At eight the next evening we arrived in New Delhi, where Lazar was in for a bitter disappointment. There was only one seat left on the Thursday morning flight to Rome. And flying home via some other European city would mean forfeiting the tickets, which had cost a lot of money. “Why don’t you take the available seat and fly back alone?” I asked Lazar, who seemed plunged in despair. “The three of us could fly to Rome on Friday and get a flight home on Sunday or Monday.” He looked at me but didn’t react, and then he glanced at his wife, whose eyes were fixed anxiously on his face, with no trace of her usual smile. “That’s impossible,” he blurted out in the end, exchanging another glance with his wife, who stared at me tensely, ready to reject any additional suggestions. So we had no option but to ride into New Delhi, which after Varanasi, Calcutta, and Gaya looked like a normal, civilized city. With uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, the Lazars let the rickshaw driver take us to a big modern hotel, with large and apparently very expensive rooms. And once again the three of them had to crowd into one room, while I was sent to the floor above, to a room that was not large but very pleasant and grand in its own way. For the first time on the journey, I felt the kind of mild, vague guilt toward them that I sometimes feel toward my parents when I think that they are doing without on my account. Accordingly, I went downstairs and knocked on their door, and despite the lateness of the hour and the disorder of the room, they welcomed me in like a member of the family and listened in surprise to my offer to look after our patient the next day by myself, so that they could take advantage of our enforced stay in New Delhi and go on a tour to Agra, 125 miles away, to see the Taj Mahal. “How will you face your friends if you come back from India without having seen the Taj Mahal?” I said with a smile, and offered to let them take my camera with them. “And how will you?” laughed his wife, whose hostility toward me had vanished without a trace. “I’m still young,” I said tactlessly. “I’ll return here one day.” To my surprise they accepted my offer, as if they were entitled to some form of compensation from me, and early in the morning they set out in a tour bus to see the mausoleum built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, while I spent most of the day with Einat, sitting in the armchair or lying on her parents’ bed and trying to read A Brief History of Time, although I didn’t understand much. The blood transfusion I had given her turned out to have been vital; for one thing, the sudden nosebleeds had completely ceased. However, she was still febrile and exhausted by the relentless itching caused by the accumulated bile salts. She hadn’t slept properly for weeks, and she kept dozing off as I changed the dressing on the wound on her leg, which looked much better. When she roused from her sleep, I showered her with questions, first about her trip to India, and then about her experiences in the hospital in Gaya, which she answered briefly but frankly. In the boredom of the lengthening hours, I began questioning her about things unconnected with her illness—first about her traveling companions, especially the shaven-headed Michaela, with the huge light eyes, who had brought the news of her illness to her parents, and then, as if I were about to become her family doctor, I began slipping in little questions about the family, asking about her younger brother and her charming grandmother. Then I questioned her eagerly about her parents, of whom she was obviously not too fond, and asked whether there was any truth in the strange complaint her father had made to me, that his wife was incapable of staying by herself.
When dusk began to fall, Lazar and his wife showed up at last, full of impressions from their day. Lazar returned my camera and thanked me for the idea of taking the trip. In addition to the sweetmeats and silk scarves they had bought for themselves, they had brought me a present, a model of the Taj Mahal the size of a small foot, made of pink marble. Lazar’s wife described the sights they had seen enthusiastically. Lazar too appeared relaxed, amused by the strange Indians he had encountered on the way, as if he had only now begun to wonder about their true nature. His face had acquired a tan during the day and no longer had its sickly gray tinge. They were about to order a big meal for the four of us to be brought up to the room, but I suddenly felt trapped and restless and got up to go out for a walk and say my good-bye to India. As I had done ten days before, I began walking around the dark streets of New Delhi, this time in a more affluent district, mingling and moving easily with the crowd whose bodies had a strangely ethereal quality in the darkness. And suddenly I sensed that in spite of my youthful boast to the Lazars, I would never return to India. As long as I lived, I would never see the wonderful Taj Mahal which they had both seen today, and this strange certainty began pressing sorrowfully inside me.
