Interfictions (33 page)

From far away, but too close, I hear Hackin explaining that the Muslims who now live here consider these Buddhist images heretical. They regularly tar them and set them on fire; sometimes they shoot at them. So many are already lost, he says.

When the others leave, I remain. I feel an oppressive urgency, as if to leave without drawing everything, saving everything on paper, would be to admit in advance that these centuries-old paintings will soon be lost to the world.

I feel here the ardor of a thousand convinced and patient hands, the spirit of a million prayers. I owe them equal ardor, equal spirit. I copy the designs I hope to make immortal, but my hand wanders away into scribbling marginal notes, powerless to re-create everything, because I cannot comprehend it.

Behind me, someone laughs.

I turn.

A silhouette against a radiant sky: his voice comes to me first.

"You stay here for hours, Frenchman. Aren't you dizzy? And what do you write there?—.—.—.—You are anxious to ‘decipher the flight of supple and vivid lines over the surface eaten by time and wounded by fanatics' rifle fire'?"

He's quoting my notes. He laughs again. And this time I see him more clearly.

"What are you drawing? What are you stalking? Ah—.—.—.—their smiles—.—.—."

He keeps behind me, a little to my right, standing on the head of the great Buddha. (How can he read over my shoulder from where he is?) His arms are crossed, he's still laughing, without mockery but with great amusement.

He's standing right at the edge of the abyss, closer than I am to falling. He leans slightly backward, as if to expose the planes of his face to the wind that touches his back. He wears copper earrings and a long dagger at his belt. He looks like the dancer who smiled at me in Mokour. Perhaps it's the same man, I don't know. They all looked alike in the dance, even the most savage of them, the one I tried in vain to draw, who seemed the incarnation of all of them.

He looks at me, smiling.

It is the same man.

His eyes are no longer ringed with kohl, nor his hair unbound. But his look is still impossible to mistake.

And seeing him, with the volplane of the Afghan countryside behind him, I tell myself that this is how a man should exist, the place where he should be. Unafraid of the height, perpetually and irrationally defying gravity and himself. Turning his back on the abyss through not fear but pride: as sure of himself as a lion in his territory, and his territory—is the world.

"How brave you are, Frenchman, to climb so high, to the very forehead of the ancient gods. To get closer to them, to walk on them, to find—what?"

"To find out."

"—'Find out'?"

He laughs again, a little more loudly.

"What they're hiding. Their faces. Their smiles."

"You think they hide something? Or they
know
something? Perhaps—.—.—."

For a moment he presents his profile to the wind, his eyes half-closed. His smile is not that of the Buddhas, but something in him is like them.

He throws me an amused side glance, then slowly, deliberately, turns and fades into the shadow of the arch.

His smile is like a courtesan's, inviting and challenging at once. But he has promised nothing. And if he's making me a proposition, it's something other than the obvious, something all the more tempting because I don't know what it is.

I gather up my sketchbook and pencils and follow him.

Below, in the bowl of the valley, two horses are standing. He is already astride one waiting for me. I mount the other and follow him without questioning. Sometimes, to become closer to something, one must put a distance between oneself and it and be silent. Each act of apprenticeship is half will, half submission.

We ride. It's some time before my unknown man speaks.

"Do you know the Heart Sutra? No? Once in my journeying, I met a man who walked alone, though he had many followers. He possessed nothing, although he had seen and possessed everything that was futile and essential. He wished to gain nothing, to keep nothing, to give nothing away, though his followers thought he did. I told him I had lost all my old life; I was questioning the value of my endless future when my world had been destroyed and only I remained alive. He smiled and told me I had never had anything. Not even myself. No eye, no ear, no nose or tongue. No body, no thought. No
self.
No form. He told me that to travel to emptiness, one must start out from form. And he smiled again. You who like smiles, do you want me to explain what was the form of that smile? Yes? All right, first you must
see
."

He dismounts; I imitate him. He leans down and picks up something from the powdery earth. He holds out the palm of his hand toward me, and I see a plaster medallion shining white through its encrustations of dirt.

