But there was no time to go on thinking about it, because the luggage started arriving, and soon it would be time to say good-bye. My suitcase, which had already been separated from theirs on the plane, turned up first, and Lazar saw no reason to keep me waiting. “You still have to drive to Jerusalem—you’d better get moving,” he said firmly, and while I was still wondering how to say good-bye to them, he remembered something and grabbed hold of my suitcase. “Just a minute, let’s free you of the silly shoe box we dumped on you before you go.” To my surprise, Dori tried to stop him. “It’s not important, not now, don’t trouble him with that now, his parents are waiting for him. He’ll give it back when he’s got time.” But Lazar could see no reason why I should have to drag his wife’s shoes to Jerusalem and back. “It won’t take more than half a minute,” he said, and he helped me to undo the straps and open the suitcase, and without even waiting for me to assist him, he inserted his hands as delicately as an experienced surgeon into my belongings and quickly extracted the cardboard box, which I had carefully avoided opening throughout the trip. He said, “There you are, no trouble at all,” and smiled good-bye. “Then I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow,” I said in an effort to keep the thread of a connection between us. “At the hospital?” Lazar seemed puzzled, as if this weren’t the place where we both worked, but he immediately remembered and said, “Of course.”
“Then I won’t see him again?” said his wife, examining me with surprise but not with sorrow. Locks of her long hair had fallen onto her face and neck, her makeup had faded during the flight, and under the white neon light, her wrinkles were once more revealed. She didn’t know how to say good-bye to me, and a sweet wave of pain trembled inside me. “The photographs,” I stammered in embarrassment, and my face began to burn as if I were playing some trick on them. “The pictures I took of you are still in my camera. When they’re ready, I’ll bring them.” Lazar and his wife remembered the snapshots and exclaimed happily, “Right, our pictures!”
“Yes,” I promised, “maybe I’ll bring them around to your place, because I should check up on my patient anyway and see how she’s getting along.”
And perhaps because of the promise that we would meet again we parted casually, as we had parted from time to time in India, without shaking hands or embracing. Still I refused even to wonder whether Dori had been touched by a spark of that absurd nocturnal fantasy of falling in love, which would no doubt vanish as soon as I got through customs and emerged into the night, where the stormy rain and hail had gathered the people loyally waiting into a dense huddle under the scant protection of the shelter—a huddle that still managed to display the traditional Israeli enthusiasm, embracing every returning citizen of the state as if his absence warranted a gentle hand to guide him home. This at any rate was apparently the attitude of my parents, who had waited for an hour at two different observation posts in order not to miss me when I came out. My mother spotted me first, and we had to go to some trouble to find my father, who was standing calmly under his umbrella in the pouring rain, after giving up his place under the shelter with his natural gentlemanliness to two elderly women who had been reduced to hopeless despair by the storm. “You look well,” said my mother as we followed my father in the dark to the parking lot, trying to shelter me under her little umbrella. “You’re a little thinner, but you look happy. So you weren’t disappointed by our India.” My mother was always afraid of disappointments and disillusionments that might come my way, afraid of those states of emptiness that threaten to overwhelm the young. Consequently, as the person who had encouraged me to accompany the Lazars on the trip to India, which she felt entitled to call “ours” because of her uncle’s memories, she was on tenterhooks to know how I had managed. And although I hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything of substance, she sensed that I had returned satisfied. If not the rain, which forced us to step carefully between the puddles of water, she might have sensed something of my feelings for Dori as well, and of the pain of parting which had already started to bubble inside me.
My mother thought that I should do the driving as the storm gathered force around us, but my father refused to forfeit his place at the wheel. “It will be all right,” he reassured her. “I know the road, it’s plain sailing,” and she had to make do with seating me beside him to guard against possible mistakes on his part. He took off his coat, cleaned his glasses, and as usual overheated the engine. He hadn’t yet spoken to me. Only after he had brought us calmly and carefully out of the parking lot into the heart of the storm, and turned onto the main road, did he turn his face to me at last. He looked at me affectionately and said, “So, it was a success.”
