Open Heart (18 page)

I dreamed that I returned to the bungalow, which was no longer in Bodhgaya but in some other town, still in the east but not in India. The kitchen was much larger than in reality, and the wooden table had given way to the glass table in the Lazars’ living room in Tel Aviv, with other furniture from their
apartment
too, and also furniture from my parents’ place in Jerusalem. The motorcycle I had left in my parents’ yard stood covered up next to the sink. Only my patient was missing. The Lazars were both sitting sadly at the dining room table, waiting for me to return from Calcutta with the results of the tests, and I suddenly realized that I was very late, and that instead of returning the next day, as I had promised in my note, I had returned after a few weeks, perhaps even months. But they were still waiting for me, faithful to the promise they had given my parents to look after me. Where’s my patient? I asked in boundless distress, and they looked at each other, and Lazar remained seated. His wife stood up and led me to the corner, where a strange little girl was lying wrapped in a gray sheet. He’s arrived, her mother
whispered.

With the first signs of light the plane began the descent to
fog-enshrouded
Calcutta, where solitary lights glittered. The city
looked like a huge ancient factory where work had stopped but which still had a cloud of smog hanging over it. Although it was very early in the morning, aimless crowds were already milling around, and the people looked as if they were floating, as if the law of gravity had been abolished here. The thought flashed through my mind that if I wanted a sign that I had indeed
descended
to the lowest rung of human suffering, this was it. In New Delhi or Varanasi even the beggars and cripples had some kind of direction, but here all direction had been lost, and people were milling around together in a vortex into which I too was soon swept, unable to find my way out. Naked beggars clung to me, leprous and limbless, and it was impossible to shake them off. I was thirsty and tired from the flight, but I vacillated
between
having something to drink here, in the heart of the
commotion
, next to maimed and dying people lying next to the walls, and waiting until I reached the city itself. In the end my thirst won and I went over to one of the stalls and asked for tea with milk, the way my English mother made it. I chose two postcards with stamps already printed on them, and took another one of the sandwiches prepared by Lazar’s wife out of my knapsack and ate it standing up while I scribbled a few affectionate words to my parents in my small, neat handwriting, telling them why I was in Calcutta. The stall-keeper showed me where to find the mailbox, which was red and big and very British, inspiring me with confidence that the letter I dropped into it would indeed reach its destination. The other postcard I put away in my pocket, and feeling somewhat recovered, I extricated myself from the human swarm. Without hesitating I chose not a rickshaw but a proper cab, which took me straight to the laboratory whose address was printed on the card.

The dream I had had on the plane disturbed me but also served me a warning: I must not get lost here. My purpose was to
ascertain
the liver functions, the two transaminases, the clotting
factors
, and the glucose levels. I had full confidence in the Indian doctor and his brother. They were connected with the University of Calcutta. But when the cabdriver dropped me outside a
regular
apartment building in a little alley, without any sign of a medical laboratory, my spirits fell, and I would not release the cabbie until he led me to the doctor’s door. To my surprise, the shabby apartment building, which was only a few stories high,
possessed a little elevator, but it was impossible to tell if it was working, for there were a number of people sleeping in it,
huddled
together like a tangle of black snakes. At this early hour the stairwell too was full of sleeping people. The cabbie immediately removed his sandals and stepped over them barefoot, and I too took off my shoes and tried to glide over them in my socks. In that way we reached my doctor’s flat, where we found a card like the one in my pocket pinned to the door. The cabbie was not content with leading me to the door but went inside to drag the doctor out of bed. The doctor, with only a narrow loincloth on his smooth, slender body, which looked like that of a boy, was not at all surprised to see me standing before him. He cried
joyfully
, “All the time I’ve been saying to my brother, Dr. Benjamin will have to come to us in the end if he wants to know the truth. But who would have believed that he would come so early?” He laughed and ushered me into a big, dim room full of carpets and ornaments, where two little girls were sleeping on the couch. He removed them quickly to the next room and returned after a few minutes in a pale European suit. He immediately took the
samples
from me, listened attentively to what I had to say about my patient’s condition and my suspicions, and in a clear firm hand wrote down the particulars of the tests I wanted performed, with which he appeared to be thoroughly familiar. Nothing seemed to him either impossible or superfluous. Finally he stood up and said, “Give me half a day and my brother and I will have all the results ready for you. If you don’t make the afternoon flight, you can always take the five o’clock train, which reaches Gaya at dawn.” He then spread a thin, colorful rug on the couch where the little girls had been sleeping, beat the cushions lightly, and turned them around. He scattered a few joss sticks in an ashy incense bowl, lit them to banish the smells of the night, and said, “You can rest here and even sleep, and return tonight refreshed to the patient for whose sake you came all the way to Calcutta.”

