by Ben Okri
‘Yes.’
The boy was silent for a while. He was not thinking of any new questions, but just turning over in his mind the clarity of her answers. Somehow, darkly, he found he deduced a great deal from her slender answers, but he wasn’t sure what. Decorum made him silent for longer, but the strangeness of her answers made him want to know more.
The young woman remained impassive, staring straight ahead, barely moving, barely breathing. He didn’t look at her, but he seemed to see her. She gave him the peculiar feeling that she was like a calf being led off to the slaughter.
Then he noticed that she moved. It was a movement so odd, full of such contained intensity, that it seemed to demand him to speak some more.
‘Do you like fields?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like rivers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like roads?’
‘No.’
He paused. He wasn’t expecting that answer at all. He couldn’t see anything wrong with roads. He quite liked roads. But now that he looked at roads through her spirit, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was something unnatural about them after all. He wandered off in thought. Then, after a while, she made the same odd movement.
‘Do you like houses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like moonlight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like mirrors?’
‘No.’
This arrested him. For the first time he turned and gave her a quick look. He thought it strange that someone so beautiful should not like mirrors. He pondered this a long time. And time became elastic as he pondered. He lost himself in thought, and he lost himself in space. He was no longer in the bus, but in a magical world, a world that made him smile. He was within happiness itself, within its secret castle. When he came to, he found that the bus had stopped. It was the end of the journey. They all filed down. The men she was with regarded him darkly. When they had all got down on the dusty road, one of the men turned to him and asked what he meant by talking to the young woman.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
Then he apologised. The man grew angry at the apology: it seemed to confirm guilt. He got steamed up, he talked in a loud voice. He addressed the other men, and appealed to their common roots. The men crowded the boy. They were all shouting. Then a tall gangly man among them, a bit of a fool, set up his fists like a boxer in a comic movie. He began to jump around the boy. The men egged him on.
The boy was perplexed. He had no idea how things had come to this point. While the shadow-boxing went on around him, he caught a glimpse of the young woman. She was hidden behind the men. Confused, he felt a punch whistle past his face. Swiftly, he set up his fists too. Before he knew it he was grappled to the ground, his feet kicking the air. A heavy weight and smelly work clothes pressed down on him. Bad breath fanned his face. Bristles stabbed his cheek. There were voices all around, hollering.
Then, suddenly, he found himself standing up. His father, who was the bus driver, was beside him, shouting, waving his arms, defending his son.
‘My son meant nothing by it. What does he know? Harmless questions. A polite young man. Gave up his seat. Meant nothing by it.’
‘So you say,’ one of the men cried. ‘He’s old enough to do enough damage. They start earlier and earlier these days.’
The voices flew back and forth. The boy stood there, a boy among men. The other school boys were a short way off, staring, whispering among themselves.
Then Reggio’s father found a solution.
‘I will solve this problem,’ he said. ‘I will solve it now.’
‘How?’ they asked.
‘Get back on the bus. Everybody get back on the bus.’
After much discussion, in which nothing was really discussed, just voices flying out of mouths, they all trooped back on the bus. Then Reggio’s father got into the driver’s seat, started the vehicle, and they soon set off.
The young woman sat in the same place as she did before, near the window. Next to her was the man who shouted the loudest. He had a big jowled face, and severe eyes. He was squinting. He was a hard working man. Working his jaw. He looked like the word ‘honour’ in ragged clothes. He stared straight ahead. The young woman looked sideways out of the window. They did not speak. There was now a strange silence in the bus. Reggio was at the front, near his father.
The bus chugged across a bridge, past an orchard, an isolated villa, vineyards, a crumbling castle, and a field with a white horse staring at the sky. The bus drove past telegraph poles in meadows of blue.
Then the voices began again:
‘Where is he taking us?’
‘Yes, where is he going?’
They went on like that till they found themselves approaching a familiar place. The bus came to a halt. They were at the precise bus stop where the young woman and the men had first got on the bus. Reggio’s father swung open the door.
‘This is where you got on,’ he said to the men. ‘This is where you get off.’
