“What would I like?” I repeated. “What have they got here?” And when they tried to tell me I interrupted them and said, “It doesn’t matter, just something light, whatever you bring. I’m really not hungry, I don’t know why.”
“Maybe the soul of an Indian fakir has already been incarnated in your body and from now on you’ll be satisfied with a starvation diet,” Lazar said with a chuckle, still diverted by the idea of reincarnation, which now, given the total darkness and the soft Indian tumult rising from the courtyard, seemed to me correct, even if impossible.
They both said at once, “Go and get washed, and we’ll go downstairs and get you something to eat. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but it’s Friday night,” and they went out to allow me to get undressed and wash myself in peace and quiet. In some strange way I didn’t feel dirty and sticky, even though my trousers had got wet in the river and cow dung had stuck to my shoes; it was as if the boat trip had dipped me in the river too, and the long contemplation of the cremation and the cracking of the blazing skull had purified me with a sense of profound mystery, which had made me forget my hunger and reconciled me to the dirt. But I didn’t want to embarrass the Lazars. I washed myself quickly in cold water before they came back. I had a long wait before they returned with a basket of fruit and candies and fresh-smelling chapatis, as well as a big bowl of steaming rice mixed with pieces of boiled mutton; and strangely enough it was Lazar, not his wife, who encouraged and coaxed me to eat, with a tender, absurdly fatherly air, trying to arouse my lost appetite and insisting on adding more and more to my plate, as if the whole great hospital in his charge had now been narrowed down to a single person, on whom he could focus the full strength of his control and concern. His wife sat opposite me, her stomach swelling, her long legs crossed, smoking a slender cigarette and examining me. When I described the cracking of the skull in order to liberate the soul, her face twisted in dismay. “How terrible—why did you look?” But Lazar understood me. “It sounds fascinating, I wish we could have seen it ourselves,” he said, as if he were actually sorry we were leaving the next morning by train for Gaya. “Tomorrow?”
“We should have stayed in New Delhi and insisted on getting a direct flight. That’s what we should have done,” said his wife. “So what do you say?” she asked, as if I had a say in anything that went on here, and she threw the burning cigarette butt over the balustrade. Lazar jumped up to reproach her. “Dori, are you crazy? There are people down there, you’ll burn somebody.”
“People don’t burn so easily.” She laughed, but at the sight of my gloomy face she said gently, “I see that you’re disappointed.” Her glasses glinted in the dark. “A little,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, I understand. But still, it seems to me,” I stammered, “for your own sake, you should have come down to the river, because from the balcony you can’t feel what you feel on the river, inside the thing itself.”
“But what is the thing itself?” She sat up with a strange anger. “Burning corpses?”
“No,” I answered her, “there’s something very strong here. It’s hard to explain. Something very ancient—not like historical ruins in Israel, it’s not historical, it’s real. If you go down, you’ll feel that what’s happening here, the purification rites and the cremations, has been going on for thousands of years, as if that’s the way it’s been forever …” Now a different smile crossed her face, not the automatic one but a thoughtful smile, as if she were wondering not about what I had said but about me. I felt that I had made a mistake in exposing my feelings to them, and in so doing giving them, especially her, permission to invade my privacy, now that she had talked me into sharing a room with them, something my parents had never done. And in order to stop her I decided not to give her another opportunity to interrogate me but instead to ask her about their sick daughter, about whom nothing had been said up to now, as if we had a kind of tacit agreement not to talk about her. Had she ever suffered from any serious illnesses in the past? I asked. Had she ever been hospitalized?
