Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

I found out where her lab was, but I didn’t go. She’d be too busy to do a reading for a silly author, I was sure—excuses were always my strong suit. Perhaps she didn’t even do readings anymore, being a famous and busy doctor. My wish to meet her remained just that—a wish. I still wish for it now, but it is too late. Even picking up the phone is too hard for me now.

There’s a knock on the door—a futile gesture. Weak as I am, the mere thought of saying “come in” makes me feel tired. I hear my thought echoed by the gruff voice of an orderly. There’s some argument about nobody being allowed to see me, but it’s settled quickly.

The door opens gently, and the tapping of low heels approaches my bed. I wait until she gets within my view—no use wasting my strength on turning my head. I wonder who she is and what she wants. I don’t get many visitors—Ray is the only one, in fact. I made sure the press was kept out.

“Hello, Simon,” she says. The voice startles me so that for a moment I forget my weakness and turn my head, and I see her sad smile. “I’m Sedef. You once came to me for a reading.”

As if I could forget. Yet the shock adds to my weakness and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t even smile back at her. I think of that old man that I hit—how silently he fell.

She has aged a lot since last I’d seen her. At last her looks seem to have caught up with her age. She looks rounder, and her hair, black touched with gray, is more orderly now. Perhaps she has a daughter named Pearl who is combing it for her, I muse—creating background details is a hard habit to break. Her clothes are more elegant, and I think the suit suits her—I find the pun amusing.

The joke eases the shock, and at last I manage to straighten my fingers—a feeble gesture of hello. She notices it and smiles. I’m glad now that the blanket is not over my hand, even though my arm feels cold.

She sits by my bed on the chair that up till now has been reserved for Ray, on his infrequent visits. She takes my cold hand in her warm one. It’s a good feeling, to have someone warm touch me. Her smile is warm, too, and there is warmth in her eyes. I find that I’m a little uncomfortable with all that warmth, even though I’ve often wished for more warmth, both for my body and for my heart. I don’t complain, though—I let her keep holding my hand.

“You know,” she says, “I was really insulted when you left me, twenty years ago, and even more when you didn’t come back. I decided to put you out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I met no one like you, with your power to alter the possibilities, and that strange barrier in your past. When I found out who you were, I was even more intrigued. You couldn’t have thought that the other path would have made you more successful. So why were you interested in it?

“I tried quite a few tricks to see your other path. I even researched you and read some of your books to get a better feeling for you. You know, some of them are quite disturbing. I liked the Lilian series, though. It’s more humorous and optimistic. It helped me forget the insult and think that perhaps there was some good in you after all.

“Anyway, I finally discovered that to move through the barrier I first had to move a little farther back in time. I didn’t even know I could do that, before. It then became easier than any other reading. It was as if your other path was the natural one, and I had to get back on it and then continue. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. Still…,” she pauses and smiles, “I guess I must thank you for all that practice. It really helped me understand better what I could do. It helped me help people better. Thank you.” It feels bad to get thanked for being selfish, but her gentle “thank you” warms my heart nonetheless.

“You had a very interesting life in that other possibility. Once I saw all I could see, I continued to follow you, day by day, in that other life. I can’t see the future, you see, even in another possibility, so I spent a little time each day finding out what you were doing. Then you died there, and I thought that if you were still alive here….I guess I’d better start from the beginning.

“Let me tell you the story of a young man,” she says. “He left his home, his parents, his sister, and went to war. It wasn’t easy for him to leave, and worse still was the war itself. Many of his friends died, people he cared a lot for. When it ended, he couldn’t face going home. He felt that it wasn’t right for him to live, with his friends dead. He started taking foolish risks, learning sports like cliff diving and bull fighting. Perhaps he was even disappointed that he was good enough at them to escape dying for years and years.

“It was in his days in Spain that he met a young woman from Turkey. He didn’t want to be her friend, but she always came to see him fight. She saw something special in him. Once, after he was injured pretty badly by the bull, she happened to see him being brought to the hospital where she interned. It wasn’t easy for her to get to see him, as he was quite famous, but she managed to pull a few strings and visit him.” She smiles. “I guess it’s the kind of thing she does.

“He talked to her then. He told her that he was sorry the bull hadn’t killed him. He said that he had friends waiting for him in another world, where life was beautiful and there were no wars.

“Then he talked to her about wars. He talked about them for hours and hours. He would only go to sleep when the doctors made the woman leave his side and would continue talking when she returned. ‘Soldiers are dreamers,’ he said, ‘and when a soldier dies, there is a little less dreamt beauty in the world.’”

I understand now what she had told me about how people react to her readings. That really felt like me, when I was younger and naïve.

“He talked about the dreams of his friends and how these dreams came to an end. And he talked about the dead of the enemy. He described the horrors of the ones unfortunate enough to survive, without parts of their body, or without a place to live or things to eat. When he came to the end of what he had seen with his own eyes, he talked of the wars he had heard about, the horrors he could only imagine.

“Eventually he finished talking and slept for an entire day. When he woke up, he said that perhaps it was good that he hadn’t died. He had a gift for stories before he went to war, he said. Perhaps if he could put all those horrors on paper, to show people what war was like, then he could do some good and make his friends in heaven happy.

“But the woman had a special gift. She had heard his war stories, and she had sensed something, and so she told him no. ‘You are special,’ she said. ‘Whatever you tell becomes more real, more possible. Don’t tell stories of war; tell stories of peace.’

“And he did. He told her stories of ending conflicts, of age-old feuds becoming forgotten through acts of love and kindness; of tyrants falling and of religious tolerance. He told of the Koreas healing back into one country, of Turkey and Greece ending their differences, of peace in the Middle East, of Europe joined. She was his only audience. ‘People don’t want stories of peace,’ he used to say. ‘They want conflict, action.’

“They moved in together, into a small apartment on the outskirts of Madrid. She worked at the hospital while he took care of their children and thought of new stories to tell. She would come home exhausted, and he would read stories to her while she slept. Around them the world blossomed. It took years and years, but they could track the change. Those stories that he typed they kept together with the news clippings from the papers when they became true. They could not be any happier, with each other, with their children, and with the world.