Should I tell her before we left, I wondered as I watched her gulping wine from a big glass, not to dismiss the soul so lightly, or should I leave this adolescent argument open till our next meeting? That there would be one, I had no doubt. This girl possessed certain qualities that suited me to the core. Not only the easygoing, carefree lightness she radiated, but also that air of self-containment, the way she had held back, even though she was expecting me, and waited for me to come to her. Yes, I definitely liked her, I thought to myself; even the way she sat alone, eating so heartily, pleased me. She could be the perfect mate for me, precisely because I didn’t want to and couldn’t fall in love with her, since I was still in love with the woman I had successfully turned into my landlady. This being the case, why should I argue with her and try to persuade her of the existence of the soul, when her view of the world would lead her to give me the freedom I wanted — a free marriage, to banish my landlady’s fears that I would overwhelm her with my lust? I went up to say good-bye to her. She did not seem embarrassed, but just the opposite: she looked straight into my face. “You must be hungry too,” she said with a smile, and pointed to the brimming plate in front of her. “Yes, I’m hungry, but my parents are in a hurry to leave.” And suddenly I couldn’t resist adding, “But as far as the soul is concerned, the argument isn’t over yet. Because, you know, I’m on the other side of the operating table now. Not a surgeon anymore, but an anesthetist. And to be an anesthetist you have to believe in the possibility of freeing the soul from the body and bringing it safely back again.”
“So you’ve turned into an anesthetist?” she asked calmly, taking a big sip of her wine and trying to grasp the significance of the change, since the world of medicine was not completely strange to her after three months with the sidewalk doctors of Calcutta. “Yes,” I replied, and again I couldn’t resist adding a phrase I thought would please her, “putting those who’ve never been awake to sleep.” She registered the message and smiled a somewhat suspicious, bitter little smile, very unlike the wholehearted, generous one that had already captured my heart. We exchanged telephone numbers and arranged to get in touch at the end of the week in Tel Aviv. When I said good-bye to her, I saw my mother standing a little way off and watching us.
Before we set out I decided to offer a little ride to Amnon’s retarded brother, who was standing and looking at the Honda with an admiring expression on his face. I put my helmet on his head and rode slowly between the houses of the kibbutz. He was very excited and frightened, and held on to me tightly from behind. His parents thanked me warmly. When we left the illuminated area of the kibbutz for the Arava road, we realized how much light was pouring from the moon, which had risen an hour before from the direction of the Jordan River, enabling us to get up to a good speed on the ruler-straight road. After thirty minutes we had already reached the Arava junction, and after another twenty we passed the white potash works of Sodom, where we slowed down a little on the winding road next to the Dead Sea, not just to enjoy the magnificent contours of the mountains of Edom in the bright moonlight but mainly in order not to miss my parents’ hotel, which turned out to be a new, recently opened place set a little apart from the others. It was a quarter past ten when Amnon succeeded in making out the little signpost directing us onto a dirt road, and we found the hotel in darkness. Since my parents had notified the hotel that they would be arriving late, the reception clerk was not surprised to see them, although he was somewhat startled at the sight of the black-helmeted motorcyclist carrying their luggage. “Perhaps we can find a room for you and Amnon to spend the night here,” my mother suggested. Amnon received this proposal gladly. He was worn out after the tiring day, which had come directly on top of his night job, and he liked the idea of spending the whole night going over his experiences at the wedding with me. But I refused. I was impatient to get back to my apartment and be by myself, to digest everything that had happened and to think about Michaela and the role she might play in my life. “Don’t worry,” I said to my parents, “it’s a very clear night, and the Honda’s running perfectly. The two of us will take care of each other,” a beloved phrase of my father’s which I always added when I went out at night with a friend. We had black coffee in the hotel lobby, and I bought a small bar of chocolate from one of the vending machines to appease my gnawing hunger. I took a spare helmet out of the black box at the back of the motorcycle for Amnon, and we started off. Meanwhile the moon had disappeared on its westward wanderings, and the sky was now full of an astonishing abundance of stars. The coastal road leading to the Jericho junction was completely deserted, and we could ride right down the middle, as if it were our private road. From the way that Amnon was clutching my waist I could sense his alarm as I kept gaining speed, but after a while he began to relax and lifted his head up to enjoy the journey. The rocky mass of Masada soon appeared on our left, looking in the stillness of the night like an ancient aircraft carrier which had risen from the depths of the sea. A few minutes later the lights on the fence of Kibbutz Ein Geddi appeared, and the buildings of the field school above the creek of Arugoth. The road began climbing steeply to the top of the cliff, and it was all I could do to restrain the motorcycle from flying off it in my enthusiasm at the sight of the steely expanse of the Dead Sea spread out below us. And then came the descent to the shores of the sea, as we coasted past Mizpeh Shalem to a stretch of straight, level road where the motorcycle could easily hit ninety miles an hour. We didn’t even notice the turnoff to the Ein Feshka hot springs, and if not for the curve in the road after the Qumran caves we might have raced past them too without even noticing their existence. Only the imposing silhouette of the abandoned old hotel looming up on the Kalya shore told us that we were about to take our leave of the lowest place in the world. And then the Almagor junction was upon us, its green signs pointing us to the west, to the mild ascent leading to the city of our common childhood, Jerusalem.
“But when are we going to get a chance to discuss your astrophysical theory, Benjy?” Amnon yelled despairingly into my ear, realizing that at the speed I was going he would soon find himself on the sidewalk outside his house in Tel Aviv, before he had had a chance to rescue me from my ridiculous mistakes about A Brief History of Time. “You’re right,” I shouted back. “I thought we could go and sit in the Atara or some other café in downtown Jerusalem, but perhaps it’s already too late for that — Jerusalem’s not Tel Aviv. So why don’t I just stop somewhere along the road? Maybe the open sky will help me to explain my ideas.” And after Mitzpeh Jericho, in a place called the Mishor Adumim, I left the main road and drove up a short dirt track leading to something halfway between a tree and a bush stuck on top of a little hill, over which the heavens were spread out like a brilliant canopy, infinite but also intimate, gathering even the distant spires of Jerusalem into its folds. I took off my helmet and prepared to expound to my friend in the stillness of the night the theory that had been elaborating itself in my brain over the past few weeks. But first I had to warn him not to interrupt me, however strange my words might sound to him, for new ideas always seemed ridiculous at first. He snickered to himself and sat down on the ground. For some reason he didn’t take off his helmet, and he looked like an absentminded space traveler who had arrived here from some other planet. There was a rustle in the branches of the tree next to us, apparently made by birds we had startled from their sleep.