Aleph

“Not at all. If you don’t get up early, you’ll never see the sun rise. If you don’t pray, God may be near, but you won’t feel His presence. However, if you believe that invocations like the one you just made are the only way forward, then you had better move to the Sonora Desert in America or to an ashram in India. In the real world, God is more easily to be found in Hilal’s violin.”

Tatiana bursts into tears. Neither Hilal nor I know quite what to do. We wait for her to finish crying and tell us what she’s feeling.

“Thank you,” she says. “Even though in your opinion it was useless, thank you. I have hundreds of wounds that I carry around with me, and yet I’m obliged to behave as if I were the happiest person in the world. At least today I felt someone take my hand and say, ‘You’re not alone, come with us, show me what you know.’ I felt loved, useful, important.”

She turns to Hilal and goes on.

“Even when you said that you knew this city better than I do, the city where I was born and where I’ve lived all my life, I didn’t feel belittled or insulted. I believed you; I wasn’t alone anymore; someone was going to show me something I didn’t know. I have never seen this fountain before, and now, whenever I feel low, I’ll come back here and ask God to protect me. I know that the words weren’t anything very special. I’ve often said such prayers before and never been heard, and each time that happened, my faith ebbed away. Today, however, something did happen, because although you are strangers, you’re not strangers to me.”

Tatiana has still not finished.

“You’re much younger than me and have not suffered what I have suffered. You don’t know life, but you’re lucky. You’re in love with a man, which is why you made me fall in love with life again. In the future, it will be much easier for me to fall in love with someone.”

Hilal lowers her eyes. This isn’t what she wants to hear. Perhaps she had planned to say the same thing, but someone else is speaking these words in the city of Novosibirsk in Russia, which is just as we’d imagined it would be, although very different from the reality God created on this Earth.

“In short, I have forgiven myself, and I feel much lighter,” Tatiana continues. “I don’t know why you came here, nor why you asked me to come with you, but you have confirmed what I have always felt: people meet when they need to meet. I have just saved myself from myself.”

And the expression on her face really has changed. The goddess has become a sprite. She opens her arms to Hilal, who goes over to her. The two women embrace. Tatiana looks across at me and beckons with her head for me to join them, but I stay where I am. Hilal needs that embrace more than I do. She wanted to do something magical, but it turned out to be a cliché, and yet the cliché was transformed into magic because Tatiana was capable of transmuting that energy into something sacred.

The two women remain locked in that embrace. I look at the frozen water in the fountain, and I know that it will thaw one day, then freeze, then thaw again. So it is with our hearts, which are also regulated by time but which never stop forever.

Tatiana takes a card out of her bag. She hesitates, then hands it to Hilal.

“Good-bye,” she says. “I know we won’t meet again, but here’s my phone number. Perhaps everything I’ve just said is merely the product of incurable romanticism and things will soon go back to being as they were before, but it was still a very important experience for me.”

“Good-bye,” says Hilal. “And don’t worry, if I could find my way to this fountain, I’ll be able to find my way back to the hotel.”

She takes my arm. We walk through the cold night, and for the first time since we met, I desire her as a woman. I leave her at the door of the hotel and tell her that I need to walk a little more, alone, to think about life.

The Path of Peace

I MUSTN’T. I can’t. And as I say to myself a thousand times over, I don’t want to.

Yao takes off his clothes and stands there in his underpants. Even though he’s over seventy, his body is all skin and muscle. I take off my clothes, too.

I need this exercise, not so much because of the time spent cooped up in the train but because my desire has begun to grow uncontrollably. It’s at its most intense when we’re apart—when she’s gone to her room or I have some professional engagement—but I know that it would not take much for me to succumb to it. That’s how it was in the past, when we met for what I imagine must have been the first time; when she was far from me, I could think of nothing else, but when she was a visible, palpable presence, the demons vanished and I barely had to control myself at all.

That’s why she must stay here, before it’s too late.

Yao puts on his uniform of white trousers and jacket, and I do the same. We head in silence to the dojo, the martial-arts training place that he found after making a few phone calls. There are several other people practicing, but we manage to find a free space.

“The Path of Peace is wide and vast, reflecting the grand design created in the visible and invisible world. The warrior is the throne of the Divine and always serves a greater purpose.” Morihei Ueshiba said this almost a century ago, while he was developing the techniques of aikido.

The path to her body is the next door. I’ll knock; she’ll open the door and won’t even ask me what I want, because she’ll be able to read it in my eyes. She might be afraid, or she might say, “Come in. I was waiting for this moment. My body is the throne of the Divine; it serves as a manifestation here of what we are experiencing in another dimension.”

Yao and I make the traditional bow, and our eyes change. We are now ready for combat.

And in my imagination, she, too, bows her head as if to say, “Yes, I’m ready, hold me, grab my

hair.”

Yao and I approach each other, we take hold of each other’s jacket collars, pause for a moment, and then the fight begins. A second later, I’m on the floor. I mustn’t think about her. I invoke the spirit of Ueshiba. He comes to my aid through his teachings, and I manage to return to the dojo, to my opponent, to the fight, to aikido and the Path of Peace.

“Your mind must be in harmony with the Universe. Your body must keep pace with the Universe. You and the Universe are one.”

But the force of the blow only brings me closer to her. I grab her hair, throw her onto the bed, and hurl myself on top of her. That is what the harmony of the Universe is: a man and a woman becoming a single energy.

I get up. I haven’t practiced aikido for years, my imagination is far off somewhere, and I’ve forgotten how to keep my balance. Yao waits for me to compose myself; I see his posture and remember how I should place my feet. I position myself before him in the correct manner, and again we grab each other’s collars.