“A success?” I said, startled. “In what sense?”
“In the sense that you had to prove yourself,” my father replied in his characteristically calm tone. “Lazar’s secretary said that you had performed the correct medical procedure and saved the situation over there.” I quickly turned my head to my mother, who was sitting in the backseat. She did not seem pleased that my father had blurted out the story, stealing my thunder, so to speak. However, happiness surged up in me. Had Lazar already managed to tell one of the professors about the tests in Calcutta and the blood transfusion in Varanasi, and was that how the news had traveled to the administrative office? Or had he said something in all innocence to his secretary, and she, full of goodwill but without really understanding anything, had sung my praises to my parents when she called to tell them when the plane was due to arrive? I would find all that out tomorrow, I said to myself, but in the meantime my father, who was eager to hear every detail, and in the right order, was already forcing me to describe the medical part of the trip from both the practical and the theoretical point of view. He drank in my explanations thirstily. He possessed the virtue of being able to learn something from everyone, which was why he was such a silent man and such a profound listener. Now, as he sat erect and slightly back from the wheel, silently contemplating, like an objective judge, the concerted efforts of the car, the wipers, the headlights, the windshield, and the road itself as they battled the savage storm threatening to drive us off the road, he wanted to learn from my lips the full extent of the salvation I had brought to the Lazars. He was afraid that the modesty he attributed to me, which he regarded as an unfortunate inheritance he himself had bequeathed to me, would make me belittle the importance of my achievement. Likewise, he had still not resigned himself to the fact that the second resident had been given the longed-for post we had all been hoping for. My mother too listened in silence. From time to time she slipped in a brief question, ultimately succeeding in picking up my lack of enthusiasm for Einat, for whom she had cherished secret hopes. She was trying to hear the inner story, which I was attempting to disguise as I spoke. In the end she blurted, “You keep saying Lazar’s wife, Lazar’s wife, but what’s her name?”
“Her name’s Dorit, but her husband calls her Dori,” I replied, and a sweet pain gripped me. “And what did you call her?” my mother stubbornly demanded. “Me?” I wondered momentarily why she was so insistent, staring wearily at the road which loomed up through the rain. “I called her Dori too in the end,” I admitted. “And what kind of a woman is she?” my mother kept on. “A spoiled woman,” I answered at once. “In the beginning she made a big fuss about the hotels.” And I closed my eyes in exhaustion, seeing the plump little woman advancing along the alleys of Varanasi with her slow, pampered walk, stepping carefully in the mud and smiling absentmindedly at the Indians crowding around her. And a wave of warmth suddenly engulfed me and almost choked me.
And I realized at that moment that I had to be careful when I was talking to my mother, because she sometimes succeeded in seeing into my soul with astonishing accuracy, and she was liable to sense something of the strange feeling I had brought back with me from the trip, and it was only natural that this feeling would offend and upset her and give rise to the wish to do something to nip this ridiculous infatuation in the bud. If that was
the right word for my thoughts about this woman, which now included a lust that I was just becoming aware of, sitting cozily next to my father as we drove through the night from Lydda to Jerusalem. I looked at the road climbing between the hills, from which the rain and mist had cleared, giving way to lightly falling snowflakes. It would be a shame, I said to myself, if my mother had to suffer even for an instant because of a feeling that was absurd and hopeless by its very nature. It would be better not to talk too much about the trip to India, in case I unintentionally let slip some hint that would embarrass us all unnecessarily. Accordingly, I suggested to my father, who was a little offended, that I take his place by the wheel, because the airy flakes were turning the journey home into an adventure that might become dangerous. And in fact the light, shining flakes, which had begun flying through the air a few miles after Sha’ar-Hagai, turned into a heavy snowfall as we approached the city, and for the next two days I was stuck in Jerusalem, because my parents, who generally trusted my driving, implored me not to return to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle on the snowy roads. Since I felt a great weariness rising in me, the fruit of the unexpected excitements of the trip to India, I agreed to settle down again in the old bedroom of my childhood and relax into a delicious sensation that had nothing to do with food and drink—for my mother had never distinguished herself as a cook—but with the silent stirrings of a ghostly British presence in the apartment, which gave me the feeling that even when I was lying in bed that I was participating in an old black-and-white family movie full of stable, kindly values, whose happy, moral conclusion was guaranteed in advance. Thus, hidden at home, surrounded by a blanket of snow, I tried to cool and perhaps even to kill my infatuation with Lazar’s smiling round-limbed wife, and I tried to stop thinking about her, so that here, in the faithful room of my childhood and youth, she would sink into the depths of the darkness, dragged down by the weight of her years.
