And I realized at that moment that I had to be careful when I was talking to my mother, because she sometimes succeeded in seeing into my soul with astonishing accuracy, and she was liable to sense something of the strange feeling I had brought back with me from the trip, and it was only natural that this feeling would offend and upset her and give rise to the wish to do something to nip this ridiculous infatuation in the bud. If that was the right word for my thoughts about this woman, which now included a lust that I was just becoming aware of, sitting cozily next to my father as we drove through the night from Lydda to Jerusalem. I looked at the road climbing between the hills, from which the rain and mist had cleared, giving way to lightly falling snowflakes. It would be a shame, I said to myself, if my mother had to suffer even for an instant because of a feeling that was absurd and hopeless by its very nature. It would be better not to talk too much about the trip to India, in case I unintentionally let slip some hint that would embarrass us all unnecessarily. Accordingly, I suggested to my father, who was a little offended, that I take his place by the wheel, because the airy flakes were turning the journey home into an adventure that might become dangerous. And in fact the light, shining flakes, which had begun flying through the air a few miles after Sha’ar-Hagai, turned into a heavy snowfall as we approached the city, and for the next two days I was stuck in Jerusalem, because my parents, who generally trusted my driving, implored me not to return to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle on the snowy roads. Since I felt a great weariness rising in me, the fruit of the unexpected excitements of the trip to India, I agreed to settle down again in the old bedroom of my childhood and relax into a delicious sensation that had nothing to do with food and drink — for my mother had never distinguished herself as a cook — but with the silent stirrings of a ghostly British presence in the apartment, which gave me the feeling that even when I was lying in bed that I was participating in an old black-and-white family movie full of stable, kindly values, whose happy, moral conclusion was guaranteed in advance. Thus, hidden at home, surrounded by a blanket of snow, I tried to cool and perhaps even to kill my infatuation with Lazar’s smiling round-limbed wife, and I tried to stop thinking about her, so that here, in the faithful room of my childhood and youth, she would sink into the depths of the darkness, dragged down by the weight of her years.
But the smiling middle-aged woman refused to sink, and blended instead with the familiar furniture and curtains of the room to which I had been brought at the age of two, when my parents moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv because of my father’s government job. And so I escaped into sleep, careful not to leave traces of my lust on the spotless sheets provided by my mother, who marveled together with my father at my sudden craving for sleep. They had grown accustomed to seeing me as a serious student who burned the midnight oil, a hard worker who got up early in the morning, and more recently as a doctor on call, capable of going without sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch. “You’re taking us back to your days in boot camp,” said my mother with a slightly worried air when I entered the dim old kitchen at twilight after sleeping the whole afternoon, feeling a pang of intense longing for the bright colors of the Indian temples. “It’s the soporific effect of the snow,” explained my father, in English, and he got up to give me my old place at the table, which he had taken for himself when I left home. “Yes, yes, you sit in your place,” he insisted when I tried to refuse, at the same time checking on my mother as she poured my tea and set it before me with a slice of crumb cake, on which I immediately spread a layer of jam to take away the dry, slightly moldy taste, which had depressed me even as a child.
“While you were asleep, your father went to town and had the photographs you took in India developed,” my mother said with a slightly embarrassed air as she handed me two envelopes crammed with pictures. “My photographs?” I turned to my father almost with a yell, refusing to believe that this quiet, aristocratic man had stolen into my room on his own initiative and taken the two rolls of film lying next to my bed while I was sleeping. In fact, it turned out that the initiative was my mother’s — she had gone into my room to check if I was warm enough, noticed the two rolls of film, and sent my father to have them developed in the center of town. She must have wanted to find out more about the trip to India, since I was too busy sleeping and too preoccupied with my thoughts to tell her. I suppose she can sense that something happened to me over there, I thought, hanging my head and avoiding her eyes, but even her native intelligence would never dare to imagine what had really happened. “Don’t you want to see how your pictures came out?” she wondered, as I went on gripping the two envelopes tightly in my hand. “But they’re not all mine,” I explained quickly. “Some of them are the Lazars’, I lent them the camera when they went on a trip to the Taj Mahal.” My parents were astounded to hear that the Lazars had gone off together and left me by myself with their sick daughter, and even after I told them that it had been my idea to send them to see the Taj Mahal, they went on criticizing the Lazars for accepting my offer, though they were proud of my generosity. “Well, why don’t you show them to us already, and tell us all about them,” said my mother as she stretched out an eager hand for the envelopes. “Of course,” I said, “but I thought you’d already looked at them.” And a little panic took hold of me at the thought of confronting her image here, in my parent’s sad kitchen, and I stood up at once and put my cup and plate in the sink and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth again, and when I returned the kitchen was flooded with light and the table was covered with colored pictures glowing with India’s reddish brown light, and already from a distance I saw her figure, which had miraculously managed to insert itself in more pictures than I would have imagined possible, and not only those taken by Lazar at the Taj Mahal. Was it her innate serenity and automatic smile that enabled her, in spite of her abundant plumpness, to look so natural and photogenic in every picture, even when she was surrounded by Indians in rags or sitting on a rickety bench in the twilight next to the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? My father passed one picture after another before his eyes and requested detailed explanations, but my mother fell silent, and a new pallor covered her cheeks. “She certainly likes having her picture taken,” she said at last, and there was a note of complaint in her voice. “Who?” I asked innocently. “Lazar’s wife — or what do you call her?” My mother kept her head lowered, as if she were afraid of meeting my eyes. “It’s her husband, it’s Lazar. I lent him my camera,” I said in self-justification, my voice muffled by the wave of excitement that surged up in me again at the sight of the woman strewn in bright glossy squares all over our gray kitchen table.
That evening the snowstorm intensified, but I went anyway to visit Eyal, a childhood friend who had studied medicine with me, and who was on call tonight in Hadassah Hospital, where he was doing his residency in pediatrics, after having been turned down by the surgical department. We sat in a little room with pictures of children stuck up on the walls, surrounded by the racket of sick children running up and down the corridor pursued by their harassed parents. We drank tepid tea from plastic cups and as usual compared conditions in our respective hospitals before discussing anything else. Then he asked me about my trip to India, of which he had already heard about from my mother, and at the sight of his friendly eyes fixed on mine, I felt an impulse to tell him immediately about the most important thing that had happened to me on the trip. I thought that Eyal, who had been living with his widowed mother for the past few years, would understand better than most people. But at the last moment I stopped myself. I had plenty of time; this wasn’t the right moment. And I began telling him about the medical aspects of the trip. He was very impressed by the night flight to Calcutta with the blood and urine samples, but seemed doubtful about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “I hope that in your enthusiasm you didn’t infect the mother with the daughter’s virus,” he said with a smile. “Nonsense,” I replied, “how could I have infected her? I was careful to place her higher than the patient too.”