But there was no time to go on thinking about it, because the luggage started arriving, and soon it would be time to say good-bye. My suitcase, which had already been separated from theirs on the plane, turned up first, and Lazar saw no reason to keep me waiting. “You still have to drive to Jerusalem — you’d better get moving,” he said firmly, and while I was still wondering how to say good-bye to them, he remembered something and grabbed hold of my suitcase. “Just a minute, let’s free you of the silly shoe box we dumped on you before you go.” To my surprise, Dori tried to stop him. “It’s not important, not now, don’t trouble him with that now, his parents are waiting for him. He’ll give it back when he’s got time.” But Lazar could see no reason why I should have to drag his wife’s shoes to Jerusalem and back. “It won’t take more than half a minute,” he said, and he helped me to undo the straps and open the suitcase, and without even waiting for me to assist him, he inserted his hands as delicately as an experienced surgeon into my belongings and quickly extracted the cardboard box, which I had carefully avoided opening throughout the trip. He said, “There you are, no trouble at all,” and smiled good-bye. “Then I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow,” I said in an effort to keep the thread of a connection between us. “At the hospital?” Lazar seemed puzzled, as if this weren’t the place where we both worked, but he immediately remembered and said, “Of course.”
“Then I won’t see him again?” said his wife, examining me with surprise but not with sorrow. Locks of her long hair had fallen onto her face and neck, her makeup had faded during the flight, and under the white neon light, her wrinkles were once more revealed. She didn’t know how to say good-bye to me, and a sweet wave of pain trembled inside me. “The photographs,” I stammered in embarrassment, and my face began to burn as if I were playing some trick on them. “The pictures I took of you are still in my camera. When they’re ready, I’ll bring them.” Lazar and his wife remembered the snapshots and exclaimed happily, “Right, our pictures!”
“Yes,” I promised, “maybe I’ll bring them around to your place, because I should check up on my patient anyway and see how she’s getting along.”
And perhaps because of the promise that we would meet again we parted casually, as we had parted from time to time in India, without shaking hands or embracing. Still I refused even to wonder whether Dori had been touched by a spark of that absurd nocturnal fantasy of falling in love, which would no doubt vanish as soon as I got through customs and emerged into the night, where the stormy rain and hail had gathered the people loyally waiting into a dense huddle under the scant protection of the shelter — a huddle that still managed to display the traditional Israeli enthusiasm, embracing every returning citizen of the state as if his absence warranted a gentle hand to guide him home. This at any rate was apparently the attitude of my parents, who had waited for an hour at two different observation posts in order not to miss me when I came out. My mother spotted me first, and we had to go to some trouble to find my father, who was standing calmly under his umbrella in the pouring rain, after giving up his place under the shelter with his natural gentlemanliness to two elderly women who had been reduced to hopeless despair by the storm. “You look well,” said my mother as we followed my father in the dark to the parking lot, trying to shelter me under her little umbrella. “You’re a little thinner, but you look happy. So you weren’t disappointed by our India.” My mother was always afraid of disappointments and disillusionments that might come my way, afraid of those states of emptiness that threaten to overwhelm the young. Consequently, as the person who had encouraged me to accompany the Lazars on the trip to India, which she felt entitled to call “ours” because of her uncle’s memories, she was on tenterhooks to know how I had managed. And although I hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything of substance, she sensed that I had returned satisfied. If not the rain, which forced us to step carefully between the puddles of water, she might have sensed something of my feelings for Dori as well, and of the pain of parting which had already started to bubble inside me.
My mother thought that I should do the driving as the storm gathered force around us, but my father refused to forfeit his place at the wheel. “It will be all right,” he reassured her. “I know the road, it’s plain sailing,” and she had to make do with seating me beside him to guard against possible mistakes on his part. He took off his coat, cleaned his glasses, and as usual overheated the engine. He hadn’t yet spoken to me. Only after he had brought us calmly and carefully out of the parking lot into the heart of the storm, and turned onto the main road, did he turn his face to me at last. He looked at me affectionately and said, “So, it was a success.”
“A success?” I said, startled. “In what sense?”
“In the sense that you had to prove yourself,” my father replied in his characteristically calm tone. “Lazar’s secretary said that you had performed the correct medical procedure and saved the situation over there.” I quickly turned my head to my mother, who was sitting in the backseat. She did not seem pleased that my father had blurted out the story, stealing my thunder, so to speak. However, happiness surged up in me. Had Lazar already managed to tell one of the professors about the tests in Calcutta and the blood transfusion in Varanasi, and was that how the news had traveled to the administrative office? Or had he said something in all innocence to his secretary, and she, full of goodwill but without really understanding anything, had sung my praises to my parents when she called to tell them when the plane was due to arrive? I would find all that out tomorrow, I said to myself, but in the meantime my father, who was eager to hear every detail, and in the right order, was already forcing me to describe the medical part of the trip from both the practical and the theoretical point of view. He drank in my explanations thirstily. He possessed the virtue of being able to learn something from everyone, which was why he was such a silent man and such a profound listener. Now, as he sat erect and slightly back from the wheel, silently contemplating, like an objective judge, the concerted efforts of the car, the wipers, the headlights, the windshield, and the road itself as they battled the savage storm threatening to drive us off the road, he wanted to learn from my lips the full extent of the salvation I had brought to the Lazars. He was afraid that the modesty he attributed to me, which he regarded as an unfortunate inheritance he himself had bequeathed to me, would make me belittle the importance of my achievement. Likewise, he had still not resigned himself to the fact that the second resident had been given the longed-for post we had all been hoping for. My mother too listened in silence. From time to time she slipped in a brief question, ultimately succeeding in picking up my lack of enthusiasm for Einat, for whom she had cherished secret hopes. She was trying to hear the inner story, which I was attempting to disguise as I spoke. In the end she blurted, “You keep saying Lazar’s wife, Lazar’s wife, but what’s her name?”
“Her name’s Dorit, but her husband calls her Dori,” I replied, and a sweet pain gripped me. “And what did you call her?” my mother stubbornly demanded. “Me?” I wondered momentarily why she was so insistent, staring wearily at the road which loomed up through the rain. “I called her Dori too in the end,” I admitted. “And what kind of a woman is she?” my mother kept on. “A spoiled woman,” I answered at once. “In the beginning she made a big fuss about the hotels.” And I closed my eyes in exhaustion, seeing the plump little woman advancing along the alleys of Varanasi with her slow, pampered walk, stepping carefully in the mud and smiling absentmindedly at the Indians crowding around her. And a wave of warmth suddenly engulfed me and almost choked me.