There was a stunned silence. No-one moved. Then the young woman stood up. The man next to her was obliged to stand up too. She made her way down the aisle and when she got to the bus driver she stopped. Reggio did not look up at her. His father said:
‘Everything should be simple.’
The young woman smiled; and when she smiled something beautiful shone from her, like the purity of that limpid sky. Then, with a barely perceptible movement, she passed something into the boy’s hand.
‘Yes,’ she said, and gracefully got down from the bus.
The other men trooped after her morosely. They said nothing. They were working men, just trying to uphold their honour. The last to get down was the gangly fool who had wrestled young Reggio to the ground. He too was silent. But when the bus started to move he set up his fists again, as if challenging the departing bus to a fight.
Only then, as they departed, did Reggio look out of the window. Then, to his father, he said:
‘But I meant nothing by it, Papa. Only harmless questions.’
‘I know, my son,’ the driver said. ‘But they are the ones that can cause trouble.’
Reggio silently stared at the young woman as she grew smaller in the distance. When he could no longer see her he opened his hand, and beheld her presence forever in a flower.
The War
Healer
1
HE SET HIMSELF in the middle of the battleground, between the two fighting factions. And there, with bullets whistling past, he patched up the wounded and buried the dead.
He had been a photographer, an onlooker, in a war-torn region. And one day, overcome by frustration at being so powerless to stop the fighting, he underwent an obscure conversion. He gave up his job, and became a sort of healer and burier of the dead.
It was bloody work indeed. He laboured alone. He performed this solitary unacknowledged task for years. He would wake up in the morning and go to the battleground and set about his grim blood-soaked work. He would arrive in a clean white shirt at dawn, and he would be blood-spattered by noon, and by the evening his glasses would be steamed over with blood and gore. His hands would be dripping with fat and the messy tissues of the dead and those hopelessly shot to pieces. He worked at healing and burying all day, in that hot place, in that no-man’s land, in the desert, between two implacable enemies. It was a wonder he wasn’t killed.
From day to day he survived all the shooting, bombing and shelling. No one joined him there. He was not paid for his work. No international organisations softened his task or knew what he did there alone. None of the warring sides knew what he did there either, what services he rendered so tirelessly, burying their dead, patching up their wounded.
2
Then one day he decided he needed to get married, and he took himself a wife. She was a good woman. His one wish was that he wouldn’t have to work on their wedding day. So he chose a holy day when he hoped there would be no fighting; a day holy to both sides.
&nbs
p; The day arrived. They were in their finest apparel. His wife was beautiful in her white wedding dress. He was simple in his black suit. But he was quite heart-broken when, on the day, the enemies struck up the fighting again, like an infernal orchestra. He had to leave the wedding service and hurry to the middle place in the fighting zone, and heal the wounded and bury the dead.
On this day his wife joined him. She was a sad vision in her bridal dress, her white bridal gown, and her white gloves. Together they worked very hard in the war zone, till her white nuptial attire had turned all bloody and darkened with gore, mud, blasted brains and intestines spewed up from all the shelling.
By the evening they were quite a sight in their filthy wedding outfits. They were shattered by the betrayal of the holy day by the implacable enemies. And they never really recovered from the peculiar ferocity of the day’s bloodshed.
They were so distraught that they were tempted never to return to the war zone again. But the day passed and they had become man and wife. She told him that he may as well continue his thankless job as no one else knew what horrors happened there in the middle place between the two warring enemies. No one else could render the important services that he did. It was a condition he had accepted, she said.
And so, with a broken heart, he continued to work there in the middle place. He buried the dead, fixed up the wounded, from dawn to dusk. But he was not so alone any more. It still remained a wonder he was never killed or hurt by all those bullets, all that bombing. This fact never occurred to him as he did his work, nor afterwards.
3
He carried on his grim vocation. The years passed. A child was born to him by his good wife. The world changed. But still the fight continued between the unforgiving enemies. He worked as long as the war raged. While they murdered one another, he restored, buried, healed.
In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever?
