The Zahir Read online

  “Yes, I do.”

  “She’s making carpets and giving French lessons.”

  Carpets! My wife (ex-wife, please, do try and get used to it), who had all the money she could possibly need, had a degree in journalism, spoke four languages, was now obliged to making a living weaving carpets and giving French lessons to foreigners? I must get a grip on myself. I couldn’t risk wounding the young man’s male pride, even though I thought it shameful that he couldn’t give Esther everything she deserved.

  “Please, you must understand what I’ve been going through for the last year or more. I’m no threat to your relationship with Esther. I just need a couple of hours with her, or one hour, it doesn’t matter.”

  Mikhail appeared to be savoring my words.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said, with a smile. “Do you think that, given the kind of person Esther is, she would leave the man of her life without at least saying goodbye and without explaining why?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why all this stuff about ‘she left me’? Why do you say, ‘I’m no threat to your relationship with Esther’?”

  I was confused. I felt something like hope stirring inside me—not that I knew what I was hoping for or where that hope had come from.

  “Are you telling me that…”

  “Exactly. I’m telling you that she hasn’t left you or me. She has just disappeared for a while, possibly forever, but we must both respect that.”

  It was as if a bright light were suddenly shining in that pizzeria, a place that had always brought me good memories and good stories. I desperately wanted to believe what the young man was saying; the Zahir was now pulsating all around me.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Yes, I do. But even though I miss her as much as you do, I must respect her silence. I find this whole situation as confusing as you do. Esther may have found satisfaction in the Love That Devours, she might be waiting for one of us to go and find her, she may have met a new man, or she may have withdrawn from the world altogether. Whatever the truth, if you do decide to go and find her, I can’t stop you. But, if you do, you must know one thing: you must find not only her body, but also her soul.”

  I felt like laughing. I felt like hugging him, or possibly killing him—my emotions changed with startling speed.

  “Did you and she…”

  “Did we sleep together? That’s none of your business. I found in Esther the partner I was looking for, the person who helped me set out on the mission I was entrusted with, the angel who opened the doors, the roads, the paths that will allow us—if our Lady is willing—to restore the energy of love to the earth. We share the same mission. And just to put your mind at rest: I have a girlfriend, the blonde girl who was on stage with me last night. Her name’s Lucrecia; she’s Italian.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes, in the name of the Divine Energy, I am.”

  He took a scrap of dark fabric out of his pocket.

  “Do you see this? The cloth is actually green; it looks black because it’s caked with dried blood. A soldier somewhere in the world asked her before he died to remove his shirt, then cut it into tiny pieces and distribute those pieces to anyone capable of understanding the message of his death. Do you have a piece?”

  “No, Esther has never even mentioned it to me.”

  “Whenever she meets someone whom she feels should receive the message, she also gives them a little of the soldier’s blood.”

  “And what is the message?”

  “If she didn’t give you a piece of the shirt, I don’t think I can tell you; not, of course, that she swore me to secrecy.”

  “Do you know anyone else who has a piece of that cloth?”

  “All the people who appear with me at the restaurant do. We’re only there because Esther brought us together.”

  I needed to tread carefully, to build up a relationship, to make a deposit in the Favor Bank. I mustn’t frighten him or seem overeager; I should ask him about himself and his work, about his country, of which he had spoken with such pride; I needed to find out if what he was telling me was true or if he had some ulterior motive; I needed to be absolutely sure that he was still in touch with Esther or if he had lost track of her as well. He may have come from a remote country, where the values are different, but I knew that the Favor Bank operated everywhere: it was an institution that knew no frontiers.

  On the one hand, I wanted to believe everything he was saying. On the other, my heart had suffered and bled enough during the thousand and one nights I had lain awake, waiting for the sound of the key in the door, for Esther to come in and lie down beside me, without saying a word. I had promised myself that if this ever happened, I would ask her no questions. I would just kiss her and say, “Sleep well, my love,” and we would wake the next day, hand in hand, as if this whole nightmare had never happened.

  Roberto arrived with the pizzas. He seemed to be endowed with some kind of sixth sense that told him when I needed time to think.

  I looked at Mikhail again. Keep calm; if you don’t get your pulse rate under control, you’ll have a heart attack. I drank a whole glass of wine and noticed that he had done the same.

  Why was he so nervous?

  “Oh, I believe what you say. But we’ve got plenty of time to talk.”

  “You’re going to ask me to take you to her.”

  He had spoiled my game. I would have to start again.

  “Yes, I am. I’m going to try to persuade you. I’m going to do everything in my power to do just that. I’m in no hurry though; we’ve got a whole pizza to eat first. Besides, I want to know more about you.”

  I noticed that he was trying to keep his hands from trembling.

  “I’m a person with a mission. I haven’t yet managed to fulfill it, but I think I still have time to do so.”

  “Perhaps I can help you.”

