicate film, like my face, which was suddenly bathed in tears because the pain and pity of this strange love were complicating my lust. In a second I lost my concentration, and I knew that I would not be able to satisfy this beloved woman but only watch as her excitement weakened and died and ebbed away, like a wave returning to the sea. Thus we remained lying in a long, silent embrace until she opened her eyes and glanced at her watch and I saw her surprise at the tears on my face. “But what’s wrong?” she said. “Don’t be sorry, it doesn’t matter. In any case, everything’s impossible here.” And with uncharacteristic speed she got dressed, watching me with some anxiety as I slowly and feebly collected my clothes and put them on in the strange, cold room. Then we left the house, which she said she liked very much, and if there was time, she said, she would show it to Lazar as a good place to spend a holiday in London. On the way back she chattered gaily and quickened her steps, as if what had happened between us gave her hope of getting rid of me, or at least of warning me off. But when we entered the administrative wing of the hospital her strange gaiety gave way to a mild tension. She preferred to leave me at the end of the corridor and go on alone to Sir Geoffrey’s room.

The room looked dark to me, as if nobody were there, and, not wanting to leave her alone, I remained where I was. Indeed, the door proved to be locked, and there was nobody in the secretary’s room either. From my position at the end of the corridor I could see that she was very agitated, not only because she didn’t like being left alone but also because she was evidently not used to waiting for her husband. She sat down on the bench opposite the office and then stood up and began pacing up and down, until she caught sight of me standing at the end of the hall. “Are you sure this is the place?” she called out angrily, as if I were capable of leading her astray. When I reassured her, she said unexpectedly and somewhat bitterly, immediately giving rise to new hope in me, “So we hurried back for nothing.” Then she sent me away, after refusing my offer to go and look for her husband. I went to the nursery, to see if Michaela had already taken Shiva, and saw that the baby was still there. The nurse told me that she had been restless, crying for most of the time since I returned her to her crib, and suggested that I take her home without waiting for Michaela. I put her into her sling, but instead of leaving right away, and despite the fact that I didn’t like hanging around the hospital with the baby, I went back to Sir Geoffrey’s office to see if Lazar had come to get his wife. From the end of the corridor I saw that she was still sitting on the bench, erect, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette, and my heart melted with love and concern. I went up to her and asked, “What’s going on? Where’s Lazar?” She shrugged her shoulders with an unfamiliar melancholy smile, as if she feared the worst. “Don’t worry,” I said, “he must be somewhere in the hospital. Let me leave the baby with you for a minute and I’ll go and look for him.” She put out her cigarette and agreed with alacrity, as if glad to have the opportunity to play grandmother for a while. I turned to the surgical wing, since I knew that the equipment Sir Geoffrey wanted to give Lazar was there. But in the surgical wing they told me that the two of them had left half an hour before for the emergency room. “Why?” I asked in surprise, and was told that Sir Geoffrey had taken Lazar to undergo some tests. I rushed breathlessly to the emergency room, to the astonishment of the phlegmatic Englishmen I passed as I ran, who up to now had no doubt taken me for one of them. In the familiar emergency room I immediately spotted Lazar’s mane of gray hair. He was lying on one of the beds without his jacket and shoes, his shirt sleeves rolled up, shaking his head and smiling apologetically at the head of the department, Dr. Arnold, a quiet, rather modest man, who was explaining something on the EKG strips to Sir Geoffrey. “Where’s Dori?” he asked in Hebrew as soon as he saw me. “She’s waiting for you outside Sir Geoffrey’s office,” I said. “Should I run and get her?”

“There’s no need for that. She’ll only get frightened. I’ll be out of here in a minute,” replied Lazar, and added with a smile, “Just imagine, they wanted to keep me here!”

It turned out that when he had examined the dialysis machine Sir Geoffrey had offered him, he decided to check out various electrical apparatus attached to it too, such as the sphygmomanometer and the EKG, and out of curiosity asked to be connected to them. The random EKG showed runs of a rapid heartbeat, which Lazar had not felt at all because of their short duration. The technician immediately noticed the abnormality and hurried to call the cardiology resident, who examined the EKG and wanted to hospitalize Lazar on the spot. But Lazar, who felt no different from usual, and Sir Geoffrey, who suspected that something might not be adequately calibrated in the machine, which had not been used for a long time, asked for a repeat examination on another machine, and those results were better, if not completely normal. A more senior cardiologist who was summoned to examine Lazar suggested that the whole thing could be attributed to the excitement and stress of the trip. This cardiologist was of Pakistani origin — English physicians are far more cautious about confusing the body and the soul. At this stage Sir Geoffrey became fed up with the arguments and took Lazar to the emergency room, where he felt he could rely on the quiet, confident Dr. Arnold, who gave Lazar a thorough examination and decided that there may have been a mistake and that the EKG results were almost normal. Lazar’s blood pressure, however, was very high, and he gave him a ten-milligram sublingual capsule of nifedipine, which immediately caused his blood pressure to drop. He also gave him medication for the next few days and instructed him to continue treatment when he got back to Israel. And then he turned to me and began explaining the EKG results, so that I would be able to translate them into Hebrew for the benefit of Lazar, whose visit he evidently saw me as responsible for, in some sense, since I was here at his initiative, after all.

“I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t feel a thing, and I don’t feel anything now either,” Lazar apologized repeatedly to his wife for the little incident, and then turned to admire the baby and try to ingratiate himself with her. Shiva had been removed from her sling and was lying comfortably in the arms of the woman whom I suddenly wanted to drop to my knees before and beg for forgiveness for my earlier failure. Lazar indeed seemed perfectly healthy. And although I could have added something at this stage and shed some light on the medical picture with the little I had understood of Dr. Arnold’s analysis of the EKG results, I decided not to add to the general confusion but to leave the Lazars with Sir Geoffrey, for I knew I would be seeing them again later, at the little reception the hospital had arranged for Lazar to recruit Jewish and non-Jewish supporters for the hospital in Israel. And that evening, in a black suit and a red tie, freshly washed and combed, Lazar looked healthy and fit. He spoke vigorously about the problems of our hospital in Tel Aviv, in a heavy Israeli accent and a basic but surprisingly effective English, which reminded me again of our trip together to India. Michaela, who was sitting next to me, listened to him with a mocking smile as she secretly breast-fed Shivi, for whom we were unable to find a baby-sitter.

Fourteen

My parents’ visit to Glasgow, which my aunt was looking forward to so much, was somewhat spoiled by a severe cold that my mother had probably caught from the baby. When my father told me about it on the phone, I remembered that streptococci in infants can cause a dangerous abscess in the throats of adults, and I rebuked myself for not warning my mother to avoid close contact with Shivi when she showed the first symptoms of her cold. Although my aunt looked after my mother devotedly and the two of them no doubt enjoyed reliving their childhood experiences, they were forced to stay at home while my father toured the wild and beautiful landscapes of the north of Scotland and the Isle of Skye with my uncle and my bachelor cousin, who was a physician like me. Because of my mother’s illness they had to stay in Glasgow for an extra three days, and when I met them at the train station and saw her pale face and heard her dry cough, I decided that in spite of the help she and my father gave Michaela with the baby, I should encourage them to return home as soon as possible, because the damp London air would only make things worse. From the station I drove them to their room, and when I carried the suitcase in, I was hit by a wave of longing for Dori, so much so that while they were hanging up their clothes I slipped into the house itself and made my way along the route which she had confidently charted, straight to the bedroom, which was still illuminated by the pale ray of light coming through the uncurtained corner of the window. I was startled to see a large, handsome leather suitcase standing on the double bed, covering the exact spot of my failure, which now, on second thought, seemed to me not just human and forgivable but even attractive in its velvety softness, until I felt a strange desire to fail in the same way again. I hurried back to my parents, who disapproved strongly of my intrusion on the privacy of their anonymous landlords, who as far as they knew were expected back any day now. They’re already back, I almost cried, but I controlled myself. “But what were you looking for?” my mother asked, looking very perturbed. “I see that you were here while we were away too.” She had spotted the two cups I had set out for Dori and myself and immediately come to her own conclusions. I had given up trying to lie to my mother when I was a child, not only because she had infinite patience and cunning in getting at the truth, but also because I had been taught that the punishment for a lie was always worse than the punishment for the truth. I therefore avoided answering her question directly and began telling them in detail about the Lazars’ visit. I described the little medical uproar over Lazar’s EKG and told them about the evening for the Friends of the hospital, which had gone very well in spite of Lazar’s elementary English, and in the end I told them of the cute little overall for Shiva and the promise he had given me that he would try to arrange a permanent half-time job for me at the hospital as an anesthetist.

“An anesthetist?” asked my father, without disguising his disappointment. “Only an anesthetist? And why only a half-time job?” he continued in the demanding tone he had adopted vis-à-vis Lazar ever since the trip to India. “Because for now that’s all that’s available,” I replied with a smile. “Dr. Nakash is retiring next year, but I’m not getting his job.”

“Dr. Nakash is already retiring?” my parents, who remembered him favorably from the wedding, exclaimed in surprise. I too had been surprised when I heard about his retirement. The darkness of his skin and the smooth freshness of his face had misled us about his real age. “But why did you have to bring Lazar and his wife to our room? I don’t understand.” My mother returned doggedly to the original subject of our conversation. I lowered my head slightly so she would not be able to look into my eyes and said, “Not both of them, only his wife. Lazar was busy checking out some equipment Sir Geoffrey wanted to offer our hospital, and in the meantime, so that she wouldn’t be bored, I took his wife to see Shivi in the nursery, and then I showed her around the hospital, and after that I took her for a little walk, and I thought I might as well show her this great room that Michaela found for you. Maybe they’ll want to rent it themselves one day.” At this my mother pointed out that I had been wasting my time — the house was being sold in the summer, and the new owners would doubtless want to use all the rooms themselves. “So then I misled her,” I said, trying on the green cardigan my father had brought me — for the first time in his life on his own initiative — as a souvenir from the Isle of Skye. My mother was silent. Although she was not satisfied by my explanation for Mrs. Lazar’s visit to their room, what other explanation could she possibly imagine? She was not a worldly woman, and there was certainly nothing in her experience that might prompt her to guess the impossible truth. She gave up and sat there, sad and exhausted, coughing from time to time. I didn’t like the sound of her cough, but since I had never dared to auscultate her heart or lungs with a stethoscope, I could only hope that the cough syrups my physician cousin had given her would help.

But they didn’t, and for the last week of my parents’ stay in London she refrained from taking the baby into her arms, which I could see was a real sacrifice for her, since Shivi had obviously captured her heart, and not only because she was her granddaughter. Michaela, who could see my mother’s sadness, tried to set her fears at rest. “Take her,” she said persuasively. “You won’t infect her with anything, don’t worry. She’s as healthy as an ox.” But in spite of my mother’s longing to rock the sweet little “ox” in her arms, she was careful not to come too close to her and only gave her sometimes to my father, who looked at the baby in his arms with an expression of playful reproof. We were all sorry for my mother, whose visit to England was ending so sadly. To make up for it to her, a few days before they were due to leave Michaela insisted on inviting them to an Indian night. Stephanie volunteered to baby-sit, and I was instructed to take a day off, for our night began at twilight with a lavish meal at an excellent and far from cheap Indian restaurant, after which we were to attend a performance by traveling troupes of singers, musicians, dancers, storytellers, and acrobats who had been gathered from all over India and brought to Europe by the Parisian Cirque du Soleil, which had taken upon itself the mission of fostering the art of the Third World, in the belief that it was important and worthy of support. This belief was shared by Michaela, who was very excited about the event, not only because of the enjoyment she expected to have herself but also because she was very curious to see how the rest of us would react. Since she had presented herself from the beginning as a missionary for India in the non-Indian world, she felt responsible for the evening’s entertainment, which was quite expensive, since the tickets were priced as if it were a charity performance. But as far as the money was concerned, at least, nobody could object, since the whole evening was being paid for by Michaela.

