The Witch of Portobello

Viorel had fallen asleep. I turned off the TV, and we went into the kitchen.

"What was the point of all that?" she asked.

"Merely to remove you from everyday reality. I could have asked you to concentrate on anything, but I like the darkness and the candle flame. But you want to know what I'm up to, isn't that right?"

Athena remarked that she'd traveled for nearly five hours on the train with her son on her lap, when she should have been packing her bags to go back to work. She could have sat looking at a candle in her own room without any need to come to Scotland at all.

"Yes, there was a need," I replied. "You needed to know that you're not alone, that other people are in contact with the same thing as you. Just knowing that allows you to believe."

"To believe what?"

"That you're on the right path. And as I said before, arriving with each step you take."

"What path? I thought that by going to find my mother in Romania, I would, at last, find the peace of mind I so need, but I haven't. What path are you talking about?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. You'll only discover that when you start to teach. When you go back to Dubai, find a student."

"Do you mean teach dance or calligraphy?"

"Those are things you know about already. You need to teach what you don't know, what the Mother wants to reveal through you."

She looked at me as if I had gone mad.

"It's true," I said. "Why else do you think I asked you to breathe deeply and to raise your arms? So that you'd believe that I knew more than you. But it isn't true. It was just a way of taking you out of the world you're accustomed to. I didn't ask you to thank the Mother, to say how wonderful she is or that you saw her face shining in the flames of a fire. I asked only that absurd and pointless gesture of raising your arms and focusing your attention on a candle. That's enough--trying, whenever possible, to do something that is out of kilter with the reality around us.

"When you start creating rituals for your student to carry out, you'll be receiving g

uidance. That's where the apprenticeship begins, or so my protector told me. If you want to heed my words, fine, but if you don't and you carry on with your life as it is at the moment, you'll end up bumping up against a wall called 'dissatisfaction.'"

I rang for a taxi, and we talked a little about fashion and men, and then Athena left. I was sure she would listen to me, mainly because she was the kind of person who never refuses a challenge.

"Teach people to be different. That's all!" I shouted after her as the taxi moved off.

That is joy. Happiness would be feeling satisfied with everything she already had--a lover, a son, a job. And Athena, like me, wasn't born for that kind of life.

HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST

I couldn't admit I was in love, of course; I already had a girlfriend who loved me and shared with me both my troubles and my joys.

The various encounters and events that had taken place in Sibiu were part of a journey, and it wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened while I was away from home. When we step out of our normal world and leave behind us all the usual barriers and prejudices, we tend to become more adventurous.

When I returned to England, the first thing I did was to tell the producers that making a documentary about the historical figure of Dracula was nonsense, and that one book by a mad Irishman had created a truly terrible image of Transylvania, which was, in fact, one of the loveliest places on the planet. Obviously the producers were none too pleased, but at that point, I didn't care what they thought. I left television and went to work for one of the world's most prestigious newspapers.

That was when I began to realize that I wanted to meet Athena again.

I phoned her and we arranged to go for a walk together before she went back to Dubai. She suggested showing me around London.

We got on the first bus that stopped, without asking where it was going, then we chose a female passenger at random and decided that we would get off wherever she did. She got off at Temple and so did we. We passed a beggar who asked us for money, but we didn't give him any and walked on, listening to the insults he hurled after us, accepting that this was merely his way of communicating with us.

We saw someone vandalizing a telephone booth, and I wanted to call the police, but Athena stopped me; perhaps that person had just broken up with the love of his life and needed to vent his feelings. Or, who knows, perhaps he had no one to talk to and couldn't stand to see others humiliating him by using that phone to discuss business deals or love.

She told me to close my eyes and to describe exactly the clothes we were both wearing; to my surprise, I got nearly every detail wrong.

She asked me what was on my desk at work and said that some of the papers were only there because I was too lazy to deal with them.

"Have you ever considered that those bits of paper have a life and feelings, have requests to make and stories to tell? I don't think you're giving life the attention it deserves."

I promised that I'd go through them one by one when I returned to work the following day.