JIYAN AND THE WHITE STONE

The rain began on the wrong side of the border.

That was how Jiyan thought of it—not because there is a right side for rain, but because that downpour carried the smell of gunpowder, boots, and oiled metal from weapons. The child, Berzan, slept with his thumb in his mouth and a small white stone clenched in his fist. Jiyan’s husband had picked it up years earlier, during an early walk along the hillside.

“It’s smooth like the truth,” he told her then, handing it to her.

Now Baran was buried in a roadside ditch, and the truth was a wet stone in her son’s hand.

There were no sirens, no speeches, no clear flags. Only the low noise of machinery coming from afar and the rumor that neighboring armies had finally decided to correct the map with kicks and shoves. The word independence became unpronounceable; the word peace, a residue; language itself, poison on the lips of anyone who dared to utter it. The market closed. Bread prices rose. Neighbors stopped greeting one another or did so with the speed of someone avoiding a mirror. The men who had not died turned into smoke, or shadow. Some joined the local militias, others hid in caves, others suddenly became saints, wrapped in wool socks and red-rimmed eyes.

Jiyan picked up Berzan, the notebook, and the tablecloth that had once been part of her trousseau, and she left.

There were no farewells. Whom do you say goodbye to when everything is coming absence?

The dirt road quickly turned to mud. A tall woman with her hair wrapped in a red scarf walked one step ahead.

“My name is Sirin,” she told Jiyan without turning around. “If we stop, they’ll eat us.”

No one asked who they were. Those who walk without papers speak little. Even names are a luxury: they are given in low voices, as if they were candles in a hospital corridor.

At the old crossroads, where oranges used to be sold, there was an improvised checkpoint. Jiyan clutched Berzan, who was no longer asleep and had switched the stone to his other hand. Two soldiers looked at them as if they were statistical possibilities.

“Documents,” said one, with that accent from nowhere that uniforms wear.

Jiyan held up her ID card; the photo looked back at another woman—twenty years old, long braid, straighter teeth. The soldier examined it as if consulting cheap fortune-telling.

“It’s no good,” he concluded, and yet handed it back.

Sirin, on the other hand, was pulled aside.

“It’s fine,” Sirin said—and it wasn’t an answer, it was a way of not crying.

They walked, kept walking, and walked again. The mud gave way to an unmarked road, which became stone, which became nothing. They entered towns with torn-down signs and silent dogs. Water was sold in bottles with labels in three languages. At the last shop still open, a pot-bellied man with a boss’s air offered them a ride in a pickup truck in exchange for wedding rings.

“It’s just a short stretch,” he promised, and his promise smelled of rotten onion. Jiyan looked at her ring: she had inherited it from her mother.

“The rain will get much worse,” the man added. “The boy will get sick.”

She took it off and placed it on the counter. The boss made it spin on the table and smiled.

“Is it enough?” Jiyan murmured.

“What a beautiful design in the silver!” he exclaimed, as if the ring were worth a palace.

He gave them water and hard bread. Seven people rode in the back of the truck. One cried without tears, another prayed so softly it sounded more like remembering than asking. Jiyan pressed the white stone into her son’s hand and whispered to him in her language, the way one speaks to animals to calm them.

“Azadî, azadî,” she said.

The word meant freedom, and it wasn’t a promise—it was a little warmth.

They reached the coast after four moonless nights. Calling it a coast was ambitious: it was the edge of the world. The traffickers herded them into a concrete house with boarded-up windows and a bare lightbulb hanging weakly from the ceiling.

“You board in Latakia. Tonight,” announced one of them with a smile meant for no one.

They told Jiyan the price in numbers—not in bills, in lives. There were no discounts for mothers or children.

“If you don’t pay, you wait another month.”

“Wait for what?” she asked, and the answer was the sound of the sea.

“It’s a big boat,” lied the youngest handler. He had postcard-green eyes and a tattoo that said Forever. Jiyan wanted to believe him—not out of naivety, but strategy. Always, she thought: the word that is not kept… never.

They boarded at midnight. The boat was neither big nor small: it was an insult. It smelled of fuel and fear. Men, women, two babies with improvised IVs in plastic bottles. Berzan insisted on bringing his stone.

“Should I throw it in the water, Mom? So it floats?”

She shook her head.

“It’s for remembering,” she said.

“Remember what?” the child asked.

What they want to take from us, she thought, but she could not find a way to say it that he would understand.

They set off. No one applauded. The engine purred with the shyness of something stolen. Two meters from shore, someone prayed aloud; at three, someone vomited; at five, everyone became clumsy sailors. Jiyan counted the rhythm of the waves as if they were contractions. Sirin was not there; she had stayed at the crossroads, or in the statistics.

On the third dawn, a distant light became a lighthouse.

“Crete, Greece,” said the man playing captain. Whether it was an altruistic lie or a consolation, no one knew. The darkness thinned.

“How do you say to live in the language of the sea?” the child asked, sitting between his mother’s legs.

Jiyan didn’t know. In her language, her name meant life, but it wasn’t enough: naming it didn’t always save you. She remembered the chant shouted in protests that had become a kind of Kurdish mantra: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî—Woman, Life, Freedom.

The boat scraped onto a pebble beach. Someone jumped with the agility of someone carrying nothing. Jiyan took longer: she had to calculate how to place her feet without falling while not letting go of her son. A Greek woman, wearing a jacket down to her knees and a face capable of indignation without witnesses, handed them a blanket.

“Kaliméra,” she said.

It wasn’t just a morning greeting: it was the beginning of something—but Jiyan didn’t know that yet.

Crete did not have blue seas in the first month. It had gray procedures, prefabricated modules, hands that pointed without touching. Jiyan learned that some words line up in front of others: permit, admission, waiting, quota. She also learned the camp’s minimal map: the white tent where Berzan’s weight was checked, the office where no one understood her surname, the bathroom with the longest line in the morning.

“You come in hordes,” she heard more than once; the word hit her like a stone—not her son’s white stone, but a heavy stone that crushes your head. She would have liked to answer with a perfect, definitive sentence, but she had no moral dictionary. She only carried her child and the habit of not asking.

