Interfictions (32 page)

Zachary and Alfred spent the morning cleaning up the room and teasing each other, and by the time Günther Lopez arrived with Zachary's brother, the maps seemed to be unruffled and unbreezed.

"This is Muriuki,” Günther Lopez said. “He is your brother."

Muriuki was a short, plump man with a bald head, perfectly round eyes, and exactly the same nose as Zachary. Günther Lopez said, “I am going to teach him to make puppets. We will be a family again. I will perform as a mime and cartographer, and you and Muriuki will put on a puppet show, and we will all be happy and world famous."

Zachary said, “Mother, this is Alfred. He and I are moving on from here and we will never return."

Günther Lopez said, “Well, wait till we get some puppets made. We can't leave until then."

Zachary held Alfred's hand and led him toward the door. “Goodbye,” Zachary said to Muriuki.

"I'm sorry we didn't get to spend more time together,” Muriuki said.

"You're welcome to come with us if you want,” Alfred said.

"No,” Muriuki said, “I think our mother needs me. But I'll send you postcards."

"Where will you send the postcards to?” Zachary said.

"The moon, of course,” Muriuki said, his eyes wide, serious, and poetic. “He'll see you, wherever you go, and he'll write my words into your dreams."

Zachary and Alfred climbed down the spiral stairs and walked slowly through the town, letting each building inspire imaginary memories for them of where they might have first caught a glimpse of each other and where they might have first touched hands and where they might have first watched a movie together and where they might have first kissed.

As they passed a diner in an abandoned boxcar, Zachary said to Alfred, “You're too thin!"

Alfred said, “It's been a long time since I had anything to eat."

"We must eat!” Zachary said, and he led Alfred into the diner. They sat in a booth with wooden seats and a marble table. A waiter dressed in a tattered tuxedo brought them menus written on fig leaves and told them the special of the day was broiled anaphora. Zachary ordered a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee. Alfred ordered a garden salad and a tofu burger.

"I've decided to become a vegetarian,” Alfred said.

"I've been a vegetarian for a long time,” Zachary said. “I don't like to hurt animals. They know more about the world than we do, but the knowledge disappears when they die."

"I just like being a member of minority cultures,” Alfred said.

After they finished their food, Alfred said, “Where should we go from here?"

"I don't know,” Zachary said. “We left all the maps back at the lighthouse. If you want, we can just sit here and look into each other's eyes forever."

Alfred blushed and bowed his head. “I can't stop moving,” he said. “My life is a picaresque story."

Zachary put a finger under Alfred's chin and lifted his head. “But you're in a love story now."

"It can't last,” Alfred said.

"Why not?"

"They never do."

"Some love stories are timeless,” Zachary said.

"We'll fight. We'll misunderstand each other. We'll hurt each other's feelings with careless comments and selfish moments. We'll get old and wrinkled and sick. We'll fall out of love. I'd rather just keep walking—.—.—.” He stood up, but Zachary stood in his way.

"Let's dance,” Zachary said.

"There's no music."

The waiter pressed a button on the face of a cuckoo clock in a corner of the diner and the sound of a tinkly waltz filled the air.

Alfred said, “I'm a terrible dancer."

Zachary put his arms around him and began moving in time to the music.

At first, Alfred couldn't figure out where to put his feet, and he stepped on Zachary's toes and once even nearly fell over. But soon they were moving gracefully, their left hands clasped together and their right arms wrapped around each other's bodies, and they giggled and whispered, and while they danced the waiter carried all of the tables and seats outside, leaving the diner empty except for the music and the two dancers, who swung around and around, laughing and kissing and resting their heads on each other's shoulders. As dusk turned the entire world grey except for a warm yellow light inside the boxcar, Alfred and Zachary finally stopped dancing, and when they looked outside they saw a crowd of people sitting in the chairs there, watching them, a crowd of people dressed in rags of old plastic, their faces craggled and lips dusty, their eyes lively with childlike joy, and the sound of their applause carried through the night to the lighthouse (where Günther Lopez was trying to show Muriuki how to make puppets from paper clips) and then on and on to the sewer fields and to the junkyard and the pet shop and the monastery, where the coffee pickers stopped shouting obscenities at the monks just long enough to hear the strange sound filling the air, and the monks briefly ceased whipping themselves and praying, and somewhere even farther away Alfred's mother stopped designing a skyscraper and his father stopped looking at pictures in a book about war, and though they were too far away to hear the sound of the applause, they knew something had changed in the world.

