"I don't know,” Zachary said. “We left all the maps back at the lighthouse. If you want, we can just sit here and look into each other's eyes forever."
Alfred blushed and bowed his head. “I can't stop moving,” he said. “My life is a picaresque story."
Zachary put a finger under Alfred's chin and lifted his head. “But you're in a love story now."
"It can't last,” Alfred said.
"Why not?"
"They never do."
"Some love stories are timeless,” Zachary said.
"We'll fight. We'll misunderstand each other. We'll hurt each other's feelings with careless comments and selfish moments. We'll get old and wrinkled and sick. We'll fall out of love. I'd rather just keep walking—.—.—.” He stood up, but Zachary stood in his way.
"Let's dance,” Zachary said.
"There's no music."
The waiter pressed a button on the face of a cuckoo clock in a corner of the diner and the sound of a tinkly waltz filled the air.
Alfred said, “I'm a terrible dancer."
Zachary put his arms around him and began moving in time to the music.
At first, Alfred couldn't figure out where to put his feet, and he stepped on Zachary's toes and once even nearly fell over. But soon they were moving gracefully, their left hands clasped together and their right arms wrapped around each other's bodies, and they giggled and whispered, and while they danced the waiter carried all of the tables and seats outside, leaving the diner empty except for the music and the two dancers, who swung around and around, laughing and kissing and resting their heads on each other's shoulders. As dusk turned the entire world grey except for a warm yellow light inside the boxcar, Alfred and Zachary finally stopped dancing, and when they looked outside they saw a crowd of people sitting in the chairs there, watching them, a crowd of people dressed in rags of old plastic, their faces craggled and lips dusty, their eyes lively with childlike joy, and the sound of their applause carried through the night to the lighthouse (where Günther Lopez was trying to show Muriuki how to make puppets from paper clips) and then on and on to the sewer fields and to the junkyard and the pet shop and the monastery, where the coffee pickers stopped shouting obscenities at the monks just long enough to hear the strange sound filling the air, and the monks briefly ceased whipping themselves and praying, and somewhere even farther away Alfred's mother stopped designing a skyscraper and his father stopped looking at pictures in a book about war, and though they were too far away to hear the sound of the applause, they knew something had changed in the world.
Alfred and Zachary bowed to their audience and giggled with a bit of embarrassment, a bit of exhaustion. As the audience continued to applaud, the two men dashed out the back door of the diner and away, running through the dark until they collapsed together in a soggy ravine, where they slept through all of the day and most of the night. When they woke, they stood up stiffly, brushed off their clothes, and continued walking, hand in hand, Zachary humming a waltz and Alfred trying to remember some prayers. They would wander together through many more nights and days, and now and then they would utter occasional harsh words to each other, now and then one would withdraw or another would be selfish, now and then they would disagree about which road to follow or which restaurant to beg a meal from, but through it all they continued to talk to each other, to fight back disappointment together, and nearly every day brought a laugh or two, and they looked forward to reaching old age, when perhaps they might settle down somewhere and draw a map of where they'd been and what they'd seen, but for now, walking through the world, the last thing either Zachary or Alfred wanted was a map.
* * * *
Today the only labels I like for what I write are Wishes and Exorcisms. Sometimes the two labels overlap, like searchlights finding each other in a dark sky.
A few months before he died in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote to his wife, an actress in Moscow. He was forty-four years old, living in Yalta, and in the last stages of tuberculosis, a disease he had suffered from for almost half his life, a disease that had claimed his brother, Nikolai, in 1889. He wrote, “You ask: What is life? That's just like asking: What is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and that's all we know."
I want my stories to be like life, which means I want them to be like carrots, which means each story is a story, and that's all we know.
Matthew Cheney
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Emblemata
(reciting the Heart Sutra)
Léa Silhol
There is no ignorance,
and no end to ignorance,
no old age, no death, no release from old age and death.
No suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering,
no path to reach the end of suffering.
—Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra
Pages from the travel notebook of Alexandre Iacovleff
Bâmiyân, 1931
Rupam (form)
We left Bayreuth on the fourth of April, and have traveled almost continuously ever since. The landscapes roll past us, and I sway rhythmically, jounced by the vibration of the awkward, hybrid half-track vehicles. It has taken us a month and a half to reach the Afghan frontier, to cross the border that separated us from this “land of piety and purity” where we are by no means sure we are welcome.
But the Orient is a paradox, a trickster. Instead of the difficulties we anticipated, of minutely examined passports and visas, we have received a welcome out of the Arabian Nights. After the rifles of Islam Kaleh and the unscalable walls, we have been unexpectedly greeted with hospitable offerings of dates, almond paste, and pistachios. Steel and sweetmeats. Georges Le Fevre wrote in his notebook about this “land where legend says every inhabitant's life-partner is his rifle, and the traveler must always assume that he is being aimed at.” Aimed at, yes, and straight for the heart, by steel or by sugar. The human climate here is as uncertain, as volatile as the rough country we explore. To explore: It's the primary object of the Citroën Yellow Cruise, and I, a man of images, have joined the expedition to explore this country with lines, to immortalize the route with brush and pencils.... No roads, no maps; fighting in the north; in between, an uncertain welcome.
Outside the port of Islam Kaleh, the inhabitants react unpredictably: indifferent, excited, or amazed by the slow passage of our half-tracks. My eyelashes are laden with grains of sand; my hand aches at not being able to preserve everything I see.
At Herat, where the roads to India and the Occident meet, the covered market is immobilized in time, crystallized, with all the gestures and movement of a way of life unchanged for centuries. We are in the midst of history, in a past sewn with golden thread and perfumed with spices.
Outside the city, the governor has had a house made ready for us. Another unexpected welcome. We're told to make ourselves at home. We are receiving a slow, patient introduction to Afghani courtesy, to its sugar and its steel. Here, even some of the children who smile at us sling a Mauser in a bandolier over one shoulder.
On the road, in the vistas around us, the beauty of the light falls on an unbearable contrast of landscapes. Under our feet, the land is harsher than the desert. High above us rise peaks crowned with mountain snow. Between them hang suspended mirage-like cities of cool shadow and vibrant colors, more enervating than perfume: hospitable, but forbidden, displaying their beauty to us without letting us touch more than the edges of their veils. Farther down the road we travel, farther, walled between the vigilant, indolent guards who line our route and the excessive pomp with which we are greeted. Step by step, until we reach the heights, the pinnacle of all these preparations for our bewitchment. The apotheosis.
Mokour.
Seven thousand kilometers from our comfortable West, we are ushered into palatial luxury.
"You are much expected."
And, to demonstrate, days of feasting.
To show us its face, proud Afghanistan summons to Mokour a troop of warrior-dancers. The men have the savage
beauty of their earth, and its paradoxes. Bracelets by the dozens on their arms, gazelle eyes veiled with black antimony.
Their hair, partly or wholly unbound, whips their wild faces. Their eyes are cast down, self-absorbed. They display themselves, they guard themselves, proud, immodest, unaccepted and unaccepting, pivoting about themselves. Some dance holding their rifles, others bare-handed; the two are the same. Beside me, amazed and admiring, Georges makes phrases: they spring from the earth like savage flowers, he says. As for myself, I think they are like flames. Wanting to draw them, my hand cannot follow them to the extremes of motion at which they fling themselves. I feel alienated, heavy, caught within my culture, which can no longer create such a thing as this, this dance of absolutes between ecstasy and defiance that only these warriors can embody.
They have come from far away to display themselves to us and defy us, and once they are done, they leave; they have done what they had to. One of them, leaving, smiles at me and glances at my notebook. I have tried to draw him and had no more success than with the others. Perhaps he is smiling in victory. “Can you comprehend us or represent us? Capture and halt our motion?” perhaps his eyes say; perhaps not.
