I found Einat standing sadly and absentmindedly next to her parents, with the gift-wrapped package in her hand, only after the ceremony was over, when I began making my way through the crush in search of her father, to hear what he had to say to me. Dori was surrounded by a number of my parents’ friends, standing with overflowing plates in their hands. She herself had not yet eaten anything but was smoking one of her slender cigarettes, in spite of the press of people around her, her eyes sparkling and flashing. I warmly embraced Einat, who gave me a gentle, hesitant hug and immediately asked for Michaela, because she wanted to give her the gift, which she firmly announced was “for Michaela, not for you,” with her own hands. “Okay, okay.” I raised my hands in laughing submission. “But why aren’t you eating anything?” I added in the tone of an offended host. “Would you like me to bring you something?” But Einat refused my offer and said in embarrassment, “No, why should you? You’ve already looked after me enough. I’ll get something myself. It looks very good.” Indeed, everyone praised the catering. Lazar returned again and again to the buffet, thrusting through the crowd with his head lowered in order to refill his plate with roast beef, which seemed particularly to his taste, while Nakash and his wife, thin and hungry, never moved from the buffet area in case they missed one of the new dishes which kept arriving from the kitchen. Even my shy father, in spite of all the friends and relations surrounding him, kept finding excuses to return to the buffet and praise the headwaiter for the excellent food, ready to be seduced by new offers. Toward the end of the wedding, when the hall began to empty out, Michaela, who had not tasted anything up to then, also succumbed to an attack of voracious hunger. She sat in a corner with her parents and their respective spouses and sent her little brother to fill and refill her plate with leftovers. My mother had refrained from eating in order to be able to give her undivided attention to her guests, and throughout the reception she had not held even one small plate of food in her hands, but my loyal young aunt from Glasgow had not forgotten her older sister, and from time to time she would squeeze through the crowd with a forkful of “something delicious” and press it on my mother, who at first refused in embarrassment but in the end opened her mouth like an obedient baby to swallow the tidbit and join in the universal chorus of praise. It seemed that only Dori and I ate nothing. Dori may have wanted to eat, but she was too proud to push and shove with everyone else around the buffet, and by the time Lazar finally took pity on her and returned from one of his forays with an extra plate for her, she was so hungry that her fork slipped from her eager fingers and fell to the floor. She stood there smiling with a plate full of food in her hands, waiting for someone to bring her a new fork, until one of the waiters, thinking that she had finished eating, discreetly relieved her of her plate. But I had not even approached the buffet, or accepted any of the hors d’oevres from the waiters circulating with big trays, and with complete indifference, even nausea, I watched my friends and relations diving into the spread. A great joy was welling up inside me, wave after wave; the joy of my parents, their excitement at the presence of their beloved relations who had come especially from Britain; my own joy in my good friends who had surrounded me under the chuppah, and in Michaela, who looked so beautiful, and of course in the secret and thrilling presence of the woman I loved, standing on her long straight legs and looking at me from across the room with her laughing eyes, and on top of all this Lazar’s surprising offer, which suddenly held out the hope that I could return to the hospital via a back door which led through England.
This door was connected with an agreement between our hospital and a London hospital, St. Bernadine’s, whose medical and administrative director, an elderly gentile called Sir Geoffrey, had visited Israel a few years before and fallen in love with the country. He had donated medical equipment and drugs to our hospital, and books to the library, and in order to strengthen the connection further he had persuaded Lazar to agree to an exchange of physicians between the two hospitals. In this framework, an English doctor had recently begun work in Professor Levine’s internal medicine department, where he had been very successfully absorbed, and our own Dr. Samuel had been about to travel to London with his family to take the place of that doctor. But there had been a hitch at the last minute, for in spite of his assurances, the director of the London hospital had failed to obtain a work permit for the Israeli doctor so that he could be paid a full salary, and to the director’s shame and regret, he had been about to bring his doctor back to England, having failed to keep his end of the bargain. But the sharp-witted Lazar remembered my British passport from the Indian consulate in Rome, and he immediately said to himself, Dr. Rubin is the ideal man for the job! It couldn’t have come at a better time; it will fall into his lap like a gift from heaven — the possibility of working in a hospital that may be a little old-fashioned but is nevertheless a very decent place, and under the supervision of a director who’ll be like a second father to him. And even though the whole exchange was only a matter of ten months, it would still be on behalf of our hospital in Israel, and it would be as if I had come back to it — albeit through a back door, but one which was nevertheless real enough from the bureaucratic point of view. And who could tell, and without making any promises — because even God would be foolhardy to make promises in the State of Israel — perhaps on my return from England a place would be found for me here, in one of the departments.
“But which one?” I asked, beside myself with excitement. “Which one?” repeated Lazar with a forgiving smile, nodding his head at my mother and father, who were approaching us from two different directions, as if they had sensed that important things were being said. “It’s too soon to say. We’ll see. When we know who’s staying and who’s leaving,” and here Lazar turned affably to my parents, to tell them about the offer he had just made me. My inquisitive young aunt, who saw my parents listening with deep attention, came hurrying up to take part in the conversation, which changed its language to English. My aunt asked the name and location of the hospital, but since she lived in Scotland the name of the area meant nothing to her, and other relations, better acquainted with London, were called in to help. A relative I did not know came up, a tall, very thin man dressed in black, with small metal-framed glasses whose thick bifocal lenses gave his long, pale face a strange expression, and this man, who had no connection with medicine, knew so many details about the hospital, which was in the northeastern part of London, that I wondered if he had been a long-term patient there. The term “a little old-fashioned,” which Lazar had used to describe the place, turned out to be a typical piece of Israeli ignorance; it was an ancient institution, a historical monument which had been founded way back in the Middle Ages, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Some of its wings were still housed in very old buildings, while others had been rebuilt. My two aunts were thrilled by the news, sure that my parents would not be able to stay away once Michaela and I were there and that they would soon see them again. And Dori, who was standing not far off, nodding as she listened to someone explaining something to her, watched the little group clustered around Lazar and me, and blushed deeply and uncharacteristically when my mother approached her to thank her too, for some reason, for her husband’s clever and generous idea.