Hippie

23

By the look of it, Karla could be a bit obsessive with certain subjects.

“But how did you learn all this about parallel realities? It’s one thing to have an epiphany, a revelation in some cave, but returning over these thousands of miles is something else entirely. It’s not as if there’s a single spot where spiritual experiences are possible—God is all around us.”

“Yes, God is all around us. I always keep him close when I walk through the fields of Dooradoyle—the place where my family has lived for centuries—or when I go to watch the sea in Limerick.”

They were sitting at a restaurant on the side of the road, near the border with Yugoslavia—where one of the great loves of Paulo’s life had been born and raised. Until that moment no one—not even Paulo—had encountered any trouble with visas. However, because Yugoslavia was a Communist country, he now felt uneasy, though the driver had told everyone not to worry—unlike Bulgaria, Yugoslavia was outside the Iron Curtain. Mirthe was next to Paulo, Karla next to Rayan, and everyone maintained an air of “everything’s all right,” even knowing that a change of couples might well be approaching. Mirthe had already said she didn’t intend to stay long in Nepal. Karla had claimed she was going there with the possibility of never returning.

Rayan continued.

“When I lived in Dooradoyle, a city the two of you should visit someday, though it rains quite a bit, I thought that I was destined to spend the rest of my days there, with my parents, who hadn’t even been to Dublin to see the capital of their country. Or I’d be like my grandparents, who lived in the country, had never seen the sea, and thought Limerick was ‘too big a city.’ For years I did everything they asked: school, work at a minimarket, school, rugby—because the city had its own team that played hard though it never managed to qualify for the national league—go to Catholic church, because it was part of my country’s culture and identity, unlike those who live in Northern Ireland.

“I was used to all this, and would set off on weekends to see the ocean. Even though I was a minor, I drank beer because I knew the pub owner, and I began getting used to the idea that this was my fate. After all, what’s wrong with living a calm and easy life, looking at all those houses that’d probably been built by the same architect, going out now and then with a girl, going to the stables just outside the village and discovering sex—good or not, it was sex, there were orgasms, though I was afraid to go all the way and end up punished by my parents or by God.

“In adventure books everyone follows their dreams, they go to incredible lands, pass through some adverse circumstances, but they always come back victorious to tell their battle stories at the market, at the theater, in films—in short, in all the places where there’s someone to listen. We read these books and we think: my fate will be similar, I’ll conquer the world in the end, I’ll become rich, return to my country as a hero and everyone will envy me, respect me for what I’ve done. The women will smile as I walk by, the men will doff their hats and ask me to tell them for the thousandth time what happened in this or that situation, how I was able to take advantage of the only opportunity I had in my entire life and transform it into millions and millions of dollars. But these things only happen in adventure books.”

The Indian (or Arab) man, who took turns at the wheel with the primary driver, came and sat next to them. Rayan continued his story.

“I went and served in the army, like the bulk of the boys in my city. Paulo, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three. But I didn’t serve, I received a deferment because my father managed to get something we call third rank, in other words, reservist for the reservists, and now I can spend this time traveling. I think it’s been two hundred years since Brazil fought a war.”

“I served,” said the Indian man. “Ever since we got our independence, my country has been at war—an undeclared war—with its neighbor. It’s all the fault of the English.”

“The English are always to blame,” Rayan seconded. “They still occupy the northern part of my country, and just last year, right around the time I had returned from a paradise called Nepal, things got worse. Now Ireland is at the brink of war after confrontations between Catholics and Protestants. They’re sending troops in.”

“Carry on with your other story,” Karla interrupted. “How did you end up going to Nepal?”

“Bad influences,” Mirthe interjected, laughing. Rayan also laughed.

“You’re absolutely right. My generation grew up and my school friends began to move to America, where the Irish community is enormous and everyone has an uncle, a friend, some family.”

“You’re not going to tell me this is also the fault of the English.”

“This is also the fault of the English,” Mirthe said; it was her turn to enter the conversation. “They tried to starve our people to death twice. The second time, in the nineteenth century, they planted a fungus in our potato fields—our main source of sustenance—and the population began to wane. They estimate an eighth of the population died of hunger—hunger!—and two million had to leave the country in search of food. Thank God America received us with open arms yet another time.”

