Interfictions (34 page)

"So many gods, so many different gods! Zoroaster, and all the Persian deities, and Zeus and his turbulent crew, and more, and more, and the Buddha whom Ashoka chose, and now the One True God of Mohammed. Which one is the rightful one, and which one hasn't borrowed a few of his predecessors' traits, thanks to his worshippers? For good and evil, human perceptions are part of the form of the layers. Yesterday sacred, tomorrow profane; yesterday revered, tomorrow profaned; because men change their minds to defy the changeableness of the world. Men seek eternity, and they think they achieve it by burying what preceded them. By burying it, by destroying it. Living on the hinge is dangerous if you don't accept change; you pinch your fingers.

"And the sand comes. It transforms everything. People think it erases everything, destroys everything, but it links everything, it transforms everything. It's men who destroy and deny, when they can. And when it's impossible to destroy, they appropriate, which is at least preferable. And everything is changed and destroyed, and everything remains. You perceive only one layer of the strata, the present, of this land, of yourself, of myself. Because you have not accepted that sensation, perception, intention, consciousness ... that they're all the void."

He contemplates the horizon for a moment, dreaming, almost grave, then turns back.

"You're still reciting the sutra."

"Yes. Come, night is falling, it'll be cold. We'll make a fire and have some tea."

Behind us the horizon is scarlet. My guide cradles his little terra-cotta bowl. I have lighted my pipe and he's rolled himself a ragged cigarette perfumed with spices. Between us the fire burns, small but fierce. Light between us; around us, the dark.

"Tell me the rest of it,” I say.

"Ask me a question. Questions get me started."

"If our names are unimportant, why not tell me yours?"

"A good question,” he laughs, “I didn't expect it. If you need a name to help you remember my form, call me Tunkun. In the Uzbek language, it means night and day, one thing and the other, or the space between them. It's the name I have here, now. But what's your real question?"

"What are you?"

"Ah ... But what do you think I am, if I'm not a warrior who is much more well-informed than you expected?"

"You are a being of the desert—a Djinn."

"A Djinn?” He laughs. “No. I'm not one of that ancient race. I come from another, less subtle and less frank, a race that has codified and ruled this world for too long not to see its power fail from its own contradictions. But you're right, I have a great deal in common with those spirits of the burning winds of the desert. Fire, for one."

He passes his hand over the flames and they lean toward him.

"
I love the fire
,” he quotes teasingly, “
and the fire loves me
.” He laughs. “Excuse me, I love a good phrase, I love all the arts of men! The Djinns and I, yes, both born of fire. But they are entirely fire, at home where they live, may the dust of time spare them! Me, I'm not so direct. I was designed twisted. Halfway between fire and cold, day and night, white and black. A foreigner. I told you."

"But you're not a man."

"Excuse me?” He raises an amused eyebrow.

"Not a mortal man. You are older, more powerful. A sort of genius loci. A ... god?"

He sighs.

"What does it matter what I am? I'll tell you what I saw, if it helps you. Long before Alexander, I came here, along the silk thread that leads to the Orient, fleeing my madness and paying my debts. They say I had a chariot drawn by leopards and many kinds of exotic creatures followed me. True. False. My followers were with me, yes. But here, in these once-fertile lands, I felt alone, as if spread between the angles of the world. Here, it's the part of the map where men should engrave a compass rose. A crossroad, a cross, a star. A mark and a marked spot: where so many tides have turned and turned, so many dynasties and creatures; so many invasions and crimes perpetuated again and again, so many cities that rose and fell, so many blindly transmitted strata of the past...

"A meeting place, fugitive, ephemeral, a place that geography didn't intend to endure.

"A crossroads, historians call this place; and that's true. But if a crossroads is a point of convergence and fusion, it's equally a breaking point. The one doesn't exist without the other. At a crossroads, which my people, like yours, have always recognized as a place of danger and power, the certainty of the path breaks down, feet stumble; for a moment one stops, one contemplates one's choices, one conjures gods.

"Here, at this junction and breaking point, there was beauty. The beauty of fusion, of melding, of the melting pot.
Better
made from combinations of
good
. But also negation, denial, utter violence, stupidity.

