End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  Kirov signaled the waiter, veiling his emotion. For in Fall he saw a reflection of his own torments. Fall’s religious calling and doubts, his passion to reconcile contradictory truths were like his own. His path was as difficult, as alien to others, as uncertain finally . . . “Darwin,” he said, “what would you like tonight? They have a good wine from Tashkent, almost as good as the Austrian spring wines. Let’s see how it compares to your California Chardonnays!”

  “It can’t compare,” Fall said. “Ours are as good as the French.”

  “We shall see! Do not be so confident.” They both laughed when their waiter, an Uzbek boy in his teens, said that Samarkand made the best wine in the world.

  “The only way to settle this,” Fall said, “is for you to come to the States. In the California vineyards there is a secret gate to Hurqalya!”

  “I cannot travel to the West,” Kirov replied, glancing away. “Maybe someday, though.”

  The waiter poured wine for them both. They drank in silence. “Not bad!” Fall exclaimed. “I wouldn’t have believed it!”

  Forcing a smile, Kirov looked into his glass. To hide his full identity now seemed a betrayal. Someday perhaps Fall would understand. “Yes, the wine is pretty good,” he said impassively. “They work hard on it.”

  “You are troubled, Sergei,” Fall said. “There is sadness in your face.”

  Kirov looked at the table. “My name is Volodya,” he said. “That is the more personal form of Vladimir.”

  “So Sergei’s your middle name?”

  Kirov did not respond. He wanted to share everything now, bring all his secrets into the witness they shared. In the Well of Light they had formed a bond that could not be broken. “I am the man you came looking for,” he said. “My name is Vladimir Kirov.”

  Fall had trouble answering, for with each sentence he formed there came a new sense of shock. Why hadn’t he recognized something so obvious? “You’ve been trying to reach us for more than a year,” he whispered. “Why couldn’t you do it directly?”

  “The nature of my work,” Kirov said. “There were dangers in your knowing.”

  Fall tried to compose himself. “Do you deal in military secrets?”

  “Only in subjects like those we’ve discussed—parapsychology, altered states, apparitions. Their military value is doubtful. Does this news upset you?”

  Fall was pulled in two directions. He felt an unbreakable bond to this man, a bond that had begun forming the day he first heard his name. But their friendship presented incalculable dangers. “Does it put me in collusion with you,” he asked, “knowing you work for the KGB?”

  Kirov shook his head. “KGB people,” he said, “inhabit most of the institutes you visited here before. They know about your work already. As long as you don’t give me military secrets or work against American interests, you won’t break any laws. But you can’t tell anyone my name. We will get into trouble if the authorities learn I have told you.”

  They sat in silence while Fall gathered his thoughts. “You might think I made a mistake,” Kirov said at last, “working for Soviet intelligence. But a destiny led me to it. The mosque, the zikhr, the Well of Light might have been taken from us if I had not had my KGB position.”

  “I heard rumors in Prague about you,” Fall said with hesitation. “The CIA people there told me you were in trouble with the KGB bosses.”

  “It was only a rumor,” Kirov said quietly, “a rumor the KGB started to take Western intelligence off my trail. Because I was traveling in Europe so much they were afraid I might be captured.”

  “And I’ve heard other stories. Someone told me you won the Order of Lenin for espionage against our military.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  As Fall described the stories he had heard, his shock began to pass. Meeting this man seemed destined. Their immediate interest in one another, the surveillance in Olema, their meeting in Prague, and their hours together in the Well of Light had joined them step by step.

  “Only once,” Kirov said, “have I done military espionage. I was in Paris in 1963 studying parapsychology. A Frenchman was guiding my studies, a scholar of Iranian mysticism and friend of Henry Corbin, who was an expert on Suhrawardi. By coincidence he knew the head of French Intelligence and learned that the French were watching some people of ours who were taking military documents from the American Courier Center at Orly Field. I helped our people escape a trap—the details are not important—and I was caught. In prison I was tortured, but managed to convince them that our espionage people were involved in another project. It took the French police off a course that might have led them to the Courier Center. Some of it has been reported in your press.” He looked sadly at Fall. “I hope this doesn’t separate us. There is much I hate about our system. And much I love. I am working to make the Soviet Union the best nation it can be.”

  “I believe you,” Fall said. “In the Well of Light today I felt the pain you live with. You were close to defection in Prague.”

  Fall appeared to understand, Kirov saw, but it would take him time to decide about their friendship. “We must be open with each other,” he said. “For there is a work we seem destined to do together.”

  Fall looked down at the table, veiling a sudden guilt. Did Kirov think he was involved with American intelligence? Had someone told him about his knowing Lester Boone? As he sipped his wine, he felt a new anxiety. Maybe Boone’s support, coming as it did indirectly from the CIA, would compromise their friendship.

  The young Uzbek stood waiting for their orders. “They have a plof,” Kirov said. “A kind of pilaf. Does that sound good to you?”

  Fall nodded, then looked down to conceal his face. His connection with Boone felt like a betrayal.

