Open Heart (8 page)

There was no restaurant in the hotel, only a small, dim bar in which a few guests in white turbans and old-fashioned European suits sat paging through newspapers and conversing quietly in
English, as if they were actually Britons who had been left behind when the Empire was abandoned and whom the years had
darkened
into old Indians. I changed a hundred dollars into rupees at the reception desk and emerged into a little street full of soft, dry sunlight, still clad in the thin skin of the English identity in which I had been pleasantly and secretly wrapped since landing in
India
. Unwilling to station myself, like an avid Israeli tourist, in front of the trays heaped up on the many food stalls, in order to nibble something sticky and mysterious, I decided to go back to the first, rejected hotel, where I had caught a glimpse of a large restaurant. I succeeded in retracing our footsteps with surprising ease, and entered the restaurant, where I examined the food lying on the tables before choosing the dish I fancied, a portion of roast meat buried in a thick black chapati resting on a large yellowish leaf. My hunger satisfied, I felt an urge to go upstairs and take a look at one of the rooms, to see what Mrs. Lazar had found so offensive. An Indian servant took me up to the second floor to show me the only vacant room left in the hotel, possibly the same room they had shown her. It was, in fact, a spacious room, with a view of a large, reddish fortress in the distance. I concentrated on the details, trying to see them through her eyes and understand what had put her off. The bed was large and covered with a gray blanket, clean but torn at the edges. One of the walls bore long thin stains, as if someone had thrown a drink at it. I took a step into the room in order to smell it. The Indian smiled at my side. I couldn’t smell a thing, apart from a faint, sweetish whiff of mold. What, then, had made her recoil? I
wondered
, thinking of the pampered woman with a new and
unfamiliar
anger.

I left the room, but instead of returning to our hotel, although I was tired and sticky, I set out for the fort I had just seen through the window. I didn’t want to waste a minute of my time in this fascinating place. We had already been told at the airport that we would have to travel from New Delhi to Gaya by train or bus, since at this time of year, with so many people on the move, we had no chance of getting onto a plane, or even perhaps of obtaining an air-conditioned compartment on the train. I
assumed
that Lazar, in a hurry to get back to Israel for his
important
meeting, would not want to hang around in New Delhi, and in spite of his promise about the fine sights we would see on the
way, he would probably insist on setting out tomorrow, or at the most the day after tomorrow, in order to reach our destination as quickly as possible. And since I had a feeling that we would find the hepatitis patient in a worse state than her parents imagined and that from the minute we arrived I would have to be at her beck and call, because practical people like the Lazars didn’t drag a doctor to the ends of the earth at their own expense for nothing, I had better make the most of every chance I got to take in whatever I could of the magic of this place, which was already beginning to draw me to it.

And so much the better, I reflected, that I was sticky and dirty from the journey; it would make me freer in my first contact with the reality of India, which seemed to be flowing and pouring and thickening around me like colorful lava; while at the same time my secret English identity would protect me from getting into trouble. And so, after writing down the name of the hotel on a piece of paper, I allowed myself to roam the filthy, crowded streets at will, proceeding slowly and steadily in the direction of the reddish stone fortress. By twists and turns, without asking anyone the way, I finally reached my goal, and discovered that my attraction to it had not been in vain. A wall stretched for hundreds of yards in the same reddish color which had initially caught my eye, and to which the light of the setting sun had now added a special charm. For a moment I searched for English
tourists
again, so that I could join them and rub up against the sounds of my parents’ language. But the only people standing at the gate were a few hesitant Indians, who were being urged by the guards to go in quickly before they shut the fort, which was indeed, with surprising simplicity, called the Red Fort. Although it was too late for a comprehensive tour I went in, almost the last to do so. I passed through an arcade of elegant shops selling antiquities and souvenirs, and from there to several exquisite
little
pavilions, particularly the one called the Painted Palace, which were already growing dark in the gathering dusk and which had been almost deserted by the tourists. I was still trying as hard as I could to feel like the hero of a movie with definite values and a clear plot, as if this were the only way to give some meaning to the trip that had been suddenly forced on me and to console me for the loss of my prospects in Hishin’s department at the hospital.

