Open Heart

Sixteen

Twice during the week of mourning I paid a condolence call to the Lazars’. The first time alone, the day after the funeral, and the second time with Michaela, who returned to the country four days after our midnight telephone conversation. I might have paid a third visit, with my parents, who vacillated between going to the funeral and paying a condolence call until I persuaded them that their relations with the Lazars did not justify either of these measures and it would be enough to send a sympathy letter, which I helped them formulate over the phone. So that I could perform the overt and covert duties imposed on me by Lazar’s sudden death, I asked my parents to keep Shiva with them until Michaela arrived. The overt duties were clearer than the covert ones, and involved the funeral itself, which was scheduled for the day after his death so the hospital administration and his many friends there could organize a dignified ceremony and try to rehabilitate the hospital’s reputation in the wake of damaging rumors about a failed operation and an incorrect diagnosis. I myself was careful at first to maintain medical confidentiality, precisely because I felt that I would be a more reliable source of information than Professor Levine, who was so stunned and grief-stricken by the death of his friend, which had taken place not only in his department but under his personal care, that he retired into a corner and delegated some of his authority to his deputy as a kind of private punishment for himself. In this way he succeeded in diverting most of the darts of criticism from himself to Professor Hishin, who had “stolen” the operation from cardiothoracic surgery and brought in an expert from another hospital. True, patients occasionally died after bypass surgery in the cardiothoracic surgery department too, but these were considered “internal” deaths, while Lazar’s was “external,” brought from outside in an act of treachery. Since I was still convinced that the cause of Lazar’s death was not connected to the surgery but stemmed from a mistaken diagnosis, when the criticism intensified I felt I had to break my silence and defend Professor Hishin from his detractors in the hospital, among them people I hardly knew — physicians, nurses, and members of the administrative staff — who began buttonholing me in the corridor the day after Lazar’s death and questioning me about what had really happened. Dr. Nakash, who happened in on one of these corridor conversations, immediately took me aside and warned me, with uncharacteristic sharpness, to stop letting my mouth run away with me. At the funeral too, which began in the plaza in front of the hospital, I sensed that he and his wife were deliberately keeping close to me and discreetly trying to prevent me from joining the inner circle of mourners, family and intimate friends now surrounding Dori, who was standing at a careful and fearful distance from her beloved husband.

Mourners were packed into the plaza — their numbers exceeded all my expectations, and many appeared to be truly grieving, for throughout the crowd I saw tears sparkling in the eyes of men and women as they listened to the eulogy delivered by the medical director of the hospital, a gray, retiring man who began by reading in a low clear voice from the notes he had prepared about Lazar’s life history. Lazar had been born and brought up only two or three streets away from the hospital. In his youth he had studied medicine, but in his second year he had had to abandon his studies because of his father’s illness and go to work to support his younger brother and sister, recognizable in the circle surrounding Dori by their physical resemblance to their brother. From a distance it seemed that the two of them were careful not to get too close to Dori, as if they feared that this pampered, vivacious woman’s rage at being left alone by her husband might be greater and more violent than her grief. Even her mother kept her distance, standing with her grandchildren on either side of her, the three supporting each other. Only Hishin, perhaps by virtue of his medical authority, which in the eyes of the Lazars was absolute, dared to approach Dori and take her arm as she stood steadily on her straight legs, her left foot even at this difficult time in the lax, slightly out-turned position I always found so appealing. Hishin had honored the occasion by wearing a black suit, but instead of a skullcap he wore an old black baseball cap on his head, which gave him the air of a sorrowful bird. As someone who had stood at his side for many hours next to the operating table and learned to sense every shift in his mood, I felt even from a distance the tremendous tension in his movements, as if he were about to whip out a knife and operate on himself. I did not yet know that he had claimed the right to eulogize Lazar at the graveside and that he was going over the first sentences of his speech in his mind as his little eyes scanned the hostile audience. Dori’s eyes too wandered over the people around her, but it did not look as if any sentences, or even words, were coming into her mind. She was so stunned by the catastrophe that she didn’t even realize how her eyes, encountering the familiar faces of her friends, lit up, even at this terrible time, in the old, friendly smile, although the light was so dim and weak that I thought my heart would break.

The next day in the Lazars’ apartment, among the many people filling the large living room — Dori wearing the black velvet jumpsuit I remembered, her face pale and free of makeup — I heard her asking about the eulogies that had been delivered outside the hospital, admitting that she had been unable to take in what was being said. But although the people surrounding her tried their best, none of them could remember the details. When I could no longer restrain myself, I intervened from the other end of the room and repeated almost word for word not only Lazar’s biography as sketched by the medical director but also the emotional phrases of the mayor, who had obviously felt both affection and respect for Lazar in spite of the bitter financial disagreements between them. But there was no need to repeat Professor Hishin’s words next to the freshly dug grave to her, both because she, like everyone else there, could not forget their power and eloquence and because Hishin himself was now sitting beside her with the strange young woman who was his mistress or perhaps already his wife and who lived for most of the year in Europe. During the week following the funeral he went to see the Lazars twice a day, partly to give his support and protection to the widow of his good friend, who was a beloved friend in her own right, and maybe partly to confront, if necessary, any complaints against him then and there. So it was only natural that in the quiet stir of people coming and going he would not overlook my presence. Even though I was sitting in a remote corner of the room, far away from him, I could feel his eyes returning to me, trying to guess if I intended to surprise Dori with something she did not yet know. But I had no desire to surprise anybody. The heaviness I had felt inside ever since Lazar’s death, accompanied from time to time by a slight dizziness, as if I had no control over what was happening inside me, had banished any complaints from my mind, especially any complaints against Hishin, who could never have guessed that the pity that flooded me at the sight of Dori’s and Einat’s tearstained eyes was accompanied by a great and paralyzing joy, which made me forget my manners, and instead of getting up to take my leave after half an hour and giving my seat to one of the other people who kept streaming in through the open door, I stubbornly sat where I was, nodding somberly to acquaintances from the hospital, as if I too were one of the mourners here.

While I could not count myself as a member of the grieving family, I felt that I secretly belonged here in this apartment, although I had only briefly visited it twice before, including on the eve of the trip to India, and from the moment I crossed the threshold I felt warmly and intimately at home. Ever since the return from India it had been the scene of my constant fantasies, and now the wounded spirit of the master of the house, which had been compassionately gathered into my soul, enabled me not only to get up and go into the kitchen without asking permission to pour myself a glass of cold water, but even to advance down the hallway and peep into the bedroom where I had given Lazar and his wife their vaccination shots before we left for India. After all, Dori, who had invaded the bedroom of a strange house in London, could hardly rebuke me for standing mesmerized in the doorway of her large, elegant bedroom, where the soft autumn twilight turning the big windows red only intensified my distress at the sight of the female clothes thrown onto the bed and the chairs, the scattered shoes, the drawers left open in a kind of chaos, which to the best of my knowledge would have infuriated Lazar. No wonder I jumped at the light touch on the back of my neck. It was Hishin. His tall body had seemed slightly stooped during the last few days, and his little eyes were tired and bloodshot. Was he looking for something too, or had he simply followed me here? He stood silently next to me, as startled as I was at the sight of the chaos created by the despairing and perhaps also angry widow. “Have you ever been here before?” He surprised me by the strange question. “A long time ago”—I blushed—“before the trip to India.” Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t referring to the apartment but to the bedroom itself, and I continued hesitantly, “I vaccinated both of them here before the trip.” He nodded his head. There was something profoundly attentive in his manner toward me. Ever since Lazar’s death, and despite the great difference in our status, I had felt that there were unanswered questions between us, connected more with medical ethics than with medicine itself. But since I had never seen him so vulnerable before, I was careful to avoid saying anything that might upset his confidence in the natural course of events leading to the death and in the impossibility of preventing it. My curiosity on one point, however, was so intense that I couldn’t stop myself from asking: how did Professor Adler, who had performed the operation, explain what had happened? “Bouma?” cried Hishin angrily, and the childish nickname seemed intended now to shrink the Jerusalem master back to his natural human dimensions. “He doesn’t know anything about it. He left the country right after the operation and he won’t be back until next week. But what can he tell us, Benjy, that we don’t already know? You know yourself that the ventricular tachycardia had nothing to do with the surgery, which you saw succeed with your own eyes.” A warm surge of happiness welled up in me to hear Hishin using my diagnosis as if it had now been confirmed as the absolute, undisputed truth.

Glowing with the excitement of this unexpected triumph, I went on looking at the bedroom, which suddenly filled with rose-tinted shadows that swallowed up the chaos left by the woman with whom I had fallen impossibly in love, and I decided to reward Hishin, who, although he had not found a place for me in his department and preferred my rival to me, had nevertheless seen me as the ideal man to send to India. I began to praise the eulogy he had delivered at the cemetery. “Your eulogy was terrific,” I said, “if that’s an appropriate word in this context.” He closed his eyes impatiently and bowed his head modestly in acknowledgment as he listened to the footsteps of the people going in and out of the front door. Although he had already received a lot of compliments on his speech, it seemed that my response was important to him. “I feel so sorry for her,” I added, unable to restrain myself. “What will she do without him?” Hishin gave me a quick glance, somewhat surprised, as if he considered it inappropriate for a young man like me to speak in a tone of such concern about people who were almost as old as his parents. “She’s incapable of staying by herself for a minute,” I added in a resentful voice, which included a note of despair. “In what sense is she incapable of staying by herself?” he said in surprise, as if by this cunning denial of a well-known fact he might be able to obtain some secret knowledge hitherto hidden from him. But I realized that I had better be careful, precisely because the events of the last few days had drawn us closer together, and the devastating guilt which continued to tear him apart, even if he didn’t admit it, would sharpen his awareness of the abyss gradually opening up inside me. The words of the eulogy he had delivered between the Kaddishes were still echoing in my mind. Had he prepared them in advance, or had they really welled out of him spontaneously with the grief and the tears breaking out all around him as the grave was filled? When I saw the men lifting the stretcher to slide the body into the grave, I had eluded the invisible grip of Nakash and his wife in order to break into the inner circle, and I had seen Hishin supporting Dori, whose legs suddenly gave way beneath her as she began to sob. He waited until she steadied herself and only then opened two buttons of his black suit, exposing a tie that was surprisingly red, as if he had wanted to tear a symbolic wound in his own chest, and delivered his astonishing speech, whose gist I repeated to Michaela on the way back from the airport. And although Michaela would no doubt have preferred to hear first about Shivi, who had recognized her mother immediately in spite of the long separation and was now lying serenely in her lap, she restrained herself and listened attentively as I repeated Hishin’s words to her, for she knew that if I thought something that had been said there was important to me, it was important to her too. Hishin began his speech with the unequivocal statement that the hospital director had been worthy of the title “the ideal man”—not as a cheap romantic compliment, but on the grounds of a realistic examination of the personality of the deceased, who, although he had been forced to abandon his medical studies in his youth as a result of his parents’ difficulties, had never abandoned the vocation of medicine in the wider sense of the word and had joined the administrative staff of the hospital, where because of his energy and talent he had soon risen to a position of power and authority. Here Hishin straightened himself up next to the fresh grave and began to describe in an almost critical tone the nature and extent of the power that Lazar had accumulated as the administrative director, secure and permanent in his position while the medical directors changed every few years. He went on to describe the way in which Lazar had used his power to serve the medical staff efficiently and well, on the condition that they put loyalty to their patients first. His power, explained Hishin, was built on two principles: “knowledge of the details, and acknowledgment of limits.” There wasn’t a detail in the life of the hospital, from the numbers of doctors absent on leave to a broken cogwheel in the dialysis machine, that Lazar considered beneath his notice, and the moment he knew something he turned it into his responsibility. But the vast scope of the responsibility that Lazar was prepared to take on himself, continued Hishin, had never blurred his awareness of the precise limits of his authority, especially with regard to the medical staff — he respected the doctors in the hospital and never interfered with their professional judgment.

Michaela listened quietly and patiently, apparently sensing that if I felt it was so important to repeat Hishin’s eulogy to her even before she reached home after being away for a year, something more personal, touching on me and her, was bound to come. And indeed, the real excitement came only after Hishin abandoned the tone of general praise for the “ideal man” and began talking in a tender, intimate tone about Lazar’s reactions to his trip to India two years before, in order to illuminate a different, hidden aspect of the soul of the efficient administrator who had left us for another world. The many mourners, standing scattered among the white headstones in the afternoon light of an autumn that was already anticipating the first winter rains, began quietly coming closer in order to hear Lazar’s impressions and thoughts about India, as quoted by Professor Hishin — not only to my own astonishment, but also, as I sensed immediately, to that of Dori, who wiped her tears and looked questioningly at the speaker. Even though Lazar had been shocked and horrified by what he had seen on the dusty streets of India, said Hishin, and especially indignant at the sight of the sick and maimed lying abandoned in their poverty and filth, he had not avoided honestly facing the question of whether the great gap between our own world and theirs granted us a spiritual advantage too. Could we claim with any degree of confidence that our happiness was any greater and more real than theirs? “And perhaps,” Hishin went on to ask on behalf of Lazar, who could not rise from his grave to deny the strange thoughts attributed to him, “perhaps it is just the contempt and indifference shown by the people of the world whom we call ‘backward’ and ‘undeveloped’ for both details and limits — perhaps it is just they who can give us a truer sense of the universe through which we pass so quickly, and help to assuage the longings we all feel for immortality, especially at painful moments of parting like this, when we bury those dear to us.” Then, looking around at the faces of the mourners listening to him attentively, Hishin straightened the black baseball cap on his head and went on to speak of the night Lazar had spent with a retired Indian clerk in the little compartment of a train traveling from New Delhi to Varanasi, and of Lazar’s amazement at this Indian clerk’s calm confidence in his ability to ensure his rebirth by dint of a correct immersion in the waters of the Ganges. It was strange to hear Hishin talking about that night in the train as if Lazar had been all alone in the compartment, but then I remembered that Hishin was right and Lazar had been alone that night, sitting awake in the dark and looking at the three people sleeping next to him. And Hishin continued in a voice full of pain, as his eyes came to rest for a moment on me, “Can we deny that we too, people as completely modern as we are, sometimes dream of being born again, especially as we stand before a freshly filled grave? But how can we console ourselves with the idea of rebirth when it becomes clearer from day to day that there is nothing to be born again? For there is no such thing as a soul and never has been.” Now a murmur of protest passed through the crowd, but Hishin continued undeterred. He himself, he announced, had spent his whole life prying into the most secret corners of the human body, and he had not yet come across any traces of a soul; and his brain-surgeon friends argued that everything they found and touched was pure matter, without a hint of the existence of any informing spirit, until they were as convinced as he was that one day it would be possible to reconstruct the whole thing artificially, and certainly to transplant parts of the brain. Just as today we implanted artificial devices and donor organs in the body, the day would come when it would be possible to implant or inject into the brain devices or substances that would expand our memories, sharpen our intelligence, or intensify our pleasure. “And so,” Hishin concluded with a surprising turn, “I can’t console myself with the immortality of Lazar’s soul, from which I could ask forgiveness, but only with the memory of what I received from the flesh-and-blood man himself and what I gave him. And if, indeed, a mistake was made, it was only because of my great love for him.”

A faint, ironic smile crossed Michaela’s lips. It was impossible to tell whether it was occasioned by Hishin’s words themselves or by my efforts to quote him word for word. “So that’s how he thinks he’ll get out of it,” she said softly, without explaining what she meant, and her great eyes tried again to meet mine, which had been avoiding her ever since I met her at the airport and which were now scanning the familiar streets around our apartment, looking for a parking place. In the apartment too, where I had not yet rearranged the furniture moved by Amnon, Michaela went on trying to meet my eyes, to make me repeat the dramatic announcement I had made in my excitement when I had called her from Lazar’s office a few hours after his death, an announcement that was so important that without a second thought she had cut her stay short, canceled her trip to the Isle of Skye, and returned home. But I went on avoiding her eyes, and she put Shivi down in the little playpen my parents had bought her the week before and followed me into the kitchen, where I was standing in front of the sink, and put her arms around me and kissed me, not only with the lust aroused in her by every change in location — and the apartment could be considered a new locale after a year’s absence — but also in order to let me know that the bizarre and mysterious message I had conveyed to her that night was both credible and attractive to her. A new warmth and sweetness began streaming into me from Michaela’s strong arms clasping me to her body and from the long tongue licking my face. And the desire that I had forgotten in the anger of our parting and in the drama and distress of Lazar’s illness and death surged up in me with such force that I almost choked in my enthusiasm as I tried to swallow her tongue and to cover her eyes with kisses, if only to hide the penetrating look she still beseeched me with in order to hear again the wild confession which had compelled her to hurry back to Israel. I picked her up in my arms, and while Shivi raised her head to follow our movements, I carried her into the other room, which because of Amnon’s love for the sea had turned from the grandmother’s bedroom into the living room. I laid her on the narrow couch, and without stopping to open it up and double its size, I took off her clothes and knelt down to caress and kiss her private parts, trying to find some sign of her unfaithfulness to me in England or Scotland. But I found no such sign, and I stood up and lay down next to her and made love to her at length, pleasurably and generously, as on that night in the desert, overlooking Eyal’s wedding. And we only stopped when Shivi’s whimpering turned into a demanding cry.

“Did I make love to Lazar too?” she asked me with a hint of laughter in her eyes when she came out of the shower, shaking her wet hair. She watched me affectionately as I fed Shivi, who was sitting in her high chair facing the glow of the sunset in the kitchen window. Her air of amusement made it easier for me to answer her question. “You’ve just made love to a lot of people, alive and dead,” I said quietly, “and among them perhaps — why not? — Lazar too.” And in the darkness of the evening descending on us, next to the baby listening and playing with her empty bowl, I told Michaela the whole story of the drama of his death: the diagnosis, the surgery, the recovery, and the sudden collapse. I spoke not as a doctor intent on proving the superiority of his diagnosis but with the profound emotion of a young man who had seen the steadfast heart of his friend open like a book and did not want to leave him alone even after it had ceased to beat. “You didn’t want to leave him alone?” said Michaela in surprise, with a note of disappointment in her voice, as if she had expected something more definite but also more mysterious. “Exactly,” I said, wondering whether to switch on the light in the kitchen, which was already full of shadows. “That’s what I meant. What did you think I meant?” I laughed lightly. “That I really thought Lazar’s soul could migrate into mine?”

“Why not?” replied Michaela almost in a whisper, and she began delicately stroking Shivi’s forehead in the area between her eyes in a caress she had evidently perfected during the two weeks she had spent alone with the baby in London, which Shivi appeared to enjoy as if she were a cat. “If you succeeded in incorporating the midwife’s soul on the night of the birth, why shouldn’t you incorporate Lazar’s soul too?” She was treading a fine line between irony and profound seriousness, as always when trying out an idea that held a hidden educational intention. “The midwife’s soul?” I laughed. “Who said so?”

“She did,” replied Michaela. “Don’t you remember? When we were all admiring the way you delivered Shivi so perfectly?” I was silent. It gave me a kick to hear her call my delivery of the baby perfect, but I didn’t want to go on discussing Lazar, who in any case couldn’t rise from his grave to betray me.

The next day I took Michaela to pay a condolence call on the Lazars. I insisted that she come with me to console Einat, who had almost been an eyewitness to her father’s death. We didn’t know if it was proper to take a baby to a house of mourning, but we took Shivi with us anyway, since we did not yet have a babysitter and I didn’t want Michaela to go without me to the apartment I visited so often in my imagination. Again I found the living room full of people, many of them familiar faces from the hospital, who had put off their condolence calls to the last days of the week of mourning. They could not possibly have all been in daily contact with Lazar, but they had all felt themselves to be under the shelter of his eagle eye, and now that the shelter was gone, they wanted to examine the extent of the gap yawning over their heads. I found Hishin there too, sitting in the same place as before, at Dori’s right hand. The shabby black cap that he had worn to the funeral was perched on his head again, like a symbol of his private mourning. His young companion, whom he had brought back with him from one of his trips to Europe, had been replaced by a short man, rather sloppily dressed in sportswear, who from a distance seemed familiar. When I went closer, it turned out, to my surprise, to be Professor Adler, the Jerusalem master surgeon. Although it was not the usual thing for a surgeon to pay a condolence call on a family mourning the death of his patient, Hishin had insisted on bringing him here, in order to prove to everyone that in spite of the unfortunate outcome, he was convinced that his friend had performed the surgery successfully. He had brought him directly from the airport, on his way home to Jerusalem. With the baby hanging on Michaela’s stomach in her sling, we hesitantly approached Einat and Dori, who, free of her husband’s reprimanding eye, was smoking one slender cigarette after another as she listened, without concentrating and without smiling, to Professor Adler’s patient and methodical exposition of his guiltless role in her catastrophe. Einat, whose face was very pale, rose immediately to greet Michaela, and she hugged and kissed her so warmly and lovingly that Shivi was almost crushed between them. Dori stopped listening and transferred her attention to her daughter, who was weeping around Michaela’s neck. I was alarmed to see a silent tear rolling down her cheek and the ash of her cigarette almost falling onto the carpet, and I instinctively bent down to move the ashtray closer. Now Professor Adler recognized me and smiled at me encouragingly. Would he also remember the ventricular tachycardia? I wouldn’t be surprised, for judging by the direct, intelligent look in his eye, it seemed that if he had not been in a hurry to get back to Jerusalem then, he would have listened with patience and respect even to the words of an insignificant junior physician like me. Accordingly, when Einat took Michaela and Shivi into her room, I sat down boldly in the place she had vacated, next to the two professors and Dori. As if my presence had the power to soothe Dori’s pain and distress, I saw the old, involuntary smile flashing dimly in her eyes again — a smile she may have felt the need to justify, for she immediately told Hishin and his Jerusalem friend how fond Lazar had been of me, while I, who felt not only his fondness but also his love like a leaden weight inside me, bowed my head like a young boy listening proudly but also impatiently to his mother praising him in front of strangers. Then, unable to restrain myself, I turned to Professor Adler and asked him how he explained what had happened to Lazar’s heart after the surgery, which I myself could humbly testify had succeeded. But although he tried to explain, and even sketched the heart that had failed and died on a large sheet of paper, it seemed that the expert surgeon who had so briskly and firmly sawed Lazar’s chest open was not capable of producing even one convincing reason for his sudden death, but only of piling one lengthy explanation on another in an attempt to disguise their essential weakness. Dori tried to listen to him, but the arrival of a delegation of her colleagues, judges and lawyers in black gowns, distracted her. And who could blame her? Even if the real cause of her husband’s death was discovered, it would not bring him back to life.

From her point of view she was right, of course, but not from the point of view of a doctor, especially a young one, for whom an unexplained death is intolerable. Therefore I kept on at Professor Adler, trying to make him clarify, not only to me but to himself, what had really happened. And he seemed ready to respond patiently to my challenge and to saw through Lazar’s chest in order to open again the book on the heart which had failed, and to probe Koch’s triangle, the place where the real threat lay hidden. But here Hishin interrupted his friend, who in his zeal to prove his point had forgotten the fact that he had just arrived back in the country a few hours before, and reminded him that it was getting dark and that his wife was expecting him in Jerusalem; a new wave of visitors had arrived too, and we all felt that it was time to get up and vacate our places. Professor Adler stood up and said good-bye to me in a very friendly way, and also invited me to come to Jerusalem and continue our conversation there. “That would be great,” I said immediately. “My parents live there, you know,” and I escorted the two professors to the door as if I too had moved in for the duration of the mourning period, like Einat and like the granny, who was standing in the kitchen in a clean apron making tea for the visitors. She seemed delighted to see me again.

Clearly my beloved, who could not bear to be alone at the best of times, could not be expected to rely solely on the presence of her soldier son — from whose room the sounds of a lively adolescent conversation could be heard, accompanied, if my ears did not deceive me, by rock music played very softly — but required her mother and her daughter as well. They had both come to stay with her, at least for the week of mourning. But what would happen in the future? I thought anxiously, as if it were up to me to find a solution, and I gave the bedroom door a little push and saw, to my relief, that the chaos raging here two days before had disappeared, as if the troubled spirit of Lazar had returned to establish order. Was it really my responsibility now to see that she wasn’t left alone? I asked myself. Although I had spent two weeks traveling with her and gone to bed with her twice, I still knew very little about her. Seeing her now surrounded by friends and well-wishers, hugged and kissed until her bun came loose and her hair fell around her face, hiding not only her tears but also her wonderful smile, which not even profound sorrow and grief could extinguish, I asked myself, had the time really come to take this burden upon myself, simply in order to go on devoting myself to the impossible love which had suddenly become possible?

But was it really possible? I thought excitedly as I entered Einat’s room, my face burning, to take Michaela and Shivi home. As soon as I saw the curious but anxious look in Einat’s eyes, I suspected that Michaela had said something to her about the transmigration of a certain soul, for Einat was strongly drawn to India in her own right, and during the weeks that she had spent lying helplessly in the monastery in Bodhgaya she may have been exposed to the beliefs of the people taking care of her, and she might be very willing to believe in all kinds of extreme ideas. I quickly smiled at her and touched her arm reassuringly, as I had touched her when I was her doctor and she was my patient. But this time a shiver seemed to pass through her at my touch. Has Michaela got so much influence over you, it was on the tip of my tongue to say in protest, that you’re prepared to believe that an alien entity could invade the boundaries of my personality? But I said nothing, and I sat down silently on the bed and quickly stretched out my arms for Shivi, whose body arched in tension, as if a stranger had picked her up and not her father. Einat looked drained. She had witnessed her father’s death throes for only a few minutes, until Professor Levine had sent her out of the room, but those minutes had left their scar. “A real scar that she won’t give up easily,” said Michaela on the way home, “a scar she can show to people who love looking at scars, or to anyone who just loves her. A more spiritual scar than the one left by the hepatitis, in spite of the dramatic blood transfusion you gave her in Varanasi.” It was impossible to tell by her tone if she was being sarcastic or not. I had already noted that things I thought Michaela said in malicious sarcasm turned out later to have been said in all seriousness and innocence. I therefore hesitated to reply. The memory of the blood transfusion in Varanasi now seemed, after Lazar’s death, to have taken place in a dream and not in the real world, which was currently filled with drops of fine, fresh rain that turned the lights of the cars in front of us into trembling diamonds. Shivi sat up on Michaela’s lap, drawn to the movement of the windshield wipers starting and stopping again. I noticed that Michaela had left Shivi’s sling in Einat’s room. But I said nothing, not wanting to turn back and preferring to return later in the evening to see who was going to stay with Dori during the night. “Did you say anything to Einat about me?” I asked, without going into detail, but Michaela knew right away what I was talking about. “No,” she said immediately, her great eyes shining with a secret smile. “If she doesn’t realize what’s happened for herself, what good will my words do?” And then she added in a whisper, “Didn’t you see how she trembled when you came into the room?” I slowed down and closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. Did she have any idea of what she was leading me into with this kind of talk? “I see you’re trying to fan the fire,” I mumbled, gripping the steering wheel tightly and wondering at the word “fire,” which had slipped out of my mouth. “But the fire’s already broken out, Benjy,” said Michaela in a quiet, steady voice. “That night when you phoned and asked me to come home and you weren’t afraid to admit what you felt, you rose in my estimation to the level of a Brahmin, and that’s why I didn’t hesitate to interrupt my trip and come home, even though I suspected that you would try to deny later what broke out of you then with such spontaneous beauty and power.” I kept quiet, smiling in astonishment at Shivi, who turned her eyes from the wipers and gave me an inquiring look, as if wondering why I didn’t respond to Michaela, who was now in the grip of real enthusiasm as she tried to persuade me to stop denying what had happened to me. She had no intention of belittling my medical understanding, she said, which was in no way inferior to that of my professors, including the little Jerusalemite, who in spite of all his expertise was blind to the approaching death of Lazar, lying open before him on the operating table. She said she knew that I had already sensed Lazar’s death in England, knew it was the reason I had hurried back, like a man seeing the flicker of flames on the horizon of a distant field who hurries toward the fire, not to put it out but to obtain inspiration from it, for it is a sacred fire in which the dead are burned and the soul is liberated from the body. Michaela knew how powerful that fire was, how its attraction can call the widow to throw herself atop its blaze.

