In the night I tossed and turned in my little room. I was still angry at the decision to leave in the morning. Was it only the insult of not being consulted that was bothering me? Maybe it was the nagging thought that I was about to return home without a job, and even though I had spent a whole week, twenty-four hours a day, with the administrative director, I still had nothing to show for it, and it was very much in the air that on my return I would have to start looking, without much hope, for a residency in the surgical department of another hospital. When I realized that I wasn’t going to fall asleep, I got out of bed and began to pack. I switched on the light and started putting the medical equipment back into the knapsack, carefully examining every item as I did so. The pharmacist was a genius; he had thought of everything. And the imagination, precision, and economy of his preparations had a particular radiance shining next to me in the silence of the night. I made a mental note to express my appreciation as soon as I got back, as I folded everything up and packed it in the knapsack, trying to remember exactly where each item fit. In the end, even though a red glow was already beginning to appear between the palm and coconut trees, I decided to try to snatch a couple of hours of sleep before the journey, and from a little glass jar with three words written on its label in the pharmacist’s handwriting—“Effective Sleeping Pill”—I fished out a smooth blue capsule and swallowed it.
The pill was so effective that Lazar had to shake me several times before he succeeded in rousing me, and his wife, who was busy cleaning the kitchen as industriously as if it were a friend’s borrowed apartment, flashed me a look which seemed to express astonishment at my voracious capacity for sleep. “I didn’t sleep all night,” I explained spreading out my hands apologetically to them, but Lazar wasn’t interested in apologies, he wanted rapid organization. Three swollen suitcases stood ready — two older bags and one new one, which had swallowed up their daughter’s sleeping bag, backpack, and other possessions. Einat herself was sitting on a chair outside, very pale, wearing the simple flowered dress and red cloth hat that her mother had brought from Israel — a sad and pensive tourist, carrying away only the hepatitis B virus, testimony to the fact that her independent backpacking trip to the stormy, colorful subcontinent had ended in failure, requiring an emergency rescue by Mommy and Daddy. Without examining her again before leaving, I hurriedly dressed and ate the sandwiches prepared by Lazar’s wife, who for a moment also seemed uncertain of the wisdom of starting off on the return journey so soon. But at this point the rickshaw driver in the white turban arrived, and when he saw me he came hurrying up to shake my hand enthusiastically, adding a little bow to express his satisfaction at my safe return from Calcutta. This time he had brought a bigger rickshaw, which easily took the four of us and our luggage aboard, and transported us rapidly to the dirty little airport in Gaya, which the light of day stripped of its mystery.
The flight from Gaya to Varanasi was not long, and the plane did not climb to any great altitude; nevertheless, a spurt of blood burst out of Einat’s nose again. I was absorbed in the window, sleepily watching, with a mixture of depression and admiration, a silvery flash apparently emanating from our plane, which streaked ahead of us, gliding over the fields and roads, vanishing into woods and canals and little lakes, then unexpectedly appearing again, darting quick and silver over another part of the landscape. Lazar’s wife was sitting in a window seat two rows in front of me, and during the flight I noticed her bun unraveling. Suddenly Lazar rose from his seat, a blood-soaked towel in his hand. I jumped up, but when he saw me he signaled me to sit down again. I ignored him and hurried over to them. Einat was lying with her head on her mother’s lap. “It’s stopped,” Lazar announced immediately, as if to send me away, but his wife looked uncertain. Her automatic smile had vanished. “What is it?” she asked me in real anxiety. “It’s probably weakness from the hepatitis,” I said without thinking, “and maybe a result of the change in atmospheric pressure too. Let’s change places for a minute,” I suggested to Lazar, sitting down in the seat next to his wife and looking straight into Einat’s eyes. She raised her head to me; she seemed a little pale, but mainly unhappy. In spite of the inconvenience to Lazar, I insisted on remaining next to the two women until the landing, which from the window was spectacular and startlingly beautiful. The plane circled over the two banks of the Ganges, the deserted east bank and the swarming west one; then it began gliding past, temple after temple, ghat after ghat, rocking in the air over the tiny black figures as if it too wished to bathe in the holiness of the golden river. I began talking to Einat, to distract her. Had she ever been in Varanasi? I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s a pity your father’s in such a hurry,” I said, “otherwise we could have squeezed in another day here. The little we saw when we were here only whetted my appetite for more,” and I smiled at her with the automatic smile of her mother, whose eyes were fixed on my face in profound concern.
It reminded me of those times in the operating room when we noticed that the glint of irony usually present in Professor Hishin’s eyes had vanished. We had to stop; it was my responsibility. This new thought began to torture me as we sat with our suitcases and knapsack in a dirty corner of the Varanasi airport, surrounded by Indian children who had come to stare at me and my patient, leaning against me with her eyes closed, too exhausted even to look at the big basket a few feet away, from which rose the alert head of a large snake. We had three hours to kill before the flight to New Delhi, and although Lazar and his wife had brought sandwiches and bottles of soft drinks from Bodhgaya, they made their usual tour of the shops, returning from these expeditions with a relatively clean-looking pastry or a glass of hot tea. I took my patient’s hand in mine to feel her pulse. It was rapid, a hundred per minute, and then, in the absurd despair of a doctor whom nobody believes, I found myself praying that she would begin bleeding again, because this was my only chance of asserting my authority and putting a stop to the dangerous journey, which Lazar and his wife were conducting with such feverish zeal. “Do you feel nauseous?” I asked. She thought a little and then nodded her head. “Then come along with me and let’s get it up.” I helped her to stand and led her into a corner, where I held her shoulders and gently pressed on her abdomen. She didn’t vomit much, but blood was evident. Wherever it was coming from, there was no doubt that the damage to the clotting factors was exacerbating the bleeding. I led Einat back to her seat and told her to lie down across my seat, after which I went to stand guard over her vomit, to make sure that nobody effaced the telltale signs until her parents returned and saw with their own eyes. At that point I was finally able to confront them quietly but firmly: “I’m sorry, but it’s impossible to continue to New Delhi. She has to have a blood transfusion immediately. You’re in too much of a hurry to get home, and you’re putting her at risk unnecessarily.”