“I want to keep calm,” he said, his face pink with the pleasure of sleep in spite of the vicissitudes of the night. “I know that she’s a sensible woman, with logical goals. But I’m sure that this disappearance of hers is directed at you, not at me. I’ve sensed for a few weeks that something wasn’t right between you. That she was angry with you for something you did. But however hard I tried to get at the truth, she wouldn’t give me even a crumb. Perhaps you can tell me now what happened between you.” But I had vowed to my mother, who was now trying to direct my life by remote control, that I wouldn’t tell my father anything. And I certainly didn’t intend to add to his troubles now. Soon he would have to decide how to excuse his absence from work. Would he too feel that he had to tell the truth about his wife’s disappearance to his colleagues and make a laughingstock of himself? But at half-past seven the phone rang. It was my aunt, talking excitedly from Glasgow. My mother was on her way to Calcutta to bring the baby back. She would land there in a couple of hours. Michaela knew that she was coming. It seemed that my aunt had not been able to rest all night long, and eventually she had succeeded in getting the details of my mother’s sudden flight out of Edgar, our pale, thin London relation, for he was the only one my mother had trusted enough to confide in.
With the news of my mother’s flight to Calcutta a profound calm descended on my father, and he got dressed and went to work. “If you find out something new, phone me at the office,” he said as he left the house. And I stayed alone in my parents’ apartment as in the days when I stayed home sick from school. I didn’t call the hospital. Since I had made the bizarre announcement of my mother’s disappearance, I might as well give it time to sink in and take on the menacing dimensions it deserved before I canceled it. But since I had remembered to slip the little bottle Nakash had given me into my pocket before leaving for Jerusalem, so that I would have something to give my father to calm his anxiety, I took the second half of the little sleeping pill and swallowed it, saying to myself as I did so, Now that my mother’s flying over India to bring the baby home, I’ll need all my reserves of strength for her return, when she will undoubtedly lay the whole burden on me.
When my father returned in the early afternoon he found me sleeping deeply, and he didn’t wake me, for unlike my mother he had always respected my sleep. He let me go on sleeping even when he received another phone call from my aunt in Glasgow, who until my mother’s return from India served as the go-between for us and Edgar, the strange relation whom my mother had rightly chosen to guide her on his journey because of his connections with firms doing business in India; through telephone calls, telegrams, and faxes, he was able to guide her safely to her destination by means of faithful Indian clerks who waited for her at airports and train stations, making modest but respectable arrangements for the comfort of an elderly woman traveling alone and returning with a slightly feverish infant, straight there and back, without looking right or left at the glorious and terrifying abundance of life that surrounded her.
My mother left on Tuesday morning and returned on Friday evening. Her whole trip took seventy-seven hours. For about twenty-six of them she was in the air, and for about six she traveled by train. Since I returned to work in the hospital on Thursday and I didn’t want to complicate things for my colleagues with another absence, I didn’t go to the airport to meet them but let my father go instead. I took off from the emergency room as soon as I could get away, and as dusk began to fall I was already racing to Jerusalem on my motorcycle, with my visor raised so I could enjoy the scents of the wild grasses and early blossoming of the almond trees. In my parents’ house the lights were on in all the rooms, and I quickly saw that there were new lines on my mother’s exhausted face, but also a new radiance. Shivi, whom my mother now insisted on calling Shiva, like Michaela’s Indian friends, was really in pretty bad shape, though not at all critical. She was thinner and browner, and in her little yellow sari, with the third eye (which my mother had not wiped off during the entire journey home) shining between her eyes, she reminded me for a moment of the Indian children who had run after me when I went down to the Ganges. In our time apart, she had learned to walk, and since she now recognized me immediately — not like the time at the airport when the two English girls had brought her back from England — she began tottering toward me. I swept her up into the air and clasped her little body tightly to my chest. All this time I had thought of her as being a part of Michaela, and I hadn’t realized how much she was also a part of me. It appeared that Michaela had agreed to let my mother have her without any arguments. She was a realistic woman, and she knew that there were risks for a small child in India. In the short, stormy night my mother had spent in Calcutta, she had received the impression that Michaela’s spiritual attraction to India was reinforced by the simple human experience of working with the sidewalk doctors, which gave her a feeling of worth and led the Indians to regard her as almost a doctor herself, even though she had never graduated from high school. Nevertheless, my mother believed that she would soon return. “But will you be able to take her back?” she asked, still not looking me in the eye. “Because if not, you’ll have to come back to Jerusalem.”
“Did you remember to get vaccinated before you left?” I asked my mother, who now realized that she may have endangered her health by her journey. But my father was overjoyed, getting down on his knees to watch the movements of the little girl, whom I now set down gently on the floor to continue her tottering investigations. He did not seem to bear my mother a grudge for her disappearance; in fact, he was very proud of what she had done. Had he kissed or hugged her, I wondered, when she emerged from the airport terminal? I had never seen them kiss or embrace in my presence or in the presence of others; sometimes I wondered how I had been born at all.
At last the door opens, and slowly they wheel the mystery’s bed out of the operating room on its way to the intensive care unit. It is sunk in a deep sleep and wrapped in white bandages, connected to infusions and flickering instruments, but none of the nurses waiting in intensive care knows what to do for it or how to help it, for no knife or saw has been brandished over it, no tube or needle inserted to implant what was amputated at the dawn of time. Even if no drop of blood was shed, it is still suffering torments after a long night of stubborn delving into a black and riven soul. And perhaps they do well to bring a big cage in which two wild birds are chained together into the room full of morning light. Perhaps the birds will relieve his suffering with their song. Indeed, for the first time a smile breaks on his face. Has the first tender young plant already taken root? ask the nurses clustered around his bed. Among them is the little girl left behind in the kitchen in her school uniform, who has grown tall and beautiful and stolen in unobserved, disguised as a nurse, to take care of him. But the ray of light shattering on the emerald of her eyes betrays her. And then I can’t stop myself any longer from bursting into this dream. My darling, I whisper to her, my darling, my love.
About the Author
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A.B. Yehoshua is the author of nine novels and a collection of short stories. One of Israel’s top novelists, he has won prizes worldwide for all his novels, and in the UK was shortlisted in 2005 for the first Man Booker International Prize. He continues to be an outspoken critic of both Israeli and Palestinian policies.