A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

When darkness fell, the little porter took me to one of the ghats where bodies of the dead were burned. First I saw how people threw flowers and sweets into a well; then, from a little distance, for the dwarf warned me not to go too close, I stood for a long time watching a body burn on a funeral pyre while the members of the family sat in a circle and chatted quietly. I waited until the fire went out, and in the dark, by the light of a torch, the family stood up and slowly circled the ashes, and one of them cracked the skull to liberate the soul into the river, and they gathered up the ashes to sprinkle them on the water. Only then was I able to return to our inn, which was already mostly shrouded in darkness. I gave the porter a few rupees and he put his hands together in thanks, but he did not leave me, for he was afraid that I would go to the wrong room, so he led me up the pitch-dark steps until I was standing in front of the door to our room. I knocked lightly to announce my return, but when there was no reply, I carefully opened the door. The room was dark and the big beds were empty. The Lazars appeared to have moved them closer together in my absence. On the balcony I made out the two heavy silhouettes. When I approached, I found them in their bathrobes, their hair still wet from the shower. All that was left of the spectacular view was deep, empty darkness; the temples and the ghats had completely vanished, and only a few solitary torches still burned on the banks of the Ganges, with mysterious shadows stirring around them. Next to the Lazars stood a stool covered with an embroidered cloth, with plates holding the remains of their supper. They did not notice my arrival, for they were deep in a conversation. I knocked lightly on the balcony door, and they both immediately turned their heads, smiling and very pleased to see me, like parents who had awaited their son. It turned out that in all this time they had not left the room but remained by themselves on the little balcony, content with the distant, general view. “You’ve been sitting on the balcony all this time?” I marveled. “We’re not as young as we used to be,” said Lazar complacently, “and this balcony is an experience in itself.” He was in a good mood, and he seemed pleased with me too, for succeeding again in not getting lost. His wife invited me to sit down beside them and tell them about my experiences on the river, but Lazar stood up and asked if I had had anything to eat. For a minute I couldn’t remember, since I felt no hunger, but when I replied in the negative he urged his wife to get up and clear away their leftovers. “We thought of leaving something for you,” he apologized, “but we know you prefer eating alone.” His wife said, “Never mind, we’ll go down now and get something for him. What would you like to eat?”

“What would I like?” I repeated. “What have they got here?” And when they tried to tell me I interrupted them and said, “It doesn’t matter, just something light, whatever you bring. I’m really not hungry, I don’t know why.”

“Maybe the soul of an Indian fakir has already been incarnated in your body and from now on you’ll be satisfied with a starvation diet,” Lazar said with a chuckle, still diverted by the idea of reincarnation, which now, given the total darkness and the soft Indian tumult rising from the courtyard, seemed to me correct, even if impossible.

They both said at once, “Go and get washed, and we’ll go downstairs and get you something to eat. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but it’s Friday night,” and they went out to allow me to get undressed and wash myself in peace and quiet. In some strange way I didn’t feel dirty and sticky, even though my trousers had got wet in the river and cow dung had stuck to my shoes; it was as if the boat trip had dipped me in the river too, and the long contemplation of the cremation and the cracking of the blazing skull had purified me with a sense of profound mystery, which had made me forget my hunger and reconciled me to the dirt. But I didn’t want to embarrass the Lazars. I washed myself quickly in cold water before they came back. I had a long wait before they returned with a basket of fruit and candies and fresh-smelling chapatis, as well as a big bowl of steaming rice mixed with pieces of boiled mutton; and strangely enough it was Lazar, not his wife, who encouraged and coaxed me to eat, with a tender, absurdly fatherly air, trying to arouse my lost appetite and insisting on adding more and more to my plate, as if the whole great hospital in his charge had now been narrowed down to a single person, on whom he could focus the full strength of his control and concern. His wife sat opposite me, her stomach swelling, her long legs crossed, smoking a slender cigarette and examining me. When I described the cracking of the skull in order to liberate the soul, her face twisted in dismay. “How terrible — why did you look?” But Lazar understood me. “It sounds fascinating, I wish we could have seen it ourselves,” he said, as if he were actually sorry we were leaving the next morning by train for Gaya. “Tomorrow?”

“We should have stayed in New Delhi and insisted on getting a direct flight. That’s what we should have done,” said his wife. “So what do you say?” she asked, as if I had a say in anything that went on here, and she threw the burning cigarette butt over the balustrade. Lazar jumped up to reproach her. “Dori, are you crazy? There are people down there, you’ll burn somebody.”

“People don’t burn so easily.” She laughed, but at the sight of my gloomy face she said gently, “I see that you’re disappointed.” Her glasses glinted in the dark. “A little,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, I understand. But still, it seems to me,” I stammered, “for your own sake, you should have come down to the river, because from the balcony you can’t feel what you feel on the river, inside the thing itself.”

“But what is the thing itself?” She sat up with a strange anger. “Burning corpses?”

“No,” I answered her, “there’s something very strong here. It’s hard to explain. Something very ancient — not like historical ruins in Israel, it’s not historical, it’s real. If you go down, you’ll feel that what’s happening here, the purification rites and the cremations, has been going on for thousands of years, as if that’s the way it’s been forever …” Now a different smile crossed her face, not the automatic one but a thoughtful smile, as if she were wondering not about what I had said but about me. I felt that I had made a mistake in exposing my feelings to them, and in so doing giving them, especially her, permission to invade my privacy, now that she had talked me into sharing a room with them, something my parents had never done. And in order to stop her I decided not to give her another opportunity to interrogate me but instead to ask her about their sick daughter, about whom nothing had been said up to now, as if we had a kind of tacit agreement not to talk about her. Had she ever suffered from any serious illnesses in the past? I asked. Had she ever been hospitalized?

When the time came to go to bed, we moved the screen between us and I lay down in my pajamas on the folding bed, which was very narrow, intended for a skinny Indian with a wish to mortify himself during his sleep. They made some noise, presumably pushing the beds closer together, and in the end they switched off the little light, and she called out suddenly, “Good night,” and her husband said, “Shh, he’s already asleep.” But I answered in a weak voice, “Good night,” suddenly afraid that they might make love in the middle of the night. On the balcony they had seemed close and loving and attracted to one another. And even though I said to myself, They wouldn’t do that to me, I remained agitated, and I began tossing and turning in the dark on my narrow bed, until a soft rhythmic snoring reached my ears, and I knew that they were her snores, which I remembered from the train. I waited for him to stop her, but he just got up and went to drink a glass of water and out onto the balcony. Before he returned I fell asleep, but only for a few hours, since a band of musicians passed very close to the inn just before dawn, beating drums and clashing cymbals. One of them broke into song, and when the music faded away I knew that the Lazars too had woken up. Suddenly I heard Mrs. Lazar whispering to her husband in a surprisingly childish, pampered voice, which I wouldn’t have imagined her capable of, “Do you love me?” and he replied with a strange decisiveness, “No.” But she did not seem upset, and in the same soft, wheedling tone she continued, “Then you should.”