I joined in the general spirit of generosity and treated everyone to drinks before the meal and a bottle of wine to accompany it, which turned out to be a very good thing, for the slightly inebriated state in which we all reached the performance helped us gain a deeper appreciation of things that at first glance, and in spite of our goodwill toward Michaela, seemed completely primitive. Take the opening “act”: a half-naked fakir, his head covered with a mane of gleaming black hair which reached down to his chest, emerged from the audience, walked with slow, grave, thoughtful steps through the vast warehouse in the old port of London which had been converted into a hall for the performance, and climbed onto the huge, empty stage, which began to be suffused with the delicate shades of light of an Indian morning, just as I remembered them. He turned a little faucet, and in a profound silence began deliberately and at length to wash his hands, feet, and face. As he began to perform yoga exercises, facing the invisible sun, little troupes of performers entered one after the other, each dressed in a different color and carrying authentic folk instruments. Each group was composed of adults and children of various ages, who were referred to modestly in the program as “pupils,” and who, despite the astonishing talents that a number of them displayed, were anxiously attentive throughout the evening to the subtle signals of their adult instructors. Although each troupe was allotted its own performance time and they were grouped separately in the corners of the vast stage, which was supposed to symbolize the map of India, they kept up a special kind of dialogue throughout the evening. While singers from one troupe performed, a child acrobat from another troupe would spring without warning from his place and for two or three minutes turn daring somersaults and cartwheels until he suddenly froze into a many-limbed contortion, like the statuette next to Michaela’s bed or like some primeval animal that no longer exists in the world; then he would unravel himself and go quietly back to his place. Or in the middle of a dance by three little girls, the ancient magician would suddenly rise from the heights of his podium at the back of the stage, throw some new magic into the air, and sink back to his seat. It was evident that a Western hand had intervened in the direction of the performance, in the attempt to create a meaningful tension between all the elements, whose power and uniqueness did not easily lend themselves to collaboration.

The primitiveness of these troupes was evident in the simple movements of the dancers and in the musical instruments, which consisted, for example, of two plain boards of wood banged together astonishingly fast, or chains of little bells tied around the ankles and tinkling with the movements of the feet, or even of a broken clay jar whose spout could be sucked to produce a sound resembling the rumble of approaching thunder. It was precisely this primitiveness that aroused a storm of emotion in Michaela. She had expected something more stylish, adapted to the “limitations” of the Western mentality, and here she was suddenly confronted, in the middle of gray London, with absolute authenticity, of the kind she remembered so vividly from the dark alleys of Calcutta or the train station of Bombay. Her cheeks burned, and tears shone in her great eyes, as if she had discovered something precious and intimate that had been lost to her and that she no longer believed she would find again, although in her heart of hearts she had not given up hoping. I noticed that in her excitement she kept losing her concentration, and her eyes would stray from the stage to us, as if to test our reactions and see if in us too the right soul was coming to life. And I think that we passed the test; not only I, to whom the Indian dancers and singers seemed to be reenacting the gradual and imperceptible process by which I had fallen in love the previous winter, but even my father — who my mother and I suspected would not have the patience for a performance without a plot — appeared tense and moved by the silent but clear and touching dialogue taking place between the “pupils” and the “teachers,” which began with acrobatic exercises agilely performed by a hefty Indian countrywoman and emulated by a little girl and boy, who were not daunted by the most amazing and dangerous tricks, and ended with a tall, gorgeous Indian woman wrapped in a glittering sari, who told with growing vehemence a long, impassioned story, which according to the program notes concerned the struggles between the gods. When the performance came to an end, the children in the audience were invited to join the Indian artists dancing and singing on the stage, and the stage was suddenly filled with rosy-cheeked, blond English children, who began to imitate the Indians’ movements with such astonishing skill that it seemed as if they must be possessed by wandering Indian souls.

The audience rose to its feet in a storm of applause, including my shy father, who clapped enthusiastically while Michaela actually wept with joy and triumph at the success of her efforts to open closed hearts such as mine and my parents’ to the Indian experience. She was still determined to return to India, and she was afraid that since it “seemed to me” that I had already been there, and it “seemed to me” that I had grasped the principle of India, I would have no motive to return. She would repeat this formula with utter seriousness, as if my trip to India hadn’t been real, as if I hadn’t sailed down the Ganges River in the evening to see the burning of the bodies next to the ghats of Varanasi, as if I hadn’t gone into the temples of Bodhgaya and sat in the dark, rotting cinema in Calcutta. No, none of this counted with her, because it had all been secondary to the external aim of taking care of Einat and finding favor in the eyes of her parents. As long as I hadn’t been to India for my own sake, to try to purify my soul, which was in need, like all souls, of purification, it was as if I had never been there at all. Although I had given her my promise, after proposing to her in the roadside diner next to Lydda airport, that I would not stop her from going back to India, she now feared the opposition of my parents, whom she had grown very fond of during their visit to London. She knew they would be scandalized if she took off alone for India, with the baby or without her, and it was therefore important to her for me to accompany her, for part of the time at least, perhaps in the context of observing the sidewalk doctors of Calcutta — or the “doctors of the forgotten,” as the French called them — and thus take responsibility for her trip vis-à-vis my parents. On the face of things, it seemed strange that a woman as free and independent as Michaela, whose relations with her own parents were tenuous in the extreme, should worry about upsetting mine, but I was already aware that a bond had formed between my wife and my parents — especially my mother, who had apparently decided to take her daughter-in-law under her wing in the wake of my coldness, which she sensed in spite of my efforts to appear smiling and attentive and to fulfill all my obligations, real or imaginary, toward Michaela.

On the day of my sexual disgrace on the green floral bedspread, in the light of the pale sunbeam piercing through the half-open curtain, when I came home with Shivi in my arms, depressed and upset by my failure and worried by the incident with Lazar’s heart, I felt that I had to compensate Michaela for my unfaithfulness to her. After telling her about the events of my day as she sat serenely breast-feeding the baby, who had calmed down at last, I suddenly knelt at her feet and put my head between her strong, smooth legs and began kissing not only the inside of her thighs but also the delicate, slightly parted lips of her vagina, which I had not touched since I had sewed up the tears of the birth over six weeks before. My lips and tongue now felt my skillful stitches. Michaela was so surprised by this sudden two-pronged attack on her privates, with me between her legs and Shivi at her breast, that she began moaning deeply and uttering loud cries of pleasure, which would no doubt have put my mother’s mind at rest if she had heard them, and allayed her suspicions about the weakness of my love for my wife.

When we said good-bye to my parents in an uncharacteristically emotional parting at Heathrow airport, my mother agreed, in spite of her lingering cough, to kiss the baby, whom we had brought along to soften the sadness of their departure from England. My mother also found a momentary lull in the excitement to take me aside and praise her beloved daughter-in-law, and warn me not to let her roam around London by herself too much, since leaving her to her own devices in this way would only accustom her to a kind of freedom that would be hard for her to find on our return to Israel. “I’ve got no objections to your going back to India at some future date, especially now that Michaela has increased our appreciation for the country,” she added in her clear way, “but to go there now would be irresponsible and dangerous for the baby, who’s too small even to be inoculated against all the dreadful diseases they’ve got there, some of which you’ve already seen for yourself. Wait a few years, until Shivi grows up, and after you’ve got full tenure at the hospital you can take an unpaid leave and go to India not just as a tourist but as a doctor, and do some good. And who knows, maybe your father and I will come and visit you there too.”

On the way back from the airport, with Michaela driving and me hugging Shivi to my chest, we both felt an unexpected sadness at my parents’ departure, as we would find it difficult now to manage without them. But while I was sure we would see them in four months’ time in Israel, Michaela was cherishing hopes of extending our stay in London by at least one more year, not only because all the Indians she had discovered in various London suburbs helped alleviate her longings for the place itself but also because of the fact that dropping out of high school did not carry the same stigma in London as she felt it did in Israel. In London nobody made any demands on her. Just the opposite: her status had only been strengthened here. Friends of her youth from Israel who came to spend a week in London would call her up from the airport to get instructions about finding things in the city that ordinary tourists didn’t even know existed. Sometimes the shoestring travelers among them would be invited to stay with us for a night or two, until they found a suitable place to live. Since I worked nights, it did not bother me to find sleeping figures curled up in the living room when I came home at dawn, because I knew that when I woke up in the middle of the day they would be gone. On one of these occasions Michaela told me, to my astonishment, that one of the sleeping figures I had encountered in the night was none other than Einat Lazar, who was on a one day stopover in London on her way to the United States. “How come you didn’t wake me up before she left, so that I could say hello to her at least?” I exclaimed in angry surprise. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I never thought that you were interested in Einat, or that you made any real contact with her when you were together in India. Besides, it seemed to me that the way you waited on her parents when they were here would be more than enough to promote your career interests in Israel.” Naturally I sulked and protested at this cynical remark, but at the same time I was relieved to see that Michaela had no suspicions about my feelings for Lazar’s wife, even though the sexual norms of the circles she moved in were broad-minded enough to encompass even the impossible passion that was still filling her husband’s heart. But no, Michaela dismissed the Lazars as she now dismissed everything connected with the possibility of our return home. “What’s the hurry?” she would repeatedly ask me. Israel wasn’t running away, and if we stayed for one more year I would be able to accumulate a wealth of surgical experience, which if it didn’t convince Hishin might convince the head of surgery in some other hospital to hire me. “We’re happy here,” she repeated, her great eyes shining imploringly. “There’s nobody waiting for us in Israel except your parents, and to a certain extent mine, and we can go and visit them all next Christmas.” But there was somebody else, and I was determined to make up for my failure with her.

I therefore insisted on returning on the original date, at the beginning of autumn, in spite of all Michaela’s arguments, which actually made a lot of sense and which were seconded by Sir Geoffrey, who tried to change my mind and persuade me to stay another year. Sir Geoffrey had become fast friends with Michaela and often found time to drop in to the chapel when she was working there. He would sit next to the altar, on which Shivi reposed in her portable crib, and chat to Michaela as she swept and mopped the floor, about Israel, India, and the world at large. Although Michaela’s English lacked even the rudiments of grammar, she had a great facility in picking up idioms, which she adroitly inserted into her uninhibited chatter, and she was universally praised for the richness of her vocabulary. It sometimes crossed my mind to wonder whether her relations with Sir Geoffrey were strictly platonic — a bizarre suspicion that was apparently founded on nothing more solid than my wish to balance my unfaithfulness to her in the past and the unfaithfulness I was contemplating in the future. Thus, when I came home from the hospital, I would sometimes imagine that I could detect Sir Geoffrey’s smell in the house. But what exactly this smell was, I couldn’t say, except that it was the smell of the hospital, which I myself carried on my body and in my soul. In any case, after Sir Geoffrey gave up trying to persuade me to stay for another year, he wrote to Lazar and asked him to send another doctor to replace me. When there was no reply, he phoned his office, but Lazar was never there. In the end Lazar returned his call, agreed to his request, and told him by the way that he was going in for a catheterization soon. He mentioned this not to complain or arouse Sir Geoffrey’s pity, which would not have been at all in character, but simply to let him know that the accidental EKG reading in London was evidently not an aberration. In fact, Lazar wanted to tell Sir Geoffrey that the old machines he had offered were in good working condition, and that as a result of the discovery of the asymptomatic arrhythmia he had undergone a stress test in Israel, as well as a stress heart scan, whose poor results had led the doctors to recommend a catheterization, even though he did not complain of chest pains.

