The Zahir

by Paulo Coelho

  “Did she never tell you her name?” asks one of the beggars.

  “Never. But it doesn’t matter because I always know when she’s talking to me.”

  “Could we find out something about our dead?”

  “No. That only happened during one particular period. Now my mission is different. May I go on with my story?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “But can I just ask one thing? There’s a town in southwest France called Lourdes. A long time ago, a shepherdess saw a little girl, who seems to correspond to your vision.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” says one of the older beggars, who has an artificial leg. “The shepherdess, whose name was Bernadette, saw the Virgin Mary.”

  “I’ve written a book about her visions and I had to study the matter closely,” I say. “I read everything that was published about it at the end of the nineteenth century; I had access to Bernadette’s many statements to the police, to the church, and to scholars. At no point does she say that she saw a woman; she insists it was a girl. She repeated the same story all her life and was deeply angered by the statue that was placed in the grotto; she said it bore no resemblance to her vision, because she had seen a little girl, not a woman. Nevertheless, the church appropriated the story, the visions, and the place and transformed the apparition into the Mother of Jesus, and the truth was forgotten. If a lie is repeated often enough, it ends up convincing everyone. The only difference is that ‘the little girl’—as Bernadette always referred to her—had a name.”

  “What was it?” asks Mikhail.

  “‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’ Obviously that isn’t a name like Beatriz or Maria or Isabelle. She describes herself as a fact, an event, a happening, which is sometimes translated as ‘I am birth without sex.’ Now, please, go on with your story.”

  “Before he does, can I ask you something?” says another beggar, who must be about my age. “You just said that you’ve written a book; what’s the title?”

  “I’ve written many books.”

  And I tell him the title of the book in which I mention the story of Bernadette and her vision.

  “So you’re the husband of the journalist?”

  “Are you Esther’s husband?” asks a female beggar, wide-eyed; she is dressed garishly, in a green hat and a purple coat.

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Why hasn’t she been back here?” asks someone else. “I hope she isn’t dead. She was always going to such dangerous places. I often told her she shouldn’t. Look what she gave me!”

  And she shows me a scrap of bloodstained fabric, part of the dead soldier’s shirt.

  “No, she’s not dead,” I say. “But I’m surprised to hear that she used to come here.”

  “Why? Because we’re different?”

  “No, you misunderstand me. I’m not judging you. I’m surprised and pleased to know that she did.”

  However, the vodka we have been drinking to ward off the cold is having an effect on all of us.

  “Now you’re being ironic,” says a burly man with long hair, who looks as if he hasn’t shaved for several days. “If you think you’re in such bad company, why don’t you leave.”

  I have been drinking too and that gives me courage.

  “Who are you? What kind of life is this? You’re healthy, you could work, but instead you prefer to hang around doing nothing!”

  “We choose to stay outside, outside a world that is fast collapsing, outside people who live in constant fear of losing something, who walk along the street as if everything was fine, when, in fact, everything is bad, very bad indeed! Don’t you beg too? Don’t you ask for alms from your boss to pay the owner of your apartment?”

  “Aren’t you ashamed to be wasting your life?” asks the woman in the purple coat.

  “Who said I’m wasting my life? I do precisely what I want to do.”

  The burly man interrupts, saying:

  “And what is it you want? To live on top of the world? Who told you that the mountain is necessarily better than the plain? You think we don’t know how to live, don’t you? Well, your wife understood that we know exactly what we want from life. Do you know what we want? Peace! Freedom! And not to be obliged to follow the latest fashions—we make our own fashions here! We drink when we want to and sleep whenever we feel like it! Not one person here chose slavery and we’re proud of it, even though you and people like you may think we’re just a lot of pathetic freeloaders!”

  The voices are beginning to grow aggressive. Mikhail steps in:

  “Do you want to hear the rest of my story or shall we leave now?”

  “He’s criticizing us!” says the man with the artificial leg. “He came here to judge us, as if he were God!”

  There are a few more rumbles of complaint, someone slaps me on the back, I offer around my cigarettes, the bottle of vodka is placed in my hand again. People gradually calm down, and I am still surprised and shocked that these people knew Esther, apparently better than I did, since she gave them—and not me—a piece of that bloodstained shirt.

  Mikhail goes on with his story.

  “Since I have nowhere to go and study and I’m still too young to look after horses—which are the pride of our region and our country—I become a shepherd. During the first week, one of the sheep dies and a rumor goes around that I’m cursed, that I’m the son of a man who came from far away and promised my mother great wealth, then ended up leaving us nothing. The Communists may have told them that religion is just a way of giving false hopes to the desperate, they may all have been brought up to believe that only reality exists and that anything our eyes can’t see is just the fruit of the human imagination; but the ancient traditions of the steppes remain untouched and are passed by word of mouth across the generations.

  “Now that the tree has been felled, I no longer see the little girl, although I still hear her voice. I ask her to help me in tending the flocks, and she tells me to be patient; there are difficult times ahead, but before I am twenty-two a woman from far away will come and carry me off to see the world. She also tells me that I have a mission to fulfill, and that mission is to spread the true energy of love throughout the world.