I found myself in a rather pleasant room, with chains of flowers and little statues of gods with elephant and monkey faces. The subtle scent of incense pervaded my senses. There was no sign of hell here. I immediately sat down on the couch in my socks and
thought how strange my journey to this place had been, and wondered whether it had really been purely out of concern for my patient or whether I wanted to prove to Hishin what a
devoted
and determined doctor I was and how far I was prepared to go to obtain all the relevant data about my patient’s condition. I took the second postcard out of my pocket and wrote in a rather lighthearted vein: “Dear Professor Hishin, Regards from Calcutta, which is the lowest of the low as far as human suffering and poverty are concerned. I arrived here alone to obtain a
reliable
and detailed diagnosis for our patient, whose condition is more worrying than you thought. The Lazars are nice and India is interesting. Yours, the ‘ideal’ man.” I wanted to add, “whom you seduced,” but I stopped myself. What would he understand by it? Even the word “ideal,” which I had put in quotation marks, seemed superfluous. What if he didn’t remember? I put the card in my pocket. It would reach him after I arrived home, so what was the point? I took off my sweater and heard light footsteps behind the door. Did the doctor’s wife know who I was and what I was doing here? But the couch was soft, and I stretched out on it in profound weariness, thinking to myself, This is a little paradise in the midst of the hell which I haven’t yet really felt, and maybe I won’t feel it at all, and in any case I have no intention of boasting about having been in it.

But in spite of my tiredness I couldn’t really fall asleep, but only dozed, because the sleepers on the stairs began to wake up, and the residents tried to chase them away, and the elevator, which had apparently been relieved of its nocturnal refugees,
began
creaking up and down on its cables, and the doctor’s two little girls opened and shut the door to peek at me, trying to wake me up, until I finally had to invite them in. They hesitated, but in the end came shyly into the room, dressed in their school
uniforms
, which consisted of flimsy pink saris, with blue ribbons in their hair and satchels on their backs. I tried to get them to talk to me and to amuse them by making funny faces, but they didn’t laugh; maybe they thought my grimaces were natural to a
Western
face. In the end their mother came to take them to school, but she was hesitant about leaving me alone in the apartment. “In that case, perhaps I should go out and walk around the town a little. Is there a river here?” I asked. And of course there was a river, which was called the Hooghly River, with ghats of its own,
and there was a fort here too, called Fort William, which was situated in the beautiful Maidan of Calcutta. It would be a pity not to see the sights, I thought, and said good-bye to my hostess. When I went downstairs I counted the stairs and made a note of their number, so I wouldn’t have any problems finding the right apartment. I went outside and noted landmarks to help me
identify
the alley too, and walked up and down to practice
remembering
the location of the building, but when I left it and turned into the main street, I was immediately surrounded by the milling crowds and realized that I was the only foreigner there. I felt suddenly weak, and I remembered my dream. I had to be careful not to go too far, to watch myself, because I had to get back; Lazar’s wife had placed her trust in me. I wasn’t a tourist, I was a doctor on duty, and I had to get back tonight to my patient, whose delicate jaundiced face came into my mind from time to time, accompanied by the meaningless smile flashing in her mother’s eyes. I decided to forgo the river and its ghats, as well as the important fort and the beautiful Maidan, and to confine my movements to a safe, narrow circle, without losing touch with the street. Every half-hour or so I would return and stand in front of the building, and sometimes I would go upstairs and knock on the door to see if the results had already arrived. In one of the nearby streets a building with a big crowd jostling in front of it attracted my attention. At first I thought it was another temple, but when I went closer I saw that it was a big old cinema, covered with colorful posters. On the sidewalk lay an old woman who appeared to be dying, with some lepers sitting next to her looking with burning eyes at the people going into the cinema. Perhaps I had better see India in a movie, I thought. I bought a ticket and entered a big, dark hall with crumbling carvings on its many pillars. Rows of heads greeted my eyes, some of them
turbaned
and others bare—smooth-shaven, wild, or curly. As I walked in they almost all turned, as if there were something unique and strange about my smell or footsteps. I selected a seat in one of the middle rows, and they all stood up eagerly to let me pass and smiled at me encouragingly. But before long an usher with a badge pinned to his chest arrived and started persuading me to move to another seat, apparently a seat of honor. At first I tried to refuse, but he pointed to the people around me and said, “Bad people, bad people,” and they all smiled at us. Again I tried
to refuse, but he insisted, coming all the way down the row and gripping my arm forcibly, pointing once more to the people around me, who never stopped smiling. In the end he led me to an armchair upholstered in red velvet, which had grown pink and stubbly over the years, like the pelt of a mangy old animal. And on the seat which had perhaps known guests more notable than myself, I sat and watched a movie without subtitles, in which a lean young Indian movie star suffered the pangs not of hunger but of love.