I went into a fabric shop for the first time since I’d arrived in India, to buy something for my parents. Entering the fragrant darkness, which rustled with flowered fabrics, I thought of my parents’ two very separate beds and wondered if they would consent to having anything so bold and blazing in their bedroom. In the end I bought two lengths of brightly colored cloth which seemed to me suitable for bedcovers; I wanted to go on and buy something else as well, because everything was so amazingly cheap, but suddenly I was fed up with wandering around alone and decided to go back to the hotel and chat for a while with Lazar and his wife; maybe she too would thank me for the enjoyable day I had given her. When I got back they had apparently gone to bed, for there was no sound in their room, not even a crack of light under the door. There was nothing left to do but go up to bed myself, and as on the last night in Bodhgaya, I tossed and turned for hours in search of sleep, which usually came to me the minute I put my head on the pillow.
We arrived in Rome in the afternoon, and of course we missed the El Al plane, that always left exactly on time so it would reach Israel before the beginning of the Sabbath. We had to wait until Sunday, but Lazar had not yet given up hope of arriving in time for his important meeting. No sooner had we settled into a big old-fashioned hotel in Via dei Coronari than he went off, to his wife’s obvious annoyance, to find a cheap flight that would get him back to Israel the next day. When I returned to the hotel in the evening, after strolling around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, I found the two of them in the hotel lobby, a new sadness on his wife’s face. It appeared that in spite of his age, he had succeeded in getting himself onto a cheap student flight that left early the next afternoon and arrived in Tel Aviv via Athens late on Saturday evening. Delighted with his own ingenuity, he now tried to appease his wife, who saw the whole thing as vanity and caprice on the part of a man who believed that he was indispensable. The next day at noon we said good-bye to him. He seemed tense, and adopted a slightly mocking air toward his wife, who to my surprise looked really upset, as if what was at stake were not a parting for twenty-four hours but total desertion. Although I was standing next to them he embraced her and kissed her again and again, smiling as if he were secretly enjoying the anxiety that stemmed from some deep and obscure source within her, and over which she had no control. Then he turned to me, as if I were a member of the family, and said, “Take care of her until tomorrow.” I saw that these innocent and half-joking words intensified her anger and her stress, and she immediately extricated herself from his embrace, gave him a little push, and said, “Go on, go, and be careful on the way and phone the minute you get home.”
For a moment I felt a desire to try and calm the childish anxiety of this middle-aged woman, who was only nine years younger than my mother yet so strangely bound to her husband, who seemed conversely unable to tear himself away from her. But as soon as he was gone, before I had a chance to think of something suitable to say, her eyes gleamed with that smile again, as if her pride would not allow her to look miserable in my presence. She asked me if I had any plans, and when I hesitated, she asked if I would be kind enough to stay with Einat for a little while, because she had to go and have her hair done, since she too had to go straight back to the office on Monday. For a moment I was flabbergasted. I had baby-sat for them for an entire day in New Delhi, and now she had the nerve to expect me to stay stuck
in the hotel again, as if I really were their hired hand, even though nothing had yet been said about the fee due to me for the trip. Her confident assumption that she would be returning to work on Monday, too, with the mental image it brought back to me of the self-assured woman in the short black dress and the high heels who had greeted me with such aplomb in her legal office, infuriated me. And who was going to take care of Einat on Monday, and take her to have the tests she still needed? Did they mean to turn me into their family doctor and nursemaid? But before I could say anything, I saw that my silence had been taken for consent, and she turned away and disappeared around the corner, as if she knew exactly where she was going. I returned unwillingly to my room and picked up my book, no longer interested in questioning Einat. Then I knocked lightly on her door, but there was no answer. I knocked again, and called her name, but there was dead silence on the other side of the door, and for the first time since meeting her I felt real panic. I hurried to the reception desk, introduced myself and explained my connection with the Lazars, and asked them to open the door. At first they refused, but I insisted, and eventually I was able, with the help of my doctor’s ID, to infect them with my alarm. But when the bellboy attempted to open the door with the master key, it transpired that a key was stuck in the lock on the inside of the door, and the door refused to open. We banged on it, but there was no reply. I tried to reassure myself that Einat’s condition had already shown signs of steady improvement after the blood transfusion; she was even strong enough for me to think of giving her a whole diuretic pill later in the afternoon to accelerate her kidney functions, since I was still worried by the small amount of urine she passed. But by now the Italians were panicking, and they began to talk excitedly among themselves. In the end a solution was found. Another young bellboy, who looked like a North African, was summoned, and he immediately entered the adjacent room and with the agility of a monkey succeeded in entering the Lazars’ room through the window. When he opened the door and let us into the room, we found Einat sound asleep—after many sleepless nights she had finally succeeded in falling into a deep, restful sleep.