The first job wasn’t a job. She performed a series of tasks in exchange for vouchers: sweeping, peeling potatoes, folding blankets. In the container that served as the communal kitchen, a Greek woman with gold rings looked at her the way one looks at a broken statue.

“The Turks hate us and we hate the Turks; the Turks hate you; the enemy of my enemy… you know.” She snatched the vouchers with two fingers so as not to brush Jiyan’s hand.

Jiyan wanted to believe that you know as a bridge, but it was a moat. Double-edged foreignness: useful for discourse, useless at the table.

One windy day, Jiyan sat on the harbor curb with Berzan. The boy offered her his stone.

“So, you’ll remember, Mom.”

She closed her fist.

“What do I have to remember?”

“That we are,” he said, and the grandeur of that grammar took her breath away. Are: a verb without borders.

A retired couple stopped looking at them. The man wore a cap with a club’s letters; the woman carried a bag of bread.

“You can’t sit here,” the woman said.

“Why?” Jiyan asked in the clumsy Greek she was beginning to understand, making an effort as great as carrying a prosthesis.

“Because…” The woman couldn’t finish her thought, as if searching for the exact clause in the manual of rejection. The man helped her.

“Because then they all come.”

The sentence was the polite sister of a much older one.

Jiyan stood up slowly and took her son’s hand.

“Let’s go,” she said in her language.

The old woman then, as if apologizing to her conscience, left a loaf of bread on the bench. The gesture had two meanings and the same result: eating.

She met Nikos at the supermarket entrance. He did a bit of everything: repaired bicycles, fixed shutters, changed pipes. He had a teenage daughter who drew horses.

“If you can sew, they’ll pay you,” he said, pointing to a discreet side door, almost clandestine.

Jiyan could sew. She could do anything that served to survive, to get food for her son. She had learned in her mother’s house, by the light of a lantern that turned the world into a circle of fabric.

The workshop owner was named Manolis, and he called all women “my love” without distinction. He paid per garment and never on time.

“This isn’t Syria,” Manolis snapped at her once—and she didn’t stay quiet.

“Nor is it heaven,” she replied.

Manolis laughed; he was sure she hadn’t understood him. She had. The laughter was one coin less.

She sewed. Cut. Threaded needles. Endured the loud music, the smell of glue, the dampness that crept into the bones. When her fingers hurt, she thought of Berzan’s stone: smooth like a truth.

The boy, meanwhile, attended a school improvised by volunteers. He learned to write his name with letters that seemed to dance. He learned songs. Above all, he learned that his language was a house no one could tear down.

One February afternoon, smelling of fish and gasoline, a group of young men waited outside the workshop.

“They’re taking our jobs,” they said loudly, so someone would hear and repeat it.

Manolis came out with his measuring tape hanging from his neck.

“No one takes anything from me,” he boasted, and looked at Jiyan as one calculates how much one loses if one loses her.

The young men left slowly, promising themselves courage for next time. A neighborhood woman followed them with her eyes and spat on the ground.

“It’s not racism, but…” That sentence is never completed; it’s a highway that ends in a garage with the door shut.

That night, on the way back to the tent, a different group confronted them. They wore clean Sunday clothes, carried a red flag with a symbol that looked like a labyrinth, their mouths twisted into hostile grimaces.

“Go back where you came from,” one said.

Jiyan didn’t stop.

“I don’t understand,” she lied, the way one defends oneself from a dog.

“We all understand you,” they said, and the truth of that all weighed more than any word.

She reached the module, counted her son’s breathing until he fell asleep. She thought of the road, of Sirin, of the stone. She thought, for the first time, of leaving the island.

Not all Greeks were hostile like those of Golden Dawn—someone told her that was their name. That would have been another comforting lie, but in reverse. Some—the silent majority—offered what they had and what they didn’t. Berzan’s teacher gave him a notebook with a blue cover showing a boat.

“So you can draw your maps,” he said.

The boy drew a triangle: his home; a line: the road; a rectangle: the sea. The island was a nameless dot.

Nikos invited them to eat once a week. His daughter, Eleni, braided Jiyan’s hair without asking permission, the way one braids a sister’s hair.

“You have strong hair,” she said. “It pulls toward the sky.”

In that house, for a while, pronouns stopped hurting. They weren’t them, those, these; they were names: Eleni, Nikos, Jiyan, Berzan. Difference stops burning when it’s pronounced properly.

One morning at the workshop, Manolis told the women he would start formalizing contracts—at first for two—because of inspections. He would choose based on productivity and presentation. Jiyan didn’t know whether her skirt counted as an argument. An Iraqi coworker told her:

“You sew better than I do.”

Jiyan shook her head.

“You speak better than I do.”

They laughed, shaded by the same roof, cut by different knives.

The selection happened as such things usually do without explanation, with bureaucratic gestures. Jiyan wasn’t chosen.

“She doesn’t meet the requirements,” said Manolis, leaning on an invisible board.

She didn’t protest. She thought of a moment in her life in the valley before the war, when she chose the fabric for her wedding dress. The shop assistant, a woman with bulging eyes, had treated her as if she already knew the dress was sewn for the photo, not for life.

“May it look pretty on you, sweetheart.”

Now what mattered was breathing.

The following month, a tourist filmed the camp with a drone. The video went viral. There were mobile homes, TV antennas, children chasing a ball.

“They live better than we do,” one comment said.

“Look how they take advantage of our taxes,” complained another.

The narrative wrote itself: invasion, usurpation, abuse. The mayor gave an interview hot as bread fresh from the oven.

“There are shadows on our island,” he announced. “Identity is in danger.”

He didn’t explain which identity or how danger is measured.

The next day there was an assembly in the square. Not many people came, but they made noise.

“It’s not hatred,” clarified a man who sold umbrellas. “It’s survival.”

The applause sounded like church bells.

That same night, a group entered the camp with torches—not because light was needed. They tore down two tents, set a trash bin on fire, shoved a child who fell onto a rusty sheet of metal and cut his foot. Jiyan shielded Berzan with her body. When silence returned, the men were gone. What remained was the echo.

“Go back where you came from! Go back where you came from!”

The next morning, Nikos appeared with a toolbox and three friends.

