Aleph Read online

  Hilal’s eyes say Liar, but I go on.

  “So if she’s on the train heading to Novosibirsk tomorrow, that’s not my responsibility. As far as I’m concerned, she can stay here, and if you can convince her to do so, I and many other people on the train will be most grateful.”

  Yao and Hilal burst out laughing.

  The pretty woman thanks me and says that she understands my situation completely and will talk to Hilal further and explain a little more about the realities of life. We all say good-bye, and the man in the suit and tie shakes my hand, smiles. For some reason, I have the distinct impression that he would love for Hilal to continue her journey. She must be a problem for the whole orchestra.

  YAO THANKS ME for a very special evening and goes up to his room. Hilal doesn’t move.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say. “You heard the conversation. I really don’t know why you went back to the conservatory. Was it to ask permission to continue the journey or to make your colleagues jealous by telling them that you were traveling with us?”

  “I went there to find out if I really exist. After what happened on the train, I’m not sure of anything anymore. What was that?”

  I know what she means. I remember my first experience of the Aleph, which happened completely by chance in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, in 1982. I felt completely disoriented for days afterward, and if my wife hadn’t told me otherwise, I would have assumed that I’d suffered some kind of stroke.

  “What happened, exactly?” I ask.

  “My heart started pounding furiously, and I felt as if I were no longer in this world. I was in a state of total panic and thought I might die at any moment. Everything around me seemed strange, and if you hadn’t grabbed me by the arm, I don’t think I would have been able to move. I had a sense that very important things were appearing before my eyes, but I couldn’t understand any of them.”

  I feel like telling her: “Get used to it.”

  “The Aleph,” I say.

  “Yes, at some point during that seemingly endless trance, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, I heard you say that word.”

  Simply recalling what happened has filled her with fear again. It’s time to seize the moment.

  “Do you think you should continue the journey?”

  “Oh, yes, more than ever. Terror has always fascinated me. You remember the story I told at the embassy—”

  I ask her to go to the bar and order some coffee—I send her on her own because we’re the only customers left, and the barman must be itching to turn off the lights. She has a little trouble persuading him but returns at last with two cups of Turkish coffee. Like most Brazilians, I never worry about drinking strong black coffee late at night; whether or not I have a good night’s sleep depends on other things.

  “There’s no way of explaining the Aleph, as you yourself saw, but in the magical Tradition, it presents itself in one of two ways. The first is as a point in the Universe that contains all other points, present and past, large and small. You normally come across it by chance, as we did on the train. For this to happen, the person, or persons, has to be in the actual place where the Aleph exists. We call that a small Aleph.”

  “Do you mean that anyone who got into the carriage and stood in that particular place would feel what we felt?”

  “If you’ll let me finish, you might understand. Yes, they will, but not as we experienced it. You’ve doubtless been to a party and found that you felt much better and safer in one part of the room than in another. That’s just a very pale imitation of what the Aleph is, but everyone experiences the Divine Energy differently. If you can find the right place to be at a party, that energy will help you feel more confident and more present. If someone else were to walk past that point in the carriage, he would have a strange sensation, as if he suddenly knew everything, but he wouldn’t stop to examine that feeling, and the effect would immediately vanish.”

  “How many of these points exist in the world?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, but probably millions.”

  “What’s the second way it reveals itself?”

  “Let me finish what I was saying first. The example I gave you of the party is just a comparison. The small Aleph always appears by chance. You’re walking down a street or you sit down somewhere and suddenly the whole Universe is there. The first thing you feel is a terrible desire to cry, not out of sadness or happiness but out of pure excitement. You know that you are understanding something that you can’t even explain to yourself.”

  The barman comes over to us, says something in Russian, and gives me a note to sign. Hilal explains that we have to leave. We walk over to the door.

  Saved by the referee’s whistle!

  “Go on. What’s the second way?” Hilal asks.

  It would seem the game is not over yet.

  “That’s the great Aleph.”

  It’s best if I explain everything now; then she can go back to the conservatory and forget all about what happened.

  “The great Aleph occurs when two or more people with a very strong affinity happen to find themselves in the small Aleph. Their two different energies complete each other and provoke a chain reaction. Their two energies…”

  I don’t know if I should go on, but I have no choice. Hilal completes the sentence for me.

  “… are the positive and negative poles you get in any battery; the power makes the bulb light up. They’re transformed into the same light. Planets that attract each other and end up colliding. Lovers who meet after a long, long time. The second Aleph also happens by chance when two people whom Destiny has chosen for a specific mission meet in the right place.”

  Exactly, but I want to be sure she really has understood.

  “What do you mean by ‘the right place’?” I ask.

  “I mean that either two people can spend their whole life living and working together or they can meet only once and say good-bye forever simply because they did not pass through the physical point that triggers an outpouring of the thing that brought them together in this world. So they part without ever quite understanding why it was they met. However, if God so wishes, those who once knew love will find each other again.”

