“I’m positive,” I replied immediately, and added that I might be delayed there until the next morning, because if it turned out that the laboratory was closed at night—something inconceivable in a serious hospital—or even that it couldn’t be trusted to give me reliable results, as the Indian doctor from Calcutta had warned us, I would have to look for another. “But where will you find another one here?” asked Lazar with a smile, surprised at this new, stringent side of my character. “I don’t know, I’ll ask. If I could, I’d go to Calcutta, to that Indian doctor’s private laboratory. I trust him, and we have his address on his card.”
“To Calcutta? Are you mad?” Lazar leapt up as if he’d been bitten. “How will you get there? It’s hell on earth, and it’s hours from here.”
“Yes, it’s far away, but maybe there’s a flight from Gaya.”
“A flight?” repeated the stunned Lazar. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to fly to Calcutta just for those tests?”
“No, of course not,” I stammered. But Lazar wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t understand what’s gotten into you. What exactly are you looking for?”
“Nothing,” I said, “I just want reliable results.”
“Reliable.” He sighed. “Here, of all places?” And when I said nothing he added, “Perhaps we should just let Einati recuperate here for a few days and go straight home, and they’ll do all the necessary tests there.” Now I had to protest, although I was still careful not to worry them too much. “Those tests are important,” I stressed. “If you say no, that’s your right—but then you’ll have to explain to me why you dragged me here with you in the first place.” And Lazar’s wife, who was sitting opposite me with a gray face and slightly untidy hair, wearing a lightweight white blouse which revealed small new freckles on her neck, smoking her slender cigarette in silence, and examining me intently with an expression that I felt radiated a new sympathy toward me, suddenly burst out and said to her husband, softly but firmly, “He’s right. Trust him. And if he wants to fly to Calcutta to get reliable results, why not? We can wait; that’s why we made ourselves comfortable here. Do whatever you think best”—she turned to me—“and we’ll wait here patiently. But have something to eat before you go.”
I sat down at the big table, ate quickly, and stood up immediately to get ready, because I still hoped to return the same night. I removed everything except a few drugs and bandages from the knapsack and filled it with a clean shirt, a sweater, underwear, and toiletries, hung my camera around my neck, and was instantly transformed into a wandering backpacker. I fastened the pouch with the samples onto my belt, and took three hundred dollars from Lazar for expenses. His wife made me sandwiches with the chapatis and put exotic fruits in a brown paper bag for me. Before I left I decided to take another look at my patient. She was sleeping, her beautiful face peaceful, only her hands still clutching each other and making sleepy scratching movements. For a moment I was loath to wake her, now that she had finally found rest in a decent bed, but I didn’t want to leave without taking the opportunity to palpate her organs. Lazar’s wife helped me wake her up and raised the light flannel pajama jacket they had brought from Israel for her. The yellowish chest, the small breasts, and the scratched stomach were again exposed to my fingers, whose special palpation technique had once even aroused the admiration of Hishin himself, who ever since then had called me “the internist.” I could now clearly feel how shrunken the liver was, compared to the enlarged gall bladder and spleen. But I was very careful not to hurt her again, because I wanted to regain her confidence. I concluded my examination and covered the thin body. I still wanted to get a stool specimen from her; it wasn’t essential, I explained to her parents, but if at all possible, it might prove very helpful. Just as I was about to leave, standing in my green windbreaker, Lazar’s wife came out and handed me a little parcel wrapped in newspaper, which I couldn’t resist removing so I could look at the color of the stool. It was suspiciously black, as if it contained occult blood. But I said nothing and wordlessly rewrapped the container, which I enclosed in another receptacle. Lazar and his wife accompanied me outside, where a gaudily painted auto-rickshaw was waiting, hired for me by Lazar, who had already begun to exert his organizational gifts on Indian life. “The driver will be at your disposal all the time. I’ve already paid him there and back, don’t worry,” he said dryly, as if he was angry with me for giving them new grounds for anxiety instead of reassuring them. Leaning against one another, embracing without an embrace, they stood and watched me as I sat down in the open rickshaw, behind the elderly and grave-faced motorcyclist, who was wearing a towering white turban on his head and who immediately began pulling me into the dark night, as if we were orbiting in a black void.
