Open Heart (7 page)

In the distance I could already see his grayish mane sticking up between the brightly colored saris. The two of them sat side by side next to their two suitcases and newly acquired parcels, among the colorful crowd of passengers gathering near our flight counter, which had not yet opened. Lazar was very pleased by my punctuality, even though he had no cause for concern,
because
it had already been announced that our flight would be two hours late. He made room for me next to him and asked me to put my luggage with theirs. “From now on we should stick
together,” he declared, in case I might be contemplating some new adventure. His wife inquired about my visit to the Vatican. They themselves had not seen anything of particular importance, only strolled along some beautiful streets and bought essential presents. “Do you have to bring back presents even from a trip like this?” I asked in surprise. “Why not?” asked Mrs. Lazar with a smile, and a somewhat reprimanding look which was
apparently
directed at her husband too, who explained that she still suffered from the old Israeli guilt at the very fact of leaving the country, which had to be covered up by expensive gifts for those left behind. “Guilt?” I persisted. “For this trip?”

“For every trip,” his wife said quickly, turning to her husband and adding, “Perhaps we should buy something to eat,
sandwiches
and snacks. Who knows what kind of meal they’ll serve on this peculiar flight, if they serve one at all.” He immediately rose to his feet, but she got up quickly too, saying, “I’ll come with you.” This woman really can’t be alone, I thought, smiling to myself. “We’re a little past the age for these charter flights,” apologized Lazar, who seemed put out by the character of the crowd gathering around us, which consisted mainly of teenagers with huge backpacks. His wife offered to bring me something from the buffet too, but I politely declined. “I’ve already eaten a full meal,” I said, “and I think it will last me until we reach India.” I suggested that they go and sit down in the cafeteria and eat a decent meal, while I stayed behind and looked after the baggage. I had already noticed that they suffered from a chronic anxiety about remaining hungry, and that they were constantly sucking candy or chewing gum. And indeed, they were both
obviously
overweight, although Mrs. Lazar was more disciplined about the way she carried herself and succeeded to some extent in disguising the roundness of her belly. They quickly vanished, and I put a couple of parcels on the chairs they had vacated to keep their seats for them. In the meantime the commotion about the delay increased, although someone from the airline had
arrived
at the counter and started negotiating with problematic passengers.

Suddenly, through the display window of a small, fancy shoe boutique opposite me, I saw her silhouette. Sitting on a little armchair in her skirt and blouse, stretching one long leg toward the gentleman who was lightly supporting her foot in order to
demonstrate the virtues of the dainty shoe to Lazar. He examined it closely and compared it with another shoe he was holding in his hand. A pale green light, faintly reminiscent of the lighting in an operating room at home, shone from the little display window and lent an air of secrecy to the picture of the plump woman stretching her long legs out to the two men. Passersby stopped to look. They were really a strange couple, these two, caught up in their pleasures to the last moment, seemingly indifferent to the difficult journey awaiting them, and perhaps even to thoughts of the condition in which they would find their sick daughter. When the flight was announced over the loudspeaker at last, they
hurried
up excitedly, carrying wrapped sandwiches in a bag and two cardboard shoeboxes. “The shoes here are so cheap that it’s hard to resist the temptation,” explained Lazar, “and they’re so beautiful too.” He went on apologizing while his silent wife, who seemed embarrassed at his apologies, opened the two suitcases, the contents of which I was already becoming only too familiar with, and stacked the Roman purchases one on top of the other, trying to leave the shoes in their boxes. But Lazar immediately jumped up in protest. “You’ll burst the bag with those idiotic boxes,” he warned her. But she refused to give in. We both watched hostilely as she stubbornly tried to cram the shoeboxes into the suitcases. One of them disappeared into the depths of the case, but the other rebelled. It seemed that she would be obliged to give up and bury the naked shoes among the clothes, and then, I don’t know why, I suddenly felt a strange compassion for this middle-aged woman’s childish disappointment, and I offered her my suitcase as a temporary lodging place for her new shoes.
Lazar
still objected, and started scolding her for her stubbornness. “Why on earth do you have to drag that damned shoebox all the way to India and back?” But his wife didn’t even look at him. She raised her head, shook her collapsing hairdo out of her eyes, and looked at me with a flushed face, not even troubling to smile her familiar smile: “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

