On a low glass table lay a large open atlas, with photo albums and travel guides scattered around it. “You’re not the only one who was taken by surprise,” Lazar apologized. “It fell on us like a bolt out of the blue when that girl knocked on the door yesterday with the letter. But first come and see where we’re going. Here’s New Delhi, here’s Bombay, here’s Calcutta, a kind of triangle, and here’s Gaya, a remote but holy town surrounded by temples. Tomorrow I’m going to Jerusalem to meet someone who spent several months there a few years ago, and after that I’ll have a clearer picture of what to expect. But just a minute, before we go any further let me introduce you to my wife.”
A woman walked into the room, a plump brunette of about forty-five, of medium height, her hair gathered into a rather untidy knot on top of her head, her eyes flashing me a frank, vivid smile behind her glasses. I stood up and her husband introduced me to her. She nodded affably and immediately sat down opposite me with a regal movement, crossing long legs that didn’t match the heaviness of her arms and shoulders, and began watching her husband, who went on drawing lines on the map of India and calculating times. As I tried to follow the route he was mapping out I sensed her appraising me, and when I looked up at her, her eyes suddenly lit up again in the same warm, lively, generous smile, and she nodded her head slightly in a gesture of approval. Then, as if she sensed my gnawing doubts, she suddenly interrupted her husband and addressed me directly. “Do you really think you’ll be able to leave your work at the hospital and go abroad for more than two weeks?” Her husband, who was very put out by this question, answered crossly in my place. “First of all, why do you already say more than two weeks? Where do you get that from? It’ll be less. I have to be back on the Sunday after next, don’t forget. And second, why shouldn’t he be able to leave the hospital? He can leave it for as long as he likes. Hishin gave him carte blanche — he can take it as leave due to him, if he likes, or as ordinary working days and we’ll find a way to make them up.” But his wife immediately protested. “Why at the expense of his leave? Why should he sacrifice his vacation for us?” And again she looked directly at me, and said in a clear, firm voice, which did not suit her plump, soft looks, “Please find out what payment you’re entitled to for your services on a trip like this. We will gladly compensate you for your efforts.”
Suddenly I felt stifled in the elegant, spacious apartment. The two middle-aged people sitting opposite me looked powerful and influential. “It’s not a question of money”—I began to blush—“and it really is true that I’ve got a lot of leave coming, but if I go away now, even for two weeks, it’s as if I’ve already finished my trial year in surgery, and I don’t want to miss a single day there.”
“In the surgical department?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” I replied, “I started in surgery, and that’s where I want to continue.”
“In surgery?” said the woman, looking at her husband in surprise. “We thought you were transferring to internal medicine or some other department, because Hishin told us that you weren’t going to continue in surgery.” A tremor of real pain passed through me on hearing the final verdict on my future spoken so casually by this strange woman. It wasn’t even a question of a position being available, I now realized, but a clear professional judgment against me. And Hishin’s tall figure seemed to loom up behind the woman, who never stopped examining me with her smiling eyes. “Who said I wanted to be an internist?” I burst into a bitter snort of laughter. “Even if Hishin has reservations, I’m still not giving up surgery. There are other hospitals, if not in Israel then abroad — England, for instance — and you can get excellent experience there too.”
“England?” repeated Mrs. Lazar, and her friendly smile disappeared. “Yes. My parents came here from England, I’m a British citizen, and I won’t have any problems doing my residency there.” Lazar, who was uninterested in the argument between me and his wife, suddenly beamed. “So I was right. I saw in your file that your parents were born in England, and I wondered if you were a British citizen too. That will help you on the trip to India. I suppose your English is perfect.”
“Perfect? I wouldn’t say so,” I said coldly, again trying to rebuff the single-minded enthusiasm of the man. “I was born and educated here, and my English is the same as everybody else’s — in other words, far from perfect. I usually speak Hebrew to my parents too, but of course, since I often hear them speaking English to each other, I’m fluent — not perfect, but fluent.” Lazar appeared more than satisfied with fluency and gave me a smile of undisguised gratification; it seemed that nothing could now detract from my virtues as a candidate for the trip to India, and he turned to his wife and raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? You haven’t offered our guest anything to drink! We’ve been talking so much we’ve forgotten our duties as hosts.” But the woman made no move to rise from the sofa. Instead she smiled at her husband and said, “Why don’t you make us some strong Turkish coffee? We’re all exhausted.”
Lazar jumped to his feet. “You don’t object to Turkish coffee?” His wife turned to me, as if to dare me to object; then she took out a slender cigarette and lit it. When her husband disappeared into the kitchen, her eyes flashed again with the same bright smile, and she leaned toward me and began talking intimately in her soft but very clear voice. “I feel that you’re still having doubts. That’s natural. Because really, why should anybody be ready to drop everything from one day to the next and go to India? And if you feel that we’re trying to put pressure on you and it offends you, you’re absolutely right. But try to understand that we’re upset too. We have to bring our daughter home quickly; the disease — as you know better than I do — is exhausting and debilitating. According to the girl who brought the letter, her condition has already deteriorated, and everyone who’s been consulted strongly recommends taking a qualified doctor with us. Before you arrived, Hishin phoned and warned us not to let you wriggle out of it, because in his opinion you’re the ideal candidate.”
“Ideal again.” I interrupted her with an angry laugh that welled up inside me. “Hishin’s exaggerating. In what sense ideal? Ideal for what? Maybe, as your husband said, because of my British passport.” The woman laughed in surprise. “Of course not! Naturally, it won’t hurt to have a British passport in India, but that’s not what Hishin meant, he’s really very fond of you. He spoke of your quiet manner, your friendliness, your excellent clinical perception, and especially of your deep concern for your patients.” She spoke warmly, passionately, her words clear and eloquent, but I was aware of a certain hypocrisy and exaggeration too. It was impossible to tell if Hishin had actually heaped all that praise on my head or if she was inventing compliments to seduce me. I lowered my eyes, but I didn’t know how to stop her. In the end I let my hands fall wearily to my sides and asked, “How old is she, this girl of yours?”
“Girl?” The mother laughed. “She’s not a girl. She’s twenty-five years old. She has spent two years studying at the university. Here, this is a picture she sent two months ago, before she got sick.” She picked up an envelope of coarse green paper, from which she extracted two snapshots of a young woman with a pretty, delicate face. In one of them the woman was standing alone against the background of a vast river in which naked figures were crouching, and in the second she was near the entrance of a building which looked like an Indian temple, a boy and a girl on either side of her, their arms wrapped around her.
When I got home I decided, in spite of the late hour, to phone my parents in Jerusalem and ask their opinion. To my surprise, both my mother, who was still awake, and my father, who was awakened by the ringing phone, thought that I should on no account turn down such a proposal from the head of the hospital. “He’s only the administrative director,” I kept explaining, but my father was adamant. “All the more so,” he insisted, beginning to speak English in his sleepiness. “Those are the people with the real power, because they’re permanent fixtures, and the others come and go around them. Even your Professor Hishin might disappear one fine day for one reason or another, and it won’t do you any harm to have the support of the administrative head of the hospital in the future.”