He took me to Gaya by strange shortcuts, dirt roads winding through fields and orchards, and if there were any houses or shacks in the vast, flat plain, I was unaware of them, for their lights were buried deep inside them. Since the sky was shrouded in a dense gray mist and there wasn’t a moon or a single star to be seen, the only sign of life was the white turban floating before me. Nevertheless, I felt quiet and confident as I held tightly to the edges of the swaying seat, the knapsack at my feet, and I was no longer troubled by attempts to decipher the Indian reality. My mind was now occupied by a practical medical reality, at the center of which was the need to diagnose correctly the condition of the sick woman I had left behind, whom I could still see in my imagination, lying in her little room with her parents—who, I now, in the darkness of the night, sensed were afraid of her—tiptoeing around her bed. When the rickshaw began to slow down, I strapped the knapsack onto my back and checked to see that the pouch was snugly fastened to my belt, and the moment we stopped outside the hospital, which I recognized even in the dense darkness, I jumped down and said to the turbaned Indian, “Don’t move from here.” I ran eagerly up the steps: it had been more than a week since I had been in a hospital, and I missed even the smell.
But the smell that greeted me here was utterly different from the familiar one of Lysol and feces, or of drugs and ether, sometimes mingled with the smell of boiled vegetables. And it wasn’t the smell of the dead either, with which I was also familiar, but simply the smell of rot that violently assailed me. I stopped in the doorway, took a large gauze pad out of the knapsack, sprinkled it with iodine, and tied it onto my face with a bandage, like a surgical mask, and then I was able to enter the corridors to look for the laboratory. It was possibly thanks to this orange bandage on my face and not to the fact that I announced myself to be a doctor that someone paid attention to me and led me to the laboratory, which was situated in a courtyard at the back of the hospital, in a big, old hut besieged by silent patients, mainly women squatting on the bare ground with ragged children by their side. There nobody was impressed by my orange-stained mask, and I had to push my way to the head of the line and force my way into the hut, toward a very dark-skinned but noble-looking middle-aged woman, tall and thin as a slab of black marble, dressed in a flimsy rainbow-colored sari, with a big red third eye painted between her eyes. She was the lab supervisor, perhaps a clerk or perhaps a technician, slow in her movements and apparently also very disorganized, because her desk was untidily heaped with dozens of cards and lab results in different colors, among which she rummaged for the test numbers in order to give the results to the people crowding around her. At first she persisted in ignoring me, even though I had already removed the mask and explained that I was a doctor, but at last she turned to me and asked me what I wanted, and when I told her and added that I was prepared to pay double if the tests were done at once, she looked down at me from her towering height and said with a faintly contemptuous expression that a hospital belonging to Buddha, who was also the god of beggars, did not take payment, but if I wanted to make a donation there was a box for this purpose at the main entrance. “Certainly, I’ll make a donation at once,” I promised, and hurried to take the test tubes and containers out of the pouch. At first she rec
oiled. “Not here,” she said, waving me away, “not here, there’s a special counter. Go and stand in the line.” But finally she gave in and told me to write down which tests I wanted on some hospital notepaper. I wrote it all down, and added a request for liver-function tests; I signed my name and gave the number of my Israeli medical license, and needless to say, I avoided mentioning the fact that until a few days before my patient had been hospitalized in this very hospital, in order not to give rise to any unexpected bureaucratic complications. She glanced at my list, put a big red question mark next to “liver-function tests,” said that she was not sure if they could do them here, casually wrapped the blood and urine samples in the notepaper—without even bothering to secure it with tape or rubber rings—and threw them into a big cardboard box full of dusty test tubes, some empty and others full of strange-colored fluids. I thanked her, but repeated my request to have the tests done as quickly as possible; if necessary, I said, I was willing to step into the laboratory myself and help. “My patient,” I said, “is burning with fever in Bodhgaya, and as soon as we know the results we can begin to treat her.” But then the noble Indian woman suddenly flared up. “Everyone here wants to know, everyone here is waiting, everyone here is sick, everyone was sent by a doctor, nobody comes to have blood tests for fun,” she scolded me angrily, as if I were a boy. Why did I think I was entitled to an answer without waiting my turn? Was it only because the people standing here had darker skins than mine? And with a long, slender hand she waved me contemptuously away.
