by Paulo Coelho
“Another plane, another carriage…”
“Exactly. We’re stuck eternally on the same train, until God decides to stop it for reasons known only to Him. But since it’s impossible for us to stay in our own compartment, we walk up and down, from one life to another, as if they were happening in succession. They’re not: I am who I was and who I will be. When I met Hilal outside the hotel in Moscow, she mentioned a story I had written about a fire on the top of a mountain. There is another story about sacred fire, which I will tell you now.
“When the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov saw that the Jews were being mistreated, he went into the forest, lit a sacred fire, and said a special prayer asking God to protect his people. And God sent him a miracle.
“Later, his disciple Maggid of Mezritch, following in his master’s footsteps, went into the same part of the forest and said, ‘Master of the Universe, I do not know how to light the sacred fire, but I do know the special prayer; please, hear me!’ And the miracle happened again.
A generation passed, and when Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov saw how his people were being persecuted, he went into the forest and said, ‘I don’t know how to light the sacred fire, nor do I know the special prayer, but I still remember the place. Help us, O Lord!’ And the Lord helped them.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, in his wheelchair, spoke to God, saying, ‘I don’t know how to light the sacred fire, nor do I know the special prayer, and I can’t even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell this story and hope that God will hear me.’”
Now it is me who is speaking, not the Divine Energy, but even if I don’t know how to relight the sacred fire, nor even why it was lit, at least I can tell the story.
“Be kind to her,” I say to the others.
Hilal pretends not to have heard. As does everyone else.
The Chicago of Siberia
WE ARE ALL SOULS wandering the Cosmos and, at the same time, living our lives, but with a sense that we are passing from one incarnation to another. If something touches the code of our soul, it is remembered forever and affects whatever comes afterward.
I gaze lovingly at Hilal, a love that is reflected through time, or what we imagine to be time, as in a mirror. She was never mine and never will be; that is how it is. We are both creators and creatures, but we are also puppets in God’s hands, and there is a line we cannot cross, a line that was drawn for reasons we cannot know. We can approach and even dabble our toes in the river but are forbidden to plunge in and let ourselves be carried along by the current.
I feel grateful to life, first, because it has allowed me to find her again when I needed to. I am finally beginning to accept the idea that I will have to go through that door for a fifth time, even if I still won’t find the answer. I am grateful to life, too, because I was afraid before, but now I am not. And third, I am grateful to life, because I am making this journey.
It amuses me to see that tonight she is jealous. Despite being a brilliant violinist and a warrior in the art of getting what she wants, she is still a child and always will be, as will I and all those who really want the best that life can offer as only a child can.
I will provoke her jealousy, because then she will know what to do when she has to cope with other people’s jealousy. I will accept her unconditional love, because when she loves someone else unconditionally, she will know what she is dealing with.
“SOME PEOPLE CALL IT THE CHICAGO OF SIBERIA.”
The Chicago of Siberia. Such comparisons normally ring very false. Before the Trans-Siberian Railway was built, Novosibirsk had fewer than eight thousand inhabitants. Now the population has risen to more than 1.4 million, thanks to a bridge that allows the railway to continue its steely, steaming onward march to the Pacific Ocean.
Legend has it that the women in Novosibirsk are the prettiest in all Russia. From what I can see, the legend appears to be true, although it would never have occurred to me to compare it with other places I have visited. Hilal, one of the local goddesses, and I are standing before what seems to be a complete anomaly: a gigantic statue of Lenin, the man who made the theory of communism a reality. What could be less romantic than looking at this man whose goatee points to the future but who is incapable of stepping off his plinth and changing the world.
The person who mentioned Chicago was the goddess, an engineer called Tatiana who is about thirty or so, and who, after the party and the supper, decided to accompany us on our walk. Being back on terra firma feels rather like being on another planet. I find it hard to get used to a place that doesn’t move all the time.
“Let’s find a bar where we can have a drink and a dance. We need all the exercise we can get.”
“But we’re tired,” says Hilal.
At such moments, I become the woman I have learned to be and read between the lines. What she means is: “You want to stay with this other woman.”
“If you’re tired, you can go back to the hotel. I’ll stay with Tatiana.”
Hilal changes tack. “There’s something I want to show you.”
“Show it to me, then. There’s no need for us to be alone. After all, we’ve known each other for only ten days.”
This destroys her “I’m with him” pose. Tatiana perks up, although this has less to do with me than with the natural rivalry that sometimes exists between women. She says she’ll be delighted to show me the nightlife in this Chicago of Siberia.
Lenin gazes impassively down on us, as if he has seen it all before. If he had opted for a dictatorship of love instead of wanting to create a paradise for the proletariat, things might have turned out better.
“Come with me, then,” says Hilal.
“ ‘Come with me’?”
Before I can react, Hilal is already striding ahead of us. She wants to turn the tables on us and thus deflect the blow, and Tatiana takes the bait. We set off along the spacious avenue that leads to the bridge.