On the flight to New Delhi, which took off at eleven o’clock at night, I read a few pages of Stephen Hawking’s book
A
Brief
History
of
Time,
which my father had bought at Ben Gurion Airport when he discovered I didn’t have anything to read, then sunk into a deep sleep, the sleep I had been looking forward to since morning and for whose sake I had been tiring myself out all
day long. It fell on me sooner than I had imagined, but it was also shorter than I would have wished. When I woke up after three hours, with my seat belt still fastened, I didn’t know where I was, and for a moment I imagined that I was on night duty in the hospital. It was very dark in the plane, and the passengers were all asleep, sprawling in the seats and also lying in the aisles, as if they had been struck down by a sudden plague. Beyond the swaying wing of the plane I tried to discover in the darkness of the sky the first hints of dawn, which by my calculation should have appeared long ago if the plane had followed a logical course. Now I saw that Lazar or his wife had visited me in my sleep, for one of the sandwiches they had bought at the airport, in addition to a large bar of Italian chocolate, was stuck in the pocket of the seat in front of me. They must have noticed that I had missed my supper when I fell so swiftly and soundly asleep. I wrapped myself in a blanket and greedily devoured the sandwich and the entire bar of chocolate, delighted at this welcome
manifestation
of their concern. And suddenly I was seized by the
desire
to see them both, or at least to know where they were sitting, but I decided to wait until dawn, which I was sure was about to break soon.

I didn’t have to wait long, and in the pale golden light I stood up and went to look for them. But I had a hard time finding them. Indian children lay huddled together in the aisles, as if in solidarity with their little friends sleeping on the sidewalks at home. The number of passengers seemed far larger than the
number
of seats, but nevertheless, it felt strange to me that I was unable to discover the whereabouts of the two Lazars, as if something had gone wrong with my sense of reality during my deep sleep. The plane began to sway in the wind, and Indian flight attendants emerged and instructed the passengers to return to their seats and fasten their belts, with the result that the aisles were gradually vacated, and here and there blankets which had been hung during the night to create sleeping nooks were taken down and hidden corners exposed. I returned to my seat,
wondering
if the Lazars had for some reason been seated apart and I had been mistaken in searching for them together, but I
immediately
dismissed this impossible thought. My parents, if unable to find seats side by side in waiting rooms or buses, would sit down separately without any hesitation, but not these two. When the
wind died down and the passengers were released from their seat belts, I suddenly saw Lazar’s gray mane looming up in the front of the plane, and then I remembered that I had sometimes come across him in the hospital during the past year, but without knowing who he was. He started advancing down the aisle, and when he reached me he bent down and said in a tone of mild complaint, “You slept and slept and slept,” as if my sleep had somehow deprived the rest of the world of theirs. “And you?” I asked. He ran his fingers through his curly hair, closed his eyes wearily, and answered in a strangely complacent tone, “Me? Hardly ten minutes. I told you, I’m a lost cause, I’ve never been able to sleep in something over which I have no control.” “And Dori?” I asked, blushing slightly at my inadvertent use of this pet name but reassuring myself with the thought that it would have been strange to go on saying “your wife” after twenty-four
intensive
hours of their company. He laughed. “Oh, all she needs is something soft to put her head on and somebody to keep watch in the background, and she sleeps like a lamb.” And he suddenly leaned right over me to look out the window. “Where are we now?” I asked him. “Don’t ask,” he laughed. “Probably flying over some crazy country like Iran.” There was a silence, after which he couldn’t resist saying, “I hope you found the sandwich and the chocolate we left for you. We saw that you missed supper.”

“Yes, yes, it was great. I wanted to thank you, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Listen,” he said with a suddenly serious expression, “it doesn’t matter if you can’t find us in the plane, but what will happen if you lose us in India? We’ll have to lay down a few rules for keeping contact. In the meantime, you should know our
private
whistle, which has stood us in good stead ever since our honeymoon.” He whistled it a few times so that it would stick in my head.