But the smiling middle-aged woman refused to sink, and blended instead with the familiar furniture and curtains of the room to which I had been brought at the age of two, when my parents moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv because of my father’s government job. And so I escaped into sleep, careful not to leave traces of my lust on the spotless sheets provided by my mother, who marveled together with my father at my sudden craving for sleep. They had grown accustomed to seeing me as a serious student who burned the midnight oil, a hard worker who got up early in the morning, and more recently as a doctor on call, capable of going without sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch. “You’re taking us back to your days in boot camp,” said my mother with a slightly worried air when I entered the dim old kitchen at twilight after sleeping the whole afternoon, feeling a pang of intense longing for the bright colors of the Indian temples. “It’s the soporific effect of the snow,” explained my father, in English, and he got up to give me my old place at the table, which he had taken for himself when I left home. “Yes, yes, you sit in your place,” he insisted when I tried to refuse, at the same time checking on my mother as she poured my tea and set it before me with a slice of crumb cake, on which I immediately spread a layer of jam to take away the dry, slightly moldy taste, which had depressed me even as a child.
“While you were asleep, your father went to town and had the photographs you took in India developed,” my mother said with a slightly embarrassed air as she handed me two envelopes crammed with pictures. “My photographs?” I turned to my father almost with a yell, refusing to believe that this quiet, aristocratic man had stolen into my room on his own initiative and taken the two rolls of film lying next to my bed while I was sleeping. In fact, it turned out that the initiative was my mother’s—she had gone into my room to check if I was warm enough, noticed the two rolls of film, and sent my father to have them developed in the center of town. She must have wanted to find out more about the trip to India, since I was too busy sleeping and too preoccupied with my thoughts to tell her. I suppose she can sense that something happened to me over there, I thought, hanging my head and avoiding her eyes, but even her native intelligence would never dare to imagine what had really happened. “Don’t you want to see how your pictures came out?” she wondered, as I went on gripping the two envelopes tightly in my hand. “But they’re not all mine,” I explained quickly. “Some of them are the Lazars’, I lent them the camera when they went on a trip to the Taj Mahal.” My parents were astounded to hear that the Lazars had gone off together and left me by myself with their sick daughter, and even after I told them that it had been my idea to send them to see the Taj Mahal, they went on criticizing the Lazars for accepting my offer, though they were proud of my generosity. “Well, why don’t you show them to us already, and tell us all about them,” said my mother as she stretched out an eager hand for the envelopes. “Of course,” I said, “but I thought you’d already looked at them.” And a little panic took hold of me at the thought of confronting her image here, in my parent’s sad kitchen, and I stood up at once and put my cup and plate in the sink and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth again, and when I returned the kitchen was flooded with light and the table was covered with colored pictures glowing with India’s reddish brown light, and already from a distance I saw her figure, which had miraculously managed to insert itself in more pictures than I would have imagined possible, and not only those taken by Lazar at the Taj Mahal. Was it her innate serenity and automatic smile that enabled her, in spite of her abundant plumpness, to look so natural and photogenic in every picture, even when she was surrounded by Indians in rags or sitting on a rickety bench in the twilight next to the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? My father passed one picture after another before his eyes and requested detailed explanations, but my mother fell silent, and a new pallor covered her cheeks. “She certainly likes having her picture taken,” she said at last, and there was a note of complaint in her voice. “Who?” I asked innocently. “Lazar’s wife—or what do you call her?” My mother kept her head lowered, as if she were afraid of meeting my eyes. “It’s her husband, it’s Lazar. I lent him my camera,” I said in self-justification, my voice muffled by the wave of excitement that surged up in me again at the sight of the woman strewn in bright glossy squares all over our gray kitchen table.