When I emerged from the gates of the fort with the last of the tourists, my soul stirred by the little I had managed to see, the sun had already set, darkness was rapidly falling, and there was a new chill, accompanied by soft raindrops, in the air, apparently coming from the direction of the broad river which I had glimpsed from one of the windows in the fort. I thought that it was the Ganges, until the guide corrected me and said that it was called the Yamuna, and it only joined the Ganges at a distance of some six hundred miles from here. And even though my
weariness
had hardened into what felt like an extra organ inside me, I told myself that if I had already come so far and enjoyed so much, I should go and see the river too, for even if it wasn’t the famous Ganges, it would have some spiritual significance which could teach me something new. Because by tomorrow evening my independent ramblings would all too quickly end, and I would be sitting in a bus or a train, squeezed between Lazar and his wife, with their anxiety about their sick daughter growing more overpowering the closer we got to the hospital. I continued eastward in the direction of the river in spite of the encroaching darkness. With my father’s sturdy old windbreaker to protect me from the cold and occasional snatches of English, local or otherwise, rising from the darkness to encourage me, I began making my way through rows of wretched hovels whose inhabitants seemed quite friendly, or at least not actively hostile.

In spite of the chill and the fine drizzle, the animated voices of women doing their washing or even bathing rose from the river, and from time to time the bobbing light of a lamp revealed their lively movements. I stood there for a long time in the fragrant rain, until I heard a long-drawn-out hoot and a very long
illuminated
train moved out of a nearby station and began crossing the river on an invisible bridge, as if it were floating between heaven and earth before sinking into the black horizon. At that moment I made up my mind to reconcile myself to this enforced journey and to stop inwardly protesting against Hishin for giving in to Lazar’s manipulations, and I allowed my profound weariness to turn me in the direction of my waiting bed, festooned with its chain of yellow, slightly wilting marigolds.

But who could have guessed that the heavy darkness had fallen not only on the river and its environs but on large sectors of the old city as well, despite the streetlights scattered here and there,
whose dim light only succeeded in blurring the landmarks I had memorized in order to lead me back? I thus had no alternative but to repeat the name of the first, rejected hotel to passersby, who were usually full of goodwill but also confusing and
misleading
. To my dismay, I found myself recognizing shops and stalls which I had already passed, until I realized that I had been going around in circles without anyone’s warning me that the streets here went around a square and led nowhere. I
immediately
lost all confidence in the directions I had been given and began accosting people lying on the sidewalks and demanding explanations, even if I had to wake them up. Somehow I
eventually
found my way to the rejected hotel, which to my surprise was brightly lit and full of the sounds of music and singing because of a wedding celebration, which I stood and watched for a while as if spellbound. From there I remembered the way to our hotel, which looked dark and silent.

I hurried up to the second floor, wondering whether the Lazars were angry with me for having disappeared for so long without even warning them, or whether they had already resigned themselves to the fact that they had no control over me or right to expect anything of me, except for the performance of my medical duties when the time came. But if I came in for a mild reprimand, I decided, I would bow my head and accept it in silence. After entering my room and discovering that it had no electric light but only an oil lamp, which had been brought in my absence and suspended over my bed, I hurried out again and knocked lightly on the door of the Lazars’ room, to announce my return and hear what they had seen and done in the meantime. Lazar opened the door, tousled with sleep, barefoot, short and clumsy in old-fashioned flannel pajamas, his eyes red and narrowed. Their room was smaller than mine, strewn with their clothing and possessions, and illuminated by a soft, weak light coming from the oil lamp hidden under their bed, which was not much larger than mine and which held the outline of Mrs. Lazar, curled up in a blanket with only her little feet sticking out. Her capacity for sleep was apparently as great as her capacity for smiling, I thought, again with a strange anger. And in fact, it transpired that no sooner had I left them than they had both fallen into a prodigious sleep, ignoring the great Indian city about them, and accordingly they had not even been aware of my
absence. I couldn’t contain myself, and standing on the threshold like an excited child, I told Lazar about the Red Fort, the little palaces, and the river too. He listened with his head bowed, swaying slightly. The true master of our great hospital, according to Hishin, stood before me now like a weak, bewildered old man. But I went on whispering nevertheless, and as I did so I saw two smiling eyes shining brightly from the outline on the bed. “I see that you enjoyed yourself,” Lazar finally stated. “It’s a good thing you didn’t wait for us. I don’t know what made us collapse like this,” he began to apologize, “but it was stronger than we were. Don’t forget we spent a few sleepless nights even before the journey. Ever since that girl brought us the letter, we’ve both begun coming apart at the seams, even if we don’t look it.”

