Aleph Read online

  Apart from Hilal, of course.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  “They were being polite and waiting for you to leave so that they could go to bed.”

  “You’d better do the same.”

  “But there’s an empty compartment here—”

  I pick up her backpack and bag, take her gently by the arm, and lead her to the end of the carriage.

  “Don’t push your luck. Good night.”

  She looks at me but says nothing and heads for her compartment, although I have no idea where that is.

  I retire to my room, and my excitement becomes intense weariness. I place my computer on the table and my saints—who go everywhere with me—beside the bed, then I go to the bathroom to clean my teeth. This turns out to be a far harder task than I’d imagined. The glass of mineral water in my hand keeps lurching about with the movement of the train. After various attempts, I achieve my objective.

  I put on the T-shirt I wear in bed, smoke a cigarette, turn off the light, close my eyes, and imagine that the swaying is rather like being inside the womb and that I will spend a night blessed by the angels. A vain hope.

  Hilal’s Eyes

  WHEN DAY FINALLY DAWNS, I get up, change my clothes, and go into the lounge. Everyone else is there, too, including Hilal.

  “You have to write a note giving me permission to come back here,” she announces, before she has even said “Good morning.” “I had a terrible time getting here today, and the guards in every carriage said that they would let me through only if—”

  I ignore her last words and greet the others. I ask if they had a good night.

  “No,” comes the collective response.

  So it wasn’t just me.

  “I slept really well,” says Hilal, unaware that she is provoking the general wrath of her fellow travelers. “My carriage is right in the middle of the train, and so it doesn’t lurch about so much. This is the worst possible carriage to be traveling in.”

  My publisher seems as though he’s about to make some rude comment but restrains himself. His wife looks out the window and lights a cigarette to disguise her irritation. My editor pulls a face that says more clearly than any words: “Didn’t I tell you she’d be in the way?”

  “Every day I’m going to write down a thought and stick it on the mirror,” says Yao, who also appears to have slept well.

  He gets up, goes over to the mirror in the lounge, and sticks a bit of paper on it, which says: “If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to like the rain.”

  No one is too keen on this optimistic saying. One doesn’t have to be a mind reader to know what’s going through everyone’s head: “Good grief, is this what it’s going to be like for another nine thousand kilometers?”

  “I’ve got a photo on my cell phone I’d like to show you,” says Hilal. “And I brought my violin with me, too, if anyone wants to listen to some music.”

  We’re already listening to the music from the radio in the kitchen. The tension in the carriage is rising. Any moment now, someone is going to explode, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.

  “Look, just let us eat our breakfast in peace. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Then I’m going to try to get some sleep. I’ll look at your photo later.”

  There is a noise like thunder. A train passes, traveling in the opposite direction, something that happened throughout the night with frightening regularity. And far from reminding me of the gentle rocking of a cradle, the swaying of the carriage felt much more like being inside a cocktail shaker. I feel physically ill and very guilty for having dragged all these other people along on my adventure. I’m beginning to understand why, in Portuguese, a fairground roller coaster is called a montanha-russa, or Russian mountain.

  Hilal and Yao the translator make several attempts to start a conversation, but no one at the table—the two publishers, the wife of one of the publishers, the writer whose idea this trip was—takes them up. We eat our breakfast in silence. Outside, the landscape repeats itself over and over—small towns, forests, small towns, forests.

  One of the publishers asks Yao, “How long before we reach Ekaterinburg?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  There is a general sigh of relief. Perhaps we can change our minds and say that enough is enough. You don’t need to climb a mountain in order to know that it’s high; you don’t have to go all the way to Vladivostok to be able to say that you’ve traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  “Right. I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

  I stand up. Hilal stands up, too.

  “What about the piece of paper? And the photo on my cell phone?”

  Piece of paper? Ah, of course, the permission she needs to be able to visit our carriage. Before I can say anything, Yao has written something in Russian for me to sign. Everyone—including me—glares at him.

  “Would you mind adding ‘once a day,’ please?”

  Yao does this, then gets up and says that he’ll go in search of a guard willing to stamp the document.

  “And what about the photo?”

  By now, I’ll agree to anything if I can just return to my compartment and sleep, but I don’t want to annoy my companions, who are, after all, paying for this trip. I ask Hilal to go with me to the other end of the carriage. We open the first door and find ourselves in a small area with two exterior doors and a third leading to the next carriage. The noise there is unbearable because, as well as the racket made by the wheels on the rails, there is the grinding noise made by the metal plates linking the carriages.

  Hilal shows me the photo on her cell phone, possibly taken just after dawn. It’s a photo of a long cloud in the sky.

  “Do you see?”

  Yes, I can see a cloud.

  “We’re being accompanied on this journey.”

  We’re being accompanied by a cloud that will long since have disappeared forever. I continue to acquiesce in the hope that the conversation will soon be over.

  “Yes, you’re right. But let’s talk about it later. Now go back to your own compartment.”

  “I can’t. You only gave me permission to come here once a day.”