Without understanding why I felt so deeply insulted by this woman, I had a momentary impulse to ask her to return the samples so that I could take them somewhere more reliable. But I kept quiet. Feeling both mortified and at a loss, because I didn’t know where else to go, nor when to come back for the results, I left the laboratory hut. For some time I hung around in the courtyard, pacing to and fro among the Indians waiting in the dark, peeping through the window at the tired lab technicians sitting crowded together in the dim light, big bottles of serum at their sides, peering through ancient microscopes at the blood and urine samples that had been brought there in little blue glass jars. In the end I got fed up with this aimless hanging around and returned to the place where I had left my rickshaw, but it was now surrounded by many similar vehicles and I couldn’t recognize it. I had to go from one rickshaw to the next and examine the sleepy drivers curled up on their backseats before I found my driver, who, luckily for me, had kept his regal white turban on in his sleep. “Take me to the river,” I instructed him, for from the day I had arrived in India I had found myself drawn to rivers. But the sleepy driver smiled at me with his gaping, ancient, toothless mouth and tried to explain that there was no river in Gaya now. “There’s no river now?” I said in bewilderment. “But there’s a river on the map in the guidebook.” There was a river but there was no water in it, he tried to say, helping me in the meantime onto the seat, still warm from his sleep, covering me with a tattered blanket, and pulling his rickshaw silently out of the heap of rickshaws surrounding it. He drove me to the bank of the river, which was indeed there, where the guidebook said it was, but almost entirely dry, even in this winter season. In the depths of the dry riverbed a fire was burning, and by its shape I guessed it was a funeral pyre. The figures squatting around it in such celestial serenity were presumably the relatives of the dead man, helping to liberate his soul.
I got out of the rickshaw, opened the knapsack, and took out my sweater, for there was a chill in the air, and began carefully descending into the broad, dry riverbed, drawn to something whose nature was not clear to me and with the tall, thin Indian woman’s reprimand still burning inside me. But why did I feel so insulted? I tried to examine myself. What was happening to me? Was I hurt because she had made light of my concern? Lazar and his wife did not appear worried; they did not seem aware of the fact that their daughter was really sick, that she was in real danger, that her disease was not simply going to run its course and cure itself. A wave of pity for the sick girl and her doctor surged up in me, and as I climbed down the bushy bank toward the funeral pyre, little tears stung my eyes. What the hell was this? Why was I really so hurt and angry? Hishin had the right to choose not to keep me in his department, but what right did he, a doctor I had always admired, have to say contemptuously “a self-limited disease”? What did he know, that Hishin? And I trembled as if he were standing before me. But I didn’t stop; I went on advancing between the bushes and over the pebbles lying on the dry bed of the creek, between the rampant wild-flowers, colorless in the dark, picking my way carefully past the sleeping bodies of pilgrims or beggars covered with blankets and cardboard boxes, wiping away the unexpected tears, scoffing at myself for turning into a crybaby, here of all places, in a place that was supposed to make us pampered Westerners calm and humble in the face of real suffering.