  “Don’t be worried,” Kirov said, guessing that Fall was concerned about the dangers involved in knowing a KGB man. “We won’t get into trouble.” He sipped his wine, then rearranged his table setting. Half-closing his eyes, he tried to recapture his mood before this exchange had started.

  “But look,” he said. “Since yesterday I have wanted to ask you about Umarov. Were you upset by his challenge?”

  “Umarov?” Fall was surprised. “I liked his openness.”

  “You weren’t disturbed by his remarks?”

  “No!” Fall said. “It’s good to see our work from another perspective. And more than that—you offer us more understanding, Volodya, than anyone I’ve met.” He reached out to touch Kirov’s arm. “There’s no other group that can help us like yours. After these two days, I see that clearly.”

  Kirov felt a rush of gratitude. Despite the questions his revelation had caused, Fall understood and forgave him. “Both our groups,” Fall said, “seek a new understanding. But we need your experience, your patience, your faith in God’s grace. Today I could see that something’s been growing inside me—and in Atabet since our experiments last autumn—in something like Umarov’s ‘dark cocoon.’ Nature’s grace must work in secret when you’ve taken your body apart. That’s one of the things your school can teach us.”

  “Angels work in ignorance,” Kirov whispered. “That is still the way our world works. But we need your bold spirit. That has been my intuition since I heard about the Greenwich Press. It is important that you know this. Our tradition is not fixed. It survives because its vision grows.” He leaned across the table. “The earth must grow or the. A mutation of our world wants to happen. But the understanding it needs for that does not exist yet. Our school doesn’t have all the answers. You could see that in my people today. You saw them, most of them working men with little education. Only Umarov’s students care about the connections of our Way with science and evolution, the relations of nations and cultures—the kinds of issues you explore in your book. We need your openness, your willingness to explore new directions.”

  “But you have a tradition,” Fall said. “We’re almost starting from zero. Maybe that’s led us to look for roots in evolution and Atabet’s ‘ret
urn to the First Day.’ Maybe these stories we tell ourselves come from our rootlessness.”

  “Nyet!” Kirov said with passion. “Your path was given to you! Atabet did not want his psychic eruptions, those visions of organs and cells. He did not ask for a mental asylum. He had to understand his demons or go crazy. And the same for you. Your obsessions were a curse until he showed you a practice. Your work comes from a passion you don’t understand. Angels work in ignorance in the lives of you and your friends. You do not have a visible tradition, but a secret one is working in you.”

  “Our two visions,” Kirov said, “come from different cultures, are expressed in different languages, and lead to different kinds of practice. And yet they have amazing similarities. I see that clearly now. Atabet’s trances drew you toward a world like the Well of Light. As he goes back in time, toward the ‘First Day of the Universe,’ he opens to the Earth of Hurqalya.”

  “You know,” Fall interrupted, “my great-grandfather had an idea like yours. ‘We carry the larvae of the next human forms’—that’s a line from one of his books. This thinking runs in both our families.”

  “Your great-grandfather!” Kirov said with surprise. “Was he a philosopher?”

  “His name was Charles Fall. He was a friend of Henry James, Senior. They worked on a synthesis of socialist and mystical thought.”

  “Even our families draw us together!” Kirov said. “I want to read their books. A synthesis like that was the dream that took me to Moscow.”

  “Their books are out of print, but I will send you old copies from the States.”

  “Your great-grandfather was right to link social and mystical thought. Ultimately you can’t separate them.” Kirov leaned close to Fall. “The crises our two nations face make it even more important that they work together. Their collaboration must grow, otherwise the world is in danger. You know the problems in America. Our nation is troubled too. You cannot see it as I do, but many of our people are losing their faith in themselves. Our morale is suffering as the old Marxist dreams and the slogans about progress lose their attraction. We need new visions, reasons to live when the old myths are dead. If our leadership were open to truths like the ones we’ve glimpsed, or if enough of our people were, what a mandate it would give them! What a mandate for both our peoples!”

  Kirov paused, for a heavyset man with Kazakh looks had taken a seat by the door. Though he pretended indifference, the man was listening to their conversation intently. “But there is hope,” Kirov said. “There are seeds of this vision in Marx, if you search his writings for them. He was inspired, after all, by Hegel.”

  “But how many Soviets know that? Is anyone trying to reconcile Marx with our kind of interest?”

  “There are a few theorists working,” Kirov said, studying the man by the door. “Someday they might be famous. Maybe Soviet thinking will embrace these ideas and give them a surprising new life. Marxism, after all, foresees an end to ordinary history in the withering away of the State. It lacks a psychology, though, to explain what the new age is like. To complete itself, Marxism needs something like our experience of this morning.”

  The stranger turned to see them, and Kirov remembered that he was a Kazakh agent of the KGB who kept track of Umarov’s students. “Don’t look back,” he said, “but someone is watching us. The police have us under surveillance.”

  “Are we in trouble?” Fall asked with alarm.

  “I don’t think so. But they are putting me on notice about our trip today. This is their way of saying they didn’t like it.” A look of disappointment crossed his face. “Tomorrow I will have to go to Novosibirsk without you. That is what the police will say. You must go back to Moscow. Can you wait there for me?”

