The Journey to Eternity · A Philosophical Novel by Nurit Rozenblat
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Chapter Thirty-Three — The Place Where There Is No Yesterday
Liara stood before me, and inside her was a memory that had once been mine.
I could have asked her to give it back to me. Perhaps at last I would have discovered why I had chosen to forget my previous lives.
But I saw the apprehension in her eyes.
"Not now," I said.
"You don't want to know?"
"I do. But not at the price of something you might lose."
She smiled, and I felt a relief I had not expected.
Since I had arrived in this world, I had searched for answers almost without stopping. Every time I came close to one, I discovered another question. Suddenly a different desire awoke in me.
To see something unconnected to my past.
To get to know the vast world that had opened before me, without searching every corner for a sign that I had already been there.
The next day I met Adra in the garden.
I told her about the decision.
"I want to see something I have never known," I said. "Something that has nothing to do with me."
Adra smiled.
"There is a place I think you will like. But you will have to give up one thing there."
"What?"
"The desire to understand at once."
The two of us set out.
The way led beyond the familiar gardens, to a space where the light changed without cease. Colors I had never seen appeared and vanished among forms that sometimes looked like plants and sometimes like living creatures.
In the distance I noticed something that looked like an enormous mountain, half transparent.
It was suspended in the air.
Beneath it there was no ground.
"How does it stay there?" I asked.
"It doesn't stay," Adra replied.
"But it isn't moving."
"You see only part of it."
We came closer.
The more I gazed at the mountain, the more its form changed. For a moment it looked like thousands of layers of glass. Then like a sea that had frozen in the middle of a storm.
And then I saw movement inside it.
Something large was moving between the layers.
"Is there someone there?"
"Yes. We call her Eva."
"Does she live inside the mountain?"
"The mountain is only the way you manage to see her."
I stood before the vast being.
It had no eyes, no face, no clear body. And yet I felt that it noticed me.
Suddenly a smell of rain spread inside me.
There was no rain there.
After it I heard a child's laughter, and then I felt warm sand beneath my feet.
The sights changed rapidly.
A green field.
Red skies.
A human hand touching my hand.
At last an image of my childhood home appeared before me.
I stepped back.
"Adra, what is she doing?"
"Trying to get to know you."
"Through my memories?"
"Through the things that arouse a feeling in you."
The house vanished.
In its place a soft light appeared, and I felt a sudden joy I could not explain.
And then I understood.
Eva was not trying to tell me something.
She was trying to ask me a question.
"Do you want to know who I am?" I asked.
The whole mountain glowed.
I tried to tell Eva about myself.
I thought about my human life, about my children, about the years that had passed and about the way that had led me to this world.
But every time I thought of another period in my life, Eva presented it beside me.
I saw myself as a little girl.
Beside her stood the woman I was when my children were born.
And a little farther away stood the older woman I had been before I left my body.
All three of them looked at me.
There was no movement between them.
They simply stood there, as if all of them existed at the same moment.
"That is me," I said.
Eva's light changed.
I felt a question.
"Yes," I repeated, "all of them are me. In different periods."
The image did not change.
"First I was a girl, then a young woman, and then I grew older."
Suddenly the three figures drew closer to one another.
The girl reached out a hand to the older woman.
The young woman looked at me.
And then they all vanished.
In their place I felt something strange.
A longing for something that had not yet happened.
"She does not understand time the way we understand it," Adra said.
"Then how does she live?"
"Perhaps for her there is no past that has vanished and no future that has not yet arrived. She experiences connections between things, without arranging them according to what came first."
I tried to imagine such a life.
Without waiting.
Without longing for what had been.
Without fearing that time would run out.
But then a question rose in me.
"If there is no before and after for her, how can she choose?"
Before Adra could reply, I felt a sharp pain.
It was not mine.
The pain came from Eva.
For a moment I saw the translucent mountain cracking from within.
Inside it a small light appeared, and then went out.
And appeared again.
And went out again.
I understood that Eva was showing me something she had lost.
"Do you long, too?" I whispered.
The whole mountain trembled.
I did not know how to comfort a being who has no face, who knows no words and who does not experience time as I experience it.
I reached out my hand.
I did not touch the mountain. It was too far away.
But I thought of the moment when I held my children when they were small.
Not of their faces.
Not of their names.
Only of the feeling of a small body falling asleep in my arms, and of the wish that that moment would never end.
The light inside the mountain grew soft.
For a moment I felt Eva so close to me that I did not know where my feeling ended and hers began.
And then I heard a voice.
Not in my ears.
Inside me.
"You too hold on to one who is not here."
I was startled.
"You can speak?"
I received no answer in words.
But I felt her presence.
Perhaps it was not she who had learned to speak.
Perhaps for a moment I had learned to listen.
Inside the mountain two lights appeared.
They moved around each other, drew closer and moved apart.
And then one of them split into thousands of tiny points.
