I hurried up to the second floor, wondering whether the Lazars were angry with me for having disappeared for so long without even warning them, or whether they had already resigned themselves to the fact that they had no control over me or right to expect anything of me, except for the performance of my medical duties when the time came. But if I came in for a mild reprimand, I decided, I would bow my head and accept it in silence. After entering my room and discovering that it had no electric light but only an oil lamp, which had been brought in my absence and suspended over my bed, I hurried out again and knocked lightly on the door of the Lazars’ room, to announce my return and hear what they had seen and done in the meantime. Lazar opened the door, tousled with sleep, barefoot, short and clumsy in old-fashioned flannel pajamas, his eyes red and narrowed. Their room was smaller than mine, strewn with their clothing and possessions, and illuminated by a soft, weak light coming from the oil lamp hidden under their bed, which was not much larger than mine and which held the outline of Mrs. Lazar, curled up in a blanket with only her little feet sticking out. Her capacity for sleep was apparently as great as her capacity for smiling, I thought, again with a strange anger. And in fact, it transpired that no sooner had I left them than they had both fallen into a prodigious sleep, ignoring the great Indian city about them, and accordingly they had not even been aware of my absence. I couldn’t contain myself, and standing on the threshold like an excited child, I told Lazar about the Red Fort, the little palaces, and the river too. He listened with his head bowed, swaying slightly. The true master of our great hospital, according to Hishin, stood before me now like a weak, bewildered old man. But I went on whispering nevertheless, and as I did so I saw two smiling eyes shining brightly from the outline on the bed. “I see that you enjoyed yourself,” Lazar finally stated. “It’s a good thing you didn’t wait for us. I don’t know what made us collapse like this,” he began to apologize, “but it was stronger than we were. Don’t forget we spent a few sleepless nights even before the journey. Ever since that girl brought us the letter, we’ve both begun coming apart at the seams, even if we don’t look it.”
He accompanied me to my room and obtained two sleeping pills. Then he told me with his characteristic practicality and foresight that he was determined not to let sleep slip away from him, in order to charge his batteries for the arduous journey still ahead of us. And indeed, when he knocked at my door and woke me up at ten o’clock the next morning, I noticed immediately that the limp exhaustion of the night before had been replaced by an energetic wakefulness. He apologized for waking me up, but explained that there were a few “urgent administrative matters.” At ten o’clock that night we were continuing our journey on the night train to Varanasi. A long journey of seventeen hours. And we had to vacate our rooms at noon and leave our luggage downstairs. “So we’re leaving tonight?” I asked in disappointment, even though I knew that his eagerness to reach his sick daughter quickly and get her and himself back to Israel as soon as possible would outweigh any promises made in his living room. Regrets welled up in me, for I had planned to go back to the river and see it in daylight, and also to visit a few places which had caught my interest when I walked past them in the dark. But it seemed that we had no alternative; it was impossible to get seats on a plane for the next two weeks, and even the express train, on which we had pinned our hopes in Israel, was full. It was only by the greatest ingenuity that he had succeeded in reserving us seats on a train that was slightly slower and less luxurious but reliable and reasonably comfortable, for otherwise, who knows, we might have been forced to rattle our bones in a dilapidated old bus as if we were characters in an adventure movie. “Yes, that’s the long and the short of it,” he apologized again, but actually he looked rather pleased with himself and his ability to cope with administrative difficulties, even in India. “We’ve arrived at the height of the internal tourist season in India. But we didn’t choose the timing of this trip, it chose us. At least there’s one thing in our favor — the weather’s fine, and we don’t have to worry about savage monsoons coming down on our heads.”
His wife emerged in sunglasses, ready to go out. She had changed the blue tunic for a colorful Indian scarf, which she had purchased that morning and immediately draped round her shoulders. On her feet she wore flat walking shoes, which made her look short and clumsy. When she saw me at the door of my room, she put her hands together and bowed her head mischievously in the Indian greeting and said, “We owe you our thanks for the Red Fort. After your stories last night we ran to see it this morning, and it really is exquisite.”
Lazar rummaged in his pockets, took out my train ticket, and said, “Here, you’d better keep it yourself.” Then he took out a pen and wrote the name of the station on the back of the ticket, and said that we should meet at the hotel at eight o’clock before leaving for the station together. “Eight o’clock?” his wife protested. “Why so early? The train leaves at ten. We’ll never get back from that place everyone says you should see at sunset. Why don’t we meet at the train station? He’s already proved himself.”
I felt a sudden surge of resentment at the way she was calmly laying down the law. I fingered the stubble of my two-day beard and said with a provocative smile, “And if we do get separated? What happens then?”
“But why should we get separated?” she asked in genuine surprise, this woman who was only here with us because she couldn’t bear being left alone. But Lazar immediately backed me up. “You’re right, everything’s possible, and if you really do get lost here, there isn’t even anyone to inform.” He rapidly wrote down the address of the hospital in Gaya on a piece of paper. “It’s over a thousand miles from here,” he said, smiling, “but at least it’s a clear and definite address. I’ve already given you money and paid for your room in the hotel. And tonight we’ll meet here, just as I said, at eight.” He turned to his wife with a frown. “You always think you can play with time. But not now. So we’ll all be back here by eight. And until then you’re free,” he added, turning back to me. “I see you like to roam around by yourself. Just see that you don’t get into trouble. And we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”
But they still didn’t leave. Now they were waiting in the corridor for a dark, very delicate boy who came to take their luggage down, and I slowly closed my door on them. In spite of my tiredness, I didn’t go back to bed but immediately began to shave, and suddenly the thought flashed across my mind, Yes, those were the right words exactly. This overweight couple was really beginning to get on my nerves, though I didn’t yet know how or why. Maybe I’m too sensitive, I said to myself, but something about the strong, deep bond shining between them, slipping to and fro with sly efficiency between Lazar’s dry, practical concern and his wife’s warm, phony charm, with her sudden, superfluous smiles, was beginning to irritate me profoundly. In spite of their openness, they weren’t frank with me, and I didn’t know what was going on in their heads, which undoubtedly worked like one constantly coordinated head. I still didn’t even know something as simple and straightforward as how much they were going to pay me for the trip. It was hard to tell what their real attitude to money was, their calculations between themselves and their calculations regarding me. And wasn’t there something strange about the fact that they were both here and dragging a doctor with them? Surely one person would have been enough to bring this sick daughter home? Suddenly it struck me that they were a little afraid of the meeting with their daughter and they had brought me along as a kind of go-between. Had Lazar been telling me the truth outside his house when he said that his wife couldn’t be without him? And if so, in what sense? It was insane. I could already sense the powerful nature of this smoothly oiled conjugality, which was only a little younger than the one between my parents, but how different they were. It would never occur to my father in a million years to take my mother’s hand like that and squeeze it in order to make her stop talking. My father would never embarrass a strange young man watching them like that. But perhaps, I said to myself as I lathered my face for the third time in anticipation of the long journey beginning tonight, perhaps I really was too sensitive, without cause, perhaps because in my heart of hearts I was still lamenting this trip imposed on me by Professor Hishin, who at this early morning hour in Israel I could see stepping, fresh and cocky, into the operating room, where the nurses, together with the anesthetist and the second resident, are waiting for him. I could even imagine Hishin’s jokes, as he teases the patient lying on the stretcher, sedated, and pale with fear, ready for the “takeoff.” Perhaps he even makes a few ironic remarks to the operating team about me and the fantastic trip he has graciously bestowed on me, although he and all the rest of them know very well that all I ever wanted was to stay at his side, next to the operating table, looking and looking deep inside the human body, in the hope that one day the knife would be placed in my hand.