“I’m positive,” I replied immediately, and added that I might be delayed there until the next morning, because if it turned out that the laboratory was closed at night — something inconceivable in a serious hospital — or even that it couldn’t be trusted to give me reliable results, as the Indian doctor from Calcutta had warned us, I would have to look for another. “But where will you find another one here?” asked Lazar with a smile, surprised at this new, stringent side of my character. “I don’t know, I’ll ask. If I could, I’d go to Calcutta, to that Indian doctor’s private laboratory. I trust him, and we have his address on his card.”
“To Calcutta? Are you mad?” Lazar leapt up as if he’d been bitten. “How will you get there? It’s hell on earth, and it’s hours from here.”
“Yes, it’s far away, but maybe there’s a flight from Gaya.”
“A flight?” repeated the stunned Lazar. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to fly to Calcutta just for those tests?”
“No, of course not,” I stammered. But Lazar wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t understand what’s gotten into you. What exactly are you looking for?”
“Nothing,” I said, “I just want reliable results.”
“Reliable.” He sighed. “Here, of all places?” And when I said nothing he added, “Perhaps we should just let Einati recuperate here for a few days and go straight home, and they’ll do all the necessary tests there.” Now I had to protest, although I was still careful not to worry them too much. “Those tests are important,” I stressed. “If you say no, that’s your right — but then you’ll have to explain to me why you dragged me here with you in the first place.” And Lazar’s wife, who was sitting opposite me with a gray face and slightly untidy hair, wearing a lightweight white blouse which revealed small new freckles on her neck, smoking her slender cigarette in silence, and examining me intently with an expression that I felt radiated a new sympathy toward me, suddenly burst out and said to her husband, softly but firmly, “He’s right. Trust him. And if he wants to fly to Calcutta to get reliable results, why not? We can wait; that’s why we made ourselves comfortable here. Do whatever you think best”—she turned to me—“and we’ll wait here patiently. But have something to eat before you go.”
I sat down at the big table, ate quickly, and stood up immediately to get ready, because I still hoped to return the same night. I removed everything except a few drugs and bandages from the knapsack and filled it with a clean shirt, a sweater, underwear, and toiletries, hung my camera around my neck, and was instantly transformed into a wandering backpacker. I fastened the pouch with the samples onto my belt, and took three hundred dollars from Lazar for expenses. His wife made me sandwiches with the chapatis and put exotic fruits in a brown paper bag for me. Before I left I decided to take another look at my patient. She was sleeping, her beautiful face peaceful, only her hands still clutching each other and making sleepy scratching movements. For a moment I was loath to wake her, now that she had finally found rest in a decent bed, but I didn’t want to leave without taking the opportunity to palpate her organs. Lazar’s wife helped me wake her up and raised the light flannel pajama jacket they had brought from Israel for her. The yellowish chest, the small breasts, and the scratched stomach were again exposed to my fingers, whose special palpation technique had once even aroused the admiration of Hishin himself, who ever since then had called me “the internist.” I could now clearly feel how shrunken the liver was, compared to the enlarged gall bladder and spleen. But I was very careful not to hurt her again, because I wanted to regain her confidence. I concluded my examination and covered the thin body. I still wanted to get a stool specimen from her; it wasn’t essential, I explained to her parents, but if at all possible, it might prove very helpful. Just as I was about to leave, standing in my green windbreaker, Lazar’s wife came out and handed me a little parcel wrapped in newspaper, which I couldn’t resist removing so I could look at the color of the stool. It was suspiciously black, as if it contained occult blood. But I said nothing and wordlessly rewrapped the container, which I enclosed in another receptacle. Lazar and his wife accompanied me outside, where a gaudily painted auto-rickshaw was waiting, hired for me by Lazar, who had already begun to exert his organizational gifts on Indian life. “The driver will be at your disposal all the time. I’ve already paid him there and back, don’t worry,” he said dryly, as if he was angry with me for giving them new grounds for anxiety instead of reassuring them. Leaning against one another, embracing without an embrace, they stood and watched me as I sat down in the open rickshaw, behind the elderly and grave-faced motorcyclist, who was wearing a towering white turban on his head and who immediately began pulling me into the dark night, as if we were orbiting in a black void.