On a soft and hazy afternoon we landed in India, and for a moment I had the feeling that we were entering not a living
reality
but a vast screen on which a Technicolor movie about India was being projected. Already I found myself squeezed against the
two of them, next to the knapsack with the medical supplies and the suitcases, which looked clumsy and almost superfluous in the small space of the ancient cab and in the face of the Indian
poverty
bombarding us through the car windows in a whirlwind of color. Lazar’s face was pressed against my shoulder, very tired and wrinkled under the stubble of his beard, while the plump and lively face of his wife was made up and scented and radiant with childish excitement. Every few minutes she broke into loud cries of admiration, exhorting me and her husband to look at all kinds of passing Indians who seemed to her worthy of special attention. But Lazar refused to raise his head. Worn out, his eyes closed, he grumbled, “Enough, Dori, not now, I haven’t got the strength, we’ll have plenty of time to look later,” while I actually tried to respond to her cries, despite their annoying loudness and enthusiasm, and turned to see where she was pointing, repeating a silly sentence that I couldn’t get out of my head: “I feel as if it’s not real yet, as if it’s only some English movie about India, and we’ve become a little English ourselves.” And she smiled at me kindly, as if I were a child trying to be original. But when we reached the hotel recommended by the travel agency, within the walls of the old city, her enthusiasm suddenly plummeted, which confirmed my objections to her joining us. Although the hotel was quite ancient, neither I nor Lazar could see anything wrong with spending the night there. But as we neared the reception desk, her face fell and she began whispering to her husband, demanding to see the rooms before we handed over our passports. Lazar grumbled at first but finally gave in to her, and they left me in the lobby with the luggage and went up to examine the rooms. On their return the argument between them seemed to have grown sharper. Her face was flushed and determined, and he looked very annoyed indeed. “I don’t understand,” he
repeated
, “I simply don’t understand. It’s for one night, at the most two. I haven’t slept for thirty hours, I’m falling off my feet, and all I want is a simple bed. That’s all. Where are we going to find a better hotel now?” But she gripped his arm tightly in an angry, distraught gesture, as if she wanted to shut him up, and sent me an automatic smile when she saw me looking at her, perhaps in order to shut me up too. “One night is worth something in life too,” she said, rebuking her husband, and she gave me a
reproachful
look as well, even though I hadn’t said a word.

We had no alternative but to leave the hotel, and the minute we hit the street two Indian boys pounced on us, relieved us of the knapsack and suitcases, and led us to see other hotels. And since we now felt light and liberated after the long, cramped flight, and the weather was soft and mild, we walked as if
floating
on air to not one but five hotels. The travel agent’s warning that we were due to arrive in India at the height of the pilgrim season proved true. The hotels Mrs. Lazar approved of were full, and the hotels which could take us were rejected by this
impossible
woman, who went up by herself to “smell the rooms,” as her husband remarked with a helpless smile, in which to my
astonishment
I also sensed a hidden admiration. And thus we
wandered
around the streets of the old city in the company of the two boys, who were enthusiastically prepared to lead us farther and farther, until after an hour of searching we finally found a hotel which was “at least possible,” and whose prices turned out to be no higher than those of the ones that had been rejected. Our two rooms were next to each other, quite small but clean, or at least colorful. The windows were draped in curtains of pale green silk, like saris, and there were heavy chains of bright yellow wilted flowers hanging over the beds. After a day and a half I was really alone at last, and the welcome solitude wrapped me in its
sweetness
. It was already four-thirty in the afternoon, and I wondered whether I was too tired to do anything but take a shower and get into bed or whether I should go out now, before it got dark, into the new world beyond the door. In the end hunger gained the upper hand, and since Lazar and his wife had
uncharacteristically
failed to mention their plans for our next meal, I decided to go out and get something to eat on my own. I wasn’t sure how frugal I needed to be since the financial arrangements between us had not yet been finalized. All I had to go on was the vague and general statement of intent made by Lazar’s wife on the first
evening
in their apartment. The arguments over the choice of the hotel, which was situated in a far from elegant quarter, indicated that in spite of her indignant protests, expense was a factor to be taken into account, at least as far as Lazar was concerned. It wasn’t going to be a luxury trip. And indeed, why should it be?