“The widow?” I whispered, surprised and amused by the wealth of Michaela’s Indian associations. But Michaela, it turned out, wasn’t just talking — she had actually seen a widow being burned when she was in India, and she would never forget it as long as she lived. Although this rite was forbidden by law and took place rarely and clandestinely, and even though strangers were never permitted to approach it, the sidewalk doctors and their helpers in Calcutta had gained the confidence of two Indian ethnologists who wanted to reward their devotion to the sick and maimed by showing them something that was not only shocking and horrifying but that went to the very heart of the national identity. Not all the doctors and nurses invited were enthusiastic about the idea of traveling for two days on rough roads to a remote village, which for all its primitiveness had already been invaded by a miasma of tourism and commercialism. But nothing would have prevented Michaela from taking advantage of the opportunity to see this ancient ritual, which the British had done everything in their power to stamp out, for she knew that anyone who shrank from the sight of death in India was resisting the true spirit of the place and had no business being there. The ceremony took place on the outskirts of the village, in a hidden hollow, and all the spectators had to keep their distance, especially the strangers among them. The widow was a woman of about fifty, supple and strong, who they were assured had chosen of her own free will and in perfect faith to be burned alive. The memory of the bright, distant flame slowly consuming her would never be forgotten by Michaela or by Einat, whom she had persuaded to accompany her. “I’m constantly amazed to discover how much time you spent together,” I said to Michaela, who was carrying Shivi upstairs and had still not felt the absence of the sling, which I would soon “remember” so I could set out once more, full of happiness and excitement, for the home of another widow, whom no one would ever ask to throw herself on a funeral pyre in order to show the world what an honorable woman she was and how much she had loved her husband.

“Yes,” said Michaela, shaking the raindrops from her hair and entering the apartment, “we hung around a lot together, but our reactions were always very different. Even though it was terrible to watch, I left that place with a feeling of elation, just like the Indians who had taken us there and who you can be sure were no less sophisticated and modern than you and me. But Einat was so upset and shocked, so confused and horrified and even angry with me for taking her, that I think it began then.”

“What began then?”

“Her illness. The hepatitis. The deterioration.”

“But in what sense?” I pressed her, excited by the thought that I was close to identifying the source of the mystery that had been disrupting my life. “I don’t know.” Michaela shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe her immune system was weakened when she saw a middle-aged woman like her mother slowly going up in flames. And once that happens, in all that filth, it’s easy enough for some vicious virus to take hold in you.” When Michaela saw how interested I was in the ritual widow-burning, she promised to look for a couple of photographs that one of her friends had managed to take in secret before a number of soldiers had arrived to disperse the crowd. But they had been unable to save the woman, who had already turned to ashes.

The doorbell rang. It was Amnon, who had come to welcome Michaela home before his night shift began. We were both glad to see him and insisted that he stay for supper, after watching us bathe Shivi, which, he said, might even tempt him to have a baby of his own. In order to suppress the excitement mounting inside me at the thought of returning to the Lazars’ apartment, I demanded his help in putting the furniture back where it belonged. Michaela tried to dissuade me at first, on the grounds that the present arrangement was worth a try at least, but I held on my opinion that it might be okay for a bachelor but not for a married couple, and the front room should be reserved for guests, not converted into a bedroom. Neither of them was convinced, but I, as “the original tenant who signed the lease, and therefore as the true representative of the landlady,” insisted on restoring order, and we dragged the big bed back into its place and set the narrow couch opposite the big window from which it was possible to catch a glimpse of the sea, but certainly not on a night like this, which was full of fog and rain. Considering the weather, and how late it was, Michaela was very surprised when I insisted on going to get the forgotten sling, as if we could not do without it until the following day.

Was Hishin’s guilt really so great that on his way back from Jerusalem he had returned to visit the grief-stricken family again? I wondered anxiously when I recognized his car parked next to the Lazars’. I ran up the stairs and knocked lightly on the door, rehearsing a short sentence of apology, which I delivered to the granny, who greeted me with a welcoming smile, fresh and neat in a white blouse and a tailored tartan skirt. The apartment, which a few hours before had been crowded with people, was now empty and a little dark, and the many chairs, which had apparently been borrowed from neighbors, were scattered without order all over the room, expressing the mourning that had descended on the house better than any words could have done. Without wasting words, the granny led me down the dark hallway to Einat’s room to look for the forgotten sling while Dori’s sobs, coming from the direction of the kitchen, pierced me like a knife. The open door of her dark bedroom revealed renewed chaos. There was a light on in the soldier’s room, but it was empty except for a rifle leaning against the wall. The door to Einat’s room was closed, and the granny first knocked lightly, and when there was no reply she carefully opened the door. Einat, who was curled up, fully dressed, asleep on her bed, with a little reading light shining on her face, opened her eyes immediately, as if she had been expecting my return, and pulled Shivi’s sling out from under the bed. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and stepped forward to take it from her hand. She smiled and nodded her head. “Give Shivi a kiss from me,” she said, and curled up into herself again like a sad fetus, limply allowing her grandmother to take off her shoes. I retreated into the hallway, refusing to resign myself to leaving the apartment without catching a single glimpse of Dori. It occurred to me to ask the granny, “Are you sleeping here?” “No,” she said in an apologetic and slightly embarrassed tone. She spent all day here, but at night she went back to the retirement home to sleep. At her age it was hard to get used to a strange bed. Now she was waiting for her grandson, who had gone out for a breath of fresh air with his friends, to come and drive her home. I kept quiet, slowing my footsteps and keeping my ears cocked for Dori’s tearstained voice as she spoke to Hishin in the kitchen. “I can take you,” I offered immediately, leaning forward to examine the granny’s face in the dim light. “Thank you very much,” she replied without hesitation, careful not to let the offer slip through her fingers after her exhausting day. “But is it on your way?” she asked. “I’ll put it on my way,” I said decisively, and followed her into the kitchen to inform Dori and Hishin that I was taking her home. They were sitting at the kitchen table in a pool of sad neon light. Among the dirty cups and glasses on the table lay Dori’s eyeglasses and several crumpled tissues. Her eyes were as telling as when I had made love to her, but now they were red and swollen. For the first time since the death I was able to grasp the depths of pain to which she had sunk. Hishin sat at a little distance from her, his face gloomy and thoughtful, his long legs stretched out in front of him. The black baseball cap was lying on the table. In front of him was a plate containing the remains of his supper, and between his long fingers was one of Dori’s slender cigarettes, which he was apparently smoking in a gesture of solidarity with her sorrow and despair, for I had never seen him smoke before. They both looked up at me without any surprise or question, as if it were only natural that I should be wandering around the apartment at this late hour. Dori made no attempt to hide the traces of her weeping, but instead she lifted her head as if to show me her tearstained face and demand from me too some clear, strong word of consolation or hope, so that she could restore herself, if not her husband.

“Can I take your mother home?” I asked her, my face flushed, as if the old lady’s authority were not enough. “Of course,” Hishin replied for her, “you’ll be providing an important service.” In an intimate tone he said to Dori, “The boy must have forgotten himself with his friends.” She nodded her head and took a sip of tea. I stood hesitating in the kitchen doorway, the straps of Shivi’s sling over my shoulder, and behind my back in the hallway, where the lightbulb had apparently burned out, I heard the granny quickly getting ready to leave. “It’s raining outside,” I warned. “But it isn’t cold,” I added reassuringly as I saw Dori reaching out to take another cigarette. Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge to stop her, as if I were being prompted by Lazar, who always tried to prevent her from smoking, and I stepped quickly forward and reached for the pack of cigarettes. At first she was astonished, as if the dead man’s hand had come back to life. But she immediately recovered, and assuming that I too, like Hishin, wanted to try one of her slender cigarettes, she offered me the pack with a generous, heart-wrenching smile, and I had no option but to take a cigarette and bend down to get a light from her, mumbling something about the strangeness and confusion of the last few days, while Hishin looked at me affectionately and nodded his head. As soon as we were outside, I threw the cigarette away and ground it out with my foot. The light rain, which had freshened the air, made Dori’s mother happy, as if only changes in nature could bring some comfort to people so overcome with grief. “Your baby’s not only sweet, she’s also very well behaved,” she announced as I showed her how to buckle the seat belt. “Your Michaela apparently knows how to handle her,” she added. “I do too,” I said, unable not to claim my share of the credit as a devoted husband and father. “You too, of course,” the old lady agreed, although she seemed to have more faith in the inner serenity of Michaela, about whom she now began to question me. But I didn’t want to waste the few minutes of the short drive on pointless chatter about Michaela or Shivi, or even myself. I wanted to talk about Dori and how she was going to manage in the future, and even how she was coping in the grim present, and in this context I mentioned Hishin’s constant presence in the apartment. “Yes, Hishin never leaves us,” she said. “It’s very difficult for him too, of course; he feels guilty about transferring Lazar’s operation from the department where it belonged and bringing in a strange surgeon from outside.” Once more I found myself defending Hishin and his acts, as if his guilt were liable to rub off on me. She listened sympathetically to what I had to say, nodding her head encouragingly as if she too would like to clear Hishin of any guilt and be convinced of the inevitability of her son-in-law’s death. “Of course, for a doctor, no death is completely unavoidable,” I said, trying to convey a more complex thought to her. “How can that be possible?” She sounded astonished, as though I were trying to persuade her of the possibility of everlasting life. “Because if we accepted some deaths as inevitable, we would lose the element of positive competition among doctors,” I explained. Now she seemed really worried by my words. “Is the competition among you really so fierce?” she asked. “Why not?” I replied. “We’re only human. To give you an example, when I changed a couple of the medicines Professor Levine had prescribed for you, I admit I felt a little triumphant.”

“But in the meantime he’s changed them all back again,” she said sharply, and smiled with obvious enjoyment at my discomfort.

The old folks’ home was in darkness, even though it was only ten o’clock at night, but the old lady didn’t seem in the least upset. She thanked me warmly, allowed me to extricate her from her seat belt, put on a white beret to protect her head from the persistent drizzle, and stepped carefully out of the car. I got out too and offered to accompany her inside. In her excellent physical and mental condition, she was in no need of an escort, but with her sharp wits she sensed that I was eager to continue the conversation, and she therefore thanked me gratefully, as if I were doing her a great favor. We walked slowly across the deserted terrace. I asked her a question or two about the place, and she answered briefly. Now we were standing in front of a big glass door, behind which the doorman was sitting opposite a television screen on which the two of us flickered like a couple of ghosts. Suddenly she shivered, as if she too had finally recognized the lost soul of her son-in-law in some movement of my head or hand, or even in the tone of voice that I had just adopted. The glass door did not open immediately. The old lady looked straight at me, but without realizing that it was my very presence which now forced her to speak of him. “Poor Lazar, my heart aches for him,” she said sadly, and she tugged at the white beret to protect at least one side of her face from the blustering wind. As if she wasn’t sure whether I shared the intensity of her emotion, she added, “Do you know how fond he was of you, and how well he spoke of you?” I nodded my head painfully, as if everything I had felt since my return from England had now been confirmed. “But what’s going to happen to Dori now?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders. “It will be very hard for Dori. Very hard.”

I saw that she still hadn’t grasped the crux of the matter. “But how will she stay by herself?”

“How?” Dori’s mother sighed, still not understanding what I was getting at. “I don’t know how. She’ll have to find a way. It will be very hard for her. As it is for everyone else.”

“But what way? In what sense?” I pressed her, refusing to let her evade the issue. “She’s incapable of being on her own for a minute. It’s impossible for her.” I saw that my insistence was beginning to confuse her. Her eyes wandered, and she hugged the door for shelter, afraid to meet my eyes lest she admit that I knew something nobody was supposed to know, something that even she refused to acknowledge. But I pressed on, oblivious to her discomfort in my fervor. “How, for example, will she stay by herself at night? Who’ll be there with her?” Finally she understood that she could no longer evade my questions, which sprang from a deep inner source, perhaps prompted by Lazar himself. “Don’t you worry your head about that,” she said, smiling in relief. “She’ll find a way not to be by herself. She’ll find someone to be with her. Even when she was a child and we sometimes left her alone in the evening, she would run to find some little friend to spend the night with her. She always knew how to find people to look after her, so that she wouldn’t have to stay by herself for even a minute.” I was flooded with sweetness at the thought of the little girl running in the pleasant evening streets of childhood to find a little friend to spend the night. I suddenly felt as if the worry had been removed from my heart and, more significantly, as if a new horizon had opened before me, full of a reassuring promise. I pressed the button next to the door and asked the doorman over the intercom to open it. He checked his list for the old lady’s name, and after he found it he pressed the buzzer and I left her. But I didn’t leave the place before calling Michaela on a pay phone to apologize for my lateness and to tell her that I was on my way home.

Michaela was indifferent to this announcement, but Amnon, who was still at the apartment and eagerly waiting for my return, wasn’t. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist passing Dori’s house again, and after checking that Hishin’s car was no longer there, I climbed softly up the dark stairs, and stood holding my breath outside the door, with my hand on the lock, to give my beloved the feeling that even if her mother had already gone home and her daughter was asleep in her room and her son had not yet returned, she was not alone.

Seventeen

Has the time come to reflect on love, so that what was impossible will become possible? The solitary bird — which broke into the room in the dead of night and underneath the bed, among the clay fragments of the broken statuette, pecked crumbs from the heart of an ancient sandwich, which had been prepared for a school lunch and for some reason had found its way there and been forgotten — mayspread itsgreat wings at dawnand flyaway to find where she has disappeared to, the curly-haired little girl in the blue uniform with the school badge fastened to her chest with a safety pin, who was left to do her homework at the kitchen table many years ago.

After the official mourning period was over, I found myself drawn to the administrative wing to find out if Lazar’s heir had already been designated. This was, of course, a pointless and ridiculous project, not only because it was only a week since he had died, but also because Lazar was not one of those executives who chose an heir-apparent during their lifetime, but believed that his true heir would have to make it on his own, after stiff competition with his peers. Nevertheless, when I walked down the corridor on my way from the surgical wing, in my green uniform, with the mask still hanging around my neck, my feet would lead me to the administrative wing and I would hesitantly advance toward Lazar’s office, whose door still bore, as if nothing had happened, the bronze plate inscribed with his name and office hours. In those days I would find the office quiet, with none of the feverish activity that had always characterized it, as if most of the urgent administrative problems demanding his attention had solved themselves with his death. The two secretaries who had always been there had disappeared, replaced by a young Anglo-Saxon typist who appeared not to be typing documents or letters but to be slowly copying material from a thick old medical textbook, presumably for one of the clinical seminars held in the hospital. The absence of Miss Kolby, Lazar’s faithful personal secretary, who had always treated me with particular affection, struck me as strange. I say “absence” and not “disappearance” because sometimes I would find traces of her in her room — a handbag, or a coat hanging on a hook. But when I tried to find out where she was, the secretaries in the adjacent rooms would shrug their shoulders, unable to give me a clear answer. “She’s wandering around” was the best answer they could come up with, referring to the confines of the administrative wing, to other parts of the hospital, and to a space beyond its geographical limits. “She’s still wandering around,” a friendly secretary tried to explain when I came back to the wing after my day’s work was over, illustrating not only the extent but also the rhythm of this wandering with a circular motion of her arm.

The truth is that I too had been infected by this aimless wandering. The women apparently realized this, and accordingly did not bother to ask exactly what I wanted from Lazar’s secretary, or whether I wished to leave a message. They seemed to sense that I had no explicit question or request but only an abstract desire to hang around in one of the many empty spaces left in the hospital by the death of the administrative director. For I had a lot of spare time now, not only because Michaela’s return took Shivi off my hands, but also because I was employed at the hospital only on a half-time basis and the private work in Herzliah had not yet been renewed. After my year in London and all the experience I had gained at St. Bernadine’s it seemed beneath my dignity to apply for night shifts at the Magen-David-Adom station, but until Michaela found a job and we knew where we stood, at least financially, I had no choice but to request a few night shifts there at the end of the month. Lazar’s departure had deprived me of the administrative patronage I still required. The permanent half-time job I had taken was more administrative than medical, the fruit of Lazar’s manipulations, which were intended to compensate me for some undefined injustice done me, in India or here. And although the permanency of the position was an achievement that most of my peers could only dream about, its partial nature left me in a situation of disturbing ambivalence, so that sometimes I wished I had the guts to give it up altogether and look for a full-time job, even on a temporary basis, in the surgical department of some other hospital. Because of this, my search for Lazar’s personal secretary was intended not only to give me a chance to rub up against one of the intimate voids left by the energetic director but also to clarify my position and prospects at the hospital as she, an experienced secretary, saw them.

More than ten days had already passed since the week of mourning, and I decided to go and look for the wandering secretary again. I was already dressed in my ordinary clothes and on my way home. In the darkness of the corridor her room looked deserted like the others, but I tried the handle of the door anyway, and found her sitting alone at her desk with a pile of accounts in front of her. I took the faint scream uttered by the pale and wilted Miss Kolby as more than met the eye. True, I had come upon her unexpectedly, at an hour of the evening when the administrative wing was empty and most of the office doors had long been locked. We both apologized immediately, I for bursting in without knocking and she for not having contacted me after hearing that I had been looking for her. She stood up and gripped my wrist, speaking directly and with deep emotion. “Yes, after what happened here I can’t settle down. I keep wandering around and thinking, why weren’t we more careful? Why didn’t we pay more attention? And why did we fail to read the obvious signs? Every day I feel guiltier for not being firmer.”

“Firmer with who?” I asked. “With everyone. Including Dori, who gave in to them in the end. But above all with him. Because he’s definitely to blame as well.”

“He?” I pretended not to know who she was talking about, because I wanted to hear her say his name. “Yes, Lazar is definitely to blame too,” she said, going on bitterly and bravely with her accusation. “Why shouldn’t he be to blame? I warned him against the designs of Professor Hishin, who in the end thinks of nothing but himself and his department. And you?” She fixed her eyes on me. “You too, Dr. Rubin, are to blame, because you knew and you kept quiet.”

“What did I know?” I said, my face red. “Everything,” she replied without hesitation. “Although it’s true that you may not have had the power to stop them. But let’s sit down.” She opened the door to Lazar’s room and led me into it in the most natural way in the world, as if Lazar were sitting there and waiting for us in order to set his administrative seal on the collective guilt that had led to his death.

What did I know, I wanted to ask her again, but I stopped myself, both because I didn’t want to get into a confrontation with her now about the depth of my knowledge and because I felt a need to take on some of the guilt that this good woman was dishing out so liberally. She switched on the light in the large, elegant room, which, apart from the fact that the big sofa had for some reason been removed, taking with it some of the room’s previous coziness, was exactly the same as before. The soil in the big planters was dry and cracked, but the plants themselves were still green. Miss Kolby sat down, with a proprietary air, in the armchair opposite the big desk, her usual place when she took dictation from Lazar, after bringing up one of the chairs standing against the wall for me. But when she saw that she had underestimated my height, which forced her to look up at me from below, she changed her mind, rose from her chair, and with a dry, businesslike air wheeled Lazar’s big executive armchair out from behind his desk so that I could sit not only more comfortably but at her eye level. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, encouraging me to sit in the armchair, although I had not shown any signs of hesitation. In contrast to her pale face and tired eyes, her movements became brisker and more alert, as if with my appearance the death had turned from a fait accompli to a kind of misadventure, which decisive intervention might still be able to correct. And thus, while a shock of happiness surged through my being, her eyes began to focus intently on mine, as if to prevent the soul already trapped inside me from slipping away. As expected, she began to talk about the deceased and the interest he had taken in me. Even though he had not succeeded in persuading Hishin to keep me on in the surgical department, at least he had found a way to secure my place among the anesthetists. Again I saw how Lazar’s affection and concern had sheltered me over the past two years, like a kind of invisible insurance policy hovering over my head, whose value I was only able to appreciate now that it had been lost. She too, of course, had lost her insurance policy, and her position as the secretary attached to the source of power in the administrative wing was now in danger of collapsing completely. Nevertheless, she did not appear depressed but rather in the grip of an inner enthusiasm — the enthusiasm of a woman no longer young who suddenly discovers that the borders of despair, which she thought she had long ago crossed, have moved.

“But where have you been all the time?” I allowed myself to ask in a mildly rebuking tone, despite the difference in age between us. “Where? With Dori, of course,” she answered immediately. “Somebody had to help her organize things.”

“What things?” I asked, a thrill of pleasure running through me. It turned out that she meant very ordinary, simple things, such as bank accounts, Lazar’s insurance policy, the papers for the car, and various bills which Miss Kolby had taken it upon herself to settle, for who knew as well as she did that Lazar’s wife was utterly helpless in such matters? “What do you mean, helpless?” I protested, leaping to Dori’s defense. “She’s a partner in a big legal firm.”

“Precisely,” said Miss Kolby. “It’s a big firm with a whole battery of accountants and secretaries, who take the practical side of things off her hands. And at home Lazar would take care of everything, of course.”

“And the children?”

“The children are gone,” she announced briskly. “Einat went back to her apartment, and the boy went back to the army. Someone has to help her.”

“She’s alone now?” I whispered, my anxiety mingled with a hint of pleasure. Miss Kolby looked at me curiously, to see if I was aware of the deeper implications of my words, and then she admitted that for the last three nights, ever since the soldier had returned to his base, she had been sleeping in the apartment with Mrs. Lazar. “You’re sleeping there!” I said with a feeling of relief. “And it doesn’t inconvenience you?”

“What if it does?” she replied evasively. “Someone has to help her, until a more radical solution is found.”

“Radical?” I sniggered, for the word seemed extreme to me, and it was indeed inappropriate for the simple solutions imagined by the secretary, such as Dori’s mother coming to live with her, or Einat agreeing to return home for a while, or Dori renting a room to a student until her son completed his military service in six months’ time and decided if he too, like his sister, wanted to travel to distant lands. “I thought you had something more radical in mind.” I lowered my eyes and released the catch under the chair so that I could rock slightly to and fro. “Yes, that would make things easier for everyone,” Miss Kolby replied, to my surprise, without hesitation or hypocrisy, in the practical spirit she had gained from Lazar during all their years of working together. But she immediately added a reservation: “But it would have to be with someone like Lazar. Someone who knows how to pamper her and take care of everything for her, so that she can keep her spirits up and go on smiling good-naturedly at everyone and listening to everybody’s troubles. Because even you wouldn’t believe it if I told you how she can sometimes behave like a frightened little girl, but obstinate too, and how helpless and almost stupid she can be when she has to deal with anything technical, even something as simple as a household appliance.” She stopped for a minute, hesitating about whether to confide the secrets she had discovered over the past few days to me. “Even I, who knew them both well, had no idea of how much Lazar took care of everything for her. Would you believe that she doesn’t even know how to work her own washing machine?”

Miss Kolby burst into astonished laughter at the new task she had taken on herself, as if the ghost of her ex-boss were still issuing a stream of domestic instructions to her now that the administrative instructions had ceased. I joined warmly in her laughter. I was delighted with this conversation about the touching helplessness of the beloved woman who from hour to hour was becoming more possible for me. And the thought that maybe at this very moment on this chilly autumn evening she was home from the office and wandering around the apartment alone, helpless and despairing before the washing machine and the big dryer, and also the stove, which refused to light, and the stereo system, which refused to play, did not give rise in me, as in Lazar’s secretary, to pity mixed with something like disgust or disbelief, but to powerful longings. For a moment I was tempted to throw caution to the wind and confess my stubborn, mysterious love to the worried secretary, and thereby notify her that another shoulder was ready and willing to share the burden. But even though I was prepared to expose myself, I wasn’t sure that I had the right to expose Dori too, not even to this close family friend. “Are you going to sleep there tonight as well?” I asked carefully, unable to control the slight tremor of desire in my voice. She hadn’t decided yet. Dori insisted that she no longer needed a constant companion, since the worst was already behind her and she was recovering and coping on her own, and perhaps it would be for the best and for her own good to leave her to her own devices, but on the other hand she had caught a cold two days ago and yesterday she had even had a fever, and this being the case, Miss Kolby thought that she should drop in to see how she was managing. Not to sleep there, but just to check up on her. In fact, she was going to get in touch right now.

Although as a physician-friend I could have stolen in through this loophole, I held my tongue and did not ask to speak to Dori. Ever since the night when I had stood silently outside her front door, I had been determined that the signal to renew contact should come from her, not me. Now that the natural protection bestowed on her by Lazar was gone and she was left exposed and vulnerable and by herself I had to restrain myself severely and be attentive to her wishes only, not to mine, as if it were incumbent on the alien soul that had taken up residence inside me to protect her from the longings and passions of its host. Thus, while Miss Kolby spoke to Dori on the phone, I went over to the window and lifted the curtain and stood behind it, half listening to the conversation and drinking in the clear autumn light bathing people who were now streaming out of the hospital with empty hands and a feeling of relief after visiting the sick. Throughout the conversation I was careful to remain in the background, so that the secretary would not feel obligated to mention my name and give Dori the impression that I was trying to get to her through her friends. She had to feel free, precisely because any contact between us now was apt to be fateful. When I emerged from my hiding place behind the curtain, before I could ask how Dori was feeling, the secretary turned to me with a serious expression and said, “She’s looking for you.” As if she suspected that I had not grasped the importance of the summons, she repeated emphatically, “Dori’s looking for you,” as if this were the gist and conclusion of the conversation between them. “So why didn’t you call me to the phone?” I asked with a smile of surprise. She shrugged her shoulders and maintained an embarrassed silence. Accustomed for years to protecting Lazar and keeping his presence in the office a secret from callers until she had his express permission to reveal it, she had left it up to me to decide if I wanted to reply or not. Even the pencil poised between her fingers seemed to be waiting for some clear instruction from me.

But did I have any clear instructions for this faithful secretary, who had surprised me by her sensitivity, since I didn’t know myself if this was indeed the signal I was waiting for or simply a call from a woman with a bad cold to a physician who had acted for a short time as her family doctor? Because if it was the signal calling me to come to her, it had arrived more swiftly than I could have imagined, though that was understandable in a woman incapable of staying by herself. I nevertheless found it startling. Was I ready for her call? I asked myself frantically as I hurried home, where Michaela was waiting for me to take her to the movies. I didn’t get in touch with Dori, and we went to an early show, where I watched the vicissitudes of the love affair on the screen and tried to see if the solutions proposed by the director would suit my case. But my thoughts kept straying to the woman waiting for me to get in touch with her and prevented me from studying these solutions, which did not seem to suit the characters in the movie either, so the director had to pervert and contort every plausible and natural feeling in order to bring his movie to a satisfactory conclusion. “Completely idiotic,” pronounced Michaela when the lights went on, and she took the glasses off her beautiful eyes and put them away in her pocket. “Like an Indian movie, but there at least the kitsch is open and unabashed, without these sophisticated tricks.” I agreed with her, and told her about the movie I had seen in Calcutta. She was astonished to hear that I had wasted my few hours in Calcutta on a silly Indian movie, a few of whose colorful scenes had nevertheless remained in my memory. “You’re right,” I admitted, “but Calcutta made me panic, and I was afraid of getting lost.” I told her about the dream I had had more than two years before on the flight from Bodhgaya to Calcutta, and I described the details so vividly that I seemed to have just woken up from dreaming it again in the darkness of the movie theater. “But it’s impossible to get lost in Calcutta,” said Michaela, and she began to describe the unique construction of the city, which made it very easy to find its center. I was unable to follow the thread of her words, not only because of the ethereal note she often struck when she was talking about India but because I was preoccupied by the thought that Dori was ill and suffering and perhaps still looking for me.

Indeed, our baby-sitter, a cute and intelligent little girl of about twelve who was the daughter of Hagit, Michaela’s girlhood friend, and an unknown father, whose tender years caused us to go to the first show instead of the second, informed us as soon as we came home that “Lazar’s wife is looking for you.”

“Lazar’s wife?” I repeated in surprise. “Is that how she referred to herself?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what she said,” the child replied confidently. Michaela gave me a look of mild astonishment when she saw that instead of going at once to the telephone, I started examining and even correcting the arithmetic exercises in our babysitter’s notebook, and while she dug into the dish of multicolored ice cream sprinkled with flakes of chocolate that Michaela set before her — the only payment her mother permitted her to take from us — I also arranged her schoolbag for her, in place of her absentee father, smoothing out the creased papers and disposing of an old sandwich as I waited for her to say good-bye to Shivi so I could take her home. “Aren’t you going to call Mrs. Lazar back?” Michaela finally asked, when I was standing at the door. “There’s no need,” I answered immediately, without even raising my eyes. “I know exactly what she wants. She’s sick and she’s looking for a doctor,” and I told her about the conversation with the secretary who had taken Dori under her wing and was sleeping in her apartment. “If she’s already taking to her bed,” said Michaela sadly, straightening the collar of the little girl’s wind-breaker and making faces to amuse Shivi, “we can expect the mourning to be a heavy, long-drawn-out affair.”

