Although the train trip lasted nine hours, I couldn’t sleep a wink. The sights of Calcutta mingled with the gnawing anxiety about Einat had turned into a single entity weighing on my heart. In the end, when sleepiness almost overcame me, I went and stood in the corridor, afraid that Gaya might slip past in the night. After midnight I was ejected onto the platform, which looked like the last station at the end of the world, and picked my way carefully through the rickshaws standing outside in the hope of finding the rickshaw driver with the white turban, but he wasn’t there. Another, younger driver took me to Bodhgaya on a country road winding through pleasant hills outlined by a slender crescent moon. The hotel by the river was closed and dark, and for a moment I forgot where the entrance to our little bungalow was. On my last legs, I walked around the building, and for the first time on this trip I felt my composure collapse, and a painful, unfamiliar sob escaped my lips. Would I really have to stay outside all night in the chill rising from the river, just because I wanted to be ideal not only in the eyes of the Lazars but in my own eyes too? I sat down under one of the large trees to recover, and remembered I still had one sandwich left, which I ate in order to ward off sleep. Then I stood up, heartened as if by a glass of good wine, and walked around the grounds again until I recognized the bungalow. I knocked lightly and the door opened at once. It was Dori, without her glasses, her hair loose, in a thin nightgown that outlined her full body and her big, firm breasts. I saw that her slippers had high heels. At first she seemed about to bestow only one of her automatic eye-smiles on me, but her emotions got the better of her and she spread out her arms and embraced me with forbidden warmth. For a moment we lingered in the gloomy kitchen, where dirty pots stood on the stove, but Lazar immediately appeared and gripped my head in a powerful embrace of both anger and deep affection. “What’s the matter with you? Where did you disappear to? In a little while we would have left without you! Just don’t tell me that you took those tests all the way to Calcutta!”
“Didn’t you get my note?” I questioned him with a strange pride. “Was it really necessary to go all the way there?” said Lazar as if he hadn’t heard me. “Yes, it was necessary,” I replied with a new firmness. “I got all the results possible in a reliable form, and now I know where we stand.”
“Where?” asked Lazar, who seemed offended by the way I had spoken. “In a minute,” I said. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Just let me check on Einat first.” And just as I was, without washing my hands, I went into the room where a yellow light illuminated the sick girl, who was still scratching herself in her restless sleep and who had no idea of the dangerous time bomb ticking inside her. I crouched down by her bed and laid my hand on her forehead. The fever was the same as before. Lazar and his wife looked at me impatiently. Her condition in the past twenty-four hours had not been encouraging, and now I had come back with the results of the tests and I was bending over her in such concern. I have to worry them, I said to myself, otherwise they won’t cooperate with me; otherwise the authority I’m going to need here will be compromised. I held her limp wrist to take her pulse. Her green eyes opened wide in her thin, beautiful face, but she didn’t smile like her mother. “Well?” said Lazar, irritated by my performance. “In a minute. Just let me wash my hands,” I said, and went into the kitchen. Lazar’s wife handed me a towel and soap, and I smiled at them, turned to Lazar, and said, “As far as Calcutta’s concerned, you were right. But there are good people there, and you won’t believe it, I actually saw a movie.”
Five
But even supposing that he has really fallen in love, what can he do about it? he says to himself with a gloomy smile, his eyes caressing the supple back of the little girl bending over the atlas and gnawing her pencil She has to belong to somebody, he reassures himself, somebody who will come to fetch her. But the thought that the little girl has been abandoned in his kitchen goes on percolating in him, and with a new and pleasant lust, which can still, he believes, be controlled, he lays his hand lightly on her slender shoulder, in order to encourage her. He leans over the tablecloth spread out in front of him in its blue, green, and yellow, sweetly reading the names of towns and countries, and says to her in a tone of mild rebuke, “But what else is there to look for here, if this is the place?” And he lays his finger on a greenish stain crossed by the blue lines of rivers and announces firmly, “There, that’s the right answer. That’s enough studying now — it’s late.” And while a sharp little knife twists in his heart, he closes the atlas and the workbook, opens the safety pin, and removes the school badge from the pocket of her blouse, feeling at the tips of his fingers the outlines of the childish breast, and now he has to ask himself what she’s feeling, and what she’s capable of understanding, and if he can kiss her without endangering himself.