He accompanied me to my room and obtained two sleeping pills. Then he told me with his characteristic practicality and foresight that he was determined not to let sleep slip away from him, in order to charge his batteries for the arduous journey still ahead of us. And indeed, when he knocked at my door and woke me up at ten o’clock the next morning, I noticed immediately that the limp exhaustion of the night before had been replaced by an energetic wakefulness. He apologized for waking me up, but explained that there were a few “urgent administrative matters.” At ten o’clock that night we were continuing our journey on the night train to Varanasi. A long journey of seventeen hours. And we had to vacate our rooms at noon and leave our luggage downstairs. “So we’re leaving tonight?” I asked in
disappointment
, even though I knew that his eagerness to reach his sick daughter quickly and get her and himself back to Israel as soon as possible would outweigh any promises made in his living room. Regrets welled up in me, for I had planned to go back to the river and see it in daylight, and also to visit a few places which had caught my interest when I walked past them in the dark. But it seemed that we had no alternative; it was impossible to get seats on a plane for the next two weeks, and even the express train, on which we had pinned our hopes in Israel, was full. It was only by the greatest ingenuity that he had succeeded in reserving us seats on a train that was slightly slower and less luxurious but reliable and reasonably comfortable, for otherwise, who knows, we might have been forced to rattle our bones in a dilapidated old bus as if we were characters in an adventure
movie. “Yes, that’s the long and the short of it,” he apologized again, but actually he looked rather pleased with himself and his ability to cope with administrative difficulties, even in India. “We’ve arrived at the height of the internal tourist season in
India
. But we didn’t choose the timing of this trip, it chose us. At least there’s one thing in our favor—the weather’s fine, and we don’t have to worry about savage monsoons coming down on our heads.”

His wife emerged in sunglasses, ready to go out. She had changed the blue tunic for a colorful Indian scarf, which she had purchased that morning and immediately draped round her shoulders. On her feet she wore flat walking shoes, which made her look short and clumsy. When she saw me at the door of my room, she put her hands together and bowed her head
mischievously
in the Indian greeting and said, “We owe you our thanks for the Red Fort. After your stories last night we ran to see it this morning, and it really is exquisite.”

Lazar rummaged in his pockets, took out my train ticket, and said, “Here, you’d better keep it yourself.” Then he took out a pen and wrote the name of the station on the back of the ticket, and said that we should meet at the hotel at eight o’clock before leaving for the station together. “Eight o’clock?” his wife protested. “Why so early? The train leaves at ten. We’ll never get back from that place everyone says you should see at sunset. Why don’t we meet at the train station? He’s already proved himself.”

I felt a sudden surge of resentment at the way she was calmly laying down the law. I fingered the stubble of my two-day beard and said with a provocative smile, “And if we do get separated? What happens then?”

“But why should we get separated?” she asked in genuine
surprise,
this woman who was only here with us because she couldn’t bear being left alone. But Lazar immediately backed me up. “You’re right, everything’s possible, and if you really do get lost here, there isn’t even anyone to inform.” He rapidly wrote down the address of the hospital in Gaya on a piece of paper. “It’s over a thousand miles from here,” he said, smiling, “but at least it’s a clear and definite address. I’ve already given you money and paid for your room in the hotel. And tonight we’ll meet here, just as I said, at eight.” He turned to his wife with a
frown. “You always think you can play with time. But not now. So we’ll all be back here by eight. And until then you’re free,” he added, turning back to me. “I see you like to roam around by yourself. Just see that you don’t get into trouble. And we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”