He took me to Gaya by strange shortcuts, dirt roads winding through fields and orchards, and if there were any houses or shacks in the vast, flat plain, I was unaware of them, for their lights were buried deep inside them. Since the sky was shrouded in a dense gray mist and there wasn’t a moon or a single star to be seen, the only sign of life was the white turban floating before me. Nevertheless, I felt quiet and confident as I held tightly to the edges of the swaying seat, the knapsack at my feet, and I was no longer troubled by attempts to decipher the Indian reality. My mind was now occupied by a practical medical reality, at the center of which was the need to diagnose correctly the condition of the sick woman I had left behind, whom I could still see in my imagination, lying in her little room with her parents — who, I now, in the darkness of the night, sensed were afraid of her — tiptoeing around her bed. When the rickshaw began to slow down, I strapped the knapsack onto my back and checked to see that the pouch was snugly fastened to my belt, and the moment we stopped outside the hospital, which I recognized even in the dense darkness, I jumped down and said to the turbaned Indian, “Don’t move from here.” I ran eagerly up the steps: it had been more than a week since I had been in a hospital, and I missed even the smell.
But the smell that greeted me here was utterly different from the familiar one of Lysol and feces, or of drugs and ether, sometimes mingled with the smell of boiled vegetables. And it wasn’t the smell of the dead either, with which I was also familiar, but simply the smell of rot that violently assailed me. I stopped in the doorway, took a large gauze pad out of the knapsack, sprinkled it with iodine, and tied it onto my face with a bandage, like a surgical mask, and then I was able to enter the corridors to look for the laboratory. It was possibly thanks to this orange bandage on my face and not to the fact that I announced myself to be a doctor that someone paid attention to me and led me to the laboratory, which was situated in a courtyard at the back of the hospital, in a big, old hut besieged by silent patients, mainly women squatting on the bare ground with ragged children by their side. There nobody was impressed by my orange-stained mask, and I had to push my way to the head of the line and force my way into the hut, toward a very dark-skinned but noble-looking middle-aged woman, tall and thin as a slab of black marble, dressed in a flimsy rainbow-colored sari, with a big red third eye painted between her eyes. She was the lab supervisor, perhaps a clerk or perhaps a technician, slow in her movements and apparently also very disorganized, because her desk was untidily heaped with dozens of cards and lab results in different colors, among which she rummaged for the test numbers in order to give the results to the people crowding around her. At first she persisted in ignoring me, even though I had already removed the mask and explained that I was a doctor, but at last she turned to me and asked me what I wanted, and when I told her and added that I was prepared to pay double if the tests were done at once, she looked down at me from her towering height and said with a faintly contemptuous expression that a hospital belonging to Buddha, who was also the god of beggars, did not take payment, but if I wanted to make a donation there was a box for this purpose at the main entrance. “Certainly, I’ll make a donation at once,” I promised, and hurried to take the test tubes and containers out of the pouch. At first she recoiled. “Not here,” she said, waving me away, “not here, there’s a special counter. Go and stand in the line.” But finally she gave in and told me to write down which tests I wanted on some hospital notepaper. I wrote it all down, and added a request for liver-function tests; I signed my name and gave the number of my Israeli medical license, and needless to say, I avoided mentioning the fact that until a few days before my patient had been hospitalized in this very hospital, in order not to give rise to any unexpected bureaucratic complications. She glanced at my list, put a big red question mark next to “liver-function tests,” said that she was not sure if they could do them here, casually wrapped the blood and urine samples in the notepaper — without even bothering to secure it with tape or rubber rings — and threw them into a big cardboard box full of dusty test tubes, some empty and others full of strange-colored fluids. I thanked her, but repeated my request to have the tests done as quickly as possible; if necessary, I said, I was willing to step into the laboratory myself and help. “My patient,” I said, “is burning with fever in Bodhgaya, and as soon as we know the results we can begin to treat her.” But then the noble Indian woman suddenly flared up. “Everyone here wants to know, everyone here is waiting, everyone here is sick, everyone was sent by a doctor, nobody comes to have blood tests for fun,” she scolded me angrily, as if I were a boy. Why did I think I was entitled to an answer without waiting my turn? Was it only because the people standing here had darker skins than mine? And with a long, slender hand she waved me contemptuously away.