The Ipatiev House
THE OMNIPRESENT HILAL HAS DISAPPEARED.
I come down from my room, assuming that I’ll find her in the hotel lobby, but she isn’t there. Despite spending most of yesterday flat out on my bed, I had still managed to sleep well once back on terra firma. I phone Yao’s room, and we go out for a walk around the city. This is exactly what I need to do right now: to walk, walk, walk, breathe some fresh air, take a look at a city I’ve never visited before, and enjoy feeling that it’s mine.
Yao tells me a few historical facts—Ekaterinburg is Russia’s third-largest city, rich in minerals, the kind of fact that one can find in any tourist leaflet—but I’m not in the least interested. Then we stop outside what looks like a huge Orthodox church.
“This is the Cathedral-on-the-Blood, built on the site of a house owned by a man called Nikolai Ipatiev. Let’s go inside.”
I’m starting to feel cold, and so I do as he suggests. We go into what appears to be a small museum, in which all the notices are in Russian.
Yao looks at me as if I should know what’s going on, but I don’t.
“Don’t you feel anything?”
“No,” I say. He seems disappointed.
“You mean that you, a man who believes in parallel worlds and in the eternity of the present moment, feel absolutely nothing?”
I feel tempted to tell him that what brought me to Russia in the first place was a conversation with J. about precisely that, my inability to connect with my spiritual side. Except that this is no longer true. Since I left London, I’ve been a different person, feeling calm and happy on my journey back to my kingdom and my soul. For a fraction of a second, I remember the episode on the train and Hilal’s eyes, but I quickly drive the memory from my mind.
“The fact that I can’t feel anything doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m disconnected. Perhaps my energies at this moment are alert to other discoveries. We’re in what seems to be a recently built cathedral. What exactly happened here?”
“The Russian Empire ended in the house of Nikolai Ipatiev. On the night of July 16, 1918, the family of Nicholas II, the last tsar of all the Russias, was executed along with his doctor and three servants. They started with the tsar himself, who received several bullets in the head and chest. The last to die were Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, and Maria, who were bayoneted to death. It’s said that their ghosts continue to haunt this place, looking for the jewels they left behind. People also say that Boris Yeltsin, when he was president of Russia, decided to demolish the old house and build a church in its place so that the ghosts would leave and Russia could begin to grow again.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
For the first time since we met in Moscow, Yao seems to be embarrassed.
“Because yesterday you asked me if I believed in God. Well, I did believe until He took away my wife, the person I loved most in the world. I always thought I would die before her, but that isn’t what happened,” Yao tells me. “The day we met I felt certain that I’d known her since before I was born. It was raining heavily, and she declined my invitation to tea, but I knew then that we were like the clouds that fill the sky so that you can no longer tell where one ends and another begins. We married a year later, as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world to do. We had children, we honored God and family, then, one day, a wind came and parted the clouds.”
I wait for him to finish what he has to say.
“It’s not fair. It wasn’t fair. It may seem absurd, but I would have preferred it if we had all departed together for the next life, like the tsar and his family.”
No, he has still not said everything he wants to. He’s waiting for me to say something, but I remain silent. It seems that the ghosts of the dead really are there with us.
“And when I saw you and the young woman looking at each other on the train in the vestibule between the carriages, I remembered my wife and the first glance we ever exchanged, and how even before we spoke, something was telling me, ‘We’re together again.’ That’s why I wanted to bring you here, to ask if you can see what we cannot see, if you know where she is now.”
So he had witnessed the moment when Hilal and I entered the Aleph.
I look around the room again, thank him for having brought me there, and ask if we can continue our walk.
“Don’t make that young woman suffer,” he says. “Whenever I see her looking at you, it seems to me that you must have known each other for a long time.”
I think to myself that this really isn’t something I should concern myself with.
“You asked me on the train if I would like to go somewhere with you tonight. Is that offer still open? We can talk more about all this later. If you had ever seen me watching my wife sleeping, you would be able to read my eyes and understand why we’ve been married for nearly thirty years.”
WALKING IS DOING WONDERS for my body and soul. I’m completely focused on the present moment, for that is where all signs, parallel worlds, and miracles are to be found. Time really doesn’t exist. Yao can speak of the tsar’s death as if it had happened yesterday and show me the wounds of his love as if they had appeared only minutes before, while I remember the platform at Moscow station as if it belongs to the distant past.
We sit down in a park and watch the people passing: women with children; men in a hurry; boys standing around a radio blasting out music; girls gathered opposite them, talking animatedly about something utterly unimportant; and older people wearing long winter coats, even though it’s spring. Yao buys us a couple of hot dogs and rejoins me.
“Is it difficult to write?” he asks.
“No. Is it difficult to learn so many foreign languages?”
“No, not really. You just have to pay attention.”
“Well, I pay attention all the time, but I’ve never got beyond what I learned as a boy.”
“And I’ve never tried to write, because as a child I was told that I’d have to study really hard, read lots of boring books, and mix with intellectuals. And I hate intellectuals.”
I don’t know if this remark is intended for me or not. I have my mouth full of hot dog, and so don’t reply. I think again about Hilal and the Aleph. Perhaps she found the experience so alarming that she’s gone home and decided not to continue the journey. A few months ago, I would have been driven frantic if a process like this had failed to run its full course, believing that my entire apprenticeship depended on it. But it’s a sunny day, and if the world seems to be at peace, that’s because it is.
“What do you need in order to be able to write?” Yao asks.
“To love. As you loved your wife, or, rather, as you love your wife.”
“Is that all?”
“You see this park? There are all kinds of stories here, and even though they’ve been told many times, they still deserve to be told again. The writer, the singer, the gardener, the translator, we are all a mirror of our time. We all pour our love into our work. In my case, obviously, reading is very important, but anyone who puts all his faith in academic tomes and creative-writing courses is missing the point: words are life set down on paper. So seek out the company of others.”
“Whenever I saw those literature courses at the university where I taught, it all seemed to me so…”
“Artificial?” I ask, completing his sentence. “No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I’m not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.”
“What about writing a book about the last days of Nicholas the Second?”
“It’s not a subject that really interests me. It’s an extraordinary story, but for me, writing is, above all, about discovering myself. If I had to give you one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t be intimidated by other people’s opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do. Seek out people who
