He didn't really need to do that. It was a bit of a waste of time for you really and a great opportunity to catch pneumonia. I hope you realize that it was just his way of showing you how welcome you are. Here, take the oil."

"I overslept."

"It's only a two-hour ride to the village. We'll be there before the sun is at its highest point."

"I need a bath. I need to change my clothes."

"That's impossible. You're in the middle of the steppes. Put the oil in the pan, but first offer it up to the Lady. Apart from salt, it's our most valuable commodity."

"What is Tengri?"

"The word means 'sky worship'; it's a kind of religion without religion. Everyone has pa.s.sed through here-Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, Muslims, different sects with their beliefs and superst.i.tions. The nomads became converts to avoid being killed, but they continued and continue to profess the idea that the Divinity is everywhere all the time.

You can't take the Divinity out of nature and put it in a book or between four walls. I'vefelt so much better since coming back to the steppes, as if I had been in real need of nourishment. Thank you for letting me come with you."

"Thank you for introducing me to Dos. Yesterday, during that dedication ceremony, I sensed that he was someone special."

"He learned from his grandfather, who learned from his father, who learned from his father, and so on. The nomadic way of life, and the absence of a written language until the end of the nineteenth century, meant that they had to develop the tradition of the akyn, the person who must remember everything and pa.s.s on the stories. Dos is an akyn.

When I say 'learn,' though, I hope you don't take that to mean 'acc.u.mulate knowledge.'

The stories have nothing to do with dates and names and facts. They are legends about heroes and heroines, animals and battles, about the symbols of man's essential self, not just his deeds. They're not stories about the vanquishers or the vanquished, but about people who travel the world, contemplate the steppes, and allow themselves to be filled by the energy of love. Pour the oil in more slowly, otherwise it will spit."

"I felt blessed."

"I'd like to feel that too. Yesterday, I went to visit my mother in Almaty. She asked if I was well and if I was earning money. I lied and said I was fine, that I was putting on a successful theater production in Paris. I'm going back to my own people today, and it's as if I had left yesterday, and as if during all the time I've spent abroad, I had done nothing of any importance. I talk to beggars, wander the streets with the tribe, organize the meetings at the restaurant, and what have I achieved? Nothing. I'm not like Dos, who learned from his grandfather. I only have the presence to guide me and sometimes I think that perhaps it is just a hallucination; perhaps my visions really are just epileptic fits, and nothing more."

"A minute ago you were thanking me for bringing you with me, and now it seems to have brought you nothing but sadness. Make up your mind what you're feeling."

"I feel both things at once, I don't have to choose. I can travel back and forth between the oppositions inside me, between my contradictions."

"I want to tell you something, Mikhail. I too have traveled back and forth between many contradictions since I first met you. I began by hating you, then I accepted you, and as I've followed in your footsteps, that acceptance has become respect. You're still young, and the powerlessness you feel is perfectly normal. I don't know how many people your work has touched so far, but I can tell you one thing: you changed my life."

"You were only interested in finding your wife."

"I still am, but that didn't just make me travel across the Kazakhstan steppes: it made me travel through the whole of my past life. I saw where I went wrong, I saw where I stopped, I saw the moment when I lost Esther, the moment that the Mexican Indians call the acomodador-the giving-up point. I experienced things I never imagined I would experience at my age. And all because you were by my side, guiding me, even though you might not have been aware that you were. And do you know something else? I believe that you do hear voices and that you did have visions when you were a child. I have always believed in many things, and now I believe even more."

"You're not the same man I first met."

"No, I'm not. I hope Esther will be pleased."

"Are you?"

"Of course.""Then that's all that matters. Let's have something to eat, wait until the storm eases, and then set off."

"Let's face the storm."

"No, it's all right. Well, we can if you want, but the storm isn't a sign, it's just one of the consequences of the destruction of the Aral Sea."

The furious wind is abating, and the horses seem to be galloping faster. We enter a kind of valley, and the landscape changes completely. The infinite horizon is replaced by tall, bare cliffs. I look to the right and see a bush full of ribbons.

