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"What are you trying to say?"
"I'm saying that, during the time I spent in the hospital, I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me and thinking that they were worse than they were. Please, don't let that happen to you."
I would like to have added: that's what happened to Esther, and I've only just realized it, remembering now how the look in her eyes changed. I'd always absorbed her life and her energy, and that made me feel happy and confident, able to go forward. She, on the other hand, had looked at me and felt ugly, diminished, because, as the years passed, my career--the career that she had done so much to make a reality--had relegated our relationship to second place.
If I was to see her again, my face needed to be as clean as hers. Before I could find her, I must first find myself.
ARIADNE'S THREAD
I am born in a small village, some kilometers from a slightly larger village where they have a school and a museum dedicated to a poet who lived there many years before. My father is nearly fifty years old, my mother is twenty-five. They met only recently when he was selling carpets; he had traveled all the way from Russia, but when he met her he decided to give up e
verything for her sake. She could be his daughter, but she behaves more like his mother, even helping him to sleep, something he has been unable to do properly since he was seventeen and was sent to fight the Germans in Stalingrad, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Out of a battalion of three thousand men, only three survived."
Oddly, Mikhail speaks almost entirely in the present tense. He doesn't say "I was born" but "I am born." It is as if everything were happening here and now.
"In Stalingrad, my father and his best friend are caught in an exchange of fire on their way back from a reconnaissance patrol. They take cover in a bomb crater and spend two days in the mud and snow, with no food and no means of keeping warm. They can hear other Russians talking in a nearby building and know that they must try to reach them, but the firing never stops, the smell of blood fills the air, the wounded lie screaming for help day and night. Suddenly, everything falls silent. My father's friend, thinking that the Germans have withdrawn, stands up. My father tugs at his legs, yelling, 'Get down!' But it's too late; a bullet pierces his friend's skull.
"Another two days pass, my father is alone, with his friend's corpse beside him. He can't stop yelling, 'Get down!' At last, someone rescues him and takes him to the nearby building. There is no food, only ammunition and cigarettes. They eat the tobacco. A week later, they start to eat the flesh of their dead, frozen companions. A third battalion arrives and shoots a way through to them; the survivors are rescued, the wounded are treated and then immediately sent back to the front. Stalingrad must not fall; the future of Russia is at stake. After four months of intense fighting, of cannibalism, of limbs being amputated because of frostbite, the Germans finally surrender--it is the beginning of the end for Hitler and his Third Reich. My father returns on foot to his village, almost a thousand kilometers from Stalingrad. He now finds it almost impossible to sleep, and when he does manage to drop off, he dreams every night of the friend he could have saved.
"Two years later, the war ends. He receives a medal, but cannot find employment. He takes part in services of commemoration, but has almost nothing to eat. He is considered one of the heroes of Stalingrad, but can only survive by doing odd jobs, for which he is paid a pittance. In the end, someone offers him work selling carpets. Suffering as he does from insomnia, he chooses to travel at night; he gets to know smugglers, wins their confidence, and begins to earn some money.
"He is caught out by the Communist government, who accuse him of consorting with criminals and, despite being a war hero, he spends the next ten years in Siberia labeled 'a traitor of the people.' When he is finally released, he is an old man and the only thing he knows anything about is carpets. He manages to reestablish his old contacts, someone gives him a few carpets to sell, but no one is interested in buying--times are hard. He decides to go a long way away, begging as he goes, and ends up in Kazakhstan.
"He is old and alone, but he needs to work in order to eat. He spends the days doing odd jobs and, at night, sleeps only fitfully and is woken by his own cries of 'Get down!' Strangely enough, despite all that he has been through, despite the insomnia, the poor food, the frustrations, the physical wear and tear, and the cigarettes that he smokes whenever he can scrounge them, he still has an iron constitution.
"In a small village, he meets a young woman. She lives with her parents; she takes him to her house, for, in that region, hospitality is paramount. They let him sleep in the living room, but are woken by his screams. The girl goes to him, says a prayer, strokes his head, and for the first time in many decades, he sleeps peacefully.
"The following day, she says that, when she was a girl, she had dreamed that a very old man would give her a child. She waited for years, had various suitors, but was always disappointed. Her parents were terribly worried, for they did not want to see their only daughter end up a spinster, rejected by the community.
"She asks him if he will marry her. He is taken aback; after all, she is young enough to be his granddaughter, and so he says nothing. At sunset, in the small living room, she asks if she can stroke his head before he goes to sleep. He enjoys another peaceful night.
"The following day, the subject of marriage comes up again, this time in the presence of her parents, who seem to think it a good idea; they just want their daughter to find a husband and to cease being a source of family shame. They invent a story about an old man who has come from far away and who is, in fact, a wealthy trader in carpets, but has grown weary of living a life of luxury and comfort, and has given it all up in order to go in search of adventure. People are impressed, they imagine a generous dowry, huge bank accounts, and think how lucky my mother is to have finally found someone who can take her away from that village in the back of beyond. My father listens to these stories with a mixture of fascination and surprise; he thinks of all the years he has spent alone, traveling, of all he has suffered, of how he never again found his own family, and he thinks that now, for the first time in his life, he could have a home of his own. He accepts the proposal, colludes with the lies about his past, and they get married according to the Muslim tradition. Two months later, she is pregnant with me.