“We’ll fix what they broke,” he said, and the sentence was as close as anyone got that day—and in a long time—to justice.

The neighborhood’s Orthodox chaplain, who hadn’t spoken in months, brought them soup. A woman who always went to the same hairdresser left bags of clothes.

“They belonged to my grandchildren; they’re too small for them.”

Everything was contradictory and true: rejection and help, disgust and tenderness, bread and stones.

Jiyan decided then that she would speak.

Not the island’s languages, she was learning it word by word, but her own: she would speak with her hands. She went to the harbor with a bag of scraps and needles. She asked the owner of a small bar for permission to sit at a side table and sew. He agreed, in exchange for her cleaning the floor at closing time.

She sewed bags with colored straps, phone cases, soft dolls with X-stitched eyes like drunken sailors. Tourists passed by, looked, and asked where the fabrics came from.

“From many lives,” she answered—and it wasn’t a metaphor.

Sometimes they bought. Sometimes they haggled with the arrogance of those who believe they’re also buying the seamstress’s biography.

One afternoon, a group of Greek boys approached and laughed in her face.

“How ugly!” one exclaimed.

The leader, a blond boy smelling of cheap cologne, grabbed one of the dolls and threw it on the ground. Jiyan bent down and picked it up without looking at him. Berzan, who had quickly learned the language, spoke slowly.

“My mom makes things from what you throw away.”

The boy stopped, unsure whether that was an insult or an artistic statement.

“So what?” he replied at last, with courage that looked borrowed and fake.

“And she can also fix what you break,” said Eleni, who had arrived without warning and stood beside the mother and her son like a slender tree.

The boys left without a final line. They learned a silent defeat.

That night, Jiyan sewed a doll with a small white stone inside. She called it Son of the Sea. She gave it to her son.

“So we remember,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“That we go on,” she replied—and it was the adult version of that grammar: we are, we go on.

An official came from the mainland to count numbers and promise procedures. He visited Manolis’s workshop, the harbor, and the camp. He smiled for photos. He said “integration” without explaining what it consisted of. He used the word “diversity” without feeling it as anything more than seasoning for a bland meal. When leaving, he shook Jiyan’s hand.

“I’m with you,” he said—and the with dissolved like vapor on the ferry’s path.

A week later, it rained again.

It wasn’t the bad border rain; it was honest rain: it soaked everyone equally and left the same smell of damp clothes in every room. Nikos lent them a bucket; Eleni brought bread. At the harbor, an old woman who had always wrinkled her nose at the sight of them approached with two enormous lemons.

“For tea,” she said, and her effort not to smile was the day’s most tender gesture.

A woman from the workshop left a card with a number on the table.

“In case you need… to talk.”

She pronounced it awkwardly, like someone saying the word sorry for the first time.

Jiyan wrote a letter—not to an authority, nor a paper that grants rights, but to herself. She wrote it in her language, with that beauty words have when they refuse to surrender.

My name is Jiyan. My name means “life,” but sometimes it means to resist. I come from a place where there are stones that fit in the hand and truths that fit on no map. My son is named Berzan, a name that promises height and strength. Here we learned other music. They look at us as if we were the mirror of a fear, but they also hand us some bread. We are two things: the threat and the neighbor. I don’t know what we will be tomorrow. I want to be a neighbor. I want a key that breaks no door.

She folded the sheet and tucked it into the passport sleeve, which was a plastic sheet without a country.

Some time later, in the neighborhood of laundromats, life settled into its humble balance. Jiyan no longer looked at the ground when she entered the supermarket. She greeted people. Sometimes they returned the greeting. Manolis called her again; he offered to “regularize” her because the inspectors had come through. She accepted.

“One signature here,” he said, pointing.

She signed like someone sewing a hem: knowing it’s not enough, but it helps.

Berzan was invited to the birthday party of a Greek classmate. Jiyan bought him a T-shirt with a blue horse, having learned Eleni’s lesson. The children ran after the ball; no one asked for papers at the playground gate. A mother commented aloud, a remnant of the beginning.

“We’ll have to see if they don’t bring problems.”

Another replied:

“The problems are brought by men with torches—the ones from Golden Dawn—haven’t you heard yet?”

They didn’t look at each other. That, too, is coexistence: arguing without touching.

That night, on the way back, Jiyan found new graffiti on the wall near the harbor.

Our island for our people.

Someone, in smaller letters, had written underneath: And who are we?

The sea, as always, answered with its murmur.

Berzan, tired, fell asleep clutching the stone doll against his chest. Jiyan covered him and stepped out onto the pier for a moment. There were stars without a forecast. She remembered the smell of bread from her village and the color of Sirin’s scarf. She remembered the ditch, the ring, the truck, the boat, the blanket. She didn’t open the letter because she knew it by heart. She wrapped her arms around her waist, as if measuring a new size. She heard footsteps: it was Nikos, coming with two coffees.

“There’s a meeting at the school tomorrow,” he said. “They’re asking for ideas for integration.”

The word hung between them like laundry waiting for sun.

“I can teach sewing,” said Jiyan. “To girls and boys,” she clarified.

Nikos nodded.

“And I can teach bicycle repair.”

“Do you think it will help?” she asked.

“It helps if we see each other working together,” he replied—and the together was worth far more than the verb to bring together.

Jiyan looked at the water. She thought that her name, back there, meant life. Here, with luck, it could also mean neighborhood, wages, routine—humble and solid ways of being alive. She didn’t want to give thanks like someone paying an unpayable debt; she wanted to reciprocate, to balance, to belong without ceasing to be. She wanted the next day to be a fact, not a hypothesis.

Before returning to the module, she threw her husband’s little stone into the sea, not as renunciation, but as a messenger. Smooth like a truth, it traced a circle, then another, as if weaving.

“So we remember,” she whispered.

That we are.

That we go on.

That when they allow it, we also know how to arrive.

And the rain, at last, fell from the correct side: from above to below, on everyone.

THREE WINDOWS

 

Marta has lived in the same house since she got married. In the dining room hangs a worn crucifix and a television turned on with no sound: mute news from a world she no longer understands. Her daughter, Laura, arrives once a week from the city with a bag full of things and a hurried expression. Aimé comes behind her, cellphone in hand and earbuds in her ears, like a declaration of independence.