“Heavy, yes, that’s only natural,” I agreed, “but long-drawn-out? I’m not so sure.” Michaela listened to me attentively, still trying unsuccessfully to catch my eye. “What do you intend to do about the phone call?” she pressed me before I shut the door behind me. “You can’t just ignore her.”

“I know,” I reassured her, and I promised that I would drop in on her on my way home. When I went back inside and took my medical bag out of the closet, Michaela looked relieved.

I didn’t call Dori, mostly because I was afraid that if I did, she would content herself with asking a couple of questions and reject my offer to go over and examine her. I was determined not to allow my role as doctor to replace my true role, which was becoming more possible from minute to minute, and which so flooded me with anxiety and desire that I didn’t even wait for our baby-sitter to wave to me from her window, but drove off the moment her curly head disappeared into the stairwell, in a hurry to arrive before something inside me could subvert my decision to interpret Dori’s phone call as the true call for which I had been waiting. Accordingly, I decided to leave my medical bag in the car, and as I soared to the top floor in the elevator, I knew that I needed no external confirmation in order to go in to her. I was impelled forward by the presence that had been stirring inside me ever since the death of Lazar, and as I stood in front of the door, surrounded by blossoming plants, I actually put my hand into my pocket to look for the key. When no key was forthcoming, I pressed the bell. It immediately uttered a shrill, piercing, birdlike whistle, but nobody seemed to hear it or to pay any attention to it. There was silence. The door was one of those heavy, opaque security doors, and left no crack to reveal if there was a light on behind it. I again pressed the bell, which the Lazars must have installed after they returned from India, for I didn’t recall such a piercing whistle the first time I visited them, and during the week of mourning I had had no opportunity to hear it because the door had been left open to accommodate the constant stream of visitors.

In the distance I could hear her footsteps hesitating. And rightly so, for how could she have guessed that I would turn up unannounced on her doorstep at an hour like this? But when I sensed her hesitating on the other side of the door, unable to make up her mind whether to ignore the visitor or to ask who it was, I pressed the whistling doorbell again and called out, “It’s only me.” And in order not to let her off the hook, I added, “You were looking for me?” Then the door opened, and she stood there clumsily attired in a flannel nightgown and a thick green sweater of Lazar’s. Her hair was disheveled, and by the red spots on her cheeks and the dull glitter of her eyes I could see that she had a real temperature, which actually reassured me, for even if it turned out that no love-call had been or could have been intended, it was still a good thing that I had come. “They’ve left you alone!” This strange cry escaped my lips, intended only as an exclamation of astonishment, but it also, to my surprise, contained a note of pain. “Who left me?” she asked with a frown, an expression of resentment crossing her face, perhaps because she sensed that in the depths of my heart I still insisted on thinking of Lazar as someone who might not have left her alone. “I mean,” I stammered, “Einat, or …” and I couldn’t remember the name of her son. But she immediately understood and leapt to his defense. “He had to return to his base,” she said, still without a single smile, almost with hostility. Was it possible that she was angry at me? I felt a thrill of happiness, accompanied by a shadow of fear, as I identified the note of impatience with which she had sometimes addressed her husband in India. “Were you looking for me?” I repeated stubbornly, without even mentioning her obvious illness, in order to force her to address me as a young lover whose way was suddenly clear before him, not as a doctor on house call.

“Yes, I was looking for you,” she admitted somberly, also ignoring the illness that had her in its grip. As if it were now my job to be at her beck and call, and she added resentfully, “Where have you been hiding from us?”

Outraged by the light shed on my situation by the last word in this short sentence, I did not hesitate, and with the feeling of confidence that had been swelling inside me ever since the first sign I had received from the secretary at the beginning of the evening, I clasped her to me in a firm embrace, her heaviness feeling curiously weightless in my arms. Whether it was the ardor burning in her limbs which gave her this new lightness or the strength of Lazar’s soul bursting out of me, it was impossible to tell. Now, when I touched her, I realized that her fever was high and worrying, and that she herself was apparently unaware of how high it was. Her skin, which was very dry, without a trace of perspiration, seemed to show signs of a viral infection, which no antibiotic, including those in my bag downstairs, would be effective against. In spite of Lazar’s heavy sweater wrapped around the upper part of her body, she was shivering, and I knew that if I insisted on removing it now and taking off her nightgown, the shivering would increase. I therefore knelt down in front of her and put my head on her stomach in the hope of kindling her desire.

But she didn’t want any part of it, and with a savage gesture she pulled my hair as if to raise me to my feet and demanded clear protestations of love from me, as if she were no longer prepared to put up with the panic-stricken silence of our last encounter in bed. Because her feverish weakness gave this unexpected demand strength, I began, without releasing my grip on her, kissing and stroking her face and her hair and groping my way down the hallway to the bedroom, which seemed to have been taken over by chaos again, I began to seek and also to find new words, not only to describe my impossible love for her but also to try to tell her of the passionate desire aroused in me by the new obligation I felt not to leave her alone. “I know why you’re looking for me. I know exactly why,” I repeated in my emotion, and I helped her get back into the big bed, torn between the natural desire of a doctor to cover her with the blanket and balance the inner heat of her body with the heat of the air around her and the impulse to go on exposing her flesh, to undo the buttons of the thick old sweater so that I could pull up the nightgown and look at the strong breasts resting peacefully and abundantly above that round, pampered belly. And for the first time since my arrival, I saw a weak smile crossing her face, and although she seemed willing to postpone covering herself with the blanket, she was not ready to allow me to make love to her before I told her how much I loved her or explained my attraction to her in the light of the deepest secret of her being.

“It was Lazar.” I couldn’t resist betraying her dead husband as I went on stroking and kissing her arms and her bare legs. “Right at the beginning, when I wanted to know the real reason that you insisted on coming with us to India.” She tried to open her eyes, heavy with both sickness and desire. “Even though he spoke about it complainingly, it was interesting to see how attracted he was, too, by your fear of abandonment.” I went on talking, gradually lowering my body onto the big double bed to bring my head closer to her and slowly slide it down between her thighs, to be engulfed by the source of warmth itself. She was surprised to hear that Lazar had spoken about her so intimately to a stranger, even before the beginning of our trip. But now she understood too why sometimes at train stations I had tried to help him by staying with her in his place, not understanding that for her there was no difference between “being left alone” and “being left without him.”

“So what’s going to happen now?” I asked, carefully and gently moving my lips down her body. Her head froze on the pillow and she did not reply. “Has it always been this way?” I raised my head for her response, and beyond the white hill of her belly she nodded in confirmation, her eyes closed, swooning in the intensity of her passion and the heat of her fever. I advanced my lips to the glowing coal of her vulva, and with the last vestiges of her strength she began to move on my tongue, moaning with pleasure, but also pleading for mercy and warning me that I was going to be infected with her germs.

Before her illness could interfere with our lovemaking, over which the threat of my failure in London was still hovering, I hurried to get up and switch off the light, leaving only the little reading light on, and with the practiced speed acquired in the changing room next to the operating room, I took off my clothes and gently but firmly undressed her too, while continuing to shower her with the words of love and affection she desperately and stubbornly demanded, so that I could penetrate the core of her dread and calm the terror of her loneliness. And only afterward did the doctor and the lover join together in one man, who not only hastened to cover her with two big blankets but also turned his attention to her dry, barking cough. “Now I’m going to be your doctor too,” I assured her, thankful that the illness had not been the pretext for her call. She lay curled up in the fetal position, limp and exhausted. I got dressed quickly and went downstairs to fetch my bag. I took the key from the door and put it in my pocket so she would not have to get out of bed to let me in. In spite of how late it was, the boulevard was full of gray-haired, elegantly dressed couples, evidently subscribers to the Philharmonic, whose concert must have lasted longer than usual. I hurried to the pay phone on the corner, behind which I used to hide to spy on the Lazars’ comings and goings. Who would have guessed then that a night would come when the key to their apartment would be stowed in my pocket and she would be lying in their double bed alone, sick and helpless, waiting for me to come and help her as if we were an old married couple? I pushed the phone card into the slot and waited for the number of units I had left to be displayed. Did I really have to call Michaela now? I asked myself, and if I did, what should I say to her? If she were given to worrying about my lateness, I could have reassured her with a few words. But Michaela felt very secure in the world; she was not in the least prone to anxiety or panic, about me or anyone else, and she was always surprised when she heard that anyone had succumbed to an attack of anxiety about her. I knew that when she picked up the phone she would not ask where I had disappeared to or when I was coming home. She was far more likely to ask if I had already turned into a Brahmin.

The little green screen on the telephone showed that I had three units left on my card, plenty for a conversation with my parents in Jerusalem, whom I had forgotten to phone earlier in my excitement. But my mother, whom I got out of bed, was very surprised to get my call, since only half an hour before she had spoken at length to Michaela, who told her about Shivi’s exploits of the day, and mentioned that I had been called out to treat the sick Mrs. Lazar. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I haven’t been home yet,” I explained. “So where are you phoning from now? Are you still there?” she questioned me anxiously. “No,” I hastened to reassure her, careful at the same time not to tell a lie. “I’m speaking from a pay phone in the street. I simply remembered that I forgot to phone you today as I promised.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” said my mother, even though she was evidently touched by my concern. “When we speak to Michaela it’s the same as if we spoke to you. But how come you’re only through there now? What’s the matter with her? Is it really something serious, or just a false alarm?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, scrupulously avoiding a lie. “She has a high temperature but no other symptoms. It looks like a viral infection. I hope the Indian hepatitis hasn’t returned through the back door,” and I laughed a strange, brief laugh, surprised to see that despite how late it was the screen already showed two units less, leaving me only one unit to call Michaela. “But why did she call you?” my mother said with some annoyance. “Where are all their friends?”

“I don’t know, Mother.” I tried to cut the conversation short. “She asked me to go, so I went. What could I do? Refuse? Look, I’m in a hurry. We’ll talk tomorrow. Good night.” But when I inserted the card into the slot to call Michaela and give her, in the metaphor she favored, the first flicker of the flame that would soon burn our house down, the last unit had vanished into thin air. If only the white-haired symphony-goers had still been strolling down the street, I would have shamelessly approached one of them and offered to buy his telephone card at its full price, never mind how many calls were left on it. But the boulevard was already deserted except for one young man, who could only offer me a telephone token, which was useless on this phone.

Suddenly I felt a strong temptation not to go back to her, not even to return the key, but to leave it in the mailbox and disappear, in order to stop my impossible fantasy from turning into a real love affair, full of suffering and disappointment. Could a woman like her really love me? I asked myself despairingly. Would she really want to take me in? And what would her children say? Her mother? Hishin? What would my parents say? And what kind of love could she give me, a woman who had a little girl inside her, abandoned by her parents in a dark empty house, running in the street to look for a little friend to come and spend the night with her? It was only because I had fallen in love with her that she was clinging to me like this. Perhaps I should warn Michaela that something bad was going to happen in the story in which Lazar’s sudden death was only the beginning. But when I went to the car and opened the door, I felt again a vague stirring inside me, which was not only the result of my weariness after a long day’s work but also the longing of a lonely, tired soul who wanted to go home, now that the key was within his grasp. I took the little medical bag my parents had bought me for my graduation from medical school out of the trunk and went upstairs, and while I pressed the bell lightly with one finger — to warn her of my arrival with the shrill, birdlike whistle — my other hand opened the door with the key, and I asked myself if it would be worth waking her up if she had already fallen asleep.

But there was no need to wake her. In spite of her exhaustion she could not settle down, and she had gone to take a shower, after which she had changed Lazar’s old sweater for the black velvet jumpsuit, put on white socks to warm her feet, and stuck bits of cotton wool in her ears, and thus attired she sat down on the sofa in the living room to smoke a cigarette, sunk in her fear of abandonment as if it were the fear of death itself. When she saw me come in she flashed me her old involuntary smile, watching silently as I put my bag down on the low glass table, where a map of India had been spread the first time I met her. But then the smile faded and she asked me sadly, “How long does it take you to take a bag out of your car?” I didn’t reply but only smiled, pleased but also agitated by the thought that she was already becoming dependent on me. And in order not to sweep away all the boundaries between us, I asked her if Michaela had phoned to ask for me. “Here?” she asked in surprise. “Does she know that you’re here?”

“Of course,” I answered immediately, and by the decisive tone of my voice I wanted to let her know that now that Lazar had died, there would be no more need to lie to anybody in the world. She seemed somewhat confused by this reply, and looked silently at the medical instruments I removed from the bag, most of which were still new and gleaming, since I had no private patients so far and I used the clinic’s equipment when I paid house calls during my night shifts at the Magen-David-Adom station. I took a chair and drew it up to the sofa, and with a quick, light movement I whipped the cigarette from her fingers, something which even Lazar had not dared to do. I put it out in the ashtray, said firmly, “You shouldn’t do that,” and took her wrist to feel her pulse, which was rapid but not as rapid as I had expected, as if her temperature had gone down a little during my absence.

Her blood pressure was normal, even low for her age, the diastolic less than eighty, and her heartbeat, which was rapid because of the fever, sounded soft and clear. In the narrow beam of light from the otoscope I looked into her throat and ears. There were no obvious signs of infection, only a redness due to excessive dryness. “You must have something hot to drink,” I said. But it turned out that her electric kettle had broken down a few hours before. I interrupted my examination to go into the kitchen and see what was wrong. Standing among unwashed cups and glasses on the gray marble counter was the electric kettle, which had nothing wrong with it apart from the fact that the plug had come loose from the socket. I showed her the source of the problem. “Is that all?” She smiled incredulously. “I don’t believe it.”

“That’s all,” I said firmly. “How come you didn’t see it for yourself?” But she was apparently incapable of seeing anything. Miss Kolby had already told me how she shrank from electrical appliances as if they were capable of harming her. But now, when the red light on the kettle went on and she was convinced of the insignificance of the “breakdown,” she decided to trust me and showed me the toaster, which had also stopped working a few days ago, hoping that here the problem would prove equally easy to fix. In fact one of the screws had come loose, and with the aid of a kitchen knife I soon returned the red glow to the coils. And then, for no apparent reason, while the electric kettle began to whistle in the silence of the night, tears suddenly welled in her eyes, as if only now she realized the depths of the new abyss of dependency into which she had been cast by her husband, who had abandoned her for the world of the dead. I stood still and didn’t make a move toward her. The sorrow and the pity in my heart prevented me from touching her, and she returned slowly to the living room and sat down in an armchair to finish her sad, soft weeping for the catastrophe that had suddenly become concrete. In the kitchen I poured two cups of tea and added a few cookies which I found in one of the drawers. I found the sugar bowl, and cut a few slices from an old melon I found in the refrigerator. I went into the living room and put the tray down on the glass table next to my stethoscope. Was she really a woman who would have to be taken care of all the time? I thought in a sweet panic, remembering how Lazar had danced attendance on her in India, and how naturally she had accepted his services, as she now accepted mine, nodding her head in thanks and picking up a teacup and beginning to sip the hot lemony brew gratefully, until I asked myself if this was already the dependency I hoped for, which would make it impossible for her to send me away.

“But how can you leave Michaela for so long?” she rebuked me, her eyes still red from crying. “She must be worried.”

“No, Michaela isn’t the worrying type,” I said, and I respectfully described her independent spirit and inner serenity, and how she was at her best on occasions like this. “She isn’t waiting up for me. I’m sure she’s been fast asleep for hours.” But I wasn’t sure at all. Just the opposite — I thought that Michaela might have stayed up, if only to strengthen me with her thoughts from a distance, so that I could rise to the demanding occasion she knew was before me. And if she hesitated to call, it wasn’t on her own account or mine but only out of her concern for Lazar’s wife, whose grief might turn into panic and terror owing to a careless move on my part. Michaela did not yet know that before Lazar’s death there had been a bond between us, which even if it did not cause the death at least prepared us for it. If she had known, she would have been as sure as I was of the trust the woman sitting here put in me. For instance, after she finished the last drop of tea, while she was wondering whether to ask for another cup, I stood up and put the stethoscope around my neck to conclude the interrupted examination. And without hesitating, she stood up submissively, and at this deep hour of night she pulled down her jumpsuit and stood facing me, half naked, white and heavy in the breasts and arms, exposing the secret map of beauty spots on her shoulders, and although she seemed slightly embarrassed, she showed no trace of fear that her young doctor would turn into a passionate lover again. As the diaphragm of the stethoscope began to warm up between my fingers, I listened carefully first to her heart and then to her lungs, which seemed a little congested but without any suspicious wheezing, and accordingly left me without a clear diagnosis, since I had no desire at this time of night to draw blood, as I had in Einat’s little room in the monastery in Bodhgaya, in order to run tests. Since I was not in the habit, like some of the young doctors on night shifts in the emergency room or the Magen-David-Adom station, of throwing out sly psychological hints to people who thought they were ill, I stopped myself from making some critical remark to this beloved woman about the deceptions of the mind and only advised her to get back into bed and give both body and mind some rest. And although she was now alert and even a little vivacious, like a lot of patients who need no more than a doctor’s examination to free them of their feelings of illness, she accepted my suggestion and only asked for another cup of tea before she went to bed, and she even went to put the kettle on herself, in order to make sure that nothing else was wrong with it, waiting to break after I left. But I had no intention of leaving her, not only because I knew that in the depths of her soul she couldn’t stay by herself, but also because I was certain that Michaela, if she had indeed succeeded in staying awake, would both accompany me in her thoughts and actively support me in the attempt to return the soul that had invaded my body to its proper home and bed.

Dori obediently swallowed the two pills I gave her to bring her temperature down and went to take off her clothes and put on a fresh, flimsier nightgown. Then she got straight into bed, asking me only to cover her with three blankets and put the light on in the hallway before I left. But I didn’t want to leave yet, certainly not before I heard the deep breathing of her sleep. I remained in the hall next to the open bedroom door, looking through the dark windows at the new restlessness of the treetops, constantly buffeted by the autumn wind. And as my eyes returned to gaze quietly at the contours of the figure buried beneath the mountain of blankets, I kept asking myself how I would be able to leave her. Even when her breathing became deep and rhythmic and was joined by a faint snore, which I remembered from the night in the train compartment with the Indian clerk, I still could not bring myself to leave. Waves of love and desire began swelling in my double soul, and a thrilling new pleasure kept me rooted to the spot. I could have gone into the bedroom and sat down for a while on the edge of the big bed without waking her, but I went on standing in the hallway, leaning against the doorjamb, keeping myself awake thanks to long experience on night shifts and hours of standing next to the operating table. But when the faint snoring became loud and coarse, because of the position of her neck on the pillow or congested sinuses, I remembered Lazar climbing onto the upper bunk in the train racing to Varanasi to take hold of her and make her stop. I went into the bedroom to follow his example, but my hold must have been too strong, or lasted too long, for she woke up, and with her eyes closed and her hair wild she sat up in bed and cried in alarm, “You?” I let go of her and retreated, because I knew that she meant him, and only him, as if through the touch of my hand she had felt the dead man’s hand. But all this lasted no longer than a second, and by the expression of pain on her face I knew that the illusion had already been shattered. She groped for the switch of the reading light, but quickly gave up the attempt, dropped her head, and curled up into herself again, to seek the even rhythm of her breathing. But she did not find it, and she woke up and opened her eyes.

“I’m bothering you,” I whispered when I saw her putting on her glasses to see me better. “No,” she said at once in a clear, wakeful voice, as if she had not been sleeping for the past hour. And when I kept quiet, as if I thought she was only being polite, she raised her head from the pillow and said, “You’ve never bothered me.” Then, as if to reinforce her words, she added, “You never bothered Lazar either. Before the trip we were wondering whether to take a doctor with us, because you know how it was with us, always together, wanting to be alone together. But already on that first evening, from the minute you came in, we felt that we would be able to get along with you. And we weren’t wrong. Throughout the trip we marveled at how you always managed to be at our side without bothering us. Is it all due to the English manners you learned at home? The British temperament you inherited from your family? Is that what keeps you from getting on people’s nerves, from pushing yourself forward, even though you too want to go far?”

“Far to where?”

“Very far.” Her voice rose clearly in the silence of the night. “Very far?” I snickered. “Yes, very far,” she repeated without hesitation. “Lazar always used to say about you, That’s a man who wants to go very far, and he’ll get there too, but quietly, the way I like.” She fell silent for a moment, her eyes closed, as if she were about to go to sleep again. “But go where?” I insisted, a new fear stirring inside me. “Far to where?” She bowed her head patiently, like a mother facing a son who demands explanations for things that can’t be explained. “Far, the way he saw himself going far.” “You mean in the hospital?” I demanded with a tremor in my voice. “Yes, in the hospital too, of course,” she said. “That’s why he insisted on fixing you up with a permanent job, even if only half-time. When Hishin let you go, he was afraid that you would leave and go to another hospital. Because like him, you not only notice things that other people don’t notice, but you also know how to absorb them and contain them in yourself, so that when you need them they’ll always be there, without your having to worry about it.”

“Without my having to worry about it.” I echoed her words in excitement, not actually understanding what she meant. “But what made him talk about me at all?” She straightened her pillow behind her head and smiled. “Perhaps because right at the beginning, when Hishin suggested you, he said, ‘This is the ideal man for you,’ and Lazar, who was influenced by Hishin, began to believe it, especially after you confronted us at the airport and forced us to interrupt our flight and insisted on going to a hotel and giving Einat that blood transfusion, which even after all the clarifications we never really understood. But Lazar always said, Never mind, let it be arbitrary, let it even be completely mysterious. I know and feel that it saved her life.” I had already heard Einat speak about her father’s positive attitude toward the blood transfusion I had given her, but the explicit word “mysterious,” uttered now in the darkness in the name of the dead director, filled me with happiness, in spite of the contempt it might have implied. And I felt a pressing desire to hear this word repeated in Lazar’s name, until I was unable to contain myself any longer and I stepped forward, and without warning, in a trance of exhaustion, I lifted the blankets to join myself to the warm source of the mystery. At the first touch I knew that the two pills I had given her to take before she went to sleep had done their work; her body temperature was normal. If I really had another soul inside me, I thought feverishly, it needed its turn too, and I began passionately embracing and kissing Dori once again. She was startled and began to struggle, but even in the depths of my fatigue I was stronger than she was. And again she pleaded with me not to be silent, to speak of my love, as if making love in silence, and in the stillness of the night, was the worst kind of betrayal. I repeated the words I had said at the beginning of the evening and felt her ripe, mature body relaxing between my hands.

In the end she fell into a deep sleep, and I lay behind her back with my arms around her stomach, in the same position in which I had seen the Lazars sleeping in the hotel room overlooking the Ganges. I thought about Michaela, asking myself if she had stayed awake up to now to accompany me in her thoughts or if she had given up and gone to sleep. In either case, there was no need for me to hurry home. Even though I knew that I must not lose control over my conscious mind in this most intimate place, lying where the dead director lay, I could not overcome the deep impulse to go on holding her sleeping body in my arms, if not to sleep, then at least to dream a little, perhaps the very same dream I had dreamed in the big old propeller-driven plane flying from Gaya to Calcutta. But I couldn’t remember the dream, only the interior of the plane, with the many Indians crowded into it. Then I tried to remember the movie I had seen with Michaela at the beginning of the evening, but it had evaporated from my mind. Thus I had no option but to surrender to the sleep overpowering me. But not for long. About three hours later, at five o’clock in the morning, I woke up in the same position in which I had fallen alseep, wide awake, as if this short sleep had satisfied me completely. I carefully disentangled my arms, slid off the bed, got dressed, and left the room, closing the door behind me. I felt light and spiritual, relieved of the inner weight that had been oppressing me for so long. In the living room windows the first lines of light were visible, and I wandered around the silent rooms, trying to identify the source of the anxiety threatening the woman I now had to leave alone. At seven I had to be at the hospital for my shift, and before then I had to go home to shave and change my clothes. But I didn’t want to go home to Michaela like this, sticky and rumpled from the long night, and I was also afraid that I might have caught Dori’s virus, if it was a virus, in the course of our lovemaking. I went to the bathroom, planning just to clean myself up with a washcloth. But the water heater was boiling, and I gave in to the temptation, got undressed, and took a shower. Lazar’s toilet aricles were still scattered over the shelves, and his presence made itself felt in all kinds of things: his toothbrush, his shaving kit, his aftershave lotion, his bathrobe hanging behind the door. He had been right about my talent for noticing insignificant details and absorbing them into myself, for I now found myself recognizing many of the things he had taken with him to India, easily distinguishing them from the articles belonging to other members of the household. This being the case, I unhesitatingly, and without any feeling of strangeness, wrapped myself in his bathrobe, shaved myself with his shaving gear, and brushed my teeth with his toothbrush. I felt no need to say good-bye before leaving the apartment, for I was determined to return to Dori as soon as possible. I even took the key.

How strange it was, after such a night, to emerge into the bright Tel Aviv morning, which held not one single hint of mystery. I looked at the broad, familiar boulevard, at the cars covered with wet leaves torn from the trees by the tempestuous winds of the night, the crates full of milk standing outside the little supermarket, the newspaper boys, their rounds over, racing down the street on their Vespas. If only I too could race straight to the hospital, which was waiting for me now no less than it had once waited for Lazar. But I knew that even though I had already bathed and shaved, I had to show myself to the woman waiting for me in the kitchen, and to my surprise not alone, but with sweet little Shivi, who had already woken up and was sitting in her high chair, her mane of hair wild and a red third eye painted between her eyes — a sure sign of her mother’s surging longings. And when Shivi saw me enter the room she put her two little hands together on her lips in the Indian greeting, as Michaela had taught her, in order to welcome the new Brahmin who had risen from the underworld.

Eighteen

And it quickly finds her, no longer a little girl in a wrinkled school uniform but a tall, attractive young woman standing in her kitchen in the morning, a red apron around her waist, stirringporridge with a big wooden spoon for her three children sitting in chairs of different heights according to their age, and gazing in astonishment at the windowsill, where a big bird has just landed and is pacing up and down before them like an agitated, preoccupied schoolmarm. The children’s glee is very great at the sight of the boastful, brightly colored tail, wagging to and fro like the pendulum of a living clock. But the young mother standing behind them knows that in spite of the general merriment, she must be quick to calm the youngest of her children, for otherwise he will soon burst into tears for fear of the winged creature, which now stands still and stares at her with a single piercing green eye. She picks the little one up, cuddles and kisses him to comfort him, and hands him to the mystery that enters the room, her balding husband in a smart suit, with the gold-rimmedglasses on his eyes. And the mystery takes the child with such a bright, cheerful smile that we may presume he has already recovered from his insanity, and no longer goes about insisting that the world stands still and every hour is final and sufficient unto itself and nothing is ever lost in the universe.

But was it wise to drop in on her now, or should I have gone straight to the hospital? The pallor of Michaela’s face and the redness of her eyes bore witness to the fact that she had not been indifferent to the events of the night. Had she followed them in full consciousness, or in the fog of sleep? She smiled at me welcomingly when I came into the kitchen, as if she bore me no grudge for my absence and was even surprised at my hurrying home. Did I really have to confess everything that had happened last night, I asked myself, and tell her about the impossible infatuation that was turning into a possible love before I left for the hospital? Or did I have the right to silence? At first I only bent down to give a tender fatherly kiss to Shivi, and also to Michaela, from whose fingers I gently took the spoon in order to go on feeding the baby so she was free to prepare a hasty breakfast, which would include, if possible, a small bowl of the sweet baby cereal to which I had recently become addicted. I tried to eat my breakfast in silence, but I soon saw that not only was Michaela demanding that I give an account of myself, but even Shivi had stopped eating to stare at me expectantly with all three eyes. This being the case, I began carefully, gradually selecting from the night’s events a few of the essential details, concentrating mainly on the physical and spiritual health of the new patient who had imposed herself on me, slightly exaggerating her helplessness in everything from her domestic arrangements to her electrical appliances, and mockingly describing the obscure but real dread that descended on her when she was left alone. Although after Lazar’s death I had resolved to try to avoid telling lies, at this moment I did not want, in the short time at my disposal, to drop the bombshell of the lovemaking into the bright morning air of the little kitchen, and I decided to make do with a description of the psychological support I had given the widow. But Michaela, who seemed fascinated by every word that came out of my mouth, insisted on confirming what she in any case sensed in her heart, and when she asked me in so many words if I had also slept with Lazar’s wife, I could not deny her the full enchantment that my story seemed to arouse in her.

