“A tea for broken hearts,” he asked, “do you have it too?”
“Sure, my boy, I have a tea to soothe broken hearts,” Gabriel gave him a wicked smile, “but I wouldn’t recommend it to you now!”
“Why not?”
“Because broken hearts cannot be mended. The break is for a purpose. It makes your heart grow.”
“What you don’t say! How comforting!”
“You’ll understand this soon. In fact, you know this already. In the back of your mind.”
“Tell me more…Please.”
Gabriel poured more tea into their cups. His gaze was now immersed in the clear morning air, behind which he appeared to read the words as he spoke them:
"The inexhaustible energy of the universe, spirit, god or whatever other name one may wish to use for it, is the indomitable and most inconceivable of all elements. It breaks down at any attempt to approach it, in order to re-establish itself immediately in another form. Its power lies in this self-transformation. Immortality lies not in a particular form or a state of existence, but in the inexhaustibility of this power’s manifestations.
“Our understanding occurs in a similar way: through the act of committing something and through subsequent realisation of its consequences. There, in this non-geographical place and at no precise point in time, occurs the awakening.”
“Perception, recognition? Vision…?”
“You’ve got it.”
“But how…what…am I supposed to get from this now?”
Jurij was desperately looking for a straw to grasp, something to hold on to.
“It is instability and all things uncertain, the discontinuity of all states and stages of life, which guarantee evolution. No product according to a pre-conceived plan. Although some teachings suggest this is the case. How else could we aim at being free? If everything were to be pre-determined? It’s a hard nut, I admit.”
Gabriel smiled kind-heartedly at Jurij as he stood up, his action declaring this to be the end of their conversation. Jurij was left with his thoughts, or what remained of them: a chaotic state, with nothing to lead him towards an intelligent action.
He had to leave A and his staff, but how? And where to go if he did? He had no home. Nowhere. The yacht had been his place to live for the last decennia, always on the move. At the company’s service, as A put it. All of a sudden he recognised how much of a prisoner he had been on the yacht, totally at his boss’s disposal, sent from port to port on highly confidential tasks. Could he leave at all, would A allow him to depart, now that he was more informed about them? And if he did, what would he do? Find another job? With what kind of qualifications? He was not an ordinary employee with a respectable record and fixed salary. The money he received, mostly in cash, was handed over generously but nowhere registered as a salary. An odd state of being. There was no way of just walking out of the business. Not even if he faked some health problems, the thought crossed his mind. Or a mental disorder perhaps…?
No, it was better not even to think of this. His fate was woven in a whole web of consequences of his deeds and no excuse to the effect that he didn’t really know what he was doing was valid.
Where was Solveig? Might she have been aware of something? Jurij tried to recall the last period of their life together, although together was anything but the right word. They had no life together for quite a number of years by then. Had they had it at all, to start with? It went wrong from the very beginning, when they married. When he, in fact, insisted that they should. Thinking that in this way, all would be corrected…His bad conscience about deceiving her. She probably knew it anyway, but kept it to herself. He never asked her. But then, neither did she. They didn’t talk…There was a barrier. And A was there, occupying all their time and space.
Sixth Picture
“What is edu…cation?”
Shootik shot his question as usual, without preambles, appearing in his smallest size, which was about the size of a hand, on the Old Man’s lap.
Staretz smiled.
“This is something you haven’t got, my son!”
“Can you give it to me?”
“I don’t think so. Besides, it is not a thing to be given.”
“What is it then?”
Staretz took a different approach to the subject.
“How about my asking you a question: where did you get this idea?”
Shootik didn’t like answering questions. Coming from Staretz, they usually meant that the Old Man wanted to know where he had been and that…was only his business, wasn’t it? This time, however, there was no harm done in telling him.
“In a bus!”
“In a bus? And what where you doing in a bus?”
“Here we go again, that’s not fair; I’ve answered one question, now it’s my turn. What is edu…cation?”
As there was no way of putting Shootik under pressure, Staretz gave up.
“It’s called education. One word and it means, among other things, that people are instructed to behave in a certain way, do certain things in a particular manner and abstain from doing things which are thought to be incorrect…And then people, when they are young, go to schools, which are educational institutions, to learn…to collect knowledge which enables them…well, which is supposed to enable them to…”
This was really difficult for Staretz to explain truthfully to the Little Fellow. He was not doing very well. It had been too long ago that he had been educated in that way. In fact, the memory of those times gave him a pain in the chest…
“I see…”
Shootik, to his surprise, didn’t insist on further information. He could see, as he said. He had just collected a whole picture, without words…
"I don’t think I want to be educa…tionalised!"
“I didn’t think you would.”
Chapter 6
Who Was ‘A’?