This is the pride of these men, to dance not for us but for themselves. Above all they danced because they are what they are, and we are merely passersby. We are their guests, but strangers. The welcome they offer is what they decided they should give us, a debt of honor that they recognize they owe, and recognize themselves by owing. Only Islam affirms its pride with such an odalisque's elegance.
We ford four rivers; it's half adventure, half clown show. The land is wild, the inhabitants charming. We reach Kabul at the beginning of the summer. Kabul, paradox of paradoxes, fragmented between abortive modern projects and the millennial layers of its history. Our convoy passes, slow, silent, stupefied, between the buildings of a city within a city, built and then capriciously abandoned. Already dead. Practice work, an attempt to see if the modern world was worth anything, the abortive dream of an outdated king. He wanted to construct a second Paris on the Afghan earth; the earth voted no.
The saying is that the king was guilty of trying, in one reign, to make changes that take lifetimes. He broke rhythm, and was condemned to exile.
After dead modern Kabul, old Kabul is like an explicit message, immutable and alive.
After the khans, we meet the current king and his ministers. Hospitable, but guarded. We are welcomed as strangers, but we do not belong to this land.
We continue on the road toward the west.
And we find ourselves at the valley of Bâmiyân.
From the veranda of a villa someone has lent us, in the gigantically scaled landscape spread out before me, I see for the first time the cliff pierced by the colossal niches of the great Buddhas. They are fifty meters high, dominating everything.
Impossible for us not to approach them; impossible not to enter the pass of the Hindu Kush and climb into the grottoes excavated in the “pure and pious country” before there was an Afghanistan.
Higher and higher I climb, until I stand on the very head of the Enlightened One.
There I have to sit down, to bring out my sketchpad. To preserve on paper the paintings that are disappearing from the vault.
From far away, but too close, I hear Hackin explaining that the Muslims who now live here consider these Buddhist images heretical. They regularly tar them and set them on fire; sometimes they shoot at them. So many are already lost, he says.
When the others leave, I remain. I feel an oppressive urgency, as if to leave without drawing everything, saving everything on paper, would be to admit in advance that these centuries-old paintings will soon be lost to the world.
I feel here the ardor of a thousand convinced and patient hands, the spirit of a million prayers. I owe them equal ardor, equal spirit. I copy the designs I hope to make immortal, but my hand wanders away into scribbling marginal notes, powerless to re-create everything, because I cannot comprehend it.
Behind me, someone laughs.
I turn.
A silhouette against a radiant sky: his voice comes to me first.
"You stay here for hours, Frenchman. Aren't you dizzy? And what do you write there?—.—.—.—You are anxious to ‘decipher the flight of supple and vivid lines over the surface eaten by time and wounded by fanatics’ rifle fire'?"
He's quoting my notes. He laughs again. And this time I see him more clearly.
"What are you drawing? What are you stalking? Ah—.—.—.—their smiles—.—.—."
He keeps behind me, a little to my right, standing on the head of the great Buddha. (How can he read over my shoulder from where he is?) His arms are crossed, he's still laughing, without mockery but with great amusement.
He's standing right at the edge of the abyss, closer than I am to falling. He leans slightly backward, as if to expose the planes of his face to the wind that touches his back. He wears copper earrings and a long dagger at his belt. He looks like the dancer who smiled at me in Mokour. Perhaps it's the same man, I don't know. They all looked alike in the dance, even the most savage of them, the one I tried in vain to draw, who seemed the incarnation of all of them.
He looks at me, smiling.
It is the same man.
His eyes are no longer ringed with kohl, nor his hair unbound. But his look is still impossible to mistake.
And seeing him, with the volplane of the Afghan countryside behind him, I tell myself that this is how a man should exist, the place where he should be. Unafraid of the height, perpetually and irrationally defying gravity and himself. Turning his back on the abyss through not fear but pride: as sure of himself as a lion in his territory, and his territory—is the world.