That afternoon, a relentless rain breaks loose. The three of them are trapped in the house.

“The roof is leaking again,” Marta says, looking at the damp stain. “If your father were alive…”

Laura sighs. She knows the sentence will never end.

“We could ask for a quote through the repairs app,” Aimé suggests without lifting her eyes from the screen.

Marta frowns.

“App? What’s that?” she asks.

“An application, Mom,” Laura explains. “A phone program. They send you a builder.”

“And how do I know he’s not a thief?” Marta crosses herself. “Before, you knew the neighbor, the neighbor’s son. Now strangers come sent by that… artificial… intelligence.” She spits out the last word as if it were a bone.

Aimé smiles faintly.

“They’re not strangers. There are reviews, Grandma. Everyone uses it.”

Laura adjusts her hair, uneasy. She knows not everyone uses it. She herself is afraid, though she doesn’t admit it.

“I’d rather call Ricardo, the usual guy,” Laura says. “I trust a familiar voice more than a machine.”

Aimé looks up, annoyed.

“Ricardo? That guy overcharges you because he knows you’re trusting. I prefer something that analyzes prices and reputation. Besides, AI doesn’t get tired or forget.”

Marta slams the table with her bony hand.

“I don’t trust those things that talk and listen. They spy on us. They steal our soul.”

“Mom…” Laura smiles gently, but she feels an echo of truth in Marta’s fear. She, too, suspects that everything is being recorded.

Aimé lets out a short laugh.

“Oh, please. The soul doesn’t exist for technology. It’s just information. Data. They help us.”

Marta looks at her with pity, though she cannot hide a certain distaste.

“And that doesn’t scare you? Being turned into data.”

“No,” Aimé replies confidently. “What scares me more is being invisible. The future goes that way.”

Silence. The rain beats against the broken roof. Marta strokes the tablecloth with trembling fingers. Laura feels suspended between two worlds: the solid past of her mother and the liquid cloud of her daughter.

When Aimé goes to her room to get her charger, Laura takes advantage of the moment.

“Mom,” she says hesitantly, “don’t be afraid of it. These are different times.”

“It’s not fear,” Marta says. “It’s sadness. They pulled the ground out from under my feet. People used to talk, ask for favors, trust each other. Now they talk to a machine.”

Laura doesn’t know what to say. She has just been fired because an AI can do in minutes what used to take her hours. She hasn’t told Marta yet; she doesn’t want to hear “I warned you.”

“Maybe they’re useful for good things,” Laura murmurs, more to herself than to her mother.

“How?” Marta asks.

“I don’t know… helping in hospitals, teaching languages, keeping people company…” But she remembers the nights in front of the screen, unsuccessfully searching for a job, and the sentence breaks, remains unfinished.

Marta watches her, senses the crack.

“It hurt you,” she says, with the certainty only mothers have.

Laura bites her lip and says nothing.

Aimé returns, waving her phone.

“Mom, Grandma, look at this: a chat that writes personalized stories. I told it our life and it made a story about three women in a storm.” She reads aloud a few lines in which the three of them appear turned into fantasy characters.

Marta listens in disbelief.

“That isn’t writing. It’s… stealing other people’s words.”

“No, Grandma. It learns from books and texts to invent something new.”

Laura feels a chill: the job she lost was precisely editing texts; now a machine writes stories about her own family.

“I don’t like it,” Marta says firmly. “It doesn’t understand what it feels like; it just stitches pieces together.”

“And what are we?” Aimé says, raising an eyebrow. “Pieces of memories, of experiences. We also learn from others.”

Laura looks up. She’s surprised by the teenager’s lucidity.

“Maybe she’s right,” Laura admits, though it’s hard for her.

“No, my daughter,” Marta says, shaking her head. “We love. We doubt. The machine doesn’t.”

“I’m not so sure either,” Aimé says. “Sometimes I wonder if it understands more than we think.”

The conversation is cut short when a thunderclap shakes the house. The rain intensifies. Aimé smiles: “Look, the app says the storm will end in an hour and that there are builders available tomorrow.” Marta seems about to protest, but she stays quiet, worn down by the dampness and fatigue.

At night, each of them stands by her window. Marta looks out at the soaked patio. She thinks of her youth: handwritten letters, visits from neighbors, a world where everything had a face. She feels she lives in a time that shattered like a dropped plate. Laura looks at the city in the distance, lit by digital advertisements. She thinks of the dignity she lost when AI did her job better and cheaper. She feels split: she needs to adapt, but she longs for what was hers. Aimé gazes at the screen reflected in the glass. She feels the vertigo of a vast future, full of promises and threats she doesn’t fully understand. She wants to move forward, but deep down she fears becoming something that will no longer be human.

Three women, three ways of looking.

One fears tomorrow because it destroyed yesterday.

Another survives with nostalgia and anger.

Another runs toward the future even though it frightens her.

The house creaks. Outside, the rain keeps falling.

And, in silence, each of them understands—without saying it—that they live under the same roof but in fragmented worlds: one made of memories, another of losses, another of algorithms.

 

 

RUSSIAN DOLLS

 

A little man with small hands was walking towards me with hesitant steps. He interrupted his walk and stood silent for a minute, stiff, as if he had forgotten the next line in his script. Right then I realized that there would be serious communications issues. At 3:30 a.m. I have no time for bullshit.

      “Strange,” he finally said. “I’ve been dreaming about you.”

      “Don’t bother me,” I replied. I lit a cigarette.

      “I know this wears you out,” he insisted. Then he returned to his dark silence.

      I overheard the thoughts of a woman doubled over in the balcony of a neighboring building: “I’ll do it for money.”

      “I have the means to pay, whatever it costs,” the man said. “I don’t care about the money. I can pay any sum. They’ll pay anything, as long as the material’s high quality.” His words were charged. He wanted, he needed for me to figure out for myself who he was. But I couldn’t read him.

      The girl on the balcony paused for a moment, watching us. She was no more than twenty: blonde, thin, with Asian eyes, probably green. I read minds, but I don’t have telescopic vision. And people don’t think about their own eye color every minute of the day.