  “Oh, you can. Anyone can; you just have to help spread the energy of love throughout the world.”

  “I can do more than that.”

  I didn’t want to go any further; I didn’t want it to look as if I were trying to buy his loyalty. Careful. I had to be very careful. He could be telling the truth, but he could also be lying, trying to take advantage of my suffering.

  “I only know of one kind of loving energy,” I went on. “The one I feel for the woman who left, or, rather, went away and who is waiting for me. If I could see her again, I would be a happy man. And the world would be a better place because one soul would be content.”

  He glanced up at the ceiling and back down at the table, and I allowed the silence to last as long as possible.

  “I can hear a voice,” he said at last, unable to look at me.

  The great advantage of writing about spirituality is that I know I’m bound to keep encountering people with some kind of gift. Some of those gifts are real, others are fraudulent, some of those people are trying to use me, others are merely testing me out. I have seen so many amazing things that I no longer have the slightest doubt that miracles can happen, that everything is possible, and that people are beginning to relearn the inner powers they long ago forgot.

  However, this was not the ideal moment to speak of such matters. I was only interested in the Zahir. I needed the Zahir to become Esther again.

  “Mikhail…”

  “Mikhail isn’t my real name. My real name is Oleg.”

  “Oleg, then…”

  “Mikhail is the name I chose when I decided to be reborn to life. Like the warrior archangel, with his fiery sword, opening up a path so that—what is it you call them?—so that the ‘warriors of light’ can find each other. That is my mission.”

  “It’s my mission too.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather talk about Esther?”

  What? Was he changing the subject again back to the very thing that interested me?

  “I’m not feeling very well.” His gaze was starting to wander; he kept gla
ncing around the restaurant as if I were not there. “I don’t want to talk about that. The voice…”

  Something strange, something very strange, was happening. How far was he prepared to go in order to impress me? Would he end up asking me to write a book about his life and powers, like so many others had before him?

  Whenever I have a clear objective, I will do anything to achieve it; that, after all, was what I said in my books and I could hardly betray my own words. I had an objective now: to gaze once more into the eyes of the Zahir. Mikhail had given me a lot of new information: He wasn’t her lover, Esther hadn’t left me, it was just a matter of time before I could bring her back. There was also the possibility that this meeting in the pizzeria was all a farce, that he was just someone with no other means of earning a living than by exploiting someone else’s pain in order to achieve his own ends.

  I drank another glass of wine; Mikhail did the same.

  Take care, my instinct was telling me.

  “Yes, I do want to talk about Esther, but I want to know more about you too.”

  “That’s not true. You’re just trying to seduce me, to persuade me to do things I was perfectly prepared to do anyway. Your pain is preventing you from seeing things clearly; you think I could be lying, that I’m trying to take advantage of the situation.”

  Mikhail might know exactly what I was thinking, but he was speaking more loudly than good manners permit. People were starting to turn around to see what was going on.

  “You’re just trying to impress me; you don’t realize what an impact your books had on my life or how much I learned from them. Your pain has made you blind, mean-spirited, and obsessed with the Zahir. It isn’t your love for her that made me accept your invitation to have lunch; in fact, I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced of your love; it might just be wounded pride. The reason I’m here…”

  His voice was growing louder; he was still glancing wildly around, as if he were losing control.

  “The lights…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The reason I’m here is her love for you!”

  “Are you all right?”

  Roberto had noticed that something was wrong. He came over to the table, smiling, and put his hand casually on Mikhail’s shoulder.

  “Well, the pizza was obviously pretty terrible. No need to pay, you can leave when you like.”

  That was the way out we needed. We could simply get up and go, thus avoiding the depressing spectacle of someone in a pizzeria pretending to be communing with the spirit world just to impress or embarrass me, although I did feel that this was more than just a theatrical performance.

  “Can you feel the wind blowing?”

  At that moment, I was sure he wasn’t acting; on the contrary, he was making an enormous effort to control himself and was more frightened by what was happening than I was.

  “The lights, the lights are starting to appear! Please, get me out of here!”

  His body began to be shaken by tremors. There was now no hiding what was going on; the people at the other tables had got up.

  “In Kazakh…”

  He did not manage to finish the sentence. He pushed the table away from him; pizzas, glasses, and cutlery went flying, hitting the diners on the next table. His expression had changed completely. His whole body was shaking and only the whites of his eyes were now visible. His head was violently thrown back and I heard the sound of bones cracking. A gentleman from one of the other tables leapt to his feet. Roberto caught Mikhail before he fell, while the other man picked up a spoon from the floor and placed it in Mikhail’s mouth.

  The whole thing can only have lasted a matter of seconds, but to me it seemed like an eternity. I could imagine the tabloids describing how a famous writer—and, despite all the adverse reviews, a possible candidate for a major literary prize—had concocted some sort of séance in a pizzeria just to get publicity for his new book. My paranoia was racing out of control. They would find out that the medium in question was the same man who had run off with my wife. It would all start again, and this time I wouldn’t have the necessary courage or energy to face the same test.