But Sir Geoffrey was not happy to hear that his hospital’s old EKG machine had been right. He would have preferred it to be wrong. He told me about Lazar’s impending catheterization with a grave face, which immediately caused me new anxiety. Even though catheterizations and coronary bypass surgery had by now become such daily occurrences that Hishin, who was not a cardiac surgeon, dismissed them with contempt, the fact that coronary heart disease was apparently associated with arrhythmias in London made the whole case more complicated. I tried to remember if Dr. Arnold had mentioned whether Lazar’s was a ventricular or supraventricular arrhythmia, the ventricular being the more dangerous. Who did I think I was, I rebuked myself, trying to diagnose the heart disease of a person thousands of miles away, the director of a hospital who was surrounded by experts in their field and who certainly didn’t need the help of a young resident like me with practically no experience in cardiology? But perhaps it was the thought that the incriminating EKG had taken place exactly at the time when one or two miles away I had been committing adultery with his wife that which gave rise to my anxiety and guilt, as if in some mysterious way my actions had caused his heart to fibrillate while at the same time he had made me fail. All these thoughts may have been legitimate in a young man embarking on the kind of adventures you read about in novels, but in my case they prompted me to take action. I went to a pay phone and put through a call to Lazar’s office to ask how he was feeling and how the catheterization had gone. Lazar’s loyal and devoted secretary was very moved by my interest, and she tried to answer as briefly and economically as possible in order to save me money. It appeared that the doctors thought that it was not a case of simple coronary disease, although they could not be sure until they had the results of the catheterization. The trouble was, complained the secretary, that too many doctors, friends and acquaintances, were interfering and giving advice, so it was a good thing that Professor Hishin was going to take charge. “But how come?” I cried in protest. “He’s not a cardiac surgeon!”

“So what?” she answered. “He won’t do the operation, but he’ll decide on the surgeon, and naturally he’ll supervise him during the surgery.”

This report from Tel Aviv, instead of reassuring me, only increased my agitation. I say agitation and not anxiety because what was there to be anxious about? If they decided on bypass surgery — with one, two, or even three or more bypasses — this was a routine operation in good hands, with a mortality rate of less than one percent in healthy men who had never suffered a myocardial infarction. My inner agitation therefore stemmed from moral rather than medical concerns. Since we now had only one month left before our return, and Sir Geoffrey insisted that I take the last two weeks as vacation due to me, I decided to ask Michaela, as tactfully as I could, if we could go home two weeks earlier than planned so that I could be present at Lazar’s surgery. At first she couldn’t believe her ears, and demanded that I explain my reasons again and again. After she had begged me to extend our stay, if only by a month, I was now asking her to move the date up by two weeks. She was stunned. For the first time since our wedding one year before, we began a confrontation that almost turned into a real crisis. Although the argument was conducted in cold and ironic tones, it was fierce and even cruel. Because of the cooling off in our sexual relations, we did not try, as a more passionate pair might have, to take our revenge on each other in bed. Free of any overtones of sexual aggression or calculation, our argument might have seemed to an outside observer calm and civilized, if sharp and penetrating. I did not try to lie to Michaela and invent excuses for my wish to return, but spoke frankly about my concern for Lazar and my need to be there to support him and his wife during the surgery. Since I could not yet admit, even to myself, the true, deep source of my anxiety and agitation, in order to persuade Michaela I had to transfer part of my impossible love for Dori to Lazar himself, as if he had become a beloved friend during the trip to India, even a kind of father figure, to whom I owed my support. “You really think he’ll be short of people to support him there? To the extent that you have to go running from England wagging your tail like a puppy?” said Michaela bitterly, narrowing her big eyes as if she could already see in the distance a miserable little dog slinking into the hospital gates and wagging his tail ingratiatingly. “You’re right,” I admitted frankly, “he won’t be short of people there. But how can I explain it to you? I’m not going for his sake but for my own.” In the end she grew tired of struggling against my obscure desires and vague arguments and cut short the argument with a surprising suggestion. If I was so desperate to attend Lazar’s operation, I could go alone, and she would come later, on the date we had previously agreed on, or even, why not? — a sly, unfamiliar smile suddenly dawned on her face, while her eyes widened again in enjoyment — perhaps she would come later, for if I allowed myself to go home two weeks early, by the same logic, and according to the principles of justice and equality, she could allow herself to come two weeks late. “And the baby?” I asked immediately. “What about Shivi?”

“The baby?” she repeated thoughtfully, with the cunning smile still on her face. “Maybe she’ll be the only one to go back on the original date. We’ll divide Shivi between us. Fair’s fair. I’ll find someone here to take her back to Israel, and you’ll have plenty of time to organize things for her there, or maybe you can give her to your mother for a while, to give me the pleasure of remaining completely on my own.”

And so it was. But after I had advanced the date of my flight by two weeks and the travel agent had warned me that I wouldn’t be able to change my mind, because all the flights at the beginning of September were already full, I came to my senses and asked myself why I was doing it. It was as if only then I discovered how warm and pleasant London was, and how full of friendly tourists, and realized how my eagerness to snatch as many opportunities as possible to operate on drunken Englishmen smashed up in road accidents or Asiatics taken sick in the middle of the night had prevented me from enjoying the wealth of cultural opportunities in the great city. Although tickets to the theater were usually beyond our means, there were plenty of other interesting events, such as lectures by famous people, including, to my surprise, Stephen Hawking, who was due to appear at a public question-and-answer session about his cosmological theory in the Barbican two days before my flight. And even though I knew that the hall would be packed with people, I decided to try and push my way in, in order to compensate myself for this premature return which I had imposed on myself in some uncontrollable impulse, as if something important were going to happen at Lazar’s operation, or as if by actually looking inside his body I would be able to discover something about myself. I invited Michaela to join me at Hawking’s lecture, even though the baby had been restless for the past week, as if the new tension between her mother and me was affecting her mood. But Michaela took no interest in the cosmos from a scientific point of view, only from an emotional one, and since there was a rehearsal of the neighborhood choir in which she sang on the same evening, she suggested that I take Shivi with me to the lecture, on the assumption that the polite British audience would show their consideration for someone, especially a man, carrying a baby and give me a seat. And indeed, little Shivi, strapped to my stomach in her sling, did help me to find a seat in the hall, which was full but not as overcrowded as I had imagined it would be.

Shivi was quiet for most of the evening. Perhaps because she spent so much time strapped to Michaela, who ran around all over with her, she saw her mother as part of herself, whereas I was a separate being, who aroused her interest and in whose arms she could also relax. So it wasn’t on her account that I found the evening so frustrating. Although there were some bona fide astrophysicists in the hall, there were also many laymen, interested readers of A Brief History of Time, for whom the public evening was intended. But Professor Hawking’s hollow, disjointed voice coming from the speech synthesizer mounted on his wheelchair was not as comprehensible to me as it was to the native English-speakers in the audience, and the ease with which I usually understood spoken English, especially after my year in London, failed me now, to my great disappointment. Maybe it wasn’t only my trouble in understanding the artificial voice that prevented me from enjoying the evening, but also the fact that it was conducted for some reason in a general spirit of levity and impish humor full of puns and hidden meanings, as if the entire universe, with its black holes and big bang from which everything had begun, and the big crunch in which everything might end, including the poignant question of whether God had a choice when He created this universe, and therefore whether He exists at all — all the theories with which I had grappled that stormy winter day in my old Tel Aviv apartment, wearing my pajamas and waiting for Dori’s mother to call me — had turned here in London, on this fine summer evening, into a matter for the amusement and diversion of the stiff-backed Englishman sitting next to me, glancing indulgently at the baby on my lap. And it may have been my serious and agitated state of mind, because of Lazar’s impending heart surgery and Michaela’s new hostility toward me, that prevented me from sitting back in my chair and trying to smile like everyone else. Accordingly, when Shivi, who had been lying quietly in my lap for a long time, suddenly burst into loud wails — which for some reason gave rise to much mirth in the audience, and led Hawking to make some witty remark — I rose to my feet and hurried out of the hall without having dared to ask a single shy question about the spirit shrinking the universe.

So in spite of all the surgical experience I had accumulated in the emergency room of St. Bernadine’s, I left London in a mood of depression, to which was added the unexpected pain of leaving the baby, even though at the end of two weeks I would be seeing her again when I went to meet her at Lydda airport, where she would be accompanied by two English friends of Michaela’s, who had gladly agreed to take care of her on the way, and two weeks after that I would be back at the airport again to meet Michaela. I myself was met at Ben Gurion by my friend Amnon, who had been living in our apartment all this time and who had decided when he heard that I was returning two weeks early to borrow a van from the company where he worked as a night watchman in order to help me with my suitcases and various other items of luggage, such as Shivi’s crib. I was naturally delighted to see him, but I immediately noticed that he had gained weight and grown his hair and that his whole appearance was sloppy in the extreme. For his part, he was surprised to see that I was wearing a jacket and a tie, as if I had forgotten the end-of-summer heat. As we loaded my luggage into the old van, I noticed that he had adopted a new style of talking, cynical and almost nihilistic — Amnon, of all people, who had always been the most pure-hearted and naive of my friends. This worried me, and as we left the airport and began crawling along in a traffic jam on the Ayalon highway — which made me long for my defunct motorcycle — I began ruthlessly questioning him about the state of his doctoral thesis. He told me that he had changed the subject slightly, or rather expanded it in a more philosophical direction, and he now had an additional supervisor, from the institute for the philosophy of science. The confused ideas I had confided in him that night on our way back from Eyal’s wedding were still floating around in his head. “You won’t believe it, but I’m still thinking about that nonsense of yours and trying to make something of it from a scientific point of view,” he said, with a smile but also a hint of resentment. I told him about the evening with Hawking, and he listened eagerly to every detail, laughing loudly when I repeated one or two witticisms that I had succeeded in grasping. He questioned me again about the reasons for my early return. He couldn’t understand how I could leave Michaela, of whom he was so fond, alone in London. “Have you two had a fight?” he asked, with a mixture of concern and hope. When he heard my explanation he seemed surprised, but he accepted it, as I hoped everyone would, at face value. “Nice of you to be so worried about Lazar,” he said, half seriously, half cynically. “If you keep on like this you’ll end up as the hospital director yourself one day.”

The apartment was not as neglected as I had feared, but since Amnon had taken the liberty of switching the furniture in the two rooms around, its whole nature had changed. The big double bed on which I had made love to Dori was now standing in the middle of the living room, covered with the same brown bedspread. Amnon had discovered that from this vantage point he could see the strip of sea beyond the chaotic roofs of Tel Aviv as he fell asleep, and argued that this improved the quality of his sleep. I had to share the apartment with him for a week, while he got himself settled in his new place, but since he worked nights we hardly saw each other, for after a brief and businesslike visit to my parents — from whom I received my father’s old car — I spent all my time at the hospital, with the secret aim of getting myself into Lazar’s open heart surgery, as a participant or an observer. To this end I went first to Dr. Nakash, to find out what he knew, even before I presented myself to Hishin or Lazar. It turned out that Nakash didn’t know yet if he was going to be the head anesthetist at the operation, whose team was being assembled by Professor Hishin. Although the hospital had a cardiothoracic department, headed by Dr. Granoth, a man of about forty who had recently returned from a long fellowship in the United States and was regarded as a gifted surgeon, Hishin, and apparently also Levine, did not see him as the ideal man to perform Lazar’s surgery. Perhaps they were afraid that if he operated on Lazar, he would gain the right to a special relationship with the director and threaten the exclusivity of their own deep friendship. In any case, they decided to invite a close friend from one of the big hospitals in Jerusalem, a man of their own age who had gone to medical school with them — Professor Adler, the bypass expert — to perform the operation under their supervision. At first Lazar protested at the idea of bringing in a surgeon from outside for him, as if he himself lacked confidence in the top cardiac surgeon of his own hospital. But Hishin and Levine, working together smoothly and secretly, succeeded in dragging things out and putting the operation off until Granoth would be at a conference in Europe, at which point they would be free to call in their friend from Jerusalem with no hard feelings.

