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  63. Acknowledgements

Gessen handed Vidor a glass of water spiked with a sedative. He looked at it with suspicion but drank it down. After dimming the lights, he had Vidor lie down and concentrate on his breathing, while looking at the mandala on the far wall. As Vidor’s breathing slowed, Gessen retreated to the chair behind his head and led him through a relaxation exercise. As soon as Vidor reached a state of deep relaxation, the questioning could begin.

48

Transcript of Patient Session: Vidor Kiraly (and putative alter) 23 December 2008

I was born in the early hours of January. Which day exactly, I do not know. But I opened my eyes and took my first breath on a night of bitter cold and a sky ablaze with stars.

I was one of twin boys. Later I learned that my mother had already given birth to seven daughters, two of whom had died in infancy, and was delirious with relief to have produced a son. After an arduous labour and the loss of a great deal of blood, my brother arrived first in the world. She thought she was done, but then I appeared twenty minutes later. My mother was too exhausted to push, and as I refused to be born, she thought I had died in the womb. When I finally slithered into the hands of the darwisha, pale as a worm and no bigger than a rat, no one thought I would live. My unschooled mother still believed in the old ways. Twins were a bad omen and she feared for our future. The darwisha, who’d acted as midwife, assured her she would take over my care in the coming days. If I died, it was the will of the gods.

My mother, a Bedouin woman celebrated for her beauty, had been sold as a young girl to my father in marriage. Though she believed in the ancient gods, not in Allah, she would pretend to say her prayers to avoid my father’s wrath. Entranced though he was by her beauty, my father, an educated man, was suspicious of her character. He hated the darwisha, a traditional healer whom he denounced as a sorceress.

I wouldn’t suckle, so the darwisha dribbled the water from pieces of soaked bread into my mouth in a half-hearted bid to keep me alive. I did not cry like a normal newborn, so she feared I was infected by a malevolent spirit. As the weeks went by, and my twin brother grew into a fat bouncing infant, it became clear I was different in another way. My brother’s skin was dark like my father’s, while I was very pale, with strange grey-green eyes like a cat’s. Paler even than my mother. As if I were a child of the northern steppes, and not sprung from the sands of the Arabian deserts.