by Ben Okri
Towards the evening a bald man with a rocklike head was seen walking through the fair. He was a hired hand for hard jobs. He was next seen sitting on a wooden chair, giving an account, cap in hand, to the one who had commissioned him. He had done satisfactorily what he had been told to do, making everyone a suspect. It was now impossible to separate the innocent from the guilty.
When he had finished giving his report, the hired hand disappeared into the unsuspecting crowd. The rigged condition lingered, but it meant nothing, it changed nothing. For here, in this fair, the only thing that matters is the charmed condition of books that endure. It is impossible, in the long run, to rig a book into a magic condition, or make it give off a light it does not have.
3
And so the lady of the fair wandered among the flowering books untouched by the scandal. And the scandal itself was soon dissolved by the higher truth and the beautiful light that protects this place from all evil.
The air is clear again. The books breathe out a timeless peace and an eternal youth into the festival. It is as though nothing untoward had happened here, or ever could.
The Racial
Colourist
THIS HAPPENED DURING the war. A group of us were sitting on a wall, and I was trying to get these two people to meet. But one of them was a racial colourist. He had a chart in one hand and paste on his fingertips. He told me there was no way he could shake hands with a third-rate white man. I was surprised, because this chap too was white, and he would receive a hug from me but he wouldn’t touch another white man whom he considered inferior. The other man was so offended that he stormed off. I went after him, but he walked away so fast he disappeared. As I went back to the group, I became aware for the first time of the danger of my position.
The man who began it all had gone. I stood among the rest, ill at ease. I had no way of telling who was a racial colourist. Then I noticed a white youth in the place of the man who had gone. He wore little round glasses. He kept looking at me in a peculiar way. I tried to ignore him. A girl went past and waved at me. She was someone I knew. The youth with the glasses consulted his colour chart and then made an urgent call with a walkie-talkie.
‘Yes, sir. He said hello to one of ours. Yes, yes, sir.’
It was clear he was monitoring the contact I had with people of accepted racial purity. I became aware that he belonged to a shadowy organisation. What else do they do? Do they murder people like me? I felt unsafe. I hurried away from the group. The bespectacled youth, with his chart, and his walkie-talkie, came after me. I crossed a field, at a near run. He picked up speed. Where was I running to, where could I run to, where was safe for me? It grew dark. The chap kept on my trail, pursuing me. I lost him across a whispering maze of fields. Soon it was night. Then suddenly I saw him in the distance, with a torch in his hand. He walked alongside the nocturnal silence of a village green. Behind him, revealed in a blue flash of lightning, was a quaint provincial town. A voice within me said:
‘Go towards him. Don’t run away. Go menacingly, purposefully. He’s more scared of you than you are of him.’
So I stopped running. And as I strode towards him, with a mean purpose in me, he appeared to hesitate. When I neared him I gazed into his eyes. Behind his glasses, he had scared, timid eyes and an ordinary harmless face which I didn’t have the heart to hurt in any way. I brushed past him in the dark. I went towards the village. I didn’t look back. I didn’t care any more.
The Black
Russian
THE FIRST TIME we failed but, this time, we will succeed in filming our version of Eugene Onegin, in splendid technicolour.
There were four of us. We were going to use the local tools available. One of us had to be in the kitchen, in charge of the taper. When the train approached the one in the kitchen had to light the taper. This was a sign to the train driver to keep the train’s fire blazing, and to maintain his speed. His fire and speed would then activate another scene, where one of the women on a bicycle would ride forth. And then somewhere else another character would do what he was supposed to do.
It was all so well co-ordinated, and depended utterly on a one-take success, a once-only event. It was then or never.
The taper caught fire, the train driver saw it, the other dependent scenes went off perfectly, and as the train sped past I jumped on the open-backed platform where, to my surprise, I encountered a black man who was an important worker on the luxury train. He was in charge of looking after the higher-ranking travellers. He was dressed beautifully in a red jacket with gleaming epaulettes. He had dark, almost blue skin. When I jumped on the platform of the moving train he smiled at me. Then, to my astonishment, he said:
‘Welcome, Dubchanka,’ as if he had known me all my life. He smiled again knowingly.
Whereupon I helped myself to one of his freshly cut and lovingly buttered sandwiches, with delicious slices of cheese. The one I chose had been bitten into by him, but I didn’t mind. Then I jumped off the slowing train. The black Russian jumped down too. He ran elegantly towards the local shops to buy some caviar for the remaining sandwich, and to get other items for himself during the train’s brief stop in town.
But someone else in our crew had jumped on the train’s platform and, imitating me, had helped himself to the last of the splendid cheese sandwiches. I could see the black Russian’s polite dismay as he watched the crew member devour his sandwich. It was so funny.
Anyway, all the scenes went off well. The school teacher had her moment. Kuragin had his. The train was beautiful and was painted black. Colours were so perfect on that day. The women played their roles excellently. All the co-ordinated filming had been a great success, and we knew in our hearts that we had brought home a great Russian classic. It was the last day of filming. We had done Pushkin proud, at last.