Since the operation had been “stolen” from the cardiothoracic surgery department and transferred to Hishin’s general surgery department, it was up to Hishin to select the members of the team. He and Levine, despite their senior positions, agreed to take a backseat to their Jerusalem friend and act as junior or even resident doctors. Naturally Hishin chose Nakash as the anesthetist, but since Lazar did not want to offend Dr. Yarden, the anesthetist from the cardiothoracic department, and insisted on including him in the team, he was invited to join Dr. Nakash, without anyone’s specifying which of the two would be senior to the other. At the same time Nakash was given the right to choose an assistant. This was exactly what I had hoped for. It was the sixth day after my arrival in Israel. Up until then I had succeeded in avoiding Hishin, and with Lazar resting at home on the instructions of his two friends, I had not met him either. Since my return to Israel I had spent all my time hanging around Dr. Nakash, in my capacity as a future colleague in the anesthesiology department, but mainly in order to persuade him to choose me as his assistant for Lazar’s operation. But Nakash, who was well aware of my professional competence, suddenly refused. “What do you need it for?” he said in his dry, quiet way. “There’ll already be two anesthetists there, and you’ll have hardly anything to do. And Lazar is in a sense a friend of yours. Why do you want to be there when his chest is being sawed open?” But I insisted. Hishin and Levine were real friends, I said, and they would not only be there during the operation but would take an active part in cutting him up. And we all had to train ourselves to maintain our composure in any situation that came along, whoever the patient was. Dr. Nakash listened to my arguments, his little coal-black eyes glittering in his dark, almost bald head and his pink tongue licking his lips, as was his habit when he couldn’t make up his mind about something. He was hesitant because he really was fond of me, in his shy, reserved way. On the one hand he didn’t want to distress me by making me watch my patron being cut open, but on the other he wanted to give me what I so eagerly insisted I wanted. In the end he decided to consult Hishin, who said at once, “Why not? What harm can Benjy do there? The more the merrier, old friends and new!”

Maybe I was only projecting my own feverish excitement onto my surroundings, but as the day of the operation neared — it was set for ten days after my return from England — I sensed that the whole hospital was in a state of suspense. But perhaps I was simply not yet acclimated to the Israeli tension and tempo after a year of long nights in the relative peace and quiet of the ancient English hospital. After all, the kind of operation that Lazar was to undergo had become a routine matter in the hospital, and every week there were bypass operations and valve replacements in at least ten patients, as well the correction of congenital heart malformations in babies and premature infants. Nevertheless, I could feel the suspense in the air. It seemed that the clerical staff, who were closer in their daily work to the administrative director and his secretaries than the medical staff, and who were the true guardians of the spirit of the hospital, were the ones responsible for spreading rumors and drumming up suspense. The fact that the operation had been “stolen” from cardiac surgery and transferred to general surgery also added to the drama, and eventually Professor Hishin decided to schedule the operation for the quieter afternoon and evening hours, so that when it was over he and Levine would be available for the long hours of their friend’s recovery in intensive care. On the eve of the day of the operation I decided to drop in to the administrative wing and say hello to Lazar’s secretary, whom I found sitting in her office next to Lazar’s, all alone in the dark, deserted wing. When she saw me standing in the door, she uttered a joyful cry and immediately rose to her feet, offering me her rather ravaged face for a kiss. I embraced her, kissed her warmly on the cheek, and sat down to chat. First of all, she asked to see a picture of the baby and to hear about England, but I soon turned the subject to Lazar, who to my surprise was sitting in his office with his two chief assistants, clearing his desk before his hospitalization, which was scheduled to begin that evening. She too was in a fever of excitement and anxiety about her boss’s surgery, and her agitation pleased me and made me feel that I was not alone in my feelings. Suddenly she said, “Come and say hello to him, at least.” I felt myself trembling, and blurted out, “Why bother him now?” But she insisted, knocked lightly on the dividing door, and opened, it saying, “Dr. Rubin’s back from England — he wants to say hello to you before the operation.”

Lazar was sitting with his two assistants next to his big desk. He didn’t seem to have lost any weight in the interim, but he did look rather pale. With a quick, friendly gesture, he immediately beckoned me to come closer and said in surprise, “But you were supposed to come back on the fifteenth of the month. What made you change your plans?” I was so astonished to see that there was room in his bureaucratic brain for something as minor as the date of my return from England, a resident of uncertain status at the hospital like me, that I was unable to make up a lie on the spot, and blushing furiously, in front of everybody, I blurted out the truth, which burst out of me with uncontrollable force: “I just wanted to be here for your operation. And tomorrow I’m going to help Dr. Nakash with the anesthesia.” With this I succeeded in surprising even the unsurprisable Lazar. “You came back especially for my operation?” He turned in amazement to his assistants, who were also suitably surprised at my generous concern. After he recovered he said, “I see that the entire medical staff of the hospital wants to be in on the show. It’s a pity they’re not operating on me on the stage of the big auditorium.” He burst into loud laughter, in which he was joined by me and the two assistants, while his secretary only smiled quietly and somewhat mysteriously. But Lazar soon cut the entertainment short with a wave of his hand in my direction, and I left the room.

Before leaving Lazar’s secretary, I asked her how Dori was taking it. As I had expected, she was tense and even more confused than her husband. And soon she would be arriving to spend the night with him in a special room which had been put at their disposal for the first night of his hospitalization. The thought that she couldn’t spend even one night alone in her own home and her own bed sent a wave of pleasurable pity surging through me. I was so moved that for a moment I even thought of waiting for her right there in the office, but I was afraid that if she heard the reason for my return from England she would ask Professor Hishin to take me off the operating team, so I removed myself from the scene — but not entirely. In the depths of a side corridor I sat hidden in the growing darkness, waiting for the sound of her brisk, confident steps.

During the six hours of the operation she and her son sat in her husband’s office, with his faithful secretary pressing food and drink on them all the time. The granny came from the old-age home to be with the family and give them the support of her natural optimism and experience of life. Hishin and Levine themselves took Lazar down from the ward to the surgical wing at two o’clock in the afternoon, apparently relishing the role of simple stretcher-bearers.

Although Lazar was already dazed and sedated, he had to smile weakly at the constant stream of jokes and witticisms showered on him by Hishin. Professor Levine, in contrast, looked grave and solemn. Perhaps he was silently brewing up the next psychotic outburst, which would save him from his anger. Because of the number of instruments crowding the room for heart operations, the initial “takeoff” was performed in a small induction room where Dr. Nakash and Dr. Yarden were already waiting for the hospital director, and I too was standing in a corner. Yes, it was already clear to me that this would be my place throughout the operation, standing in a remote corner, for apart from the two technicians in charge of the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, and the three nurses, and Professor Adler himself, who was still standing at the basin and washing his hands with compulsive thoroughness, Hishin and Levine would be watching every move with gimlet eyes. In an operation of this nature it was necessary to maintain close communication between the surgeon and the anesthetists, and after the “takeoff” they had been instructed to maintain the “flight” by using a Fentanyl drip, a short-action anesthetic that could be precisely controlled, as opposed to anesthetic gases, whose action was more general and erratic. Nakash just had time to explain this change of plan to me before Lazar was brought in, but the moment his bed was rolled into the room, I noticed something about Nakash that I had never seen before: his hands were trembling slightly. After he had begun to inject the cocktails he had prepared into the two intravenous lines in the wrist, when it was time to insert the tube into the lungs, I saw that he, the most skillful and precise of anesthetists, suddenly missed the exact spot where the tube should have been inserted, and the dazed but not yet unconscious Lazar jerked under Nakash’s dark hand as if he wanted to bite it. Nakash went pale, and was obliged to apply force to Lazar’s face in order to regain control. It then transpired that the tube had been inserted too deeply so that only one lung was being respirated, and it had to be brought up to above the bifurcation point so that both lungs would be respirated equally. In contrast to Nakash’s uncharacteristic agitation, which heightened my anxiety, the second anesthetist, Dr. Yarden, experienced in cardiac surgery, behaved with calm and impeccable professionalism. He immediately bent over Lazar’s right leg to insert an extra intravenous line in case there was an urgent need for blood or fluids if something went wrong. All of a sudden Lazar’s genitals were exposed to everyone standing in the room. I bowed my head in a sorrowful gesture of respect, but I went on looking out of the corner of my eye at the administrative director’s large penis lying there calmly and full of dignity, with no idea that one of the people present had dared to contend with him in the name of an impossible love. After first cleaning the area with Betadine, Dr. Yarden inserted the long, thin catheter into the penis; then he spread a blue, sterile towel over the entire area in order to protect it from the large syringe being inserted into the femoral vein to provide the extra intravenous line.

It was new to me that in complex surgery of this kind auxiliary sites were prepared in various places in the body in order to infuse emergency drugs and fluids. Nakash, who had completely recovered by now, prepared himself to insert a central venous line through the jugular vein into the right atrium of the heart. Hishin, who was watching all these preparations with interest, hesitantly offered to do it, but Nakash, intent on regaining his honor after the slip he had made with the tube, insisted on doing it himself and began to spread the blue sterile towels over the entire chest area of the patient, who was already being ventilated. He put on gloves and with the decisiveness of a surgeon inserted the venous line quickly and efficiently. Then he threw the bloodstained gloves into the bin and indicated to Hishin and Levine, who were watching him as fascinatedly as first-year medical students, that they could take Lazar into the operating room. “Come and hold the ambo, Benjy,” Nakash called to me, the way you call to a child when you want to give him something to do, not only to let me know that he hadn’t forgotten me but presumably also to justify my presence to the other anesthetist. I immediately began walking behind the bed as it was wheeled into the other room, squeezing the blue ambo between my hands to pump oxygen into Lazar’s lungs until he was connected to the respirator next to the operating table. At this table the “ideal” surgeon, Professor Adler, was waiting, wrapped in a sterile gown and wearing a headlamp attached to an electric cable that supplied a special beam of light to help him see through the long, narrow binocular lenses he favored, perhaps because his specialty was correcting congenital heart defects in premature babies. In the argot of the surgical wing this specialty was considered the “penthouse” of cardiac surgery, and even a surgeon as arrogant as Hishin showed respect for the delicate skills required to correct the mistakes and negligence of the Creator Himself. But the patient lying in front of Professor Adler now was not a premature baby with a tiny defective heart but a large and important man, the administrative director of the hospital, who required a very routine operation of three bypasses, two venous and one of the left mammary artery. Thus Professor Hishin, who had apparently decided to do the job of the nurse as well, was swabbing his friend’s naked body with Betadine of an almost yolkish consistency, in order to guarantee the sterility that was so essential, before proceeding to make an incision along his leg so the surgeon could extract the long vein which would be cut up to form the bypasses.

The proud and patronizing Professor Hishin, wonder of wonders, seemed not only willing but even happy to act as the junior surgeon to his Jerusalem friend, to whom he and Professor Levine referred by his nickname, Bouma. But Bouma himself didn’t seem to be particularly happy with the two professors eager to carry out his orders. If anything, he seemed a little pressured by the crowded succession of tasks imposed on him here. In his department in Jerusalem a master surgeon like himself usually arrived two or three hours after the operation began, after the intensive preparatory work had already been done by assistants and residents while he watched and supervised them on a special television screen installed in his room. When he finally descended to the operating room, he found the chest already opened, the internal mammary artery detached and clamped at its lower end, and the vein destined to become an artery already immersed in its softening solution, ready for cutting. Accordingly, there was nothing left for a head surgeon like himself to do but clamp the aortic outlet from the heart and attach two suction tubes to the inferior vena cava, and then to connect the tubes of the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, say “Bypass on,” and warn the two technicians to be ready to drive the entire blood circulation through the wheels of their machine, so that he could begin to work on the still, moist heart. But here he had to attend to the tedious work of preparation too, which there was no doubt he could do in the best possible way but which he hadn’t done for a long time. Hishin, who was well aware of the situation, constantly tried to make jokes in order to make the time pass more pleasantly for his friend and prevent him from feeling too exploited. Was he also going to get a special fee from the Lazar family? I wondered. Or would he forgo his fee, like me, in favor of other benefits? To this question I could get no answer, certainly not from Professor Levine, who as an internist par excellence had taken up his position in a more spiritual place, next to the anesthetists. They had hung a sheet between Lazar’s face and chest, taped his eyes, and immobilized his neck, gradually decreasing his blood pressure and maintaining a deep and stable sleep in anticipation of the most painful moment of all — the moment when the chest was opened with an electric saw, an operation performed by the Jerusalem wizard with such stunning speed and aplomb that Hishin could not resist a cry of “Bravo!” to which his old friend responded with a faint smile as he bent down to peer at the expressionless face of his patient, whose deep sleep, judging by the stability of the graphs and parameters flickering on the instruments around us, had not been disturbed by the terrible sawing.

