Aleph
“Look, I love you. I would never leave you here alone.”
She knows this isn’t true, but my words of love have an instantaneous effect.
“You love me like a river, you said, but I love you the way a woman loves a man.”
Hilal doesn’t want to die. If she did, she would have said nothing. But quite apart from the words she used, her voice is saying, “You’re part of me, the most important part, and it’s being left behind. I will never be the person I was.” She’s quite wrong, but this is not the moment to explain something she won’t understand.
“And I love you the way a man loves a woman, as I did before and always will for as long as the world exists. I explained to you once: time doesn’t pass. Do I have to say it again?”
She turns around.
“That’s a lie. Life is a dream from which we wake only when we meet death. Time passes while we live. I’m a musician, and I have to deal with the time of musical notation every day. If time didn’t exist, there would be no music.”
She’s speaking coherently now. And I do love her. Not as a woman, but I do love her.
“Music isn’t a succession of notes. It’s the constant movement of a note between sound and silence,” I say.
“What do you know about music? Even if you were right, what does it matter now? You’re a prisoner of your past, and so am I. If I loved you in one life, I will continue to love you forever! I have no heart, no body, no soul, nothing! All I have is love. You think I exist, but that’s just an optical illusion. What you’re seeing is Love in its purest state, yearning to reveal itself, but there is no time or space where it can do that.”
She moves away from the window and starts pacing up and down the room. She has no intention of throwing herself out the window now. Apart from her footsteps on the wooden floor, all I can hear is the infernal tick-tock of a clock, proving me wrong about time. Time does exist, and, at that very moment, it is busily consuming us. I need Yao, that poor man through whose soul the black wind of loneliness still blows but who always feels good whenever he can help someone else; he could have calmed her down.
“Go back to your wife! Go back to the woman who has always been by your side through thick and thin! She’s generous, loving, tolerant, and I’m everything you hate: complicated, aggressive, obsessive, capable of anything!”
“What right have you to talk about my wife?”
I am once again losing control of the situation.
“I’ll say what I like. You never could control me, and you never will!”
Keep calm. Keep talking, and she’ll quiet down. But I’ve never seen anyone in such a state before. I try another tack.
“Then be glad that no one can control you. Celebrate the fact that you were brave enough to risk your career and set off in search of adventure, and find it, too. Remember what I said on the boat: someone, one day, will light the sacred fire for you. And from now on, it won’t be your fingers playing the violin but the angels’. Let God use your hands. Your feelings of bitterness will eventually disappear, and the person fate has placed in your path will arrive bearing a bouquet of happiness in his hands, and then everything will be fine. Right now, you feel desperate and think I’m lying, but that’s how it will be.”
Too late.
I have said precisely the wrong thing, which could be summarized in just two words: “Grow up.” No woman I’ve ever known would have accepted that piece of advice.
Hilal picks up a heavy metal lamp, rips the plug out of the wall, and hurls the lamp in my direction. I manage to catch it before it hits my face, but now she’s slapping me as hard as she can. I drop the lamp and try to grab her arms but fail. A fist hits my nose, and blood spurts in all directions.
She and I are covered in my blood.
“The soul of Turkey will give your husband all the love she possesses, but she will spill his blood before she reveals what it is she is seeking.”
“Right, come with me!”
…
MY TONE OF VOICE has changed completely. She stops hitting me. I take her by the arm and drag her out of the room.
“Come with me!”
There’s no time for explanations. I run down the stairs, taking with me a Hilal who is now more frightened than angry. My heart is pounding. We hurry out of the building. The car that was supposed to be taking me to supper is still waiting.
“To the train station!”
The driver looks at me uncomprehendingly. I open the door, shove Hilal inside, then get in after her.
“Tell him to go straight to the train station!”