"Everything seems so set, so fixed now, but that is a dangerous illusion. Everything is movement. This fixedness is nothing but the brightness of the desert, which hides the unstoppable movement of the dunes. Destruction, believe me, is more powerful than any melting pot. Rifle-stocks across the noses of your Buddhas, that's the crossroads at work. There has been beauty here; but beneath it, always, there's hatred. Here men marry art to art and create a mingled beauty; but not forever, never forever. And who's to blame? The Muslims; the northern pillagers; Genghis Khan; your countrymen, the Russians, who one day will import here the tyranny of the proletariat? Even the French, who began their excavations by disemboweling the stupas ‘to see what was underneath'? Who's guilty? Men, time, life, the world? All of these, and none. It's not important.

"Because yesterday, today, tomorrow all exist together, for those who know how to see. Because all things, which are by nature emptiness, have neither beginning nor end.

"Listen. I have told you what was and I will tell you what will be. Your French compatriots will find the Alexandria they're looking for. They've excavated patiently but they'll find it by luck. A few years from now—in a time you won't see, because you aren't long for this world—a shah out hunting will see the capital of a column rising like a vision from bare ground. He will talk about his vision, and the French, less mystical than he, will dig. And they will find Ay Khanum, the royal capital. They will uncover its endless ramparts, the towers of its citadel, its enormous palace, its theatre and its sanctuaries. They will walk in Alexander's footsteps and prove their theories. And doubtless some of them will weep with joy at the miraculous mingled beauty of Greece and the Orient.
Better
born from two
goods
. There, in the north, at Ay Khanum.

"At Begram and at Peshawar, they will find the treasure of treasures: sublime works in glass, Hellenistic bronzes, perfume-flasks, unbelievable Indian plaquettes. Emblemata by the hundreds. They will find the crossroads within the crossroads: face to face, Athenas with the curves of sacred dancers and Buddhas more beautiful than the ones you have seen here. Angels and devils born of the crossroads; the world will be struck with amazement. Some of these treasures will remain here, some will be taken to foreign countries; and only the stolen and the exiles will survive. Because the sand will blow. There will be war and destruction. The City of the Moon Lady, Ay Khanum, so recently returned to the surface of the earth, will be sacked and raped. The museum will be pillaged. And the great Buddhas of Bâmiyân themselves, which have stood for so many centuries, will fall under blows struck in the name of younger and fiercer gods. No one will see this plain from where we have seen it, standing on the head of a patient Enlightened One, climbing to understand better, tracing a new path in the weave of this crossroads, adding to the millions of threads the improbable and unimportant thread of our encounter.

"Stranger, you're pale. I am too, perhaps. No need. These things are emptiness. They neither begin nor end, they are neither vicious nor pure, not perfect nor broken. They cannot be those things, or become them. Never, in any time, in any place."

He says this, but his eyes are grave, and his mouth has a crease I haven't seen before. He sighs and is silent a moment. I respect this pause in the mourning that he does not allow himself. When he turns back toward me, his voice is infinitely calm.

"I met the man they call the Awakened One. I loved him, even though his lesson was difficult and painful. And still—.—.—.—To take the lesson into oneself, one must be willing to see everything, all these eras at once. The greatness, the falls, the heights, the pillage. Even to accept, as he told me, that these statues will fall, and what he taught will count for nothing.

"Will Ay Khanum be more beautiful tomorrow, for having been excavated and exhibited? Was she more beautiful yesterday, when burnt offerings were made at the foot of monumental Zeus? Is she less grand for being underground today? Is she even real? More real in the sunlight, or underground? Real because she was built by the exalted hands of man? When those hands will have destroyed the Buddhas, what shall we say to ourselves? That it's a terrible loss, that we're horrified by the stupidity that lost us the beauty of Apollo's meeting with Siddhartha? Should you and I be glad because we saw them with our own eyes, while their beauty lasted? And you, stranger, who have already cried over their wounds, should it console you that you have preserved their image for the future?"

I have trouble answering him. My voice sounds dry when I speak.

