“Yes,” I replied immediately and unhesitatingly, trying to hide my naked legs from his eyes, “that’s all. Nothing else. And I would keep it to myself as well. What did you think? That I would go and tell Dori?” His little eyes scrutinized me in silence, believing and not believing. Then he continued sternly, “I hope so. I certainly hope so…. I hope you won’t get it into your head to go to her and involve her in your truth. It’s time you grew up, Dr. Rubin, and realized that there are mysteries in medicine too. That’s its fascination. We deal with living human beings, not inanimate objects.” I couldn’t resist asking, “But how is she? How is Dori? Is she getting over it?” Now Hishin couldn’t help smiling a faint smile of satisfaction. “Can you ever really tell?” He spread his hands out in a questioning gesture. “But at least we’ve succeeded in persuading her to go on a trip to Europe. We’ve already made a date to meet her in Paris next week.” Because of his obscure marital status, there was no knowing whether there was another woman behind his use of the first-person plural or he was referring only to himself. In any case I couldn’t restrain myself. “She’s going to Europe already?” I burst out in a cry of pain. The old ironic gleam returned to Hishin’s eyes. “I trust you don’t have any objections?” He leaned over and gave my shoulder a friendly pat. My heart beat painfully. Was she already capable of taking a trip on her own, whereas I found it more difficult from minute to minute to stay by myself?
When I recognized Dr. Nakash standing quietly at the bus stop, I braked and offered him my crash helmet if he would agree to let me take him home. Nakash had had his driving license suspended for three months for speeding. “You, speeding?” I marveled as he put the helmet, still warm from my head, onto his own bald head. “And I always see you as the most stable person in the world.”
“Is that what you see?” Nakash grinned and got onto the pillion. He confessed that he had never been on a motorcycle before, but I felt no current of fear behind my back; instead, his hand, which sometimes seemed to put patients to sleep and wake them up by its touch alone, lay lightly on my shoulder, somewhat calming my anxiety about the lonely night ahead. I took him home and gladly accepted his invitation to go up and have something to drink in his small apartment, which in contrast to my expectations was rather chaotic; the living room was filled with scientific journals, and the equipment of a small, improvised laboratory dominated half the room. Nakash and his wife were testing the possibilities of combining anesthetics, analgesics, and muscle relaxants used in the operating room into tranquilizers for everyday use. “Only tranquilizers?” I asked, willingly giving Mrs. Nakash my cup for another round of coffee, which had a good but unfamiliar taste. “Or more than that?” They exchanged looks, as if wondering how far they could trust me. They were both very dark and skinny, as alike in their ugliness as identical twins.
They naturally avoided giving me a full and unequivocal answer, but it was evident that they wanted to give me a hint, mentioning that their own end would be quick and gentle, and above all free of the arbitrary decisions of self-righteous doctors, sanctifying the suffering of life. In order to show me concrete proof of their success, they gave me a little bottle containing a few sleeping tablets, the product of their home laboratory, which differed from the usual sleeping pills prescribed by family doctors not in the heaviness or duration of the sleep they induced but in the speed with which it descended, and perhaps also in the ease and pleasantness of waking from this sleep. Even though I felt more prepared to face the night with the little bottle in my pocket, I decided not to hurry home, and in spite of the gale-force winds blowing, it occurred to me to keep an old promise and go to visit Amnon at his place of work. He was so surprised and pleased to see me that he could hardly bring himself to let me out of his bearlike embrace. “And I was beginning to think that you were getting fed up with me because of that damn thesis,” he blurted out — a strange but accurate complaint, which gave me a guilty pang. “But I’ll finish it, Benjy, you’ll see. If I’m a little stuck, it’s only because I don’t want to chew over the same old stuff as everybody else, I want to say at least one thing that will be absolutely original.” And this original idea he sought not only by day, at home or in the library, but also by night at his watchman’s post, especially now that he had been promoted and no longer had to walk around the perimeter of the factory, but sat with a walkie-talkie and telephone in the little hut, which was full of his books and papers. But before talking about himself and his plans, he wanted to hear about all the women I had sent to India. Had they already reached their destination in Calcutta? Michaela had promised to phone him from there, directly to this hut. If Michaela had revealed to him what she had hidden from me, I said to myself, perhaps he knew other things about her too. And to my astonishment I discovered that Amnon did indeed know things about her, and about me, that nobody had told him but that he had grasped through his own intelligence and intuition, and especially through his immense curiosity, dating from our high school days, about his friends and acquaintances.
“Did you guess about my impossible love affair too?” I couldn’t resist asking him, without looking him in the eye, my head bent over the papers strewn on the table in an attempt to identify something familiar in his equations and charts. He was surprised by the unexpected confidence I was placing in him. No, he admitted honestly. He had heard about it for the first time from Michaela when they said good-bye. He had guessed that something which affected me deeply had happened in India, but he thought it was connected with Einat and not her mother. Yes, at first he had sensed that something had opened up in me when I came back from India, but on the way back from Eyal’s wedding, when we had stopped on the little hill on the road from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem and I had begun holding forth about my own private theory of the contraction of the universe and how spirit was going to shrink matter until there was nothing left of it, he had begun to worry about me. I had always been the good friend whom nobody had to worry about, the successful student who homed in steadily and accurately on the target his parents had set for him. But when he saw the speed with which I decided to marry Michaela — whom, if I didn’t mind his saying so, I didn’t really love enough — he began to feel that I might be following in his footsteps and losing my way. Even now, if I had come to visit him here in the middle of the night, it meant that I wasn’t in the greatest shape. While he himself was stuck and buried in the ground, maybe because of his brother — yes, because of his poor little brother — I, who had always seemed to him the ideal, well-balanced man, had turned into a kind of spaceship which had gone out of orbit and was now spinning aimlessly among the stars. But a spaceship that could be brought back on course. I myself must have seen how astronauts left their shuttles to return straying objects to their original course. Because that was the great advantage of space — nothing crashed there.
For a moment he was silent, astonished at himself for having blamed his failure on his retarded brother. And then, as if unable to contain his emotion, he stood up and hugged me warmly again, pressing the revolver on his belt against my chest until I too had to stand up and return his hug. Thus we stood embracing in the little watchman’s hut, listening in the silence to the wind howling outside, accompanied by the unearthly whistles of the walkie-talkie. Although my heart genuinely ached for him, I felt repelled by the sentimentality that had been overpowering him of late. God save me from deteriorating into this kind of pain and self-pity, I thought with increasing disgust. Better to be detached — not depression but Nirvana, which is the end of all incarnations. I was already thinking of Nakash’s sleeping pills, which would sweeten the night for me. You can always rely on Nakash, Hishin used to say. The news that Dori was going to travel to Europe by herself continued to astound me. Was it possible? I thought in anger and envy. Mightn’t it be dangerous? And a new thought came into my mind. I had to find Einat and talk to her. Gently but decisively I extricated myself from Amnon’s emotional embrace, and although I had the telephone number of Einat’s apartment, I asked him if he knew what she was up to. He hadn’t bumped into her since the night of Michaela’s departure, but he thought she was still working as a waitress in the same pub where she had worked before.