Читать книгу The Year of Facing Fire - Helena Kriel - Страница 11

CHAPTER 5

Place of Love

Mataji is a short, square, seventy-year-old woman in a white sari.

Grey hair. Neat bun.

Everything in her office is cheerful: the walls are painted bright Tiffany blue, the sun streams in, and Mataji is super cheery like the good witch in all the fairy tales, like Sabrina and Glinda.

“Very good looking. What a beautiful young man.” Her stumpy hands bracket his cheeks. “You are scared, hey, Evan? Nearly dying has frightened you.”

He blinks. I know that blink – it’s holding back tears.

“I want you to listen carefully to me. It is important to stop feeling afraid.”

I sit across the office listening. I am also afraid.

“You must use all your mental concentration for something other than this terror you have of dying.”

But how do you pull that off? When you’re facing death and you’re not even thirty. It all sounds easy in words. Words are so neat and clean, with definable borders, they’re manageable. I know, I spend my life in their company.

“You must begin to think of your illness as a gift. Can you do that, Evan? You have had to remember death. How fortunate, actually.”

My mother and Evan are listening to Mataji; apparently she’s making sense to them, but I want to confront her, say: Fortunate? Fortune is having your health and freedom, expressing yourself, finding a compatible mate, looking into the future without that thick black wall. That’s fortune! Having options. I’m relegated to sitting in a blue corner, wanting to rail at Mataji and Evan and God; Thanks for this, God, I want to shout.

“Your mother has told me about all your charity work every night! You have become a virtuous person. Someone who is kind to others, who serves, is fulfilling the true meaning of being alive. The Buddha says that if a man lives a pure life nothing can destroy him and you have been living a pure life, I see it in your eyes. I see great kindness.”

My mother is apparently going along with this, the notion of the pure man being inviolable. Not me. He’s being destroyed in front of us. This quiet, depressed, sombre, walking wounded, walking dead, dead and walking person is not my brother! My brother was an alive person leading an alive life. Easy to say that facing death is okay, is fortunate, if you’re seventy.

“What I want you to do is see the beauty inside you and let that inform you,” she’s saying. “I want you to practise gratitude. There is a story about the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman. He had been stricken with polio, so was crippled. He was in New York to give a concert and made his way slowly across the stage; he signalled to the conductor, and began to play. Then a few bars into the music one of the strings on his violin snapped. He could have brought the concert to a halt and replaced the string, but he waited, then signalled the conductor to pick up where they had left off. He had three strings to play his violin solo, so he had to rearrange the music, on the spot! Imagine that, Evan, in his head so that it all still held together. He rearranged the symphony right through to the end. When he finally rested his bow, the audience rose to their feet and cheered. Afterwards, he said that it is the artist’s task to find out how much beautiful music he can still make with what he has left. Who knows if he was speaking of his violin strings or his crippled body?”

“As a Jew, one is reminded to recognise the good,” Evan says. “A practice of gratitude means recognising the good that is already yours.”

“That is correct!” Mataji takes his hands. “Recognising the good that is already yours. In Buddhism we say: Enjoy the view, no matter what it is. This is wisdom, so be grateful for all things, including this illness, because it has deepened your soul.”

I don’t understand how to be grateful for my brother’s potentially terminal condition. I’m not developed enough – not spiritual enough, not Jewish enough, not Buddhist enough. Is Evan enough of all these things?

“So, Evan …” she is saying, “do you remember anything about the night you almost died?”

He nods.

“Can you tell me now, Evan?”

“I knew I was dying.”

“How did that feel?”

“It felt like there were sharp chicken bones sticking in my throat and I couldn’t breathe, as though my throat was being sliced open.”

“Yes?”

“I was frightened … I felt very alone, because no one could help me. And then I became aware there was—”

“What, Evan?”

“There was an angel sitting at the side of the bed.”

“An angel?”

“Yes. There was an angel sitting at the bed and I thought I was dead.”

“What happened then?”