  Tiredness must be affecting my reasoning powers, because I realize now that I have created a monster. If she can come only once a day, she’ll arrive in the morning and not leave until nighttime, an error I’ll try to correct later.

  “Listen, I’m a guest on this journey, too. I’d love to have your company all the time, because you’re always so full of energy and never take no for an answer, but you see … ”

  Those eyes. Green and without a trace of makeup.

  “You see…”

  Perhaps I’m just exhausted. After more than twenty-four hours without sleep, we lose almost all of our defenses. That’s the state I’m in now. The vestibule area, bare of any furniture, made of only glass and steel, is beginning to grow fuzzy. The noise is starting to diminish, my concentration is going, and I’m not entirely sure who or where I am. I know that I’m asking her to cooperate, to go back where she came from, but the words coming out of my mouth bear no relation to what I’m seeing.

  I’m looking at the light, at a sacred place, and a wave washes over me, filling me with peace and love, two things that rarely come together. I can see myself, but, at the same time, I can see elephants in Africa waving their trunks, camels in the desert, people chatting in a bar in Buenos Aires, a dog crossing the street, the brush being wielded by a woman finishing a painting of a rose, snow melting on a mountain in Switzerland, monks singing exotic hymns, a pilgrim arriving at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, a shepherd with his sheep, soldiers who have just woken up and are preparing for war, the fish in the ocean, the cities and forests of the world—and everything is simultaneously very clear and very large, very small and very quiet.

  I am in the Aleph, the point at which everything is in the same place at the same time.

  I’m at a window, looking out at t
he world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words left hanging in space. Those eyes are telling me about things that we do not even know exist but which are there, ready to be discovered and known only by souls, not by bodies. Sentences that are perfectly understood, even when left unspoken. Feelings that simultaneously exalt and suffocate.

  I am standing before doors that open for a fraction of a second and then close again but that give me a glimpse of what is hidden behind them—the treasures and traps, the roads never taken and the journeys never imagined.

  “Why are you looking at me like that? Why are your eyes showing me all this?”

  I’m not the one saying this, but the girl or woman standing before me. Our eyes have become the mirrors of our souls, mirrors not only of our souls, perhaps, but of all the souls of all the people on this planet who are at this moment walking, loving, being born and dying, suffering or dreaming.

  “It’s not me… It’s just…”

  I cannot finish the sentence, because the doors continue to open and reveal their secrets. I see lies and truths, strange dances performed before what appears to be the image of a goddess, sailors battling the fierce sea, a couple sitting on a beach, gazing at the same sea, which looks calm and welcoming. The doors continue to open, the doors of Hilal’s eyes, and I begin to see myself, as if we had known each other for a long, long time…

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “The Aleph…”

  The tears of that girl or woman standing before me seem to want to leave by those same doors. Someone once said that tears are the blood of the soul, and that is what I’m beginning to see now, because I have entered a tunnel, I’m going back into the past, and she is waiting for me there, too, her hands pressed together as if saying the most sacred prayer God ever gave to mankind. Yes, she is there before me, kneeling on the ground and smiling, telling me that love can save everything, but I look at my clothes, at my hands, in one of which I am holding a quill pen…

  “Stop!” I shout.

  Hilal closes her eyes.

  I am once more on a train, traveling to Siberia and beyond to the Pacific Ocean. I feel even wearier than I did before, and although I understand exactly what has happened, I am incapable of explaining it.

  She embraces me. I embrace her and gently stroke her hair.

  “I knew it,” she says. “I knew I had met you before. I knew it the first time I saw your photograph. It’s as if we had to meet again at some point in this life. I talked to my friends about it, but they thought I was crazy, that thousands of people must say the same thing about thousands of other people every day. I thought they must be right, but life… life brought you to me. You came to find me, didn’t you?”

  I am gradually recovering from what I have just experienced. I know what she’s talking about, because centuries before I went through one of the doors I have just seen in her eyes. She was there, along with other people. Cautiously, I ask her what she saw.

  “Everything. I don’t think I will ever be able to explain this, but the moment I closed my eyes, I was in a safe, comfortable place, as if I were in my own house.”

  No, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t know yet. But I do. I pick up her bags and lead her back into the lounge.

  “I haven’t got the energy to think or speak right now. Sit over there, read something, let me rest a little, and then I’ll be right back. If anyone says anything, tell them that I asked you to stay.”

  She does as asked. I go to my compartment, collapse onto the bed fully clothed, and fall into a deep sleep.

  SOMEONE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR.

  “We’ll be arriving in ten minutes.”

  I open my eyes. It’s night outside, or, rather, it’s the early hours of the morning. I’ve slept all day and will have difficulties now getting back to sleep.

  “They’re going to uncouple the carriage and leave it in a siding, so take what you need for two nights in the city,” says the voice.

  I open the shutters. Lights begin to appear; the train is slowing; we really are arriving. I wash my face and quickly pack whatever I will need for two nights in Ekaterinburg. What I experienced earlier is gradually beginning to come back to me.