When I returned to the apartment at midday, I found not only the little girls and their mother but also the doctor and his brother, waving the results of the tests. My suspicions were right. There was liver damage. The coagulation system was impaired. The bilirubin was very high, nearly thirty. The ALT had risen from 40 to 180, and the AST was also elevated. Hypoglycemia was causing the extreme fatigue. The patient needed an urgent injection of glucose, and perhaps also something to replenish the depleted clotting factors, the simplest thing being a unit of fresh blood. They also showed me results of tests I hadn’t requested. There was no doubt that they had done a thorough job—spent the whole morning running from one laboratory to the next and squeezing the maximum information out of the samples I had given them. Now I had to get back to my patient as quickly as possible; I didn’t have a minute to waste. I took out my wallet and gave them a hundred dollars, a very generous sum, not only in their eyes but in mine. However, I added a condition: that they wouldn’t leave me to get back by myself but would put me on the right train for Gaya, since there was no hope of getting on a flight. They were astonished and delighted by the fee and
promised
to make a generous donation to charity with part of it, and they said that of course they would put me on a good train to Gaya, but first they wanted to know if I had seen anything of Calcutta. “Very little,” I replied. “It’s a rough place, but it’s not hell on earth.” They burst into hearty laughter, but insisted that parts of the city were indeed hellish, as if being a hell on earth constituted a major tourist attraction they were reluctant to give up. On the way to the train station they would show me places
that would really depress me, but on condition that I first sit down to feast. I wasn’t hungry, and my anxiety for my patient was beginning to overwhelm me, but I couldn’t refuse the
blandishments
of my genial hosts. In the meantime a lot of little dishes arrived, full of every possible kind of food in a variety of original shapes and colors. The doctor and his brother sat down next to me with the little girls in their arms, and they all watched to make sure that I didn’t miss tasting a single dish. I soon felt full and slightly nauseated. The grave looks of the dark little girls added to my anxiety. I stood up and announced apologetically that the results of the tests had deprived me of my peace of mind. “I beg you, my friends, in the name of God, let’s go, and if you want to show me something on the way, maybe you can drop me next to the river, because I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but ever since I arrived in India I’ve been drawn to rivers as if I’ve fallen in love with them.” Although they were sorry at the
interruption
of the feast, they quickly did as I asked and took me to the Maidan, a vast green expanse overlooking the river, at the northern end of which stood a tall column, where they took a photograph of me with my camera and posed for me to take one of them. But I wasn’t satisfied with looking at the river, I wanted to go right down to the water. They took me down, and when they saw me suddenly bending over and dipping my fingers in the chilly water, they bowed their heads in gratification. This private and independent dip reinforced their opinion that I was worthy of seeing hell from within, and not only from the window of a speeding car but very slowly, in a man-drawn rickshaw, through terrible alleys full of vast piles of stinking garbage, in some of which decaying human beings were crawling, dying from the
moment
they were born, cast-off humans twitching like broken
insects
squashed beneath a giant boot. For an entire hour they led me through streets that had apparently once been pleasant and civilized, in which fine houses had once stood, and that now looked as if they had been ravaged by a terrible leprosy, and the pain was even greater because of the vestiges of beauty that were still evident. And so we advanced in the clear winter sunshine, I in the slow rickshaw and my two bearded escorts in their white suits walking beside me, occasionally taking a coin out of their pocket and placing it in the palm of a dying man or a child, seemingly pleased by my interest. “Could hell be worse?” they
asked, turning to me in the end with a strangely triumphant
expression
as we entered the station.