That girl, who looked like a diva from some other planet, began to hold court on the subject of the two great famines, something Paulo had never heard of. Thousands dead, no one to support the people, a fight for independence, or things like that.

“I earned my degree in history,” she said. Karla tried to guide the conversation back to what mattered—Nepal and parallel realities—but Mirthe didn’t stop until she was finished teaching everyone how much Ireland had suffered, how many hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death, how the country’s great revolutionaries went before the firing squad after two attempted uprisings, how finally an American (yes, an American!) forged a peace treaty for a war that had seemed it would never end.

“But this will never happen—never happen—again. Our resistance is much stronger now. We have the IRA and we’re going to take the war to their land, with bombs, killings, whatever’s possible. Sooner or later, as soon as they find a good excuse, they’re going to have to march their dirty boots straight off of our island.” And, turning to the Indian man: “Like they did in your country.”

The Indian man—whose name was Rahul—had begun to tell what had happened in his country, but this time Karla adopted a stronger, more decisive tone.

“Shall we let Rayan finish his story?”

“Mirthe is right: it was ‘bad influences’ that led me to Nepal the first time. When I was serving in the army, I was in the habit of going to a pub in Limerick, near the barracks. They had everything there, darts, pool, arm wrestling, everyone trying to prove to the others how manly they were, how they were ready for any challenge. One of the regulars was an Asian guy who never spoke; all he ever did was drink two or three glasses of our national treasure—a dark beer called Guinness—and leave before the bar owner would ring the bell advising it was nearing eleven at night and the bar was about to close.”

“It’s all the fault of the English.”

In fact, the tradition of closing at eleven had been set by Great Britain at the start of the war, as a means of keeping drunk pilots from setting off to attack Germany, or soldiers lacking discipline from waking up late, ruining morale.

“One fine day, tired of listening to the same stories of how everyone was getting ready to go to America as soon as they could, I asked permission to sit at the table of this Asian man. We sat there for maybe a half hour—I figured he might not speak English and I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. But before leaving that day, he said something that stuck in my head: ‘You may be here, but your soul is in another place—my country. Go in search of your soul.’

“I agreed and raised my glass to salute him, but avoided getting into details. My rigid Catholic upbringing kept me from imagining any scenario beyond body and soul united, awaiting their meeting with Christ after death. They are obsessed with this idea of the soul in the East, I told myself.”

“Yes, we are,” said Rahul.

Rayan realized he’d offended the man and decided to poke fun at himself.

“We’re worse still, we think the body of Christ can be found in a piece of bread. Don’t take me the wrong way.”

The other man waved his hand, as if to say, “It’s no big deal,” and Rayan was finally able to finish his story—but only a part, because soon they would all be interrupted by some bad energy.

“So anyway, I was already resigned to return to my village, take care of our business—more specifically, my father’s dairy farm—while the rest of my friends crossed the Atlantic to see the Statue of Liberty as it welcomed them, but I couldn’t get that man’s comment out of my head that night. The truth was I was trying to convince myself everything was all right, that I was going to find a girl one day and get married, have kids, far from this world of smoking and swearing where I lived, even though I’d never made it further than the cities of Limerick and Dooradoyle. I’d never been curious enough even to stop and have a walk through one of the small towns—villages, actually—between these two cities.

“At that time, I thought it was enough, safer and cheaper, to travel through books and films—no one on the planet had laid eyes on fields as beautiful as those that surrounded me. Still, I returned the next day to the pub, sat at the solitary man’s table, and even knowing it’s risky to ask questions that have a high probability of getting an answer, I asked him what he’d meant. Where was this country of his?”

Nepal.

“Anyone who’s made it to high school has heard of a place called Nepal, but he’s probably already learned and forgotten the name of its capital, the only thing he can remember is that it’s far away. Maybe in South America, in Australia, in Africa, in Asia, but one thing’s for certain, it’s not in Europe, or else he would have met someone from there, seen a film, or read a book about it.

“I asked him what he’d meant the day before. He wanted to know what he’d told me—he couldn’t remember. After I reminded him, he sat there staring at his glass of Guinness for several moments without saying anything, then finally he broke his silence: ‘If I said that, perhaps you really ought to go to Nepal.’ ‘And how do you suppose I get there?’ ‘The same way I came here: by bus.’

