Since I was due to participate in another operation shortly, we had no time to dawdle, and I took her up to the cafeteria to hear the real reason for her unexpected visit. It was hard to get anything clear out of her. First of all, she protested, she hadn’t made a special trip to see me. She had been to visit my father’s aunt in the old folks’ home, the grandmother of his niece Rachel, who had been so nice to them in London, she and her husband Edgar. And afterward it had occurred to her to drop in on me in the hospital, to talk to me about Shivi. My reassurances the night before had not succeeded in putting her mind to rest. She wanted to give me the phone number in Calcutta where I could get in touch with Michaela again. If Michaela wanted to endanger herself, let her, but she had no right to put the baby at risk. Altogether, my mother was surprised at me — how could I be so indifferent to my own child? I wanted to make a crushing reply, but I said nothing, trying unsuccessfully to imagine Shivi in Calcutta. While I was drinking the last drops of coffee, I looked into her bloodshot eyes and tried to figure out what it was she wanted from me. She, who never lingered over partings, was now finding it difficult to part from me, and after I accompanied her to the exit, she turned around and followed me back to the surgical wing. “Don’t worry about Shivi,” I repeated before pressing the numbers of the code that opened the big glass doors. For a moment I wanted to add, You should worry about me instead, but I didn’t, and I disappeared from her view into the bright corridor opening out in front of me.
The next evening, after I had eaten my supper, despairingly aware of how my new dread of being alone was creeping up on me even in the early twilight hours, I decided to return to the hospital and explore the possibilities available to me in one of the empty operating rooms. The thought of going to sleep on the operating table and never waking up seemed increasingly attractive to me. But at seven o’clock my father phoned from Jerusalem. It appeared that when he came home from work that afternoon my mother wasn’t at home, although the insurance agency where she worked as a secretary was closed on Tuesday afternoons. He had found a vague note saying, “Gone out for a while, don’t worry.”
“Then why are you worried?” I said impatiently. “She’ll probably come back soon.” But about two hours later he phoned again, to say that there was no sign of her and nobody knew where she was. “You know I’m not a hysterical type,” he said, trying to defend himself, “but I don’t know where she could be.” We arranged to talk again in an hour, but after fifteen minutes he phoned again. It was after nine. He had conducted a little search of the house, and it seemed to him that the new suitcase which she had bought in London was missing. Perhaps she had lent it to somebody without telling him. “Surely she couldn’t have gone anywhere without giving me any warning?” he asked, and now he spoke in English, without even an occasional word in Hebrew, as if he had made up his mind to cling firmly to his mother tongue, which alone was capable of anchoring him in the chaos swirling around him. I asked him if he wanted me to come to Jerusalem. “Not yet. But if I have to go and report her missing to the police,” he added in a humorous tone, “you should come with me.” I promised him that I would stay near the phone, sensing how my father’s new anxiety, streaming to me from Jerusalem, was making me forget my own anxiety, which quickly turned to astonishment when he phoned with the update. Not only was the new suitcase missing, but her favorite summer dress was also gone. “Could she have suddenly taken it into her head to take a trip somewhere? But where?” he asked himself more than me, without any note of complaint or anger against his wife for leaving him without a word. “See if you can find her passport,” I suggested to him at ten o’clock at night. He went to look for it immediately, and fifteen minutes later he announced that he had found her Israeli passport, but the British passport, which was always in the same place as his, was missing. Could she have taken it with her? But why? “I’ll give you an answer soon,” he promised with a peculiar confidence in his voice, and half an hour later he phoned to say that he had just concluded a long conversation with my mother’s sister in Glasgow, and even though she had been astonished and also a little amused by his announcement and couldn’t give him any leads, he had the feeling that she wasn’t as worried as she should have been. Did she know something that she was hiding from him? Or were the Scots just more phlegmatic than the English?
It was now clear to both of us that my mother had undertaken a mysterious journey to an unknown destination. If my father had been more familiar with her wardrobe, he might have been more able to find out what was missing, but he was indifferent to such details, and it was hard to get anything specific out of him. His concern, however, evaporated the minute he realized that my mother had gone on a trip. Now he began to see the whole thing in a different light. Although people might disappear in the course of a journey to an unknown destination, at least a journey progressed in a definite direction; a rational woman like my mother would never set off without a goal, and this notion calmed him. “I’m turning into Sherlock Holmes in my old age,” he said with a chuckle at one o’clock in the morning, astonishingly wide awake, and he reported on private investigations of her belongings in the secret corners of unfamiliar drawers. At five o’clock in the morning, between one fitful doze and another, I tried to call him, but there was no answer. I left a message with the hospital switchboard to say that my mother had disappeared, I had to go to Jerusalem at once to help my father look for her, and I wouldn’t be coming to work. Why couldn’t I have lied and said my mother was sick? I castigated myself as I sped along the expressway to Jerusalem in the teeth of an east wind that had blown up, watching the rays of the sun forcing their way through the haze. Luckily the key to the house was always on my key ring, and I was able to walk inside and find my father sleeping soundly in his bed.