Wild Bulls
IT IS THE aftermath of war, and there is chaos everywhere. I am in a fabulous house where they have gathered the children of war. They are all orphans and all lost. I am meant to be their teacher.
They can’t absorb anything just yet, so I try to get them interested in art. To my surprise, they take to it. They paint and draw freely, for long hours, absorbed and lost in colour, fleeing from grief into a world of mysterious shapes, of bulls, birds, hybrid creatures, and patterns in which are concealed indeterminate beings.
I also try to get them to do other subjects, like maths, history, geography, but about these they are desultory. For them art is the thing.
After some time folks come visiting, acquaintances from various universities. They take an interest in what the children of war had been doing. They find little to remark upon in the general subjects. Then I show their art. The visitors are bowled over, thunder struck. They are astounded at the paintings, in rich ochre, in reds and yellows, of enormous wild bulls. The canvases are large, and the paintings bristle with unaccountable energy and wildness.
There isn’t one painting that isn’t extraordinary, or terrifying, in some way. It is like beholding, on the walls of obscure caves, works of bold mature colourists, of the stature of the post-impressionists, or even the masters of expressionism. It is awesome, and spooky. Who on earth are these children? Has grief unhinged them into genius?
Later on we are at a large round table. It is the end of dinner. Most of us are writers. One of the writers, a woman, and celebrated, proposes that we each sing “thank you” in as many different languages as possible. I begin by doing so in the language of a favourite aria, with all the elaborated modulations required. The others sing in German, Japanese, Russian, Swahili …
There is good cheer among us. But it is a moment in an oasis, a brief respite from all the suffering around, in the aftermath of war.
Outside, children search for their mothers in bombed houses and cratered tower blocks.
At night, in the darkened city, children sleep on the rubble of their bombed-out homes, waiting for their parents to return from the dead.
The
Leg
endary
Sedgewick
1
A MAN CALLED Sedgewick performed a legendary feat in our presence. He had been a great cricketer, but he wasn’t a cricketer any more. He had gone beyond the game. For some time now he had been developing a new form.
There were many rumours about him. As he tended towards silence, the rumours hardened into facts. No-one knew where he lived, or what he did with his time. And so it was concluded by many that he did business with the devil. Others, more charitably, maintained that he occupied himself with a little harmless dabbling in alchemy.
He no longer played cricket in public, and hadn’t done for years. In fact what he was perfecting was more like golfing cricket, for it was a strange amalgam he played.
And so we found ourselves oddly assembled for no particular reason, it seemed, except that those of us who hadn’t seen him in years received a call asking us to witness an event as interesting as a brief meeting with a once-famous cricketer whose name recalled for us magical moments from our youth.
And there he was, unceremonious as ever. Not even a word or nod to acknowledge our presence. Just the merest hint of a smile, tender enough to charm us into a mood of expectancy that only nostalgia permits to those who have seen it all, and who no longer dream of new glories.
He stood in the woods and made a barely discernible spin-throw with the cricket ball. It travelled lightly from his hand, fell on the ground, rolled up the slope and span among the roots of a tree. Then, circling the tree, it went a short way on, and slipped into a brook.
We sighed in disappointment. But there was something about his smile, so we continued gazing at the ball in mild perplexity. Meanwhile the ball appeared to change consistency, appeared to float, but in truth it span back towards us, inching along the surface of the water. And, to the astonishment of the gathering crowd that sensed a legendary event was unfolding, the ball went on spinning backwards till it rolled out of the water, onto the land. Then, as if pushed by an invisible force, it made its way to the hole, and dropped in, to the tremendous applause of the crowd.
It was a miraculous throw, done with the greatest nonchalance, defying all known laws of motion and cricket. Instantly Sedgewick, a black chap, became a legend. He became internationally famous.
The next time we saw him he lived in a nice house. He attempted again a nonchalant throw, out of his frosted window. But he missed, twice. The third time, however, something began to happen. The ball, spinning, began its famous journey. And we watched, fascinated, to see what it would do, how it would get to that distant hole, from such a lackadaisical throw. …
2
Afterwards, we were all downstairs. There was Sedgewick, me, a few others, and a proper legend of the game – a man called Jackson. Now Jackson was the man. He was the most respected cricketer of them all. He was trim, he was alert, and Sedgewick had for him the highest regard.
We were all there, downstairs, outside, and the dapper Jackson was demonstrating a classical overarm bowl, with a wrist action that was his speciality. Sedgewick stood next to me, respectfully looking on at the moves of an acknowledged master. Sedgewick had an interesting air about him. His chemistry had changed. Jackson knew this. Jackson was a great player, but Sedgewick had done something truly magical and inexplicable. He had, it seemed, cracked the arcane art of the spin and speed rotation of the casual throw. He had mastered something so unique that no one even dreamt it was there to be mastered. His new ability, his mastery of a completely new and original skill, put him in an unfathomable class, a different space. And not even Jackson knew how to deal with it. Sedgewick’s airy achievement made Jackson’s legend seem ordinary, without allure, without mystery, without romance. Such was the mood that day.
