However irrational it might seem, she felt instead that there was collaborative impulse at work, as if her passionate refusal to inhabit this frozen domain was being answered by a pitying Nature, which stooped down and lifted her from the ice with the same impersonal tenderness with which she sometimes lifted a struggling insect from a swimming pool. And then an idea like ripeness would descend on her with utter conviction and, like the insect opening its wings again in the sun, everything was perfect just as it was.
Crystal’s relationship with gurus and spiritual authority was far from simple, and she recognized in her reading of Adam’s predicament the shadow of some of her own doubts and difficulties. Adam was a kind of authority himself, not only in his own eyes, but also in the part of her that was still impressed by his cleverness and notoriety. Why else would she be wondering whether to approach a man whose behaviour she found silly and corrupt? Was she expecting to acquire mystical prowess by association? And if she was, how different was that from his ruptured faith that, bathed in Mother Meera’s omnipotence, he could realize an omnipotence of his own?
Crystal, too, had longed for paraplegics to rise from their beds as she passed, longed for emotional knots to unravel in the clear light of her presence, and longed to crown these powers with the touching modesty of disclaiming them. Perhaps the only difference between her and Adam was that when she had these longings she realized that, under present conditions, she was wasting her time.
In order to see Mother Meera, Crystal had been forced to overcome reservations about going to Germany at all. Most of her father’s family had died in the Holocaust, and her sense of her father’s absence from her childhood was exacerbated by the ancestral void that lay behind him. Germany was the Fatherland of her fatherlessness, a personal wound that took the preposterous form of a nation state, it had bequeathed her not only a family which she didn’t know but one she could not know. Her loathing of its Nazi past cut across all her ideals of forgiveness and compassion. She went there to challenge her hatred and indignation, and found her desire to give them up challenged instead.
Thalheim lay in what might have been called the heart of Germany until, arriving there, it seemed wiser just to call it the middle. The ugliness of the surrounding villages would have been dazzling enough without the hostility of the population to reinforce it, but the stony-faced family who ran Crystal’s boarding house in Dornburg chose to underline the atmosphere of dutiful depression with a particular grimness of their own. Frau Varden treated her clients as an insufferable imposition, as if they had been billeted on her by an invading army, while her two lumpish sons had perfectly decanted their sibling rivalry into a competition for the role of village idiot, knowing that the loser would always be welcome in some humble capacity at the local abattoir.
Walking around Dornburg, Crystal’s thoughts grew wilder and wilder. She longed to haemorrhage against the walls to add a little colour to the scene. All the buildings were white, the gardens trim, the designs utilitarian. Post-war Germany seemed to be punishing itself for the extravagances of its past. If its internally shuttered houses and tight-lipped inhabitants were also trying to renounce world domination, the discipline carried with it a hygienic ferocity reminiscent of the drives it was designed to extinguish. No wonder the Germans had spent their history invading other countries. Who could blame them for wanting a holiday from their own Kultur? When she reached the edge of the village on her first walk, shivering in the December snow, she found a cute sign, decorated with a cow and a few buttercups, saying, AUF WIEDERSEHEN DORNBURG! It reminded her that on the flip side of every bully was a sentimentalist, like those smiling pigs painted on a butcher’s window, wearing a lop-sided trilby and a willing expression.
The devotees in her boarding house added to her isolation by drowning all the fine distinctions which had crowded her mind since she had first heard rumours of Mother Meera’s divinity. For them the focus of controversy was not her status, but their own status, as measured by where they sat during darshan, the silent encounter with Mother Meera which was the climax of their pilgrimage.
Crystal discovered this preoccupation at her first breakfast, and learned the nicknames of some of the Meera entourage, jokingly called the ‘darshan Police’.
‘I didn’t want to be in Kansas in the fucking kitchen,’ complained one American woman.
‘I was in the bookshop,’ her friend groaned, ‘and every time anyone wanted to get past me, they tapped me on the shoulder. Moustache Boy gave me a really nasty shove. You know, that was abusive. The only way I can figure it is that I had to learn something about my body.’
Boris, a ponderous Russian living in North Carolina, controlled the little group through the power of his mind.
‘Please!’ he said, as if he were asking someone to remove their car from his driveway and couldn’t be expected to keep his temper for much longer. ‘Read Jung!’
Everyone, it turned out, had read some Jung already and so Boris badgered them from another angle.
‘Jung only wrote one book for the public, that is Man and His Symbols, the other books are too esoteric for the public.’
‘Oh, I kinda liked Memories, Dreams, Reflections,’ said Robin, the woman who had been abused by Moustache Boy.
Boris gave her a furiously soulful and patronizing glance with which he conveyed that she had not understood its inner meaning. When he heard that Crystal was living in California, he became bitter.
‘Ha! California,’ he said, ‘the capital of spiritual materialism.’
It was too cold for Crystal to refuse a lift that evening, but she paid the price of overhearing Boris’s dream interpretation.
That afternoon Robin had dreamt that she was driving a six-wheeled truck. Before she could say anything more, Boris explained that ‘Six is the number of the higher intelligence.’
‘Why?’ asked Robin.
‘Because it is the sixth chakra, the brow chakra, which is the chakra of the higher intelligence.’
‘Well, there are so many systems…’ Robin began, but she was soon silenced by the Rasputin-like power of Boris’s self-belief.
‘It is very clear: you are being driven by a higher intelligence,’ said Boris, turning into the municipal car park.
Crystal, who was going to darshan for the first time, was able to break away and go to the head of the crowd, a privilege reserved for newcomers.
A lecture on darshan manners, delivered on the edge of the dark and foggy car park by a skeletal and lamp-eyed man with a monkish haircut who looked as if he’d been interrupted illuminating a twelfth-century manuscript, advised Crystal not to look at the other devotees but to turn her attention inwards and meditate during the three hours she would sit in Mother Meera’s presence.
While she stood there waiting to leave, Crystal overheard a snatch of conversation between two American men.
‘What did you say this guy’s name was?’