"If I accept what you tell me, no, I won't feel any of that. Because, since they have existed, they cannot be destroyed. Because, never having existed, they have never been drawn. They do not exist. They are forever."

He smiles at me still, but his eyes are somber.

"Yes, Iacovleff. Yes. And now you are reciting the Heart Sutra yourself. And now you understand why they are smiling, the Boddhisattvas and the blessed ones of Gandhara, smiling that secret smile that comprehends everything and never alters. And the eyes, too, stranger. Haven't you seen their eyes? Half-closed, because
they
know in advance, and admit, what is going to happen. They know the emptiness of everything, including themselves and what they have left behind them.

"It is the echo of the Zen master's answer to his pupil: ‘What do you do when you encounter the Buddha in your path? Kill him.' Even ultimate wisdom must be abandoned as one more illusion.

"It's here, you see, at the crossroads of all things, that the last lesson of impermanence had to be learned. The emptiness of form, the form of emptiness.

"And here I returned, after Alexander and all his conquests. Without a chariot, without leopards, without honor or escort. To sit in front of an old friend, like an obsolete and outworn god who takes off his sandals and becomes a follower of another god, one wiser and infinitely more humorous, who has understood and accepted that we all wear out, gods though we were.

"In the end, at the crossroads, we are all caught in the hinge of time.

"To recite the hard lesson of the Heart Sutra.

"No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no self. No Alexandre."

I repeat after him, one step behind his smile, “No Alexandre."

And he replies, one beat behind me, “No Dionysus. And you know, don't you, where this logically leads us, once we've accepted the emptiness of all things; do you know why the Buddhas smile?"

He turns away and says, softly, “No created thing, no knowledge, no ignorance. No destruction of any created thing, no limit to knowledge, no end to ignorance. No Four Noble Truths, no, neither suffering, nor cause of suffering, nor Path to reach the end of suffering. No old age and death, no cure for old age and death. No salvation, nor exile from salvation.

"No gods.

"No Buddha."

And he repeats, and it seems to me that his voice trembles, “No Buddha.

"Ga-te, ga-te, para-gate para-samgate bodhi-svaha.

"Sleep, stranger, sleep. The night has come and I have finished talking. Sleep—.—.—."

I stretch out on the ground, still warm from the sun of the vanished day, and his voice cradles me, my eyelids become heavy. In the darkness I see the incandescent end of his cigarette, glowing in the rhythm of his rising and falling breath. And I think I hear him murmuring, from farther and farther away,

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond...

In the morning my eyes are full of grit. The dawn is cold. I tell myself my guide will have disappeared, as men do so often when they can't face the morning after a night of confidences. But he is there, brewing tea over the feeble campfire. He has the unruly look of those who have not slept and have counted too many stars. He must read my thoughts, for he says:

"Yes, once men met me only for a day, between the rising and the setting sun. The given length of time, the rule: one day, ‘the life of a mayfly,' they used to say. Once, when I was a god. No more."

He smiles like a man and not a god. Like a friend, perhaps.

"I'll take you back, Alexandre."

I accept his tea and his silence. We follow the road back without a word, and at the foot of the great Buddha, we part ways. He has finished talking. And, if I have understood him correctly, I haven't much time to learn the lesson.

I don't tell him goodbye. There is no beginning, he told me, and no end. So I don't say goodbye. I don't say—.—.—.—

anything.

I draw, and I erase.

And draw, and erase.

And the page doesn't change, in spite of the traces of the work I have destroyed.

And the page takes no account of the spoiled sketches, nor of the ones that would have earned me riches and glory, and a ridiculous immortality.

The page treats success and failure with the same passivity. I forget them myself, and neither re-invoke nor reject them.

I draw, and I erase myself.

In spite of myself, I have sketched out my twilight encounter, as if I am a man who is measuring what he still needs to do. Not to meditate on it or transmit it, but because one day, perhaps, at the very end, I will feel the need of a form in front of which I can sit. As if I were sitting in front of an old friend, waiting with him until the clocks stop. Until the Void finally imposes itself, and the All that it also is. The Beyond, where we must go.