Although I was standing very close to Professor Levine, he stubbornly ignored me, as if from the moment I had decided not to go back and be “examined” by him about what had happened in India he had written me off as a moral failure. But knowing as I did that in spite of his mental problems and other shortcomings he was still one of the most thoughtful and intelligent physicians in the hospital, I kept a close watch on his expression, which was stern and grave, as if what was going to happen here filled him with profound concern. Did all this concern stem from the fact that he was an internist, I asked myself, and it was a long time since he had seen the inside of an operating room? Maybe he was worried about his next psychiatric leave, which he was getting ready to take and which his friend Lazar would have to authorize after he woke up, a long time from now. Then the two anesthetists, Dr. Nakash and Dr. Yarden, began to get ready for the second “takeoff,” this time into outer space: no longer detaching the body from the spirit, but detaching the body from itself and handing it over to the machine with its five pumps and its gleaming bronze wheels. The three technicians, who had inserted all the tubes into their proper places and who had up to now been running the machine on saline, were ready and eager to receive Lazar’s blood from the head surgeon — who began muttering orders to them from behind his mask and binoculars, which all three of them repeated aloud — and to take over the functions of the heart and lungs: pumping, purifying, cleansing, oxygenating, and returning the blood to the body in the right amounts, together with cardioplegia to paralyze the heart. At this moment I saw Levine raising his eyes to the screen in the corner of the ceiling, where he could see Lazar’s pulse monitor as a flat, even, horizontal line without any fluctuations, while the systolic and diastolic blood pressure values were equal owing to the uniform action of the silent machine. And then I felt that I could no longer control the excitement surging inside me, and not like an experienced resident doctor but like an inquisitive greenhorn, I tiptoed over to Hishin — who had just finished suturing Lazar’s leg and was now standing on a little platform to watch the surgeon deftly implanting the bypasses, and who appeared very satisfied with the way things were going — and asked him if I could join him in watching the master surgeon at work so that I could learn something more, for who knew as well as Hishin did that even if I had been banished from surgery into the exile of anesthesiology, my true and eternal desire was and always would be to get my hands inside the human body? “Of course,” he replied immediately and made room for me next to him, to give me a good vantage point. And then, in the middle of the steel frame holding the gaping chest like an open book, I suddenly saw, in its entirety, the still heart of Lazar, and for a moment the pain of my impossible love opposite the silenced love of this strong heart pierced my own.

Fifteen

Very close, yet far away, the brown statuette stands on the little table next to our bed. Can we address our complaints to it? What is it but a bit of inorganic matter torn from nature, lacking any will of its own, indifferent to its painstakingly sculpted humanappearance? For the little clay hand flung out toward us is not only incapable of touching us, it can’t even let itself drop back into place. And despite the faint, mysterious, Gioconda smile on its face, its threat is only the threat that we project on ourselves, now in the depths of the night, as we toss and turn between sheets that scratch our limbs. Why should the close and intimate statuette of death be any different from the glasses, for instance, or the wallet, or even the keys lying beside it? Nevertheless, in the thick of the night our hand gropes only for it, to take hold of the slender neck and throttle it in the darkness, for in the light of day we might be stopped by the expression on the painted face and the frozen aesthetic movement of the delicate, shapely limbs, which deceive us into thinking that it possesses life and a soul. And then, in the darkness, we hear the sound of the fall, for the groping hand has missed its mark, and as we get out of bed and crouch down to grope for the broken pieces, a sudden but absolute pain jolts our chest and stuns our heart, to tell us that death has indeed come to us and not to the pieces of clay strewn over the floor.

Now that Lazar’s “space flight” had begun, guided by the three agile, swarthy technicians in charge of the state-of-the-art cardiopulmonary bypass machine — which was connected to many large and small plastic tubes coiling over the operating table and sucking the blood out of the square steel frame of the retractor as it slowly opened the heart like a book, and then streaming it back again — Nakash could leave his post at Lazar’s head and go out of the room to pour himself a cup of strong coffee from his private thermos. Although I was ready for a cup of the excellent coffee his wife made for him every morning myself, I couldn’t tear myself away, even though Dr. Yarden’s supervision of the patient’s anesthesia was more than adequate, especially since the respirator was still. Lazar’s heart as well as his lungs were paralyzed, and the rate of cleansed and oxygenated blood being pumped into the body and the brain was being determined by the instructions of the surgeon, who kept throwing changing orders over his shoulder. The three technicians would repeat them after him, like a crew of gunners making sure that no fatal misunderstanding should occur. The blood in the tubes flowed freely, with no danger of clotting, thanks to a continuous drip of Heparin, which neutralized the natural clotting factors and ensured an unimpeded flow between the turning wheels. The head of the technical crew enjoyed explaining to me how he pampered the bloodstream entrusted to his charge, warming and cooling it as required, as if it were an independent, sentient being that had to be soothed by an alkaline solution to neutralize the strong acidity produced by the trauma of being suddenly removed from the warmth of the human body and placed into the movement of the alien machine. When Dr. Yarden saw that Nakash wasn’t coming back immediately, he took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and beckoned me to approach the silent anesthesia machine, which didn’t really need an anesthetist but only a pair of eyes to watch the controlled drip of fentanyl and curare, which maintained the relaxation of the muscles and the analgesia. Levine too left the room, and next to the operating table there were now only three doctors, Dr. Adler, Professor Hishin, and myself. I took two footstools and placed one on top of the other so I could raise myself above the net protecting Lazar’s head, to give myself a better vantage point from which to look down directly at the implanting of the bypasses. This was now being purposefully performed by Dr. Adler, with the assistance of Hishin, who played the double role of pupil to his friend, addressing various technical questions to him, and teacher to me, generously passing on tidbits of clinical diagnosis or anatomical observations to satisfy the inquisitive gleam in my eye and to ensure that my presence, the reason for which was still not clear to him, would at least seem justified.

That night as I lay in bed, before burying my face in the pillow and trying to fall asleep, I reviewed the six hours of the operation in my mind’s eye — Lazar’s naked genitals, his exposed heart reposing within the walls of his open chest, the blood coursing through the dozens of crisscrossing tubes, the silent bronze wheels of the cardiopulmonary bypass machine — and everything that had happened there seemed to me more harmonious, calm, and sure than I could possibly have imagined. Including the rather dramatic moment when the blood was returned to the body and Lazar’s heart refused to return to its sinus rhythm, a refusal that led Professor Adler to pull two electrodes from the defibrillator, place them on either side of the recalcitrant heart, and give it a few short electric shocks to start it and return it to the right rhythm, which appeared on the screen of the big monitor. Hishin and Levine had been right, I thought, lying in the dark in my bed, to bring in the Jerusalem master, who had worked with awe-inspiring competence and quiet confidence, and who had also dismissed with a reassuring gesture the fears I had dared to express when the operation was over. Although he was so tired after standing on his feet for six hours that he asked the nurse to help him divest himself of all the stuff encumbering him — the mask, the gloves, the headlamp, the sterile cap and gown — he seemed interested and willing to listen, with the patience of a wise physician who is never bored by anything to do with the human body. But Levine, who was still hostile toward me, broke in rudely to point out a mistake in one of the assumptions I had made, and Professor Adler, who had no desire to get involved in an argument, cut the discussion short, murmuring something reassuring about Lazar’s heart, and went out with Hishin to inform Lazar’s wife and the other members of the family of the success of the operation.

I did not join the convoy taking the sleeping and bandaged Lazar up to the intensive care unit that had been prepared for him in Hishin’s department. Hishin had also turned his own office into an improvised bedroom for Lazar’s wife, who intended to spend the night there. Now that the operation was over and I had seen what I wanted to see and felt what I wanted to feel, all I wanted was to be by myself. But since it was already past one o’clock in the morning and the rates for overseas calls were particularly low, I decided to phone Michaela to make the final arrangements for Shivi’s return in two days, and at the same time to tell her how smoothly Lazar’s surgery had gone and how admirably the Jerusalem wizard had performed and how I did not regret my early return from London, even though I hadn’t been needed there at all. But in spite of the lateness of the hour — eleven o’clock in London — Michaela was not at home. I found it strange and also annoying that she was prepared to drag the baby around London in buses at this hour of the night.

We had sold our little car, after strenuous efforts, to one of the nurses at the hospital, in order to pay for our plane tickets. Mine and Michaela’s, that is, for Shivi flew home free, on the ticket of one of the two sweet young English girls who amused themselves with her on the way. When I met them at the airport, it turned out that Michaela had promised them, without my knowledge, that they could stay in our apartment for their first few days in Israel. I was furious. Only a few days before I had finally succeeded in getting rid of Amnon and all his possessions, and now I had two new guests on my hands — an intolerable nuisance when I was still in a state of inner turmoil stemming from Lazar’s operation. Although the operation had taken place forty-eight hours earlier, I had not yet visited Lazar in the special room set aside in Hishin’s department, for fear that Dori, or anyone else, would notice the storm raging inside me.

However, I had no option but to keep Michaela’s promise, and I sullenly gave the two English girls the key, wrote the address down clearly in both languages, and warned them to be careful in the apartment, since it did not belong to me. I also asked them not to stay longer than one or two days. “You won’t want to hang around in Tel Aviv anyway,” I warned them gloomily. “It’s a filthy place. Go down to the desert, take a bus to Eilat — that’s where you’ll find the real pleasures Israel has to offer.” I strapped Shiva into the special seat I had bought and installed in my father’s car, and with her sitting next to me but facing in the opposite direction, I drove to Jerusalem to leave her for seven days with my mother, who had taken a week’s vacation as an advance on her next year’s leave, since she had already used up all her vacation on the trip to England. On the way to Jerusalem Shivi gave me an inquiring look, as if trying to remember who I was. She was still too young to remember me clearly after an absence of two weeks, but she was old enough not to have forgotten me entirely. And thus, on the border between memory and forgetfulness, she stared at me suspiciously, but so sweetly that I couldn’t resist bending down to kiss her whenever traffic permitted, while keeping up a stream of chatter, telling her about my plans for the future and sometimes even bursting into forgotten old songs, to amuse her and also to raise my own spirits. Ever since Lazar’s surgery I had been confused, as if the bypasses planted in his heart had somehow wound their way into mine as well, and sometimes I would even feel a sharp pain in my chest, as if it too had been split open with an electric saw.

But when I reached my parents’ home in Jerusalem, I immediately stopped concentrating on my inner sensations in order to be free to give all my attention to their concerns. In spite of their joy at seeing their granddaughter again, they were worried about their ability to take care of her for a week, especially my mother, who was usually so calm and composed about everything. It was clear that she was full of secret resentment against Michaela, and even suspected that she would not return when she had promised to. But I reassured her. Michaela always kept her promises, and since it was only because of my insistence that she had agreed against her will to return to Israel instead of extending our stay in London, I could hardly object if she permitted herself one last little fling: two weeks on her own to enjoy her liberty and independence to the fullest. After putting Shivi down in the crib my father had borrowed from a young colleague at his office and giving my parents detailed instructions about feeding and bathing her, as well as telling them a little about Lazar’s successful surgery and my own prospects at the hospital, I went to bed early and immediately fell into a deep sleep, which for some reason was so haunted by recurrent nightmares that I got up before dawn, said a whispered good-bye, and set out for the return journey to Tel Aviv and to my first day of work at the hospital as a permanent, albeit half-time, member of the medical staff.

