What’s your sign?

As far as pick-up lines go, this one doesn’t go very far. In those half-forgotten days of my youth, I never relied on it as the starting point on the road to a girl’s heart.

Moreover, I despised those men who did and those women who fell for such overtures, but then young people are good despisers. They recognise other people’s foibles more easily and surely than their own, and contempt comes naturally to them as a form of self-assertion.

And what could be more despicable to a budding rationalist than astrology or anything occult? Materialists poopoo everything magical, while Christians look down on anything that breaks God’s monopoly on magic.

As a youngster, I was neither of those two extremes, but I certainly hadn’t yet realised the limits of reason, especially my own. It took something paranormal to put a dent in that self-perception, something that I was sure didn’t exist.

I was in my early 20s, doing a stint in a Soviet hospital, my customary habitat during my last 15 years in Russia. Altogether, almost two of those years were spent in hospitals.

One didn’t just stay at Soviet hospitals. One lived there, in my case months at a time, because things medical developed at an excruciatingly slow pace, typical of natural forces. Even a simple blood test took two or three days to deliver results, and seldom had less than a fortnight passed before treatment could even begin.

As an experienced patient, I always looked for temporary friends, those who could play chess or cards, talk on interesting subjects or at least tell jokes. That time my friend was named Stas, an old man of about 30 obsessed with paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy.

I knew nothing about it, other than being certain that all such things were nonsense. Instead of trying to convince me otherwise, Stas offered a demonstration. He blindfolded himself and asked me to put a chess piece on the board.

He then told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the occupied square, my mind acting as a transmitter of mental waves. He himself was to be the receiver, and receive he did. A minute or two later, he announced: “D5!” – and so it was.

I insisted on repeating the experiment several times, and each time Stas either got the exact square or one adjacent to it. We then swapped roles, with him sending and me receiving. My results were somewhat less impressive, but not by much.

That was my first brush with the paranormal, but it didn’t make much of an impression. I was too focused on trying to dodge the KGB to worry about such incidentals.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was living in Houston, having got out of Russia and made a seminal, if yet unrecognised, contribution to medical science.

My polyarteritis nodosa, to which I owed the pleasure of meeting Stas, mysteriously cleared the moment I left the Soviet Union. That enabled me to come up with a ground-breaking hypothesis on the aetiology of collagen diseases: they are caused by communism.

Anyway, I found myself at a party where I knew everyone, except one man who was someone else’s friend passing through Texas. We struck up a conversation, and he said he was a professional astrologist.

Again, I expressed scepticism bordering on contempt. I refuse to accept, I said, that stars determine our fate.

My new short-term friend was patient with me. We don’t claim, he said, that stars determine anything. All one has to accept is that life is by its nature cyclical. If so, stars are the clock by which one could time various phases of the cycle.

That’s a hell of an assumption, I objected. I wasn’t yet a Christian but I was already thinking like one. Hence I insisted life was linear, not cyclical, expressing in crude terms my understanding of teleology. And he couldn’t really believe that one’s star sign affected one’s personality, could he?

Yes, he could. Well, in that case, I said triumphantly, he ought to be able to guess a man’s birthday just by talking to him. Yes, he said, I suppose that’s true. So what’s mine then, I asked, again demanding empirical proof.

He didn’t hesitate. “August 9^th or 10^th,” he said. My high horse bucked and threw me off. “How did you know that?” I asked. “Simple,” he replied. “You are a quintessential Leo, which means you were born right in the middle of that sign”.

I suspected legerdemain of some sort, perhaps our hostess having told him in advance what my birthday was. To put such suspicions to rest, he then proceeded to guess the birthday of everyone present, never being a day or two off. Once again, he was passing through and didn’t know anybody there except the man who had brought him in.

Push the fast-forward button again, and now we are in the late 90s. Penelope and I had been married for some 10 years, and she insisted that we travel to Moscow for her to see where I had spent the first 25 years of my life.

It was winter, the best season in Moscow, when snow acts as makeup concealing the blemishes on the city’s skin. We arrived at night, dumped our bags at my friend’s place about a mile northeast of Red Square and went for a walk.

We took Miasnitskaya Street that in my day was named after Kirov, but had since recovered its ancient name. Let me reemphasise that Penelope had never been to Moscow before, and had little idea of the city’s geography.

As we approached the top of Miasnitskaya. Penelope suddenly stopped and pointed at the back of the massive building on our right. “There are awful vibes emanating from it,” she said. “Some horrible things must have happened there”. So they had. That was the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square.

Penelope had no way of knowing that. Even if she might have seen photographs of that sinister building, the pictures would have featured its façade, not its back. Yet, as an extremely sensitive artist, she possesses an emotional conduit to knowledge residing in the ultra range above reason and hence superior to it.

On another occasion, a few years later, we were staying with friends in Amsterdam. Our bedroom was in the loft of a typical 17^th century Dutch house, tall and narrow.

On our first night there, Penelope couldn’t fall asleep. She seemed anxious, tossed and turned, keeping me awake too. When I asked what was bothering her, she again mentioned awful vibes. Something terrible had happened there, she was sure about that.

In the morning, I laughingly mentioned that little quirk to our hosts, but they didn’t laugh. They happened to have a written history of the house, and sure enough, a family of Jews had been hiding there during the war. They were then betrayed, arrested and taken away to a concentration camp, where they perished.

If you expect a conclusion to such recollections, I haven’t got one. The best I can do is quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”