Aleph (14 page)

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.

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.

“I am concentrating.”

That’s a lie, and he knows it. He may not be able to read my thoughts, but he knows that I’m not really here. My body is on fire from the adrenaline coursing through my veins, from the two falls I’ve suffered, and from everything
else that fell along with the blows I received: her blouse, her jeans, her sneakers flung to the other side of the room. It’s impossible to foresee the next blow, but it’s perfectly possible to act with instinct, attention, and …

Yao lets go of my collar and bends my finger back in the classic finger lock. Just one finger and the body is paralyzed. One finger stops everything else from functioning. I try not to cry out, but I can see stars, and the pain is so intense that the dojo seems to have suddenly disappeared.

At first, the pain seems to make me concentrate on the one thing I should be concentrating on—the Path of Peace—but it immediately gives way to a feeling of her biting my lips as we kiss. My knees are no longer pinning down her arms. Her hands are grasping me hard; her nails are digging into my back; I can hear her moans in my left ear. Her teeth release their grip, her head shifts slightly, and she kisses me.

“Train your heart. That is the discipline every warrior needs. If you can control your heart, then you will defeat your opponent.”

That’s what I’m trying to do. I manage to extricate myself from his hold and grab his jacket again. He thinks I’m feeling humiliated; he has noticed my lack of practice and will almost certainly let me attack him now.

I have read his thoughts; I have read her thoughts; I surrender. Hilal rolls over in bed and sits astride my body. Then she undoes my belt and starts to unzip my trousers.

“The Path of Peace flows like a river, and because it resists nothing, it has won even before it has begun. The art of peace is unbeatable, because no one is fighting against
anyone, only themselves. If you conquer yourself, then you will conquer the world.”

Yes, that is what I’m doing now. My blood is circulating faster than ever. The sweat runs into my eyes so that, for a fraction of a second, I can’t even see, but my opponent does not seize the advantage. In just two moves, he’s on the floor.

“Don’t do that,” I say. “I’m not a child who has to be allowed to win. My fight is taking place on another plane right now. Don’t let me win without having deserved the pleasure of being the best.”

He understands and apologizes. We are not fighting, we are practicing the Path of Peace. Again he grabs the collar of my jacket, and I prepare for a blow coming from the right, but, at the last moment, it changes direction. One of Yao’s hands grabs my arm and twists it in such a way that I’m forced to my knees to avoid having my arm broken.

Despite the pain, I feel much better. The Path of Peace appears to be a fight, but it isn’t. It’s the art of filling up what is missing and emptying out what is superfluous. I put all my energy into that, and gradually my imagination leaves the bed, the girl with her small breasts and hard nipples, the girl who is unzipping my trousers and then stroking my penis. I am fighting with myself, and I need to win this fight at all costs, even if that involves falling and getting up over and over. The kisses never given, the orgasms never achieved, the nonexistent caresses after the bout of wild, romantic, abandoned sex—all those things disappear.

I am on the Path of Peace, and my energy is being poured into that tributary of the river that resists nothing and thus follows its course to the end and reaches the sea as planned.

I get up again. I fall again. We fight for nearly half an hour, completely unaware of the other people there, all of whom are equally focused on what they’re doing, looking for the right position that will help them find the perfect posture in their everyday life.

Afterward, both of us are exhausted and dripping with sweat. He bows to me, I return his bow, and we head for the showers. He beat me every time, but there are no marks on my body; to injure your opponent is to injure yourself. Controlling your aggression in order not to harm the other is the Path of Peace.

I let the water run over my body, washing away everything that has accumulated and dissolved in my imagination. When desire returns, as I know it will, I will ask Yao to find another place where we can practice aikido—even if that place is the corridor of the train—and I will rediscover the Path of Peace.

Life is one long training session in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning; there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquillity.

“T
HERE’S A MAN
who needs to talk to you,” Yao says, while we’re getting dressed. “I said I’d arrange a meeting, because I owe him a favor. Will you do that for me?”

“But we’re leaving early tomorrow morning.”

“I mean at our next stop. I’m just an interpreter, of course, so if you don’t want to meet him, I’ll tell him that you’re busy.”

He isn’t just an interpreter, as he well knows. He’s a man who senses when I need help, even if he doesn’t know why.

“No,” I say. “That’s fine.”

“You know, I have a lifetime of experience in the martial arts,” he says. “And when Ueshiba was developing the Path of Peace, he wasn’t just thinking about overcoming a physical enemy. As long as there was a clear desire on the part of the student, he could learn to overcome his inner enemy as well.”

“I haven’t fought for a long time.”

“I don’t believe you. It might have been a while since you practiced aikido, but the Path of Peace continues inside you. Once learned, we never forget it.”

I can see where the conversation is leading. I could stop it right there, but I allow him to continue. He is a man with great experience of life and who was honed by adversity, a man who has survived despite having to change worlds many times in this incarnation. There’s no point trying to hide anything from him. I ask him to go on.

“You weren’t fighting with me but with her.”

“That’s true.”

“We’ll continue practicing, then, whenever the journey allows us. I want to thank you, by the way, for what you said on the train, comparing life and death to moving from one carriage to another, and explaining that we do that many times in our life. I slept peacefully for the first time
since I lost my wife. I met her in my dreams and saw that she was happy.”

“I was talking to myself, too, you know.”

I thank him for being a loyal adversary who would not let me win a fight I did not deserve to.

I finally had access to the Internet. I needed to remember everything I had learned about the Path of Peace.

Someone knocks at the door. I’m so focused on what I’m reading that at first I can’t understand what the noise is.
My first impulse is simply not to open the door, but what if it’s something urgent? Why else would someone come knocking at this late hour?

As I go over to the door, I realize that there is one person with enough courage to do just that.

Hilal is standing outside, wearing a red T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Without saying a word, she comes in and lies down on my bed. I lie down beside her. She rolls over toward me, and I put my arms around her.

“Where have you been?” she asks.

“Where have you been?” is not an empty question. Anyone asking it is also saying “I missed you,” “I want to be with you,” “I need to know what you’ve been up to.”

I don’t answer. I simply stroke her hair.

“I phoned Tatiana, and we spent the evening together,” she says, in answer to the question I neither asked nor answered. “She’s a sad woman, and sadness is contagious. She told me she has a twin sister who’s a drug addict and incapable of holding down a job or a relationship. Tatiana’s sadness doesn’t stem from there, though, but from the fact that she’s successful, pretty, desirable, and enjoys her work, and, although she’s divorced, she’s already met another man who’s madly in love with her. The problem is that whenever she sees her sister, she feels terribly guilty. First, because she can’t do anything to help, and, second, because her victory makes her sister’s defeat seem all the more bitter. In other words, we’re never happy, whatever the circumstances. And Tatiana isn’t the only person to think like that.”