Possessing the Secret of Joy Read Online Free PDF

trial is entertainment. But most of all, I scream it at my family: Adam, Olivia, Benny.
    No one responds to my question. The prosecuting attorney suppresses a smile because I have lost control. The judges rap their pencils on their tea trays.
    But on the morning of the twelfth of October last did you not make a point of buying several razors at the shop near the Ombere bus station?
    Once upon a time there was a man with a very long and tough beard… I began without thinking. Stopping only when it dawned on me that the entire courtroom had burst into laughter. Even Olivia, when I cast a glance at her, was smiling. Oh, Tashi, her look seemed to say, even here, on trial for your life, you are still making things up!
    If you would be so kind as to answer the question, says the dapper young attorney, and not attempt to indulge and distract the court with your fantasy life.
    My fantasy life. Without it I’m afraid to exist. Who am I, Tashi, renamed in America “Evelyn,” Johnson?
    The razor to me was always associated with men, with beards and barber stools. Until I went to America it would never have occurred to me to pick one up, to shave my legs and underarms with it.
    Yes, I say to the attorney, I bought three razors.
    Why three? he asks.
    Because I wanted to be sure.
    Sure of what?
    To do the job properly.
    You mean to kill the old woman?
    Yes.
    That is all, Your Honors, he says.
    That night in my cell I suddenly remembered the large razor I saw at the old man’s house in Bollingen, when Adam took me there. It was truly huge, as if it had belonged to a giant. I thought: How could a man’s face be so large; it would be almost like shaving one’s face with an axe. It was lying outside in the loggia, near the fireplace, and the old man used it, along with a large machete, to shave off slivers of wood for kindling. It was black and ancient, with Chinese dragons engraved in greenish bronze on its sides. The blade was exceedingly sharp. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. The old man, noticing my fascination, placed it tenderly in my hands, closing my fingers over it protectively. It is beautiful, isn’t it? he asked, but I thought he observed my clutching of the thing with a quizzical look in his eye.
    I held the razor and looked out over Lake Zurich. Marveling that after our long trip, Adam and I had indeed arrived there.
    We had flown first to London, where Olivia was speaking before the Theosophy Society, and then to Paris, and then on to Zurich, a remarkably clean and somnolent city. In fact, from the airplane window the whole of Switzerland seemed to be quietly sleeping. Everything neat and trim, safe. There was an air of thrift, of husbandry, even before one touched the ground. I could see that the forests were carefully tended: where trees were taken out, seedlings were put in. It seemed a country in miniature, where every slight wrong might be corrected, without much trouble.
    I remarked to Adam how odd this was: that the people’s characteristics, easily discerned, were imprinted on the landscape.
    But that is true everywhere, he said. Everywhere some people go they wreck the land, he said. But this is the land of people who’ve stayed home. Mountains, he said, gesturing at the magnificent Alps, make a wonderful fence.
    We were circling the airport. It was in the middle of a field. There were cows and, as we descended closer to the ground, white clover and yellow wildflowers.
    There was a train to Bollingen, and we took it. It ran noiselessly on its track, its conductor a redfaced, jovial fellow with graying flaxen hair. We looked out the window at the chalet-style houses, the acres of grapes, the family plots of corn. Gardens everywhere.
    I had never imagined a warm Switzerland. In my imagination it was always snowing. People were on skis. The ground was white. There was hot chocolate. To feel the intense heat of the sun, to see people in summer pastels, to glimpse an ice cream vendor in one of the stations, amused