The second light remained in its place.
Suddenly I felt an immense loneliness.
Not the loneliness of one who has no one around him.
The loneliness of one who can no longer reach someone who was part of him.
"She lost someone," I whispered.
Adra gazed at the lights.
"I see that they parted. I do not know what that means for her."
Eva's light spread around us.
And for the first time I saw something I did not know how to describe.
A vast space within which countless points of light existed, connected to one another in ways I could not follow.
Some of them drew closer.
Others moved away.
One of them vanished.
But in the place where it had been, a small hollow remained, around which the other points continued to move.
As if even what no longer exists can still affect everything that remains.
The image began to dissolve.
And then I noticed something.
The light that remained alone was not extinguished.
It moved slowly within the space, and every point that came near it changed its course slightly.
I did not know whether this was the way Eva was showing me the one she had lost, or whether this was how she herself continued to feel his presence.
But I wanted to come closer.
I stepped forward.
"Wait," Adra called.
I stopped.
"What will happen if I enter the light?"
"I do not know."
I looked at the translucent mountain.
Until now Eva had shown me things without my asking. This time I wanted to choose for myself how to answer her.
I did not want to take a memory from her.
I did not want to try to fix what I did not understand.
I only wanted her to know that I had managed to feel something of her pain.
I placed my hand on the light before me.
It was cold.
Not the cold of water or of wind, but a feeling of immense distance.
I closed my eyes.
I thought of the people I had lost in my human life.
Of how even after their death I continued to hear their voice inside me, to remember the way they laughed, to think what they would say if they were beside me.
I did not try to show Eva their faces.
I let her feel what remained of them in me.
The light beneath my hand warmed.
Inside the mountain the two points of light appeared again.
One was still far from the other.
But this time, instead of vanishing, a thin glow spread from it.
It passed among the points around it, touched them and went on.
I saw the distant light change slightly.
And then another point changed.
And another.
I understood that what Eva was showing me was not only absence.
Even after the light moved away, something of it continued to move among the others.
I reached out my other hand.
For a moment I felt I was touching two different points at the same time.
One was close.
The other so far away that I could not see it.
But the feeling was the same.
The translucent mountain began to glow from within.
Adra called my name.
I did not answer.
For a brief moment I did not know where I was.
I did not see the way we had come.
I did not remember whether time had passed since I had placed my hand on the light.
I felt only the two points.
And then one of them touched me.
I opened my eyes.
I stood beside Adra.
The mountain was quiet.
"What happened?" I asked.
Adra looked at me with concern.
"You disappeared for a moment."
"I disappeared?"
"Your form blurred. I could hardly make you out."
I looked at my hands.
They looked as usual.
But something in my feeling had changed.
"I saw two lights," I said. "They were far from each other, and yet I felt them as if they were touching each other."
Adra was silent.
"Perhaps the distance between them was not as I saw it," I continued.
"Possibly."
"And perhaps what we call absence is only a state in which we can no longer manage to feel the presence."
Adra gazed at the mountain.
"I do not know whether that is the meaning of what you saw."
"Neither do I."
But this time not knowing did not frustrate me.
I felt as if a small window had opened before me onto a reality far wider than the one I knew.
We were about to leave when something changed in Eva.
Inside the mountain a tiny point of light appeared.
It approached the mountain's transparent face, stopped before me and began to pulse.
Adra came closer.
"I have never seen her do that," she said.
"What is it?"
"I do not know."
The point split into two.
One remained in its place.
The other came closer to me.
I felt no fear.
I reached out my hand, but before it touched me the point of light stopped.
It remained hanging before me.
As if it waited.
I looked at Adra.
"Do you think she wants me to take it?"
"Perhaps. But do not assume that is what she is asking."
I returned my gaze to the light.
"I do not know what you are offering me," I said to Eva. "And I do not want to take something I do not understand."
The point flickered.
For a moment I thought it was about to vanish.
But instead, it moved a little away and took its place beside me.
When I moved, it moved with me.
I stopped.
It stopped too.
"Adra…"
She gazed at us.
"It seems she has chosen to accompany you."
We began to walk.
The small point of light moved quietly beside me.
I did not know whether it was part of Eva, whether it was a being in its own right, or whether it was only a way in which Eva managed to go on being with me even when I was not standing before her.
When we had moved away, I turned toward the mountain.
It no longer looked like a mountain.
From a distance it seemed to be expanding into the air, until it was impossible to discern where it ended.
"Adra," I asked, "was Eva always here?"
"Since I have known this place."
"And does anyone know where she came from?"
"No."
"Then perhaps she came from another world."
"Perhaps. And perhaps the world we know is only a small part of the place in which she exists."
I went on walking.
That thought filled me with wonder.
Until now I had tried to understand what happens to a consciousness after it leaves the body.
But perhaps that question is too small.
Perhaps there are forms of existence that never needed a body.