  “The owner of the sheep is worried by the increasingly wild rumors. Oddly, the people spreading these rumors and trying to destroy my life are the very people whom the little girl had helped during the whole of the previous year. One day, he decides to go to the Communist Party office in the next village, where he learns that both I and my mother are considered to be enemies of the people. I am immediately dismissed. Not that this greatly affects our life, because my mother does embroidery for a company in the largest city in the region and there no one knows that we are enemies of the people and of the working classes; all the factory owners want is for her to continue working on her embroidery from dawn to dusk.

  “I now have all the time in the world and so I wander the steppes with the hunters, who know my story and believe that I have magical powers, because they always find foxes when I’m around. I spend whole days at the museum of the poet, studying his possessions, reading his books, listening to the people who come there to recite his verses. Now and then, I feel the warm wind blowing, see the lights, and fall to the ground, and then the voice tells me concrete facts—when the next drought will come, when the animals will fall sick, when the traders will arrive. I tell no one except my mother, who is becoming ever more anxious and concerned about me.

  “One day, she takes me to see a doctor who is visiting the area. After listening attentively to my story, taking notes, peering into my eyes with a strange instrument, listening to my heart, and tapping my knee, he diagnoses a form of epilepsy. He says it isn’t contagious and that the attacks will diminish with age.

  “I know it isn’t an illness, but I pretend to believe him so as to reassure my mother. The director of the museum, who notices me struggling to learn, takes pity on me and becomes my teacher. With him I learn geography and literature and the one thing t
hat will prove vital to me in the future: English. One afternoon, the voice asks me to tell the director that he will shortly be offered an important post. When I tell him this, all I hear is a timid laugh and a firm response: there isn’t the remotest chance of this ever happening because not only has he never been a Party member, he is a devout Muslim.

  “I am fifteen years old. Two months after this conversation, I sense that something is changing in the region. The normally arrogant civil servants are suddenly much kinder and ask if I would like to go back to school. Great convoys of Russian soldiers head off to the frontier. One evening, while I am studying in the little office that once belonged to the poet, the director comes running in and looks at me with a mixture of alarm and embarrassment. He tells me that the one thing he could never imagine happening—the collapse of the Communist regime—is happening right now, and with incredible speed. The former Soviet republics are becoming independent countries; the news from Almaty is all about the formation of a new government, and he has been appointed to govern the province!

  “Instead of joyfully embracing me, he asks me how I knew this was going to happen. Had I overheard someone talking about it? Had I been engaged by the secret services to spy on him because he did not belong to the Party? Or—worst of all—had I, at some point in my life, made a pact with the devil?

  “I remind him that he knows my story: the little girl, the voice, the attacks that allow me to hear things that other people do not know. He says this is just part of my illness; there is only one prophet, Mohammed, and everything that needed to be said has already been revealed. This, he goes on, does not mean that the devil is not still abroad in the world, using all kinds of tricks—including a supposed ability to foresee the future—to deceive the weak and lure people away from the true faith. He had given me a job because Islam demands that we should be charitable, but now he deeply regretted it: I am clearly either a tool of the secret services or an envoy of the devil.

  “He dismisses me there and then.

  “Life had not been easy before and it now becomes harder still. The factory for which my mother works, and which once belonged to the government, falls into private hands, and the new owners have very different ideas; they restructure the whole business and she, too, is dismissed. Two months later, we have nothing to live on, and all that remains for us is to leave the village where I have spent my whole life and go in search of work.

  “My grandparents refuse to leave; they would rather die of hunger on the land where they were born and have spent their entire lives. My mother and I go to Almaty and I see my first big city: I am amazed at the cars, the huge buildings, the neon signs, the escalators and—above all—the elevators. My mother gets a job in a shop and I go to work at a garage as a trainee mechanic. Much of the money we earn is sent back to my grandparents, but there is enough left over for us to be able to eat and for me to see things I have never seen before: films, fairs, and football games.

  “When we move to the city, my attacks vanish, but so does the voice and the little girl’s presence. It’s better that way, I decide. I am too fascinated by Almaty and too busy earning a living to miss the invisible friend who has been my companion since I was eight years old; I realize that all it takes to become someone in the world is a little intelligence. Then, one Sunday night, I am sitting at our small apartment’s only window, which looks out onto a small dirt alleyway. I am very worried because, the day before, I dented a car as I was maneuvering it inside the garage and am so frightened I might get the sack that I haven’t eaten all day.

  “Suddenly, I feel the warm wind and see the lights. According to my mother, I fell to the floor and spoke in a strange language and the trance seemed to last longer than usual. I remember that it was then that the voice reminded me of my mission. When I come to, I can feel the presence of the little girl again, and although I cannot see her, I can talk to her.