  “How long will you be in Novosibirsk?” Fall asked with a sinking sensation.

  “For three days, but do not be alarmed. No one will bother you, and I need to see you. I am directing a project that could help further our ideas, a study sponsored by our Academy of Sciences to explore the things we’ve discussed. I need your help with it.”

  “But my visa only lasts for another week.”

  “Good!” Kirov said. “We will meet there three days from now. If your morale begins to suffer, remember that the Well of Light is waiting. The power and freedom it holds cannot be denied forever. Someday, we will see an end to ordinary history.”

  22

  FOR SIX YEARS PROJECT Elefant’s two-story barracks had gone unlandscaped and unpainted. Some of the windows were broken and much of the plumbing leaked. By deliberate policy the building was left in decrepitude, to reassure the project’s many critics that the army shared their low opinion of psychic research. Still, a small core of psychologists and army men were now committed to Project Elefant, and their work produced just enough inexplicable results to justify a staff of sixty. It was a convenient place, moreover, to dump members of the officer corps who suffered disabling depression. The old barracks had become a retirement home for them, in effect a kind of sanatorium.

  As Kirov made the rounds, he felt the same combination of moods he had felt here since its founding. There was a subtle embarrassment everywhere—in the stoop of the project director, in the avoidance of eye contact, in the reports the staff delivered. And with the shame there was resentment. Kirov could feel it in the staff’s response to him. Anticipating his negative report, they instantly perceived him as an enemy.

  But something more disturbed him, another layer in the mood of the place. Most of the staff took pleasure from inflicting pain. Depressed and hostile to begin with, they had developed their own oblique malevolence through their experiments. Kirov wondered if their muffled energies helped cause the building’s disrepair.

  In a narrow room at one end of the building, a staff meeting was in progress. Every member of the group watched Kirov with distrust. Which of them, he thought, would observe him for the secret police? Though no regular agent had been assigned to him here, he suspected that every one of his conversations would be reported to the KGB Center in Moscow.

  Boris Latchev, the project’s director, introduced Kirov to the group, then took him into his office. Kirov guessed that their talk would be recorded.

  Latchev gestured toward a chair, then slumped behind an old metal desk. “I am very discouraged,” he said. “We hear more and more rumors of our termination. Do you hear them too?”

  “There have always been rumors that parapsychology is finished,” Kirov shrugged. “But it goes on decade after decade.”

  “Our field has a difficult history.” Latchev’s red-rimmed eyes rolled back with frustration. “For every positive result ten failures. For every success a hundred other explanations. An Academy of Sciences team explained our results away last month. They are trying to have the project disbanded.” Latchev threw up his hands. “They have even enlisted the Chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology.”

  “Alexander Rozhnov?” Kirov masked his surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He was here to see the Argentine boy, Ramón. The one from Lester Boone.” Latchev seemed embarrassed. “Rozhnov spent an entire day watching him perform.”

  “Rozhnov spent a day with Ramón?” Kirov held his amazement in check. “What kind of things were you doing?”

  “His Umbanda hexing, with dancing and shouting. It was stormy, but Rozhnov insisted on seeing it all. We were fortunate, though. There was the kind of thing you told us Boone produced—a ball of light, a seeming apparition! Three of the staff and Rozhnov saw it.”

  “He has not told us about the incident,” Kirov said casually. “That is curious.”

  “Not so curious,” Latchev said with a sigh. “People close up after these incidents. The stronger the results, the more decisive the denial and forgetting. I am surprised he encouraged your study. Maybe his experience with Ramón had a delayed effect.”

  “You say that several people saw the apparition?”

  “Three staff members. I wasn’t there when it ha
ppened, but they said it was clearly visible.”

  “What did Ramón see?”

  “He panicked and had a convulsion. The thing was a deity of the Umbanda cult, he said, an angel of death. When it embraces you, your body moves to another dimension.”

  “And Rozhnov saw it too?”

  “Yes. He had to sit down when the thing was over. The laboratory was a bedlam.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “In August, around the twentieth.”

  Kirov contained his excitement. August 20 was the date of the space-capsule crash. “You must check the date,” he said. “Can we get your files?”

  Latchev went through his file drawers, while Kirov carefully framed his next question. “Latchev?” he asked calmly. “Has Project Elefant tried experiments with the space agency, any work with telepathy? Rozhnov would be interested in that.”

  “Yes, we have,” Latchev said, bringing two folders to his desk. “But first here is the date. August twentieth. You can look at our descriptions. But yes, we have done some things in space. We tried to duplicate the telepathy experiments on Apollo Twelve on the days before Ramón’s fit. Unfortunately, the space agency has not given us their tapes to check the cosmonauts’ responses.”

  “Your experiments took place on August eighteenth and nineteenth?” Kirov asked, pretending to study the file.

  “And on the twentieth.” Latchev said, “We were hopeful with Ramón as the sender. It was the first time we had used him in a long-range try like that. I hope he didn’t cause some metal to bend in the capsule. These forces are so unpredictable.” A look of mischief crossed his pale face, then he smiled despite himself. “He has broken pipes around here. It would be awful if he caused trouble in the capsule.”