Thus, with my eyes fixed on the big clock hanging on the wall above the many-armed statuette we had received from Einat, which was standing on a high shelf, safely ensconced between two vases, I began to describe economically not only the first bout of lovemaking but also the second, to show how serious my battle with the soul inside me had been. I may have gone too far, for suddenly Michaela’s face went very red and she seemed stunned, not so much by the sex itself as by its repetition, which was a clear sign of the profound change awaiting us all. “If so, he’s got a strong grip on you now,” she pronounced, contemplating me with a mixture of pity and admiration. “Instead of entering some lifeless, inanimate object in order to animate it and be reborn, he’s latched onto a living human being in order to cling with all his strength to his previous place.” And when I maintained my silence she added, “Be careful, Benjy, that in the end you don’t lose your soul.”

“But I’ve apparently already lost it, Michaela,” I whispered with a very glum smile, shrugging my shoulders and taking my plate to the sink. And I took the key to the Lazars’ apartment out of my pocket, as if to prove to her the concrete reality behind the bizarre metaphysical exchange we were conducting, half in earnest, half in jest, over our kitchen table — a reality that for all its pain was also one which might thrill her. For before her very eyes an ethereal idea from the India she so adored and longed for was being incarnated, not by a Hindu but by a rational, practical Western doctor, a moderate man trapped in the mystical seam between body and soul, where even Stephen W. Hawking had floundered, paralyzed. My heart contracted now at the sight of Shivi’s eyes raised in deep attention to the words of the adults standing over her head. I had already noticed the peculiar attention she paid the conversations between her parents, an attention full of an inexplicable inner excitement, which led her now to rub her finger unconsciously on the perfect circle of the third eye which Michaela had painted on her brow and to turn it into a smudge spreading over her entire forehead. I looked at the clock. There were only a few minutes left before I had to leave for the hospital. I saw from close up that Michaela’s beloved statuette was covered in dust and even had delicate spiderwebs clinging to it. Michaela looked with a smile at the key I showed her. “Now do you understand the profound wisdom behind the custom of burning the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre?” she asked, and there was a malicious gleam in her eye. “No, I don’t understand it,” I answered honestly, a faint tremor of anxiety passing through me. “She has to be burned so that the yearning soul of her husband won’t steal into her through a stranger’s body. They don’t burn the widow to punish her for remaining alive, but only to protect the soul of some weak, innocent stranger who is prepared to lend his body to the husband’s eternal love.” I nodded my head, and with a certain absentmindedness, because it was already time for me to leave, I took the statuette down from its shelf and lightly removed the lacy covering of spiderwebs, examining it to see if there was any coordination among its six arms. “In that case,” I said, smiling, “do you think Dori should have been burned too?”

“Of course,” she answered unsmilingly, in a provocative tone, her face flushing. “If she made Lazar love her so much, let her follow him to the grave.” And with a new thought flickering in her great eyes: “And if she can’t do it by herself, she can be helped.” These last words, which had surely been said in a joke, struck terror into my soul, but I went on smiling, bending over Shivi, who seemed so interested in the statuette in my hand that I gave it to her. But she wasn’t ready to receive the unexpected gift, and the statuette slipped out of her little hands and fell to the floor, scattering its six clay arms in various directions, and after a moment detaching itself from its head as well. A cry of pain burst from me, but Michaela remained composed, as if she had been prepared for an act of revenge after what she had just said. She crossed her arms on her chest to ensure the restraint she had imposed on herself, showing no intention of kneeling down with me to pick up the pieces of the little statue so dear to her heart, nor any intention of answering my ridiculous question as to whether it might be possible to mend it. With satisfaction and a note of triumph in her voice she said, “Now I’ll have to go back there to find another one.” And when she saw that I wasn’t taking her seriously she added: “The only question we’ll have to think about is whether I’m going to take Shivi with me right away or whether I should leave her for the time being with you, or your mother, or, why not, with Lazar’s wife.”

But there was no time to discuss this question now. The operation in which I was to participate as an anesthetist was scheduled to begin in half an hour. Surprisingly enough, in spite of the sharp words we had exchanged and Michaela’s explicit announcement that she was going back to India, I did not feel that a real rift had taken place between us, and I left for the hospital feeling excited, and even a little happy at the idea that Michaela was giving me permission to continue my affair without throwing me out of the house. When she asked me just before I left if I would leave her the car in view of the rainy weather and the chores she had to do, I agreed immediately, since I had no idea that she meant chores connected with her trip to India. Surely the broken statuette alone could not have been enough to make her get up and leave immediately for the Far East. Nor did I believe that my infidelity had shocked her. A woman as free-spirited as Michaela wasn’t outraged by infidelities, hers or anyone else’s. No, it made more sense to think that what was happening to me had simply reawakened, with great intensity, her old longing for the spiritual climate in which she felt, as she had repeatedly explained to me, free and liberated, in a place that only seemed so wretched and defeated. But was it really only her old longing for India? Perhaps there was a new yearning behind it all, not for the great subcontinent but for herself, as the true source of what was happening to me, since more than two years before it had been she who had come back from India in order to tell the Lazars about their daughter’s illness. Now, just as I too was being swept up into an ill-fated karma, she felt that in order to rescue me she had to return to the starting point, and to take my baby with her, so that she might draw me back to the place where wise and understanding forces would come to my aid, working through those who needed me urgently — in other words, the truly sick and maimed of the world, waiting on the sidewalks of Calcutta for volunteer doctors to come to them from the world that called itself free and happy. But I only began to understand all this when Michaela finally decided to take Shivi with her, after Stephanie in London agreed to join her on this trip to India. On the morning in question, in the operating room, feeling slightly dizzy as I stood behind the anesthesia machine, I was thinking neither of Michaela nor of myself but of the woman I had left sleeping in the spacious apartment, either sick or well, who would soon wake up and find herself alone and begin to worry about when I, or somebody else, would come to keep her company.

When I reached the hospital I wanted to go straight to the administration wing to tell Lazar’s secretary that I had responded to the call she had referred to me in the fullest possible way, and to find out indirectly if she had already received any reports from the other party. But there was no time. So I waited until after the “takeoff” had succeeded and the patient had begun to sail gently along his appointed course before slipping into the anteroom to call her and tell her that I had made a house call and there was nothing to worry about. She thanked me gratefully. “I know we’re being a bit of a burden to you,” she said, glibly including herself with the woman who was constantly in my thoughts, “but I saw that Mrs. Lazar was a little lost, without knowing exactly who to turn to, because Lazar used to put the whole hospital at her disposal. And although everyone’d be happy to help her, after what happened, everybody thinks that someone else is taking care of her.”

“Yes,” I said, “I thought that Professor Levine had taken her under his wing. He’s more or less their family doctor, isn’t he?”

“He was,” she corrected me emphatically. “He was in the past. But now he’s angry with her because she refuses to put all the blame on Hishin. He isn’t satisfied with what I keep telling him, and what I told you too — that we’re all a little to blame, me, Dori, her mother, and even Lazar himself. But no — that crazy, stubborn man, who was forgiven so many times by Lazar, wants to set up a kangaroo court to sentence Professor Hishin. He’s not like you, Dr. Rubin, and refuses to take responsibility for himself. Yesterday, after you left, I felt a little bad about including you in my accusations.”

“But why?” I reassured her. “You’re right. We’re all guilty, morally at least. Me too. No less than Lazar himself.” But there was no time to elaborate on the moral guilt for Lazar’s death while the patient I had left on the operating table could implicate me in criminal guilt as well. I therefore hurried back to make sure that the numbers flickering on all the monitors were compatible with the smooth continuation of the flight, leaving Miss Kolby with the promise that I would get back to her during the day for a firsthand report on the quarrel that had flared up between the two friends. This secretary was proving herself to be a pillar of support on which we could all lean in the confusion left by her boss’s death. But how much support would she give me, I wondered, when sooner or later she found out about my relationship with his widow? I decided to go on investing in her, for I very much wanted this loyal and lonely woman on whom Lazar had depended, like many powerful executives depended on their secretaries, to be my ally not only in the little battles of the hospital but also in the great battle that had commenced this morning. At the end of the operation, after I saw the clear gleam of consciousness in the pupil of the anesthetized patient’s eye, which meant I could leave him with the nurses in intensive care, and after I received no reply when I called the Lazars’ apartment, I bought two sandwiches in the cafeteria instead of joining the surgeons for lunch and hurried to Lazar’s office.

Miss Kolby flushed with pleasure, not just because of the cheese sandwich I offered her but mainly because I wanted to eat my lunch in her company. “Lazar used to do that sometimes,” she said, and the sweet light of memory touched her delicate, faintly lined face. “When he saw that I was staying in the office because of the workload and refusing to go to the cafeteria for lunch, he would get annoyed with me, and in the end he would go and get me something to eat.”

“Someone who’s become accustomed to taking care of one woman is apparently drawn to taking care of other women too.” I laughed affectionately at the thought of the energetic director, who was probably suffering torments of frustration in his grave because of his inability to take care of things. “He used to take care of me too,” I recalled. “On the trip to India, on the flight from Rome to New Delhi, when I fell asleep and missed supper, I woke up and found a sandwich and a chocolate bar in the pouch of the seat in front of me.” Lazar’s secretary bowed her head in sorrow. Grief for her patron was apparently welling up in her again, especially in view of the changes that had taken place in her office since yesterday, as if the many administrative problems that had seemed to vanish along with the administrative director had not found anyone else in the entire hospital to take care of them and had come back to flood the office in the form of stacks of files piled on and around her desk. Was an heir about to appear and take over? Judging by the arrival of an unfamiliar secretary, who had replaced the vanished typist, it seemed so. This new secretary had apparently been brought in from outside the hospital, and although she had not known Lazar, she listened avidly to every word Miss Kolby and I exchanged, a secret, faintly mocking smile occasionally crossing her face. When she saw that Lazar’s secretary was ignoring her and not troubling to introduce me to her, she waited for a break in our conversation and introduced herself and asked me my name, which I knew she would not forget but would file away for future reference, like all ambitious secretaries. Then she offered to make me something to drink. But Miss Kolby dismissed this offer and took me into Lazar’s office, both to give me the treatment a member of the inner circle of the previous director’s friends deserved and to escape the curiosity of this woman, who might have been hired not only to assist her but to replace her.

When I entered the big room I saw that the sofa which had been missing the day before had now been returned, apparently after undergoing some minor refurbishment or repair. The dry soil in the planters had been watered. Here too stacks of files awaited the attention of the new director, signs of whose imminent arrival were apparent everywhere. “Do you know who it’s going to be?” I asked Miss Kolby, who was putting on the electric kettle. “No.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t even know if they’ve decided on anyone yet. But I can already feel him in the air.”

I suddenly felt a twinge of envy, as if the man who was going to replace Lazar and run the hospital were superseding me too, for I was both willing and able to make decisions regarding these files, one of which I even picked up and paged through, to the evident disapproval of Miss Kolby, who said nothing. “What does the administrative director actually do all the time?” I asked when I saw that the file in my hands was a personnel file, with the photograph of a young woman attached to it. “Personnel problems?”

“Not just those, of course,” she replied, “but they did take up a lot of Lazar’s attention. He was attracted to them. Yes, he took satisfaction in secretly controlling people’s lives.” I took the cup of coffee she offered me and sank onto the sofa with a deep sigh, overcome by exhaustion after standing on my feet for six hours during the surgery, on top of the nearly sleepless night I had spent at the Lazars’.

But this secretary was so devoted to the Lazar family that it didn’t surprise her at all to hear that I had spent the whole night there. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why I had remained awake. “That’s going too far,” she rebuked me, as one who had accumulated a few nights’ experience in keeping vigil over the loneliness of Mrs. Lazar herself. “It would have been enough for her to know that you were there, sleeping on the sofa in the living room.” She settled into an armchair next to me, crossing her extremely thin legs and speaking as if she thought it likely that I might be called on to spend the night again this evening, and other nights to come too. A wave of pleasure flooded through me, and a wish to confess what had really happened. Why should Michaela have the right to spread the news in her Indian version of events while I was sentenced to silence? And the woman sitting next to me wasn’t just a secretary, but a bosom friend of the Lazars. In the depths of her soul she must have realized who was really sitting beside her, because when she saw me yawn and sink back into the cushions, she suddenly suggested that I remove my shoes and use the sofa for a short nap before my next operation, in only half an hour. “Sometimes I used to arrange things so that Lazar could take a short nap between appointments without anyone’s noticing. You deserve a rest too. Why not?” she declared warmly. And while I was hesitating over whether to accept this tempting offer, she drew the curtains to darken the room, took a thin blanket out of one of the bottom drawers, and disconnected the battery of telephones, after which she left the room, saying, “Even fifteen minutes will help to make up for the sleep you missed last night, and in the meantime I’ll phone to find out what’s going on and where Mrs. Lazar disappeared to.” There was no doubt, I reflected with an obscure satisfaction, that Lazar’s sudden death had turned this usually correct and refined woman’s head too, if she could suddenly invite me to take a nap on his sofa. The idea of sleep seemed impossible, excited and intoxicated as I was by the previous night’s events. But I closed my eyes and withdrew like a snail into my thoughts, and wrapped myself in Lazar’s blanket, which was too thin to provide any warmth and apparently intended only to protect him symbolically from the world constantly knocking at his door.

In the stillness of the room I suddenly became aware of the steady dripping of the rain, and it began to oppress me, as if it too were joining in the general hostility that would confront me as soon as Michaela’s departure for India and my love affair became known. But if, in addition to taking Lazar’s place with the woman who was only a few years younger than my mother, I was called upon to fill his chair, which I could see looming behind the desk, and to administer the hospital in his place, the hostility might be seriously diminished. And why not? I might be only a young doctor, but I felt that I had the ability and the strength to make decisions. With my medical education, I would even be able to improve the quality of the decisions taken in this room. Prompted by a sudden urge to examine the file I had previously glanced through, I got up and walked over to the desk in my stocking feet, only to discover that the picture of the young woman on the cover had misled me and that the file belonged to the head nurse in the surgical department, who had written to ask Lazar to postpone the date of her retirement and added a recommendation from Hishin. But while I was deliberating over what I would say if the decision were up to me, Lazar’s secretary, who had overheard the rustle of the papers in the next room, knocked on the door and came in to announce the good news that Dori was at home, her temperature had gone down, and she was feeling fine. She had gone out to do some shopping and was about to go in to her office for a few essential meetings. She sounded altogether more cheerful, and tonight her son the young soldier would arrive for a few days’ leave, so we could all relax. “Didn’t you tell her that I was here?” I asked. But, faithful to her principle of never betraying anyone’s presence without their explicit permission, she immediately replied, “Of course not. We’ve already given you enough trouble. Now her son’s with her, and Hishin has also promised to get in touch with her. You’ve already done more than enough.”

With this confirmation, I left the administrative wing for the surgical wing, where I was scheduled to assist Dr. Joubran, who was soon to replace Nakash as anesthetist in the intensive care unit, in a thyroidectomy. But when I arrived, there was nobody there except for the patient, an elderly man with a lot of red hair, who had just been brought down from the ward to the operating room. In spite of the premedication he had been given in the ward, he was still very alert, sitting up restlessly on his bed in a short white open gown, his naked legs swinging in the air, listening to the sound of the storm raging outside, his eyes wide open and terrified. I went up to him, introduced myself, and urged him to lie down. I gently rubbed his neck and shoulders, as if I were calming a frightened animal. His medical file and the brown envelope with his X-rays were lying at the foot of his bed, and although it was not my duty as the assistant anesthetist to study them, I took out all the documents and X-rays and spread them on the bed and examined them one by one. Then I asked him a few questions about himself. He was a quiet, modest man of about seventy, a member of a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, who was proud not only that he still worked six hours a day in one of the regional factories but also that his son, who had brought him down from the ward and was now waiting outside in the waiting room, was also a loyal member of the kibbutz. I talked to him a bit about his illness and asked him to tell me how he felt and where it hurt. He said that he had hardly any pain, and his main feeling was fear at being left alone in the operating room. His face was flushed and his breathing heavy and noisy. I decided to examine him, in order to pass the time and also to set my mind at rest. First I measured his blood pressure, which as I had suspected was alarmingly high, and totally unsuitable for the lengthy surgery he was about to undergo; his pulse and heartbeat were irregular too. It was impossible to tell if these findings were temporary, caused by the panic raging inside him, or if there was some organic cause which nobody upstairs had noticed. I called the internal medicine department and asked to speak to one of the doctors. When they put me through I recognized the voice of Professor Levine. At first I wanted to put the receiver down, but he had already recognized my voice and called me by my name. Ever since Lazar’s death we hadn’t exchanged a word, and so I tried to be as careful as possible and to give him only the dry facts, without interpretations or suggestions. He listened to me attentively and did not try to belittle any of the details I mentioned or dismiss my speculations. Instead he inquired, with a very uncharacteristic anxiety, what I would recommend doing, as if I, not he, were the true source of authority here. “I thought maybe one of your people could come down and discuss it with the surgeons,” I suggested cautiously. “There’s no point in talking to the surgeons,” he said with inexplicable anger. “Once they’ve got their hands on the patient, they won’t let go. No, the best thing would be for you to get him out of there right away and bring him back to the ward, and after that perhaps we’ll decide what to do together.” Now I knew that I had made a mistake by interfering. The terror of the patient, and the anxiety that had been floating around inside me since the morning, had already fanned the flames of Levine’s paranoia. But I had no option now, and I went out into the corridor to look for the patient’s son, a sturdy kibbutznik who was sitting and reading a newspaper, to ask him to take his father back upstairs. I refrained from accompanying them, not only because I had to wait for the operating team to explain the disappearance of their patient, but also because I didn’t want to meet Professor Levine, who I knew wasn’t interested in discussing the patient’s condition but in denouncing Professor Hishin and his role in Lazar’s death. The surgeon soon arrived, and as I had imagined, it was none other than my old rival, Dr. Vardi. I told him dryly about my examination of the patient, my phone call to Professor Levine, and the decision to postpone the operation. He listened quietly to my explanations, his blond head slightly bowed. I knew that he was dying to come out with some crushing remark about the strange new collaboration between myself and Professor Levine, but he restrained himself and said nothing, as if he realized that I was not myself and did not want to upset me any more. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and said, “In that case, we can all go home.”

Since I didn’t have the car with me, I thought of getting a ride part of the way with Dr. Vardi, but when I stood in the entrance to the hospital and realized how heavy the downpour was, I was overcome by a desire to wash away all the tension and tiredness that had accumulated inside me with the pure water filling the air. I said good-bye to him and went out into the storm, occasionally taking shelter under a store awning or in the entrance to a building, vacillating between the need to go home and rest and the intense desire to go to Dori’s office in the south of the city and see for myself if she was as well as she said she was. But my problem was solved when a deluge soaked me to the skin, forcing me to go home and change my clothes. The apartment was empty, and judging by the few plates in the rack over the sink, Michaela and Shivi had not even come home for lunch. I switched on the hot water heater and got undressed and into bed, where I covered myself completely with the quilt. The thought of sending the red-haired patient back to the ward without his operation now filled me with remorse. Who would have imagined that the mere sound of my voice would throw Levine into confusion? If he was really tormented by guilt over Lazar’s death, I would have to be particularly careful in any future contact with him. The telephone rang. For a moment I was afraid to answer in case it was a summons to return to the operating room, but it was only Hagit, Michaela’s childhood friend and the mother of our young baby-sitter. She was looking for Michaela, who was supposed to have arrived at her place with Shivi an hour before. “They must have been held up by the rain,” I said, without feeling worried, and I asked her to tell Michaela that I had come home early from the hospital. “Do you want her to call you when she gets here?” she asked. “Only if she wants to,” I replied, and after I put the phone down I called my parents. They weren’t at home, but they had installed a new answering machine, which I knew they had been considering buying. My father’s slow, excited voice answered first in Hebrew and then in English and asked the caller to leave a message after the beep. I congratulated them on their new acquisition, which was intended to improve communication between us without making it too burdensome, for ever since Shivi had arrived in the country their craving for daily contact had increased. I added something about the storm raging in Tel Aviv, told them how their granddaughter had accidentally smashed the Indian statuette to smithereens this morning, and promised to call again during the evening. Now that I had fulfilled all my duties to the world, I snuggled up under the granny’s big down quilt and dove into my soul to discover what remained there.

At last, a dream bathed in light rose quickly in the darkness of my closed eyes. And clearly the dream was mine and nobody else’s, for my father was supposed to be present in it, since I had gone especially to meet him in a rural settlement next to a lake which lay hidden in the gentle fold of a pleasant hill whose slopes were covered with plots of land so well tended that they looked like flourishing gardens. Although it was a fine spring day, vestiges of the long, hard winter were still floating at the edges of the sky, scraps of gray cotton wool sailing past the stone window of one of the houses, which consisted of nothing but one narrow room. In it a handful of silent farmers, their reddish hair proclaiming them to be blood relations, were sitting around a long narrow table full of knives and forks, waiting for the last guest so they could begin their meal, which an invisible woman was cooking in a lean-to kitchen. Maybe they’re waiting for me to bring him to them, I thought, and I went out to search for my father among the narrow canals of water winding between the houses, and as I walked I thought not of him but of the old car he had given me. Where had it disappeared to, I wondered, where had I parked it? Was it possible that I had driven up the narrow dusty paths through the flourishing fields covering the slopes of the hill? The hill was so easy to climb that I effortlessly reached its summit and looked down at the large lake surrounded by empty wasteland, and I went down the other side, and as I walked I felt full of distress that I was here all alone and there was nobody to help me drag the old car out of the grim gray water of the lake, into which I had apparently absentmindedly allowed it to roll. But then I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone, which immediately rescued me from my distress. It was Hagit, phoning to tell me not to worry, because Michaela had called to say that she and Shivi were on their way to her house.

“Thank you. But I really wasn’t worried,” I explained affably to this good friend, who apologized for waking me up in her eagerness to reassure me. “I always have complete faith in Michaela. Soon you’ll see just how much I trust her, when you hear about her new plan to return to India, this time with Shivi.”

“So you gave in to her in the end?” cried Hagit, who sounded upset at the idea of parting from her friend, even though she knew how Michaela longed for India. “And you? Are you going too?”

“How can I leave everything here? You tell me,” I demanded. Then I added, “Maybe I’ll go in the end to bring them back.” And with this thought I also reassured myself when shortly afterward I heard how much Michaela had already accomplished in preparation for the journey. It was as if to compensate for the dismemberment of her beloved statuette she had decided to grow another head and two more pairs of hands during the few hours of my absence so she could transform her return to India into a fact from which there was no turning back. She had been to several travel agencies to compare dates and prices of cheap flights and make notes of possible alternatives, and she had visited the Indian consulate that had recently opened in Tel Aviv to apply for a visa, and of course she had not forgotten to go to the Health Bureau to find out whether a baby of Shiva’s age could be vaccinated. Since all this wasn’t enough for her to feel that her trip was becoming a concrete reality, she had made her way in the pouring rain to a number of used-car lots to find out how much she could get for our car, which she had decided to sell to pay for her trip, and at the same time to inquire about a secondhand motorcycle for me so as not to leave me without any means of transport after she was gone. All this had been preceded, of course, by a long telephone conversation with Stephanie in London, to warn her of the imminence of the date of departure. She told me all this on the phone as soon as she arrived at Hagit’s place, as if she were afraid that I might have changed my mind during the day and would try to prevent her from taking Shivi, whose participation in the trip she regarded as absolutely essential, especially now that Stephanie had agreed to go along.

Michaela’s voice was full of excitement; it was evident that the day of running around in the rain to prepare for the trip had filled her with joy, as if the possibility of a great love had opened up today not for me but for her. Darkness had already descended on the apartment in spite of the earliness of the hour, and the rain which had been falling all day was still pouring down, as if the winter so often promised by the weather forecasters had finally burst forth in full force. I had taken a shower and changed into clean, warm clothes, and when Michaela called I was in the middle of wondering whether to go to Dori’s office to find out where I stood after the night before. It was even dark in the kitchen, which was usually full of light in the afternoons, and only a single ray of light succeeded in escaping the sunset hiding behind the clouds and weakly penetrating the window above the sink. To Michaela’s credit, I have to say that her great happiness did not prevent her from sensing my somber mood, which was due not only to the return of the soldier-son and my growing uncertainty about my position but also to the thought that I would soon have to travel around on foot. After repeating her assurance that she would not have Shivi vaccinated without first consulting me, Michaela suddenly took pity on me and said persuasively, “You remember how amazed I was the first time we met, at Eyal’s wedding, that you hadn’t taken advantage of your free trip to India to stay on for a while by yourself? If you regret what you missed then and you want to join us, why don’t you come along? We’ll welcome you with open arms and accept you just as you are, whatever the state of your soul.” And her laughter burst out, free and uninhibited, just as it had always done in London. For a moment the thought crossed my mind, Why not? Perhaps this was my chance to escape from the snares in which I was getting increasingly entangled. Maybe in the place where the gorgeous silk of my infatuation had gradually been woven, my love might slowly unravel and dissolve into the mystery that had given birth to it.

But Michaela was not able to penetrate my thoughts any further, nor to take advantage of my momentary indecision and sweep me along with her. And perhaps she didn’t want to. She immediately took my silence for a refusal, and without asking me what I was going to do for the next couple of hours she said good-bye, without telling me when she was coming home — as usual. I switched on the light in the kitchen, not only in order to banish the gloom but also to look for my old crash helmet in the storage space between the kitchen and the bathroom. I wasn’t angry with Michaela for selling the car to finance her trip; I knew there was no other way we could pay for it, and although my parents had given the car to me to replace my motorcycle, it was still our joint property, like everything else we possessed. Her offer to buy me a motorcycle with part of the money she got for the car seemed fair to me too, and I even liked the idea, although I knew that seeing me on a motorcycle again would upset my parents, whose continued absence from their house on a day like this surprised me. When I heard my father’s excited voice on the answering machine again, I was careful not to say anything, in order not to alarm them by leaving two messages in a row, and I quietly replaced the receiver and put on the black helmet, which during the year and a half of lying in storage had absorbed the bitter smell of mold brought by winds from the nearby sea. In the mirror I saw my previous self, young and carefree. Wouldn’t the motorcycle make things more difficult for me in the battle I had commenced today with the world around me? Naturally I couldn’t expect a woman of mature years to put on the second helmet like Michaela and ride behind me to visit my parents in Jerusalem. But it was quite possible that on some hot summer evening when the streets were jammed with traffic and parking places were hard to find, she might be persuaded to mount the pillion in order to arrive at the movies on time. The mere thought of this filled me with yearning to see her now, and although it was not a hot summer evening but a rainy winter one, I couldn’t bear to stay in the apartment alone any longer, and I took an old umbrella that the granny had left in a corner with the mop and the broom and went outside.

There was no doubt that the big black umbrella had belonged not to the dainty little granny herself but to her husband, and I was glad to see that in spite of long disuse it opened easily and gave me plenty of protection from the rain. I decided to continue by foot, remembering with a smile the Indians who never parted from their umbrellas, rain or shine, by day and sometimes even by night, as if the black shelter above their heads were intended not only for physical protection from the elements but also for spiritual elevation. Indeed, I too felt elevated when I arrived almost completely dry at Dori’s office, which I found very crowded and busy at this early evening hour. The lights were on in all her colleagues’ rooms, and there were a number of people in the waiting room. I had to wait until one of the three secretaries opened Dori’s door to usher in two clients who had been sitting conspicuously apart in the waiting room, and then I let her know I was there and asked her how she was feeling, in my capacity as a fussy family doctor. Even if she was embarrassed and confused by my sudden appearance, she maintained her composure and greeted me with the old automatic smile, as if I were one of the clerks here. A silver-haired gentleman in an elegant suit who looked like a lawyer drew his chair up to hers, apparently to equalize their positions vis-à-vis the two clients who entered the room, presumably for the purpose of reaching a compromise. She took advantage of the brief pause and came over to me, confident that I would not try to draw her into a long discussion just now. She was wearing black, as she often had before Lazar’s death. But this time I did not recognize her outfit, which consisted of a black sweater with a high collar and a slightly too-tight skirt, which made her stomach stick out with an ugliness than even her long shapely legs, in high-heeled boots, did not make up for. Was she really better? I asked myself. Or maybe she had never been ill? But the night before I had felt her fever in every part of my body. She evidently had no intention of introducing me either to her colleague, who was obviously wondering who I was, or to the unfamiliar secretary who tried to bar my way and find out whether I wanted Dori or one of the other partners. I did not want to get involved in a long discussion either, but only to tell her my big news: that Michaela knew, that she was going abroad, and that very soon I would be free to make myself entirely available to Dori until … who knows? Even marriage was possible. But it was impossible to say any of this in the presence of so many strangers, so I stuck to the role of the devoted doctor dropping in on his patient on his way home from work to ask if the medication had helped. “Everything’s fine. The fever’s gone down completely,” she said, smiling in embarrassment, and when she saw that I was not content with such an optimistic report, she added, “It’s just that I’ve started to cough. I’ll try to pick up something on my way home. Symphocal, or something like that.”

