Garbo's Faces

Garbo's Faces tells the story of Nachiketa Krishnamurti, a boy raised in India by his paternal grandmother who teaches him to speak with snakes. His father, Jiddu, is a well-known Indian mystic who is rarely home. His mother is never discussed.

When Nachiketa is 23, Jiddu reveals to him that his mother is the reclusive Swedish film star, “Harriet Brown” (the alias Greta Garbo often used): No one knows, or will ever know. You have no mother. Officially. You know that of course. You can never tell anyone. Nachiketa and Harriet do eventually meet and together embark on a decades-long spiritual journey of sporadic meetings, prolonged silences, and extraordinary, shared experiences complete with ancient snakes, trolls, and a mysterious white horse, that originally belonged to Mark Helprin. And the boy who was once given away will become the person who knows his mother best.

This is all a lie, of course, but a lie that tells the truth.

:: Prologue ::

When my mother was twelve years old, directing imaginary plays from the little outhouse roof in her tenement back yard, she knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the world.

Standing by her living room window, catching a brown and watery glimpse of the East River these many years later, she knew it to be a bad place.
Whether this knowledge had gathered little by little over the intervening years, cloud by cloud, and just now let on; or whether it had sprung, a gray horizon to horizon upon an unsuspecting sky just moments ago, since finishing her breakfast, she couldn’t tell. Only that it was so obvious now.
But she mustn’t let this ruin her day. She slipped into her beige duffle coat, donned her sunglasses, covered her head with a gray and black scarf, patted her coat pocket to hear the keys tinkle, made sure she had her cigarettes, and her lighter, and without as much as a word of good-bye to Claire, headed out for her morning walk.

:: ::

My mother gave me away when I was two weeks old. Yes: I was a gift. That’s what she later told me: a gift. Of course, I was also the unthinkable, in a world that must never know about me, at least not the world which knew and celebrated her. I was to be hidden from it.

Later I realized that I was also to be hidden from her, the deeper the better.

“And given sounds so much better than hidden, don’t you think?” she said once after I had come to know her. “So much better than unthinkable.”

The original benefacteeâ€"if that’s a wordâ€"was my father. His name was Jiddu, and at that time (I was born on April 10, 1928) he was a reasonably well known mystic. Indeed, he was quite famous in his day, even though in this day and age, if remembered at all, he seems more myth than man. Still, he has left a bit of a legacy, along with not a few schools and foundations scattered here and there about the world. But the man on the street, were you to mention his name, would look at you blankly, then shake his head, taking his time about it.

At first Jiddu argued that she should keep me. “Children should be with their mothers,” he said. “That’s why women give birth and not men.” Besides, would a child not be in his way as much as in hers? This, however, he soon had to admitâ€"even to himselfâ€"simply was not true. Sure, to him I would be a burden, an inconvenience and an embarrassment, but to her I would be the end of a career, the end of a successful life.

:: ::