Sedgewick, meanwhile, remained himself – simple, ordinary, plain. But the space he occupied was transformed by that strange knack of coolly flicking a ball with a twisting wrist movement. And the ball would travel, spin mysteriously, endlessly, up slopes, down, round, through obstacles, as if aided by an unseen power, right to the unexpected hole, in an art so fiendish that it amounted to sorcery. …
Perhaps rumours are a parallel kind of reality.
The Golden
Inferno
1
THE HOUSE WAS a country, and in front of it there was a gutter. And the gutter was clogged with things which made the air foul to breathe. There was a dead cow in it, with feet sticking out from the muddy water. This poisoned everything. There were thick books drowned in the gutter. It was suspected that there were dead human beings in there too, their arms also sticking out, barely discernible. A hospital bed rested, lopsided, on all this poisonous detritus. And on the bed were people who were ill because of the foul ness of all that was concealed in the gutter and which was now leaking out to the whole world.
In the country that was a house I saw thousands of tables and pallets. On them were innumerable men and women stricken with a disease for which, as yet, there was no cure. They were an inferno of bodies, of dying people, in a nightmare from which there was no awakening except death. The rows of them seemed infinite.
On a stand, before a platform of dignitaries, the archbishop kept repeating the same words into a microphone:
‘This is a husband and wife thing, a thing between husbands and wives.’
He didn’t seem to know what else to say. He was trying to simplify the problem so that it could be dealt with, section by section.
Crowds of people were gathered. They had a tragic air.
The plague had plunged the world into gloom.
2
They eventually woke up to the dead cow and the drowned books and the dead bodies in the great gutter in front of the house that was a country. A world-famous popstar took an interest in the house and drew more attention to it. This made the house more conscious of itself. It took a lot of time for this to happen. Children played near the gutter and caught a mysterious illness and died. For a long time no-one did anything. All pretended the problem wasn’t there. Or that it wasn’t a problem.
On the tables and pallets women were naked and dying in the nightmare grip of the merciless disease. One woman was making sexual motions, writhing and making love to the air. This is not because it was what she wanted to do, but because the motion eased her agony.
There was a mist over all these bodies writhing like the condemned in a hell that no one has ever imagined. Millions of them were on the path to perishing. The world watched them die in their lonely mute agony.
Someone’s thought circulated in the air, but was not expressed. Someone inwardly evil. The thought went: they should all be killed.
Who can harbour such a holocaustal notion, such a genocidal vision?
3
We had to watch them in their long lonely deaths. We tried to prevent more people from joining their numbers. So many thoughts circulated in the air. Some extreme, some spiritual, some practical, running in the underworld of our grief:
‘We must change. Sex cannot be the angel of death of a whole people. If we master desire we will be transformed. We will become masters of ourselves, the magnet of a beautiful new future.’
4
It came about that one day the people in the house had simply had enough. A woman borrowed some boots and went into the gutter and began to probe and heave. Foul water ran into the boots, the stink was intolerable, but she was undeterred. She worked hard at clearing the mess. She worked alone. We watched and did not watch her. And then, gradually, people joined in. They waded into the great gutter. They lifted up the hospital bed and pulled out the sunken books. They hoisted out the dead cow and lowered it onto the back of a truck. They took it far away, and dug a very deep hole, and buried it. Some thought it should have been burnt. Others couldn’t bear the thought of death in the air they breathed. They dug out corpses in the gutter and gave them decent burials too.
It was plenty for a day’s work. A symbolic day. The gutter had other grim secrets, though. The hospital bed was s
till there, on the mud and detritus. But the gutter was less clogged than before. Fewer people were dying. Fewer people caught the mysterious disease. The people felt better about themselves. The long denial was over. Something was being done at last. Children could begin, tentatively, to play again in the house that was a country.
The Secret
Castle
THE BUS DROVE past telegraph poles in meadows of blue. In the bus, on that beautiful Italian day, there were boys returning from school, and working men. The bus came to a stop. A woman with several men came on. She was a young woman who carried herself gracefully. One of the boys helped her into the bus and gave up his window seat to her. She had an exquisite complexion, clear eyes, and uncanny composure. The boy, called Reggio, made friendly conversation with the young woman. The men she was with regarded Reggio with suspicion. He was just a boy, coming home from school, and he meant nothing by it. He was drawn by the mystery of the young woman, who sat impassively, staring straight ahead, as if she were dead, or going to die.
Her face, or, rather, her eyes lit up only when the boy spoke to her and asked questions, to which answers were not necessary. The questions were not necessary either, but life would be duller if he hadn’t asked them.
‘Do you like those hills?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like that cloud?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like that horse in the field?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like that car going past us?’
‘No.’
‘Do you like this bus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like school?’
She paused. Her face clouded a little. Then she gave a tiny smile, like a snowdrop, and said: