A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

They finally returned, agitated but also proud of their achievements. Suddenly the room filled with a number of half-naked young Indians, who before our eyes put together two stretchers from bamboo poles and mats, like the ones on which dead bodies were transported to the river. One of them was quickly loaded with our luggage, while the sick girl was carefully lifted onto the other and covered with a floral cloth. In a soft, beautiful twilight hour, our little procession left the Thai monastery with two stretchers held shoulder-high and made its way through the tree-shaded streets of Bodhgaya, passing shacks made of cloth and wood, under the sympathetic gaze of locals and pilgrims. Our destination was a hotel not far from the local river, surrounded by lawns and flower beds, where the Lazars had found a bungalow consisting of three small rooms connected by a passage and a rather dirty kitchenette with a sink and a stove in one corner and a table in the middle, which someone had already heaped with fruit and vegetables, cheeses and chapatis in anticipation of our arrival. For a moment I stood amazed at the transformation of my simple request for a decent room into this massive domestication. Before even asking about the results of the examination I had carried out on their daughter in their absence, both the Lazars burst into a frenzy of organization. Einat was put to bed between clean white sheets in a little room of her own, and Lazar’s wife fussed over her and pampered her and went to fetch a vase of fresh flowers from the hotel manager, while Lazar himself attacked the clutter and disorder with a vengeance, opening the suitcases and putting the clothes away in the closets as if he had forgotten all about his hospital and his promise to conclude the trip in ten or twelve days. It was as if all he wanted was to settle down in this little bungalow in the charming Buddhist village, which in comparison to the Indian reality we had seen up to now was a veritable paradise on earth.

But I still hadn’t opened my suitcase, only put it on the bed in the little room set aside for me. I was uneasy, not only because of the color of Einat’s urine, and the blood, which at first sight looked diseased and saturated with bilirubin, or the enlarged gall bladder, which had made her scream with pain when I touched it, but mainly because of my failure to palpate the liver, as if it had shrunk or degenerated in an alarmingly accelerated process of cell destruction. In which case, I thought, there was a good chance that before long she might develop a sudden internal hemorrhage. The thought terrified me, because if that happened here, in this remote village, all we would be able to do was pray to Buddha. As Lazar stood in the doorway with a strange-looking apron tied around his waist and invited me to come into the kitchen, I pulled myself together and decided to return immediately to Gaya and hand the samples over to the hospital laboratory and at the same time have a look at their equipment, so I would know what would be available to us if we needed it. If, as I feared, the results were bad, it would make no sense to settle down in this funny little bungalow with its dirty little kitchen and big dining table — we should go straight to Calcutta and take her to the hospital recommended by the Indian doctor on the train, so I wouldn’t have to cope with any possible deterioration on my own. Strangely enough, the Lazars did not seem worried; perhaps they had expected to find her in worse condition, or perhaps they had put their faith in Hishin’s pronouncement that in the last analysis hepatitis was a self-limited disease, and accordingly, after collecting their daughter and transferring her to the bungalow, all they sought was rest. The holy village too appeared to have had a calming effect on them, and they seemed perfectly happy to putter about in their little kitchen with its knives and forks and plates and even a pot bubbling on the stove.

I decided to sow a few seeds of anxiety in the cozy domesticity that was taking over here, and, declining to sit down at the laid table, I announced without undue gravity that I felt obliged to go straight to the hospital at Gaya with the samples I had obtained. I placed the ointment to relieve Einat’s incessant itch on the table, between the fruit and the chapatis, and also a few Valium tablets and paracetamol to bring down her temperature, and warned the Lazars not to mask her symptoms by exaggerating the dosage. But I wasn’t sure that I had conveyed my anxiety to them, for Lazar greeted my announcement with astonishment. “Are you sure that it’s really necessary to go to the hospital now, in the dark?”

“I’m positive,” I replied immediately, and added that I might be delayed there until the next morning, because if it turned out that the laboratory was closed at night — something inconceivable in a serious hospital — or even that it couldn’t be trusted to give me reliable results, as the Indian doctor from Calcutta had warned us, I would have to look for another. “But where will you find another one here?” asked Lazar with a smile, surprised at this new, stringent side of my character. “I don’t know, I’ll ask. If I could, I’d go to Calcutta, to that Indian doctor’s private laboratory. I trust him, and we have his address on his card.”

“To Calcutta? Are you mad?” Lazar leapt up as if he’d been bitten. “How will you get there? It’s hell on earth, and it’s hours from here.”

“Yes, it’s far away, but maybe there’s a flight from Gaya.”

“A flight?” repeated the stunned Lazar. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to fly to Calcutta just for those tests?”

“No, of course not,” I stammered. But Lazar wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t understand what’s gotten into you. What exactly are you looking for?”

“Nothing,” I said, “I just want reliable results.”

“Reliable.” He sighed. “Here, of all places?” And when I said nothing he added, “Perhaps we should just let Einati recuperate here for a few days and go straight home, and they’ll do all the necessary tests there.” Now I had to protest, although I was still careful not to worry them too much. “Those tests are important,” I stressed. “If you say no, that’s your right — but then you’ll have to explain to me why you dragged me here with you in the first place.” And Lazar’s wife, who was sitting opposite me with a gray face and slightly untidy hair, wearing a lightweight white blouse which revealed small new freckles on her neck, smoking her slender cigarette in silence, and examining me intently with an expression that I felt radiated a new sympathy toward me, suddenly burst out and said to her husband, softly but firmly, “He’s right. Trust him. And if he wants to fly to Calcutta to get reliable results, why not? We can wait; that’s why we made ourselves comfortable here. Do whatever you think best”—she turned to me—“and we’ll wait here patiently. But have something to eat before you go.”

I sat down at the big table, ate quickly, and stood up immediately to get ready, because I still hoped to return the same night. I removed everything except a few drugs and bandages from the knapsack and filled it with a clean shirt, a sweater, underwear, and toiletries, hung my camera around my neck, and was instantly transformed into a wandering backpacker. I fastened the pouch with the samples onto my belt, and took three hundred dollars from Lazar for expenses. His wife made me sandwiches with the chapatis and put exotic fruits in a brown paper bag for me. Before I left I decided to take another look at my patient. She was sleeping, her beautiful face peaceful, only her hands still clutching each other and making sleepy scratching movements. For a moment I was loath to wake her, now that she had finally found rest in a decent bed, but I didn’t want to leave without taking the opportunity to palpate her organs. Lazar’s wife helped me wake her up and raised the light flannel pajama jacket they had brought from Israel for her. The yellowish chest, the small breasts, and the scratched stomach were again exposed to my fingers, whose special palpation technique had once even aroused the admiration of Hishin himself, who ever since then had called me “the internist.” I could now clearly feel how shrunken the liver was, compared to the enlarged gall bladder and spleen. But I was very careful not to hurt her again, because I wanted to regain her confidence. I concluded my examination and covered the thin body. I still wanted to get a stool specimen from her; it wasn’t essential, I explained to her parents, but if at all possible, it might prove very helpful. Just as I was about to leave, standing in my green windbreaker, Lazar’s wife came out and handed me a little parcel wrapped in newspaper, which I couldn’t resist removing so I could look at the color of the stool. It was suspiciously black, as if it contained occult blood. But I said nothing and wordlessly rewrapped the container, which I enclosed in another receptacle. Lazar and his wife accompanied me outside, where a gaudily painted auto-rickshaw was waiting, hired for me by Lazar, who had already begun to exert his organizational gifts on Indian life. “The driver will be at your disposal all the time. I’ve already paid him there and back, don’t worry,” he said dryly, as if he was angry with me for giving them new grounds for anxiety instead of reassuring them. Leaning against one another, embracing without an embrace, they stood and watched me as I sat down in the open rickshaw, behind the elderly and grave-faced motorcyclist, who was wearing a towering white turban on his head and who immediately began pulling me into the dark night, as if we were orbiting in a black void.