But did I have any clear instructions for this faithful secretary, who had surprised me by her sensitivity, since I didn’t know myself if this was indeed the signal I was waiting for or simply a call from a woman with a bad cold to a physician who had acted for a short time as her family doctor? Because if it was the signal calling me to come to her, it had arrived more swiftly than I could have imagined, though that was understandable in a woman incapable of staying by herself. I nevertheless found it startling. Was I ready for her call? I asked myself frantically as I hurried home, where Michaela was waiting for me to take her to the movies. I didn’t get in touch with Dori, and we went to an early show, where I watched the vicissitudes of the love affair on the screen and tried to see if the solutions proposed by the director would suit my case. But my thoughts kept straying to the woman waiting for me to get in touch with her and prevented me from studying these solutions, which did not seem to suit the characters in the movie either, so the director had to pervert and contort every plausible and natural feeling in order to bring his movie to a satisfactory conclusion. “Completely idiotic,” pronounced Michaela when the lights went on, and she took the glasses off her beautiful eyes and put them away in her pocket. “Like an Indian movie, but there at least the kitsch is open and unabashed, without these sophisticated tricks.” I agreed with her, and told her about the movie I had seen in Calcutta. She was astonished to hear that I had wasted my few hours in Calcutta on a silly Indian movie, a few of whose colorful scenes had nevertheless remained in my memory. “You’re right,” I admitted, “but Calcutta made me panic, and I was afraid of getting lost.” I told her about the dream I had had more than two years before on the flight from Bodhgaya to Calcutta, and I described the details so vividly that I seemed to have just woken up from dreaming it again in the darkness of the movie theater. “But it’s impossible to get lost in Calcutta,” said Michaela, and she began to describe the unique construction of the city, which made it very easy to find its center. I was unable to follow the thread of her words, not only because of the ethereal note she often struck when she was talking about India but because I was preoccupied by the thought that Dori was ill and suffering and perhaps still looking for me.
Indeed, our baby-sitter, a cute and intelligent little girl of about twelve who was the daughter of Hagit, Michaela’s girlhood friend, and an unknown father, whose tender years caused us to go to the first show instead of the second, informed us as soon as we came home that “Lazar’s wife is looking for you.”
“Lazar’s wife?” I repeated in surprise. “Is that how she referred to herself?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what she said,” the child replied confidently. Michaela gave me a look of mild astonishment when she saw that instead of going at once to the telephone, I started examining and even correcting the arithmetic exercises in our babysitter’s notebook, and while she dug into the dish of multicolored ice cream sprinkled with flakes of chocolate that Michaela set before her — the only payment her mother permitted her to take from us — I also arranged her schoolbag for her, in place of her absentee father, smoothing out the creased papers and disposing of an old sandwich as I waited for her to say good-bye to Shivi so I could take her home. “Aren’t you going to call Mrs. Lazar back?” Michaela finally asked, when I was standing at the door. “There’s no need,” I answered immediately, without even raising my eyes. “I know exactly what she wants. She’s sick and she’s looking for a doctor,” and I told her about the conversation with the secretary who had taken Dori under her wing and was sleeping in her apartment. “If she’s already taking to her bed,” said Michaela sadly, straightening the collar of the little girl’s wind-breaker and making faces to amuse Shivi, “we can expect the mourning to be a heavy, long-drawn-out affair.”
“Heavy, yes, that’s only natural,” I agreed, “but long-drawn-out? I’m not so sure.” Michaela listened to me attentively, still trying unsuccessfully to catch my eye. “What do you intend to do about the phone call?” she pressed me before I shut the door behind me. “You can’t just ignore her.”
“I know,” I reassured her, and I promised that I would drop in on her on my way home. When I went back inside and took my medical bag out of the closet, Michaela looked relieved.
I didn’t call Dori, mostly because I was afraid that if I did, she would content herself with asking a couple of questions and reject my offer to go over and examine her. I was determined not to allow my role as doctor to replace my true role, which was becoming more possible from minute to minute, and which so flooded me with anxiety and desire that I didn’t even wait for our baby-sitter to wave to me from her window, but drove off the moment her curly head disappeared into the stairwell, in a hurry to arrive before something inside me could subvert my decision to interpret Dori’s phone call as the true call for which I had been waiting. Accordingly, I decided to leave my medical bag in the car, and as I soared to the top floor in the elevator, I knew that I needed no external confirmation in order to go in to her. I was impelled forward by the presence that had been stirring inside me ever since the death of Lazar, and as I stood in front of the door, surrounded by blossoming plants, I actually put my hand into my pocket to look for the key. When no key was forthcoming, I pressed the bell. It immediately uttered a shrill, piercing, birdlike whistle, but nobody seemed to hear it or to pay any attention to it. There was silence. The door was one of those heavy, opaque security doors, and left no crack to reveal if there was a light on behind it. I again pressed the bell, which the Lazars must have installed after they returned from India, for I didn’t recall such a piercing whistle the first time I visited them, and during the week of mourning I had had no opportunity to hear it because the door had been left open to accommodate the constant stream of visitors.
In the distance I could hear her footsteps hesitating. And rightly so, for how could she have guessed that I would turn up unannounced on her doorstep at an hour like this? But when I sensed her hesitating on the other side of the door, unable to make up her mind whether to ignore the visitor or to ask who it was, I pressed the whistling doorbell again and called out, “It’s only me.” And in order not to let her off the hook, I added, “You were looking for me?” Then the door opened, and she stood there clumsily attired in a flannel nightgown and a thick green sweater of Lazar’s. Her hair was disheveled, and by the red spots on her cheeks and the dull glitter of her eyes I could see that she had a real temperature, which actually reassured me, for even if it turned out that no love-call had been or could have been intended, it was still a good thing that I had come. “They’ve left you alone!” This strange cry escaped my lips, intended only as an exclamation of astonishment, but it also, to my surprise, contained a note of pain. “Who left me?” she asked with a frown, an expression of resentment crossing her face, perhaps because she sensed that in the depths of my heart I still insisted on thinking of Lazar as someone who might not have left her alone. “I mean,” I stammered, “Einat, or …” and I couldn’t remember the name of her son. But she immediately understood and leapt to his defense. “He had to return to his base,” she said, still without a single smile, almost with hostility. Was it possible that she was angry at me? I felt a thrill of happiness, accompanied by a shadow of fear, as I identified the note of impatience with which she had sometimes addressed her husband in India. “Were you looking for me?” I repeated stubbornly, without even mentioning her obvious illness, in order to force her to address me as a young lover whose way was suddenly clear before him, not as a doctor on house call.