      “How do you want to use me? Do you have something worked out or do you make this up as you go along?”

      “I’ve got all the bases covered,” he answered. He didn’t hear me; he only heard the monologue he had prepared. “You never know what you’ve got yourself into. They pay well, of course.”

      “Whatever it is, I want her too,” I said, pointing at the girl on the balcony.

      “Why?” the man said without looking at her.

      “She has a talent that complements mine,” I lied. “I can’t function without her.”

      “Holy Mother of God!” the man answered. “That makes us a crowd, and for what?”

      “Just the three of us,” I corrected.

      “Does she know?”

      “No. I mean, yes. Now she does.”

      “And what is her talent?”

      “She’s a field blocker. Nobody within a radius of twelve or fifteen meters could tune me in or neutralize me.”

      “You’re a common telepath. Maybe that’s not what I want. There are thousands like you.”

      I took a long drag on my cigarette and then answered him gruffly. “Your call. You going to recruit me or not? You said you’ve been dreaming about me.”

      “Yes. I am prepared to. Is ten thousand all right?”

      “Ten thousand apiece. You include her or there’s no deal.”

      Though we didn’t like it, we were up to our necks in that war. That’s how it was. People like him traveled from town to town rounding up potential combatants at all hours of the night. We weren’t even sure how many sides there were in this war. I pointed at the girl with a stern finger, convinced that she wouldn’t even open the door for us.

      “I’ve changed my mind,” the man said. “We don’t need her. My team is below combat strength and all I’m missing is a common tellie like you.” I wondered how I would change his mind, now that I had begun to add up the benefits to be had from a complementary like her.

      “All right. You said that money wasn’t the problem, and now you act like a loan shark. I’ll take the ten thou, and I’ll handle her.”

      “That is an interesting proposition. No reason not to try it.”

      “Shit! ‘I don’t care about the money, I can pay any sum.’ You’re all the same; every day that goes by you become more and more like us.”

      He headed toward the house and stopped beneath the balcony. The girl pulled half her body outside, drawn perhaps by curiosity; that was enough. The man pulled a cylinder from the inner pocket of his overcoat and shot a half dozen tracers, thin as sewing thread. The girl was caught in the web, unable to move. He hoisted her up a couple meters and then lowered her as if she were a helium-filled balloon trapped in the middle branches of a tree.

      “Isn’t that a bit rude?” I protested.

      “Brusque is a more precise word,” he said in way of defense. “I don’t know a better way.”

      I studied the girl, pausing at her blonde hair and her sensual mouth. I felt long-suppressed desires reawaken, but I quickly noticed that it was neither the time nor the place to satisfy them.

      “No time for romantic adventures,” the man told me, as if he could hear my thoughts.

      “Who’s the mindreader here?” I shot back. The girl, who had been quite philosophical about her abduction, pointed at the threads of the web which prevented her from standing up.

      “Undo the web,” she ordered. It was the first time that I had heard her voice. I fell in love immediately. She was perfect.

      The man obeyed meekly. He inverted the polarity of the field and the threads dissolved in the air or returned to the inside of the cylinder; I can’t tell which.

      “We’ve been recruited,” I said.

      “We’ve been recruited?” she repeated. “I’ve heard about a war, but nobody seems to know anything about it. I’d like to know your names. Now that we’re going to die... it’s no fun dying among strangers. I’m Rita.”

      “Nobody dies in the telepathic wars,” the man said. “The very worst that happens is you lose your talent.”

      “My name is Zurich,” I said.

      “Zurich? Sounds like an alias,” Rita said.

      “My name is Joel Green,” said the man. “And he’s telling the truth; his name is Zurich.”

      “But you’re not Joel Green,” I pointed out. “Where’d you get that name? From some novel? Ubik?”

      “The guy in Ubik was Joe Chip,” Rita corrected. She wiped some imaginary specks of dust from the sleeve of the overcoat. “When’s the action start?”

      Joel Green (His real name was Josué de Campos y Oliveira; he had been born in Curitiba of a German mother and a Portuguese father.) led us to a building over thirty stories tall. The lights burning on almost every floor confirmed that war continued to rage despite the lateness of the hour. The guards stationed behind a large semicircular counter snapped to attention when they saw their routine efforts at identifying the new arrivals blocked. They knew Green by sight, but that wasn’t always a guarantee with psychs; appearances could be altered with surgery, focused meditation or inductors... They smelled a rat the moment their attempts failed. The guards were a couple of simple level-two snoops, nothing more, capable of verifying identities, but totally incapable of canceling the antifield Rita was generating. We stopped and waited. After a few seconds it was obvious that Green had managed to generate a series of credible passwords, and the boys smiled stupidly and let us pass.

      We used an ultrafast to reach the 28th floor. All around us, in dozens of two-meter-tall cubes, their gazes lost in virtual battlefields, all kinds of operators were waging the quietest war in history. Rita stood watching them. There was a trace of disapproval in her eyes. She might be an antifield, but she had all the vices of the empaths. The symmetry of the boxes bothered her, those talents all chained to the insides; and yet she hadn’t protested about the abusive way Green had recruited her.

      “We change shifts every two hours,” Green said, anticipating Rita’s protests. Maybe someday I’d discover why she was so uneasy about the cubicles.

      “Who’s in charge of operations?” she asked. The question revealed a familiarity with military protocols which I would not have imagined when I first saw her on the balcony. She sat down in an armchair. From there she could make out five precogs arguing about the correct interpretation of a meshwork. Each of the five held a different colored thread and they obtained a different configuration based on their orders of entry and the knots at the crossings. The source of the disagreement was that there weren’t even two crossings.

      “Forget them,” Green said. Seeing that I remained silent, stone-faced behind a disapproving posture, he tried to cheer me up with an absurd boast. “We’re winning.”

      Since the beginning of the war we had known that the teams that were fighting were not terrestrial. They needed fresh cannon fodder, and Earth was able to supply it. After discovering that Earth was full of talents, they landed with all the solemnity appropriate to the occasion. Ambassadors. Exchanges. Everything proceeding toward a limitless expansion of knowledge. Mutual confidence, sympathy. No talk of wars. They seemed as gentle as lamas.