  “Not necessarily, but people like my master and myself, who had shared affinities—”

  “Before, in past lives,” she says, interrupting me again. “Or people who meet, like at the party you used as an example, in the small Aleph and immediately fall in love. The famous ‘love at first sight.’ ”

  I decide to continue the example she has used.

  “Although, of course, it isn’t ‘at first sight’ but linked to a whole series of things that occurred in the past. That doesn’t mean that every such encounter is related to romantic love. Most of them occur because of things that have remained unresolved, and we need a new incarnation in order to finish something that was left incomplete. You’re reading things into the situation that aren’t there.”

  “I love you.”

  “No, that isn’t what I’m saying,” I exclaim in exasperation. “I’ve already met the woman I needed to meet in this incarnation. It took me three marriages before I found her, and I certainly don’t intend to leave her for someone else. We met many centuries ago and will remain together for the centuries to come.”

  But she doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. Just as she did in Moscow, she plants a brief kiss on my lips and sets off into the icy Ekaterinburg night.

  Dreamers Can Never Be Tamed

  LIFE IS THE TRAIN, not the station. And after almost two days of traveling, it’s also weariness, disorientation, nostalgia for the days spent in Ekaterinburg, and the growing tensions in a group of people confined together in one place.

  Before we set off again, I found a message from Yao at reception asking if I fancied doing a bit of aikido training, but I didn’t reply. I needed to be alone for a few hours.

  I spent the whole morning getting as much exercise as possible, whi
ch for me meant running and walking. That way, when I went back to the train, I would surely be tired enough to sleep. I managed to phone my wife—my cell phone didn’t work on the train—and confide to her that I had my doubts about the usefulness of this Trans-Siberian trip, adding that, although the journey so far had been a valuable experience, I might not carry it through to the end.

  She said that whatever I decided was fine with her and not to worry. She was very busy with her paintings. Meanwhile, she’d had a dream that she couldn’t understand. She had dreamed that I was on a beach and someone walked up from the sea to tell me that I was finally fulfilling my mission. Then the person vanished.

  I asked if that person was male or female. She didn’t know, she said, the face was covered by a hood. Then she blessed me and again reassured me, telling me not to worry. Even though it was still only autumn, she said, Rio was like an oven already. She advised me to follow my intuition and take no notice of what other people were saying.

  “In that same dream, a woman or a girl, I can’t be sure, was on the beach with you.”

  “There’s a young woman with me here on the train. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s definitely under thirty.”

  “Trust her.”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, I met up with my publishers and gave a few interviews, then we had supper at an excellent restaurant and at about eleven o’clock at night headed for the station. Back on the train, we crossed the Ural Mountains—the chain of mountains that separates Europe from Asia—in the pitch dark. No one saw a thing.

  From then on, it was back to the old routine. When day broke, we all appeared at the breakfast table as if summoned by some inaudible bell. Again, no one had managed to get a wink of sleep, not even Yao, who seemed accustomed to this type of journey. He was beginning to look ever wearier and sadder.

  As usual, Hilal was there waiting, and, as usual, she had slept better than anyone else. Over breakfast, we began our conversation with complaints about the constant rocking of the carriage, then I went back to my room to try to sleep, got up again a few hours later, and returned to the lounge, where I encountered the same people. Together we bemoaned the thousands of kilometers that still lay ahead. Then we sat gazing out the window, smoking and listening to the irritating piped music issuing from the train’s loudspeakers.

  Hilal now barely spoke. She always sat down in the same corner, opened her book and began to read, removing herself from the group. No one else, apart from me, seemed bothered by this, but I found her behavior very rude indeed. However, when I considered the alternative—her penchant for making inappropriate remarks—I decided to say nothing.

  I would finish breakfast, go back to my compartment to sleep or doze or write. As everyone agreed, we were rapidly losing all sense of time. We no longer cared if it was day or night; our days were measured out in mealtimes, as I imagine the days of all prisoners are.

  We would turn up in the lounge to find supper was served. More vodka than mineral water was drunk, and there was more silence than conversation. My publisher told me that when I wasn’t there, Hilal played an imaginary violin, as if she were practicing. I know that chess players do the same, playing entire games in their head, without the need of a board.

  “Yes, she’s playing silent music for invisible beings. Perhaps they need it.”

  …

  ANOTHER BREAKFAST. Today, though, things are different. Inevitably, we are starting to get used to our new way of life. My publisher complains that his cell phone isn’t working properly (mine doesn’t work at all). His wife is dressed like an odalisque, which strikes me as both amusing and absurd. She doesn’t speak English, but we somehow manage to understand each other very well through looks and gestures. Hilal decides to take part in this morning’s conversation and describes some of the difficulties faced by musicians struggling to make a living. It might be a prestigious profession, but many musicians earn less than taxi drivers.

