Paulo Coelho - Aleph

There’s no point in arguing, but I know she’s right. That’s how it will be. I’m fifty-nine and she’s twenty-one.

WE GO BACK TO THE PLACE where we’re staying. Not a hotel this time but a vast house built in 1974 for a summit on disarmament between Leonid Brezhnev, then general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the American president at the time, Gerald Ford. It is made all of white marble, with a vast hall in the middle and a series of rooms leading off it. These must once have been intended for political delegations but are now used for occasional guests.

We intend to take a shower, change our clothes, and go straight out to supper in the city, far from that chilly atmosphere. However, a man is standing right in the middle of the hall. My publishers go over to him. Yao and I keep a prudent distance.

The man takes out his cell phone and dials a number. Now my publisher is speaking respectfully into the phone, his eyes bright with happiness. My editor is smiling, too. My publisher’s voice echoes around the marble walls.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“You’ll find out in a minute,” answers Yao.

My publisher turns off the phone and comes toward me, beaming.

“We’re going back to Moscow tomorrow,” he says. “We have to be there by five in the afternoon.”

“Weren’t we going to stay here for a couple of days? I haven’t even had time for a wander around the city. Besides, it’s a nine-hour flight to Moscow. How could we possibly be there by five o’clock?”

“There’s a seven-hour time difference. If we leave here at midday, we’ll be there by two. That’s plenty of time. I’m going to cancel the restaurant booking this evening and ask them to serve supper here. I’ve got a lot of arranging to do.”

“But why the urgency? My plane for Germany leaves on—”

He interrupts me, saying, “It seems that President Vladimir Putin has read all about your journey and would like to meet you.”

“AND WHAT ABOUT ME?”

My publisher turns to Hilal.

“It was your decision to come with us, and you can go back how and when you want. It’s nothing to do with us.”

The man with the cell phone has vanished. My publishers leave, and Yao goes with them. Hilal and I are alone in the middle of that vast, oppressive marble hallway.

Everything happened so fast that we still haven’t recovered from the shock. I had no idea President Putin even knew about my journey. Hilal cannot believe that things are going to end so abruptly, so suddenly, without her having another opportunity to talk to me of love, to explain how important everything we’ve experienced is for our lives and that we should carry on, even if I am married. That, at least, is what I imagine is going through her mind.

You can’t do this to me! You can’t just leave me here! You killed me once because you didn’t have the guts to say “no,” and now you’re going to kill me again!

She runs to her room, and I fear the worst. If she’s serious, anything is possible. I want to phone my publisher and ask him to buy a ticket for her; otherwise, we could be faced by a terrible tragedy, and then there will be no meeting with Putin, no kingdom, no redemption, no conquest, and my big adventure will end in suicide and death. I run to her room, which is on the second floor, but she has already opened the windows.

“Stop! You won’t kill yourself if you jump from this height—you’ll just be crippled for the rest of your life.”

She isn’t listening. I have to stay calm and in control of the situation. I have to be as authoritative as she was in Baikal when she ordered me not to turn around and see her naked. A thousand thoughts go through my mind, and I take the easiest route.

“Look, I love you. I would never leave you here alone.”

She knows this isn’t true, but my words of love have an instantaneous effect.

“You love me like a river, you said, but I love you the way a woman loves a man.”

Hilal doesn’t want to die. If she did, she would have said nothing. But quite apart from the words she used, her voice is saying, “You’re part of me, the most important part, and it’s being left behind. I will never be the person I was.” She’s quite wrong, but this is not the moment to explain something she won’t understand.

“And I love you the way a man loves a woman, as I did before and always will for as long as the world exists. I explained to you once: time doesn’t pass. Do I have to say it again?”

She turns around.

“That’s a lie. Life is a dream from which we wake only when we meet death. Time passes while we live. I’m a musician, and I have to deal with the time of musical notation every day. If time didn’t exist, there would be no music.”

She’s speaking coherently now. And I do love her. Not as a woman, but I do love her.

“Music isn’t a succession of notes. It’s the constant movement of a note between sound and silence,” I say.

“What do you know about music? Even if you were right, what does it matter now? You’re a prisoner of your past, and so am I. If I loved you in one life, I will continue to love you forever! I have no heart, no body, no soul, nothing! All I have is love. You think I exist, but that’s just an optical illusion. What you’re seeing is Love in its purest state, yearning to reveal itself, but there is no time or space where it can do that.”

She moves away from the window and starts pacing up and down the room. She has no intention of throwing herself out the window now. Apart from her footsteps on the wooden floor, all I can hear is the infernal tick-tock of a clock, proving me wrong about time. Time does exist, and, at that very moment, it is busily consuming us. I need Yao, that poor man through whose soul the black wind of loneliness still blows but who always feels good whenever he can help someone else; he could have calmed her down.

“Go back to your wife! Go back to the woman who has always been by your side through thick and thin! She’s generous, loving, tolerant, and I’m everything you hate: complicated, aggressive, obsessive, capable of anything!”

“What right have you to talk about my wife?”

I am once again losing control of the situation.

“I’ll say what I like. You never could control me, and you never will!”

Keep calm. Keep talking, and she’ll quiet down . But I’ve never seen anyone in such a state before. I try another tack.

“Then be glad that no one can control you. Celebrate the fact that you were brave enough to risk your career and set off in search of adventure, and find it, too. Remember what I said on the boat: someone, one day, will light the sacred fire for you. And from now on, it won’t be your fingers playing the violin but the angels’. Let God use your hands. Your feelings of bitterness will eventually disappear, and the person fate has placed in your path will arrive bearing a bouquet of happiness in his hands, and then everything will be fine. Right now, you feel desperate and think I’m lying, but that’s how it will be.”

Too late.

I have said precisely the wrong thing, which could be summarized in just two words: “Grow up.” No woman I’ve ever known would have accepted that piece of advice.

Hilal picks up a heavy metal lamp, rips the plug out of the wall, and hurls the lamp in my direction. I manage to catch it before it hits my face, but now she’s slapping me as hard as she can. I drop the lamp and try to grab her arms but fail. A fist hits my nose, and blood spurts in all directions.

She and I are covered in my blood.

“The soul of Turkey will give your husband all the love she possesses, but she will spill his blood before she reveals what it is she is seeking.”