“Symphocal is good for children,” I responded quickly, even though it was effective with adults too. “I’ll bring you something better. When are you leaving here? Because I haven’t got the car.” She touched my arm lightly with her fingertips to bring me to my senses. She didn’t have a car either. Someone from the office would take her home, or perhaps Hishin would pick her up, because he wanted to come over and look for some papers Lazar had taken home with him. “So if not here,” I said, retreating, “I’ll take it around to your apartment.” And with those words I took the keys out of my pocket, to show her that I was serious.

Upon seeing them, she uttered a strange cry of relief, as if she had been looking for them everywhere, and reached out and snatched the key ring nimbly from my fingers. In spite of her patience with me, in the face of the growing irritation of the other people in the room — and her confidence that my youth would prevent the inquisitive secretary from guessing the nature of our relationship — she wanted to restrain me and draw clear limits, which I immediately showed myself willing to accept, and in spite of my disappointment at having the keys taken away from me, I said good-bye pleasantly and left. Outside, the rain had stopped, but I opened the umbrella anyway. I soon found a pharmacy, where my physician’s card enabled me to obtain a powerful cough medicine from the restricted-medicines cabinet, a drug that Nakash liked to use to nip colds and influenzas in the bud. Although I could have gone back to Dori’s office and left the cough medicine with her secretary, I felt a strong urge to return to the Lazars’ apartment. Seeing that the lull in the rain was continuing and the radiant, sparkling air was bringing many people out to walk happily in the streets, even though they had to negotiate between the puddles, I decided to continue on my way, taking a shortcut across town and thinking of the letter I would leave for my love along with the medicine. Soon, as if I had been coming home here for years, I could recognize in the white light the distant silvery tops of the trees in the boulevard next to the house, and even though the slot in the Lazars’ mailbox was big enough to accommodate the package, I folded my umbrella and took the elevator to the top floor, knowing that perhaps in doing so I was entering a battle for my love against its most fanatical, if still unknown, opponent.

But he had not yet come home from the army. The door was opened by Einat, with the sound of the washing machine spinning in the background. She had come home to do her laundry, and she now stood in the doorway, surprised and even a little alarmed to see me holding the medicine bottle in my hand, not only because she did not know her mother had been ill but also because she had thought that her father’s death would put an end to my relations with the family, not the opposite. Now that her face was so pale and her beauty had faded, I noticed a resemblance to Lazar that had not been evident before, as if the painful memory of seeing her father die before her eyes had carved his image secretly on her face. She was sloppily dressed in a greenish sweater and a pair of jeans that were too big for her. When she took the bottle hesitantly from my hand, careful not to touch me, I was afraid that in her distraction she was liable to send me away. I asked her if I could call the hospital. Without a word, still fearful, she showed me the way to the living room, which was now perfectly clean and tidy — no doubt the work of the maid. Einat went into the kitchen and shut the door behind her, ostensibly to give me privacy but actually to quickly finish eating the improvised meal I had interrupted. I phoned the internal medicine ward to ask about the patient whose surgery I had prevented at the last minute. Although I didn’t know his name, the nurse immediately knew who I was talking about, not by the details of his medical condition or his age but by his red hair, which had apparently made an impression on her too. It turned out that he had been returned to the operating room after a heated argument between Professor Levine and Professor Hishin, who had suddenly appeared in the ward and insisted that the operation take place. “So they did it anyway,” I said softly, thinking remorsefully that my excessive anxiety had led to a renewed outbreak of the rivalry between the two friends. “Did they mention my name, by any chance?” I asked. “Yes, Dr. Rubin,” said the nurse. “They’re angry with you and with Dr. Vardi for playing hooky.”

“Playing hooky?” I giggled at the use of this childish term. But was there any point in trying to explain my real motives? I put the phone down and went to ask Einat, who was sitting at the kitchen table polishing off a carton of cottage cheese, if I could make another phone call. The kitchen too was clean and tidy, and between the flowered curtains on the big window I saw that it was beginning to rain again. Einat smiled shyly. “What a question! As many as you like. Make yourself at home,” she said, and as I turned back to the phone to call Hagit and ask Michaela to come and pick me up here and take me home, she asked if I had time for a cup of coffee before I left.

I was of course happy to accept her offer. In the first place I intended to wait for Michaela to come and pick me up anyway, and, more to the point, I still hoped to see the mistress of the house when she came home. I wanted to try to get to know Einat a little better, and also her soldier brother, who suddenly arrived, soaking wet. Since I had last seen him in the corridor of the internal medicine ward he had exchanged his khaki uniform for the pale gray of the Air Force and his gun for a small, light submachine gun, no doubt thanks to the intervention of influential friends of the family, who had succeeded in getting him transferred to a service unit close to home and his widowed mother. Despite his surprise at my presence, which bordered on hostility, I tried to be nice to him. When I told Einat about Michaela’s plans to return to India, it was as if this simple announcement transformed her, rousing her from her apathy and even restoring a little of her previous beauty to her delicate face. “I knew it!” she cried enthusiastically, although she also expressed some doubt about how much fun it would be to wander around India with a baby. But when I told her that a good friend from London would be accompanying them, she was reassured. A good friend could be a great help. If only she could, she too would gladly join them, but nobody would give her permission to go now, especially after what had happened. It was impossible to tell whether she meant the hepatitis or the death of her father. “You need permission?” I cried in astonishment. “Who from? Your mother? I’ll give you permission.” And although I didn’t say in whose name I was giving her permission, she understood that it was in my capacity as a doctor, and her eyes lit up with a rare, provocative gleam. “And if I get sick again,” she asked, “will you come by yourself to fetch me?”

“You won’t get sick again,” I said confidently, “and if by any chance something does happen to you there, don’t worry. We’ll come to the rescue again. Why do you still want to go there, Einat? Wasn’t the first time enough for you? What draws all of you so much to India?” She was surprised at my question. “I thought Michaela had already infected you with the India bug.”

“Michaela is a lost cause. She’s already half a Hindu herself,” I replied. “That’s why she’s incapable of explaining anything to an outsider like me.” Einat looked at her brother, who was standing in the doorway listening to our conversation and eating a thick slice of bread. Then she bowed her head, trying to meet the challenge of finding a convincing explanation for the fascination with India. In a quiet, halting voice she began to formulate her thoughts. “A lot of things are attractive. But the most compelling is the sense of time. Time’s different there — it’s free, open, not harnessed to some goal. Without any pressure. At first you think it’s unreal, and then you discover that it’s the true time, the time that hasn’t been spoiled yet.” When she saw that I had not succeeded in understanding the depths of this other sense of time, she added, “Sometimes it seems there that the world’s stopped turning, or even that it never started turning in the first place. And every hour there is enough in itself, and seems final. So nothing ever gets lost.” A faint sneer now crossed her brother’s face, but when he saw that I was nodding my head in profound agreement, he crammed the rest of the bread into his mouth and went to pick up his submachine gun and duffel bag, which were lying in the middle of the living room floor.

But the shrill whistle of the front door bell interrupted him, and he opened the door to his wet, shivering mother, both of whose hands were full — one with a cake box and the other with a shopping bag and a dripping umbrella. Although she knew that her son was due to arrive, she broke into loud cries of joyful surprise and hurried to put down her packages and embrace him as if he had just come home from the wars, forgetting that there were other people present. In the end she gave Einat a quick kiss too and asked her to help her unpack her bag. When at last she turned her attention, with a suspicious smile, to the medicine I had brought her, the bird-cry pierced the air again, and Hishin appeared at the door in a heavy, waterlogged coat and with the old baseball cap once more on his head, carrying another shopping bag. He too was glad to see the soldier, slapping him on the shoulder and saiding, “I see we pulled it off” as if he had had a hand in the boy’s transfer. Without asking permission from anyone or taking any notice of me, as if I were some kind of ghost, he took off his coat and hurried over to the big desk standing in the corner of the living room. This was apparently the true purpose of his visit, for within a few minutes he had succeeded in identifying the documents he was looking for and separating them from the rest of the files and papers. Then he announced to Dori, with a satisfied look, “Now I can rest easy.” A violent attack of coughing prevented her from reacting, and when all her smiles did not succeed in calming the spasms racking her, she picked up my medicine and showed it to Hishin, who said nothing except that it was a strong cough medicine favored by Nakash, which did nothing to recommend it to Dori. “Wait, don’t go yet,” she said to her old friend, who showed no signs of intending to leave. “Let’s all have tea.” And after asking Einat to put the electric kettle on and see that the plug wasn’t loose, she went into her bedroom to take off her wet, muddy boots, to which a few autumn leaves were sticking. Hishin finished reading what was written on the label of the bottle and without saying a word sank into an armchair, the files in his hand, still ignoring me pointedly, as if I really had turned into a ghost. During the past month he had grown a little thinner, and there were new lines on his face, which still, in spite of everything that had happened, fascinated me. From the bedroom the sound of Dori’s coughing reached us. Hishin stopped reading and listened, a faint smile crossing his face, as if he did not believe there was an organic cause for her cough. His eyes finally met mine, and he suddenly said in a natural tone of voice, as if he were continuing a conversation that had already begun, “What happened this afternoon with Levine? What exactly did you discover that made you phone him from the operating room?” But before I had a chance to answer he silenced me with a rude wave of his hand. “Never mind. Never mind. Don’t start reciting numbers again. I know. You’re right. You’re always right. But for God’s sake, leave Professor Levine out of it. What do you want from him? Why did you call him?”

“I didn’t call him,” I said to defend myself. “I called the ward, and he picked up the phone and told me to send the patient back upstairs.”

“Okay, okay.” Hishin waved his hand again and continued in a harsh voice, “Forget it. But in future leave him alone. He’s having a very rough time at the moment. He’s afraid of his own shadow, let alone the faintest hint of criticism from anybody else, especially you.”

“Me?” A cry of amazement escaped me, which in spite of its genuineness held the knowledge that Levine was now afraid of me. “Yes, you, you,” said Hishin impatiently, even angrily. “What have you got to be surprised about? Ever since the operation and what happened, with all the diagnoses flying around, you somehow managed to get stuck inside his head, and he can’t stop thinking about you. So until he calms down, do me a favor and just leave him alone. Don’t talk to him about anything, medical or anything else. Just keep out of his way. He’s completely out of control. We had a terrible fight today.”

The excitement that gripped me now was so great that I didn’t know where to begin. Alongside the intense embarrassment Hishin’s words caused me, I also felt pleasure and satisfaction. I should have protested against Hishin’s strange outburst, or at the very least been astonished, but given his serious expression I knew that he’d appreciate it if I held my tongue. We both turned to Dori, who now entered the room still coughing, as if everything she had choked back when she was with her clients were now coming out. She had changed and was dressed in a strange assortment of garments: a white embroidered blouse and thick woolen trousers, old slippers on her feet and a muffler around her neck, as if she did not yet know what to expect from the evening or the people now gathered, who were dear and close to her. I rose from my place, flushed with lust and love, impatient to begin my battle here and now, but I was surrounded by people who were obligated to protect her and send me away. I waited for Michaela to join us, which she soon did, with Shivi in her sling, alert and curious in spite of her long, active day, as if she had already begun the trip to India. Michaela’s great shining eyes scanned the room and looked so penetratingly at Dori that I was afraid she was about to make a public declaration of my love, and suddenly I felt terrified and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Einat urged Michaela to sit down and have a cup of tea, but I firmly declined her offer. “Enough. We have to go. Shivi’s been away from home all day, and your mother should be in bed.” I looked at Dori, who broke into a cough again but still obstinately refused any medicine. Einat would not take no for an answer, however, and implored Michaela, almost tearfully, not to leave. Was it only Michaela’s intention to set off for India again that so excited Einat and drew her to my wife, or was it something else? There was something that wrung my heart in the way that Einat took Shivi out of her sling and began rocking her in her arms. Michaela was in a quandary. She was perfectly willing to accede to Einat’s pleas and sit down for a cup of tea, especially since it would give her an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about the woman I had made love to twice the night before. But she sensed my agitation and my unwillingness to remain at their home. Since she was so happy and satisfied with her preparations for her journey, she decided to be nice to me and gave in to my demand to leave at once. And I was right to insist, for when we got home and I removed Shivi’s diaper, I saw that the long day had left its mark in a red rash between her legs and around her tender little groin. I decided to bathe her myself, and when I had finished getting her ready for bed and Michaela was sunk in a profound reverie in the tub, I picked up the phone and called my parents. It was intolerable that twenty-four hours should have passed since I had issued my challenge to the world, and nobody had yet noticed it.

Since it was relatively late, I was surprised to find my mother alone in the house. My father had gone to a general meeting of the employees of the Agriculture Ministry. His absence encouraged me to begin my confession immediately. Without beating around the bush, to the sounds of Michaela splashing in the bathtub, I went straight to the heart of the matter. I had something to tell them. Michaela had decided to return to India with Shivi. Yes, with Shivi. Stephanie was coming from London to join them. I was staying here. In the meantime. Not only because I had nothing to look for in India, but also because I had found what I looking for right here. I had found love. An old-new love for a married woman, now suddenly made possible. Possible in the sense that her husband had died. She’s older than I am, much older, and you can guess who she is. Yes, you can guess. Yes, you know who she is. If you don’t know, I’ll tell you. So you do know. Yes, it’s serious, and yes, I’ll have the strength to cope with it. How do I know? I know because the dead man is supporting me too. The dead husband. In what sense? In a mysterious sense, which you’ll never be able to understand, because I don’t understand it myself, but I don’t have to understand, because I can feel it inside me. My mother now sank into a silence so stern that I had to move the receiver away from my ear. In the end she was brief. She was too intelligent to try to argue with me now, especially since she could feel my tremendous agitation. She only asked me to promise her one thing: that I wouldn’t say a word about it to my father. I promised her at once. But she wasn’t satisfied by my promise, and for the first time in my life she asked me to swear to her. And I swore by the life of Shivi, who was soon to set out on a long journey.

Nineteen

For now, after the mystery finishes eating the porridge served him by his young wife and enjoying the sight of his three laughing, frightened children throwing crumbs at the windowsill to appease the impudent, obstinate bird, he rises to his feet, picks up the new briefcase given him by his wife, and with sweet solemnitytakes his leave from his family to go to his daily work. Although judging by his status as a subsidized ex-patient of a reputable institution for the mentally ill, no real work is waiting for him, when he emerges into the bright, sunny morning his body, which is as supple as a dancer’s in its elegant suit, is still bursting with energy, and his furled, folded umbrella begins to wave vigorously in the air as if an entire orchestra were following in his wake. And even though we can assume that he has not disclosed his destination to anyone, the second bird, circling faithfully above his head, precedes him to the windowsill of the travel agency, where he is warmly welcomed by the travel agents, eager to know at last where he is bound.

Yes, the earth has suddenly begun to move, he admits with a shy smile shining in his black eyes, now clearly visible behind the polished lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. But the mystery of its movement, he continues, is no different from the mystery of its stillness. Is there really any need to travel to all the fascinating and seductive places whose pictures are hanging on your walls, he asks, when if we only rise a little above time, trying to sweep us along like a strong river in its current, where we want to go will come to us wherever we are, thanks to the revolutions of the earth itself. If you don’t believe me, please be so good as to ask the bird tapping on your windowpane.

Is a new sense of humor budding here to replace the one that was withered? wonder the travel agents, whose computers stopped working as soon as he entered the office. If so, maybe there is hope that an unconscious too can be implanted, to replacethe one that was amputated.

It was only when my head was already heavy with sleep on the pillow, while the calm breathing of Michaela — who had no objection to sleeping in the same bed next to me — murmured in my ears as I tried to close my eyes and mobilize the darkness inside me to overcome the splinters of light constantly coming into the house from the outside world, that I realized I had made a mistake. I should never have agreed, certainly not on oath, to my mother’s request not to say anything to my father, for in this way I indirectly admitted that there was something perverse about my love, which was apt to upset my father so much that the whole thing had to be hidden from him in order to spare his feelings. How else was I to understand my mother’s request? My parents had always been scrupulously open and aboveboard with each other, especially in everything concerning me, not necessarily because the bond between them was particularly strong but out of fairness and loyalty, which were the guiding principles of their lives — and now my mother was suddenly breaking the rules and betraying my father. Did she think that she would be able to convince me to give up Dori without his help? Or maybe the opposite — was she afraid that in the battle that had already begun between us, he might cross the lines and become my ally? In the feverish confusion of my thoughts I could not come to any clear conclusion about what my mother might do or how she might react, but I was sure that tonight she wouldn’t sleep a wink, and she might not even go to bed. I felt sorry to think of her suffering alone, awake in the night. If I were really a good, sensitive son, not only in the superficial manner in which I fulfilled my obligations, I would call her and tried to comfort her and reassure her, or at least give her an opportunity to express her anger, in words or silence. But since I knew that my father might pick up the phone instead of my mother, or during the course of our conversation, I did nothing. If she had decided to engage me in single-handed combat, she would have to do so without the solidarity of their marriage.

From that moment on, this principle ruled the relations between my mother and me. I was silent, and any initiative for further clarification was in her hands, just as the initiative for setting the date for the journey to India was in Michaela’s hands, and the only initiative left to me was in the pursuit of my relationship with Dori. But while my mother and I seemed to have been struck by a slight paralysis, Michaela continued her preparations energetically and efficiently, until the trip to India was drawn tight as a bow and all that had to be done to deliver the arrow was touch the string. Deliver in the sense of redeem, for Michaela’s devotion to the dream of the return to India was so great that it gave her journey a spiritual, almost religious status. Not redemption from me, of course, but from the materialistic and achievement-oriented reality around us, which Michaela was not yet resigned to spending the rest of her life in. And her joy was intensified by the fact that she was enabling others to benefit from the journey too. Not only Stephanie, who was calling us almost every day from London, but even Shivi, whose tender mind Michaela believed would absorb impressions that would last for the rest of her life.

In order to prepare Shivi for the journey, Michaela painted a third eye on her forehead every morning, red, blue, or green, which made her look adorable and increased her excitement over their departure. I tried to spend as much time as possible with her, picking her up whenever she held out her little arms to me. Michaela often could not take her along when she went about the business of preparing for the trip, since the car had already been sold, half the proceeds going to the trip and the other half to buying a motorcycle for me, not as big and strong as my old one but quick and light enough to be effective on the flat, clogged roads of the city. When Stephanie arrived on a charter flight from London in the middle of a clear winter’s night, I saw no problem in taking the motorcycle to the airport to pick her up, for her luggage consisted only of a backpack, which even my modest little motorcycle could take with ease.

Indeed, there was a kind of lightness hovering over all the preparations for the trip. The date had been set, and since Michaela had chosen to fly from Cairo, which could be reached by a cheap bus ride, the tickets turned out to be exceptionally inexpensive, especially in view of the fact that Shivi was not yet one year old and was thus entitled to fly for free. This was Michaela’s reason for refusing my mother’s request to postpone the flight until after Shivi’s first birthday party, which might have consoled them a little for the separation from their granddaughter, the bulletin of whose doings was the high point of their day. Although they relied, as I did, on Michaela’s resourcefulness and experience and her grasp of the mysteries of the Indian mentality, the fact that the trip was open-ended naturally caused them profound anxiety, which Michaela tried to assuage to the best of her ability, not only because she was fond of them but also because she had learned to respect and appreciate them when they had visited us in London. Accordingly, she found the time to take Shivi to Jerusalem and spend a day with my parents to say good-bye and set their minds at rest with a detailed and practical discussion of the solutions to all kinds of problems that might crop up. In order to reassure them even further, she took Stephanie with her, to remind them of the solid common sense of her friend from London, who would act as both her traveling companion and a substitute mother for Shivi if, God forbid, something happened to Michaela, or if she simply felt like taking off for a couple of days to places unsuitable for small children.

As I could have predicted, my mother succeeded in persuading Stephanie to accompany my father and Shivi on a walk in the park so that she could remain alone with Michaela and tactfully try to find out what had really happened between us and whether there was any substance to my declaration of love for the “older woman,” whose name my mother still refrained from mentioning, even though she knew very well who she was. Michaela’s replies to her questions astounded her, not only because they were frank and explicit, for which she may have been prepared, but because they were given in terms of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, as if the trip to India had already begun and Michaela were sitting with her friend on the banks of the Ganges, not in a Jerusalem neighborhood opposite a woman whose mind was as uncompromisingly clear as the Israeli light coming through the windows. My mother had grown used to Michaela’s rather obscure and esoteric manner of analyzing human situations in London, and as long as it concerned other people, usually unknown to her, she could react with tolerance, but now they were talking about me, her only child, and my marriage, which was in danger of breaking up completely. But my mother understood that the infidelity was only a pretext for Michaela to realize her dream of going back to India, a dream that had been hovering over our marriage from the first day. In the middle of the conversation she therefore changed her tactics, suggesting to Michaela that her trip with Shivi was not something that must necessarily deepen the rift in our marriage but rather something that could open the way to a future reconciliation. Michaela agreed immediately, perhaps because she suddenly pitied this stoic woman who was longing for reconciliation and suffering torments of guilt over my behavior. And in order to gain my mother’s support for her trip, she explained how her and Shivi’s absence for the next few months could help me to extricate myself from a situation that would probably lead to suffering and misery. She believed that my feelings, if only for Shivi, would take me to India too, where it would be possible to strengthen me, precisely because reincarnation and rebirth were a natural part of daily existence there. “The two of you are welcome to come with him,” added Michaela in complete seriousness. “We’ll be happy to have you.” And her great light eyes were radiant with generous hospitality, as if the expanses of India were rooms in her private home. “It would be really wonderful to meet there, as we said we would in London.”

My mother hurried to report this conversation to me before Michaela, Stephanie, and Shivi returned to Tel Aviv. She even went out to buy another carton of milk, and called me from a pay phone on the way so that my father would not overhear. Her anxiety was no longer for my endangered marriage, nor for my love for Lazar’s wife, which she still saw as a passing and unrealistic fantasy. Her anxiety was now focused on Shivi, for this was the main thing she grasped in all Michaela’s confused eloquence: that Michaela wanted to use Shivi as bait to draw me, and perhaps my parents too, after her, even at the price of dragging Shivi irresponsibly around India, in places full of sickness and suffering. And so she suddenly demanded, in a tone that was almost hysterical, that I put a stop to the trip immediately, or at least prevent Michaela from taking Shivi. “It’s impossible, Mother, to prevent a mother from taking her baby with her,” I replied quietly, trying to maintain my composure, my heart aching at this display of irrationality on the part of so rational a woman. But I promised her that I would make arrangements with Michaela so I could send for Shivi if I decided at any stage to do so. In spite of my sorrow at the idea of parting from her, which grew as the date of their departure drew closer, it was not of Shivi that I was thinking now but of another baby, whose helplessness, which Lazar had tried to make light of and conceal, only fanned the embers of my desire, which had remained alive and burning ever since the unexpected lovemaking on her sickbed. If my mother had really succeeded in persuading Michaela to leave Shivi with me, I would have lost my freedom and flexibility in the battle for my love, which kept returning to its starting point and leaving me at square one again, especially since Dori had once more succeeded in surrounding herself with loving companions so she would not have to be alone. Not only had her son found a way of coming home every night from his base, but Hishin too was a frequent caller in the evenings, and who knew if she hadn’t succeeded, with the power of her ingratiating smiles, in persuading even her mother to stay over from time to time, in order to introduce a little structure into the accumulating chaos that gathered in her bedroom and close the open drawers behind her.

When the day of departure actually dawned, my heart was flooded with sorrow, as if I only now realized that I was going to be deprived of the affection and company that surrounded me without having made sure of even a fraction of the love for which I hoped. And the parting from Shivi was made even more painful by the fact that it took place at midnight, the strange hour chosen by the cheap travel agents to take the busload of young backpackers directly to the airport in Egypt for their flight. When I saw Shivi strapped into her carrier like one more pack next to Michaela’s and Stephanie’s big backpacks, I realized that my tolerant attitude toward the trip might not have been completely responsible. Although I had vaccinated the baby myself with the dosage prescribed by two reputable pediatricians in the hospital, I could not avoid the thought that I should have made them postpone their departure to make sure there were no complications. Shivi looked healthy and happy, though, as she gazed curiously at the faces of the young backpackers bending over her with admiring cries and showing their worried parents the baby with the third eye painted on her forehead as encouraging evidence of a traveler who was even younger than they were. I still felt guilty over Michaela’s irresponsibility and my own, and I swore to myself that the moment my situation became clearer, I would find a way to bring my daughter back to her natural place. But until that moment arrived, her “natural place” would presumably be on sidewalks and train platforms; after all, she was beginning her trip on two Tel Aviv paving stones, with damp sand creeping out between them, while her mother was busy embracing her friends, who were far more numerous than I had imagined and so loyal that not even the lateness of the hour had prevented them from coming to say good-bye. Even Amnon had deserted his night watchman’s post and hurried here in order not to miss the moment of farewell to Michaela. I overheard him promising to go and join her if he received a postcard inviting him, even though I knew that he would never abandon his parents and his retarded brother, who needed him so much.

Finally it was my turn to say good-bye, and after showering kisses on Shivi’s face and looking deep into her eyes so she would not forget me, I took Michaela aside to warn her once more to be careful. Although I had avoided touching her since the morning when the statuette had been broken, in order not to cause any embarrassment, I no longer shrank from contact with her, and to reinforce my words I took her into my arms, held her tightly, and placed a long kiss on her lips. Her great eyes remained open, shining in the darkness of the night, and her fingers lightly stroked my hair, which was something she never did, as if she knew that the danger hanging over my head was graver than any of the possible dangers threatening her on her trip. Before joining Stephanie and Shivi, who had already disappeared into the bus, she did not forget to say, “If you get into bad trouble, just leave everything and come to us. We’ll all be glad.” And while I joined my hands and held them to my face in thanks for this generous gesture of reconciliation, she let slip this final, surprising sentence: “Nothing’s worth dying for, Benjy.” Without giving me the chance to reply, she hurried into the bus, which was apparently waiting just for her and now lit its little red lights and silently, as if it had already joined one of the great rivers awaiting the young travelers, sailed out of the narrow alley, leaving behind it a crowd of friends and relations who suddenly realized that there was not much left of the night.

Accordingly, they did not hurry home but hung around exchanging telephone numbers and addresses in an attempt to tie a web of connecting threads to their loved ones, whose disappearance into the night turned even the joking words of parting they had just uttered into a suddenly painful memory. Only now did I notice Einat, who was standing next to Amnon’s pickup truck wearing a long black coat that emphasized the fairness of her hair, which she had brutally cropped as if in an act of self-mutilation. Had she just arrived, or had she been trying to avoid me? A shy smile crossed her face as she hesitated about whether to accept Amnon’s offer of a ride home on the condition that she climb into the back, for the seat next to Amnon was already taken by Hagit and her daughter, who had insisted on coming to say good-bye to her little charge. I quickly went up to Einat, for even if she guessed what had happened between her mother and me, this was no reason to avoid her. In fact, it was an opportunity to try to turn her into an ally. In spite of her embarrassment and resistance, I persuaded her to give up Amnon’s pickup for the pillion of my motorcycle, and with my own hands I put the helmet on her head and gently buckled the strap under her slender chin. Although I was used to the fear of first-time pillion riders, I had never come across anxiety as intense as that coming from Einat. Like a terrified animal, she clung to my leather jacket, occasionally breaking out into a scream, as if I were going to roll her into some terrible, hostile abyss instead of simply taking her home, driving barely above the speed limit through the still, silent streets of the city. As we neared her building, located in a pretty seedy quarter of the city, I asked about the terrible anxiety that had taken hold of her. But she was not embarrassed by her hysterics during the ride, nor did she laugh them off. She acted as if her panic had been natural and completely justified, if not because of the motorcycle then because of the driver. Now too, with the bike silent beside us and my hands removing the strap from beneath her chin, she seemed to be afraid of me, pale and shivering with cold, ready to give me her telephone number as I requested, as long as I would release her into the dark stairwell, where she disappeared with such celerity that she neglected to put on the light.

