“Your parents are in a hurry to get home,” I said to her while I gave her another shot of glucose, but I refrained from saying anything about my opinion of this haste. “Yes,” replied Einat weakly, as if she too were afraid of starting off. “Daddy has to be back at work on Sunday.”
“But why?” I inquired. She didn’t know, or else she didn’t want to give me a clear answer, as if she had no desire to be her parents’ interpreter. I therefore decided to forget about satisfying my curiosity, and suggested a short walk outside. “I know you feel weak,” I said to her, “but if your parents insist on leaving tomorrow, you might as well take your first step home this evening, in the open air and without any pressure.” A timid smile crossed her face, hesitant, a little agonized, quick to efface itself under the pressure of some inner anxiety. At first she wasn’t interested, but then she agreed and got up, swaying on her feet. She didn’t know whether to change the long white Indian shift she wore as a kind of robe. In the end she decided to keep it on, adding a faded jean jacket, which emphasized the yellowish tinge of the whites of her eyes. I slung my camera over my shoulder and asked the Indian girl to accompany us so we could get back safely if we got lost, although there was actually no danger in this calm, tranquil place, which in spite of its simplicity I still insisted on thinking of as a kind of little paradise, perhaps because of the eternal sun, immense but soft and ripe, poised motionless on the flat horizon.
And in its yellow light I first posed the two young women next to the little golden gate in the stone wall surrounding the Buddha’s sacred bo tree, which was festooned with strips of colored cloth. Then I asked the Indian girl to photograph Einat and me in the same place. But when I asked Einat to take a photo of the Indian girl and me next to the nearby lotus pond, I noticed the camera trembling in her hands, and I immediately took it away from her and asked a passing Oriental pilgrim to photograph the three of us. This is what paradise must look like, I kept thinking as I lightly supported my patient, giddy from the walk I had imposed on her after she had spent so many days in bed. “Look how steeped in spirituality everything is here,” I said encouragingly, and pointed to the flourishing gardens surrounding the big Tibetan monastery farther down the road. “This is what paradise must be like, full of spirituality. It’s intended for the soul, not the body, after all.” And again I took my camera out of its case and asked passersby to photograph us at various points along the road that wound among the different Buddhist monasteries, each of them belonging to a different nation. “After I die, perhaps my soul will peep into the photograph album and remember where to fly to,” I said in English to the Indian girl, but my joke did not raise the ghost of a smile. On the contrary — she bowed her head and confirmed that it was right and proper for a young man like me to start thinking seriously about his death. “It’s really a shame that your parents insist on leaving tomorrow,” I repeated to Einat, who said nothing. “If your father’s in such a hurry,” I added gently, “let him go alone, and we’ll stay for a few days, until you feel better.” But she maintained her strange silence. Was the idea of her parents’ separating for even a few days impossible for her to contemplate, I wondered, or was her debilitation making her apathetic? But precisely because I wanted to go on interrogating her about her parents, I refrained from pressing her for an immediate answer, especially since in the distance, at the end of the broad road, it was already possible to see the dumpy figures of Lazar and his wife, trailing a pinkish light from the river behind them and picking their way gingerly through a big crowd of young backpackers who had just arrived from Gaya. Presumably they had been told at the hotel that we had gone out for a walk, and they had come hurrying to find us. “I’m suddenly beginning to like India,” I announced to the Indian girl, feeling that “like” was a temporary word, until I found a better one, to describe the strange sensation of freedom that was welling up in me. Then I noticed the blood beginning to flow from Einat’s nostrils, without her being aware of it at first. I not only put my arm around her, I even swung her up in the air to seat her on a stone wall, with her head thrown back and resting carefully on my knee as I sat beside her, using my handkerchief to soak up the stream of blood, which was a small but clear sign of the correctness of my medical intuition. So, I said to myself, it is too early to start the trip home.
But it was already too late to change anything. Lazar and his wife had come back from Gaya with plane tickets for all of us for the next morning, and Lazar reacted with considerable annoyance to the sight of the blood-soaked handkerchief. “What on earth made you go out for a walk?”
“If you want to leave tomorrow morning,” I replied in a tone that I knew contained both complaint and rebuke, “she has to get accustomed to the open air.” But only his wife was aware of the rebuke. Lazar, looking at his daughter, who was beginning to raise her head, was even more determined to leave for home before things got worse. “Never mind,” he said, as if he were the expert here, “it’s only a little nosebleed, and it’s already stopped. Let’s go back to the hotel — we have to eat and start packing.” I took my camera out of its case again and snapped the three of them a couple of times. Then I called the Indian girl to join them and I took a photo of the four of them, and after that I asked Lazar to take one of the four of us, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I took the camera again and posed him and his wife opposite the soft sun, and took a picture of the two of them by themselves. “We might as well finish the film,” I said. “The light’s so pretty now and the place is gorgeous, and tomorrow we’ll be on ugly roads.” Lazar looked too tired to take any further part in my sudden lust for photography, but Dori cooperated gladly. It was evident that she liked having her photograph taken. There was suddenly something captivating about this middle-aged woman — in the way she drew herself up to her full height, crossed her long legs, tried to pull in her protruding stomach, and then looked straight at the camera and shot out smile after smile, even before the button was pressed. And for the first time on this journey I felt a slight pang of regret and longing. I had come so far but seen so little. Would I be able to come back here one day?
Although I guessed that the sudden bleeding was related to Einat’s general weakness, and perhaps also to the onset of her period — as sometimes happens, but usually with young girls — I couldn’t avoid the nagging thought that there might be a small hemorrhage somewhere which refused to stop because of the coagulopathy caused by the viral hepatitis. So I didn’t take my eyes off Einat, who was now leaning on the Indian girl. Lazar’s wife supported her too, and the three of them walked slowly behind Lazar, who hurried in the direction of the hotel. Who could tell what other surprises she had in store for me on the way home? I thought to myself, adopting the cynical tone beloved of Hishin, who sometimes talked about his patients as if they were cunning opponents whose only aim was to trip him up. And while I quickly changed the film in the camera and insisted on snapping one more shot of the four of them outside the entrance to our hotel, which was now suffused in a strange purple-yellow twilight, like a huge bruise remaining after the sun refused to set, I also inquired casually, and without explaining why, about Lazar’s and Dori’s blood types. I had guessed right: the only possible donor if an emergency arose would be Lazar’s wife.