But my one thought is:
Before me lies a vast lake, so big that I can barely see the far shore. Against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, a fishing boat is setting out across the lake’s transparent waters and will presumably return this evening. All I want is to be here, entirely present, because I don’t know if I will ever come back. I take several deep breaths, trying to soak up the beauty of it all.
“It’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.”
Encouraged by this remark, Yao decides to feed me some facts. He explains that Lake Baikal, called the North Sea in ancient Chinese texts, contains roughly twenty percent of the world’s surface fresh water and is more than twenty-five million years old. Unfortunately, none of this interests me.
“Don’t distract me; I want to absorb this whole landscape into my soul.”
“It’s very big. Why don’t you just plunge straight in and merge your soul with the soul of the lake?”
In other words, risk suffering thermal shock and dying of hypothermia in Siberia. He has finally managed to get my attention. My head is heavy, the wind unbearable, and we decide to go straight to the place where we are to spend the night.
“Thank you for coming. You won’t regret it.”
We go to an inn in a little village with dirt roads and houses like the ones I saw in Irkutsk. There is a well near the door, and a little girl is standing by it, trying to draw up a bucket of water. Hilal goes to help her, but instead of pulling on the rope, she positions the child perilously near the edge.
“According to the
The child’s mother comes over and berates Hilal. I leave them to it and go to my room. Yao had been vehemently opposed to Hilal coming with us. Women are not allowed in the place where we are going to meet the shaman. I told him that I wasn’t particularly interested in making the visit. I know the Tradition, which is to be found everywhere, and I’ve met various shamans in my own country. I agreed to go only because Yao has helped me and taught me many things during the journey.
“I need to spend every second I can with Hilal,” I had said while we were still in Irkutsk. “I know what I’m doing. I am on the path back to my kingdom. If she doesn’t help me now, I will have only three more chances in this life.”
He didn’t understand exactly what I meant, but he gave in.
I put my backpack down in one corner of my room, turn the heat up to maximum, close the curtains, and fall onto the bed, hoping my headache will go away. At this point, Hilal comes in.
“You left me out there, talking to that woman. You know I hate strangers.”
“We’re the strangers here.”
“I hate being judged all the time and having to hide my fear, my emotions, my vulnerabilities. You think I’m a brave, talented young woman who is never intimidated by anything. Well, you’re wrong. Everything intimidates me. I avoid glances, smiles, close contact. You’re the only person I’ve really talked to. Or haven’t you noticed?”
Lake Baikal, snowcapped mountains, limpid water, one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and this stupid conversation.
“Let’s rest for a while, then we can go out for a walk. I’m meeting the shaman tonight.” She makes as if to put down her backpack, but I say, “You have your own room.”
“But on the train…”
She doesn’t complete her sentence and leaves, slamming the door. I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, wondering what to do. I can’t let myself be guided by my feelings of guilt. I can’t and I won’t, because I love another woman who is far away just now and who trusts her husband even though she knows him well. All my previous attempts at explanation have failed; perhaps here would be the ideal place to set things straight once and for all with this obsessive, adaptable, strong but fragile young woman.
I am not to blame for what is happening. Neither is Hilal. Life has placed us in this situation, and I just hope it is for the good of both of us. Hope? I’m sure it is. I start praying and immediately fall asleep.
WHEN I WAKE UP I go to her room, and from outside I can hear her playing the violin. I wait until she has finished, then knock on the door.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
She looks at me, surprised and happy. “Are you feeling better? Can you stand the wind and the cold?”
“Yes, I’m much better. Let’s go.”
We walk through the village, which is like something out of a fairy tale. One day, tourists will come here, vast hotels will be built, and shops will sell T-shirts, lighters, postcards, models of the wooden houses. They will make huge parking lots for the double-decker coaches that will bring people armed with digital cameras, determined to capture the whole lake on a microchip. The well we saw will be destroyed and replaced by another, more decorative one; however, it won’t supply the inhabitants with water but will be sealed by order of the council so that no foreign children risk leaning over the edge and falling in. The fishing boat I saw this morning will vanish. The waters of the lake will be crisscrossed by modern yachts offering day cruises to the center of the lake, lunch included. Professional fishermen and hunters will arrive, armed with the necessary licenses for which they will pay, per day, the equivalent of what the local fishermen and hunters earn in a year.
At the moment, though, it’s just a remote village in Siberia, where a man and a woman less than half his age are walking alongside a river created by the thaw. They sit down beside it.
“Do you remember our conversation last night in the restaurant?”
“More or less. I had rather a lot to drink, but I remember Yao standing up to that Englishman.”
“I talked about the past.”
“Yes, I remember. I understood perfectly what you said, because during that moment when we were in the Aleph, I saw that your eyes were full of a mixture of love and indifference, and your head was covered by a hood. I felt betrayed and humiliated. But I’m not interested in what our relationship was in a past life. We’re here in the present.”
“You see this river? Well, in the living room in my apartment at home is a painting of a rose immersed in just such a river. Half of the painting was exposed to the effects of the water and the elements, so the edges are a bit rough, and yet I can still see part of that beautiful red rose against a gold background. I know the artist. In 2003, we went to a forest in the Pyrenees, found a dried-up stream, and hid the painting under the stones on the streambed.
“The artist is my wife. At this moment, she’s thousands of kilometers away and will still be sleeping because day has not yet dawned in her city, even though here it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve been together for more than a quarter of a century. When I met her, I was convinced that our relationship wouldn’t work out, and for the first two years, I was sure that one of us would leave. In the five years that followed, I continued to think that we had simply got used to one another and that as soon as we realized this, we would each go our separate ways. I thought that a more serious commitment would deprive me of my ‘liberty’ and keep me from experiencing everything I wanted to experience.”
I see that Hilal is starting to feel uncomfortable.
“And what has that got to do with the river and the rose?”
“By the summer of 2002, I was already a well-known writer with plenty of money, and I believed that my basic values hadn’t changed. But how could I be sure? I decided to test things out. We rented a small room in a two-star hotel in France, intending to spend five months of the year there. There was just one small wardrobe in the room, and so we had to keep clothes to a minimum. We went for long walks in the forests and the mountains, ate out, spent hours talking, and went to the cinema every day. Living like that confirmed to us that the most sophisticated things in the world are precisely those within the reach of everyone.
“We both love what we do, but whereas all I need is a laptop, my wife is a painter, and painters need vast studios in which to produce and store their paintings. I didn’t want her to give up her vocation for my sake, and so I suggested renting a studio. Meanwhile, though, she had looked around her at the mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, and forests, and thought,
Hilal’s eyes are fixed on the river.
“That was where she got the idea of ‘storing’ pictures in the open air. I would take my laptop and do my