When the time came to go to bed, we moved the screen between us and I lay down in my pajamas on the folding bed, which was very narrow, intended for a skinny Indian with a wish to mortify himself during his sleep. They made some noise, presumably pushing the beds closer together, and in the end they switched off the little light, and she called out suddenly, “Good night,” and her husband said, “Shh, he’s already asleep.” But I answered in a weak voice, “Good night,” suddenly afraid that they might make love in the middle of the night. On the balcony they had seemed close and loving and attracted to one another. And even though I said to myself, They wouldn’t do that to me, I remained agitated, and I began tossing and turning in the dark on my narrow bed, until a soft rhythmic snoring reached my ears, and I knew that they were her snores, which I remembered from the train. I waited for him to stop her, but he just got up and went to drink a glass of water and out onto the balcony. Before he returned I fell asleep, but only for a few hours, since a band of musicians passed very close to the inn just before dawn, beating drums and clashing cymbals. One of them broke into song, and when the music faded away I knew that the Lazars too had woken up. Suddenly I heard Mrs. Lazar whispering to her husband in a surprisingly childish, pampered voice, which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable of, “Do you love me?” and he replied with a strange decisiveness, “No.” But she did not seem upset, and in the same soft, wheedling tone she continued, “Then you should.”
“Why?” he replied in affected astonishment.
“Because.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m nice.”
“But you’re terribly obstinate,” he said sternly.
“I’m not terrible at all,” she answered archly, but he insisted, “Yes, you’re terribly obstinate. You talked us into this room, and the poor boy has to sleep here next to us like a dog.”
“Why a dog?” Now she was taken aback, but she didn’t lose her self-confidence. “What kind of a way is that to talk? Can’t you see that he’s perfectly happy and pleased to be with us, even though he’s a cold type who doesn’t show his feelings?”
“Shh … Shh!” Lazar suddenly seemed nervous. “He can hear us.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “The way those youngsters sleep, nothing wakes them. Come and hold me. Let’s go to sleep—I’m afraid of what’s waiting for us tomorrow.” They must have started kissing, or so I assumed, and I immediately turned over in bed in order to stop them, and they evidently heard something, because the rustling stopped at once, and soon her faint snoring rose again. It suddenly stopped, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. And after a long time I got up and walked barefoot, careful not to look, past the two beds, which were indeed a little closer together and bathed in the light of the huge moon slowly rising over the far bank, desolate and a little frightening, of the Ganges.
In the morning they woke me ruthlessly and pressed me to eat my breakfast, which was already laid on the balcony table. Their suitcases were packed, and they had also managed to go down to the river at dawn to see the pilgrims taking their first dip. Soon two elderly Indians arrived to take our luggage, loaded it onto a pushcart downstairs, and led us to the train station through a flood of fresh pilgrims, who had apparently arrived on the night trains and were now on their way to the river. Again I had the feeling that I was in a very ancient place, as if precisely here, in this muddy swarm of humanity, between the large cows stubbornly stuck in the middle of the alleys, the world had been created, or at least begun to bubble. When we entered the frenzied station, I spotted as if by magic the diminutive porter of the previous day in the distance, a suitcase on his back as he led two elderly female tourists in big straw hats, probably to the room we had just vacated. I could not resist the impulse to rush up to him and say good-bye. To my surprise, Lazar’s wife hurried after me. The little porter was so moved by our gesture that he removed the suitcase from his back and almost knelt in the middle of the dung and the mud, putting his hands
together in the Indian greeting and pleading with us in the little English at his command, “Come back to Varanasi. You didn’t see anything.”