Did she really know about my love for her mother? And did this love, I asked myself, with not a little pain, seem to her so alarming, so outrageous and repulsive, that she couldn’t even stand for a moment next to the man who had gone to the ends of the earth to rescue her and whom she had trusted far more than her parents to save her life? Even if she thought that this love deprived her of her due, she could still have respected its mystery, which had begun in the hotel in Varanasi when I took blood from her mother to revive her. These reflections continued to trouble my thoughts on my way home and added distress to the sorrow of returning to the apartment, which in spite of Michaela’s efforts to leave it neat and tidy was still full of traces of the baby, the memory of whose sweet face brought tears to my eyes. And although my parents had told me not to hesitate to wake them up to tell them about the parting, I refused to burden my already sorrow-filled heart with the anger and disappointment of my mother, who knew that I had agreed so casually to their going so I could devote myself entirely to the insanity of the love I had so perversely chosen. I therefore not only refrained from calling Jerusalem but disconnected the phone, darkened the apartment, and got into bed hoping not only to sleep but to lose consciousness completely.

But my sleep, which did indeed begin with a full loss of consciousness, was soon violently interrupted by something like an electric shock passing through it. As if by someone’s hand on an invisible switch, it not only was interrupted but disintegrated completely, and from its ruins something seemed to fly up and disappear. And in spite of my soul, which was feverish with exhaustion, and my body, which was sinking heavily and limply into the bed, my conscious mind had taken control of me again and knew that there was no more hope of sleep. However tightly I closed my eyes, I found no consolation in the darkness, only a bus with little red lights, racing now, after crossing the border, on a desert road not far from the sea in the silvery moonlight, with Shivi sleeping on Michaela’s lap and Michaela probably sleeping now too, perhaps leaning on the shoulder of her friend Stephanie, who was chatting with one of the young backpackers. And for the first time I felt a pang of the anxiety of abandonment squeezing my soul, as if I were not looking at the lights of the bus which held my wife and daughter receding into the distance not from the breadth of this double bed but from the opening of a little pup tent, alone and abandoned in a desolate wilderness. Suddenly I was exposed to the incomprehensible indifference of the universe, and I had to switch on the reading light, although it did not restore my composure. Instead, it only increased the pain of my envy for all those who are able to sleep, connected to each other by their bodies or their dreams. It was then that I thought, I have not been liberated but abandoned. And even the soft sound of the rain falling outside could not soften the new dread of loneliness stealing into the walls of the house. I felt as if the blood coursing through my veins were not enough to sustain me. When I shifted restlessly underneath the quilt and threatened myself with getting out of bed in the hope that my weariness would overcome me and return my lost sleep, the bed itself seemed to cast me out, as if my touch on the pillows and bedclothes were a burden to it. And a little like a sleepwalker I emerged from the circle of light in the bedroom into the darkness of the living room, trying to attach myself to a less alienating version of reality, the one contained in the shabby floral upholstery of the sofa, which immediately aroused my longing for the plump, laughing woman who sat on it with her legs crossed, frozen in alarm but also in delight at the young man’s declaration of love. But was such a longing, which might warm the heart with a sweet sorrow, enough to make me take off my pajamas and with limp heavy movements put on layer after layer of clothes? No. Something more real and powerful forced me to switch off the lights and go out into the rainy night with my helmet in my hand, in order to seek human contact. As if now that Lazar’s soul had left me, my abandonment had doubled.

If it had been even six o’clock in the morning I might have called my parents and avoided this weird nocturnal expedition. However, I could not have unburdened myself to my mother in my father’s presence or spoken of everything weighing on my heart — the parting from Michaela and Shivi, our plans for the future — though sharing these feelings would have eased my sudden sense of abandonment. But it was three o’clock in the morning, and since I never had had time to become acquainted with the Tel Aviv pub scene, let alone with the all-night discos, I could not seek human contact at this hour with anyone but those who were always prepared to give it — in other words, those at the hospital, where I knew that even at this still, secret hour, absolute and eternal vigilance held sway over even the remotest corner in the building, wrapping staff and patients alike in a blanket of security, whether they were tossing in their beds or asleep in their chairs or dead in their iron drawers. I knew that after getting over the surprise of my sudden arrival at the wrong time, one of the anesthetists in the emergency room might try to coax me into changing places with him, so I decided to go to one of the other parts of the hospital. It seemed much darker than usual. I asked one of the security guards about the darkness. He too was aware of the difference and concerned by it — if darkness reigned over the entire hospital, it meant that it wasn’t just a coincidence or an accident but the result of a new directive from administration to save electricity. And then it dawned on me, like a flash of lightning: they had found a successor to Lazar, and he must be someone from outside, if his first instruction was to dim the lights. I decided to go up to the pediatric ward, where there were always parents awake, sitting in vigil. But first I went down to my locker in the intensive care unit, to leave my helmet and leather jacket and put on the coat with my name embroidered on it and hang a stethoscope around my neck. Thus protected by the neutral identity of a doctor on night duty, I went up to the pediatric ward. As I had guessed it was humming with activity, not so much because of the concern of the parents, some of whom were sleeping in corners while others paced the corridors red-eyed with despair, but thanks to the wakefulness of those children whose as yet undiagnosed illnesses gave them the right to demand unremitting attention. I too wanted attention, but the parents who surrounded me did not see that I was no less exhausted than they were. Although I repeatedly explained that I was not a pediatrician but an anesthetist and I had only come up here to look for someone, they clung even to this passing medical authority and showered me with questions of a medical or bureaucratic nature, which I answered patiently but in a general, ambivalent, evasive, and noncommittal way, as if the source of authority which had always given strength and clarity to my responses and diagnoses were slipping away from me. It was not surprising that after a while even the most insistent of the parents turned away from me, and with my whole being crying out for the sleep that had been denied me, I walked down the corridor and peeped into the rooms full of bright posters and toys, to soften my burning eyes with the sight of the sleeping babies, some of whom were no older than Shivi, now lying in the warmth and safety of Michaela’s arms, or perhaps Stephanie’s lap. Even after I had gone downstairs, firmly resolved to go home, get into bed, and drown the inexplicable anxiety that had taken hold of me in sleep, I nevertheless made one last effort, going outside, still in my white coat and stethoscope, oblivious to the wind raging in the little stand of trees behind the main building, and into the annex that housed our small psychiatric department, which Lazar’s death had perhaps saved from extinction. Although I had never been there before, I knew very well that no concerned relatives would be wandering around its corridors. And even if they were, it was not them I was seeking but the doctor on duty, to ask his advice.

The doctor on duty was sound asleep. Still, I found someone to talk to in the person of an old acquaintance, none other than the ex-head nurse of Hishin’s surgical department, whose application to have her retirement postponed for a year had been rejected and who was doing night shifts as a substitute nurse in various departments of the hospital in order to supplement her modest pension. “But who rejected your application so quickly?” I exclaimed sympathetically, and I told her that I had seen her file on Lazar’s desk a few days before. “If Lazar was still alive, he would never have rejected a request from Professor Hishin to leave you with him for another year,” I added confidently, for like other people working in surgery, I had felt the greatest respect for her, even though I knew that she too preferred Dr. Vardi to me. But the white-haired nurse sitting in the cold, deserted nurses’ station, wrapped in a thick winter coat with a little electric heater at her feet, was not at all sure how Lazar would have treated her request if he had been alive. “Sometimes he could be rigid and almost cruel in his obstinacy,” she pronounced, and when she saw that I was astonished by her words she added, “Don’t imagine, Dr. Rubin, that just because you spent a couple of weeks with him and his wife in India, you knew all the sides of his personality.” There was a slightly aggressive note in her voice, and I expressed my surprise that even though two years had passed she still remembered my trip to India. “But how could I forget?” She laughed. “I still remember you coming in all confused with that big medical kit you got from Dr. Hessing and asking me to inoculate you. You looked so pressured and so angry and bitter about the whole business that Professor Hishin had forced you into.” I suddenly was overcome with affection for this noble elderly woman, uncomplainingly doing the job of a substitute nurse to take a few more shekels home every month. I also remembered how I had dropped my trousers in front of her that evening, behind an improvised screen, so that with a light and steady hand she could inoculate me with the two shots I had brought from the Health Bureau. “It’s strange that we’re meeting again today,” I said, unable to control the little confession that had been burning inside me ever since I had arrived at the hospital, “because my wife and baby left tonight on a trip to India. Only a few hours ago I took them to the bus to the airport in Egypt, and when I got home, tired out, and went to bed, I suddenly woke up after an hour or two. I couldn’t go back to sleep again. In fact, I can hardly stand to be on my own, something that has never happened to me before.”

She listened quietly to my complaint with a serious expression on her face. I knew that she didn’t have much imagination, but she had a lot of common sense and sympathy for any human distress, as long as she was convinced that it was genuine distress and not just a passing mood. She offered me a cup of coffee, but I refused. “No, I still want to try to sleep,” I explained. “I have to go back to bed. In less than eight hours I have to be on my feet in the operating room.” Like everyone else on the hospital staff, she was surprised at the strange half-time post Lazar had created for me, and she asked me if I thought the arrangement would last now that he was dead. “Why not?” I asked with some annoyance. She shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps they’d find a way to eliminate irregularities committed in the name of friendship, things that weren’t strictly according to the letter of the law, she said — it all depended on the new director. “But is there a new director already?” I asked. “Has anybody seen him? Has Hishin said anything?” It appeared that she knew nothing, and neither did Hishin. But her guess was that somebody had already been appointed to the job, maybe even two or three people. Lazar had had a lot of power in the hospital, and perhaps the time had come to spread it around a little. That, at least, was what Professor Hishin thought should be done. “Yes,” I reflected quietly, “Hishin’s going to miss Lazar a lot.” She nodded her head. Her conclusions were graver than mine. Hishin was afraid of the new director’s revenge, and that was why he was demanding that his powers be divided. In spite of his eulogy at the graveside, he was well aware of the damage he had caused, not because of overconfidence in his medical decisions, as many people thought, but out of jealousy, for fear that some other doctor in the hospital would take charge of the case and get close to Lazar and usurp his favored position. That was why Hishin was still tortured by guilt, both toward the deceased and toward his wife, because everybody knew how close a couple the Lazars had been and how they had always done everything together, and anyone who loved one of them loved the other one too. For a second my blood froze. “In what sense, love?” I smiled, and my heart filled with despair at the possibility of the guilt and the love uniting into a powerful emotion that nothing would be able to withstand. “In what sense?” Hishin’s old nurse, taken aback, tried to think of an appropriate answer. “In the sense that he’ll stay close to her now and take care of her until he’s sure that she isn’t angry with him and she doesn’t hate him. Because the truth is that Hishin is peculiarly attracted to people who’re angry with him or who hate him,” she said. For many years she had been sharpening her perception of the head of her department, just as Miss Kolby had done with Lazar. “But how can he stay close to Lazar’s wife now that he’s got a woman of his own?” I objected. “Only one woman?” she retorted. “Hishin has a lot of women that he’s attached to. He’ll have no problem adding another one to the list.”

A brief but wild scream now rose from one of the rooms, and a chorus of muttering immediately broke out from the other patients, as if they had been waiting up all night for one of their fellows to have a nightmare. The nurse cocked her head in the attentive gesture I remembered from my year in the surgical department, to see if they would all settle back down or if further intervention would be necessary. I felt a pang of pity for this hardworking woman, who as the head nurse in the surgical department had been accustomed to thinking in the drastic terms of knives and incisions, sutures and infusions and wounds to be dressed, and who now had to cope with mysterious mental illnesses by means of the little colored tablets lined up on the shelves of the cupboard behind her back. She was definitely disturbed by the freedom with which I went up to examine her stock. Although she knew that as a physician I was entitled to treat myself, she insisted that I could not take anything without the express permission of an authorized psychiatrist. In spite of this slight, I felt that she was right, for by dint of her strictness and her unimaginative honesty she was forcing me to try to calm my troubled spirit, torn between exhaustion and panic, by spiritual and not material means. For instance, a phone call to my parents, whose ability to judge my mood by the tone of my voice soon succeeded in locating the source of the pain and putting it into perspective. Even if my mother had distanced my father from me by refusing to allow him to know about my love for Dori, his natural, kindly patience could still be of value in a crisis. But it was five o’clock in the morning, and it was impossible to think of calling them before six, even if one of them happened to be awake and prowling around the house, as sometimes happened at this hour.

I said good-bye to the nurse, and to show her that I didn’t bear a grudge against her for refusing to let me help myself from the bottles of pills on her shelves, I promised to come back and visit her on one of her shifts. I returned to the main building, looking up at the cloudy sky and wondering whether Michaela too, in the heart of the desert, was searching the sky for the first stain of dawn. I went down to the intensive care unit to return my gown to its place, put on my leather jacket, and take my helmet, but instead of going upstairs I punched the code that opened the door to the surgical wing. It was a simple code, the first three even numbers, which hadn’t been changed since I started at the hospital, and it occurred to me that here was a job for the new administrative director — to change the code, because as things were there wasn’t a worker in the hospital who couldn’t open the door. As always in the hour between shifts there was no activity, but the darkness was new. The order to save electricity had succeeded in penetrating to the holy of holies of the hospital, and the operating rooms, always flooded with light coming from a separate and independent source, were all shrouded in darkness except for one little room. Although I spent a lot of time in the wing, since Lazar’s death I had not had any particular reason to visit that little room, which was full of instruments and medications used in cardiac surgery, first and foremost the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, with the white plastic tubes dangling from it like a great octopus’s arms. It wasn’t the big machine that attracted my attention, however, but the cupboard of anesthetics, most of which I knew not only by name and function but also by their pharmacological composition. With a giggle I thought of the strict nurse, who had refused to give me one little tranquilizer from her stock, whereas I was now standing before a cupboard full of powerful, expensive drugs, and without asking anyone’s permission, on my own initiative, I could easily prepare a little cocktail that I could inject into my vein and that would soon put me completely to sleep: a sleep without sensation, without consciousness, without movement or dreams. A sleep from which nothing would wake me.

But strangely enough, as I stood alone in the dark, empty surgical wing among dozens of sophisticated instruments capable of taking a man apart and putting him together again in an improved version, I felt none of the panic and anxiety that had interrupted my sleep and sent me rushing out of the house. It was as if what threatened me were connected not to the outside world but to what lay within the familiar walls of my own house, which had been abandoned by those closest to me. Was it possible that my love sought to embrace both the woman herself, and her inability to stay by herself, for fear of something that might be without form or shape but was sexual and infinitely malevolent in its intentions, not only hiding in the little storage space near the bathroom or the dark corner next to the kitchen where the brooms were kept but spreading through the little spaces between the closet shelves, pervading the drawers with the socks and underwear with a musty, invisible smell, until they turned to spiderwebs and skeins of dust underneath the bottom drawers where she kept her high-heeled shoes? Was this the smell she tried to sniff out in the hotel rooms where it was proposed that she should sleep? And suddenly this surprising new understanding of what was happening to me cheered me up so much that I switched off the light and left the surgical wing without taking a single drop of a sedative or analgesic or muscle relaxant, because I didn’t want anything material and external to calm my spirit, just the belief that whatever was disturbing me tonight would in the end strengthen me in my efforts to get closer to her and engulf her totally now that I was free of the yoke of my little family. On my way home I turned into the broad avenue next to her house in order to make sure that Lazar’s big car was parked in its usual spot, under the pillars of the building. I didn’t get upset when I spied an unfamiliar little car blocking its exit, because a little bit of imagination was all it took to realize that they must have bought it for the soldier, to make it easier for him to come home every night to be with his mother.

The minute I walked into my apartment, I could feel the agitation of abandonment stirring again in the ruins of my exhausted soul, as if only here, between these walls, this familiar furniture, lay the real world, substantial and secret, which immediately exposed one’s weakness and inability to remain and contend with it alone. Although the hands of the clock had not yet reached six, I didn’t want to wait and I phoned my parents to tell them the story of my parting from Michaela and Shivi and at the same time receive an encouraging word. My father was the one who picked up the phone, and he also conducted the conversation with me, asking questions and demanding details. He did not seem able or willing to give me any encouragement or comfort, for he more than anyone felt the loss of Michaela and Shivi, as if all the progress I had made in the past two years had gone down the drain with their departure. The rustle and echo accompanying the conversation told me that my mother was listening in on the phone next to her bed, but to my surprise she did not join in, as if she didn’t want to talk to me. I knew that her anger was deeper than my father’s, and also more justified, but her silence began to worry me, and when I felt that my father was about to bring the conversation to a close, I asked to talk to her. She interrogated me dryly and even coldly about where I was calling from, if I was at the hospital or at home. When I told her that my shift only began at noon, she wanted to know why I was calling so early. Did I wake up early, or couldn’t I fall asleep? “Both — I woke up and I couldn’t fall asleep,” I explained, and I told her a little about my night of wandering and added, “I seem to be having difficulty in getting used to staying by myself again.” For some reason a silence now fell in Jerusalem, and I heard the sound of my father putting his receiver down, as if now that my mother had taken over the conversation, he could express, in his shy but decisive way, his disapproval of me, for he never cut short a telephone call with me of his own volition. Then my mother’s voice softened a little, as if she too had understood the meaning of my father’s action, and she asked if I meant to come to Jerusalem for the weekend. When I said yes, she asked me not to use the new motorcycle but to come up by bus, as if the separation from Michaela had made my existence more dangerous and vulnerable. “And if you want to visit your friends, you can use your father’s car,” she added to encourage me to agree, and quickly put the phone down, as if from the distance she could feel me trembling on the brink of sleep.

I disconnected the phone, in part because I had already spoken to my parents, but also because I knew that if Michaela called before her flight, she’d call my parents and not me; she knew that their sorrow was greater than the sorrow she left behind in her own apartment, where I now began to draw the curtains to prevent any ray of light from sabotaging the sleep that almost had me in its grip. I was convinced that the more I blotted out the world around me, the less severe my anxiety would be. Indeed, a deep sleep, frightening in its power, overcame me at last, and nothing succeeded in penetrating the leaden curtain that came down on me, as if I were not lying on my bed on a noisy, busy Tel Aviv day but in an iron drawer in the hospital morgue. The hospital was also blotted from my mind for the first time since I had begun working there, for after nearly twelve hours of sleep I woke to discover that it was already six o’clock and long past the hour I was supposed to begin my shift. They must have tried to get in touch with me from the operating room, and given up in despair owing to the disconnected phone, and found someone to take my place. The thought that someone had taken my place did not increase my guilt, as might have been expected in someone as reliable, dutiful, and punctual as myself, but only gave me a sense of relief. As if not only Michaela and Shivi had disappeared from this reality, but I had too.

True, there was a clear contradiction between the pleasure I felt in this disappearance and the agitation and anxiety caused by my solitude. But I knew that there was one person in the world capable of understanding my situation perfectly. Accordingly, I did not switch off the little light, which was revealing more and more of the threat looming in the known and familiar world of my apartment — a threat that made me feel again as if I didn’t have enough red blood cells in my body — but in great excitement I got up to reconnect the phone, in order to call her office and demand the right to talk to her not, only as a lover and occasional doctor but also as a tenant calling on his landlady for help. Dori had just left to go to a café with one of her friends, and her secretary, who couldn’t tell me exactly when she would be back, asked me very civilly who I was and what I wanted. I couldn’t tell her what I wanted, but I agreed to tell her who I was, and asked her to have Mrs. Lazar call me back. “My wife and daughter left last night for India,” I told the secretary. And when I sensed by her silence that she didn’t know what to make of this announcement, I added in a hoarse voice, “And I’m sick in bed.” This strange lie, slipping so glibly from the lips of a man who had always been taught to tell the truth, began to depress me so much that I felt the need to disconnect the phone again, so as to spare myself the necessity of reinforcing the first lie with additional ones. Once I had announced my illness, I was sure that she would get in touch with me, but what I wanted from her now was not duty but love. I realized that the lie I had just told might poison whatever was between us, just as it would have poisoned my relations with the hospital if I phoned them now to excuse my absence on the same grounds. The fear of infection, even an imaginary illness, in an operating-room doctor was always taken very seriously and I felt it would be wrong to take the easy way out, playing off their justified anger aroused, no doubt, by my failure to show. If a replacement had already been found for Lazar, let him call me into his office and warn me about the consequences of another disappearing act — like the one I was contemplating right now, at six o’clock in the evening, while the outside world pulsed and throbbed in a tumult of activity and people who had just finished a successful and rewarding day’s work went from shop to shop and bought things to help them relax and spend a pleasant evening at home.

I got up and switched off the light so that I could disappear into the darkness and shut out the intimate world where the threat of loneliness grew greater the farther my wife and baby receded into the distance. But I was so saturated with sleep that I couldn’t even close my eyes in the utter darkness I had succeeded in creating around me, let alone sink back into slumber. After spending hours on call and growing accustomed to sleeping and waking quickly, I had lost that innocence of youth which allows itself to be engulfed in sleep without rhyme or reason. Quite the opposite: after ten hours of uninterrupted sleep my mind had begun to acquire the pure and lucid quality of an angel gliding through the sky, so that even hunger and thirst did not trouble me. I felt the stubble that had grown on my chin since the previous morning and asked myself whether Dori would come to look for me here. If I were really sick in bed, it wouldn’t be in the hospital or in my parents’ home but right here in this apartment, which she had signed the lease for, even though she wasn’t the actual owner. That didn’t of course oblige her to love me but it did oblige her to remember that here she had agreed to hear my declaration of love, which she had listened to without interrupting and in the wake of which she had gone to bed with me. Since my mind continued to accumulate clarity and lucidity, I began to believe that I had it in my power to influence from a distance not only her thoughts but also her plump, pampered body, whose sweet, secret map of beauty spots I had not yet finished studying. And thus, after her last client has left, she will stand up, wrap herself in her blue velvet tunic, scatter her smiles to everyone she is leaving behind in the office, and even if there is no real rain in the air but only a few solitary drops shaken by the wind from the trees, she will stop to open her umbrella over her head, even for the few yards between the office door and the big car parked carelessly and inconsiderately in the little side street. After smiling again into the rearview mirror as she checks to see if the road behind her is clear, perhaps she will remember the strange message I left for her and with her little foot on the brake, she will sigh and take her makeup out of the big bag lying on the seat beside her and draw a narrow line around her eyes and powder her nose and cheeks. But instead of painting a third eye in the middle of her brow, the better to perceive the reality around her, she will only flash another smile at the little mirror in front of her, in the hope that it will smile back and cheer her up. Only then will she relax her foot on the brake and sail into the middle of the street, very slowly but also with total indifference to the cars behind her.

Maybe she hopes I won’t hear her, knocking so softly on the door? For she is not only hesitant about entering this place she knows so well, which was taken over almost two years ago by her lover, she is also worried that none of her family or friends know that she is about to be swallowed up in a vortex of intense and demanding love, from which nobody can save her but herself. Maybe she hopes that the light knock on the door won’t be heard so that she can turn around and go downstairs with a clear conscience at not having deserted me in my illness, even if she’s sure it isn’t serious. But my soul, which I sent to accompany her here in the big car crawling through the dense early evening traffic, the soul that waits for her when she stops to buy a cake and fruit at the stores I recognize from the times when I followed her and Lazar home on my motorcycle, the soul that blows on her face through the air vents next to the dashboard to persuade her to make a detour and see what the meaning of this silence is on the part of one who left so clear a message about himself — this soul is also attuned to catch not only her lightest knock on the door but even the sound of her breathing if she decides to stand there, without moving, on the other side of my door, as I once stood outside her door.

Is it any wonder, then, that I sprang out of bed, trembling with excitement but protected by the darkness, to open the door to the woman illuminated by the dim light of the stairwell, her umbrella in one hand, her key ring and a little bunch of flowers in the other, and a new hat on her head, which suited the shape of her face and announced to the world by its black color that she still considered herself to be in mourning?

Only then, as she entered the apartment, did I dare switch on a single light, to dispel the darkness and reveal the shadows in the room and discover how exaggerated and even childish my fears were, if they could be so quickly banished. Although I was supposed to be ill, with my hair matted, my face pale and unshaven, my body dressed in a pajama top, she did not ask me how I was but looked around as if she had only now remembered that she was also the landlady, entitled to check up on the nature and extent of the changes made by her tenant in her apartment. Judging by the way the smile vanished from her lips, she was not only surprised but also annoyed by the many changes that Michaela and I had made, wittingly and unwittingly, in her mother’s cozy, well-cared-for apartment. But she refrained from comment and just took a step toward the crib standing in the corner of the living room, and as she looked at the crumpled sheet and the furry teddy bear, which was too big to take to India, I wondered whether Shivi was missing him now, as she crawled down the aisle of the airplane. Anxiously inspecting the woman who was much older than I was, I saw that the new hat was only one sign of the change that had taken place in her appearance: gone was the tailored suit tightly encasing her body, the high heels which were so flattering to her legs, replaced by plain, sturdy comfortable flat shoes and a loose suit with pants, which, even though it completely concealed her stomach, transformed her into a shorter, squarer woman, although, strangely enough, also a younger one. Then at last she turned to me and asked in an inquiring and slightly mocking tone, “Are you really sick?” I bowed my head a little so that she wouldn’t see the faint blush spreading over my cheeks but would be able to hear my halting words of apology for the lie that had brought her to the only place which truly belonged to both of us, as well as the only place where we could now be free of the judgment of the third eye. But she interrupted me in a maternal tone, which also contained a new note of impatience. “Never mind, don’t apologize. I knew you weren’t.” As if to soothe my guilty conscience, she handed me the modest bunch of anemones. I filled a blue vase with water in the light of the quiet flashes of lightning flickering in the window over the sink, and raised the flowers to my face to search their scent for the scent of her body, trembling at the certain knowledge that these flowers were meant not to bring us closer but the opposite, to say good-bye. After I put them in the vase and saw that she was already sitting in the same place on the couch where she had sat two years before and listened silently to my confession, I was flooded by a wave of pain. Did I really have to begin again from the beginning every time I met her? Was everything that happened between us so contrary to nature and divorced from life that it evaporated from meeting to meeting, as if it didn’t have the strength to sustain itself for our benefit? If only she had been able to believe, as Michaela believed, that her husband’s soul had been reincarnated in me, it might have set her mind at rest. I didn’t have to wait for the plane to land in India in order to offer her everything an ardent young man had to offer, so she wouldn’t have to stay by herself anymore.

But it was apparently precisely because she sensed what I was about to offer her now that she had answered my call and made a detour on her way home after a long day’s work. It wasn’t my supposed illness that had drawn her here but the fact of Michaela’s and Shivi’s departure, which had taken place with such speed and which she now realized wasn’t just an idle threat made in anger on the night when I had not come home. The fact that I had cooperated in this adventure of Michaela’s, and agreed to let her uproot the baby from her home and set off on a backpacking trip with no definite limits in time, in strange places filled with filth and sickness, just so that I could be as free as she was — this worried Dori and alarmed her with the obligations it sought to impose on her. When she could no longer contain herself, she blurted out a strange and surprising question—“But who are you?”—even before she asked me what I wanted. Perhaps this was the question I had long been waiting for, for without hesitating I began to tell her, the mere glint of her glasses now filling me with excitement, about the other river, the fifth river, which had flowed alongside me throughout our trip to India: the love and closeness between herself and Lazar. If at first I had been disturbed and put off by the intensity of the relationship between them, which was so different from anything I had known at home between my parents, in the end I was powerfully drawn to it. While I had been careful to wet only the tips of my fingers in the four real rivers flowing between New Delhi and Calcutta, in this fifth river I had bathed my whole body, and as if that weren’t enough, I had also drunk from its waters, which now, after the death of Lazar, were bursting from me until I was no longer sure who I really was. And although I knew that the disparity in age between us made us impossible for each other, I also knew that only I could guarantee that she would never be alone again.

“But I want to be alone.” The surprising answer came in a whisper but with great vehemence, and a gleam of anger flashed in her eyes before it died and disappeared, together with the lights, which now went out not only in the room and the apartment but in all the windows of the buildings surrounding us. And from the entire neighborhood, in which the power had suddenly failed, a faint, muffled sigh rose, a mixture of sorrow and excitement, leading me to pronounce with a smile, which held a little pity too, “But you can’t.”

“Because I never really wanted to before,” she replied with a curious confidence, as if the unexpected darkness that had descended on us enabled her to explain her entire life as if it were purely a matter of will. No wonder then that when I got up to look for a candle or a flashlight, she said, “What for? Leave it. The light will come on again soon anyway.” She took a slender cigarette out of her bag, and with its tip burning in the darkness around us, which seemed to be trying to produce light from every pale object in the room, even from the white smoke curling up from her cigarette, she spoke not only of the need to part from me but also of the obligation to do so, just because we had both lost the protection of our mates. Now that the man whose heart had failed to keep up with the intensity of his desire to dominate her was dead, she felt that the secret relationship that had come into being with me, which had been meant to give her some relief from the suffocation of his boundless and domineering love, was quickly turning into the same kind of demanding love, until she could almost believe, with me sitting in front of her in the dark, that Lazar’s soul had been reincarnated in me.

