“Tomorrow morning?” I suggested immediately. “Yes, tomorrow morning’s fine, or tomorrow afternoon, whenever it suits you — even this evening, if you like.”
“This evening?” I repeated in surprise. “But it’s already night.”
“Not yet,” the old lady protested. “The news has just finished, and there are still plenty of programs to see.” I hesitated for a moment, and then agreed. “Just give me time to get organized,” I requested. “It’s twenty to ten now. I’ll be at your place by half past ten.”
“You’ll find me here even if you come later,” she reassured me jokingly, “and in the meantime I’ll phone Dorit. Maybe she’ll want to come too.”
“Yes, I think that would be a very good idea,” I said, and went quickly to take a shower.
In spite of my haste, I arrived later than ten-thirty; while I had spent the day in bed reading about the expanding universe, a number of the central arteries of Tel Aviv had turned into real lakes, in whose murky yellow waters I had no desire to dip my motorcycle or wet the instrument bag my parents had given me in honor of my graduation from medical school. Accordingly, I chained the Honda to the post of a taxi rank and took a cab to Grizim Street, one of the little streets in the north of the city which despite their proximity to busy main roads are themselves quiet, with pretty, comfortable houses. Lazar’s wife had not yet arrived. “But she’s coming,” promised her mother, who was quite elderly but, unlike Dori, very slim. She was wearing a tailored gray wool suit, and warm slippers on her feet. The centrally heated house was scrupulously neat, although the furniture was old. On a low table next to the couch, a tea service and dishes of candies and nuts were waiting, perhaps since morning. “We won’t wait for her,” I announced, and I requested the medical questionnaire required by the old-age home, which was packed with questions and demands. I sat myself down at the table and began asking her about herself and her childhood diseases, in order to fill in the first, more trivial items. Then I hurried to remove my sphygmomanometer from my bag, but before I could wrap the cuff around her frail arm the old lady admitted, or perhaps simply recalled, that she sometimes had peaks of high blood pressure, reaching levels of over 200—the systolic — and 110—the diastolic. “We’ll soon see,” I said, and measured her blood pressure a number of times, one after the other. It changed every time I measured it, but the average was a little high. “Are you excited now?” I asked gently. She blushed, thought for a minute, said, “Perhaps,” and smiled with a faint echo of her daughter’s enigmatic smile. I asked her to show me the pills prescribed by Professor Levine, which she didn’t like taking regularly because they made her sleepy and depressed. Indeed, they included a powerful sedative used in the emergency room. “Maybe I’ll give you something gentler instead,” I suggested, “but in the meantime you must take it regularly. Even a half or a quarter of a tablet a day is sufficient — the main thing is the regularity.” I stood up and went to the kitchen and fetched a big knife to show her how easily the tablet could be divided into four. As I was returning to the living room a key turned in the front door, which opened to admit Lazar’s wife wrapped in her cape, her hair wet from the rain, wearing the black velvet jumpsuit which I remembered from my second visit to their house. She was also wearing clunky white running shoes. She was pale and not made up, and when she saw the knife in my hand she raised her finger threateningly and said in a mock-serious tone, “I hope you’re not about to operate on my mother. I don’t want any more misunderstandings between us.”
I stayed there until after midnight. We spoke about aches and pains, illnesses and eating habits. I checked the old lady’s medicine chest and recommended a few changes, which I wrote down on the prescription pad my parents had once had printed for me, with their Jerusalem address under my name. Then I asked her to take off her white silk blouse so that I could auscultate her lungs and heart with my stethoscope. Dori helped me clear the cushions off the sofa and settle her mother comfortably on it so that I could examine the abdominal organs. Her skin was very withered, but washed with scented soap, and at a superficial glance her body looked more like her granddaughter’s body than her daughter’s. The map of her beauty spots was completely different. Dori stood next to me, looking at my hands palpating her mother’s stomach. Was she too remembering the dim chamber in the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? I wanted to ask her, but I restrained myself. Finally I completed my examination and sat down to fill in the questionnaire with scrupulous care. In general the grandmother’s health was fine, but it seemed to me that Professor Levine was keeping her on an excessively rigid medication regime. His approach was more appropriate to recent hospital cases than to ordinary patients who led normal lives. As a consequence she occasionally suffered from severe constipation. I suggested ways of obtaining relief and reduced her medication. My long day of rest had made me exceptionally lucid and eloquent, and when midnight approached and my job was done, I agreed to have tea with the two women, who did not seem in a hurry, even though Lazar had already phoned his wife twice. Was he too incapable of staying at home by himself?
The night into which I now emerged was not the same night in which I had arrived. In the new clarity flowing from the star-spangled sky, diamond drops slid separately down the the windshield of Dori’s car. Dori drove me to the post where I had chained my motorbike, teasing me about the lake of yellow water that I been afraid to cross, which had in the meantime drained completely. “What do you need a motorcycle for in the first place?” For some reason this question seemed to me too personal, and I felt unable to give her a satisfactory reply. I expressed my admiration for her mother and asked her what she intended to do with the apartment. Would she sell it? “No,” she replied, driving slowly but with no consideration for the other drivers on the road, “in the beginning we’ll only rent it, so my mother can always go back there if the experiment with the old-age home doesn’t work out.”
“Have you found somebody to rent it yet?” I asked softly. “No.” She shook her head wearily. “So far we haven’t even thought about it.”
“The reason I ask,” I kept on, “is because I’m looking for an apartment.” She gave me a quick glance which seemed to hold a mild suspicion of hidden motives. “How much are you paying now?” she asked. I told her. “That’s not much,” she stated, with justice — the rent I paid was definitely low. Now she fixed her eyes on me. I noticed an incipient double chin blurring her jaw-line. “We’ll want more than that for my mother’s apartment,” she warned me. “I don’t care,” I said calmly, with my eyes focused on the road, as if I were the one driving the car, “not only because it would be nice to think of you as my landlady, but also, who knows, I might get married soon, and then there’d be someone to help me pay the rent.” And then I saw the smile disappear completely, for the first time, from her eyes, which widened as her face turned a little red in the headlights of an approaching car. “You’re getting married?” she asked softly, as if marriage weren’t a possibility for me at all. “Not exactly, not yet,” I replied with a mysterious smile, full of love and sympathy for her. “I mean, there isn’t even a candidate yet, but I feel that she’s already marked, even if she isn’t yet aware of my existence.”
Eight
But in fact, how do marriages come about? Why should two separate creatures wish to tie themselves to each other with one chain, however slender and delicate? Is it the mystery — which in the dead of night smuggles a schoolgirl in a pale blue uniform with a badge pinned to her heart into the house, where she sits bowed over her books and workbooks at the kitchen table, waiting for an empty bed — is it the mystery which clouds their minds and ties them to each other, in order to turn itself into their subject, their willing slave, seeking to take responsibility for something that may prove too much for its powers?