Before take-off they get in a word or two with neighbours to their left and right. Reservedly they express their satisfaction with their recent stay – it wouldn’t do to say more, and in any case, it’s understood. Just a few, those most incorrigible, ask last questions about the prices and the range of services, and then – content – they doze off. It all turned out to be so cheap.
PILGRIM’S MAKE-UP
An old friend of mine once told me how he hated travelling alone. His gripe was: when he sees something out of the ordinary, something new and beautiful, he so wants to share it with someone that he becomes deeply unhappy if there’s no one around.
I doubt he would make a good pilgrim.
JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S SECOND LETTER TO FRANCIS I, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA
Since I have not received any response to my letter, I will ask to be allowed to write to Your Majesty once more, this time in terms much bolder, though I would not wish them to be taken as excessive familiarity: Dear Brother. Because has not God, whomever He may be, made us to be brothers and sisters? Has he not divided diligently among us our obligations so that we would carry them all out always with dignity and devotion, tending to His works. He entrusted to us the lands and the seas, and to some He gave industry, and to some He gave governance. Some He made highborn, healthy, and attractive, while others He made of lower birth and of lesser physical blessings. With our human limitations, we cannot explain why. All that remains us is to trust that there is His wisdom within it, and that in this way we all form a part of His complex architecture, parts whose purpose we are incapable of divining, but – we must believe this – without which this world’s great mechanism would simply stop working.
Just a few weeks ago, I gave birth to a baby boy, whom my husband and I named Edward. My great maternal joy is marred, however, by the fact that my little son’s grandfather has not yet attained his final resting place. That his unburied body has been exhibited by Your Majesty to curious onlookers at the Prince’s Wunderkammer.
We have been so fortunate as to have been born in an age of reason, in an exceptional era that has been able to clearly express to what extent the mind is the most perfect of God’s gifts. The power of the mind is such that it may cleanse the world now of superstitions and injustices and make all the world’s inhabitants rejoice. My father was fully dedicated to that idea. It was his deeply held belief that human reason is the greatest power we as people can achieve and wield. And I, brought up in all my father’s love, believe that, too: reason is the very best thing God could have given us.
In my father’s papers, which I put in order after his death, there is a letter from His Majesty the Emperor Joseph, Your Majesty’s predecessor and uncle, a letter written in His Majesty’s own hand and containing the following passage, which I shall permit myself to repeat here: ‘All people are equal at birth. From our parents we inherit only animal life, and in this – we know well – there is not the slightest difference between king, prince, merchant, or peasant. There is no law in existence, divine or natural, that could counter that equality.’
How am I to believe this passage now?
I am no longer asking but imploring Your Majesty for the return to my family of my father’s body, which has been stripped of all honour and all dignity, chemically treated and stuffed, and exhibited to human curiosity in the proximity of dead wild animals. I write to you, too, on behalf of the other stuffed human beings contained within that Cabinet of Natural Curiosities of His Royal Highness, since, as far as I know, they have no one of their own to stand up for them, not even family – here I refer to that anonymous little girl, and to one Joseph Hammer and to Pietro Michaele Angiola. I don’t even know who these people are, and I would not be able to tell even the most abbreviated version of the stories of their unhappy lives, but nonetheless I feel it is my duty to them as the daughter of Angel Soliman to perform this Christian deed of asking. It is my duty, too, as of now, as the mother of a human being.
Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben
SARIRA
A beautiful bald-headed nun in robes the colour of bone bends over a tiny reliquary where, on a little satin cushion, there rests what is left of the burned body of an enlightened being. I stand beside her, both of us just looking at that speck. We are aided in this endeavour by the magnifying glass that is a permanent fixture of the room. That whole enlightened essence takes the form of this tiny crystal, a little bitty stone barely bigger than a grain of sand. The body of this nun, no doubt, will also be transformed into a grain of sand, in some years; mine – no, mine will be lost: I was never practising.
But none of this should make me sad, given the number of sandy deserts and beaches in the world. What if they’re entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings?
THE BODHI TREE
I met a person from China. He was telling me about the first time he flew to India on business; he had lots and lots of important individual and group meetings. His company produced quite complicated electronic devices allowing blood to be conserved longer-term, and allowing organs to be safely transported, and now he was negotiating to open up new markets and start some Indian subsidiaries.
On his final evening there he mentioned to his Indian contractor that he had dreamed since childhood of seeing the tree under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment – the Bodhi tree. He came from a Buddhist family, although at that time there could be no public mention of religion in the People’s China. But later, once they could avow whatever faith they wished, his parents unexpectedly converted to Christianity, a Far Eastern variety of Protestantism. They felt that the Christian God might come in handier to His followers, that He would be, let’s be honest, more effective, and it would be easier with Him to get some money and get set up. But this man did not share that view and kept the Buddhist faith of his ancestors.
The Indian contractor understood the man’s desire. He nodded and topped off his Chinese colleague’s drink. In the end they all got pleasantly inebriated, getting out all the tension of signing contracts and negotiations. With the last of their strength, wobbling on swaying legs, they went into the hotel sauna to sober up since in the morning they still had work to do.
The following morning a message was delivered to his room – a little note with just one word: ‘Surprise.’ Clipped to it the business card of his contractor. In front of the hotel stood a taxi, which now conveyed him to a waiting helicopter. After a flight of less than an hour the man found himself in the sacred spot where, beneath a great fig tree, the Buddha had attained enlightenment.
His elegant suit and white shirt vanished into the crowd of pilgrims. His body still preserved the bitter memory of alcohol, the heat of the sauna and a rustle of papers signed in silence on the glass surface of the modern table. A scraping of a pen that left behind his name. Here, however, he felt lost, and helpless as a child. Women who came up to his shoulder, colourful as parrots, pushed past him in the direction this wide human stream was flowing. Suddenly the man was frightened by the thing that he repeated as a Buddhist several times a day, when he had time – the vow. That he would try to bring with his prayers and actions all sentient beings to enlightenment. Suddenly this struck him as utterly hopeless.