"It was here! It was here that you saw..."

"No, my tree was destroyed."

"So what's this, then?"

"A place where something very important must have happened."

He dismounts, opens his saddlebag, takes out a knife, and cuts a strip off the sleeve of his shirt, then ties this to one of the branches. His eyes change; he may be feeling the presence beside him, but I prefer not to ask.

I follow his example. I ask for protection and help. I, too, feel a presence by my side: my dream, my long journey back to the woman I love.

We remount. He doesn't tell me what he asked for, and nor do I. Five minutes later, we see a small village of white houses. A man is waiting for us; he comes over to Mikhail and speaks to him in Russian. They talk for a while, then the man goes away.

"What did he want?"

"He wanted me to go to his house to cure his daughter. Nina must have told him I was arriving today, and the older people still remember my visions."

He seems uncertain. There is no one else around; it must be a time when everyone is working, or perhaps eating. We were crossing the main road, which seemed to lead to a white building surrounded by a garden.

"Remember what I told you this morning, Mikhail. You might well just be an epileptic who refuses to accept the diagnosis and who has allowed his unconscious to build a whole story around it, but it could also be that you have a mission in the world: to teach people to forget their personal history and to be more open to love as pure, divine energy."

"I don't understand you. All the months we've known each other, you've talked of nothing but this moment-finding Esther. And suddenly, ever since this morning, you seem more concerned about me than anything else. Perhaps Dos's ritual last night had some effect."

"Oh, I'm sure it did."

What I meant to say was: I'm terrified. I want to think about anything except what is about to happen in the next few minutes. Today, I am the most generous person on the face of this earth, because I am close to my objective and afraid of what awaits me. My reaction is to try and help others, to show G.o.d that I'm a good person and that I deserve this blessing that I have pursued so long and hard.

Mikhail dismounted and asked me to do the same."I'm going to the house of the man whose daughter is ill. I'll take care of your horse while you talk to Esther."

He pointed to the small white building in the middle of the trees.

"Over there."

I struggled to keep control of myself.

"What does she do?"

"As I told you before, she's learning to make carpets and, in exchange, she teaches French. By the way, although the carpets may look simple, they are, in fact, very complicated-just like the steppes. The dyes come from plants that have to be picked at precisely the right time; otherwise the color won't be right. Then the wool is spread out on the ground, mixed with hot water, and the threads are made while the wool is still wet; and then, after many days, when the sun has dried them, the work of weaving begins. The final details are done by children. Adult hands 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 h.e.l.lo. As if she had never left. As if only a day had pa.s.sed, 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 sc.r.a.p 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 silly, we're happy, we can spend the rest of our lives like this." After all, she had read the same stories, seen the same films, watched the same TV series, and although none of them said that love was anything more than a happy ending, why give herself a hard time about it?

If she repeated every morning that she was happy with her life, then she would doubtless end up believing it herself and making everyone around us believe it too.

However, she thought differently and acted differently. She tried to show me, but I couldn't see. I had to lose her in order to understand that the taste of things recovered is the sweetest honey we will ever know. Now I was there, walking down a street in a tiny, cold, sleepy village, once again following a road because of her. The first and most important thread that bound me-"All love stories are the same"-had broken when I was knocked down by that motorbike.

In the hospital, love had spoken to me: "I am everything and I am nothing. I am the wind, and I cannot enter windows and doors that are shut."

And I said to love: "But I am open to you."

And love said to me: "The wind is made of air. There is air inside your house, but everything is shut up. The furniture will get covered in dust, the damp will ruin the paintings and stain the walls. You will continue to breathe, you will know a small part of me, but I am not a part, I am Everything, and you will never know that."I saw that the furniture was covered in dust, that the paintings were being corroded by damp, and I had no alternative but to open the windows and doors. When I did that, the wind swept everything away. I wanted to cling to my memories, to protect what I thought I had worked hard to achieve, but everything had disappeared and I was as empty as the steppes.