  I knew a few of the other diners, but which of them were really my friends? Who would be capable of remaining silent about what they were seeing?

  Mikhail’s body stopped shaking and relaxed; Roberto was holding him upright in his chair. The other man took Mikhail’s pulse, examined his eyes, and then turned to me:

  “It’s obviously not the first time this has happened. How long have you known him?”

  “Oh, they’re regular customers,” replied Roberto, seeing that I had become incapable of speech. “But this is the first time it’s happened in public, although, of course, I’ve had other such cases in my restaurant before.”

  “Yes,” said the man. “I noticed that you didn’t panic.”

  The remark was clearly aimed at me, for I must have looked deathly pale. The man went back to his table and Roberto tried to reassure me:

  “He’s the personal physician of a very famous actress,” he said. “Although it looks to me as if you’re more in need of medical attention than your guest here.”

  Mikhail—or Oleg or whatever the name was of the young man sitting opposite me—was beginning to come to. He looked around him and, far from seeming embarrassed, he merely smiled rather shyly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did try to control it.”

  I was doing my best to remain calm. Roberto again came to my rescue.

  “Don’t worry. Our writer here has enough money to pay for the broken plates.”

  Then he turned to me: “Epilepsy. It was just an epileptic fit, that’s all.”

  I left the restaurant with Mikhail, who immediately hailed a taxi.

  “But we haven’t talked yet! Where are you going?”

  “I’m in no state to talk now. And you know where to find me.”

  There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

  In my dream world, Mikhail had told the truth: I was just going through a difficult patch, experiencing the kind of misunderstanding that can occur in any love relationship. Esther was somewhere, waiting patiently for me to discover what had gone wrong in our marriage and then to go to her and ask her forgiveness so that we could resume our life together.

  In that dream world, Mikhail and I talked calmly, left the pizzeria, took a taxi, rang the doorbell of a house where my ex-wife (or my wife? The question now formulated itself the other way around) wove carpets in the morning, gave French lessons in the afternoon, and slept alone at night, waiting, like me, for the bell to ring, for her husband to enter bearing a large bouquet of flowers and carry her off to drink hot chocolate in a hotel near the Champs-Elysées.

  In the real world, any meeting with Mikhail would always be tense, because I feared a recurrence of what had happened at the pizzeria. Everything he had said was just the product of his imagination; he had no more idea where Esther was than I did. In the real world, I was at the Gare de l’Est at 11:45 in the morning, waiting for the Strasbourg train to arrive, bringing with it an important American actor and director who very much wanted to produce a film based on one of my books.

  Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, “No, I’m not interested.” I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: “The book is so much better than the film.”

  This time, my agent had been more insistent. She told me that this actor-filmmaker was very much “on our side,” and was hoping to do something entirely different from any of the other proposals we had received. The meeting had been arranged two months earlier, and we were to have supper that night to discuss details and see if we really were thinking along the same l
ines.

  In the last two weeks, however, my diary had changed completely: it was Thursday, and I needed to go to the Armenian restaurant, to try to reestablish contact with the young epileptic who swore that he could hear voices, but who was nevertheless the only person who knew where to find the Zahir. I interpreted this as a sign not to sell the film rights of the book and so tried to cancel the meeting with the actor; he insisted and said that it didn’t matter in the least; we could have lunch instead the following day: “No one could possibly feel sad about having to spend a night in Paris alone,” he said, leaving me with no possible comeback.

  In the world of my imagination, Esther was still my companion, and her love gave me the strength to go forward and explore all my frontiers.

  In the real world, she was pure obsession, sapping my energy, taking up all the available space, and obliging me to make an enormous effort just to continue with my life, my work, my meetings with film producers, my interviews.

  How was it possible that, even after two years, I had still not managed to forget her? I could not bear having to think about it anymore, analyzing all the possibilities, and trying various ways out: deciding simply to accept the situation, writing a book, practicing yoga, doing some charity work, seeing friends, seducing women, going out to supper, to the cinema (always avoiding adaptations of books, of course, and seeking out films that had been specially written for the screen), to the theater, the ballet, to soccer games. The Zahir always won, though; it was always there, making me think, “I wish she was here with me.”

  I looked at the station clock—fifteen minutes to go. In the world of my imagination, Mikhail was an ally. In the real world, I had no concrete proof of this, apart from my great desire to believe what he was saying; he could well be an enemy in disguise.

  I returned to the usual questions: Why had she said nothing to me? Or had she been trying to do just that when she asked me the question that Hans had asked? Had Esther decided to save the world, as she had hinted in our conversation about love and war, and was she preparing me to join her on this mission?

  My eyes were fixed on the railway tracks. Esther and I, walking along parallel to each other, never touching. Two destinies that…