“The Aleph,” I say.
“Yes, at some point during that seemingly endless trance, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, I heard you say that word.”
Simply recalling what happened has filled her with fear again. It’s time to seize the moment.
“Do you think you should continue the journey?”
“Oh, yes, more than ever. Terror has always fascinated me. You remember the story I told at the embassy —”
I ask her to go to the bar and order some coffee—I send her on her own because we’re the only customers left, and the barman must be itching to turn off the lights. She has a little trouble persuading him but returns at last with two cups of Turkish coffee. Like most Brazilians, I never worry about drinking strong black coffee late at night; whether or not I have a good night’s sleep depends on other things.
“There’s no way of explaining the Aleph, as you yourself saw, but in the magical Tradition, it presents itself in one of two ways. The first is as a point in the Universe that contains all other points, present and past, large and small. You normally come across it by chance, as we did on the train. For this to happen, the person, or persons, has to be in the actual place where the Aleph exists. We call that a small Aleph.”
“Do you mean that anyone who got into the carriage and stood in that particular place would feel what we felt?”
“If you’ll let me finish, you might understand. Yes, they will, but not as we experienced it. You’ve doubtless been to a party and found that you felt much better and safer in one part of the room than in another. That’s just a very pale imitation of what the Aleph is, but everyone experiences the Divine Energy differently. If you can find the right place to be at a party, that energy will help you feel more confident and more present. If someone else were to walk past that point in the carriage, he would have a strange sensation, as if he suddenly knew everything, but he wouldn’t stop to examine that feeling, and the effect would immediately vanish.”
“How many of these points exist in the world?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but probably millions.”
“What’s the second way it reveals itself?”
“Let me finish what I was saying first. The example I gave you of the party is just a comparison. The small Aleph always appears by chance. You’re walking down a street or you sit down somewhere and suddenly the whole Universe is there. The first thing you feel is a terrible desire to cry, not out of sadness or happiness but out of pure excitement. You know that you are
The barman comes over to us, says something in Russian, and gives me a note to sign. Hilal explains that we have to leave. We walk over to the door.
Saved by the referee’s whistle!
“Go on. What’s the second way?” Hilal asks.
It would seem the game is not over yet.
“That’s the great Aleph.”
It’s best if I explain everything now; then she can go back to the conservatory and forget all about what happened.
“The great Aleph occurs when two or more people with a very strong affinity happen to find themselves in the small Aleph. Their two different energies complete each other and provoke a chain reaction. Their two energies…”
I don’t know if I should go on, but I have no choice. Hilal completes the sentence for me.
“… are the positive and negative poles you get in any battery; the power makes the bulb light up. They’re transformed into the same light. Planets that attract each other and end up colliding. Lovers who meet after a long, long time. The second Aleph also happens by chance when two people whom Destiny has chosen for a specific mission meet in the right place.”
Exactly, but I want to be sure she really has understood.
“What do you mean by ‘the right place’?” I ask.
“I mean that either two people can spend their whole life living and working together or they can meet only once and say good-bye forever simply because they did not pass through the physical point that triggers an outpouring of the thing that brought them together in this world. So they part without ever quite understanding why it was they met. However, if God so wishes, those who once knew love will find each other again.”
“Not necessarily, but people like my master and myself, who had shared affinities—”
“Before, in past lives,” she says, interrupting me again. “Or people who meet, like at the party you used as an example, in the small Aleph and immediately fall in love. The famous ‘love at first sight.’ ”
I decide to continue the example she has used.
“Although, of course, it isn’t ‘at first sight’ but linked to a whole series of things that occurred in the past. That doesn’t mean that
“I love you.”
“No, that isn’t what I’m saying,” I exclaim in exasperation. “I’ve already met the woman I needed to meet in this incarnation. It took me three marriages before I found her, and I certainly don’t intend to leave her for someone else. We met many centuries ago and will remain together for the centuries to come.”
But she doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. Just as she did in Moscow, she plants a brief kiss on my lips and sets off into the icy Ekaterinburg night.
Dreamers Can Never Be Tamed
LIFE IS THE TRAIN, not the station. And after almost two days of traveling, it’s also weariness, disorientation, nostalgia for the days spent in Ekaterinburg, and the growing tensions in a group of people confined together in one place.
Before we set off again, I found a message from Yao at reception asking if I fancied doing a bit of aikido training, but I didn’t reply. I needed to be alone for a few hours.
I spent the whole morning getting as much exercise as possible, which for me meant running and walking. That way, when I went back to the train, I would surely be tired enough to sleep. I managed to phone my wife—my cell phone didn’t work on the train—and confide to her that I had my doubts about the usefulness of this Trans- Siberian trip, adding that, although the journey so far had been a valuable experience, I might not carry it through to the end.
She said that whatever I decided was fine with her and not to worry. She was very busy with her paintings. Meanwhile, she’d had a dream that she couldn’t understand. She had dreamed that I was on a beach and someone walked up from the sea to tell me that I was finally fulfilling my mission. Then the person vanished.
I asked if that person was male or female. She didn’t know, she said, the face was covered by a hood. Then she blessed me and again reassured me, telling me not to worry. Even though it was still only autumn, she said, Rio was like an oven already. She advised me to follow my intuition and take no notice of what other people were saying.
“In that same dream, a woman or a girl, I can’t be sure, was on the beach with you.”
“There’s a young woman with me here on the train. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s definitely under thirty.”
“Trust her.”
IN THE AFTERNOON, I met up with my publishers and gave a few interviews, then we had supper at an excellent restaurant and at about eleven o’clock at night headed for the station. Back on the train, we crossed the Ural Mountains—the chain of mountains that separates Europe from Asia—in the pitch dark. No one saw a thing.
From then on, it was back to the old routine. When day broke, we all appeared at the breakfast table as if