As empty as the steppes: I understood now why Esther had decided to come here. It was precisely because everything was empty that the wind brought with it new things, noises I had never heard, people with whom I had never spoken. I recovered my old enthusiasm, because I had freed myself from my personal history; I had destroyed the acomodador and discovered that I was a man capable of blessing others, just as the nomads and shamans of the steppes blessed their fellows. I had discovered that I was much better and much more capable than I myself had thought; age only slows down those who never had the courage to walk at their own pace.

One day, because of a woman, I made a long pilgrimage in order to find my dream. Many years later, the same woman had made me set off again, this time to find the man who had gotten lost along the way.

Now I am thinking about everything except important things: I am mentally humming a tune, I wonder why there aren't any cars parked here, I notice that my shoe is rubbing, and that my wrist.w.a.tch is still on European time.

And all because a woman, my wife, my guide, and the love of my life, is now only a few steps away; anything to fend off the reality I have so longed for and which I am so afraid to face.

I sit down on the front steps of the house and smoke a cigarette. I think about going back to France. I've reached my goal, why go on?

I get up. My legs are trembling. Instead of setting off on the return journey, I clean off as much sand from my clothes and my face as I can, grasp the door handle, and go in.

Although I know that I may have lost forever the woman I love, I must try to enjoy all the graces that G.o.d has given me today. Grace cannot be h.o.a.rded. There are no banks where it can be deposited to be used when I feel more at peace with myself. If I do not make full use of these blessings, I will lose them forever.

G.o.d knows that we are all artists of life. One day, he gives us a hammer with which to make sculptures, another day he gives us brushes and paints with which to make a picture, or paper and a pencil to write with. But you cannot make a painting with a hammer, or a sculpture with a paintbrush. Therefore, however difficult it may be, I must accept today's small blessings, even if they seem like curses because I am suffering and it's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, and the children are singing in the street. This is the only way I will manage to leave my pain behind and rebuild my life.

The room was flooded with light. She looked up when I came in and smiled, then continued reading A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew to the women and children sitting on the floor, with colorful fabrics all around them. Whenever Esther paused, they would repeat the words, keeping their eyes on their work.

I felt a lump in my throat, I struggled not to cry, and then I felt nothing. I just stood studying the scene, hearing my words on her lips, surrounded by colors and light and by people entirely focused on what they were doing.

In the words of a Persian sage: Love is a disease no one wants to get rid of. Those who catch it never try to get better, and those who suffer do not wish to be cured.

Esther closed the book. The women and children looked up and saw me.

"I'm going for a stroll with a friend of mine who has just arrived," she told the group.

"Cla.s.s is over for today."

They all laughed and bowed. She came over and kissed my cheek, linked arms with me, and we went outside.

"h.e.l.lo," I said.

"I've been waiting for you," she said.

I embraced her, rested my head on her shoulder, and began to cry. She stroked my hair, and by the way she touched me I began to understand what I did not want to understand, I began to accept what I did not want to accept.

"I've waited for you in so many ways," she said, when she saw that my tears were abating. "Like a desperate wife who knows that her husband has never understood her life, and that he will never come to her, and so she has no option but to get on a plane and go back, only to leave again after the next crisis, then go back and leave and go back...."

The wind had dropped; the trees were listening to what she was saying.

"I waited as Penelope waited for Ulysses, as Romeo waited for Juliet, as Beatrice waited for Dante. The empty steppes were full of memories of you, of the times we had spent together, of the countries we had visited, of our joys and our battles. Then I looked back at the trail left by my footprints and I couldn't see you.

"I suffered greatly. I realized that I had set off on a path of no return and that when one does that, one can only go forward. I went to the nomad I had met before and asked him to teach me to forget my personal history, to open me up to the love that is present everywhere. With him I began to learn about the Tengri tradition. One day, I glanced to one side and saw that same love reflected in someone else's eyes, in the eyes of a painter called Dos."

I said nothing.