Alfred and Zachary bowed to their audience and giggled with a bit of embarrassment, a bit of exhaustion. As the audience continued to applaud, the two men dashed out the back door of the diner and away, running through the dark until they collapsed together in a soggy ravine, where they slept through all of the day and most of the night. When they woke, they stood up stiffly, brushed off their clothes, and continued walking, hand in hand, Zachary humming a waltz and Alfred trying to remember some prayers. They would wander together through many more nights and days, and now and then they would utter occasional harsh words to each other, now and then one would withdraw or another would be selfish, now and then they would disagree about which road to follow or which restaurant to beg a meal from, but through it all they continued to talk to each other, to fight back disappointment together, and nearly every day brought a laugh or two, and they looked forward to reaching old age, when perhaps they might settle down somewhere and draw a map of where they'd been and what they'd seen, but for now, walking through the world, the last thing either Zachary or Alfred wanted was a map.

Today the only labels I like for what I write are
Wishes
and
Exorcisms
. Sometimes the two labels overlap, like searchlights finding each other in a dark sky.

A few months before he died in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote to his wife, an actress in Moscow. He was forty-four years old, living in Yalta, and in the last stages of tuberculosis, a disease he had suffered from for almost half his life, a disease that had claimed his brother, Nikolai, in 1889. He wrote, “You ask: What is life? That's just like asking: What is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and that's all we know."

I want my stories to be like life, which means I want them to be like carrots, which means each story is a story, and that's all we know.

Matthew Cheney

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There is no ignorance,

and no end to ignorance,

no old age, no death, no release from old age and death.

No suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering,

no path to reach the end of suffering.

—Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra

We left Bayreuth on the fourth of April, and have traveled almost continuously ever since. The landscapes roll past us, and I sway rhythmically, jounced by the vibration of the awkward, hybrid half-track vehicles. It has taken us a month and a half to reach the Afghan frontier, to cross the border that separated us from this “land of piety and purity” where we are by no means sure we are welcome.

But the Orient is a paradox, a trickster. Instead of the difficulties we anticipated, of minutely examined passports and visas, we have received a welcome out of the Arabian Nights. After the rifles of Islam Kaleh and the unscalable walls, we have been unexpectedly greeted with hospitable offerings of dates, almond paste, and pistachios. Steel and sweetmeats. Georges Le Fevre wrote in his notebook about this “land where legend says every inhabitant's life-partner is his rifle, and the traveler must always assume that he is being aimed at.” Aimed at, yes, and straight for the heart, by steel or by sugar. The human climate here is as uncertain, as volatile as the rough country we explore. To explore: It's the primary object of the Citroën Yellow Cruise, and I, a man of images, have joined the expedition to explore this country with lines, to immortalize the route with brush and pencils.... No roads, no maps; fighting in the north; in between, an uncertain welcome.

Outside the port of Islam Kaleh, the inhabitants react unpredictably: indifferent, excited, or amazed by the slow passage of our half-tracks. My eyelashes are laden with grains of sand; my hand aches at not being able to preserve everything I see.

At Herat, where the roads to India and the Occident meet, the covered market is immobilized in time, crystallized, with all the gestures and movement of a way of life unchanged for centuries. We are in the midst of history, in a past sewn with golden thread and perfumed with spices.