The Indians sitting around the fire apparently sensed that I was making my way toward them, and they started getting up to welcome me, but also to prevent me from approaching the pyre and desecrating the sacred rite by my alien presence. Judging by their attire, they were urban Indians of quite a high class, and they behaved with both firmness and tact. They surrounded me, putting their hands together on their chests in the traditional greeting, apparently intent on barring my way. I joined my hands in an imitation of their gesture, to signal my sympathy and good will, and then I felt someone touching me lightly. It was my rickshaw driver, who had secretly followed me to see that I didn’t get into trouble. He spoke favorably of me to the people, but he too tried to prevent me from approaching the pyre, which was burning brightly and cheerfully, as if nothing was lying on top of it. I took the knapsack off my back and sat down on a big, damp boulder. The remnants of the river were gurgling nearby, and the night was cold and misty. Now that the Indians saw I had given up any intention of breaking through to the fire itself and had seated myself to one side, they calmed down, and one of them offered me a cup of scalding tea, perhaps as a sign of thanks for my restraint. I took the cup gratefully, but before I raised it to my lips I saw in astonishment that the body lying wrapped up next to the pyre and waiting to be burned was not yet dead but that of a mortally sick or dying man, who had apparently been dragged here in order to die in the right place. Every now and then someone would bend down to examine him, to stroke him, or to whisper to him, to encourage him with hopes for the waiting fire. Now I understood why they had been so insistent about barring my way. I could no longer drink the tea, and after a while, when the sound of an airplane overhead made all heads turn upward, I quickly poured the yellowish liquid onto the ground. Bright red lights now appeared in the mist, and a large old plane, whose propellers made a pleasant purring sound, came down very low, right over our heads, and continued flying along the riverbed until it landed. The Indians began talking about this night flight from New Delhi, which stopped at Gaya and went on to Patna and Calcutta. “Calcutta?” My excitement flared. They all knew the old plane and spoke affectionately about the night flight, which in an hour or two would take off for Patna and would reach Calcutta at dawn. Without another moment’s hesitation I stood up, returned the empty cup, and said to my driver, who was sitting there in his tall turban, looking pleased with himself and drinking his second cup of tea. “Take me quickly to the airport. I want to go to Calcutta.” “No chance,” he said without budging from his place. “That plane is always full.” But I insisted. The possibility of ascertaining not only the bilirubin level but also which liver functions had been impaired, especially with regard to the glucose level and clotting factors (a deficiency which could cause an internal hemorrhage), was so crucial that it justified an attempt to get to Calcutta, even if Lazar, who had never been there in his life, called it “hell on earth.” I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to take double samples of everything from Einat, so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the tall Indian woman in the laboratory.
The flight was indeed full, just as my rickshaw driver h
ad warned me, but after I had repeatedly explained to the clerks at the airport that I was an English doctor who needed to take urgent medical tests to a laboratory in Calcutta—I even displayed the blood and urine samples as evidence—they agreed to provide me with a little folding seat at the back of the plane, apparently meant for the attendants, whom I paid for the ticket, which seemed very cheap. I gave the rickshaw driver a few rupees and a note to take to the Lazars in Bodhgaya, in which I outlined my plans to take the samples to Calcutta and return the next day, by train or plane, with reliable results. Don’t worry, I concluded ironically, I’ll come back from hell too—you know that I don’t get lost. I added quotation marks to the word “hell,” to show that I was quoting Lazar but also to alleviate my own anxiety, and signed “Yours, Benjamin.” It was almost midnight. I took one of the three large sandwiches Lazar’s wife had prepared out of my knapsack and ate it with relish, and I thought about the two of them and how compatible they were. Even their attitude toward their daughter was the same: a strange, detached compassion, and something like fear of her as well. Would Lazar’s wife also have called Calcutta hell? And what did Lazar know about hell? He must know sinister places in his hospital, like the morgue. Let’s say that Calcutta was hell—the doctor and his brother whom we had met in the train looked perfectly cheerful, and they lived there. And even if the poverty and suffering were worse than anything we had seen up to now, so much the better. On my return to Bodhgaya I would have a certain advantage over the Lazars, which would establish my authority as a doctor if the dire circumstances I feared arose. They were too sure of themselves; the deep bond between them made them smug. And when, after midnight, the propellers turned and the plane took off with an ease that was surprising in view of its age, I saw the takeoff as a sign of the Tightness of my decision and fell asleep at once.
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