“The angel was very beautiful, filled with a light that was spilling over her and into me and taking up the room. It filled me from the inside; it was warm … It felt like the light had an emotion. If I have to find the right word for it, it was as if the intangible quality of love manifested itself in the physical form of this light. She started talking to me, the angel, telling me about being on a beach. She took me swimming. We were lying on our backs in a warm sea, dolphins all around us. The sky and the sea turned orange. And then night came and there were clouds of fireflies, thousands of pricks of pink and green light.”

My mother and I are staring at each other from across the room.

“As I walked with the angel, water started wetting my throat and the chicken bones disappeared and suddenly I could swallow and breathe. It was then that I knew I wasn’t going to die.”

“Love saved you, Evan. I hope you understand that. I hope you can see that there is no need to be afraid. And in the end we all die. We all go back into the big void, which is itself a place of love. Can you hear that?”

He nods.

“You can live with fear or live with faith. In the end, those are the only choices we have. Life will never be as we wish it. If it was we would not develop as souls.”

I sit crumpled. If it is true that I brought in the angel or became the angel, that I was instrumental in helping Evan to live through that terrible night, she must be correct – what is there to fear? Evan’s illness has made me aware of how uncertain it all is and now this is all that occupies me. It’s a creeping nervousness inside me at all times, eroding me from the inside, like worms in wood, and everything once solid and reliable is being mulched into sawdust. It’s me gone wrong and expecting things to go wrong, because the big guillotine is no longer invisible; it’s over our heads. And nothing can be trusted. I am like someone who has just survived an earthquake and the seismic plates, always beneath one, once invisible sound, have suddenly been exposed as unreliable, liable to crash against one another and collapse entire cities, bridges, setting tsunamis in motion, those blue brackets that cross oceans at five hundred miles an hour, fast as arrows, to drown everything out – cities, suburbs, houses, lives, old, young, rich, poor, loved, hated, no matter – all gone! All vanished under a landscape gone to sticks, hundreds of miles of pick-up sticks.

I was lying in bed in Los Angeles; it was five in the morning when a big earthquake struck the city. The bed began to move. I stumbled outside to join the neighbours gathered around the swimming pool, all of us half-naked and vomiting out of our rooms in the shocked early-morning dark to stare as the earth’s movement was made visible by the water in the swimming pool. It sloshed out at the shallow end as the deep end tilted up, then ran in a racing wave to slosh out at the deep end. The swimming pool emptied itself right in front of us as it rocked from side to side, the sliding plates beneath us tipping that liquid blue oblong onto one side, then up onto the other.

For weeks afterwards everyone walked around haunted. I was finding soil from a potted plant in a jewellery drawer, or rice studded with lentils, nothing in its place. I was coming across shards of ceramic from broken plates in books, strangers were enquiring after each other, all ashen-faced. Suddenly, we no longer trusted the ground beneath our feet, unable to rely on what was once fundamental. And I feel the same way now. It’s as though plates below have shifted, or as though some boundary between this known, tangible world and the jungle beyond the border have been pulled back. I see into places that were always there, just conveniently hidden.

Mataji gives Evan exercises he is to do every morning.

“Lie in a comfortable position and see your illness, your fear, as a dark swamp inside you. Then breathe out all the blackness. And breathe in your health as white light. See yourself becoming a man made of light. Okay, Evan?”

She takes out a pendulum to test Evan’s energy. Evan holds his palm out and Mataji lets the pendulum swing over it. It starts in a line. From Mataji’s expression, I understand that a straight line is not good news. But slowly it begins to form circles. The circles are not wide and generous, though, as I am sure they are meant to be. They are long and thin, odd, egg-shaped circles.

“Yes.” She is nodding. “The pendulum reads the electromagnetic field. You’re still weak, but the curve of the swing tells me that we can keep you alive, Evan.”

My mother and I are watching the pendulum, holding fast to the arc.

“Did you hear what Evan said about the angel?” my mother asks, as we wait outside for Mataji to finish up with Evan. We gaze at one another like Lot’s wife looking at Lot’s wife – not moving, both turned to salt.

I stand in the sunshine, made of salt. Evan has AIDS. Everything is uncertain and I feel precarious. I am on California’s San Andreas Fault here in Johannesburg, South Africa, on shifting tectonic plates. I climb into the car and, as we head slowly towards the concrete highway and home, stare out of the window at the poor whites begging.