  “A change of home has meant a change of worlds too, and I am no longer interested in all this. Nevertheless, I ask her what my mission is: the voice tells me that it is the mission shared by all human beings—to fill the world with the energy of total love. I ask about the one thing that is really worrying me at that precise moment: the dented car and the owner’s reaction. She tells me not to worry, just tell the truth and he will understand.

  “I work at the garage for five more years. I make friends, have my first girlfriends, discover sex, get involved in street fights; in short, I have an entirely normal adolescence. I have a few fits and, at first, my friends are surprised, but then I invent some story about being in possession of ‘higher powers’ and this earns me their respect. They ask for my help, consult me when they have problems with their girlfriends or with their families, but I never ask the voice for advice—the traumatic experience of seeing the tree cut down all those years ago has made me realize that when you help someone you get only ingratitude in return.

  “If my friends probe further, I tell them I belong to a ‘secret society.’ After decades of religious repression in Kazakhstan, mysticism and the esoteric are now very fashionable in Almaty. Books are published about people with so-called higher powers, about gurus and teachers from India and China; courses of self-improvement abound. I go to a few, but realize that I have nothing to learn. The only thing I really trust is the voice, but I am too busy to pay attention to what it is saying.

  “One day, a woman in a four-wheel drive stops at the garage where I work and asks me to fill up the tank. She addresses me in halting, heavily accented Russian, and I respond in English. She seems relieved and asks if I know of an interpreter who could go with her into the interior of Kazakhstan.

  “The moment she says this, the little girl’s presence fills the whole place, and I understand that this is the person I have been waiting for all my life. She is my way out, and I must not miss this opportunity. I tell her that, if she wants, I can be her interpreter. She says that I obviously have a job already and, besides, she needs someone older, more experienced, someone who is free to travel. I say that I know every path in the steppes and the mountains, and I lie, saying that the job I have is only temporary. I beg her to give me a chance; reluctantly, she arranges to meet me later in the city’s most luxurious hotel.

  “We meet in the lounge; she tests my knowledge of English, asks a series of questions about the geography of Central Asia, wants to know who I am and where I come from. She is suspicious and will not say exactly what she does or where she wants to go. I try to play my part as best I can, but I can see she’s not convinced.

  “And I am surprised to realize that, for no apparent reason, I am in love with her, with this woman I have only known for a matter of hours. I control my anxiety and once more place my trust in the voice. I plead for help from the invisible girl and ask her to enlighten me; I promise that, if I get this job, I will carry out the mission entrusted to me; she had told me that one day a woman would come and take me far away from there; she had been there with me when the woman stopped to fill her tank; I need a positive response.

  “After Esther’s intense questioning, I sense that I am beginning to win her confidence; she warns me that what she wants to do is completely illegal. She explains that she is a journalist and wants to write an article about the American bases being built in a neighboring country in preparation for a war that is about to begin. Her application for a visa has been turned down and so we will have to travel on foot, crossing the border at points where there are no guards. Her contacts have given her a map and shown her where it is safe to cross, but she says she will reveal none of this until we are far from Almaty. If I want to go with her, I must be at the hotel in two days’ time at eleven o’clock in the morning. She promises me only a week’s wages, unaware that I have a permanent job, earn enough to help out my mother and my grandparents, and that my boss trusts me despite having been witness to several of the convulsive attacks—what he calls my “epileptic fits”—that always accompany my contacts with the unknown world.
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br />   “Before saying goodbye, the woman tells me her name—Esther—and warns me that if I go to the police to report her, she will be arrested and deported. She also says that there are moments in life when we need to trust blindly in intuition, which is what she is doing now. I tell her not to worry. I feel tempted to say something about the voice and the presence, but decide against it. I go home, talk to my mother, and tell her I’ve found a new job as an interpreter, which is better paid but will involve me going away for a while. She doesn’t seem in the least concerned; everything around me is developing as if it had long been planned and we were all just waiting for the right moment.

  “I sleep badly and the following day I arrive earlier than usual at the garage. I tell my boss that I’m sorry, but I’ve found a new job. He says that, sooner or later, they’ll find out about my illness, that it’s very risky giving up steady employment for something less certain, but, just as happened with my mother, he makes no real fuss about letting me go, as if the voice were manipulating the minds of all the people I have to talk to that day, facilitating things, helping me take the first step.

  “When Esther and I meet at the hotel, I tell her: ‘If we’re caught, you’ll just be deported but I’ll get put in prison, possibly for many years. Since I’m running the greater risk, you really ought to trust me.’ She seems to understand what I’m saying. We walk for two days; a group of men are waiting for her on the other side of the frontier; she goes off with them and returns shortly afterward, frustrated and angry. The war is about to start, all the roads are being guarded, and it’s impossible to go any farther without being arrested as a spy.

  “We start the journey back. The usually self-confident Esther seems suddenly sad and confused. To distract her, I recite some lines written by the poet who used to live close to my village, at the same time thinking that in forty-eight hours this whole experience will be over. However, I prefer to trust in the voice. I must do everything I can to prevent Esther leaving as suddenly as she came; perhaps I should show her that I have always been waiting for her, that she is important to me.