"How brave you are, Frenchman, to climb so high, to the very forehead of the ancient gods. To get closer to them, to walk on them, to find—what?"
"To find out."
"—'Find out'?"
He laughs again, a little more loudly.
"What they're hiding. Their faces. Their smiles."
"You think they hide something? Or they know something? Perhaps—.—.—."
For a moment he presents his profile to the wind, his eyes half-closed. His smile is not that of the Buddhas, but something in him is like them.
He throws me an amused side glance, then slowly, deliberately, turns and fades into the shadow of the arch.
His smile is like a courtesan's, inviting and challenging at once. But he has promised nothing. And if he's making me a proposition, it's something other than the obvious, something all the more tempting because I don't know what it is.
I gather up my sketchbook and pencils and follow him.
Below, in the bowl of the valley, two horses are standing. He is already astride one waiting for me. I mount the other and follow him without questioning. Sometimes, to become closer to something, one must put a distance between oneself and it and be silent. Each act of apprenticeship is half will, half submission.
We ride. It's some time before my unknown man speaks.
Sunyata (emptiness)
"Do you know the Heart Sutra? No? Once in my journeying, I met a man who walked alone, though he had many followers. He possessed nothing, although he had seen and possessed everything that was futile and essential. He wished to gain nothing, to keep nothing, to give nothing away, though his followers thought he did. I told him I had lost all my old life; I was questioning the value of my endless future when my world had been destroyed and only I remained alive. He smiled and told me I had never had anything. Not even myself. No eye, no ear, no nose or tongue. No body, no thought. No self. No form. He told me that to travel to emptiness, one must start out from form. And he smiled again. You who like smiles, do you want me to explain what was the form of that smile? Yes? All right, first you must see."
He dismounts; I imitate him. He leans down and picks up something from the powdery earth. He holds out the palm of his hand toward me, and I see a plaster medallion shin
ing white through its encrustations of dirt.
"The Greeks, they called these Emblemata."
I pick carefully at the object, rub it gently to disengage an astonishingly pure face.
"Little images of deities. Some think, because these works look simple, not important, they were sketches made by student artists. The soil of Gandhara is sown with them still. They show the spirits, the divinities, the procession of Dionysus, often. Maenads, Silenus.—.—.—.— You know them?"
"A little."
"For the people of those times, the gods were everywhere. Later, in more ‘civilized’ eras, artists would paint big and little kings, and even bankers’ wives and their own mistresses. But in those barbaric times artists immortalized almost nothing but the gods. Men had proud hearts; they wanted nothing less than Olympus. Of course, they were actually representing concepts, making them in stone or on the breakable skin of vases; they were modeling the essence of this world using the materials of this world. Sculptors know you have to slap the clay or strike the marble so that the idea can emerge. Strike and slap ... It's the same to shape the spirit, eh?” He laughs. “So, still, often, sculptors are barbarous. They take for a time the imprint of the gods, or the primary impulses that the gods incarnated. They betray the gods less than painters do. The beings who chisel at the hard matter of the world extract its essence; painters, who make colors flow and dance at the end of a brush, merely impress their visions on the world.
"The men of Attica knew that. Their gods, they found them everywhere. Now they're dead or silent; there's nothing left of them but traces, like the Emblemata scattered on this ground. Laughable. A bit of fragile plaster. All the same, that's all there is.
"At least on the surface—Ah, but only on the surface.
"The Greeks who came here with Alexander left enormous ruins behind. Dust, fires, invasions buried them; but they're still here, underneath this parched once-fertile skin of earth. For more than a century, the French have been searching for them, patiently, curiously. They like that, Frenchmen, to study the ancient forms. And ancient they are. Old, serious, heavy. Only the little things, the light unimportant things, rise again to the surface, alone, like these plaster shells where someone has sketched the profile of a god.
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