“Do you know the city, then?” asks the goddess, somewhat surprised.
“That depends on what you mean by ‘know.’ We know everything. When I play the violin, I’m aware of the existence of…”
She searches for the right word, then finds a term that I will understand but that will exclude Tatiana from the conversation.
“I’m aware of a vast, powerful information field around me. It’s not something I can control; rather, it controls me and guides me to the right chord whenever I feel unsure. I don’t need to know the city; I simply have to let it take me where it wants to.”
Hilal is walking faster and faster. To my surprise, Tatiana has understood exactly what Hilal means.
“I love to paint,” she says. “I’m an engineer by profession, but when I stand before a blank canvas, I find that every brushstroke is like a visual meditation, a journey that transports me to a state of happiness I never find in my work and which I hope never to lose.”
Lenin must often have witnessed such scenes before, the encounter of two forces in conflict over a third force that must be maintained or conquered. It doesn’t take very long for those two forces to become allies, leaving the third force forgotten or, quite simply, irrelevant. I am merely the companion of these two young women, who now look as if they have known each other since childhood and are talking animatedly in Russian, oblivious to my existence. It’s still cold—given that we’re in Siberia, it’s probably cold here all year round—but the walk is doing me good; each step raises my spirits, each kilometer is carrying me back to my kingdom. There was a moment in Tunisia when I thought this would never happen, but my wife was right: being alone may make me more vulnerable, but it makes me more open, too.
I’m beginning to get tired of trailing after these two women. Tomorrow, I’ll leave a note for Yao, suggesting that we practice a little aikido. My brain has been working harder than my body.
WE STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, in a deserted square with a fountain in the middle. The water is still frozen. Hilal is breathing fast; if she continues to
do so, she’ll induce in herself a sensation of floating, a kind of artificially induced trance that no longer impresses me.
Hilal is the master of ceremonies of some spectacle of which I know nothing. She asks us to hold hands and look at the fountain.
“All-powerful God,” she begins, still breathing fast, “send Your messengers to Your children standing here with open hearts to receive them.”
She continues with this familiar invocation, and I notice that Tatiana’s hand is beginning to tremble as if she, too, is going into a trance. Hilal appears to be in contact with the Universe, or with what she called an “information field.” She continues to pray, and Tatiana’s hand stops trembling and clutches mine. Ten minutes later, the ritual is over.
I’m not sure if I should tell her what I think, but Hilal is so full of generosity and love, she deserves to hear what I have to say.
“What was that?” I ask.
She seems put out.
“A ritual to bring us closer to the spirits,” she explains.
“And where did you learn it?”
“In a book?”
Should I go on or wait until we’re alone? Since Tatiana was also part of the ritual, I decide to continue.
“With all due respect to your research and to the person who wrote the book, I think you’ve got hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick. What is the point of such a ritual? I see millions and millions of people convinced that they’re communicating with the Cosmos and thus saving the human race. Each time it fails, as it always will, they lose a little bit of hope. The next new book or seminar restores their faith, but after a few weeks they forget what they learned, and hope drains away.”
Hilal is surprised. She wanted to show me something beyond her talent as a violinist, but she touched on a dangerous area, the only one in which my tolerance level is zero. Tatiana must think me very rude, which is why she speaks out in defense of her new friend: “But isn’t prayer a way of bringing us closer to God?”
“Allow me to answer with another question: will all your prayers make the sun rise tomorrow? Of course not. The sun rises in obedience to a universal law. God is always close to us, whether we pray to him or not.”
“Are you saying that our prayers are useless?” says Tatiana.
“Not at all. If you don’t get up early, you’ll never see the sun rise. If you don’t pray, God may be near, but you won’t feel His presence. However, if you believe that invocations like the one you just made are the only way forward, then you had better move to the Sonora Desert in America or to an ashram in India. In the real world, God is more easily to be found in Hilal’s violin.”
Tatiana bursts into tears. Neither Hilal nor I know quite what to do. We wait for her to finish crying and tell us what she’s feeling.
“Thank you,” she says. “Even though in your opinion it was useless, thank you. I have hundreds of wounds that I carry around with me, and yet I’m obliged to behave as if I were the happiest person in the world. At least today I felt someone take my hand and say, ‘You’re not alone, come with us, show me what you know.’ I felt loved, useful, important.”
She turns to Hilal and goes on.
“Even when you said that you knew this city better than I do, the city where I was born and where I’ve lived all my life, I didn’t feel belittled or insulted. I believed you; I wasn’t alone anymore; someone was going to show me something I didn’t know. I have never seen this fountain before, and now, whenever I feel low, I’ll come back here and ask God to protect me. I know that the words weren’t anything very special. I’ve often said such prayers before and never been heard, and each time that happened, my faith ebbed away. Today, however, something did happen, because although you are strangers, you’re not strangers to me.”
Tatiana has still not finished.