"The Greeks, they called these Emblemata."

I pick carefully at the object, rub it gently to disengage an astonishingly pure face.

"Little images of deities. Some think, because these works look simple, not important, they were sketches made by student artists. The soil of Gandhara is sown with them still. They show the spirits, the divinities, the procession of Dionysus, often. Maenads, Silenus.—.—.—.— You know them?"

"A little."

"For the people of those times, the gods were everywhere. Later, in more ‘civilized' eras, artists would paint big and little kings, and even bankers' wives and their own mistresses. But in those barbaric times artists immortalized almost nothing but the gods. Men had proud hearts; they wanted nothing less than Olympus. Of course, they were actually representing concepts, making them in stone or on the breakable skin of vases; they were modeling the essence of this world using the materials of this world. Sculptors know you have to slap the clay or strike the marble so that the idea can emerge. Strike and slap ... It's the same to shape the spirit, eh?” He laughs. “So, still, often, sculptors are barbarous. They take for a time the imprint of the gods, or the primary impulses that the gods incarnated. They betray the gods less than painters do. The beings who chisel at the hard matter of the world extract its essence; painters, who make colors flow and dance at the end of a brush, merely impress their visions on the world.

"The men of Attica knew that. Their gods, they found them everywhere. Now they're dead or silent; there's nothing left of them but traces, like the Emblemata scattered on this ground. Laughable. A bit of fragile plaster. All the same, that's all there is.

"At least on the surface—Ah, but only on the surface.

"The Greeks who came here with Alexander left enormous ruins behind. Dust, fires, invasions buried them; but they're still here, underneath this parched once-fertile skin of earth. For more than a century, the French have been searching for them, patiently, curiously. They like that, Frenchmen, to study the ancient forms. And ancient they are. Old, serious, heavy. Only the little things, the light unimportant things, rise again to the surface, alone, like these plaster shells where someone has sketched the profile of a god.

"Some people, you know how it is, they see nothing but the lessons one can learn from an ancient object: its materials, its motifs, its form. Fewer see the great importance of this little thing."

"Which is?"

"
How
it came to be. One man's hand modeled this, and then disappeared. His civilization became ashes, the wind blew it away, and he was forgotten, the man and his art and his passage through this world. But, later, other artists came here and found these chips of yesterday. They rubbed the balls of their thumbs over the lines; they saw the faces of the Greek gods, Apollo's cold perfection, the satyrs' grimaces; and they didn't need a French archeologist to recognize gods. They just didn't know the names; they depended on nothing but their artists' eyes. And the faces of the Buddhas these artists made emerged from the stone of Gandhara with Apollo's profile. With all that and more: the straight nose, the long eyelids, the folds of the drapery, but without the Occidental divinities' cold posing; because the Buddha is Blessed, he wants to smile. His smile has blossomed. The sculptures have freed it from its encrustations. And the Buddhas show their radiant faces to the world, to fascinate you.

"That is form. The explication, and what your eye sees. The form of the smile, but
not
the smile.

"Because the smile cannot be understood unless you accept that form is emptiness."

I raise my eyebrows. “Emptiness?"

"Oh, the problems you make for yourself, Iacovleff! When you draw, where's the form of what you're drawing? Is it there, on your sketch pad? No, you know it isn't."

He taps my forehead with stiff fingers.

"It's there. When you put marks on the paper, that's only the way you're explaining the form to yourself, by pretending to show it to others. While you think you're battling impermanence, you're subscribing to it. You're uselessly trying to immortalize a particular form. You want to seize it, comprehend it. But form doesn't exist and you can't draw emptiness. So you artists are never satisfied with your work.

"The potter who makes a bowl creates it with a function in mind, a use. If the bowl fits its use, if it can serve in a tavern or a palace, it's a good bowl and the potter can be satisfied. Making it beautiful, that's between the potter and himself, as long as its beauty doesn't take away from its function. But what you do is nothing but an attempt to give form to the world because you sense its emptiness. You think you can show the form of the world, but on the contrary, aren't you fighting to invent it?"