      “Can we start this job?” Rita’s restlessness interrupted my train of thought.

      “It’s not that simple,” Green said. “When the shifts change, in just about...,” he looked at his watch, “forty-five minutes, I’ll have a meeting of precogs to determine whether you are in any shape to form part of my team.”

      This news disappointed Rita. On the other hand, I had known it from the beginning.

      “Accept us or not,” Rita said, “we’re going to do it. We’ll be an independent team, Zurich and me. We’ll recruit talents to reconquer the Earth. You’ll help us, Green.”

      “You’re crazy! That’s just not possible. I work for them, not for myself.”

      “Someone want coffee?” I asked, trying to defuse the tension in the room, which was as thick as jelly. I had discovered -- from the smell, not from any metapsychic power -- that someone had been assigned to the job of preparing it.

      “All right,” Rita said. “Let’s declare a truce for a few minutes.”

      Green stood in front of Rita, perhaps wishing he hadn’t brought her along. Marking out the chain of command in such a peculiar war was no job for amateurs, and that’s what Green seemed to be. I was troubled by the way he was making it up on the fly, most of the time without any real knowledge of what was up.

      We all jumped when a shriek arose from one of the cubicles.

      “We lost a tower,” I whispered.

      “That’s not something to take lightly,” Rita said. “Those people suffer.”

      “Miss,” Green said, politely. “I think I misspoke before. It would be better to write romantic poems or to be working in a sweatshop.” Rita wished for a moment that she had some active talent to rely on, some kind of telekinesis which would allow her to pluck the slats out of the ceiling fan and sink them into Green’s neck like scythes. He felt no remorse: it was evident that inside Green there lived a being without emotions or even a face. The monster had taken possession of the body to manipulate it and use it to recruit people with talent for war. I stepped forward, and for the first time I saw the creature lodged inside Green: it had the form of a bile-colored Pear; four symmetric orifices, similar to circular mouths with ragged edges, proving that after evolving over hundreds of thousands of years organisms tend toward simple, functional designs.

      “Leave me alone!” I barked once I had managed to fight back the apathy that had engulfed me.

      “It would be better if you left,” Green insisted. “I was wrong. I admit it.”

      “No, you weren’t wrong, mister monster from outer space,” Rita said. But it was the last thing that she said. An invisible hand, clearly manipulated by one of the talents around us, squeezed her throat, knocking her out of commission. For the first time that night I began to suspect that I had made a bad decision, or at least a hasty one. It was clear that this team would exploit my unusual talent hidden in the guise of an ordinary telepath, but I didn’t care; what I couldn’t stand was the way they picked on the girl.

      A cicada chirped. A horde of fresh talents approached the cubicles and were relieving the ones who were just finishing up. It didn’t seem much different from shift change at a normal office. I saw some very strange mutants, but also many normal looking people. What made the difference was the rapture on some faces, as well as the fatigue visible in their bodies, their faces and minds.

      “Are they in any shape to bring us up to date? They look exhausted.” I looked at Green who, inexpressive, looked at the talents as though they were beings from another planet. “War requires fresh soldiers, but not green ones.”

      “My God,” Rita exclaimed, recovering. “How can they be so apathetic, so emotionless?” Green turned his attention to the girl. He had imagined her unconscious, or at least shivering and frightened in a corner. Instead, he found a resolute Rita, ready for combat.

      “Miss! Damn it!” Green was in the foulest mood. Perhaps he had discovered something in the script that endangered both himself and his situation. I anticipated his movement, but he anticipated me. He blocked my mental attack, and he knocked Rita out with a simple blow to the jaw.

      “We’re not going to get anywhere like this. You insisted on recruiting her. Now you can’t stand her autonomy.” I hadn’t even managed to verify who our teammates were and who the enemies were in this mess we had gotten ourselves into. Nor was it clear that Green had wanted to recruit Rita; I had forced her on him. Still, I was so disoriented that I wasn’t even able to remember what my specific talent was.

      One of the crew being relieved, as tall as a poplar, knelt down in front of Rita to try to revive her. Maybe he didn’t even see the punch, since he imagined that, as would usually be the case, the psychic attack had taken Rita out of play. He was an accidental empathic, his talent linked to borderline cases, and that’s what Rita was, although he had not figured out which kind she was. Green had him pegged as a telekinetic or a panic inducer, and so he retreated, leaning his outer body against the wall. His inner body curled up in a pathetic manner. He was a coward deep inside, whatever species he was. The empath paid no mind. He pulled out a deck of plastic cards from his pocket and began to place them one by one at the girl’s head. The images of the cards represented natural catastrophes or imaginary landscapes from the invaders’ worlds. The aliens’ arrival had inspired a morbid fantasy cult, similar to the one that existed in the second and third quarters of the 20th Century.

      “Help me,” he said, “to ward off this pig so it doesn’t attack Rita again.”

      “It’s not a pig. There’s something else inside. You think maybe we’re from the same side?” My question made no sense.

      “You think? These vermin change sides as easily as they change bodies.” Then, as if reacting in slow motion, he said, “Look inside. What do you see?”

      “A Pearoid, greenish, with four mouths.”

      “A Scap. Strange. It’s a member of the Fraternity, a kind of sergeant recruiter. He recruited you?”

      “A couple of hours ago.”

      Several operators came closer to Rita’s inert body as they abandoned their posts and were replaced. They were making all sorts of connections and were surprised by the story which flowed from the girl’s mind. I didn’t notice how long that part of the cycle lasted. There were already about a dozen talents of every warp and woof -- telepaths, precogs, empaths, telekinetics, inductors. Green, curled up between the floor and the wall, doubled over in an outlandish angle, seemed to have lost control of the situation, perhaps pressed in by the joint action of blockers and depressors. It was never clear to me why they all had ganged up on Green. After all, they were on his team and Rita was a complete unknown.

      “It’s not working,” the empath finally declared, collecting his cards.

      “She’s been liquidated,” a precog said. “Only five or six minutes of life left.”