  When I leave the compartment, everyone is standing in the corridor, apart from Hilal, who is still sitting in the place where I left her. She doesn’t smile but simply shows me a piece of paper.

  “Yao got me the permit.”

  Yao looks at me and whispers, “Have you ever read the Tao Te Ching?”

  Yes, of course I have, like almost everyone of my generation.

  “Then you’ll remember these words: ‘Expend your energies and you will remain young.’ ”

  He nods slightly in the direction of the girl, who is still seated. I find this remark to be in bad taste.

  “If you’re insinuating—”

  “I’m not insinuating anything. If you have misunderstood me, it’s because that idea must be inside your head. What I meant, since you don’t understand Lao-tzu’s words, was: place all your feelings outside of yourself and you will be renewed. As I understand it, she is the right person to help you.”

  Have the two of them been talking? Was Yao passing by when we entered the Aleph? Did he see what was happening?

  “Do you believe in a spiritual world, in a parallel universe, where time and space are eternal and always present?” I ask.

  The brakes begin to squeal. Yao nods, but I can see that he is weighing his words. At last, he says, “I don’t believe in God as you imagine Him to be, but I believe in many things that you could never even dream of. If you’re free tomorrow night, perhaps we could go for a walk together.”

  The train stops. Hilal gets up and comes to join us. Yao smiles and embraces her. We all put on our coats, and, at 1:04 in the morning, we step out into Ekaterinburg.

  The Ipatiev House

  THE OMNIPRESENT HILAL HAS DISAPPEARED.

  I come down from my room, assuming that I’ll find her in the hotel lobby, but she isn’t there. Despite spending most of yesterday flat out on my bed, I had still managed to sleep well once back on terra firma. I phone Yao’s room, and we go out for a walk around the city. This is exactly what I need to do right now: to walk, walk, walk, breathe some fresh air, take a look at a city I’ve never visited before, and enjoy feeling that it’s mine.

  Yao tells me a few historical facts—Ekaterinburg is Russia’s third-largest city, rich in minerals, the kind of fact that one can find in any tourist leaflet—but I’m not in the least interested. Then we stop outside what looks like a huge Orthodox church.

  “This is the Cathedral-on-the-Blood, built on the site of a house owned by a man called Nikolai Ipatiev. Let’s go inside.”

  I’m starting to feel cold, and so I do as he suggests. We go into what appears to be a small museum, in which all the notices are in Russian.

  Yao looks at me as if I should know what’s going on, but I don’t.

  “Don’t you feel anything?”

  “No,” I say. He seems disappointed.

  “You mean that you, a man who believes in parallel worlds and in the eternity of the present moment, feel absolutely nothing?”

  I feel tempted to tell him that what brought me to Russia in the first place was a conversation with J. about precisely that, my inability to connect with my spiritual side. Except that this is no longer true. Since I left London, I’ve been a different person, feeling calm and happy on my journey back to my kingdom and my soul. For a fraction of a second, I remember the episode on the train and Hilal’s eyes, but I quickly drive the memory from my mind.

  “The fact that I can’t feel anything doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m disconnected. Perhaps my energies at this moment are alert to other discoveries. We’re in what seems to be a recently built cathedral. What exactly happened here?”

  “The Russian Empire ended in the house of Nikolai Ipatiev. On the night of July 16, 1918, the family of Nicholas II, the last tsar of a
ll the Russias, was executed along with his doctor and three servants. They started with the tsar himself, who received several bullets in the head and chest. The last to die were Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, and Maria, who were bayoneted to death. It’s said that their ghosts continue to haunt this place, looking for the jewels they left behind. People also say that Boris Yeltsin, when he was president of Russia, decided to demolish the old house and build a church in its place so that the ghosts would leave and Russia could begin to grow again.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  For the first time since we met in Moscow, Yao seems to be embarrassed.

  “Because yesterday you asked me if I believed in God. Well, I did believe until He took away my wife, the person I loved most in the world. I always thought I would die before her, but that isn’t what happened,” Yao tells me. “The day we met I felt certain that I’d known her since before I was born. It was raining heavily, and she declined my invitation to tea, but I knew then that we were like the clouds that fill the sky so that you can no longer tell where one ends and another begins. We married a year later, as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world to do. We had children, we honored God and family, then, one day, a wind came and parted the clouds.”

  I wait for him to finish what he has to say.

  “It’s not fair. It wasn’t fair. It may seem absurd, but I would have preferred it if we had all departed together for the next life, like the tsar and his family.”

  No, he has still not said everything he wants to. He’s waiting for me to say something, but I remain silent. It seems that the ghosts of the dead really are there with us.

  “And when I saw you and the young woman looking at each other on the train in the vestibule between the carriages, I remembered my wife and the first glance we ever exchanged, and how even before we spoke, something was telling me, ‘We’re together again.’ That’s why I wanted to bring you here, to ask if you can see what we cannot see, if you know where she is now.”