When I heard this sentence coming explicitly from the mouth of the person who had been closest to him, I could no longer restrain myself and I rose from my place, transported by the heady knowledge that I was now free to realize all my hopes, not only with regard to her but also about the hospital and wherever else I wanted to go. As if not only the city, the country, and the world were opening up before the spirit which bore my darkest and most secret desires, but even the universe itself, where the most beautiful stars were now shining in the continuing darkness around us. But Dori too apparently felt the power of the terrible freedom seeking to engulf her, and she stood up, angry and frightened, and said with a hysterical sob in her voice, “No. Don’t come any closer. You mustn’t touch me. I won’t allow you. It’s impossible. Einat already knows about us. It’s horrible. You have to let me go. Say to yourself, She’s gone. She’s gone to join her husband in the land of the dead.”

Twenty

On the Friday evening of a dry, clear winter’s day, the journey on the top of a double-decker bus going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem seemed not quite real to a motorcyclist used to riding low on the ground — like a gentle sail, rocking the hills and woods and rolling them up like a bolt of soft fabric. Now I was pleased that I had kept my promise not to make the trip on my bike, although I wanted to test its pull on the steep street leading to my parents’ house. This gentle journey, with its pleasant memories of riding on English double-decker buses, seemed to ease and soften the despair of my thoughts. I had lost the battle for my love. As quick and generous as she had been in her response to my first declaration of love, so sharp and stubborn was she now in her refusal to allow me even to approach her, as if she were fighting for her life. Even the darkness of the long power failure seemed to help her in her efforts to evade me. And when I insisted, in spite of her objections, in taking down a dusty candelabrum which had remained on the shelf from her mother’s days, and lit the stubs of the two thick red candles, I was alarmed to see in the light of the crimson flame that her face was hard and burning, as if the struggle to separate herself from me were using up all her strength. A feeling of pity for her stirred in me. And I kept quiet, to make it easier for her to leave me.

When I reached the central bus station on the outskirts of Jerusalem, I saw that nobody was waiting at the stop for my parents’ neighborhood. It looked as if I had missed the last bus. Although I could have called and asked my father to come and get me, I preferred to take a bus to the center of town and walk from there, perhaps in order to postpone the difficult meeting awaiting me. Since the evening when I had blurted out my confession to my mother, I had not met her face to face, and our telephone conversations had become brief and businesslike. Even Michaela and Shivi’s parting from my parents had taken place without me. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt apprehensive about going home.

I slowed down deliberately and tried out a number of new shortcuts in the little streets, which I had not frequented for many years as a pedestrian, wondering at the sight of the many worshipers in heavy coats disappearing into the doorways of private houses which on Friday evenings turned into song-filled little synagogues. Once more I realized how from year to year the Sabbath was tightening its grip on the city, not like Tel Aviv, where it descended like a filmy veil of silence, touching first the tops of the trees, like the ones I saw from Dori’s windows. Although she believed in her heart that if she persisted she would succeed at last in staying by herself, after death had released her from the yoke of love, I knew for certain that at this darkening moment, as dusk descended, she was not alone but surrounded by members of her family — her mother, the soldier, and maybe also Einat, with whom I would have to make my peace — and in the brightly lit apartment they were all helping her prepare dinner. Full of longing for the city I had left behind me, I entered my parents’ home, looking at the remains of the Sabbath candles smoldering in the two old silver candlesticks standing, as always, very far from each other on the dinner table, which in recent months had been surrounded by five chairs, including Shivi’s high chair. But this evening the table had returned to its state during the days of my bachelorhood — three chairs opposite three drearily familiar pale blue plates. I knew I was tense and worried in anticipation of the meeting, and that my parents too were afraid of the anger in their hearts. Since they didn’t know if I would keep my promise to come by bus, my lateness had added a new worry to the anxiety that had been hovering in the air here since Michaela’s and Shivi’s departure. Although a first announcement of their safe landing in India had been recorded on the answering machine, it was too brief to satisfy my father, who was far more concerned about Shivi than my mother. Because he was shy and reserved and careful not to burden others with his feelings, the anxiety secretly gnawing at him had built up into a new and unfamiliar aggression toward me for so lightheartedly allowing his beloved little granddaughter to set out on this irresponsible adventure. And although my mother — who was not an emotional woman, and whose attitude to Michaela and Shivi was always more matter-of-fact and balanced — might have been able to calm his fears a little by speaking to him logically, she did not do it. The gloom and depression that had descended on her with my astonishing confession, whose contents she had decided to keep from my father at all costs, seemed to prevent her from coming to my support in the simple argument that I now repeated to my father — that Michaela was entitled to take her child wherever she wanted to, including India. But this argument did not relieve the gloom around the dinner table. Nor was it dispelled by my parents’ restraint and good manners, nor by the obligatory humor which was part of every Englishman’s birthright. I was especially disturbed by a new phenomenon: my mother persistently and deliberately avoided looking me in the eye. Even when she spoke to me, she averted her face. She did not yet know that my love had been rejected and now caused me nothing but suffering. Seeking my father’s eyes, which met mine unhesitatingly but in total silence, I thought bitterly of the injustice of it all. When I challenged him for not answering my questions, he admitted with a embarrassed smile that he couldn’t stop thinking of what was happening to Shivi in India, what she was eating, where she was sleeping. “Stop worrying,” I said to him, “nothing will happen to her. Michaela has a special talent for finding her way around in the most questionable places.” My father listened and nodded his head, but he did not seem reassured.

At the end of the meal he asked my mother to help him find his prayer shawl, for it appeared that the old janitor in his office had invited all the staff to his grandson’s bar mitzvah, which was to take place the next day in a synagogue in one of the new suburbs that had grown up at some distance from the city. “But do you really intend to go?” my mother said in surprise. “Why risk getting lost? I’m sure nobody really expects you to go.” But my father insisted. He was sure the invitation was genuine. It was important to this good, simple man for my father to honor his grandson’s bar mitzvah with his presence. Uncharacteristically, my mother went on trying to talk him out of going. And then a strange idea occurred to me. She was afraid to remain alone with me in the house, exposed against her will to the story of my love affair, which apparently still filled her with indignation and shocked her to the depths of her being. This being the case, despite my exhaustion after all my sleepless nights, I decided to spare them my painful presence, and soon after dinner I took my father’s car and went to visit Eyal, whom I hadn’t seen for ages. He and his wife had gone to live with his mother, whose condition had deteriorated. Even though I knew that living with her must be difficult for Hadas, I thought that the saving of rent had probably consoled her. Hadas opened the door and kissed me warmly and immediately asked for news from my “Indian women.” Eyal had apparently been delayed at the hospital, and Hadas would soon take the car to pick him up. In the meantime we chatted. She had put on weight and looked placid and serene, as if married life suited her. We spoke about Michaela’s trip to India. “It was only to be expected,” said Hadas. “Ever since she came back, she never stopped announcing her intention to return. When we wondered at the speed with which she agreed to marry you, she said, Benjy’s a doctor, he’ll always find something to do in India.” She didn’t even mention Shivi, as if she were simply a part of Michaela’s body. And when I began to complain about how much I missed the child and how sad it made me to look at her empty crib, it was suddenly time for her to drive to the hospital to pick up Eyal. Before she left, she woke Eyal’s mother, who knew that I was coming and had asked Hadas to receive me. She didn’t get out of bed but invited me into her bedroom, in which nothing had changed since my childhood except for a wheelchair, which was standing next to her bed and which filled me with surprise and concern. She reassured me, a faint blush spreading over her bloated face. She didn’t need the wheelchair, she only used it out of laziness, because her legs found it hard to bear the weight of her body. Indeed, since the last time I had seen her, she had put on even more weight. She was very glad to see me and began telling me all kinds of stories about her son and daughter-in-law, but my heart, which was shriveled up in its own pain and sorrow, was not interested in hearing stories about other people, even if they were good friends. My weariness and the excitement of the past week were also beginning to take their toll. Since I was now deep in the old brown velvet armchair opposite her bed, breathing in the familiar smell of the big bedroom, my eyes began to close of their own accord as she spoke. She smiled to herself. In the light, fitful slumber that descended on me, I saw her getting up, vast beyond belief, wrapping herself in her robe, sitting down in her wheelchair, and riding over to me to place a blanket on my knees, and then gliding out of the room, whose warmth and coziness combined with my depression to make me want to disappear or be absorbed into my surroundings.

When Eyal and Hadas arrived after a considerable delay, the three of us were unable to enjoy the reunion as we had hoped. Even though Eyal was very tired from a hard day at the hospital, he didn’t want to talk about anything not connected to medicine and his work. He was particularly interested in finding out what had happened in Lazar’s open heart surgery, and if anything in my position could change for the worse now that the director who had taken me under his wing had gone. But still a little dazed and slow from my unexpected nap, I answered in general terms, which did not satisfy Eyal, eager for gossip about dramatic confrontations between doctors to rouse his overworked soul from its lethargy. Only his mother was now wide awake, and she even got out of her wheelchair to give us a little midnight snack, including warm cookies fresh from the oven, which I polished off despite how late it was. When I reached home after midnight, I did not make for the kitchen as usual to look for something before I went to bed, but sat for a while in the dark living room, brooding about the fact that although I knew my mother was lying awake in bed, she did not dare to come out to me as usual, as if she were afraid of facing me. I myself would not have objected to holding the impossible but essential clarification between us right now, in the middle of the night. My father’s prayer shawl, which was lying on the table, ironed and neatly folded, testified to the fact that his determination had overcome her fears of being alone with me, and tomorrow, whether we wanted to or not, his absence would force us to confront one another. This being the case, I averted my face when I walked past their open bedroom door, so I wouldn’t see her lying there awake, and went straight to bed. And in complete contrast to the torments of insomnia that I had suffered in recent nights, even before I could curl up in the fetal position to look for help in the memory of that primal sleep, the flicker of consciousness went out, as if the presence of my parents in the next room, even though they were hostile to me at the moment, acted on my nerves like a shot of dormicum.

Perhaps because sleep came to me so immediately, I felt no pleasure on waking but only a sudden oppression, exacerbated by the sound of my mother’s soft but unquiet steps pacing around the house. It was very late, and the fact that my mother had failed to wake me before my father left was a sign not of her consideration for my tiredness but of her fear of listening to my story. To make things easier for her, I didn’t go straight to the kitchen to have breakfast. Instead I went to the bathroom to take a shower and shave and then back to my bedroom to get dressed, and only then, washed and dressed, as in the movies, where the perfectly groomed appearance of the hero at the breakfast table is a declaration of his decency and stability, I looked into the living room, which was bathed in the quiet light of a winter Sabbath in Jerusalem. She was sitting in the corner of the sofa, upholstered with green floral fabric that they had bought on their last visit to England. She was holding her book at a great distance from her upright head, which was as sharp as the head of a sad, tired bird. Vocal music full of emotion was pouring out of the radio, interrupted by the conceited voice of the director of the Saturday morning musical quiz. She sensed my presence immediately, and she looked straight at me, although from a distance, and said, “Everything’s ready on the table, Benjy. Eat first and then we’ll talk.” This strange and definite separation between breakfast and the conversation about to take place was a clearer indication than anything else of her fear that talking about my love would dirty us. I stopped in my tracks, and despite the dryness in my throat and my craving for coffee, I walked into the living room and said, “Never mind. I’ll eat later. Father might be back at any moment. Let’s talk now.” I switched off the radio, and for no apparent reason, without asking her permission, I shut the book which she had placed open on the table — an English translation of a Hebrew novel she had mentioned admiringly at dinner last night. Then I lowered myself slowly into an armchair and asked, “Are you angry with me?” Before she had a chance to answer I added, “If you’re angry or worried, there’s no more reason for you to be. The relationship I told you about has already been broken off. And anyway, what did you think? That there was any chance for a love like that?” It was possible to sense the deep shock that passed through her at the sound of the word “love” coming from my mouth. “What are you talking about?” she asked, as if she could hardly breathe. “About my love for that woman,” I replied firmly and quickly, trying to fix her eyes on mine and not let her evade me anymore. “But how can it be possible?” She dropped her eyes with a forgiving smile, as if struggling with the strange obstinacy of a child. “It’s possible,” I stated in a voice that was quiet but full of anger. “I’m telling you so. Listen to me. I’m very unhappy, because I fell in love with that woman with all my heart and soul.” My mother clenched her hand and raised it to her mouth in a gesture of obvious distress. A long silence ensued. “But when did it begin? This love of yours?” she asked in the end, and a very thin, twisted smile passed over her lips, as if only by twisting them could she force her lips to pronounce the word in whose reality she had up to now refused to believe in — perhaps for herself as well. “When?” I was at a loss, because it suddenly seemed to me that we were talking about something very ancient. “Apparently on our trip to India. But not at the beginning, only toward the end. At first she got on my nerves. But at the end my feelings underwent a transformation. Maybe they took a young doctor with them so that he would fall in love with Einat, but I fell in love with her instead.” My mother listened to me with concentrated attention, nodding her head slightly. “But what do you want now?” she asked gently, the shy little girl’s fist still by her mouth. “What you always want when you love somebody. Everything,” I answered calmly, suddenly feeling that only the whole truth, that truth which had always been a supreme value in this house, would protect me from her disgust, even if I revealed everything that had happened over the past two years to her. “Yes, everything,” I repeated firmly, “because I already had everything. Because I’ve already been with her. Even before Lazar’s death. Even before my marriage to Michaela, but afterward too. A few times. In England, for example, when you were away, in the house where you stayed — but not in your room, in another room further inside the house.” My mother’s face now turned very red, as if the indication of the exact spot made the act so powerfully real that it made her giddy. She averted her face, in profound agitation but not in anger. Did she think that what had happened a few feet from the room where she had stayed with my father had caused Lazar’s death and compelled Michaela to take Shivi and escape to India?

But even if such harsh thoughts crossed her mind, she repressed them and said nothing, perhaps in the hope of stopping the spate of my confession and not giving me any more opportunities to reveal further details about the love that aroused such antipathy in her. The minute I grasped the power of the truth in my hands, I took pity on her and kept quiet. “But now, Benjy, you say it’s all over?” she suddenly asked with great delicacy. I bowed my head in confirmation. “But why? Now that Lazar’s dead?” asked my mother in surprise, logical to the end in spite of her revulsion. And something like a faint smile began breaking inside me, as I tried to explain the woman who wanted to test her ability to be a self-sufficient, independent human being. Even her response to me had only resulted from her wish to lighten the burden of her husband’s suffocating love, which because of her inability to be alone had twined about her like a strong, stubborn vine. My mother’s thin mouth parted a little in amazement as she listened to me, and it was now possible to discern, beneath the wrinkles on her face, the straight and delicate features of the naive Scottish girl she had once been. “But I thought …” she stammered. “So did I,” I interrupted without letting her finish her sentence, without knowing what she wanted to say — trying with all my strength to avoid her small, slightly bloodshot eyes. “And maybe that’s the reason I’m so miserable and confused. Because now that I feel his love forcing me to dominate her too, I know she’s right.” A deathly pallor spread over my mother’s face, as if the mysterious and absurd thing I had just said was far more dangerous in her eyes than my lost love for the woman who was only nine years her junior. And then my mother, the epitome of restraint and composure, couldn’t sit still any longer, and she jumped up in a storm of agitation, her stooped back turning her into a dangerous bird, her braided bun coming loose without her being aware of it and falling onto her shoulders, and with her arms folded on her chest, perhaps in order to muffle the pounding of her heart, she began pacing up and down the big room, looking all the time at the clock on the wall, until she recovered her self-control and stood before me in a calmer frame of mind and suggested that I go and have my breakfast, as if the egg, the cheese, the coffee, and the toast would do more than any words at her command to return me, and perhaps her too, to the only reality she considered worthy of the name.

When she saw me hesitate, she added, “Come on, I could do with a cup of coffee too.” I stood up and followed her into the kitchen, sat down in my usual place, and looked at the piece of butter beginning to melt in the black pan. She broke an egg, dropped it into the pan, and surrounded it with pieces of salami. Should I take pity on her and stop now? I asked myself. Or should I remain faithful to the truth? The egg began to bubble; the slices of salami began sinking into its edges. She sliced bread and put it in the toaster; then she dished up some of the Quaker Oats my father had prepared for himself before setting out early in the morning, to fortify himself for the long hours in the synagogue. She put the bowl of oats in front of me without asking if I wanted it, apparently in the belief that the traditional breakfast of my childhood would bring me back to my senses. But the pleasant smell of the cinnamon strewn over the wrinkled white surface of the oats, the smell of the childhood of an only son, who knew that whether he liked it or not, in the course of his life he would become the be-all and end-all of his parents’ existence, made me so profoundly sad that my eyes suddenly darkened. I put the spoon down, feeling that all I wanted was to go back to bed and sink into a long sleep. My mother noticed the spoon slipping from my hand, and without saying anything she moved the bowl away carefully and smiled at me. In spite of everything, the news of my breakup with Dori had appeased her and brought her some relief. But her relief only sharpened my pain, and I felt my hunger vanish, and without looking at her I pushed away the big plate she now placed in front of me, with the fried egg surrounded by the red salami, which in my childhood I saw in my imagination as the huge eye of a prehistoric beast, and I started to talk to my mother frankly, to warn her of what was happening inside me. Even though I had always accepted her teachings about not wasting time on the impossible and always doing only the right and proper thing, now, after Lazar’s death, I saw that what had once seemed fantastic and impossible might be real and possible. Without deciding the question of whether the soul as such existed or there was no such thing, as Hishin had argued in his eulogy next to Lazar’s grave, I felt that whatever had taken possession of me, real or imaginary, had turned my love into the only thing worth living for, and without it life would be bitter and lonely, frightening and superfluous. Now that Michaela had gone and taken Shivi with her, I felt that I was losing my ability to stay by myself, an ability that I had always had and that I could always rely on. For a number of nights now I hadn’t been able to sleep. And I felt nervous and exhausted all the time. I knew that I could easily put myself to sleep, just as I put other people to sleep every day on the operating table. Without pain, in a state of complete relaxation — the absolute sleep that a doctor could bestow on himself in exchange for all his years of study and experience.

She turned off the gas under the boiling kettle and poured herself a cup of coffee. Her head was bowed and her face was so mournful that I asked myself whether she saw my thoughts of death, which I had thrown at her simply to show her how miserable I was, as an actual possibility. Did she recognize a catastrophe inside me of which I myself was not yet aware? Without consulting me, she took the plate I had pushed away, slid the wounded eye back into the frying pan, and asked me, “Is it possible that you’re really thinking of it?” I saw that she didn’t have the courage to say the word itself, and I asked her, “Of what?” in order to force her to say it. And she said it, holding the cup between her hands, careful not to touch it with her lips, as if death had settled into the black liquid. “Yes, Mother,” I answered calmly. “Already in India I was drawn to the riverbanks to see the cremation of the dead, for even if death seems more natural and less tragic there, it is very far from being empty.” My mother’s face was now so grave that she really seemed to be taking my threat seriously. And the thought suddenly flashed through my mind, Why couldn’t I have used the same threat with Dori? At least when I had insisted on accompanying her down the dark stairs to her car, which was parked in a nearby street whose darkness was interrupted by the flickering light of oil or gas lights. They reminded me of the dim lights in the ring-shaped street in New Delhi where I had gone around in circles on my way back from the Red Fort, without arriving at the hotel where she lay dozing, not because she was tired but out of loyalty to her husband, who had fallen exhausted onto his hotel bed after spending a sleepless night on the plane. I had pointed the lamps out to her and reminded her of New Delhi, but she smiled without remembering. Her flat shoes made her look shorter and clumsier, but also younger, perhaps because the new black hat was no longer on her head but at her nape, tied around her neck with the ends of the scarf dangling from it. I should have done it then, in the dark Tel Aviv street, which was full of a real, powerful mystery; I should have threatened this woman who wanted to cut herself off from me and stay by herself. If it had been the opposite, if I had wanted to leave and she had asked me to stay, I would not have hurt her as she was hurting me. But I said nothing then, for I knew that she would smile and dismiss my threat like dust. Only my mother, who knew me better than anyone else, knew that I had never, not even when I was a small child, uttered a threat that wasn’t real to me. And as she stood now with the cup of coffee between her hands, she did not have to wonder whether the threat was real or imaginary, but only to say in a low voice, “How dare you even think of such a thing? There are people who depend on you.”

“Not you,” I replied quietly but vehemently. “Certainly not you. The only person who depends on me is Shivi, and she’s got Michaela, who’ll always take care of her because she sees her as part of herself.”

My father’s footsteps were now heard, and judging by the speed with which the front door opened and the way he called my mother’s name, I guessed that he had come back cheerful and content, if not with the ceremony at the synagogue, at least with his own good deed, and perhaps also at not having lost his way. His face was blotched with red, a sure sign that he had been drinking wine. “You came back so soon?” said my mother, getting up quickly and going to meet him in the hallway, to prevent him from coming into the kitchen, presumably to give me time to recover and wipe the glum expression from my face. “Why soon?” said my father in an offended tone, as if he had forgotten his worries during the morning’s little adventure. “I left the house at seven o’clock this morning, and how long can they drag out their prayers?” It turned out that he had found his way without too much difficulty, and since he was the only one of the office staff to put in an appearance, he was greeted with respect and enthusiasm and also given the honor of reading from the Torah. “It was important for me to go,” he affirmed, if not to us then at least to himself, and he took off his hat and entered the kitchen. When he noticed the primeval wounded eye, which had shriveled a little in the pan, he said, “Is that for me?”

“Yes,” said my mother, “if you want it. Benjy didn’t feel like eating this morning.” He sat down immediately and ate my breakfast with relish, even though he had had refreshments at the synagogue too. He realized from our silence that something important had been said between us during his absence, but he was too full of his own experiences to try to find out what it was, and I soon left to wander around the neighborhood until lunch and breathe the dry, cold air of the radiant Sabbath morning. Strange how rarely I had set out on foot in recent years, I thought, and a sweet melancholy descended on me with the memory of the rainy evening when I had walked across Tel Aviv holding a big black umbrella over my head. But how different the Jerusalem streets were from the straight, open streets of Tel Aviv. Where could you find in the whole of Tel Aviv a steep narrow lane like this, running along the wall of the Lepers’ Hospital and suddenly opening out into the plaza fronting the Jerusalem Theater? What a pity that I couldn’t test the true power of the new motorcycle on an incline like this, I thought regretfully, as if I were about to leave the place forever. And thus, with a feeling of parting, perhaps genuine, perhaps imaginary, I continued along the street of the foreign consulates, which I had taken every day to school, examining the familiar facades of the houses and stopping to read the signs on the gates. Among them were many brass plates with the names of physicians, mentioning degrees and specializations, and I was surprised to see how many of them I still remembered from my schooldays, such as the big old sign bearing the name of the famous cardiologist Professor Ziegfried Adler, and next to it a small new one, PROFESSOR AVRAHAM ADLER, CARDIAC SURGEON. So this is where Bouma lives, I said to myself, the master-surgeon who came down from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to kill the administrative director and send his soul flying into mine in order to ruin my love affair. And all the arguments Bouma had piled on top of each other hadn’t torn off the veil of mystery surrounding that death.

I felt an urge to go inside and see the house. After all, I had promised Professor Adler to drop in to see him when I was in Jerusalem, so we could continue our discussion about Lazar’s sudden cardiac fibrillation. He seemed like a serious doctor who was interested in hearing the questions and observations of a younger colleague. It was almost noon. Even the laziest people were already up, and the most industrious could afford an hour of idleness at this time of day on a Saturday. Was it possible that the son, the successful professor, stayed in the same old apartment as his father? I wondered when I saw that there was only one entrance to the house, with an old sign simply saying ADLER, without any first names on the door. I was sure it couldn’t be where my Adler lived. But since the music pouring out of the house had a welcoming sound, I knocked on the door, and a sprightly old German Jew in a sporty sweater opened it. I explained not only who I was and who I was looking for, but also why. It turned out that Adler Junior did not live here but in Ein Karem, near the hospital; only his clinic was here, next to his father’s clinic and residence. In the meantime Professor Adler’s mother came out too, a stout, confident German who had bequeathed her plumpness to her son. What a pity, exclaimed both Adlers, who seemed very suited to each other; they would have phoned their son at home to ask if he could see me, but he had flown to a conference in England yesterday and would only be returning in a few days’ time. “A pity,” repeated the pleasant old man, the well-known cardiologist. “I’m sure he would have wanted to talk to you, Dr. Rubin, about Mr. Lazar’s operation, which we were all very sorry about. I know who you are; he mentioned the fact that you were present at the operation and that you thought of the ventricular tachycardia. He spoke to me a lot about that operation, and although it wasn’t his fault, he was left with an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. True, it isn’t exactly his specialization, it’s more my specialization, but he wants to go into the subject more deeply, in order not to be taken by surprise …” He laid his gnarled old hand on his sweater in the area of the heart, as if he felt a pain there. “I know,” I interrupted him, “Koch’s triangle.” The old man’s face lit up, and his brown eyes, full of humanity, gave me a warm look of acknowledgment. “Yes, Koch’s triangle,” he repeated happily and in an intimate tone, as if he had been personally acquainted with the learned Koch, who had identified the tiny invisible command post of the heart. He invited me in. But the conversation with Professor Adler Senior, which continued for a whole hour in his big study, where the somber library consisted mainly of history and literature rather than medical books, did not help to solve the mystery of Lazar’s death but only increased it. During the course of the conversation I discovered that this famous cardiologist, who had been one of the great names of Hadassah Hospital in his day, was not really interested in the cause of Lazar’s death, having never met the man. His only aim was to protect the reputation of his son, and with this in mind he began to tell me about all kinds of cases of sudden ventricular fibrillations that he had come across in the course of his long career and tried to connect them to Lazar. His wife, who sat next to us and listened attentively to our conversation, interrupted from time to time to mention patients of her husband’s whom she recalled. Although it was very pleasant to sit there between the two kindly old people, protected from the bright midday light outside, and to impress them with both my knowledge and understanding and with my interest and questions, I could not keep my parents from their lunch any longer.

I hurried home, and although I was only half an hour late I saw by the dread on my mother’s face that she had taken my threat with alarming seriousness, and after lunch I decided not to go out again but spent the afternoon dozing in my room, in anticipation of the sleepless nights awaiting me now that I was unable to stay by myself in the empty house. My father too, still tipsy from the wine they had plied him with at the synagogue, sank into a deep sleep. My mother sat up trying to read her novel, but in the end she couldn’t help herself and came into my room to make me swear not to divulge a word of our conversation to my father. Why make him any more miserable than he already was? She didn’t say anything about my threat, as if talking about it added to its reality. But in the evening, when I was already back in Tel Aviv, she took advantage of a brief absence on my father’s part to call and ask how I was feeling now. My vague and detached answers, and especially my fear of not being able to sleep, increased her anxiety, and she suggested that I come back to spend a few days in Jerusalem. “But how can I? I’m expected at the hospital tomorrow.” She thought for a moment and then said that perhaps she or my father, or both of them, could come to Tel Aviv for a day or two. To her surprise, I didn’t turn this offer down immediately. “We’ll see,” I said. “Let’s think about it.” But she persisted, and suddenly she began speaking haltingly in English, which she never spoke to me. If I was thinking of doing anything drastic, I should warn her, at least. “Don’t take us by surprise,” she whispered over the phone, turning the vague threat I had presented her with that morning into something real and alive. “You have no moral right to keep even the thought from me,” she added. “I’ve never hidden anything from you.” And she was right; neither she nor my father had ever hidden anything from me, nor did it seem as if they had anything to hide. “But why are you in such a panic?” I said with grim humor, lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, laying the side of my face on the exact spot where Dori had sat with her legs crossed, listening with excited sympathy to the declaration of love bursting out of me. “Not that I’m really thinking of harming myself, but if you believed in reincarnation, you would find the world less alarming. Because if anything happens to me, I’ll leave you my soul, at least.” But she was in no mood now to understand irony or witticisms on my part.