On the train traveling east we shared our compartment, this time with two brothers in white suits who were returning home to Calcutta after cremating their father’s body. At ten o’clock in the morning, after the train left the station, they presented Lazar and me with their cards, and when we saw that one of them was a doctor, Lazar quickly told them about the object of our journey and asked if they knew anything about the hospital in Gaya. Immediately filled with interest and curiosity, they began showering us with advice and ideas. They had never seen the hospital in Gaya, but they knew by hearsay that it was small and poorly equipped, for it sometimes sent specimens to the private laboratory the Calcutta doctor was connected with a consultant and a partner. Accordingly, they advised us to take Einat as quickly as possible to the big hospital in Calcutta, where everything was more reliable. At this point Lazar informed them that I too was a doctor, that we had brought medical equipment with us, and that we had no intention of wandering between Indian hospitals but were going to take the girl home to Israel as quickly as possible. This idea seemed to them basically sound, and they wished us luck and asked if they could peep at our equipment. Now that we were approaching the patient, Lazar too was curious to know what we were bringing to save his daughter, so I opened the knapsack and displayed its contents, explaining what everything was. The Indians listened attentively, as if eager to learn from me, and Lazar took each instrument and examined it carefully, questioning me as to how it worked, as if he believed that by mastering such details he could penetrate his hospital more deeply and strengthen his control over it. His wife sat in absent-minded silence, her liveliness and gaiety extinguished, as if the approaching meeting with her daughter filled her with dread. I measured Lazar’s blood pressure, at his request, and found it to be very high, 170 over 110, but I didn’t want to upset him before the meeting with his daughter and gave him lower numbers. The Indian doctor asked for the sphygmomanometer and measured his own and his brother’s blood pressure repeatedly and at length, but since I didn’t ask for the results, he saw no reason to tell me what they were.
When we got off the train at the Gaya station that afternoon and said good-bye to the two Indians—who presented us with their cards again and reminded us that they would be waiting for us in Calcutta if we needed them—we felt that the last part of the trip had passed comfortably enough, and congratulated ourselves on the ease with which we had reached the point that had seemed so remote when we looked at the map lying on Lazar’s living room table. “So this is Gaya. What a hole …” muttered Lazar as we stood outside the station, contemplating the strange, absolutely un-Indian emptiness around us. All around us were low yellow hills, and the earth was dry and hard. An apathetic porter approached us slowly, but when he heard where we wanted to go he drew back and beckoned to a more energetic friend, who took us to the hospital, which was a rather small three-story building plastered with pale brown clay. “You go in, and I’ll wait outside with the luggage,” I said to the Lazars, “and don’t tell them you brought a doctor, or you’ll make the medical staff nervous.” Lazar looked at me sharply and said, “You’re right. Quite right. Very good thinking.” And when I saw his wife’s face, rather pale, tired, and ugly, without any makeup, dark glasses covering her unsmiling eyes, I added, “And don’t be frightened if she’s yellow or even greenish—it’s hepatitis, and the color isn’t dangerous.” They nodded their thanks and went inside. I sat down on the ground next to a ruined fountain, leaned against one of the suitcases, and prepared myself for a long wait. Well, I thought, I’m on duty at last—if I had a time card here, I’d have to get it punched. But fifteen minutes later they emerged from the hospital in a state of extreme agitation. It appeared that their daughter was no longer there; the week before she had been transferred to Bodhgaya, about ten miles from Gaya, since there was no reason to keep her in the hospital any longer, whether because her condition had improved or the opposite neither of them had managed to understand.