Outside the city, the governor has had a house made ready for us. Another unexpected welcome. We're told to make ourselves at home. We are receiving a slow, patient introduction to Afghani courtesy, to its sugar and its steel. Here, even some of the children who smile at us sling a Mauser in a bandolier over one shoulder.

On the road, in the vistas around us, the beauty of the light falls on an unbearable contrast of landscapes. Under our feet, the land is harsher than the desert. High above us rise peaks crowned with mountain snow. Between them hang suspended mirage-like cities of cool shadow and vibrant colors, more enervating than perfume: hospitable, but forbidden, displaying their beauty to us without letting us touch more than the edges of their veils. Farther down the road we travel, farther, walled between the vigilant, indolent guards who line our route and the excessive pomp with which we are greeted. Step by step, until we reach the heights, the pinnacle of all these preparations for our bewitchment. The apotheosis.

Mokour.

Seven thousand kilometers from our comfortable West, we are ushered into palatial luxury.

"You are much expected."

And, to demonstrate, days of feasting.

To show us its face, proud Afghanistan summons to Mokour a troop of warrior-dancers. The men have the savage beauty of their earth, and its paradoxes. Bracelets by the dozens on their arms, gazelle eyes veiled with black antimony.

Their hair, partly or wholly unbound, whips their wild faces. Their eyes are cast down, self-absorbed. They display themselves, they guard themselves, proud, immodest, unaccepted and unaccepting, pivoting about themselves. Some dance holding their rifles, others bare-handed; the two are the same. Beside me, amazed and admiring, Georges makes phrases: they spring from the earth like savage flowers, he says. As for myself, I think they are like flames. Wanting to draw them, my hand cannot follow them to the extremes of motion at which they fling themselves. I feel alienated, heavy, caught within my culture, which can no longer create such a thing as this, this dance of absolutes between ecstasy and defiance that only these warriors can embody.

They have come from far away to display themselves to us and defy us, and once they are done, they leave; they have done what they had to. One of them, leaving, smiles at me and glances at my notebook. I have tried to draw him and had no more success than with the others. Perhaps he is smiling in victory. “Can you comprehend us or represent us? Capture and halt our motion?” perhaps his eyes say; perhaps not.

This is the pride of these men, to dance not for us but for themselves. Above all they danced because they are what they are, and we are merely passersby. We are their guests, but strangers. The welcome they offer is what they decided they should give us, a debt of honor that they recognize they owe, and recognize themselves by owing. Only Islam affirms its pride with such an odalisque's elegance.

We ford four rivers; it's half adventure, half clown show. The land is wild, the inhabitants charming. We reach Kabul at the beginning of the summer. Kabul, paradox of paradoxes, fragmented between abortive modern projects and the millennial layers of its history. Our convoy passes, slow, silent, stupefied, between the buildings of a city within a city, built and then capriciously abandoned. Already dead. Practice work, an attempt to see if the modern world was worth anything, the abortive dream of an outdated king. He wanted to construct a second Paris on the Afghan earth; the earth voted no.

The saying is that the king was guilty of trying, in one reign, to make changes that take lifetimes. He broke rhythm, and was condemned to exile.

After dead modern Kabul, old Kabul is like an explicit message, immutable and alive.

After the khans, we meet the current king and his ministers. Hospitable, but guarded. We are welcomed as strangers, but we do not belong to this land.

We continue on the road toward the west.

And we find ourselves at the valley of Bâmiyân.

From the veranda of a villa someone has lent us, in the gigantically scaled landscape spread out before me, I see for the first time the cliff pierced by the colossal niches of the great Buddhas. They are fifty meters high, dominating everything.

Impossible for us not to approach them; impossible not to enter the pass of the Hindu Kush and climb into the grottoes excavated in the “pure and pious country” before there was an Afghanistan.

Higher and higher I climb, until I stand on the very head of the Enlightened One.

There I have to sit down, to bring out my sketchpad. To preserve on paper the paintings that are disappearing from the vault.