“Everything’s okay, everything’s okay,” I reassured the disappointed Italians, who were anticipating a big drama and didn’t want to go away. I sat down next to my patient; even her hands, which hadn’t stopped their incessant scratching since we arrived in Bodhgaya, were now lying quite still on the bed. I lit a small lamp and began once more to read Hawking’s book, which according to the blurb on the cover had already been bought by millions of readers, who had no doubt thought, like me, that they were about to have the secrets of the universe explained to them, only to discover that these secrets were extremely difficult and complicated, and above all, controversial. Nevertheless, I went on reading, turning pages and skipping to more comprehensible passages and thinking crossly of Lazar’s wife. Even though my presence at the bedside of my sleeping patient was not really necessary I didn’t budge, in part because I wanted to see how she would apologize to me when she finally returned. And when she walked into the room with her elegantly styled hair, her face made up, her hands full of parcels, her high heels tapping, blushing at her lateness, I felt not anger but a strange, frightening happiness, which flooded me as if I were in love.
My face turned red and I immediately sat up in the armchair. She would never be able to guess, not even in her wildest dreams … All she did was apologize, and apologize again. She hadn’t thought that I would still be sitting next to Einat, who for some reason woke up as soon as her mother entered the room, assumed a suffering expression, and began voraciously scratching herself again. When I told Lazar’s wife about Einat’s long sleep, she looked worried and asked me to examine her again. I therefore went to fetch my stethoscope and sphygmomanometer, and palpated Einat’s flat stomach, trying to feel the damaged liver. There did not seem to be any change for the worse; the kidneys still seemed somewhat enlarged, but I decided against intervening at this stage with any additional medication, and left them after agreeing to come back to the room later for dinner. Outside it was raining, and the display windows of the European shops which had taken the place of the Indian temples gleamed with colored lights. I walked along the sidewalks, getting wet, amazed at my sudden new feeling for this impossible older woman. It’s completely idiotic, I scolded myself, but nevertheless I soon retraced my steps and returned to the hotel, went up to my room to shower, put on the shirt I had washed in Bodhgaya, and joined the two women for an excellent Italian meal. In spite of my excitement, I tried to joke with Einat, whose deep sleep had brought a fresh, rosy color to her cheeks. Her mother laughed a lot all evening, and when the phone rang and Lazar announced his safe arrival, she sounded loving and tender and not at all angry. She asked him about the flight and assured him that all was well with us. They spoke for a long time, as if they weren’t going to meet again in less than twenty-four hours. I looked at her legs, which for most of the trip had been hidden by slacks. They were youthful and very shapely, but the overflowing belly and full arms spoiled her appearance. Nevertheless my excitement persisted, not without the accompaniment of an inner nervousness, and I stayed with them longer than they expected me to.