The
Message
1
YOU ARRIVE DIRTY and hungry. You are covered in grime. You have come from beyond the snowline. It has been an epic journey.
You have travelled through forests, through innumerable cities and villages, barely stopping, travelling mostly on foot, with no change of clothes.
You have come through regions where you were unfamiliar with the language and the customs. You have slept at roadsides, in strange inns. You have travelled alone, bearing a message which only you can carry.
How long have you been travelling? You don’t know. Maybe your whole life.
You forego pleasures on the way. It’s been hard enough just keeping on the journey. You have travelled nights without sleeping, days without eating. Your destination is your rest and your food. Your mission is to arrive at the court, deliver the message, and then to be free.
Many countries you have crossed, wolves you have battled, hard men you have transcended, cunning men you have eluded, seducing women you have slithered away from.
Youth deserted you in the virgin forests; and yet you travelled with youth, and never lost it. Youth remains in you, in your freedom and the simplicity of your spirit. Encased in the dirt of the road is your preserved freshness.
2
The last part of the journey was the worst. Getting closer was also getting farther. It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. It is easier to feel one has arrived when one sees the battlements and turrets, the flags and banners of the castle. Then in renewed hope and exultation one hurries. And yet the way is still far. Distances are deceptive. Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous.
You kept your eyes on the road. You nearly got lost in the village. You were tempted to stay the night, to divulge your destination to an old woman, and thus be given conflicting or self-serving advice. But you kept it to yourself. You imagined you were still at the beginning of your journey. You were conscious that it was still full of perils, and that you still had a long way to go.
Your whole life had been the journey. If you stopped to think now, or confess despair, who knows what snares of your own making you would fall into. So you staked your life on the journey. The journey was your life, your life on the road. You might have died on it, but you were vigilant. You took each moment as the whole. That’s what you did.
3
And then you found you had arrived. You were in the court. You were in the place. In the grime and dirt of the journey the message was divested of you. It was painless. You didn’t even know what it was. The message was on you. The message was in your dirt, on your unwashed body, in your weary but alive spirit. The message was in your eyes. It was in your arrival, in your dreams, in your memory. It was in all you had brought, and the nothing that you had brought.
The message was divested of you. It was shorn off you, and you were light. You were cleaned up of your message. You were scrubbed and shaved of it, bathed and washed of it. The filthy clothes were taken off you, and you were given new ones that shone like light.
4
There had been a mysterious ceremony acknowledging the heroic nature of your journey. But the true gift of it was in your spirit, your inner liberation. There was a new eternal light in you.
Fresh, young, and free, you wander the streets of the kingdom. You have the sense of being in a new world, a luminous world. You are living an enchanted life in the kingdom.
You had set out early and had arrived sooner than you thought. You have a whole new life ahead of you. And so here you are, a youth with a spirit of shining gold, rich beyond measure in the lightness of your being. Everything is before you. Your main quest and journey is over, because you had begun early and arrived early. Now you have it all to live, in peerless freedom. What luck! No need to fret, but just to live, now, the life you want.
Like a youth just arrived in a great city, with hope in his heart, looking to make his fortune and find his true love, in the happiest and most innocent days of his life, like such a youth you wander lightly through the streets of the mysterious kingdom. The pastel sky is touched with blue, and there is dawn sunlight.
Acknowledgements
Material in this collection has been previously broadcast or first published as follows:
‘Belonging’ first broadcast by the BBC and published in Ode Magazine; ‘The Mysterious Anxiety of Them and Us’ first broadcast by the BBC and published in Global Report; ‘Music for a Ruined City’ published by Ode Magazine; ‘The Racial Colourist’ published in VSO Magazine; ‘The Black Russian’ published in Diaspora City (Arcadia Books, 2003); ‘Wild Bulls’ published in The London Magazine; ‘The Golden Inferno’ published in Ode Magazine; ‘The Secret Castle’ first broadcast by the BBC; and ‘The War Healer’ published in The Spectator.
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Published in 2009 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
This edition published by Rider in 2010
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Copyright © 2009 Ben Okri
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