  “How old are you?” asks my editor.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  She says this in a way that implies she looks much older. And she really does. It had never occurred to me that she was so young.

  “The director of the music conservatory came to see me at the hotel in Ekaterinburg,” says the editor. “She said you were one of the most talented violinists she’s ever known but that you had suddenly lost all interest in music.”

  “It was the Aleph,” Hilal replies, avoiding my eyes.

  “The Aleph?”

  Everyone looks at her in surprise. I pretend not to have heard.

  “Yes, the Aleph. I couldn’t find it, and my energy stopped flowing. Something in my past was blocking it.”

  The conversation seems to have taken a completely surreal turn. I still say nothing, but my publisher tries to ease the situation.

  “I published a mathematics book with that word in the title. In technical language, it means ‘the number that contains all numbers.’ The book was about the kabbalah and mathematics. Apparently, mathematicians use the Aleph to represent the cardinality of infinite sets…”

  No one appears to be following this explanation. He stops midway.

  “It’s in the Apocalypse as well,” I say, as if I’d just picked up the thread of the conversation. “Where the Lamb is defined as the beginning and the end, as the thing that is beyond time. It’s also the first letter of the alphabet in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic.”

  The editor now regrets having made Hilal the center of attention and decides to bring her down a peg or two.

  “Nevertheless, for a girl of twenty-one, just out of music school and with a brilliant career ahead of her, it must be quite enough to have traveled all the way from Moscow to Ekaterinburg.”

  “Especially for someone who’s a spalla,” says Hilal.

  She noticed the confusion her use of the word “Aleph” caused and is delighted to confuse the publisher still further with yet another mysterious term.

  The tension grows, until Yao intervenes.

  “You’re a spalla already? Congratulations!”

  Then, turning to the rest of the group, he adds, “As you all know, spalla is the first violin in an orchestra, the last player to come onto the stage before the conductor enters, and who is always seated in the first row on the left. He or she is responsible for making sure all the other instruments are in tune. Actually, I know an interesting story on the subject, which took place when I was in Novosibirsk, our next stop. Would you like to hear it?”

  Everyone agrees, as if they had, indeed, always known the meaning of the word “spalla.”

  Yao’s story turns out not to be particularly interesting, but confrontation between Hilal and my editor is averted. After a tedious dissertation on the marvels of Novosibirsk, everyone has calmed down and people are considering going back to their compartments and trying to rest for a little, while I once again regret ever having had the idea of crossing a whole continent by train.

  “Oh, I’ve forgotten to put up today’s thought,” says Yao.

  On a yellow Post-it, he writes, “Dreamers can never be tamed,” and sticks it on the mirror next to the previous day’s “thought.”

  “There’s a TV reporter waiting at one of the next stations, and he’d like to interview you,” says my publisher.

  I say “Fine,” glad of any distraction, anything to help pass the time.

  “Write about insomnia,” says my publisher. “You never know, it might help you sleep.”

  “I want to interview you, too,” says Hilal, and I see that she has fully recovered from her lethargy.

  “Make an appointment with my publisher,” I tell her.

  I go and lie down in my compartment, then, as usual, spend the next two hours tossing and turning. My biological clock is completely out of kilter. Like any insomniac, I assure myself optimistically that I can use the time to reflect on interesting matters, but that, of course, proves to be totally impossible.

  S
uddenly, I can hear music. At first I think that my perception of the spiritual world has somehow effortlessly returned, but realize that as well as the music, I can also hear the sound of the wheels on the track and the objects joggling about on my table.

  The music is real. And it’s coming from the bathroom. I go and open the door.

  Hilal is standing with one foot in the shower and one foot out, balancing as best she can and playing her violin. She smiles when she sees me, because I’m naked, apart from my underpants. However, the situation seems to me so natural and so familiar that I make no effort to go and put on my trousers.

  “How did you get in here?”

  She continues to play but indicates with a movement of her head the door into the next compartment, with which I share the bathroom. She says, “I woke up this morning knowing that it’s up to me to help you get back in touch with the energy of the Universe. God passed through my soul and told me that if you succeed in doing that, then so will I. And He asked me to come in here and play you to sleep.”

  I’ve never mentioned losing touch with that energy, and I’m moved by her concern. The two of us struggle to keep our balance in the constantly rocking carriage; her bow touches the strings, the strings give out a sound, the sound fills the space, and the space becomes transformed into musical time and is filled with peace and the Divine Light that comes from everything dynamic and alive, and all thanks to her violin.

  Hilal’s soul is in every note, in every chord. The Aleph had revealed to me a little about the woman standing before me. I can’t remember every detail of our joint story, but I know that she and I have met before. I only hope she never learns in what circumstances that meeting took place. At this precise moment, she is enfolding me in the energy of love, as she may have done in the past. And long may she continue to do so, because love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.