“Come with me, then,” says Hilal.
“ ‘Come with me’?”
Before I can react, Hilal is already striding ahead of us. She wants to turn the tables on us and thus deflect the blow, and Tatiana takes the bait. We set off along the spacious avenue that leads to the bridge.
“Do you know the city, then?” asks the goddess, somewhat surprised.
“That depends on what you mean by ‘know.’ We know everything. When I play the violin, I’m aware of the existence of…”
She searches for the right word, then finds a term that I will understand but that will exclude Tatiana from the conversation.
“I’m aware of a vast, powerful information field around me. It’s not something I can control; rather, it controls me and guides me to the right chord whenever I feel unsure. I don’t need to know the city; I simply have to let it take me where it wants to.”
Hilal is walking faster and faster. To my surprise, Tatiana has understood exactly what Hilal means.
“I love to paint,” she says. “I’m an engineer by profession, but when I stand before a blank canvas, I find that every brushstroke is like a visual meditation, a journey that transports me to a state of happiness I never find in my work and which I hope never to lose.”
Lenin must often have witnessed such scenes before, the encounter of two forces in conflict over a third force that must be maintained or conquered. It doesn’t take very long for those two forces to become allies, leaving the third force forgotten or, quite simply, irrelevant. I am merely the companion of these two young women, who now look as if they have known each other since childhood and are talking animatedly in Russian, oblivious to my existence. It’s still cold—given that we’re in Siberia, it’s probably cold here all year round—but the walk is doing me good; each step raises my spirits, each kilometer is carrying me back to my kingdom. There was a moment in Tunisia when I thought this would never happen, but my wife was right: being alone may make me more vulnerable, but it makes me more open, too.
I’m beginning to get tired of trailing after these two women. Tomorrow, I’ll leave a note for Yao, suggesting that we practice a little aikido. My brain has been working harder than my body.
WE STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, in a deserted square with a fountain in the middle. The water is still frozen. Hilal is breathing fast; if she continues to do so, she’ll induce in herself a sensation of floating, a kind of artificially induced trance that no longer impresses me.
Hilal is the master of ceremonies of some spectacle of which I know nothing. She asks us to hold hands and look at the fountain.
“All-powerful God,” she begins, still breathing fast, “send Your messengers to Your children standing here with open hearts to receive them.”
She continues with this familiar invocation, and I notice that Tatiana’s hand is beginning to tremble as if she, too, is going into a trance. Hilal appears to be in contact with the Universe, or with what she called an “information field.” She continues to pray, and Tatiana’s hand stops trembling and clutches mine. Ten minutes later, the ritual is over.
I’m not sure if I should tell her what I think, but Hilal is so full of generosity and love, she deserves to hear what I have to say.
“What was that?” I ask.
She seems put out.
“A ritual to bring us closer to the spirits,” she explains.
“And where did you learn it?”
“In a book?”
Should I go on or wait until we’re alone? Since Tatiana was also part of the ritual, I decide to continue.
“With all due respect to your research and to the person who wrote the book, I think you’ve got hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick. What is the point of such a ritual? I see millions and millions of people convinced that they’re communicating with the Cosmos and thus saving the human race. Each time it fails, as it always will, they lose a little bit of hope. The next new book or seminar restores their faith, but after a few weeks they forget what they learned, and hope drains away.”
Hilal is surprised. She wanted to show me something beyond her talent as a violinist, but she touched on a dangerous area, the only one in which my tolerance level is zero. Tatiana must think me very rude, which is why she speaks out in defense of her new friend: “But isn’t prayer a way of bringing us closer to God?”
“Allow me to answer with another question: will all your prayers make the sun rise tomorrow? Of course not. The sun rises in obedience to a universal law. God is always close to us, whether we pray to him or not.”
“Are you saying that our prayers are useless?” says Tatiana.
“Not at all. If you don’t get up early, you’ll never see the sun rise. If you don’t pray, God may be near, but you won’t feel His presence. However, if you believe that invocations like the one you just made are the only way forward, then you had better move to the Sonora Desert in America or to an ashram in India. In the real world, God is more easily to be found in Hilal’s violin.”
Tatiana bursts into tears. Neither Hilal nor I know quite what to do. We wait for her to finish crying and tell us what she’s feeling.
“Thank you,” she says. “Even though in your opinion it was useless, thank you. I have hundreds of wounds that I carry around with me, and yet I’m obliged to behave as if I were the happiest person in the world. At least today I felt someone take my hand and say, ‘You’re not alone, come with us, show me what you know.’ I felt loved, useful, important.”
She turns to Hilal and goes on.
“Even when you said that you knew this city better than I do, the city where I was born and where I’ve lived all my life, I didn’t feel belittled or insulted. I believed you; I wasn’t alone anymore; someone was going to show me something I didn’t know. I have never seen this fountain before, and now, whenever I feel low, I’ll come back here and ask God to protect me. I know that the words weren’t anything very special. I’ve often said such prayers before and never been heard, and each time that happened, my faith ebbed away. Today, however, something did happen, because although you are strangers, you’re not strangers to me.”
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 cliche, and yet the cliche 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
