The Zahir

"Oh, I do, and it would be lovely to have you around."

She smiled broadly and picked up the phone to call her manager and ask her to change her engagements. I heard her say: "Don't tell them I'm ill though. I'm superstitious, and whenever I've used that excuse in the past, I've always come down with something really horrible. Just tell them I've got to look after the person I love."

I had a series of urgent things to do too: interviews to be postponed, invitations that required replies, letters to be written thanking various people for the phone calls and flowers I'd received, things to read, prefaces and recommendations to write. Marie spent the whole day on the phone to my agent, reorganizing my diary so that no one would be left without a response. We had supper at home every evening, talking about the interesting and the banal, just like any other couple. During one of these suppers, after a few glasses of wine, she remarked that I had changed.

"It's as if having a brush with death had somehow brought you back to life," she said.

"That happens to everyone."

"But I must say--and, don't worry, I don't want to start an argument and I'm not about to have an attack of jealousy--you haven't mentioned Esther once since coming home. The same thing happened when you finished A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew: the book acted as a kind of therapy, the effects of which, alas, didn't last very long."

"Are you saying that the accident has affected my brain?"

My tone wasn't aggressive, but she nevertheless decided to change the subject and started telling me about a terrifying helicopter trip she'd had from Monaco to Cannes. Later, in bed, we made love--with great difficulty given my orthopedic collar--but we made love nevertheless and felt very close.

Four days later, the vast pile of paper on my desk had disappeared. There was only a large, white envelope bearing my name and the number of my apartment. Marie went to open it, but I told her it could wait.

She didn't ask me about it; perhaps it was information about my bank accounts or some confidential correspondence, possibly from another woman. I didn't explain either. I simply removed it from the desk and placed it on a shelf among some books. If I kept looking at it, the Zahir would come back.

At no point had the love I felt for Esther diminished, but every day spent in the hospital had brought back some intriguing memory: not of conversations we had had, but of moments we had spent together in silence. I remembered her eyes, which reflected her inner being. Whenever she set off on some new adventure, she was an enthusiastic young girl, or a wife proud of her husband's success, or a journalist fascinated by every subject she wrote about. Later, she was the wife who no longer seemed to have a place in my life. That look of sadness in her eyes had started before she told me she wanted to be a war correspondent; it became a look of joy every time she came back from an assignment, but it was only a matter of days before the look of sadness returned.

One afternoon, the phone rang.

"It's that young man," Marie said, passing me the phone.

At the other end I heard Mikhail's voice, first saying how sorry he was about the accident and then asking me if I had received the envelope.

"Yes, it's here with me."

"Are you going to go and find her?"

Marie was listening to our conversation and so I thought it best to change the subject.

"We can talk about that when I see you."

"I'm not nagging or anything, but you did promise to help me."

"And I always keep my promises. As soon as I'm better, we'll get together."

He left me his cell phone number, and when I hung up, I looked across at Marie, who seemed a different woman.

"So nothing's changed then," she said.

"On the contrary. Everything's changed."

I should have expressed myself more clearly and explained that I still wanted to see Esther, that I knew where she was. When the time was right, I would take a train, taxi, plane, or whatever just to be by her side. This would, of course, mean losing the woman who was there by my side at that moment, steadfastly doing all she could to prove how important I was to her.

I was, of course, being a coward. I was ashamed of myself, but that was what life was like, and--in a way I couldn't really explain--I loved Marie too.

The other reason I didn't say more was because I had always believed in signs, and when I recalled the moments of silence I had shared with my wife, I knew that--with or without voices, with or without explanations--the time to find Esther had still not yet arrived. I needed to concentrate more on those shared silences than on any of our conversations, because that would give me the freedom I needed to understand the time when things had gone right between us and the moment when they had started to go wrong.

Marie was there, looking at me. Could I go on being disloyal to someone who was doing so much for me? I started to feel uncomfortable, but I couldn't tell her everything, unless...unless I could find an indirect way of saying what I was feeling.

"Marie, let's suppose that two firemen go into a forest to put out a small fire. Afterward, when they emerge and go over to a stream, the face of one is all smeared with black, while the other man's face is completely clean. My question is this: Which of the two will wash his face?"

"That's a silly question. The one with the dirty face, of course."

"No, the one with the dirty face will look at the other man and assume that he looks like him. And, vice versa, the man with the clean face will see his colleague covered in grime and say to himself: I must be dirty too. I'd better have a wash."