Since I had given the keys to the English girls, I was forced to stand outside banging on the door of the apartment until one of them, in short pants and a blouse that barely covered her breasts, woke up and let me in. They had misunderstood my instructions and unrolled their sleeping bags in the bedroom instead of the living room, but apart from this mistake I saw that they had not disturbed anything in the apartment and had left the kitchen clean and tidy. Nevertheless, I urged them again to go down to the desert and enjoy an experience which they could never have in England. At close quarters, I saw that they were not as young as I had imagined them to be at the airport. They were my age, and in the spare, athletic build of their bodies they reminded me of Michaela, whose depression when she landed in Israel in two weeks’ time I could already imagine. I drove to the hospital, and since I didn’t yet have a parking space, I had to park a long way off and walk. Although autumn had officially begun, the morning light was still so bright that I had to put on my sunglasses so my eyes could make the transition from English to Israeli light. First I went to the anesthesiology department, to introduce myself to its head, an energetic middle-aged woman with a sharp, ironic tongue, whom Lazar had informed of my appointment a week before and who was ready, although the official confirmation had not yet arrived, to fit me into the night shifts in the operating rooms. Strange, I thought, that here too I was beginning with night duty, as in London, but I accepted her offer, not only to cut my contact with the English girls down to a minimum but also to enable me to keep an eye on Lazar and perhaps alleviate his loneliness. In the cafeteria I came across Nakash and asked him about Lazar. His recovery was proceeding as expected. He had already been disconnected from most of the equipment and transferred to the ninth floor, to a private room in Levine’s department, where Levine could also take an active part in treating him. In three or four days’ time he would be able to go home. There you are, I said to myself, what were you so frightened of? But I refrained from going up to visit him, knowing that the room would be crowded with visitors from the hospital and from outside. I decided to postpone my visit until the evening, before my night shift began.

I returned to the apartment in the hope of finding my two visitors already gone, but it seemed that they had just woken up, and, wearing bathrobes over their bathing suits, they asked me the way to the beach and invited me to go with them. I was about to refuse, but suddenly I said to myself, Why not? Perhaps a soothing dip in the sea was just what I needed to banish the oppression from my heart. I began to look for my trunks, which I had not worn for ages, and which, judging by the amused looks of the English girls, had indeed gone out of fashion long ago. It was a strange feeling to find myself walking down the busy Tel Aviv street in the middle of the day in a pair of trunks and a light summer shirt, like a teenager, in the company of these two strange English girls, who turned out to be cousins who liked traveling the world together. “Have you been to India?” I asked. No, they hadn’t been to India yet. I immediately urged them to go. Yes, they heard praises of India everywhere, including, of course, from Michaela. In fact, they were considering joining us when we went, to help us look after dear little Shivi. We entered the sea, which was warm and gentle, without any waves. For a moment the smell of the water reminded me of the smell of the amniotic fluid in the London apartment, perhaps because there was an amniotic element in the algae constantly breaking up in the water. But the smell didn’t stop me from enjoying diving into the water and racing one of the English girls. Now I began to feel lighter, as if whatever had been weighing on me since Lazar’s operation had been swallowed up and dissolved inside me. After emerging from the sea and drying myself, I invited the English girls to join me for hot corn on the cob. On the beach I found Amnon playing ball with an intelligent-looking boy. “Now I know why your thesis is stuck,” I couldn’t help saying, scolding him, but I immediately regretted it. However, he did not seem hurt by my remark, and he was very interested in the two girls. “Ah,” he said with a bitter laugh, “now I know why you were in such a hurry to get me out of the apartment.” I had a hard time convincing him that they had descended on me without any warning, and feeling the need to make some kind of gesture, I didn’t object when he suggested returning to the apartment with us. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon, and Amnon and the girls, still in their swimsuits, began putting together an improvised meal. “I’m sorry, but tomorrow you’ll have to leave the apartment,” I warned the girls again, this time without mentioning the desert. “Because it looks as if I’m going to bring the baby back tomorrow, and she needs peace and quiet,” I suddenly added, in order to provide a logical-sounding pretext for the evacuation order. Amnon immediately invited them to go and stay with him, and they accepted the invitation gladly. They didn’t look like promiscuous women to me, but perhaps their blood relationship gave them a boldness and confidence to embark on secret adventures together that ordinary girlfriends wouldn’t have had. They weren’t pretty, even though their bodies were smooth and appealing. Taken separately, neither of them seemed particularly attractive, not even to a man like me, who hadn’t slept with his wife for over two weeks now, but the sudden thought that perhaps Amnon would go to bed with both of them at once immediately aroused me, even though the fantasy of making love to two women at once was not among my favorites.

I called my parents to hear how they were getting on with Shivi. Everything was going smoothly, although my father had had to come home early from work to help my mother, who sounded, despite her calm, reassuring voice, rather strained. I had already noticed that ever since the severe influenza she had come down with in Scotland, she seemed frailer, and I promised myself that as soon as Lazar recovered and Michaela returned to Israel, I would go up to Jerusalem for a day or two to check up on her health. In any case, my parents did not disguise their profound enjoyment of their granddaughter, who had already demonstrated a number of cute tricks. I said good-bye to Amnon and the two English girls, who were still eating the meal they had prepared, and set off for the hospital. It was six o’clock. First I went to intensive care unit to announce my arrival. I took my beeper and turned it on, and then I went up to the ninth floor to internal medicine to look for Lazar. He wasn’t hard to find. At the end of the corridor I saw a few doctors and members of the administrative staff, who evidently couldn’t wait to visit the recovering director, and peals of happy laughter, immediately recognizable as Dori’s, rang out in the distance. I turned back, not wanting to be part of the crowd, and only returned two hours later. Now it was quieter. Dori was sitting on a bench in the corridor. Their son was sitting on one side of her, and her mother on the other.

I greeted them all and asked how the patient was feeling. Dori went very red and for a moment she was speechless, as if she were in love with me too, but the granny, who was delighted to see me, said that her son-in-law was doing well, and Professor Hishin, who had changed his dressings in the morning, was very pleased with the rate of his recovery. Dori regained her composure and smiled brightly and introduced her son to me. He nodded indifferently, no doubt sick and tired of the constant introductions to the stream of visitors making the pilgrimage to the ninth floor. I reminded him that we had already met for a moment almost two years before, when I had gone to their house on that first evening to talk about the trip to India. He raised his eyes to examine me. “Yes, it’s the famous Dr. Rubin,” repeated his mother, avoiding the use of my first name. They were all waiting outside, it seemed, because Professor Levine was examining the patient and changing his dressings. Although I knew that my intrusion would annoy Levine, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get a look at the place where I had seen the chest being rapidly sawed open, and I knocked lightly on the door and went inside. Professor Levine, who was busy smearing iodine on the long line of brown stitches running down Lazar’s chest, glared at me angrily as I entered the room, which surprised me with its size, the stunning view from its window, and the multitude of flowers filling it. But the warmth of Lazar’s greeting prevented him from objecting aloud to my entry. “Where did you disappear to?” cried Lazar — his eternal cry to me, which had first been sounded in India, although it was they, not I, who had disappeared in the train station at New Delhi. “I’m right here,” I said with a smile, “I’ve been here all the time.” I asked him how he was feeling and he immediately said that he was feeling fine, as if he wanted to please me too, along with the rest of the doctors who had participated in his operation, at which for some reason he insisted on thinking I had played an active role. Levine, who had finished smearing the stitches with ointment, now began to bandage the wound with the unpracticed hands of the head of an internal medicine department. I picked up the patient’s charts, which were pinned together at the foot of the bed, and looked at the temperature, the blood pressure, the EKG, and the results of the blood and urine tests which had been run on Lazar over the past few days. Maybe the fact that I had taken part in the surgery gave me the nerve to draw Levine’s attention to the acute irregularities to be seen in a number of the EKG strips, which showed premature ventricular beats, sometimes even in couplets or triplets, whose origin was unclear to me. “Isn’t there a danger of ventricular tachycardia here?” I asked. At first Levine tried to ignore my question, but since I stubbornly repeated it, he decided to say something, perhaps in order not to worry Lazar. “Yes, Dr. Rubin,” he said rapidly and rudely. “We saw that too. We’re not blind, you know, and we’re perfectly capable of drawing our own conclusions. We don’t need every doctor in the hospital sticking his nose in here, even if the patient is the director. No doubt you have work to do elsewhere. Why don’t you get back to it and let us worry about Mr. Lazar?”

But I couldn’t stop worrying, and four hours later, late at night, I knew that I would have no rest until I went up again to the ninth floor, already in darkness except for the nurses’ station, which, in my doctor’s gown, I had no problems passing. I stopped outside the closed door of Lazar’s room and listened, but all I could hear was the television. I knocked lightly, careful not to burst in without an invitation. But the fact that there was no answer did not make me turn away and only increased my anxiety. I opened the door. Apart from the moonlight pouring into the room through the open window and the glare of the television, the room was in darkness. Dori was curled up in a big armchair, sleeping with her legs tucked up underneath her, one hand clutching her glasses and the other holding the outstretched hand of Lazar, whose little eyes were fixed on the television suspended from the ceiling next to the screen of his monitor, which was turned off. Ever since the trip to India, when I had first become aware of the strength of the bond between them, I had not felt the unique nature of their intimacy so strongly. After a whole day at his side, she couldn’t leave him to his own devices for a while and go home to be by herself. Suddenly I felt a shiver of pain running through me for the way I had betrayed him. And I wanted to take a vow that after Lazar recovered I would never try to touch her again, not even if she asked me. If it really was an impossible love, then everything about it should be impossible and unreal. Lazar regarded my entrance in the dead of night as completely natural, and he greeted me with a friendly wave. I went up to him, and since his eyes were slightly glittering and his cheeks flushed, I put out my hand instinctively to feel his forehead, which he offered me obediently, as if from the moment he had crossed the lines in his hospital he had become the patient of every nurse and doctor in it, who were all at liberty to touch him as much as they liked. He had a slight temperature, which was natural and expected after the brutal shock his whole system had suffered, but which might also be interpreted as a warning sign. He told me that the nurse had discovered the fact that he was febrile a short time before but had decided to wait until morning to consult Professor Levine. “I’ll get you a pill to bring your temperature down,” I said simply. Because Lazar had been “stolen” from cardiac surgery and taken under the personal wings of the heads of two different and even contradictory departments, and the master surgeon who had operated on him had disappeared into thin air, he was essentially abandoned in this attractive private room, which was still full of the smell of flowers although all the vases had been removed for the night. Our whispers had awakened Dori, who opened her lovely eyes, which immediately filled with her brilliant, happy smile as if nothing untoward had happened in her world. “Well, Benjy, how does he look to you?” she asked, and it was hard to tell if she was asking me as a physician or a friend. “He looks fine,” I said with a smile. “But with all these important professors looking after him, I’m afraid he might get a little lost between them,” I added, and immediately regretted it, because I saw that her anxiety for him was so great that any expression of doubt or concern coming from outside could upset her equilibrium. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Nothing, really,” I said, trying to reassure her, “but I just dropped in by chance and discovered that he has a temperature, and it turns out that nobody’s given him a pill to bring it down because they don’t want to wake Professor Levine, as if no other doctor is allowed to touch him.”

“But why? Can’t you give him a pill?” she asked with a naïveté that touched my heart, which was still excited by the sight of her eyes — eyes that I had seen without their glasses only when I had made love to her. “Of course,” I said confidently. “Why not? Even if it’s only a slight temperature, why should he suffer?”

But I was not worried about Lazar’s temperature. My thoughts turned stubbornly around the possibility of ventricular tachycardia, which could suddenly turn into ventricular fibrillation. The charts at the foot of Lazar’s bed contained the records of a considerable number of EKGs that had been done since his operation. I picked them up to examine them in the full moonlight of the autumn night and immediately noticed longer runs of a rapid, ectopic beat, five to six in a row, whose shape was obviously different from the regular and dominant sinus rhythm, which made me think they were of ventricular origin. Imperfect as it was, my knowledge of cardiology was enough to arouse my fears and give me a powerful urge to photograph these EKG strips and take them with me to the library tomorrow to study them, or even to go up to Jerusalem after my night shift and show them to Professor Adler, to hear what the master had to say. Perhaps for the first time since I had begun work at the hospital, I felt so powerfully convinced of something that it was only my youth and inexperience that prevented me from getting in touch with Professor Hishin right then, in the middle of the night, and expounding my interpretation of the data to him, an interpretation that was so obviously right that only it could save us from the catastrophe threatening to descend. But I had left my post in the emergency room for some time and was concerned that I might have been missed. I went to the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor and signed an order for two paracetamols for Lazar and one 5 milligram of Valium for his wife, and after seeing them swallow the pills I left them with the promise to come again tomorrow afternoon, because I knew that in spite of the confidence they felt in their professor friends in the hospital, they had also developed a kind of hidden dependency on the young doctor who had accompanied them to India.