      I absorbed the information, stupefied. What game was Green playing, or the entity that had taken him over? What was our role in this game? Rita, if you could take the precog at his word, would end up dying for nothing, without even having entered into battle, simply on the whim of some low-level official.

      “In the event of an emergency,” the empath said, “we are authorized to remove or even destroy the recruiter. Perhaps you were not aware how many parallel battles were being waged this very moment.”

      Now it was my turn to witness something incredible. Two of the talents sat down in front of Green. Without touching him, they began some process which clearly targeted him. The outer casing of the Scap flickered two or three times and then dissolved. The pieces, independent modules of what had been Green a moment earlier, scattered serenely, soundlessly, as if they were pieces of some soft material. The trunk, stripped of extremities and head, began more and more to resemble the Pearoid inside.

      The empath moved in front of me, blocking what remained of Green, and gave me his hand.

      “I’m Burgueño.”

      “Zurich,” I answered. “What’s their plan?”

      “Cut it in the middle, through the equator. The Scap that’s hiding inside the Pearoid is the worst vermin in the Universe. You know the expression ‘Trojan horse’?”

      “No.”

      “You read the Pearoid’s mind, but some time ago the Scap had devoured it from the inside out, as some kinds of worms do. Only the carcass of the Pearoid remains.

      “It could have defended itself.” The impotence of the first invader surprised me. That must have been happening while Green was recruiting us, when he wrapped up Rita on the balcony and led us to the Central Building.

      “It didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. And we found ourselves unable to intervene; this phase of the battle is intense. We were erecting a thermal wall this whole shift. Two of us fell. Did you hear the scream?”

      It was hard to take in. The significance of the battles had escaped me. But I did not try to probe Burgueño. The guy had a dirty side, something in his gestures that repulsed me. That’s why it did not surprise me when, anticipating my vibration, he opened himself wide open, placing his most intimate thoughts on display, and expecting my talent to shake him like an old moth-eaten carpet. He wagered that the shaking wouldn’t give off a single flake of putrefaction.

      After this gesture from Burgueño several things began to happen around me all at once, although I will have to describe each of them sequentially. The information to which I had been given access permitted me to recognize the previous steps of my recruitment and of Rita’s. Green had detected the anti-field of the girl; he wanted me only as a cover for his interest in her. He had hundreds like me, or at least who were like what I appeared to be. But he lacked antis in the team, and so it was becoming difficult to neutralize the Scaps. It was a confusing explanation. Why did Green want to neutralize the Scaps if he was one of them? Maybe there was a Galac or the representative of some uncatalogued species inside the Scap which was inside the Pearoid which was hidden in Green’s chest. This war was spreading like an ink stain, turning loose every hobbyist with any psychic talent on the Universe.

      While Burgueño was dazzling me with his overload of confusing data, the talents opened up the middle of what remained of Green. They cut the Pearoid in two and extracted a black hedgehog that began to bounce off the walls like a ball of adhesive cement trying to break free. So this was what the Scap really looked like. Now I understood how they had screwed around with my perception and I couldn’t see anything but Pearoids: the Scaps were sheathed in a sterile film refractive to third-level psychic reading. The surprise of the sudden explosion had blown the Scap’s mind, if that expression even makes sense for a creature of its morphology.

      Seeing the hedgehog rebounding against the walls and floor like a squash ball, I shot an inquiring glance at Burgueño: “What’s it trying to do?” I asked.

      “The Scap? To leave its armor, I guess. Bernardo is going to crush it like a bad tooth. That’s Bernardo,” he said pointing to the inductor who was wiping his hands like they were caked in mud. “I wish it was always this easy.”

      The third simultaneous action had begun outside my field of view and was continuing behind me. I noticed it when Burgueño’s mind slammed shut on me. Rita had come to, and the antitelepathic field she was generating was enough to wipe out all the talents. Only the Scap, supposedly blind and mute, managed to break through the shield with a clear message, a message directed at me.

      “They’re lying,” the Scap transmitted. “I’m on your side. They’re the enemies.”

      I have two or three words to describe what followed: thick, cloudy; a body falling from a great height into a tank full of honey. I had lost my thread in a maze full of blind eyes, eyes which looked but did not see. Another three: sticky, slow, stale. I sought help from Rita, both surprised and delighted that she had entered the fight, taunting the fate they had predicted for her. But Rita had vanished, perhaps swallowed up by the flood of talents who were stumbling chaotically among the cubicles, some relieving the others and others simply bumping into each other like Keystone Cops. Burgueño, his hand at his waist, pulled away from the bedlam for a moment, apparently defying the Scap.

      “I think your kind are totally paranoid,” he said. “It will never stay like this; soon it will all return to normal and you can go back to your games.”

      “Why would you say that?” I protested. “It’s not human. Is it trying to take advantage of your confusion?”

      “Shut up, Zurich! This isn’t your war, and you don’t know its protocols; you never even enlisted in it, so there’s no reason for you to insist on staying. Don’t bother me.”

      Resigned, I looked for a chair. Rita appeared from the void and sat at my side. She put her hand on my knee and squeezed. The warning ran through me electrically, but her mind remained a large fog of noise.

      “I can’t read you,” I muttered.

      “It’s safer between teeth,” she muttered back.

      I smiled. “What are they?”

      “Perms, a species from a sunless planet. Strange, huh? A planet that wanders between solar systems. They’re psychs, but of the lowest grade, although pretty clever and capable. They butted into this war between the Scaps and Galacs, without anybody inviting them...”

      “No, no!” I insisted without raising my voice. A hissed cry is the same as a thought in an underwater cave. We were stuck right in the middle, and so an uncomfortable thought came over me. “You could clear things up a bit.”

      “You’re not going to like it.”

      “Then I’ll explain it. Green recruited me for money, ten thou. But I insisted on your presence as a non-negotiable.”

      “How sweet of you!” Rita looked at me like you would look at a slobbering imbecile. “That shows that you don’t understand a thing. It is your destiny to be the next to last ball; it’s all about you being in the right place at the right time, hitting the right angle, and then the mission is complete. Nobody cares about what happens to you after that.”

      “Rats!” I exclaimed, this time indiscreetly. But the office had emptied. While we were talking, a clean-up crew had started using magic to eliminate every trace of the human and alien psychs infecting the place. Rita watched me closely.