In a panic they hailed a passing auto-rickshaw, and we hurried to Bodhgaya over a rough country road winding through soft fields. A sweet breeze caressed our faces, and in the distance, at the end of the plain, poised gently and motionlessly on the horizon, a big yellow Indian sun refused to sink. In just half an hour we were at Bodhgaya, which turned out to be a pleasant religious retreat full of leafy trees, with a broad dirt road leading from one Buddhist monastery to the next. There were no tourists or backpackers to be seen. We seemed to be the only Westerners in the place, but we had no difficulty in finding the right monastery, luxuriant entrance where green creepers twined around a big door. We were welcomed by several Thai monks, who were expecting us and even looking forward to our coming, since the telegram sent to the hospital from Israel had been attached to the patient as a kind of guarantee that she was not anonymous and somebody would soon come to claim her. Here too I stopped in the courtyard and suggested that I should wait outside with the luggage while the Lazars went in, but Lazar’s wife insisted that I go in with them, as if she couldn’t face meeting her sick daughter without a doctor on hand to calm her. So we went in with all our luggage, since Lazar was unwilling to part from it even in a Buddhist monastery, and we were led through corridors decorated with tattered carpets and statuettes of gods into a dim chamber strewn with big backpacks and rolled-up sleeping bags. Two Japanese girls who were sitting next to a gas burner and drinking tea stood up as soon as we entered the room and stayed in the corner bowing their heads politely and respectfully. The patient, a blonde with cropped hair, lay exhausted in a fetal position on a sleeping bag covered with a gray sheet, a mosquito net folded at her side. Her skin was dry and as green as the bark of a tree, and there was a grubby bandage on her right leg. Her parents went up and knelt down next to her, talking in low voices, stroking her hands and cheeks, trying to joke, but taking care not to kiss her. Lazar’s wife tried to flash her automatic smile in order to cheer her daughter up, but in the circumstances her would-be cheerful gesture came out as a strange grimace. The girl was silent and remote, and for a moment she seemed angry with her parents, either because they had come late or because they had come at all. And then I saw the despairing looks as Lazar and his wife turned mutely to me and invited me, the doctor, to approach. I stepped up and bent down next to the patient. Her father introduced me by my full name, and the girl turned her pale green face, whose features I immediately saw to be pure and fine, toward me. Even though I was a stranger to her, she tried to give me the smile she had withheld from her parents. And the flickering light green irises, drowning in the dark yellow, almost orange whites of her eyes, were very like the eyes not of her mother or father but of her grandmother, who had been sitting in their living room and longing, according to Mrs. Lazar, to meet me.
Four
Is it time to speak of falling in love? For the lover is not yet aware of his state, although in the middle of the night it steals in and clutches his heart and he wakes up stirred to the depths, as if falling in love is only a new dominance and not also a servitude which is liable to drag anyone who persists in it to his doom. Already he can’t go back to sleep, and in his happiness he has to get out of bed, still not believing that it has actually happened to him, and, dazed and heavy, he propels his agitated being through the dark rooms of the house, trying to understand what it is that has shattered his sleep. And there in the kitchen, next to the dining table, he discovers her—a strange little girl, left in his house without his knowledge by one of the neighbors, or perhaps the cleaning lady, and forgotten there. Still wearing her school uniform, with a simple childish badge pinned to her chest with a safety pin, she bends over her books in the faint light of the moon and a streetlight, merging and filtering together through the window bars, and does her homework. He whispers to himself, somewhat ironically, It can’t be possible that this has really happened to me, that I’v
e simply fallen in love; I know hardly anything about her. But he goes on advancing soundlessly toward the back of the girl, who has been waiting in his heart and who now ignores him and continues bending over an old, ink-stained atlas, a chewed-up pencil between her teeth. And already he is gazing breathlessly at the back of her neck, which is pure and stalklike but also rich in mature delights as it descends into the school-uniform shirt, which after a long day of study is still sweet and fresh. Only when he clenches his fists, careful not to touch her, does she turn to look at him, and with a brisk, simple movement she tosses her curly head, and her serious, beautiful face shows no surprise at the stealthy approach of the silent intruder with the knife twisting in his heart.
Even as the pain stuns his heart he tries to reassure himself. It isn’t serious, it’s a midnight madness, it will pass, it’s already passing, it’s a bizarre, absurd, superfluous, almost criminal, and also hopeless infatuation, in a minute someone will come and take her away. But the little girl gives him a frank, open smile that does not suit her tender years, as if in the few seconds he stood behind her and lusted after her neck she grew up and understood—understood so much that he panics and tries to cover up his sudden infatuation. He bends coolly over the open atlas, leafs through an exercise book, and asks in pretend irritation, “Haven’t you finished yet? Do you have any problems? It’s late. Why don’t you leave it now?” Her pure face grows even purer, and she places her little hand freely on his pajama sleeve and says, “Shh … he’s here.” And in the long corridor between the dark rooms of the house, the funny old glasses glitter on the nose of the mystery, that skinny, humorless mental patient who is still stubbornly seeking people and events that came to an end long ago.
Open Heart Page 10