In the middle of the night I woke up, opened the closet, stood in front of the mirror, and examined my reflection in the dark. I suddenly whispered her name, Dori, Dori, as if by the mere act of whispering her name I was exorcising her or secretly taking possession of her. This is too weird, this is insane, I chided myself. The room was heated to boiling point, and in spite of the high ceiling I felt stifled. I got dressed and went downstairs to see if I could get a glass of milk. But it was two o’clock in the morning, and the hotel bar was still and silent. Even the reception clerk—perhaps the same one who had helped me to break into the Lazars’ room that afternoon—was asleep on a bed hidden behind the desk. I wandered around the big, dark dining room, where the tables were already laid for breakfast, and before going back upstairs I opened the door into the kitchen, as I was in the habit of doing when I was on call in the hospital at night, in the hope of finding something there. And indeed, the big kitchen was not in total darkness. In its recesses a faint light flickered redly on great copper saucepans, and I heard low laughter. I advanced past the neat tables and gleaming sinks. Next to a big dining table I saw three people sitting and talking in a foreign language, not Italian, eating soup from pottery bowls decorated with pink flowers. They were foreign workers, perhaps refugees. One of them immediately rose from his seat and asked me what I wanted, in Italian and with a friendly expression on his face. “Milk,” I said in English, and I laid a heavy hand on my stomach, to signal the burning pain of my sudden fall into love, while with my other hand I raised an imaginary glass to my lips and drank it to the dregs. He understood at once, repeated my request to his guests in their language, and went to the refrigerator to pour me a glass of milk. Then I saw that next to the giant fridge, whose motor was humming like a small plane’s, sat a little girl with a waiflike appearance, looking at the screen of a small television set. And next to her a thin bespectacled man with a very sickly appearance sat paging through a school workbook.
Six
Lazar received special permission, apparently on medical grounds, to meet us in the arrival lounge immediately after passport control. Even before his wife and daughter noticed him, I saw his stocky, broad-shouldered figure in a wet raincoat standing next to the guard at the end of the barrier, anxiously inspecting the people walking past him as if he really doubted our ability to get home without him. Next to him, his long hair soaking wet and a distracted expression on his face, which resembled his father’s, stood Lazar’s son, whom his mother hurried to gather lovingly to her bosom, as if he were the dangerously ill child who had to be brought back home. But Lazar had no intention of allowing anyone to waste time on hugs and kisses. He handed his son a big black umbrella and instructed him to lead his sister, draped in a raincoat, straight to the car, while he himself hurried to seize an empty car
t and began to collect the luggage. “Wait till you see the storm raging outside—you’ll wish you were back in India,” he warned us. “Was it really necessary for you to get back in such a hurry?” his wife asked him, her tone still showing vestiges of her anger at having been left alone for twenty-four hours. “Not only necessary but essential,” he replied with a triumphant smile, and when he saw me looking at him somberly, he reassured me cheerfully, “Don’t worry, your parents are here too, waiting for you outside.”
“My parents?” I was astonished. “What on earth for?” Lazar seemed taken aback. “What for? I don’t know—so that you won’t have to go home by yourself in the rain, I suppose. My secretary got hold of them on the phone this morning, and they promised to be here to take you back to Jerusalem.” But I didn’t want to go to Jerusalem now, even though I had left my Honda there; I wanted to remain in Tel Aviv so as to report back to the hospital at the crack of dawn. Lazar had kept his promise; the whole trip had lasted only two weeks, and here, next to the luggage conveyor turning emptily on its axis, the length of our absence shrank to its natural proportions. Nevertheless, I was afraid that significant changes to my disadvantage had taken place in the meantime. “Did you have time to tell Hishin about what happened?” I asked, dying to know if Hishin had already been told about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “No,” said Lazar, with his arm around his wife’s shoulder, as if he still had to appease her. “Hishin’s not here, he took off for Paris a few days ago. That’s why he didn’t want to come with us himself. He kept the real reason from us. Never mind, we managed very well without him.” He smiled at us complacently, as if the medical responsibility had been shared equally among the three of us. He seemed elated now. The meeting with the group of donors had been a success. I saw that underneath his raincoat he was elegantly dressed in a suit and tie. His wife started to fawn on him, the abandonment of yesterday suddenly forgiven. I looked at her and found myself blushing. She looked tired but happy to be back home. Had I really fallen a little bit in love with her, I wondered, or was it all some strange hallucination?
Open Heart Page 16