Therefore, after waking up late the next morning, I did not drive to Jerusalem as I had promised to help my parents with Shivi, who, although my mother assured me she had been no trouble at all and was giving them a lot of joy, was still a handful for two older people to look after by themselves. I phoned them and apologized profusely. And since I didn’t know how to explain, even to myself, the nagging anxiety I felt about Lazar and the need I felt to stay close to the hospital, and I didn’t want to lie to them, I told them the truth without going into any medical details, and these two rational and realistic people had to be content with mysterious premonitions and to rely on the trust that they were accustomed to having in me. Six hours before my shift began I was already back at the hospital, where I went to the library to consult the EKG and arrhythmia teaching manuals used by nurses in cardiac intensive care courses. But no clear conclusions emerged from my reading. It appeared that there were atrial beats which could look like ventricular beats. The uncertainty only increased my anxiety, whose source was now less clear than ever. I went to the coronary intensive care unit and looked at the EKG strips of patients with acute myocardial infarction taken over the past few hours, and when there was a quiet moment I asked the doctor in charge to show me EKGs showing clear runs of ventricular tachycardia. Equipped with these strips, I went up to the ninth floor to see how Lazar was doing. In the cafeteria I had already heard from two psychiatrists who had visited him that morning that he looked and acted “like a man-eating tiger,” and that tomorrow or the next day he would probably be sent home, and the week after that he would presumably be back in his executive chair with his hands once again on the reins.

The two psychiatrists spoke about him with anger and bitterness, for Lazar had turned their well-meaning visit into a power struggle over his new initiative to do away with the psychiatric department in the hospital and turn it into an outpatient clinic — a community mental health service. “Let them take their mental illnesses somewhere else, we don’t need them here,” he said, smiling from his bed, when I told him about the psychiatrists’ angry reaction to his ideas for their department. The private room, which I had last seen bathed in moonlight, full of the intoxicating scent of flowers, had already been transformed into a kind of office, with two telephones on the floor and a pile of files next to his food tray. Levine was still trying to keep the stream of visitors at bay, but Hishin, who was standing next to Lazar’s bed as large as life and twice as tall, was perfectly satisfied with the new energy displayed by his patient. Lazar’s temperature had gone down, the bandages had been removed, and through the hospital pajamas the straight row of neat stitches was clearly visible. Dori was sitting in the corner, listening smilingly to Lazar’s secretary’s chatter. She was heavily made up, wearing an elegant suit and high heels; it seemed that she had already spent a few hours in her office and had also done some shopping, judging by the plastic bags heaped at her crossed feet. I suddenly turned to her, rudely interrupting the secretary. “Are you going to spend the night here again?” She nodded her head in surprise, as if I should know that she preferred the discomfort of sleeping in an armchair to being separated from her husband and spending a lonely night in her bed. A consoling thought crossed my mind, light as the touch of a feather. In spite of everything, there had not yet been one ugly moment between us. And a powerful wave of love swept over me for this middle-aged woman, who boldly took out a cigarette and lit it in the closed room, to the horror of Professor Levine, who came into the room at that moment and held out both his hands to her in an imploring gesture, to stop her from poisoning us all.

Was it possible that in the depths of my heart I wished for Lazar’s death? This secret thought, which held a certain sweetness, and which had been stubbornly simmering inside me ever since the flight home from Rome, now seized hold of me again and forced me to go out to the little balcony and bend over the railing as if I wanted to spew it out of me once and for all. Levine drew Hishin onto the balcony to show him the results of some tests which had just arrived, including the left ventricular function using a technetium radioactive scan. Hishin took off his glasses and ran his eyes rapidly over the results. He looked completely calm. “It’s so predictable,” I heard him exclaim in his loud, confident voice. “You don’t need to be a cardiac surgeon to know that the heart muscle is still stunned from the surgery and the prolonged use of the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. That explains the poor function.” But Levine, whose voice was too low for me to hear his arguments, appeared to be insisting on something. Hishin listened attentively, but without appearing to be convinced. “All right,” he said, “we’ll keep him until the end of the week and repeat all the tests in ten days’ time. And if the cardiac function is still unsatisfactory, we’ll take him to Jerusalem to Bouma and see what he has to say.” Levine nodded, but he didn’t seem satisfied. Suddenly he fixed his blue eyes on me standing in the corner of the balcony, the EKG strips in my hand, and trying not to look as if I were dying to intervene in their conversation. Levine beckoned me to approach. I took a few steps, and to my astonishment he touched my arm in a friendly gesture, and in his deep, serious voice, his eyes on the strips in my hand, he said to Hishin, “Listen to what Dr. Rubin has to say, Yosef. You were the one who was so impressed with him that you chose him out of all the residents in the hospital to go to India. Tell Professor Hishin what you think about Lazar’s arrhythmia.” I was so overwhelmed by Levine’s gentle touch on my arm and by the friendly tone in which he spoke that at first I was confused and stammered incoherently, but gradually I organized my thoughts and even added a few new elements I had picked up a couple of hours before in the coronary intensive care unit. Hishin listened to me with a paternal smile, but he seemed to be enjoying the vigor with which I expounded my views rather than following what I had to say. “And you let a resident like Benjy slip through your fingers?” he said to Levine when I had concluded my argument. “It wasn’t up to me,” said Levine in tone of real regret. “It was up to him.” And with this the medical debate ended before it had even begun, just as Lazar’s two children, Einat and the boy, now a soldier in uniform, entered the room and were enthusiastically greeted by all those present.

It turned out that Einat, who hugged and kissed her father with a certain hesitation, had just arrived from the United States, and her brother had met her at the airport. As she turned to her mother, who came up to hug her, she caught sight of me and waved. I shook my finger at her in mock reprimand. “You sleep at our house and leave without even saying good-bye?” She blushed, laughing and apologetic, and then explained to her parents how rushed she had been during her short stopover in London. I felt surrounded by warmth. In the room crowded with the Lazars’ family and friends, I felt as if I were planted deeply among them. The unexpected reconciliation with Professor Levine added to my joy. But I didn’t have much time to bask in these good feelings, for everyone was in a hurry to go somewhere except Einat, especially the rather sad and alienated son, who kept his distance from me. He had to get back to his base, and his mother had to drive him to the bus station and then rush home to prepare herself for another night at the hospital with her husband. Now she stood next to his bed to say good-bye and make various arrangements, and as she patted her hair lightly into place and asked him what to take home and what to bring back with her, I noticed that his hand, still blue from the hematoma caused by the infusion needles, was groping for hers, which was stroking his hair, both in order to stop her from caressing him in public and to draw it to his chest, perhaps to hint at a new, nagging pain which he was loath to trouble his doctor friends with.

And so we all parted from the administrative director except for Einat, who looked exhausted from the flight but insisted on believing, according to the biological clock inside her, that it was still morning. We went out into the corridor, where a clear and wonderful light poured through the big ninth-floor windows directly from the sea, streaming toward us over the roofs of the houses — the soft, pink autumn light of the afternoon hours, when the whole hospital was taken over by the visitors who crowded the elevators and flooded the rooms of the wards, who used the flowers, the fruit, the evening papers, and the boxes of chocolate which they strewed about them to banish the medical staff with their instruments and medications and instill new hope into the hearts of the sick people huddling beneath their blankets. Although Dori had her son on one side of her and her husband’s secretary on the other, I still hoped that I would be able to snatch a word or two with her in private, but I was prevented from doing so by Hishin. I had sensed that he wanted to talk to me in Lazar’s room, as if the information I had gathered and expounded to him and Levine on the balcony about the irregularities in the EKG had led him to believe that I had succeeded in finding a new lead to the wayward heart of Lazar, which apparently had him worried as well. Perhaps he even regretted letting me go so easily. In any case, he signaled me to wait for him, went over to the nurses’ station, and held a short telephone conversation with the head nurse of his department, who in spite of his pleas refused to let him off an operation that had already been postponed from the morning. Then he turned to me and asked me in a friendly way if I was going home before my shift. I looked at my watch. It was half-past four, and my shift began in two hours’ time. If I’d still had my motorcycle I wouldn’t have hesitated to go home in order to take a shower and rest before the long night ahead of me, and especially to call my parents again. But crawling along in the Tel Aviv evening traffic and finding parking for the car was another matter. “In that case,” he said firmly, as if he were still my patron, “come and keep me company in an operation that won’t take long but can’t be postponed any longer. Lazar tells me that in the hospital in London they let you operate as much as you wanted to. The English apparently like cutting up their patients slowly and delicately.” He winked at me and laughed loudly. I laughed too, not only because of the friendliness he had displayed toward me since my return from London but because of the feeling of victory and self-esteem that had filled me ever since the sudden reconciliation with Professor Levine. Who knows, I said to myself, the wild thought popping into my mind, perhaps Amnon was right and one day I will be the head of a department here, or perhaps even the director of the hospital. Thus, wrapped in premonitions of greatness, which sometimes carried me away, I generously agreed to begin my night’s work then, in that clear and rosy hour of the afternoon, and followed Hishin down to the surgical wing. I took the last green shirt and trousers left on the cart, and while the anesthetist began the preparations for the “takeoff” of a very young woman who looked at us sadly and accusingly, I succeeded in persuading the switchboard operator to give me an outside line to call my parents. They had been trying to get in touch with me to tell me about a call from Michaela, who had phoned that morning from Glasgow, where she had spent the night at my aunt’s with Stephanie on their way to the Isle of Skye. It was surprising and annoying to know that while we were all steeped in worries and cares, Michaela found the time to go off on a jaunt to Scotland and visit the places my mother had known as a child. I asked them about Shivi, and they said that she had vomited twice in the morning and they had called in old Dr. Cohen, the pediatrician who had taken care of me, and he had examined her and prescribed some medication but mainly reassured them. They read the name of the drug to me over the phone and asked my permission to give it to Shivi. Although she was apparently feeling better, it was obvious that they were nervous and wished that I would come and get her.

I promised that I would drive to Jerusalem first thing in the morning, as soon as my night shift was over. As I entered the changing room, I saw Dr. Vardi, my short and sturdy rival-friend, standing in a blood-soaked green uniform, with the mask still tied around his neck emphasizing the burning seriousness of his eyes as he looked at us. Hishin asked him about the operation that had just been concluded, and Vardi began to answer with his usual compulsive thoroughness, until Hishin seemed sorry that he had asked. He appeared distracted and troubled, as if his mind were somewhere else. “Do you want me to assist you?” asked Vardi, who seemed upset by my sudden presence at the side of his patron. “No, there’s no need. You’ve done enough today, you can go home,” said Hishin, and laid his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve got Benjy here, as both a former surgeon and a present anesthetist, and as a friend, and that’s quite enough.” We went into the operating room, washed our hands, put on gloves and masks, and suddenly he asked me if I could manage the anesthesia alone. I answered confidently in the affirmative, although formally speaking I was not yet supposed to be the only anesthetist present at an operation. He told the anesthetist that he could go, after getting some necessary information from him, and turned to the white stomach of the woman, which as always gave rise to tender feelings of compassion in me. With a swift and precise movement he cut a thin, firm line from her navel to her pubic hair, which for a moment seemed on fire in the ray of light filtering through the round porthole in the door. Although the bypass operation I had witnessed a week before by far surpassed the abdominal surgery now being performed by Professor Hishin, who suddenly seemed a little like a butcher, in its medical-technological complexity and even its aestheticism it was impossible not to admire his precision and skill, and also the human warmth and intimacy of his long fingers as they felt their way among the tissues opening up in front of him, not only to see but also to sense what needed to be done.