Aristide…a name he hated, as he hated the rest of his family name and everything related to it. Who was he then? Known by the A of his three first names, Aristide Antoine Alphonse, he swore never to use them in this order. “A, just call me A,” he said to all his employees, with no further explanations. He had a few other names by which he was known in other fields of operations, which were kept secret. A was a master of disguise and a great actor. To Jurij and some more people, including Barb, Syl and Mag, his three-fold secretarial service, as he called it, he was a fascinatingly ambiguous person. His flow of words, his charismatic charm, his open-handedness, his jolly jokes and his vast body of knowledge of a variety of subjects, always ready to be shown off, never failed to bewitch them. At other times, there was his cold-blooded look when dealing with the next project, never revealed to them in full detail.
He was a big fish in the pond, but only on his level of operations. On a higher level above this, as well as on a secret level below, there were faceless figures known only by numerical codes, which revealed nothing of their true existence on this globe. These were people whose real identities were never uncovered. Together, they acted as one.
A powerful hidden reality of a ghostly governing body, not to be disobeyed. Nobody had ever seen the full face of this group which consisted of well-known public figures whose records showed no trace of their undercover activity. It pulled the threads together. What it ordered to be done had to be done without question.
On yet another plane, a location kept top-secret and known only to a chosen few, there was nobody in particular. No human figure with a biological existence on this planet. Therefore, never to be detected or called to responsibility. It was a collector of energy. A cold-blooded technological organism, a monster one might say, or a genial invention programmed with a brilliant super-human intelligence.
A had been following orders from this creature for nearly a quarter of a century. His mind worked on automatic, with no conscience involved. But then, his dreams lately…the recurring dreams of the last months: always the same scenery, a kind of a library and office in one piece. Therei
n a big desk and leather chair. An old man sitting at the desk. No windows, but bookshelves covering the walls. The books on the shelves had different colours. They looked like manuscripts filed between substantial covers. They were not published books. No titles on their backs. The old man had something to do with these documents. Once, in one variation of this dream, A saw him standing up and searching with his left hand for one of these books, or files. His hand was doing the searching, not his eyes. That was odd…Then it found the right object. It was aubergine in colour, and it appeared to be vibrating as he touched it and brought it to his desk. There he put it down…Unopened.
A always woke up with a fluttering heart after such a dream. What did it mean? In the split second of coming out of that space, he always felt his consciousness expanding, his awareness reaching beyond his physical existence. Just a split second, enough to make him perceive…And to close that door again. It was too painful to look beyond it. Unthinkable, to walk through…And yet…the knowing was there, no matter how much sand he threw over it.
Could it be that he was being called by powers greater than those which he served? A disquieting thought. What if his astute manipulations, the network which he maintained functioning and expanding, had been perceived by someone? Jurij…his most devoted servant? And Solveig…? She was no longer the pretty doll she used to be. Might she know more than she pretended to know?
Nothing pointed to this, however. A shook his head, chasing the idea away. Getting out of bed, he went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. The recurring dreams. With always the same content, kept him busy. That old man in his library, the book he took from the shelf…Whose book was it? Might this point to his records kept inside the aubergine-coloured leather covers? What if everything had been recorded somewhere? Every single detail of the cunningly designed procedures to…At this point he would not say the final words not even to himself, although he lived with them day by day: to switch off people’s use of their ability to think, and to have access to their reserves of free will. The ultimate goal was to enslave humanity as a whole.
Give them enough of the ready-mades. That was the slogan. Tell them: ’We’ll do it for you. Whatever you wish us to do. We are those who will make your dreams come true! That was the promise, except that, as A knew it to be true: We, not you, will decide about the contents of your dreams. We will give you what you desire…Once we made you desire…what we want.
Becoming all of a sudden aware of his position in this game, A realised that he, too, was switched into matters over which he had no control. With no personal freedom at all, he was caught in a system which someone else had produced, which he was supposed to keep functioning. A was the heir, with a title and an immense fortune, but at that moment he had an undeniable feeling of being nothing more than a prolonged arm of someone who kept him prisoner. Was he not a perfect product of that system? This, he asked himself for the first time, his well-played self-assurance crumbling like icing on a cake.
The main strategy was to keep ordinary people’s minds asleep, keep them occupied in a somnambular state most of the time. Feed them with all sorts of illusions and give at least some of them enough money, with the promise of more and more. Suggest that all is technically possible…in the physical body, first of all. Make them believe in the power of modern science, gen-manipulation, and promise them remedies…
If not at once, then certainly in the near future, for every possible illness. Meanwhile, give them enough toys to entertain themselves, and make sure that they have no time to think of anything else. Give, give, give them more than they need! That was the motto, the magic word. This was the best-sounding word of the world, in fact. Let them ask for…demand…desire…dream of…We’ll give them, or promise them, everything they want. If not today, then tomorrow, we will provide it for them.
