Пауло Коэльо - Hippie

“Let’s go to my room. But first I want you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“You must never leave my side. There are several kinds of LSD, and this is the most potent—you could have an amazing experience or an awful one.”

Marie laughed. The Dutch girl had no idea who Marie was, the things she’d already experienced in life.

“Promise me,” Karla insisted.

“I promise.”

The rest of their group was ready to leave, and “girl problems” were the perfect excuse for that moment. They would be back in ten minutes.

Karla opened the door and felt proud to show off her room; Marie saw the clothes hung out to dry, the window open to let in fresh air, and a bed with two pillows that looked as if a hurricane had blown through—which was in fact what had happened, taking several things with it and leaving others behind.

She walked over to her backpack, grabbed the book, opened it to page 155, and, with tiny scissors she always carried with her, cut a quarter of a square inch of paper.

Next, she handed it to Marie and asked her to chew it.

“That’s all?”

“To tell the truth, I’d thought about giving you only half. But then I thought it might not have any effect, so I’m giving you the amount I used to take.”

That wasn’t the truth. She was giving the girl a half dose and, depending on Marie’s behavior and tolerance for the drug, she’d make sure she had the real experience—she was simply waiting a bit.

“Remember what I’m telling you: it’s what I used to take, it’s been more than a year since I’ve put LSD in my mouth and I’m not sure I’ll ever do it again. There are other, better ways to achieve the same effect, though I don’t have the patience to try them out.”

“Such as?” Marie had put the paper in her mouth, it was too late now to change her mind.

“Meditation. Yoga. Overwhelming passion. That sort of thing. Anything that makes us think about the world as though we’re seeing it for the first time.”

“How long until I feel the effects?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the person.”

Karla closed the book again and put it back in her bag. They went downstairs, and everyone walked together to the Grand Bazaar.

Back at the hotel, Mirthe had grabbed a brochure about the bazaar, founded in 1455 by a sultan who’d managed to wrest Constantinople from the hands of the pope. In an era when the Ottoman Empire ruled the world, the bazaar was the place people brought their wares, and it grew and grew to such an extent that the ceiling structures had to be expanded several times.

Even after having read this, the group was far from ready for what they would find—thousands of people walking through packed corridors, fountains, restaurants, prayer spots, coffee, rugs—everything, absolutely everything you could find in France’s best department store: finely wrought gold jewelry, clothes in all styles and colors, shoes, rugs of all kinds, working artisans indifferent to those around them.

One of the merchants wanted to know if they were interested in antiques—the fact that they were tourists was written on their foreheads; it was clear from the way they looked around them.

“How many stores are there?” Jacques asked the merchant.

“Three thousand. Two mosques. Several fountains, an enormous number of places where you can have the best Turkish food. But I have some religious statuary you won’t find anywhere else.”

Jacques thanked him, said he’d be back soon—the merchant knew it was a lie and briefly redoubled his efforts but soon saw it was useless and wished them all a good day.

“Did you know Mark Twain was here?” asked Mirthe, who at this point was covered in sweat and somewhat frightened by what she was seeing. What if there was a fire, how would they get out? Where was the door, the tiny little door they’d used to come in? How would they keep the group together when everyone wanted to see something different?

“And what did Mark Twain have to say?”

“He said it was impossible to describe what he saw, but that it had been a much more powerful, more important experience than his visit to the city. He spoke of the colors, the immense variety of visual tones, the rugs, people conversing, the apparent chaos that nonetheless seemed to follow an order he was unable to explain. ‘If I want to buy shoes,’ he wrote, ‘I don’t need to go from store to store along the street, comparing prices and models, but simply find the aisle of shoemakers, lined up one after another, without there being any sort of competition or annoyance between them; it all depends on who is the better salesman.”

Mirthe didn’t care to mention that the bazaar had already been through four fires and an earthquake—it wasn’t known how many had died because the hotel brochure said only this and glossed over any talk of body counts.

Karla noticed that Marie’s eyes were glued to the ceiling, its curved beams and its arches, and she’d begun to smile as if she could say nothing beyond “incredible, absolutely incredible.”

They walked at about a mile per hour. When one person stopped, the rest did, too. Karla needed some privacy.

“At this rate, we won’t even make it to the corner of the next aisle. Why don’t we split up and meet back at the hotel? Unfortunately—I repeat, unfortunately—we’ll be leaving this place tomorrow, so we have to make the most of this last day.”

The idea was greeted with enthusiasm, and Jacques turned to his daughter to take her with him, but Karla stopped him.

“I can’t stay here on my own. Let the two of us discover this universe of wonders together.”

Jacques noticed that his daughter didn’t so much as glance at him, she merely repeated “incredible!” as she stared at the ceiling. Had someone offered her hashish when they entered the bazaar? Had she accepted? She was old enough to take care of herself—he left her with Karla, that girl who was always ahead of her time and always trying to show how much smarter and more sophisticated she was than all the rest, though she’d toned it down a bit—only a bit—during the last two days in Istanbul.

He went his way and disappeared amid the multitude. Karla grabbed Marie by the arm.

“Let’s get out of here right now.”

“But everything is so beautiful. Look at the colors: absolutely incredible!”

Karla wasn’t asking, she was giving orders, and began to gently tug Marie toward the exit.

The exit?

Where was the exit? “Incredible!” Marie was growing increasingly intoxicated with what she saw, and completely inert, while Karla asked several people the best way out and received several different answers. She started to get nervous; that itself was as disorienting as an LSD trip, and she wasn’t sure where the combination of the two would leave Marie.

Her more aggressive, more dominating manner returned; she walked first in one direction then another, but she could not find the door through which they’d entered. It didn’t matter if they returned the way they’d come, but each second now was precious—the air had grown heavy, people were full of sweat, no one paid attention to anything except what they were buying, selling, or bargaining over.

Finally, an idea came to her. Instead of looking for the exit, she ought to walk in a straight line, in a single direction, and sooner or later she’d find the wall that separated the largest temple to consumerism she’d ever seen from the outside world. She charted a straight path, begging God (God?) that it also be the shortest. As they walked in the direction they’d chosen, she was interrupted a thousand times by people trying to sell their wares. She pushed past them without so much as an “excuse me” and without considering they could well push back.