“You’re much younger than me and have not suffered what I have suffered. You don’t know life, but you’re lucky. You’re in love with a man, which is why you made me fall in love with life again. In the future, it will be much easier for me to fall in love with someone.”
Hilal lowers her eyes. This isn’t what she wants to hear. Perhaps she had planned to say the same thing, but someone else is speaking these words in the city of Novosibirsk in Russia, which is just as we’d imagined it would be, although very different from the reality God created on this Earth.
“In short, I have forgiven myself, and I feel much lighter,” Tatiana continues. “I don’t know why you came here, nor why you asked me to come with you, but you have confirmed what I have always felt: people meet when they need to meet. I have just saved myself from myself.”
And the expression on her face really has changed. The goddess has become a sprite. She opens her arms to Hilal, who goes over to her. The two women embrace. Tatiana looks across at me and beckons with her head for me to join them, but I stay where I am. Hilal needs that embrace more than I do. She wanted to do something magical, but it turned out to be a cliché, and yet the cliché was transformed into magic because Tatiana was capable of transmuting that energy into something sacred.
The two women remain locked in that embrace. I look at the frozen water in the fountain, and I know that it will thaw one day, then freeze, then thaw again. So it is with our hearts, which are also regulated by time but which never stop forever.
Tatiana takes a card out of her bag. She hesitates, then hands it to Hilal.
“Good-bye,” she says. “I know we won’t meet again, but here’s my phone number. Perhaps everything I’ve just said is merely the product of incurable romanticism and things will soon go back to being as they were before, but it was still a very important experience for me.”
“Good-bye,” says Hilal. “And don’t worry, if I could find my way to this fountain, I’ll be able to find my way back to the hotel.”
She takes my arm. We walk through the cold night, and for the first time since we met, I desire her as a woman. I leave her at the door of the hotel and tell her that I need to walk a little more, alone, to think about life.
The Path of Peace
I MUSTN’T. I can’t. And as I say to myself a thousand times over, I don’t want to.
Yao takes off his clothes and stands there in his underpants. Even though he’s over seventy, his body is all skin and muscle. I take off my clothes, too.
I need this exercise, not so much because of the time spent cooped up in the train but because my desire has begun to grow uncontrollably. It’s at its most intense when we’re apart—when she’s gone to her room or I have some professional engagement—but I know that it would not take much for me to succumb to it. That’s how it was in the past, when we met for what I imagine must have been the first time; when she was far from me, I could think of nothing else, but when she was a visible, palpable presence, the demons vanished and I barely had to control myself at all.
That’s why she must stay here, before it’s too late.
Yao puts on his uniform of white trousers and jacket, and I do the same. We head in silence to the dojo, the martial-arts training place that he found after making a few phone calls. There are several other people practicing, but we manage to find a free space.
“The Path of Peace is wide and vast, reflecting the grand design created in the visible and invisible world. The warrior is the throne of the Divine and always serves a greater purpose.” Morihei Ueshiba said this almost a century ago, while he was developing the techniques of aikido.
The path to her body is the next door. I’ll knock; she’ll open the door and won’t even ask me what I want, because she’ll be able to read it in my eyes. She might be afraid, or she might say, “Come in. I was waiting for this moment. My body is the throne of the Divine; it serves as a manifestation here of what we are experiencing in another dimension.”
Yao and I make the traditional bow, and our eyes change. We are now ready for combat.
And in my imagination, she, too, bows her head as if to say, “Yes, I’m ready, hold me, grab my
hair.”
Yao and I approach each other, we take hold of each other’s jacket collars, pause for a moment, and then the fight begins. A second later, I’m on the floor. I mustn’t think about her. I invoke the spirit of Ueshiba. He comes to my aid through his teachings, and I manage to return to the dojo, to my opponent, to the fight, to aikido and the Path of Peace.
“Your mind must be in harmony with the Universe. Your body must keep pace with the Universe. You and the Universe are one.”
But the force of the blow only brings me closer to her. I grab her hair, throw her onto the bed, and hurl myself on top of her. That is what the harmony of the Universe is: a man and a woman becoming a single energy.
I get up. I haven’t practiced aikido for years, my imagination is far off somewhere, and I’ve forgotten how to keep my balance. Yao waits for me to compose myself; I see his posture and remember how I should place my feet. I position myself before him in the correct manner, and again we grab each other’s collars.
Again, it isn’t Yao before me but Hilal. I immobilize her arms, first with my hands, then with my knees. I start to unbutton her blouse.
I fly through the air again without realizing how it happened. I’m on the floor, staring up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, unable to understand why I’ve let my defenses get so ridiculously low. Yao holds out a hand to help me up, but I refuse it. I can manage alone.
Once more we grab each other’s collars. My imagination once more travels far from here: I’m back in bed, and her blouse is now unbuttoned to reveal her small breasts and hard nipples, which I bend over to kiss while she struggles a little with a mixture of pleasure and excited anticipation of the next move.
“Concentrate,” says Yao.