It was a sublime strategy. Who would dare to question it? A had fully identified himself with this goal. His soul and conscience had been switched off, somehow. This happened a long time ago, when he was still a child. He had been recruiting people, as he had done with Jurij and Solveig, taking advantage of their innocence and naïvety. Although Solveig…She went to sleep, yes…but he could never be sure of that and in a strange way he felt attracted to her. As though…the thought made him feel uneasy, she had something which he badly needed.
Seventh Picture
There were times when Shootik didn’t appear for days and days, sometimes weeks, in the Old Man’s extra-terrestrial studio. These were times when Staretz could ‘work in peace’, as he would comment on his young friend’s return. In reality, these were times when he travelled far in his memory to those very ancient days when he had been living on Earth…His own book, in a dark aubergine-coloured cover, was there amongst others, on the middle shelf. He rarely took it into his hands to read what had happened then. Reading, he thought, was hardly necessary, since it stayed quite vividly in his memory, refreshed by the course of events in the current histories of the men and women whose books he was commissioned to guard. History repeated itself countless times in human lives. He wished he could know how long it would continue to do so.
With a sigh, he stood up and reached out for the aubergine-coloured book. How heavy it was, he felt, and he knew that it was not only the weight of the thick cover and the paper which it enclosed. It was that which still would have to be lived…Which was unlived in times past, lost as opportunities, chances disregarded, lessons not learned, trials failed, wrong turnings taken…Yet, this was also part of the long-term ‘apprenticeship in becoming human’!
In which one has to fail in the first place, in order to learn! How otherwise would one know…?
Yes, he knew, didn’t he…after having failed in his first attempt and many times afterwards. And since then, reading other people’s personal histories, he also knew that they were all destined to travel the same road…Unless they woke up from their naïve dreams! Then, only then, would he also be released…
Feeling again the weight of his book, he was aware of something else in it, which made it so heavy. It was the content of secrets, all kinds of them, very well guarded. Never to be revealed…and feelings, repressed, rejected, denied even to himself…Desires…The weight of all this can become too much for the secret chambers of the soul. In his book there was a great deal of this matter. No wonder, because he had refused to share it with anybody.
And now? What if somebody were to ask him embarrassing questions? Like Shootik sometimes does, in childlike innocence…
Reluctantly, he opened his book at random and started to read.
Chapter 7
Anna
In the beginning of her work at the publisher’s, when the column ‘Write to Anna’ was assigned to her, she tried to answer people’s questions while offering some advice. Soon, however, it became clear to her that this was not what most people really wanted. Their first need was to tell their story, having somebody paying real attention to it. Gradually, she changed her way of answering, by entering into dialogue with the writers, inviting them to listen to their own stories but from different point of views, which she suggested. Possibly to find answers to questions asked or needs expressed. This proved to be successful and in the course of time, Anna was the most addressed person at the publisher’s office, her column running out of space to respond to all the letters she received.
Some topics of general or special interest inspired Anna to write short, poetic essays which were published separately as an addition to her column.
This was an inspiring, rewarding job, and Solveig used to dialogue with Anna, her writer’s self, when she needed a feedback or even advice for herself as well. Her writing became a means of being in contact with people, responding to their need to share their thoughts. Or to ask an unusual question. Once she received a letter which started with:
‘Dear Anna,* why do people marry?’ The question made her smile at its bluntness and before reading the rest of the letter she was inclined to answer it
in the same tone:’Because they need a dream to lift them up, as if on a pair of wings above the ground of a greyish reality into a realm of an imagined beatitude of an aphrodisiac kind.’* All this to compensate for something lost?…She wondered. Why did she marry, after all?
Jurij, whom she married and had been so much in love with, her first and only love…Once she would have trusted her entire self into his hands. Once, when they were young and innocent. Or were they just naïve, romantically blind? No, it was a time when they both were still complete. Untouched. When they had a dream…Their ever so special and unique dream, as they thought! Then something happened and a curtain fell between them. It divided their souls.
That was it. Very soon there was no contact between them on that level. This was the major cause of the slow decay in their relationship. They never spoke about it. There was an impediment, right there in their middle, something which was blocking them. Seen from a distance now, the knowing was there. It had been ever so clear, but they were unable to handle it. Then Jurij got his first job. As a shipwright, in the shipyard. Very convenient, as he said, for later…and she as a cashier in a supermarket. Their joint salaries were enough to live on, they said.
On a sudden impulse, the words jumping onto her paper, Anna wrote:
‘We need to be lost, so that we can search for the way. We need to be imprisoned, so that we can fight for our freedom. We need to be blindfolded, so that we can develop an inner vision. We need to be exposed to the excruciating light of self-confrontation, so that we can see again.’
Another time, it was a reader’s letter which inspired her to write a longer reflection on a particular subject. Like that of expectations, and especially with regard to gods, by whatever names they are familiar to people. Reflecting on the matter, she wrote:
Shootik Page 7