Four
Is it time to speak of falling in love? For the lover is not yet aware of his state, although in the middle of the night it steals in and clutches his heart and he wakes up stirred to the depths, as if falling in love is only a new dominance and not also a servitude which is liable to drag anyone who persists in it to his doom. Already he can’t go back to sleep, and in his happiness he has to get out of bed, still not believing that it has actually happened to him, and, dazed and heavy, he propels his agitated being through the dark rooms of the house, trying to understand what it is that has shattered his sleep. And there in the kitchen, next to the dining table, he discovers her — a strange little girl, left in his house without his knowledge by one of the neighbors, or perhaps the cleaning lady, and forgotten there. Still wearing her school uniform, with a simple childish badge pinned to her chest with a safety pin, she bends over her books in the faint light of the moon and a streetlight, merging and filtering together through the window bars, and does her homework. He whispers to himself, somewhat ironically, It can’t be possible that this has really happened to me, that I’ve simply fallen in love; I know hardly anything about her. But he goes on advancing soundlessly toward the back of the girl, who has been waiting in his heart and who now ignores him and continues bending over an old, ink-stained atlas, a chewed-up pencil between her teeth. And already he is gazing breathlessly at the back of her neck, which is pure and stalklike but also rich in mature delights as it descends into the school-uniform shirt, which after a long day of study is still sweet and fresh. Only when he clenches his fists, careful not to touch her, does she turn to look at him, and with a brisk, simple movement she tosses her curly head, and her serious, beautiful face shows no surprise at the stealthy approach of the silent intruder with the knife twisting in his heart.
Even as the pain stuns his heart he tries to reassure himself. It isn’t serious, it’s a midnight madness, it will pass, it’s already passing, it’s a bizarre, absurd, superfluous, almost criminal, and also hopeless infatuation, in a minute someone will come and take her away. But the little girl gives him a frank, open smile that does not suit her tender years, as if in the few seconds he stood behind her and lusted after her neck she grew up and understood — understood so much that he panics and tries to cover up his sudden infatuation. He bends coolly over the open atlas, leafs through an exercise book, and asks in pretend irritation, “Haven’t you finished yet? Do you have any problems? It’s late. Why don’t you leave it now?” Her pure face grows even purer, and she places her little hand freely on his pajama sleeve and says, “Shh … he’s here.” And in the long corridor between the dark rooms of the house, the funny old glasses glitter on the nose of the mystery, that skinny, humorless mental patient who is still stubbornly seeking people and events that came to an end long ago.
Still without touching her, judging only by the way she lay limply curled on the gray sheet in the corner of the room, I concluded that the young woman’s clinical condition was not good and that she may, in Hishin’s words, have “managed to do herself real liver damage.” I had already noticed how she was hugging herself with both arms, and how with weak but incessant movement she kept scratching and rubbing herself, a classic symptom of accumulated bile salts penetrating the skin. But I smiled, trying not to reveal to her parents, who were standing right behind me, any sign of anxiety or panic. I knew too that there was no point in undressing her now, in front of her parents and the Japanese backpackers, and trying to auscultate her heart and lungs. Obviously I had to perform a blood count and sedimentation rate quickly and obtain the exact bilirubin and glucose levels and liver functions. I had to see the color of her urine and have it tested right away. In the meantime I bent over her on my knees and covered her forehead lightly with my hand to feel her temperature, which seemed worryingly high, and I put my other hand onto her cropped blond head, wondering momentarily whom she had inherited this blondness from, for both Lazar and his wife had dark hair. Then I slid my hand down to her nape and her neck, to feel if there was any swelling in the neck or the thyroid gland, and at the same time I asked her the kinds of meaningless routine questions I usually asked patients in order to gain their confidence and encourage them to reveal, even if unintentionally, additional truths about themselves.
I was glad to see that despite her weakness she seemed eager to cooperate with me, for my main fear when I had begun this trip had been that I would find her so far gone in that she would be completely apathetic, or even resist my efforts to arrive at an exact diagnosis of her condition and take the right steps to bring her home quickly. In contrast to the resistance she seemed to show toward her parents, she answered my questions willingly, if hesitantly, and recalled how it had all begun and what she had felt and where it had hurt most, and she was even able to describe the changing color of her urine since then, and of course what hurt her now, apart from this itchiness that was driving her crazy — for which I was prepared, because after Hishin had forgotten to bring me the articles he had promised, I had managed to read up on the disease in an old English medical encyclopedia I found in my parents’ house the night before we left, where the itch was particularly vividly described. “Apart from the itch, what is giving you pain?” I pressed her to go on complaining to her heart’s content, and she did so, and although I noticed that she was confusing symptoms associated with the disease with independent symptoms, such as pains in her legs and a heavy feeling in her back, I said nothing and just nodded my head in agreement with everything she said, still stroking her neck, where I felt a slight swelling in the trachea. Perhaps, I thought, the swelling was natural to her, and I dropped my hand in order not to confuse myself with superfluous speculations before I obtained the results of the crucial tests, which had to be given and rushed to the hospital in Gaya immediately. But I couldn’t forget the remark made by the Indian doctor in the train, about the unreliability of the laboratory in the Gaya hospital. It was a pity we’d met him, I reflected bitterly, because if we had to start checking up on how reliabile the Indian laboratories were, we would never finish. But I immediately suppressed this idle thought. Even if Hishin had exaggerated my qualities greatly, mainly in order to get his friends off his back, he was well acquainted with my scrupulous thoroughness, and he had trusted it to guide me without making any mistakes that might eventually be discovered in the hospital in Tel Aviv, where malicious professors and sycophantic doctors would lick their lips over them. I was only too familiar with the fact that in medicine everybody always has to have the last word: what should have been done, what shouldn’t have been done, and what did more harm than good.