That evening the snowstorm intensified, but I went anyway to visit Eyal, a childhood friend who had studied medicine with me, and who was on call tonight in Hadassah Hospital, where he was doing his residency in pediatrics, after having been turned down by the surgical department. We sat in a little room with pictures of children stuck up on the walls, surrounded by the racket of sick children running up and down the corridor pursued by their harassed parents. We drank tepid tea from plastic cups and as usual compared conditions in our respective hospitals before discussing anything else. Then he asked me about my trip to India, of which he had already heard about from my mother, and at the sight of his friendly eyes fixed on mine, I felt an impulse to tell him immediately about the most important thing that had happened to me on the trip. I thought that Eyal, who had been living with his widowed mother for the past few years, would understand better than most people. But at the last moment I stopped myself. I had plenty of time; this wasn’t the right moment. And I began telling him about the medical aspects of the trip. He was very impressed by the night flight to Calcutta with the blood and urine samples, but seemed doubtful about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “I hope that in your enthusiasm you didn’t infect the mother with the daughter’s virus,” he said with a smile. “Nonsense,” I replied, “how could I have infected her? I was careful to place her higher than the patient too.”
“That doesn’t make much difference,” he said knowingly, “but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. The main thing is for you not to lose touch with this Lazar—and don’t take any money from him, so he’ll remain in your debt and maybe he’ll influence Hishin to let you have another year in his department.” While Eyal was showering me with practical advice, he was urgently summoned to
the emergency room to examine a young boy who had tried to kill himself. It was late, but I was curious to see how they would manage the case. The patient was about thirteen, tall for his age, jerking violently under the hands of the nurses brutally pumping his stomach. Since I was wearing civilian clothes, they took me for his brother or some other relative and kept ordering me out of the little treatment cubicle. In the end I decided to leave in spite of my curiosity. Eyal, who had thought that I was going to spend the night keeping him company, suggested that I postpone my return to Tel Aviv and come to lunch at his house the next day. I hesitated. The commotion of the Hadassah emergency room made me homesick for my own hospital. But Eyal began urging me through the curtain separating us, holding on firmly to the arm of the boy, who had already begun spewing out the sleeping pills through the thick tube which had been inserted into his stomach. “Come on, you have to come—I’ve got an amazing story for you.”
“What story?” I asked suspiciously, unwilling to commit myself. “You won’t believe it, but I’m getting married,” he announced loudly and shamelessly to the frightened, unhappy people filling the emergency room.
The road from Ein Kerem back to town was very clear now; the crowns of snow on the branches of the trees and the rocks at the roadside lent a new magic to the night, and I was cheered by the thought that after lunch tomorrow, in exchange for the story of the wedding, I might gather the courage to tell Eyal about my own unexpected falling in love. Why not? If not Eyal, who would be able to understand me? My mother was waiting up for me, sitting in the dark in the living room in her old woolen robe. “It’s because of the snow, only because of the snow on the roads,” she apologized, and immediately got up to make us a cup of tea. “I already had tea with Eyal in the hospital,” I announced, and made for my room, refusing to linger and risk a nocturnal interrogation. And as she retired, disappointed, to her bedroom, I caught a glimpse through the door of my parents’ beds standing in an L-shape under the two moonlit windows. “You won’t believe it, Mother,” I blurted out in a whisper, “Eyal’s getting married.”
Open Heart Page 17
