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.