The Zahir Page 0,32

for a twenty-five-year-old who will only end up treating her just as I did." Some more cautious words emerged from my mouth however.

"I don't think that's true. You've read my book, you came to my book signing because you knew what I felt and wanted to reassure me. My heart is still in pieces: have you ever heard of the Zahir?"

"I was brought up in the Islamic religion, so, yes, I'm familiar with the idea."

"Well, Esther fills up every space in my life. I thought that by writing about my feelings, I would free myself from her presence. Now I love her in a more silent way, but I can't think about anything else. I beg you, please, I'll do anything you want, but I need you to explain to me why she disappeared like that. As you yourself said, I understand nothing."

It was very hard to stand there pleading with my wife's lover to help me understand what had happened. If Mikhail had not come to the book signing, perhaps that moment in the cathedral in Vitoria, where I acknowledged my love for her and out of which I wrote A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew, would have been enough. Fate, however, had other plans, and the mere possibility of being able to see my wife again had upset everything.

"Let's have lunch together," said Mikhail, after a long pause. "You really don't understand anything. But the divine energy that today passed through my body is generous with you."

We arranged to meet the next day. On the way home, I remembered a conversation I had had with Esther three months before she disappeared.

A conversation about divine energy passing through the body.

Their eyes really are different. There's the fear of death in them, of course, but beyond that, there's the idea of sacrifice. Their lives are meaningful because they are ready to offer them up for a cause."

"You're talking about soldiers, are you?"

"Yes, and I'm talking as well about something I find terribly hard to accept, but which I can't pretend I don't see. War is a ritual. A blood ritual, but also a love ritual."

"You're mad."

"Maybe I am. But I've met other war correspondents, too, who go from one country to the next, as if the routine of death were part of their lives. They're not afraid of anything, they face danger the way a soldier does. And all for a news report? I don't think so. They can no longer live without the danger, the adventure, the adrenaline in their blood. One of them, a married man with three children, told me that the place where he feels most at ease is in a war zone, even though he adores his family and talks all the time about his wife and kids."

"I just can't understand it at all. Look, Esther, I don't want to interfere in your life, but I think this experience will end up doing you real harm."

"It would harm me more to be living a life without meaning. In a war, everyone knows they're experiencing something important."

"A historic moment, you mean?"

"No, that isn't enough of a reason for risking your life. No, I mean that they're experiencing the true essence of man."

"War?"

"No, love."

"You're becoming like them."

"I think I am."

"Tell your news agency you've had enough."

"I can't. It's like a drug. As long as I'm in a war zone, my life has meaning. I go for days without having a bath, I eat whatever the soldiers eat, I sleep three hours a night and wake up to the sound of gunfire. I know that at any moment someone could lob a grenade into the place where we're sitting, and that makes me live, do you see? Really live, I mean, loving every minute, every second. There's no room for sadness, doubts, nothing; there's just a great love for life. Are you listening?"

"Absolutely."

"It's as if there was a divine light shining in the midst of every battle, in the midst of that worst of all possible situations. Fear exists before and after, but not while the shots are being fired, because, at that moment, you see men at their very limit, capable of the most heroic of actions and the most inhumane. They run out under a hail of bullets to rescue a comrade, and at the same time shoot anything that moves - children, women - anyone who comes within their line of fire will die. People from small, provincial towns where nothing ever