Note About the Traveler and the School.

The traveler has a passport that is considered western in the East and eastern in the West. Her passport therefore causes suspicion in both East and West; it casts two shadows; to the right it is masculine and to the left it is feminine. At the bottom of a forest furrowed with paths she looks for the famous school at the end of a long journey, a school where she is to pass her greatest test. Her navel is like the navel of unbaked bread and journey is so long that it eats up the years. On finally reaching the forest, she meets two men and asks them the way. They gaze at her, leaning on their weapons, and remain silent, although they know where the school is. Then one of them points with his finger and says, "Go that way, and at the first crossing turn left, and then left again, and it will bring you right to the school.." The traveler thanks them, thinking it was a good thing they had not checked her travel document, because then they would certainly be suspicious of her as a foreigner and would wonder what her real purpose was. She continues down the path, takes the first left turn, then left again; it is not at all difficult to follow the directions, but the second path on the left leads not to the school but to a large swamp. And in front of the swamp stand two smiling, armed men whom she already knows. They apologize through their smile and say:

"We gave you the wrong directions: you should have turned right at the first crossing and then right again, and there is the school. But we had to find out whether you really did not know the way or were just pretending. However, it is late now, and you can't reach the school today. And that mean s not ever. Because the school will no longer exist as of tomorrow. You have missed your entire life's destination because of this small test, but you must realized that we had to take this precaution, for the security of others and to protect ourselves against any evil intent on the part of travelers looking for the school. But don't blame yourself either. Had you taken the opposite direction and gone right instead of left, it wouldn't have changed anything, because then we would have known that you were deceiving us and that you did know the way to the school even though you were inquiring about directions, and we would have had to check up on you: your purpose would have been clearly suspect, since you were concealing it from us. So you really can't get to the school either way. But you haven't sacrificed you life in vain: it has been used to verify something in the world and that is no small matter."

The men talked and the traveler had one consolation--she had not shown her passport, and the men by the huge swamp had no idea what color it really was. But, at the same time, she had deceived them and hindered their investigation, which meant that her life had been sacrificed in vain after all. Of course, it was in vain from their point of view in one way and from her point of view in another. What did she care about their checking.

It all comes out the same anyway. And so the purpose of her being, which no longer awaited her, must inevitably shift against the flow of time; now she starts thinking that the purpose was not the school itself, but somewhere along the way to the school, as vain as the actual search was. Suddenly, her memory of this search becomes more and more beautiful; looking back, she begins to see the many beauties of the trip, and she concludes that the crucial thing happened not at the end of the road, in front of the school, but somewhere much earlier on, during the first half of her journey, which she would never have thought of had the trip not been in vain. In the rearrangement of her memories, dealing with her legacy like an agent on the market, she begins to pay attention to new details, barely registered in her mind. She looks for the most important details, constantly narrowing down their number, until, by ruthless reduction and increasingly strict selection, she arrives at a single scene from her memory.

A table, and on it a glass of wine colored with another wine. Freshly caught snipe roasted on camel droppings. Still nutritious from the bird's dream the night before. Hot bread which has the dark face of your father and the navel of your mother. And cheese from the milk of young and old island sheep. On the table by the food a candle with a drop of flame on the top; next to the Holy Book and the month of Jemaz-ul-aker flowing through it.