“Then he left. The next day, when I asked to sit at his table so he could tell me more about this story of my soul awaiting me so far away, he told me he preferred to drink alone, as he did, after all, every night.

“Now, if it were a place I could reach by bus and I managed to find some company for the trip, who knows, maybe I would end up visiting that country after all.

“That’s when I met Mirthe, in Limerick, sitting in the same spot I often visited to stare at the sea. I thought she wouldn’t have any interest in some kid from the country whose destiny wasn’t Trinity College in Dublin—where she was finishing her studies—but the O’Connell Dairy, in Dooradoyle. But we had an immediate connection, and during one of our conversations I told her about the unusual character from Nepal and what he’d said to me. Soon I would be going home for good and all that—Mirthe, the pub, my friends in the barracks, everything—would merely be a phase from my youth. I was caught by Mirthe’s tenderness, her intelligence, and—why not just say it?—her beauty. If she thought I was deserving of her company, it would make me more secure, more confident in myself in the future.

“One long weekend, just before the end of my military service, she took me to Dublin. I saw the place where the author of Dracula had lived and Trinity College, where she studied, which was bigger than anything I could have dreamed. In one of the pubs near the university, we sat drinking until the owner rang the closing bell. I sat looking at the walls covered in photos of the writers who had made history in our land—James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw. At the end of our conversation, she handed me a piece of paper telling me how to get to Kathmandu. There was a bus leaving every fifteen days from the Totteridge and Whetstone subway station.

“I thought she’d grown tired of me, wanted me far, far away, and I grabbed the piece of paper without the slightest intention of going to London.”

In the midst of telling his story, Rayan pretended not to hear a group of motorcycles pull up and then rev their engines in neutral. From the travelers’ vantage point inside the restaurant, they couldn’t tell how many bikers there were, but the sound was threatening and out of place. The manager of the restaurant mentioned they were closing soon, but no one at any of the other tables had budged and Rayan continued speaking.

“Then Mirthe surprised me with what she said: ‘Setting aside travel time, which I won’t mention so as not to discourage you, I want you to come back from there after exactly two weeks. I’ll be here waiting for you—but if you aren’t here by the day I think you ought to arrive, you’ll never see me again.”

Mirthe laughed. That wasn’t exactly what she’d said—it was closer to “Go in search of your soul, because I’ve already found mine.” What she hadn’t said that day, and wasn’t about to now, was “You are my soul. I’ll pray every night that you return safely, that we meet again, and that you never want to leave my side, because you deserve me and I deserve you.”

“Was she really going to wait for me? Me, the future owner of O’Connell Dairy Milk? What would she care for a kid with so little culture and so little experience? Why was it so important for me to follow the advice of some strange man I met in a pub?

“But Mirthe knew what she was doing. Because the moment I stepped onto that bus, after having read everything I could find about Nepal and then lying to my parents that the army had extended my service time for misconduct and was sending me to one of its most remote bases, in the Himalayas, I came back another person. I left as a hayseed, I came back as a man. Mirthe came to meet me, we slept in her house, and ever since we’ve never been apart.”

“That’s the problem,” she said, and everyone at the table knew she was being sincere. “Of course I don’t want some idiot at my side, but I also wasn’t expecting someone who would say to me, ‘Now it’s your turn to go back with me.’”

She laughed.

“And what’s worse, I accepted!”

Paulo was already feeling awkward about sitting next to Mirthe, their legs touching and, now and then, her hand rubbing his. The look in Karla’s eyes was no longer the same—this wasn’t the man she was looking for.

“Now what, do we talk about parallel realities?”

But the restaurant had filled with five people dressed in black, heads shaved, chains around their waists, tattoos in the form of swords and ninja stars, who had walked over to the table and surrounded the group without a word.

“Here’s your bill,” said the restaurant manager.

“But we haven’t even finished eating,” Rayan protested. “And we didn’t ask for the bill.”

“I did,” said one of the members of the group that had just arrived.

The Indian man started to get up, but someone pushed him back down into the chair.

“Before you leave, Adolf wants you to promise never to come back. We hate freeloaders. Our people like law and order. Order and law. Foreigners aren’t welcome here. Go back to wherever you came from with your drugs and your free love.”

Foreigners? Drugs? Free love?

“We’ll leave when we’ve finished eating.”

Paulo was annoyed at Karla’s comment—why provoke them further? He knew they were surrounded by people who truly hated everything they represented. The chains hanging from their pants, the motorcycle gloves with their metal appliqués of a much different variety from those he’d bought in Amsterdam. Tiny spikes designed to intimidate, to wound, to inflict serious harm when they decided to throw a punch.

Rayan turned around to face the one who appeared to be the boss—an older man, with wrinkles on his face, who’d looked on silently.

“We’re from different tribes, but we’re tribes that fight against the same thing. We’ll finish and leave. We’re not your enemies.”

The boss, it appeared, had difficulty talking, since he stuck an amplifier to his neck before responding.

“We don’t belong to any tribe” came the voice of the metallic instrument. “Get out of here now.”

It seemed as if the next moment would never end, as the women looked the strangers in the eyes, the men weighed their options, and those who had just arrived waited in silence, except for one person who turned to the restaurant owner and screamed.

“Disinfect these chairs once they’ve left. They must have brought the plague with them, venereal disease, who knows what else.”

The rest of the people there seemed not to pay any attention to what was happening. Perhaps one of them had summoned the group, someone who took the simple fact that there are free people in the world as a personal affront.

“Get out of here, you cowards,” said someone else who had just arrived, a man with a skull stitched into his leather jacket. “Head straight and in less than a mile you’ll find a Communist country where you’ll no doubt be welcome. Don’t come around here with your bad influence on our sisters and our families. We’re Christians, our government doesn’t allow trouble, and we respect others. Stick your tails between your legs and get out of here.”

Rayan flushed red. The Indian man seemed indifferent, perhaps because he’d watched scenes like this before, perhaps because Krishna taught that no one should flee when he finds himself before the battlefield. Karla shot a look at the men with their shaved heads, especially the one to whom she’d remarked that they weren’t done eating. She must have been bloodthirsty now that she’d discovered the bus trip was less interesting than she’d imagined.

It was Mirthe who grabbed her purse, took out what she owed, and calmly placed it on the table. Then, she walked to the door. One of the men barred her; once again there was a confrontation that no one wanted to see turn into a fight, but she pushed him—without politeness and without fear—and continued on her way.

The others got up, paid their portions of the bill, and left—which, in theory, meant they truly were cowards, capable of facing a long journey to Nepal but only too eager to run at the first sign of any real threat. The only one who seemed ready to take the group on was Rayan, but Rahul grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him out, while one of the men with the shaved heads stood by opening and closing his penknife.

The two French travelers, father and daughter, also got up, paid their bill, and left with the others.

“You can stay, sir,” the boss told him in the amplifier’s metallic voice.

“I can’t, actually. I’m with them, and it’s a disgrace what’s going on here, in a free country, with beautiful landscapes. The ultimate impression we’re going to have of Austria is still the river splitting the rocks, the Alps, the beauty of Vienna, the magnificent Melk Abbey. A group of no-good…”

His daughter grabbed him by the arm as he continued talking.

“…who don’t represent this country will be promptly forgotten. We didn’t come all the way from France for this.”

Another man came from behind and punched the Frenchman in the back. The British bus driver stood between the two with eyes like steel—he stared at the boss without saying a word; there was no need, because his presence at that moment seemed to fill everyone with fear. The Frenchman’s daughter began to scream. Those who were at the door began to turn back, but Rahul stopped them. The battle had been lost.

He walked back in, grabbed father and daughter by the arms, and pushed them all out the door. They walked toward the bus. The driver was the last to leave. He didn’t take his eyes off the leader of that gang of thugs, he showed no fear.

“Let’s get out of here, go back a few miles, and sleep in some other town.”

“And run away from them? Is that what we’ve come all the way here for, to run at the first sign of a fight?”

The older man had spoken up. The young girls looked petrified.

“That’s right. Let’s run,” said the driver as the bus pulled forward. “I’ve already run from all sorts of things the few times I’ve taken this journey. I don’t see any cause for shame in that. Worse would be if we woke up tomorrow with the tires slashed, unable to continue our journey because I only have two spares.”