"Are you saying my work is useless? Is that where we're going?"

"No. What you do is not a work, it's an intention. Intention is not useless, but just more complex than a work that can be submitted to examination. No, what you do isn't useless. Because form is nothing else than emptiness, but emptiness is nothing else than form."

"Then what are you trying to explain to me? That your Sutra has a firm foundation?"

"A Sutra isn't explained. It is transmitted, and some people understand it and receive it into themselves, open themselves to it, and some don't. Those who experience its truth suffer, because it's terrible to accept that everything around us, everything that causes all our joys and sorrows, is illusion. Beauty and suffering, love and pain, and our very selves: all illusion. Nothingness. But it's exactly because our spirits rebel, because we
can't
detach ourselves from these concepts of beauty and suffering and self, that proves there's a truth for us to understand.

"But a Sutra can't be explained. I'm not explaining it to you, I'm reciting it. It happens that you're here and are listening. The demonstration of a Sutra is the world, Frenchman. It's everything that you see now around us. Me, I'm just reciting."

He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, provocatively. Something in me revolts against what he says, but I don't know how to tell him; so my anger turns on him.

"I'm no
Frenchman
, stop calling me that. I'm Russian, if I have to be anything."

He bursts out laughing. His laugh is loud, raucous, long and joyful. He wipes his eyes.

"Finally! I thought you'd never dare. No, you're not Russian. You were born in Russia, you left your country for Paris; you're not Russian and you're not French. You're a
foreigner
. Why do you suppose I chose you to speak to? I'm a foreigner like you, a passerby, a voyager, an exile; you see me as the symbol of what the natives are, but I come from ‘outside,' like you. One must come from ‘outside' to be able to take that step from outside to the center, and to wear the mask without which there is no revelation. I came here as a
xenos.
I asked for hospitality, and it was given to me."

"Who are you? You know too much about everything to be what you pretended to be."

"You try to solve my mystery the way you approach anything that is
other
. You want to learn what I know about the Buddhas' smile—by studying what I am; but you haven't understood that what I
am
means nothing. I am nothing. I am a moment in your life. A mask over emptiness.—Don't get angry,
Russian.
I like to amuse myself, but I don't mean you harm.—Don't ask who I am, ask who you are. Who is Alexandre Iacovleff? Brown hair? Raised eyebrows? A hand that draws? A foot, a hand, a face—.—.—.—
or any other part of the human body.
” He laughs. “Shakespeare had a phrase for everything. ‘What's Montague? What's in a name?' Without a name, are you not still yourself? And if you do need a name, would you keep Iacovleff, or Alexandre? Be careful if you keep only Alexandre, though your first name is the more personal of your names. For another Alexander came here once. He did wonders. He conquered, he built, on his way toward the incredible Indies. And he returned broken, sorrowful, betrayed. Are you that Alexander, returned to Gandhara? Are you another Alexander? Or no Alexander at all?"

I want to laugh myself. “All that and nothing."

"Yes. Nothing and all that."

And he laughs unaffectedly. Not like a Buddha, but like a trickster warrior who has momentarily put down his weapons.

"Is there a reason to laugh about it?"

"Oh, you never get tired of looking for a reason. Is that really what you want to look for? All right. Look. You see this land all the way to the horizon, bare, dry, but it wasn't always that way. A long time ago, these valleys were rolling and green. When Genghis Khan came, he destroyed the inhabitants' painstaking work, the vital and fragile reservoirs. What they say about him is true, you know? Where he passed, the grass never grew again. So many peoples before him, so many dynasties. The Bactrians, Darius, Alexander, the Scythians, so many others, and now the Muslims whom you blame for firing off their rifles—.—.—.— They have all fought, conquered, and built; built and built again; and, even if they don't want to, they have all
inherited
layers of ancient forms, geological strata of forms. The profiles of the Emblemata have given their faces to the Blessed but also their versos to the Bactrians' coins. Inheritance is a difficult job, stranger. It means living on the hinge between past and present; in a past that isn't even yours, that can be hatefully greater than you. A past of other architectures, languages, arts. Other gods.