      “Did you understand what I said? You’re not going to make it to the end.”

      “Yes, I understood. That’s not my question. Why can’t I read your mind? I lied to them. I hid the real nature of my talent: my penetration can’t be blocked.”

      “I’m something else,” Rita said, tersely.

      “Something else? What are you talking about? How many other somethings are there that I didn’t know could exist?”

      By way of reply, Rita shows her true appearance: she is no longer a girl, but a closed-up tulip, her petals louvered like steel panels. I watch spellbound as a small, irregular pulse travels through the polished surface, which culminates in a thirsty, growing opening. As she unfolds like a flower, she displays complex microscopic systems, artificial organs of unsurpassed quality and precision. I feel as if I am falling from a great height. The stamens are receptor antennae for signals emitted by a higher being, one born on a planet that revolves around a star that is not the Sun, and that at this moment happens to be hovering ten thousand kilometers above the Earth, spying on our movements. Rita-tulip receives a trillion terabytes per nanosecond. That compressed information is explaining the origin, nature and end of the Universe; it would take eons to decode it, but the entity pities us and condenses and summarizes the content. The Universe, it says, has no purpose but is the product of chance. It is cyclical, it says. The dimensions of the Universe, it says, link together, interlace, complement, forming a sequential continuum in which the beginning and end, inside and outside, past, present and future lack any sense. Is that all? A little bit more. The creatures that inhabit it are distortions of time and space, accidents with neither purpose nor reason. This war? This war is useless, like any other war, like all the individual or collective acts of the creatures that infect the Universe. Scaps, Humans, Galacs, Perms. In the final analysis the actions, passions, lives, and deaths of trillions of species hold no importance for the Universe -- God, if you wish. Then, the entity is silent. It needs no time, but it takes pity on us and pauses before executing the next step.

      The stamens transform into claws. Acting quickly and efficiently, they hold me down, immobilize me, bring me closer to the petals, which slowly close. One stamen undergoes another transformation: now it is a scalpel. The claws move me into position and the scalpel slices through my belly, tracing a perfect line which rolls through my waist, continues along my back, reunites at my navel and joins up with itself. Four stamens, converted into jaws, hold down my extremities, another surrounds my neck. They fly off in opposite directions and split my body in two, separating the upper half from the lower. A toroidal form, a violet donut with red spots, emerges for the first time. It is a Coci-dí. The higher being blesses me with this insight. It is incredible! I have been harboring a Coci-dí inside me, controlling my actions, manipulating me. Now, split in two by the scalpel of a higher being, although not deprived of the ability to perceive my surroundings, I witness the second phase of the process. The stamens mutate once more, turning into the appropriate instruments for dealing with the morphology of a Coci-dí. Clasps, scribes, pile-drivers, wedges, chisels. I already know what comes next, of course. Who is the unseen operator, buried inside the depths of the Coci-dí? The higher being perhaps? Rubbish. In the interior of the Coci’dí there is a rough black pearl, a chick pea capable of swallowing all of the surrounding light. It calls itself Freber.

      “That’s not the end of it,” Rita whispers. Rita? We have returned to our more conventional reality. The tulip with steel petals and the chopping stamens of the superior entity has vanished. But not Freber.

      “Here, from the interior of Freber,” says a sharp-edged thought, focusing like a laser toward the center of my pineal gland. “I am One, the Indivisible.”

      “Does this ever end?” I look at Rita. We are seated in twin armchairs, our hands entwined like turtledoves.

      “That’s part of this war,” she responds, mystically. “You noticed, when the fighting started, that we were taking on alternative realities, alien to our own experience? Be careful.”

    

      Unprepared, I feel the wave shake me, drag me. The motion can only be measured in combined units, now that the entire space-time continuum has been affected. I understand the analogy of the dolls: one inside the other, all the way out to infinity. Still, there must be a final, indivisible doll. Miniscule, almost theoretical, bobbing in the limit between being and nothingness. The present too is a point capable of containing all of the past. And so too will be the future, since it does not yet exist. And even so it can include the present, the fluctuating point, the quantum of eternity. I have to tell Rita: knowledge is power, its duration shorter than the leap of one particle to another plane of reality, but whoever possesses it wins.

      “No,” Rita says. “Rained out.”

      “Rained out?” The building is still empty; the extinguished lights and the turned-off machines form an almost unreal tableau. What could seem unreal to me, at this point in the story?

      “Rained out,” Rita repeats, at my side. “A draw.”

      “A draw? You made me go through all that just to reach a miserable draw?”

      A little man with small hands is walking towards me with hesitant steps. He interrupts his walk and stands silent for a minute, stiff, as if he has forgotten the next line in his script. Right then I realize that there will be serious communications issues. At 3:30 a.m. I have not time for bullshit.

      “Strange,” he finally says. “I’ve been dreaming about you.”

      “Don’t bother me,” I reply. I light a cigarette.

      “I know this wears you out,” he insists. Then he returns to his dark silence.

      I overhear the thoughts of a woman doubled over in the balcony of a neighboring building: “I’ll do it for money.” It’s promising. All I want to do is get rid of the man. “But I’ve had enough already, and I don’t think this war is worth it.” Before the man can sense that I’ve moved my arms, I press his neck with one hand and squeeze his ankles together. I knock him over. I pull him apart. One identical man, but smaller, jumps from the interior hole and presses on, continuing the same old pitch.

      “I have the means to pay, whatever it costs,” the man says. “I don’t care about the money. I can pay any sum. They’ll pay anything, as long as the material’s high quality.”

      I repeat the operation, twelve times, a thousand. The last men are smaller than ants. Their cast-off shells give the landscape a make-believe sheen. Rita, laughing, hands me a magnifying glass and two stamp collector’s tweezers. Very carefully I pull him apart once more. It could be an angel, but it isn’t. It stubbornly repeats its schpiel, already inaudible. It seems that there is a war somewhere and that the Universe has no purpose, but I’m not certain what this one is saying. Rita laughs, and without me being able to stop her, she squashes the last man, the indivisible one, with the heel of her boot.

    

Original title: Russian dolls

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman