The Zahir Page 0,107
are too big for the smallest, most delicate bits of embroidery."
He paused.
"And no jokes about it being child's play. It's a tradition that deserves respect."
"How is she?"
"I don't know. I haven't spoken to her for about six months."
"Mikhail, these carpets are another sign."
"The carpets?"
"Do you remember yesterday, when Dos asked me to choose my name, I told you the story of a warrior who returns to an island in search of his beloved? The island is called Ithaca and the woman is called Penelope. What do you think Penelope has been doing since Ulysses left? Weaving! She has been weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, as a way of putting off her suitors. Only when she finishes the shroud will she remarry. While she waits for Ulysses to return, she unpicks her work every night and begins again the following day.
"Her suitors want her to choose one of them, but she dreams of the return of the man she loves. Finally, when she has grown weary of waiting, Ulysses returns."
"Except that the name of this village isn't Ithaca and Esther's name isn't Penelope."
Mikhail had clearly not understood the story, and I didn't feel like explaining that it was just an example.
I handed him the reins of my horse and then walked the hundred meters that separated me from the woman who had been my wife, had then become the Zahir, and who was once more the beloved whom all men dream of finding when they return from war or from work.
I am filthy. My clothes and my face are caked with sand, my body drenched in sweat, even though it's very cold.
I worry about my appearance, the most superficial thing in the world, as if I had made this long journey to my personal Ithaca merely in order to show off my new clothes. As I walk the remaining hundred meters, I must make an effort to think of all the important things that have happened during her - or was it my? - absence.
What should I say when we meet? I have often pondered this and come up with such phrases as: "I've waited a long time for this moment," or "I know now that I was wrong," or "I came here to tell you that I love you," or even "You're lovelier than ever."
I decide just to say hello. As if she had never left. As if only a day had passed, not two years, nine months, eleven days, and eleven hours.
And she needs to understand that I have changed as I've traveled through the same places she traveled through, places about which I knew nothing or in which I had simply never been interested. I had seen the scrap of bloodstained cloth in the hand of a beggar, in the hands of young people and adults in a Paris restaurant, in the hand of a painter, a doctor, and a young man who claimed to see visions and hear voices. While I was following in her footsteps, I had gotten to know the woman I had married and had rediscovered, too, the meaning of my own life, which had been through so many changes and was now about to change again.
Despite being married all those years, I had never really known my wife. I had created a love story like the ones I'd seen in the movies, read about in books and magazines, watched on TV. In my story, love was something that grew until it reached a certain size and, from then on, it was just a matter of keeping it alive, like a plant, watering it now and again and removing any dead leaves. Love was also a synonym for tenderness, security, prestige, comfort, success. Love could be translated into smiles, into words like "I love you" or "I feel so happy when you come home."
But things were more complicated than I thought. I could be madly in love with Esther while I was crossing the road, and yet, by the time I had reached the other side, I could be feeling trapped and wretched at having committed myself to someone, and longing to be able to set off once more in search of adventure. And then I would think: "I don't love her anymore." And when love returned with the same intensity as before, I would doubt it and say to myself: "I must have just gotten used to it."
Perhaps Esther had had the same thoughts and had said to herself: "Don't be