In other words, the sense of mystery is still as quiescent as the point of the pencil delicately poised on the white sheet of paper between the characters. Or the travelers and their escorts, who are sleepy and somewhat excited in the departures hall, sending tentative signals to each other in the tired smiles of resignation with which they answer the predictable questions of the girl carryingout the security check, who is dressed in a spotless white shirt with a tag fastened to its pocket with a safety pin. A drama student in the evenings, she interrogates them one after the other, in a dry, monotonous voice, about the contents of their luggage. But their detailed replies do not save them, in the end, from opening their suitcases and exposing their personal belongings to each other, and handing over the big medical knapsack too, which astonishes one and all with the wealth and variety of its contents, the sheen of its instruments, until it seems that disaster and disease will be sucked into it willy-nilly. And the morning mists that pursued the young doctor and his parents on their way from Jerusalem filter into the great hall, hovering over the keys of the computers which eject the boarding passes, and the white-haired parents now hand over their only son, even if he is already twenty-nine years old, to the care of another pair of parents, total strangers, but faithful to the solidarity of parenthood as a self-evident human value. Perhaps it is precisely here, in this act of handing over, that the mystery originates. But if so, where does it lead?
It leads nowhere, for that is its nature. It has no direction, for the goal disappears once the cause has been forgotten. And in the tireless turning of the earth the ancient mystery suddenly appears among us, like a forgotten relative let out of a mental institution on a short vacation, despite its continuing delusion that the earth is eternally still, and every hour is sufficient unto itself, and nothingin the universe is ever lost; and after it comes to visit us, and sits among us pale and emaciated, and sets forth its fantastic views, it suddenly stands up, careful not to spill the tea we have placed before it, and begins wandering like a sleepwalker between our bedrooms, to meet people and events concluded long ago.
And so, even if a drop of mystery has fallen here, there is still no one capable of sensing it. Certainly not the young doctor’s father, Mr. Rubin, a tall English Jew wearing an old felt hat purchased five years before on a trip to Manchester, the city of his birth, who has been listening for some time in profound and patient silence to the lively explanations of the hospital director, whose hands, now that his luggage is sailing away on the conveyorbelt, are free to sketch the map of India over and over in the air, pointing out the possibilities of various alternative routes, while his plump little wife, dressed in a loose blue tunic, her eyes no doubt already smiling behind her big sunglasses, listens calmly to the polite small talk of Mrs. Rubin, a lean, bony EnglishJewess, who steps ahead of her toward the guard, who in a moment will separate with a gesture of his hand the passengers and the people seeing them off, but who will not be able to separate the common thought, new and pleasant, that has begun spinning itself secretly — yes,secretly and without a word — be tween the two middle-aged women, each of whom is now imaginingto herself a possible love story between the young doctor- son, who still sees the journey as something that has been forced upon him, and the sick daughter, waiting thousands of miles away in a state of total debilitation.
To my great relief my seat on the plane was not next to the Lazars, but several rows distant from them. If they had arranged it that way on purpose, I thought, it was an encouraging sign. They too wanted to avoid excessive intimacy, which would make us get on each other’s nerves right at the beginning of the trip. And indeed, for the first three hours of the flight I saw them only once, on my way to the toilet. They were sitting in the last row, in the smokers’ section; their breakfast trays had not yet been removed, but the curtain on the window was drawn. Lazar’s wife was sleeping, the dark glasses clutched in her fist, her head buried in the chest of her husband, who was studying some papers. My parents, who were only a little older than they were, would never have dared to display such intimacy in public. I intended to slip past without their noticing me, but Lazar took off his gold-rimmed reading glasses and asked me affably if I had managed to sleep. “I didn’t even try,” I replied immediately. “I’ve decided to tire myself out in anticipation of the flight to New Delhi tonight.” I could see that this practical answer was to his liking. “Do you find it difficult to fall asleep in the air too?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “So you’re like me,” he pronounced happily, as if he had found an ally. “I’ve never been able to sleep on a plane. We’ll see what happens tonight.” His wife raised her head; without her glasses her eyes looked red and puffy with sleep, but they immediately lit up in that mechanical, indiscriminate smile of hers. “What nice parents you have,” she said unhesitatingly, as if she had just seen them in her dreams. “Yes,” I nodded in agreement, and added without knowing why, “They’re not hysterical.” But she understood. “That’s right,” she said. “Your mother told me that they actually encouraged you to make the trip with us.”
“Yes, India has apparently kept its charms for Englishmen of the older generation.”
“You won’t be sorry you came with us,” she said soothingly, as if she still felt that she had to overcome the vestiges of my resistance. “You’ll see.” I didn’t answer, only smiled faintly. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her about the foreign currency the girl from her office had withdrawn from the bank in my name and for some reason pocketed herself, but I restrained myself and continued on my way to the toilet.
We reached Rome at eleven o’clock in the morning, and had about ten hours until the night flight to New Delhi. During these ten hours we had to get our visas for India, and Lazar decided that we should drag our luggage with us in order not to lose precious time, so that we wouldn’t have to come back to the airport in case of any delay with the visas, should we miss our flight and have to sleep over in Rome. But his wife was in favor of leaving the luggage at the airport so that we could get around more freely. They immediately plunged into a heated argument, which Lazar, with his practical pessimism, seemed on the point of winning, but suddenly, without any warning, she gained the upper hand, and the three of us went to look for the baggage check. We walked up and down corridors, confused by misleading directions, with Lazar grumbling at his wife all the time, “You see what a mess you’ve gotten us into now?” until in the end she stopped smiling and hissed, “Stop whining, get a hold of yourself,” and he shut up. Finally we found the place, which seemed to be located in a very out-of-the-way spot, but when we remarked on this to the baggage handler, he protested indignantly and pointed to the nearby elevator, which reached the heart of the airport. Once more we were obliged to undergo the tedious process of opening our luggage and having it inspected, and I was forced to contemplate for the second time their intimate belongings — far too many, in my opinion, for a short trip with a serious purpose to a poor country. Lazar collected the claim tickets and we emerged unburdened into a large plaza to look for a cab. His wife smiled happily, and said with a note of self-congratulation, without any animosity, “There you are — now we can move freely.” But although Lazar too seemed pleased, he didn’t want to admit it. “We’ve wasted the whole morning on the luggage, and who knows if those Indians go back to work at all after their lunch break.” But it transpired that the Indians worked without a break. When we arrived at the consulate building, which was surrounded by shrubs and ornamental trees, we found a long line of waiting Indians, and we lost no time in joining it. But Lazar soon expressed doubts as to the purpose of the line and wandered off to make inquiries, returning to announce triumphantly that we were in the wrong line: this one was only for Indians, the line for foreigners was around the back. And indeed, behind the building, in a little annex, we found an office with only a few European youths waiting in front of it. Lazar took my two passports, deliberating whether to present the Indians with the Israeli one or the British one, which seemed to interest him greatly, for he kept turning the pages to see how it was organized. In the end he gave it back to me, saying that we had better not present them with a passport that we would not know how to defend if it turned out to have flaws we had not noticed, and handed the three Israeli passports to the quiet, dark-skinned clerk, who refused even to look at them without the airline tickets and vaccination certificates. Lazar whipped out these documents, which he had ready, and smiled modestly. As a bureaucrat himself, he knew how much damage and delay could be caused by one recalcitrant official at a pivotal point. But the official wasn’t in the least hostile. The visas were quickly stamped, and we returned to the Roman street with eight free hours in front of us.