"I live with my father until I am seven years old; he sleeps well, works in the fields, goes hunting, and talks to the other villagers about his money and his lands; and he looks at my mother as if she were the only good thing that has ever happened to him. I grow up believing that I am the son of a rich man, but one night, by the fire, he tells me about his past and why he married, but begs me not to tell anyone else. Soon, he says, he will die, and four months later he does. He breathes his last in my mother's arms, smiling, as if he had never known a moment's sadness. He dies a happy man."
Mikhail is telling his story on a very cold spring night, although it is certainly not as cold as in Stalingrad, where temperatures can plummet to <35degC. We are sitting with some beggars who are warming themselves before an improvised bonfire. I had gone there after a second phone call from Mikhail, asking me to keep my part of the promise. During our conversation, he did not once mention the envelope he had left at my apartment, as if he knew--perhaps through the voice--that I had, in the end, decided to follow the signs and allow things to happen in their own time and thus free myself from the power of the Zahir.
When he asked me to meet him in one of the most dangerous parts of Paris, my first reaction was one of alarm. Normally, I would have said that I was far too busy and tried to convince him that we would be better off going to some cozy bar where we could safely discuss important matters. I was still afraid that he might have another epileptic fit in public, even though I now knew what to do, but that was preferable to the risk of being mugged when I was wearing an orthopedic collar and had no way of defending myself.
Mikhail insisted: I had to meet the beggars; they were part of his life and part of Esther's life too. I had realized while I was in the hospital that there was something wrong with my own life and that change was urgently needed. How best to achieve that change? By doing something totally different; for example, going to dangerous places and meeting social outcasts.
There is a story about a Greek hero, Theseus, who goes into a labyrinth in order to slay a monster. His beloved, Ariadne, gives him one end of a thread so that he can unroll it as he goes and thus be able to find his way out again. Sitting with those people, listening to Mikhail's story, it occurs to me that I have not experienced anything like this for a long time--the taste of the unknown, of adventure. Who knows, perhaps Ariadne's thread was waiting for me in precisely the kind of place that I would never normally visit, or only if I was convinced that I had to make an enormous effort to change my story and my life.
Mikhail continued his story, and I saw that the whole group was listening to what he was saying: the most satisfying encounters do not always happen around elegant tables in nice, warm restaurants.
"Every day, I have to walk nearly an hour to the village where I go to school. I see the women going to fetch water, the endless steppes, the Russian soldiers driving past in long convoys, the snow-capped mountains which, I am told, conceal a vast country: China. The village I walk to each day has a museum dedicated to its one poet, a mosque, a school, and three or four streets. We are taught about the existence of a dream, an ideal: we must fight for the victory of Communism and for equality among all human beings. I do not believe in this dream, because even in this wretchedly poor village, there are marked differences: the Party representatives are above everyone else; now and again, they visit the big city, Almaty, and return bearing packages of exotic food, presents for their children, expensive clothes.
"One afternoon, on my way home, I feel a strong wind blowing, see lights all around me, and lose consciousness for a few moments. When I come to, I am sitting on the ground, and a very white little girl, wearing a white dress with a blue belt, is floating in the air above me. She smiles but says nothing, then disappears.
"I run home, interrupt my mother's work, and tell her what I have seen. She is terrified and asks me never to repeat what I have just told her. She explains to me--as well as one can explain such a complicated concept to an eight-year-old boy--that it was just a hallucination. I tell her that I really did see the girl, that I can describe her in every detail. I add that I wasn't afraid and came home at once because I wanted her to know what had happened.
"The following day, coming back from school, I look for the girl, but she isn't there. Nothing happens for a whole week, and I begin to think that perhaps my mother was right: I must simply have dropped asleep and dreamed it all.
"Then, this time very early one morning, on my way to school, I again see the girl floating in the air and surrounded by a white halo. I don't fall to the ground or see any flashing lights. We stand for a while, looking at each other; she smiles and I smile back; I ask her name, but receive no answer. At school, I ask my classmates if they have ever seen a girl floating in the air. They all laugh.
"During class, I am summoned to the headmaster's office. He explains to me that I must have some mental problem--there is no such thing as 'visions'; the only reality is what we see around us; religion was merely invented to fool the people. I ask about the mosque in the city; he says that only the old and superstitious go there, ignorant, idle people who lack the necessary energy to rebuild the socialist world. Then he issues a threat: if I repeat the story about the little girl, I will be expelled. Terr
ified, I beg him not to say anything to my mother, and he agrees, as long as I tell my classmates that I made the whole thing up.
