Dori obediently swallowed the two pills I gave her to bring her temperature down and went to take off her clothes and put on a fresh, flimsier nightgown. Then she got straight into bed, asking me only to cover her with three blankets and put the light on in the hallway before I left. But I didn’t want to leave yet, certainly not before I heard the deep breathing of her sleep. I remained in the hall next to the open bedroom door, looking through the dark windows at the new restlessness of the treetops, constantly buffeted by the autumn wind. And as my eyes returned to gaze quietly at the contours of the figure buried beneath the mountain of blankets, I kept asking myself how I would be able to leave her. Even when her breathing became deep and rhythmic and was joined by a faint snore, which I remembered from the night in the train compartment with the Indian clerk, I still could not bring myself to leave. Waves of love and desire began swelling in my double soul, and a thrilling new pleasure kept me rooted to the spot. I could have gone into the bedroom and sat down for a while on the edge of the big bed without waking her, but I went on standing in the hallway, leaning against the doorjamb, keeping myself awake thanks to long experience on night shifts and hours of standing next to the operating table. But when the faint snoring became loud and coarse, because of the position of her neck on the pillow or congested sinuses, I remembered Lazar climbing onto the upper bunk in the train racing to Varanasi to take hold of her and make her stop. I went into the bedroom to follow his example, but my hold must have been too strong, or lasted too long, for she woke up, and with her eyes closed and her hair wild she sat up in bed and cried in alarm, “You?” I let go of her and retreated, because I knew that she meant him, and only him, as if through the touch of my hand she had felt the dead man’s hand. But all this lasted no longer than a second, and by the expression of pain on her face I knew that the illusion had already been shattered. She groped for the switch of the reading light, but quickly gave up the attempt, dropped her head, and curled up into herself again, to seek the even rhythm of her breathing. But she did not find it, and she woke up and opened her eyes.
“I’m bothering you,” I whispered when I saw her putting on her glasses to see me better. “No,” she said at once in a clear, wakeful voice, as if she had not been sleeping for the past hour. And when I kept quiet, as if I thought she was only being polite, she raised her head from the pillow and said, “You’ve never bothered me.” Then, as if to reinforce her words, she added, “You never bothered Lazar either. Before the trip we were wondering whether to take a doctor with us, because you know how it was with us, always together, wanting to be alone together. But already on that first evening, from the minute you came in, we felt that we would be able to get along with you. And we weren’t wrong. Throughout the trip we marveled at how you always managed to be at our side without bothering us. Is it all due to the English manners you learned at home? The British temperament you inherited from your family? Is that what keeps you from getting on people’s nerves, from pushing yourself forward, even though you too want to go far?”
“Far to where?”
“Very far.” Her voice rose clearly in the silence of the night. “Very far?” I snickered. “Yes, very far,” she repeated without hesitation. “Lazar always used to say about you, That’s a man who wants to go very far, and he’ll get there too, but quietly, the way I like.” She fell silent for a moment, her eyes closed, as if she were about to go to sleep again. “But go where?” I insisted, a new fear stirring inside me. “Far to where?” She bowed her head patiently, like a mother facing a son who demands explanations for things that can’t be explained. “Far, the way he saw himself going far.” “You mean in the hospital?” I demanded with a tremor in my voice. “Yes, in the hospital too, of course,” she said. “That’s why he insisted on fixing you up with a permanent job, even if only half-time. When Hishin let you go, he was afraid that you would leave and go to another hospital. Because like him, you not only notice things that other people don’t notice, but you also know how to absorb them and contain them in yourself, so that when you need them they’ll always be there, without your having to worry about it.”
“Without my having to worry about it.” I echoed her words in excitement, not actually understanding what she meant. “But what made him talk about me at all?” She straightened her pillow behind her head and smiled. “Perhaps because right at the beginning, when Hishin suggested you, he said, ‘This is the ideal man for you,’ and Lazar, who was influenced by Hishin, began to believe it, especially after you confronted us at the airport and forced us to interrupt our flight and insisted on going to a hotel and giving Einat that blood transfusion, which even after all the clarifications we never really understood. But Lazar always said, Never mind, let it be arbitrary, let it even be completely mysterious. I know and feel that it saved her life.” I had already heard Einat speak about her father’s positive attitude toward the blood transfusion I had given her, but the explicit word “mysterious,” uttered now in the darkness in the name of the dead director, filled me with happiness, in spite of the contempt it might have implied. And I felt a pressing desire to hear this word repeated in Lazar’s name, until I was unable to contain myself any longer and I stepped forward, and without warning, in a trance of exhaustion, I lifted the blankets to join myself to the warm source of the mystery. At the first touch I knew that the two pills I had given her to take before she went to sleep had done their work; her body temperature was normal. If I really had another soul inside me, I thought feverishly, it needed its turn too, and I began passionately embracing and kissing Dori once again. She was startled and began to struggle, but even in the depths of my fatigue I was stronger than she was. And again she pleaded with me not to be silent, to speak of my love, as if making love in silence, and in the stillness of the night, was the worst kind of betrayal. I repeated the words I had said at the beginning of the evening and felt her ripe, mature body relaxing between my hands.