There were three of us in the operating room, Hishin and I and a new nurse whom neither of us had seen before, with a face as fresh and pure as an angel’s. After half an hour, when the critical stage of the operation was approaching, the internal telephone fixed to the wall rang. I went to pick it up and immediately recognized Levine’s voice, asking urgently to speak to Hishin. At first, in the wake of the reconciliation between us, I wanted to identify myself, but Levine sounded so agitated that I decided against it and confined myself to saying that I didn’t think Hishin would be able to come to the telephone now and would call back as soon as he could. But Levine insisted, and Hishin, who was listening with half an ear to the conversation, asked me to find out what was the matter. Still without saying who I was, I said that Hishin couldn’t come to the phone now and wanted to know what the trouble was. A note of hesitation came into Levine’s voice, and he asked who was speaking. After I identified myself, his agitation increased, and he said in a deep voice, “I think that you were right, Dr. Rubin, about Lazar’s arrhythmia. His condition has deteriorated — at the moment he’s being mechanically ventilated. There’s a cardiologist from coronary intensive care with him now. He’s diagnosed ventricular tachycardia and is considering an electric shock, but it’s very important to me for Hishin to come up here at once to see him, because he knows his general condition better than anyone else.” And he put the phone down. From the tone of his voice I realized that Hishin’s presence was important to him not for the reason he gave but because he wanted him by his side in this emergency in order to share the responsibility for any catastrophe. I immediately filled Hishin in on the picture. He froze in his place and raised his two bloody hands in the air as if he wanted to hold his stunned head between them. He knew that Lazar was now fighting for his life upstairs, and he knew that there was no way he could leave the operating room. He couldn’t even send me to find out what was going on. Suddenly I saw that his hands were trembling, and I sensed that he was losing his intense inner concentration. He tried to go on working, but immediately stopped and asked me to go out and see if Vardi was still around to take over from him, and when he saw that I was hesitating, unwilling to abandon the anesthesia machine, he added angrily, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after it while you’re gone.”

It was breaking every rule in the book to leave the operating room now, but I knew that if I could find Dr. Vardi, Hishin would be able to go upstairs, and with his courage, his resourcefulness, perhaps he would be able to save Lazar’s life. But the wing was empty except for a couple of nurses in the intensive care unit. Suddenly the twilight turning red around me intensified my feeling of dread, and in the absolute silence I could sense my heart beating. Hishin was absorbed in the woman’s stomach, and nobody was watching the anesthesia machine. But I pressed the button of the main door of the wing nevertheless and hurried out into the bustling corridor to see if I could find some other surgeon to take Hishin’s place. In the distance I saw Nakash’s brown suit. He was on his way home, but the minute I told him what was up he hurried back into the surgical wing with me, although he wouldn’t enter the operating room itself in his ordinary clothes. In my absence there had been another phone call from Levine. “But what does he want?” cried Hishin, his face gray. “How can I leave the operating room now?” In the meantime the rumor of the administrative director’s deteriorating condition had apparently spread through the hospital like wildfire, and two doctors from cardiothoracic surgery had already hurried upstairs, as Dr. Levine called desperately for help in all directions. With a pang I saw that Hishin’s hands were trembling again. He stood still for a moment, closed his eyes in concentration, and then returned to work at the proper tempo, refusing to give way to the temptation to hurry things up.

The quiet, fresh-faced young nurse, who had not yet opened her mouth, could no longer restrain herself and asked, “Who’s Lazar?” Hishin didn’t answer, but I began to tell her much more about Lazar than her innocent question warranted, as if I wanted by my words to strengthen his soul as it hovered between life and death. The telephone rang again. It was Nakash, who announced that he had succeeded in persuading Levine to bring the still unconscious Lazar down to the cardiothoracic surgery intensive care unit, which was close to us in the surgical wing. Hishin nodded his head. The hour of his most terrible test was upon him, under the watchful eyes of the entire medical staff of the hospital. Would he really be able to save his friend? But he went on cauterizing the blood vessels to prevent bleeding. From time to time he would offer his forehead to the nurse for her to wipe away the perspiration. The sound of loud, excited voices reached us as Lazar was brought into the wing, but Hishin didn’t budge from his place and he signaled me too not to move. Nakash came into the room, wrapped in the green operating room uniform, a plastic cover on his head and his face hidden behind a mask. In his quiet, noble way he offered to help so that Hishin could leave as soon as possible. All he could tell us about Lazar was that his heart was still fibrillating in spite of the electric shock he had received. Suddenly Levine burst into the room in his ordinary clothes, with a strange, rather mysterious expression on his face, looking as if his psychiatric leave had already begun. But Hishin stopped him immediately. “For God’s sake, David,” he said in a stern tone, “let’s try to keep our heads here. I have to finish the operation. And this young woman too deserves to get everything we can give her.” He bent over the gaping stomach, steadily continuing his work, and when it was all over and she was ready to be sewn up again, I could no longer hold back and offered to complete the suture for him. Hishin gave me a hard look, his little eyes burning in his pale face; he thought for a minute, and then he said, “Right. Why not? Nakash can take over the anesthesia.” He put the scissors down on the tray, held out his hands to the nurse for her to remove his gloves, and hurried from the room.

I began stitching the big incision, straining my ears to hear what was going on in the intensive care unit, even though I knew that the heavy doors would prevent any sound, encouraging or otherwise, from reaching us. I suggested to Nakash that he pop out to see what was happening, but he waved a dark hand in firm refusal and said, “No, Benjy, let’s wait. We don’t want to disturb them now,” as if he too were afraid to see what was happening next door. And so I continued neatly and carefully suturing the surgical wound, doing my best to ensure that the scar on the young woman’s stomach would be as unnoticeable as possible.

At last I was able to give Nakash the signal to bring our patient around and to ascertain from the state of her pupils, before he got dressed and hurried home, whether she had indeed returned to the land of the living. Outside in the corridor I felt the full weight of the weariness and the anxiety that had accumulated inside me. I decided to sit down for a moment on one of the little chairs, to fill in the anesthesia form and to ask the nurse with the face as pure as an angel’s to find out what was happening in the intensive care unit at the end of the corridor. She came back immediately and said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin.” I jumped up and hurried there myself. My eyes were immediately drawn to the bed crammed between the various instruments, between the respirator and the big old defibrillator. His body was covered with a white sheet, but over his face there was a green sterile cloth, which for some reason brought back in a flash the picture of the two of them in the textile bazaar in New Delhi, standing next to a stall selling silk scarves, where she’d tried on one scarf after another and he’d watched her with an expression of weariness and boredom and had tried to move on; and then she’d held out a green silk scarf, and before he could resist, she’d put it on his head and adroitly tied the ends under his chin, like a granny’s handkerchief, and stepped back to contemplate his embarrassed and amused expression before bursting into peals of jubilant laughter, in which she was momentarily joined by the passersby. And now he was dead. The pain clutched my heart. And his good friends Hishin and Levine would not be able to escape the duty of going, stunned and eaten up with guilt, to give the terrible news to the woman who couldn’t stay a single day by herself. Nakash was now standing beside me in his suit and tie. For a moment he hesitated, and then his curiosity got the better of him and he went up to the dead body lying between the medical instruments and lifted the green cloth off, to look at Lazar’s face and perhaps to say good-bye to him too. In spite of everything Nakash had come to us from the East, and despite his great expertise in anesthesiology and his thorough knowledge of medicine, in the depths of his soul he remained a fatalist, and when death descended on someone close to him, he accepted it completely, without question, without complaint, and above all without trying to blame anyone.

He also did not want to hear my diagnosis, but calmly took his leave of Lazar and of me and went home, switching off the light behind him with his usual economy and casting the entire wing into gloom. I decided not to change my clothes but to hurry as I was to the emergency room, not only because my shift had already begun but also because I was sure that somebody there would be able to tell me what had happened. But the two young surgeons I found there, who had been with Hishin and Levine and the others when they tried to resuscitate Lazar, were still so stunned and upset that despite their eagerness to explain and interpret everything, as eager young doctors will, it was difficult to get a clear picture from them. All I learned was that after Lazar had been declared dead, Levine and Hishin had rushed off to treat Einat, who went into shock when she heard of her father’s death. At first they had wanted to co-opt me to join the delegation bearing the bad news to his wife, but since I was still busy in the operating room, they had called on Lazar’s secretary instead, who went into hysterics and began to scream and cry. Again, unlike the usual practice, the young doctors did not try to blame anyone. Not even Levine, who had been with Lazar when the fibrillation began. Nobody could have expected it — only two hours before an EKG had yielded completely normal results. Arrhythmia was characteristically elusive — it came and went as it pleased. I decided to keep my peace, since nobody could possibly know just how deep my ties with the Lazars went, and I busied myself with the work of the emergency room, which was particularly intensive, with the knowledge of the death of the hospital director breaking over us in wave after stunning wave as we worked into the night. At two A.M., I was called to the surgical wing to assist with a local anesthesia. As soon as it was over I went into the little instrument-packed room again, as if to be certain that the body had indeed been transferred to the hospital morgue, where I had for some reason never been before.

“How do you get there?” I asked the man at the information desk in the entrance lobby, who told me what I wanted to know but insisted that at this hour of night the place was locked and there was nobody there. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I said angrily, “people die at night too,” and I went down to the basement. On the stairs I met three doctors, whom I immediately recognized as Dr. Amit, deputy head of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Yarden, the anesthetist who had taken part in Lazar’s operation, and the elderly pathologist Dr. Hefetz. I knew that they were coming from the place that I was going to. To my surprise, they not only recognized me but did not seem surprised to see me there, as if it were only natural that I should be going down to the morgue at two in the morning. “Were you there when it happened?” they asked immediately, as if looking for someone to blame. “No,” I said, “but ever since the operation I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the possibility of ventricular tachycardia.” Dr. Amit shook his head. He didn’t agree with me; perhaps the immediate cause of death had been the arrhythmia, but he suspected that the deterioration in Lazar’s condition stemmed from an infarct caused by an occlusion in one of the bypasses. All three of them seemed very depressed by what had happened. “This death won’t do the reputation of our hospital any good,” pronounced Dr. Hefetz, who agreed to come down with me and show me the body. “But there isn’t much left to see,” he warned me as he turned back down the stairs — for Lazar, like the rest of us, had donated his organs to the hospital research laboratories. It seemed strange to me that the pathologist agreed without any hesitation to my request, as if he, too, understood that I had some special rights here. Had he heard about the trip to India? He opened the door leading to the two adjoining basement rooms. In one of the corners stood a large refrigerator with rows of big iron drawers. He pulled one of them out. I saw a smaller, shrunken Lazar, crudely stitched up after the removal of his internal organs. “Did they take his heart too?” I asked. “Of course not,” Dr. Hefetz answered in surprise.

I suddenly felt calm and wide awake. I knew that I shouldn’t wake my parents at this hour of the night, but I felt that I had to share my feelings with them. I called them up and told them about Lazar’s sudden death. Like all kindhearted people on such occasions, they were shocked and saddened. Again and again they wanted to know how and why it had happened, as if from their home in Jerusalem they could understand what important professors at the hospital like Hishin and Levine had failed to understand. Suddenly I wanted to console them and tell them not to grieve, for Lazar’s soul had already been reincarnated in me, but I knew that they would think my sorrow had driven me out of my mind, and so I only asked them for my aunt’s telephone number in Glasgow so I could get in touch with Michaela. I took a beeper from the emergency room, switched it on, and stole into the administrative wing, which I was sure that the secretary had forgotten to lock up in the commotion. I was right. The door to Lazar’s office was open, and I didn’t even have to put on the light, because there was enough moonlight for me to see the numbers on the telephone. I found Michaela and Stephanie with my family in Scotland. I told Michaela about Lazar’s sudden death and asked her to cut her trip short and come home. There was a silence on the other side of the line. “Look,” I said aggressively, “I know you’re entitled to another week in Britain, but it wouldn’t be right to leave me to cope with the baby alone now in the new situation that’s arisen.”

“What situation are you talking about?” asked Michaela in surprise. For a moment I was angry that she couldn’t understand by herself, but I tried to stay cool. “I’m asking you, Michaela.” I spoke quietly but firmly. “It’s not only Shivi who needs you; I need you too. You’re the only one I can talk to about what’s happening to me. Because nobody else would believe that Lazar’s soul has entered my body.” There was a profound silence on the other end of the line again. But it was no longer the silence of resistance. It was a new, different silence. And I knew that what I had just told her would capture her imagination and excite her curiosity so much that she would cancel her trip to Skye and fly home.