Perhaps there are beings who are not born and do not die in the way we know.
And perhaps time itself is only one of the ways in which reality can be experienced.
When we reached the city, the point of light still hovered beside me.
It did not disturb me.
Every so often it moved a little away, as if curious about something, and then returned.
We passed a garden where several consciousnesses sat listening to music.
When the sounds reached us, the point of light stopped.
It began to move slowly, almost to the rhythm.
I smiled.
"Do you like music?" I asked.
The light flickered.
Adra laughed quietly.
"It seems you will have to learn to know her."
"Her?"
"Or him. Or something we have no word for."
I looked at the small point.
There was nothing in it that recalled a face or a body.
And yet, I already felt affection for it.
I parted from Adra and continued alone to the garden.
I sat down on a bench.
The point of light hovered before me.
I thought about Eva.
About the way she had managed to show me longing without using a single word.
About how even a being who experiences time in so different a way can feel the lack of another.
And then a thought rose in me.
If Eva does not experience time as I experience it, perhaps her parting, too, is not like the parting I know.
Perhaps what seems to me a loss is for her a bond that has changed.
And perhaps in my human life, too, when I thought someone had vanished from me forever, I continued to be bound to him in ways I did not know how to discern.
I looked at the point of light.
"I do not know who you are," I said, "but I am glad you came with me."
It came a little closer.
For a moment I again felt that same warmth I had felt beside Eva.
And then, without warning, it moved away.
The small light moved swiftly to the edge of the garden.
I rose.
"Wait!"
It did not stop.
I went after it.
It passed among the trees and stopped beside a small pool.
When I came closer, I saw that it hovered above the surface of the water.
Its reflection was visible in them.
But beside it another reflection appeared.
A second point of light.
I looked around.
There was nothing there.
Only the small light that had accompanied me.
I looked at the water again.
The two points moved around each other.
For a moment they touched each other.
And then I felt something I had not expected.
Joy.
Not my joy.
It was so strong that I laughed aloud.
The point of light before me began to flicker rapidly.
It no longer seemed alone.
I stood beside the pool and tried to understand.
Perhaps Eva had not sent part of herself with me.
Perhaps she had sent me to meet something I had not managed to see before.
I bent down toward the water.
The second point of light moved beneath the surface, but I saw nothing inside them.
I reached out my hand.
The water was cool.
The moment I touched them, the two points of light moved away from each other.
One remained above the water.
The other moved deeper.
And then I saw something that made me stop.
The point beneath the water was not a reflection.
It continued to move even when the light above me stood motionless.
There were two beings there.
One I could see directly.
The other only through the water.
I sat down at the edge of the pool.
I did not know whether they knew each other.
I did not know whether they had come from the same place.
But I saw how they responded to each other.
Every time the light above the water drew closer, the light beneath them moved toward it.
And every time it moved away, the other waited.
I gazed at them for a long time.
And then I understood that perhaps this was Eva's gift.
Not a memory.
Not an answer.
But a chance to see something I had been unable to see before.
I reached out my hand to the point of light above me.
It came closer.
"Do you want to stay here?" I asked.
The light flickered.
I looked at the point beneath the water.
It approached the surface.
"Then stay," I whispered.
I withdrew my hand.
The small point of light descended to the water.
For a moment the two of them glowed together.
And then they vanished from my eyes.
I remained sitting beside the pool.
I did not feel I had lost something.
On the contrary.
I felt as if I had witnessed a meeting that would not have been possible had I insisted on holding on to what had been given me.
I thought of all the times I had tried to keep things close to me because I was afraid of losing them.
Of people.
Of memories.
Of beautiful moments.
And of how sometimes it is precisely the desire to hold on that prevents something from continuing on its way.
I looked at the water.
The two points of light were no longer visible.
But for a brief moment a small circle of light appeared on the surface of the pool, spread and vanished.
I did not know whether Eva had sent me here on purpose.
Perhaps even she did not know what would happen.
And yet, I felt I had learned from her something I would not have managed to understand through words.
I rose from the bench and began to return.
The city looked different to me.
Not because it had changed.
But because for the first time I thought of everything that might exist in it without my being able to see it.
I passed a tall tree.
The wind moved among its branches.
I remembered Ayla, who had asked me to tell her how the wind sounds in the leaves.
I smiled.
I still had so much to tell her.
But this time I wanted to tell her also about Eva.
About a being with no face, who does not speak in words and who perhaps does not know what the word yesterday means.
About two lights that met in a place where I could see only one of them.
And about how perhaps reality is not limited to what we are able to perceive.
I went on walking.
And for the first time since I began the journey, I did not ask who I had been.
I wanted to know what else exists.
End of Chapter Thirty-Three
↑ Book index · עברית · ← Chapter Thirty-Two — The Place Where Memories Meet · Chapter Thirty-Four — What Was Left Behind →
