I hurried home, and although I was only half an hour late I saw by the dread on my mother’s face that she had taken my threat with alarming seriousness, and after lunch I decided not to go out again but spent the afternoon dozing in my room, in anticipation of the sleepless nights awaiting me now that I was unable to stay by myself in the empty house. My father too, still tipsy from the wine they had plied him with at the synagogue, sank into a deep sleep. My mother sat up trying to read her novel, but in the end she couldn’t help herself and came into my room to make me swear not to divulge a word of our conversation to my father. Why make him any more miserable than he already was? She didn’t say anything about my threat, as if talking about it added to its reality. But in the evening, when I was already back in Tel Aviv, she took advantage of a brief absence on my father’s part to call and ask how I was feeling now. My vague and detached answers, and especially my fear of not being able to sleep, increased her anxiety, and she suggested that I come back to spend a few days in Jerusalem. “But how can I? I’m expected at the hospital tomorrow.” She thought for a moment and then said that perhaps she or my father, or both of them, could come to Tel Aviv for a day or two. To her surprise, I didn’t turn this offer down immediately. “We’ll see,” I said. “Let’s think about it.” But she persisted, and suddenly she began speaking haltingly in English, which she never spoke to me. If I was thinking of doing anything drastic, I should warn her, at least. “Don’t take us by surprise,” she whispered over the phone, turning the vague threat I had presented her with that morning into something real and alive. “You have no moral right to keep even the thought from me,” she added. “I’ve never hidden anything from you.” And she was right; neither she nor my father had ever hidden anything from me, nor did it seem as if they had anything to hide. “But why are you in such a panic?” I said with grim humor, lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, laying the side of my face on the exact spot where Dori had sat with her legs crossed, listening with excited sympathy to the declaration of love bursting out of me. “Not that I’m really thinking of harming myself, but if you believed in reincarnation, you would find the world less alarming. Because if anything happens to me, I’ll leave you my soul, at least.” But she was in no mood now to understand irony or witticisms on my part.
In the middle of the night the phone rang, shattering the remnants of my brittle sleep. It was Michaela, calling as the dawn rose in Varanasi. Her voice was warm, clear, and joyful. “Varanasi?” I cried in astonishment, and with a note of envy. “I thought that this time you wanted to go to places you haven’t been to before.” “Right,” admitted Michaela, who sounded happy and relaxed, but how could she deprive Stephanie of the chance to touch the open heart of India? Even I, the superficial tourist, knew that the heart was there, in the ghats and temples lining the banks of the Ganges. “And Shivi?” I cried. “What about Shivi?” Shivi too could not fail to be impressed by the spiritual power of Varanasi, because she was now happy and contented after a little restlessness in New Delhi, perhaps because of the diarrhea, which was already clearing up. “But what was it?” The strange cry that escaped me was not only the cry of a father and physician, too far away to save his child, but also the cry of someone in need of salvation himself. But Michaela, who even in her joy grasped my pain, quickly reassured me. I could rely on her. When it came to Shivi there were no compromises. In any case, in a few days’ time they would be in Calcutta, where they would be surrounded by excellent doctors and good friends. “Calcutta again?” I exclaimed in surprise, and the suspicion entered my heart that the doctors of Calcutta were as much an attraction to her as the mystery and fascination of India. “And Shivi?” I couldn’t help bursting out again. “How are the Indians treating her?” And this strange question, which had broken out of me in the hallucination of nighttime, was greeted with excitement. Even an “expert” on India like Michaela would never have imagined that Shivi would arouse such interest and affection among the Indians, who were not accustomed to seeing such a small representative of the West; in her tininess, she exposed the humanity common to us all. When Michaela told them her name, their interest turned to real enthusiasm. “They’re not annoyed that you gave her the name of one of their gods?” I cried, with a tumult of feelings flooding me. But it appeared that not only did they feel no anger, they expressed only joy and admiration at seeing the little creature with her light blue eyes bearing the name of the stern and dangerous god, the destroyer of the world — so much so that people sometimes followed her around. “Be careful, Michaela, for God’s sake, be careful,” I began to shout into the receiver as her voice grew fainter as if it were being carried away in a gale. Then it was completely lost.
I couldn’t go back to sleep after this conversation, and I had to be at the hospital very early in the morning anyway, since all the operations had been moved up to the first half of the day because of the farewell party for Dr. Nakash, which was to take place at lunchtime. Nakash himself appeared in the operating room as usual on this, his last day of work, to stand with his famous serenity next to the anesthesia machine, his smooth bald head gleaming darkly through the plastic of his cap. No wonder the speakers at the farewell party in the little auditorium next to the administrative wing were full of sincere praise for the devoted loyalty of this man, who in forty years of work had never missed a day. Hishin also made a speech in honor of his faithful anesthetist, but ever since Lazar’s death he had lost his confidence and humor, and his speech soon became boring. The ceremony was conducted by a young man of about thirty, who was introduced as one of the two directors who were taking over Lazar’s job. “I see,” I said with some emotion to Miss Kolby — who came to the party not because she knew Nakash but because she was still at loose ends after having been removed from her position in the administrative director’s office—“that one man isn’t enough to fill the void left by Lazar.” Indeed, it needed more than one man to overturn some of the decisions taken by the former director, such as bestowing a permanent a half-time position on a young doctor. My job was canceled that very day, right after the party, when I spoke with the new man, who was my age and who apologized profusely and tried to appease my obvious depression, which was caused not by the cancellation, which I had expected, but by the youth of the man now rocking in the chair of the previous director, whose soul had rapidly departed from my body.
Until a new post was found for me as a regular resident in the anesthesiology department, I could only be grateful to Dr. Nakash, who invited me the next day to act as an assistant anesthetist in a private operation at the hospital in Herzliah. During the entire course of the lengthy operation, removing malignancies and metastases from the patient’s abdomen and chest, Hishin was unusually quiet and sad, and when I saw that he was deliberately avoiding my eye, it occurred to me that he had heard either directly or indirectly about my affair with Dori. But after the operation was over, when we were getting dressed in the changing room, I discovered the real reason for his hostility. Professor Adler had told Hishin about my visit to his father. “What exactly are you up to, Dr. Rubin?” He pushed me into a corner. “Are you really only interested in discovering the truth?”