— Ha ha ha ha ha…
— Most thoroughly amusing, Father, was it not? Ha ha ha ha…
— Sometimes the artery is collapsed.
— Of course it has a name. Why should it not? Everything in our body has a name.
— Why do you ask?
— The radial artery, or something of the sort…
— Absurd… perfectly… and yet there you are…
— To think that I, of all people, who am so accustomed to weak pulses… in the case of children it is quite common…
— Well, don’t take it to heart… in any case, no one will ever remember it was me…
— Fiendish luck? Come, now, that is putting it a bit strongly… why be so upset by it? I am not about to have my license revoked, ha ha ha…
— No, no one else tried to examine him. They all just wanted to meet him. They were some quite famous professors there who spoke a wicked German, and before long a group of them had formed around him while I retired to a corner — where, if you must know, I was thinking not of Herzl but of Linka, who was no doubt worrying what had happened to me — the lord only knew if she had not already returned to our hotel and lost her way in its dark corridors! And in that same corner — to which he too had retreated from that boisterous outbreak of German — was the doctor from Jerusalem, feeling rejected and rather shamefaced that Herzl had not recognized him — so much so that, when we were given the hint to leave the room and let our pulseless leader rest, he slipped out a back door and disappeared, while I — no doubt attracted to his mortification by my own — ran after him. I found myself in a long, dark hallway, which I realized at once was not the way I had come; but not wishing to retrace my steps, I groped my way onward in pursuit of the shadow ahead of me. He sensed that he was being followed and halted; took a little candle from his pocket and lit it; and held it up to light my way while waiting for me politely… from which moment, Father, you may if you like draw a straight and ghastly line to his death ten days ago in the train station of Beirut, even though in my heart I know well that the two of us, Linka and myself, were only a pretext…
— A pretext.
— A pretext… a pretext for an entirely different reckoning. That is, I was a pretext for Linka, and Linka was a pretext for someone else, perhaps even another woman…
— I ask myself the same question.
— I cannot stop thinking about it; cannot stanch the grief of it…
— No.
— No…
— You aren’t tired?
— I? I have just begun to wake up. Beware of me, dear Papa, because the story and I have become one — my soul has been smelted to it by this fire, which has bewitched me since childhood — so that — who knows — perhaps when I finish this story I will leap into it and vanish in a heap of ashes… brrrr…
— I do not know why, but I have had this chill in my bones since crossing the Bosporus. I feel as though I were levitating.
— That may be so. For a Palestinian like me, though, the autumn here is like winter…
— Fill my glass up, will you?
— No, not with tea… with brandy…
— More.
— Thank you. And that, Father, was how it began: with an encounter in a dark hallway near the service stairs, where a man from Jerusalem was waiting for me with a little candle burning in his hand. I still cannot get over his having that candle ready in his pocket — you would have thought he had spent his whole life being trapped in dark passages — indeed, he had two candles, one for me too, which I lit at once with great joy. To this day I wonder whether had Herzl not had that weak spell, we would have met. Or suppose he had had it and I had not run after the man? But I would have run after him — I was drawn to him — I would have found him — perhaps because from the very first he seemed to me, that stocky man from Jerusalem, the complete antithesis to everything around him… most vital with a great shock of hair… a rather handsome oriental gynecologist…
— Antithesis.
— To all of us. To you, for instance — to the other delegates — to all those German Jewish physicians…
— I do not know.
— A gynecologist. Actually, more of an obstetrician. Do you remember, dear Papa, how I too could not decide whether to specialize in gynecology or pediatrics? You were in favor of women; Linka thought I would do better with children.
— Of course… I can still change my mind… it’s not impossible. But this man was a gynecologist through and through — an obstetrician with a maternity clinic in Jerusalem — and something of a public figure there as well.
— About fifty. But though he could not have been much younger than you, forgive me for saying that he was still unspoiled — even childlike — yet cunning at the same time — although not in an ordinary sense…
— A real clinic. Be patient and I will tell you about it…
— Why should it be just for Jewesses? For Arabs too and Christian pilgrims — for everyone. But be patient…
— A good question! At first we spoke in broken German. Before long, however, we realized that this would get us nowhere; at which point he suggested English, which, I already had noticed, he spoke as flamboyantly as a peacock, rounding his syllables like hard-boiled eggs in his mouth. He swore that it was the language of the future — which did not deter me from throwing up my hands and switching to Yiddish, a language I saw he had some knowledge of, although it came out a mangled Hebrew when he spoke it — so that I suddenly thought: well, then, why not Hebrew itself — it is certainly good enough for two Jews groping down a dark hallway! And that was how we started talking in Hebrew, which slowly started coming back to me in the darkness, so that I thought how proud you would have felt after all your efforts to drum a bit of it into me…
— Real Hebrew, Father, as queer and rusty as it was, with the verbs completely unconjugated, just as you would find them in the dictionary. I must have confused my masculines and feminines too — and yet I must say that it was not unpleasurable to be using the language of our forefathers in that hallway, and even to joke in it a bit — because at first we kept losing our way and ended up descending some narrow little stairs to a wine cellar, each step of which did wonders for my command of the holy tongue — which he himself spoke in a guttural version of the language that sounded as if his throat were on fire. Eventually we realized that we had taken a wrong turn and climbed back up with our candles to the door we first had exited from… only to discover to our dismay that it was locked. There was silence on the other side of it — perhaps Herzl had already been put to bed or whisked away by his friends for another session of Zionism. In any case, I was beginning to panic, because I kept picturing Linka out in the night, in that low-cut dress, looking for me high and low. Just then, though, we heard heavy footsteps, which belonged to a sturdy Swiss servant girl, who was on her way up to her room after a hard day’s work. She directed us through the labyrinth to a back street behind the Casino — and a most narrow and deserted street it was; you could not possibly have guessed from it what a mob of noisy Jews had just been there…
— I already told you, Father. About your age — but unjaded and full of energy — a total antithesis…
— In what sense? In every sense!
— For example? For example… do you think that you, Father — being the person that you are — a respected member of the community — the owner of an estate — the father of a not-so-young but quite capable doctor and a decidedly attractive young daughter — could one day fall madly — passionately — head over heels in love…