In the middle of the night the phone rang, shattering the remnants of my brittle sleep. It was Michaela, calling as the dawn rose in Varanasi. Her voice was warm, clear, and joyful. “Varanasi?” I cried in astonishment, and with a note of envy. “I thought that this time you wanted to go to places you haven’t been to before.” “Right,” admitted Michaela, who sounded happy and relaxed, but how could she deprive Stephanie of the chance to touch the open heart of India? Even I, the superficial tourist, knew that the heart was there, in the ghats and temples lining the banks of the Ganges. “And Shivi?” I cried. “What about Shivi?” Shivi too could not fail to be impressed by the spiritual power of Varanasi, because she was now happy and contented after a little restlessness in New Delhi, perhaps because of the diarrhea, which was already clearing up. “But what was it?” The strange cry that escaped me was not only the cry of a father and physician, too far away to save his child, but also the cry of someone in need of salvation himself. But Michaela, who even in her joy grasped my pain, quickly reassured me. I could rely on her. When it came to Shivi there were no compromises. In any case, in a few days’ time they would be in Calcutta, where they would be surrounded by excellent doctors and good friends. “Calcutta again?” I exclaimed in surprise, and the suspicion entered my heart that the doctors of Calcutta were as much an attraction to her as the mystery and fascination of India. “And Shivi?” I couldn’t help bursting out again. “How are the Indians treating her?” And this strange question, which had broken out of me in the hallucination of nighttime, was greeted with excitement. Even an “expert” on India like Michaela would never have imagined that Shivi would arouse such interest and affection among the Indians, who were not accustomed to seeing such a small representative of the West; in her tininess, she exposed the humanity common to us all. When Michaela told them her name, their interest turned to real enthusiasm. “They’re not annoyed that you gave her the name of one of their gods?” I cried, with a tumult of feelings flooding me. But it appeared that not only did they feel no anger, they expressed only joy and admiration at seeing the little creature with her light blue eyes bearing the name of the stern and dangerous god, the destroyer of the world — so much so that people sometimes followed her around. “Be careful, Michaela, for God’s sake, be careful,” I began to shout into the receiver as her voice grew fainter as if it were being carried away in a gale. Then it was completely lost.

I couldn’t go back to sleep after this conversation, and I had to be at the hospital very early in the morning anyway, since all the operations had been moved up to the first half of the day because of the farewell party for Dr. Nakash, which was to take place at lunchtime. Nakash himself appeared in the operating room as usual on this, his last day of work, to stand with his famous serenity next to the anesthesia machine, his smooth bald head gleaming darkly through the plastic of his cap. No wonder the speakers at the farewell party in the little auditorium next to the administrative wing were full of sincere praise for the devoted loyalty of this man, who in forty years of work had never missed a day. Hishin also made a speech in honor of his faithful anesthetist, but ever since Lazar’s death he had lost his confidence and humor, and his speech soon became boring. The ceremony was conducted by a young man of about thirty, who was introduced as one of the two directors who were taking over Lazar’s job. “I see,” I said with some emotion to Miss Kolby — who came to the party not because she knew Nakash but because she was still at loose ends after having been removed from her position in the administrative director’s office—“that one man isn’t enough to fill the void left by Lazar.” Indeed, it needed more than one man to overturn some of the decisions taken by the former director, such as bestowing a permanent a half-time position on a young doctor. My job was canceled that very day, right after the party, when I spoke with the new man, who was my age and who apologized profusely and tried to appease my obvious depression, which was caused not by the cancellation, which I had expected, but by the youth of the man now rocking in the chair of the previous director, whose soul had rapidly departed from my body.

Until a new post was found for me as a regular resident in the anesthesiology department, I could only be grateful to Dr. Nakash, who invited me the next day to act as an assistant anesthetist in a private operation at the hospital in Herzliah. During the entire course of the lengthy operation, removing malignancies and metastases from the patient’s abdomen and chest, Hishin was unusually quiet and sad, and when I saw that he was deliberately avoiding my eye, it occurred to me that he had heard either directly or indirectly about my affair with Dori. But after the operation was over, when we were getting dressed in the changing room, I discovered the real reason for his hostility. Professor Adler had told Hishin about my visit to his father. “What exactly are you up to, Dr. Rubin?” He pushed me into a corner. “Are you really only interested in discovering the truth?”

“Yes,” I replied immediately and unhesitatingly, trying to hide my naked legs from his eyes, “that’s all. Nothing else. And I would keep it to myself as well. What did you think? That I would go and tell Dori?” His little eyes scrutinized me in silence, believing and not believing. Then he continued sternly, “I hope so. I certainly hope so…. I hope you won’t get it into your head to go to her and involve her in your truth. It’s time you grew up, Dr. Rubin, and realized that there are mysteries in medicine too. That’s its fascination. We deal with living human beings, not inanimate objects.” I couldn’t resist asking, “But how is she? How is Dori? Is she getting over it?” Now Hishin couldn’t help smiling a faint smile of satisfaction. “Can you ever really tell?” He spread his hands out in a questioning gesture. “But at least we’ve succeeded in persuading her to go on a trip to Europe. We’ve already made a date to meet her in Paris next week.” Because of his obscure marital status, there was no knowing whether there was another woman behind his use of the first-person plural or he was referring only to himself. In any case I couldn’t restrain myself. “She’s going to Europe already?” I burst out in a cry of pain. The old ironic gleam returned to Hishin’s eyes. “I trust you don’t have any objections?” He leaned over and gave my shoulder a friendly pat. My heart beat painfully. Was she already capable of taking a trip on her own, whereas I found it more difficult from minute to minute to stay by myself?

When I recognized Dr. Nakash standing quietly at the bus stop, I braked and offered him my crash helmet if he would agree to let me take him home. Nakash had had his driving license suspended for three months for speeding. “You, speeding?” I marveled as he put the helmet, still warm from my head, onto his own bald head. “And I always see you as the most stable person in the world.”

“Is that what you see?” Nakash grinned and got onto the pillion. He confessed that he had never been on a motorcycle before, but I felt no current of fear behind my back; instead, his hand, which sometimes seemed to put patients to sleep and wake them up by its touch alone, lay lightly on my shoulder, somewhat calming my anxiety about the lonely night ahead. I took him home and gladly accepted his invitation to go up and have something to drink in his small apartment, which in contrast to my expectations was rather chaotic; the living room was filled with scientific journals, and the equipment of a small, improvised laboratory dominated half the room. Nakash and his wife were testing the possibilities of combining anesthetics, analgesics, and muscle relaxants used in the operating room into tranquilizers for everyday use. “Only tranquilizers?” I asked, willingly giving Mrs. Nakash my cup for another round of coffee, which had a good but unfamiliar taste. “Or more than that?” They exchanged looks, as if wondering how far they could trust me. They were both very dark and skinny, as alike in their ugliness as identical twins.

They naturally avoided giving me a full and unequivocal answer, but it was evident that they wanted to give me a hint, mentioning that their own end would be quick and gentle, and above all free of the arbitrary decisions of self-righteous doctors, sanctifying the suffering of life. In order to show me concrete proof of their success, they gave me a little bottle containing a few sleeping tablets, the product of their home laboratory, which differed from the usual sleeping pills prescribed by family doctors not in the heaviness or duration of the sleep they induced but in the speed with which it descended, and perhaps also in the ease and pleasantness of waking from this sleep. Even though I felt more prepared to face the night with the little bottle in my pocket, I decided not to hurry home, and in spite of the gale-force winds blowing, it occurred to me to keep an old promise and go to visit Amnon at his place of work. He was so surprised and pleased to see me that he could hardly bring himself to let me out of his bearlike embrace. “And I was beginning to think that you were getting fed up with me because of that damn thesis,” he blurted out — a strange but accurate complaint, which gave me a guilty pang. “But I’ll finish it, Benjy, you’ll see. If I’m a little stuck, it’s only because I don’t want to chew over the same old stuff as everybody else, I want to say at least one thing that will be absolutely original.” And this original idea he sought not only by day, at home or in the library, but also by night at his watchman’s post, especially now that he had been promoted and no longer had to walk around the perimeter of the factory, but sat with a walkie-talkie and telephone in the little hut, which was full of his books and papers. But before talking about himself and his plans, he wanted to hear about all the women I had sent to India. Had they already reached their destination in Calcutta? Michaela had promised to phone him from there, directly to this hut. If Michaela had revealed to him what she had hidden from me, I said to myself, perhaps he knew other things about her too. And to my astonishment I discovered that Amnon did indeed know things about her, and about me, that nobody had told him but that he had grasped through his own intelligence and intuition, and especially through his immense curiosity, dating from our high school days, about his friends and acquaintances.

“Did you guess about my impossible love affair too?” I couldn’t resist asking him, without looking him in the eye, my head bent over the papers strewn on the table in an attempt to identify something familiar in his equations and charts. He was surprised by the unexpected confidence I was placing in him. No, he admitted honestly. He had heard about it for the first time from Michaela when they said good-bye. He had guessed that something which affected me deeply had happened in India, but he thought it was connected with Einat and not her mother. Yes, at first he had sensed that something had opened up in me when I came back from India, but on the way back from Eyal’s wedding, when we had stopped on the little hill on the road from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem and I had begun holding forth about my own private theory of the contraction of the universe and how spirit was going to shrink matter until there was nothing left of it, he had begun to worry about me. I had always been the good friend whom nobody had to worry about, the successful student who homed in steadily and accurately on the target his parents had set for him. But when he saw the speed with which I decided to marry Michaela — whom, if I didn’t mind his saying so, I didn’t really love enough — he began to feel that I might be following in his footsteps and losing my way. Even now, if I had come to visit him here in the middle of the night, it meant that I wasn’t in the greatest shape. While he himself was stuck and buried in the ground, maybe because of his brother — yes, because of his poor little brother — I, who had always seemed to him the ideal, well-balanced man, had turned into a kind of spaceship which had gone out of orbit and was now spinning aimlessly among the stars. But a spaceship that could be brought back on course. I myself must have seen how astronauts left their shuttles to return straying objects to their original course. Because that was the great advantage of space — nothing crashed there.

For a moment he was silent, astonished at himself for having blamed his failure on his retarded brother. And then, as if unable to contain his emotion, he stood up and hugged me warmly again, pressing the revolver on his belt against my chest until I too had to stand up and return his hug. Thus we stood embracing in the little watchman’s hut, listening in the silence to the wind howling outside, accompanied by the unearthly whistles of the walkie-talkie. Although my heart genuinely ached for him, I felt repelled by the sentimentality that had been overpowering him of late. God save me from deteriorating into this kind of pain and self-pity, I thought with increasing disgust. Better to be detached — not depression but Nirvana, which is the end of all incarnations. I was already thinking of Nakash’s sleeping pills, which would sweeten the night for me. You can always rely on Nakash, Hishin used to say. The news that Dori was going to travel to Europe by herself continued to astound me. Was it possible? I thought in anger and envy. Mightn’t it be dangerous? And a new thought came into my mind. I had to find Einat and talk to her. Gently but decisively I extricated myself from Amnon’s emotional embrace, and although I had the telephone number of Einat’s apartment, I asked him if he knew what she was up to. He hadn’t bumped into her since the night of Michaela’s departure, but he thought she was still working as a waitress in the same pub where she had worked before.

In spite of his detailed explanations, I did not find the place easily. The savage wind buffeting the motorcycle led me astray in the little streets close to the sea in the north of the city, and it was a long time before I found myself standing in front of the red-painted wooden door with the name of the pub emblazoned on it. It was a small place, apparently not very popular, for even on a night like this only a handful of people had taken refuge in it, and even they were sitting in a noncommittal way, as if they were still making up their minds whether to stay. The music was not too loud and pleasant enough, and I didn’t have to look far for Einat, in jeans and a red tee shirt with the name of the place printed on it, collecting glasses from one of the tables. Remembering her panic on the night I took her home after we said good-bye to Michaela, I didn’t go up to her at once, but only waved to her from a distance and sat down in a quiet corner where we would be able to talk later. Although she must have realized that I had gone there looking for her, she didn’t come up to me but sent the second waitress to take my order while she went to stand behind the bar, as if to place an additional barrier between us. She knows everything, I thought fearfully. After I had traveled to the ends of the earth to take care of her, and may have saved her life at a certain moment, could she really want to sever all contact with me? Even now I could remember the results of her blood tests, and my hands still remembered her swollen liver. I couldn’t help myself. I took my beer from the waitress and carried it over to the bar, to sit opposite her and force her to listen to what I had to say. But Einat, who had obviously been watching my every move, hurried to a remote corner of the pub and began talking to the people sitting at one of the tables. The few people and low music made it impossible to force her to face me and listen to at least one question without arousing attention. I therefore remained standing at the bar, sipping my beer slowly, knowing that sooner or later she would have to come back. But instead she disappeared. I asked the other waitress where she had gone, but she said she didn’t know. I waited a few minutes and then asked for my glass to be refilled and returned to my table. But Einat didn’t come back, and since no new customers showed up, the second waitress did not seem bothered by her disappearance.

Half an hour passed. One of the customers requested rock and roll, and the second waitress immediately complied with his wishes. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t used to drinking, and the two beers had made me slightly light-headed. I decided to leave, but not before visiting the bathroom. It was deserted, but next to it was a door leading to the little neon-lit kitchen. I saw her immediately, sitting in the corner next to a big refrigerator and holding a glass of milk. Presumably it hadn’t occurred to her that I would pursue her, for when she saw me she turned very pale, as if she had seen a ghost, jumped up from her chair, and held her slender hand up to stop me with a desperate, pathetic gesture, which I immediately respected. She looked frantic, afraid to meet my eyes, her fingers nervously pleating the edges of the big red tee shirt, hoping against hope that someone would come in to save her from confronting me. But nobody came in, and the savage new music grew louder inside the pub.

“Tell me, Einat, did I make a mistake when I fell in love with your mother instead of falling in love with you?” I asked her in a quiet voice, without beating around the bush. Her face, which looked even purer than usual against the gaudy background of the colored bottles on the wall, turned bright red. She shook her head quickly, as if trying to repulse me, and mumbled, “No, you didn’t make a mistake.”

“Your mother and father took me to India to fall in love with you, and I behaved like a doctor,” I went on. “Was I wrong? Tell me, was I wrong?” She went on shaking her head with a tormented expression on her face and said, “No, you weren’t wrong. You couldn’t have behaved any differently.” Now a deep calm descended on me, as if I had received her approval for the oblivion I sought. But she didn’t know what I intended to do, and fearing a continuation of the conversation, she slipped nimbly past me like a little squirrel, taking great care not to touch me. She hurried up the steps and just as she was, in the thin tee shirt, opened the wooden door, letting in a wild gust of wind, and disappeared, perhaps into the pub next door.

In the stairwell I heard the telephone ringing as I arrived home. It can only be Michaela, I thought, and I began running upstairs. But the ringing stopped before I could open the door. On the little bottle Dr. Nakash had given me was a label listing all the ingredients of the home-produced drug he had concocted. Should I take a whole pill? I wondered, and broke one of the little tablets in two. I swallowed one of the halves, and judging by the speed with which my eyes drooped, I realized that the minute quantities of a distilled poppy extract which the experienced anesthetist had added to the usual ingredients had produced a knockout sleeping pill. But I couldn’t allow the wonderful heaviness to overpower me, because in the depths of my mind I was waiting for the phone to ring again. Which it soon did. But it wasn’t Michaela, it was my mother. “Where have you been? Where have you been?” Her voice rose complainingly in my ear, as if I owed it to her to be at home when she was looking for me. It turned out that Michaela had called my parents from Calcutta early in the evening and had a long conversation with them. “So what do you want?” I responded sulkily to this information, hanging on to the thin, slippery thread of wakefulness trying to slip away from me. “Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” But my mother had a definite aim in mind. Michaela and Shivi had arrived safely and found rooms in a hostel where some of the volunteer doctors were staying, but Shivi had not yet recovered from the diarrhea that had started in New Delhi, and she had a slight fever too. Ever since this conversation my parents had had no peace. Didn’t I think it was time for me to take a firmer line with Michaela? They had succeeded in getting the phone number of a store near the hostel where it would be possible to leave a message for her. While I struggled against the thick blanket of sleep that was now wrapping itself around me, I tried to reassure her. Diarrhea was endemic in India, especially in newly arrived tourists. Lazar had suffered from it throughout the trip, and nothing had happened to him in the end. But the main thing — which they seemed to have forgotten — was that Michaela was now in the company of real, Western doctors, and they would help her overcome all of Shivi’s problems. I didn’t know if I had succeeded in dispelling my mother’s anxiety, but the shock effects of Nakash’s half-tablet made it impossible for me to say anymore, and I rudely cut the conversation short, perhaps even without saying good-bye.

The next day in the afternoon, when I began disconnecting my patient from the anesthesia machine before checking his pupils in the narrow beam of my flashlight, one of the nurses from the intensive care unit came up to me and told me that there was a woman waiting for me in the waiting room. To my surprise I found my mother sitting among the relatives of the people undergoing surgery, probably listening as usual to other people’s troubles without saying anything about her own. Had she identified herself as the mother of one of the young doctors standing next to the operating table, or had she kept quiet in order not to appear boastful? Even from a distance she looked very tired and tense, like someone now fighting alone on two fronts without knowing which was the most important. She was wearing her gray wool suit, which I remembered from my high school graduation ceremony, and although last night’s gale had swept the clouds from the sky and left it a sparkling, polished blue, she had not forgotten to bring her umbrella, like the native of the British Isles she was. I touched her shoulder and bent over her tenderly. She interrupted her conversation and looked up, confused to see me in my green operating-room uniform. Then she introduced me to the woman sitting next to her, who immediately asked me if I knew anything about her husband’s operation. I apologized to her for not knowing anything, and without asking my mother what had brought her to me, I lifted her to her feet and offered to show her around the operating rooms, which she had never seen before. She was surprised and pleased by my offer, and only wanted to know first if I had permission to take her inside. I told her that I didn’t need anyone’s permission and took a white gown from one of the trolleys and helped her on with it. Then I secured a plastic head-cover over the thin, childish braid coiled on the nape of her neck. Naturally I didn’t take her into the room where an operation was underway, but into the one that had just been vacated, to show her the various instruments and especially the anesthesia machine and to tell her the names of the different anesthetics, pointing out the little colored bottles. She listened attentively to my explanations, and although she didn’t appear to be taking in too much of what I said, she didn’t ask any questions, as though some new and menacing thought were preoccupying her and paralyzing her mind as she gazed at all the lethal possibilities at my disposal.

Since I was due to participate in another operation shortly, we had no time to dawdle, and I took her up to the cafeteria to hear the real reason for her unexpected visit. It was hard to get anything clear out of her. First of all, she protested, she hadn’t made a special trip to see me. She had been to visit my father’s aunt in the old folks’ home, the grandmother of his niece Rachel, who had been so nice to them in London, she and her husband Edgar. And afterward it had occurred to her to drop in on me in the hospital, to talk to me about Shivi. My reassurances the night before had not succeeded in putting her mind to rest. She wanted to give me the phone number in Calcutta where I could get in touch with Michaela again. If Michaela wanted to endanger herself, let her, but she had no right to put the baby at risk. Altogether, my mother was surprised at me — how could I be so indifferent to my own child? I wanted to make a crushing reply, but I said nothing, trying unsuccessfully to imagine Shivi in Calcutta. While I was drinking the last drops of coffee, I looked into her bloodshot eyes and tried to figure out what it was she wanted from me. She, who never lingered over partings, was now finding it difficult to part from me, and after I accompanied her to the exit, she turned around and followed me back to the surgical wing. “Don’t worry about Shivi,” I repeated before pressing the numbers of the code that opened the big glass doors. For a moment I wanted to add, You should worry about me instead, but I didn’t, and I disappeared from her view into the bright corridor opening out in front of me.

The next evening, after I had eaten my supper, despairingly aware of how my new dread of being alone was creeping up on me even in the early twilight hours, I decided to return to the hospital and explore the possibilities available to me in one of the empty operating rooms. The thought of going to sleep on the operating table and never waking up seemed increasingly attractive to me. But at seven o’clock my father phoned from Jerusalem. It appeared that when he came home from work that afternoon my mother wasn’t at home, although the insurance agency where she worked as a secretary was closed on Tuesday afternoons. He had found a vague note saying, “Gone out for a while, don’t worry.”

“Then why are you worried?” I said impatiently. “She’ll probably come back soon.” But about two hours later he phoned again, to say that there was no sign of her and nobody knew where she was. “You know I’m not a hysterical type,” he said, trying to defend himself, “but I don’t know where she could be.” We arranged to talk again in an hour, but after fifteen minutes he phoned again. It was after nine. He had conducted a little search of the house, and it seemed to him that the new suitcase which she had bought in London was missing. Perhaps she had lent it to somebody without telling him. “Surely she couldn’t have gone anywhere without giving me any warning?” he asked, and now he spoke in English, without even an occasional word in Hebrew, as if he had made up his mind to cling firmly to his mother tongue, which alone was capable of anchoring him in the chaos swirling around him. I asked him if he wanted me to come to Jerusalem. “Not yet. But if I have to go and report her missing to the police,” he added in a humorous tone, “you should come with me.” I promised him that I would stay near the phone, sensing how my father’s new anxiety, streaming to me from Jerusalem, was making me forget my own anxiety, which quickly turned to astonishment when he phoned with the update. Not only was the new suitcase missing, but her favorite summer dress was also gone. “Could she have suddenly taken it into her head to take a trip somewhere? But where?” he asked himself more than me, without any note of complaint or anger against his wife for leaving him without a word. “See if you can find her passport,” I suggested to him at ten o’clock at night. He went to look for it immediately, and fifteen minutes later he announced that he had found her Israeli passport, but the British passport, which was always in the same place as his, was missing. Could she have taken it with her? But why? “I’ll give you an answer soon,” he promised with a peculiar confidence in his voice, and half an hour later he phoned to say that he had just concluded a long conversation with my mother’s sister in Glasgow, and even though she had been astonished and also a little amused by his announcement and couldn’t give him any leads, he had the feeling that she wasn’t as worried as she should have been. Did she know something that she was hiding from him? Or were the Scots just more phlegmatic than the English?

It was now clear to both of us that my mother had undertaken a mysterious journey to an unknown destination. If my father had been more familiar with her wardrobe, he might have been more able to find out what was missing, but he was indifferent to such details, and it was hard to get anything specific out of him. His concern, however, evaporated the minute he realized that my mother had gone on a trip. Now he began to see the whole thing in a different light. Although people might disappear in the course of a journey to an unknown destination, at least a journey progressed in a definite direction; a rational woman like my mother would never set off without a goal, and this notion calmed him. “I’m turning into Sherlock Holmes in my old age,” he said with a chuckle at one o’clock in the morning, astonishingly wide awake, and he reported on private investigations of her belongings in the secret corners of unfamiliar drawers. At five o’clock in the morning, between one fitful doze and another, I tried to call him, but there was no answer. I left a message with the hospital switchboard to say that my mother had disappeared, I had to go to Jerusalem at once to help my father look for her, and I wouldn’t be coming to work. Why couldn’t I have lied and said my mother was sick? I castigated myself as I sped along the expressway to Jerusalem in the teeth of an east wind that had blown up, watching the rays of the sun forcing their way through the haze. Luckily the key to the house was always on my key ring, and I was able to walk inside and find my father sleeping soundly in his bed.

“I want to keep calm,” he said, his face pink with the pleasure of sleep in spite of the vicissitudes of the night. “I know that she’s a sensible woman, with logical goals. But I’m sure that this disappearance of hers is directed at you, not at me. I’ve sensed for a few weeks that something wasn’t right between you. That she was angry with you for something you did. But however hard I tried to get at the truth, she wouldn’t give me even a crumb. Perhaps you can tell me now what happened between you.” But I had vowed to my mother, who was now trying to direct my life by remote control, that I wouldn’t tell my father anything. And I certainly didn’t intend to add to his troubles now. Soon he would have to decide how to excuse his absence from work. Would he too feel that he had to tell the truth about his wife’s disappearance to his colleagues and make a laughingstock of himself? But at half-past seven the phone rang. It was my aunt, talking excitedly from Glasgow. My mother was on her way to Calcutta to bring the baby back. She would land there in a couple of hours. Michaela knew that she was coming. It seemed that my aunt had not been able to rest all night long, and eventually she had succeeded in getting the details of my mother’s sudden flight out of Edgar, our pale, thin London relation, for he was the only one my mother had trusted enough to confide in.

With the news of my mother’s flight to Calcutta a profound calm descended on my father, and he got dressed and went to work. “If you find out something new, phone me at the office,” he said as he left the house. And I stayed alone in my parents’ apartment as in the days when I stayed home sick from school. I didn’t call the hospital. Since I had made the bizarre announcement of my mother’s disappearance, I might as well give it time to sink in and take on the menacing dimensions it deserved before I canceled it. But since I had remembered to slip the little bottle Nakash had given me into my pocket before leaving for Jerusalem, so that I would have something to give my father to calm his anxiety, I took the second half of the little sleeping pill and swallowed it, saying to myself as I did so, Now that my mother’s flying over India to bring the baby home, I’ll need all my reserves of strength for her return, when she will undoubtedly lay the whole burden on me.

When my father returned in the early afternoon he found me sleeping deeply, and he didn’t wake me, for unlike my mother he had always respected my sleep. He let me go on sleeping even when he received another phone call from my aunt in Glasgow, who until my mother’s return from India served as the go-between for us and Edgar, the strange relation whom my mother had rightly chosen to guide her on his journey because of his connections with firms doing business in India; through telephone calls, telegrams, and faxes, he was able to guide her safely to her destination by means of faithful Indian clerks who waited for her at airports and train stations, making modest but respectable arrangements for the comfort of an elderly woman traveling alone and returning with a slightly feverish infant, straight there and back, without looking right or left at the glorious and terrifying abundance of life that surrounded her.

My mother left on Tuesday morning and returned on Friday evening. Her whole trip took seventy-seven hours. For about twenty-six of them she was in the air, and for about six she traveled by train. Since I returned to work in the hospital on Thursday and I didn’t want to complicate things for my colleagues with another absence, I didn’t go to the airport to meet them but let my father go instead. I took off from the emergency room as soon as I could get away, and as dusk began to fall I was already racing to Jerusalem on my motorcycle, with my visor raised so I could enjoy the scents of the wild grasses and early blossoming of the almond trees. In my parents’ house the lights were on in all the rooms, and I quickly saw that there were new lines on my mother’s exhausted face, but also a new radiance. Shivi, whom my mother now insisted on calling Shiva, like Michaela’s Indian friends, was really in pretty bad shape, though not at all critical. She was thinner and browner, and in her little yellow sari, with the third eye (which my mother had not wiped off during the entire journey home) shining between her eyes, she reminded me for a moment of the Indian children who had run after me when I went down to the Ganges. In our time apart, she had learned to walk, and since she now recognized me immediately — not like the time at the airport when the two English girls had brought her back from England — she began tottering toward me. I swept her up into the air and clasped her little body tightly to my chest. All this time I had thought of her as being a part of Michaela, and I hadn’t realized how much she was also a part of me. It appeared that Michaela had agreed to let my mother have her without any arguments. She was a realistic woman, and she knew that there were risks for a small child in India. In the short, stormy night my mother had spent in Calcutta, she had received the impression that Michaela’s spiritual attraction to India was reinforced by the simple human experience of working with the sidewalk doctors, which gave her a feeling of worth and led the Indians to regard her as almost a doctor herself, even though she had never graduated from high school. Nevertheless, my mother believed that she would soon return. “But will you be able to take her back?” she asked, still not looking me in the eye. “Because if not, you’ll have to come back to Jerusalem.”

“Did you remember to get vaccinated before you left?” I asked my mother, who now realized that she may have endangered her health by her journey. But my father was overjoyed, getting down on his knees to watch the movements of the little girl, whom I now set down gently on the floor to continue her tottering investigations. He did not seem to bear my mother a grudge for her disappearance; in fact, he was very proud of what she had done. Had he kissed or hugged her, I wondered, when she emerged from the airport terminal? I had never seen them kiss or embrace in my presence or in the presence of others; sometimes I wondered how I had been born at all.

At last the door opens, and slowly they wheel the mystery’s bed out of the operating room on its way to the intensive care unit. It is sunk in a deep sleep and wrapped in white bandages, connected to infusions and flickering instruments, but none of the nurses waiting in intensive care knows what to do for it or how to help it, for no knife or saw has been brandished over it, no tube or needle inserted to implant what was amputated at the dawn of time. Even if no drop of blood was shed, it is still suffering torments after a long night of stubborn delving into a black and riven soul. And perhaps they do well to bring a big cage in which two wild birds are chained together into the room full of morning light. Perhaps the birds will relieve his suffering with their song. Indeed, for the first time a smile breaks on his face. Has the first tender young plant already taken root? ask the nurses clustered around his bed. Among them is the little girl left behind in the kitchen in her school uniform, who has grown tall and beautiful and stolen in unobserved, disguised as a nurse, to take care of him. But the ray of light shattering on the emerald of her eyes betrays her. And then I can’t stop myself any longer from bursting into this dream. My darling, I whisper to her, my darling, my love.