by Ben Okri
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These are journeys in the hyper-realism of a suffering city. Wherever I go, I see veiled mothers in black, wailing. They cry out the stories of their dead children, or their missing husbands.
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But somewhere in this tragic city an orchestra strikes up. A performance of music begins. Strains of a classical air seep out from the fabulous concert hall, one of the few buildings untouched by the seven-day bombardment. No one knows who the people are within. They listen to music that enchants and cleanses the spaces of suffering. There time stands suspended, and a pure joy percolates out from the orchestra, out and up, in a spiral, to the sky and the stars. This is a music alien to all around it, to the bombed-out city, but casting a spell, changing what it touches. Such beauty can be a denial and an affront to all this tragedy.
But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.
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I go on wandering among the broken columns, witnessing the faces of mute grief, with Mozart in my heart, like ice over a wound.
The Unseen Kingdom
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There is a fair, which takes place in the south of France, where books are treated like roses. Writers are rarely invited to attend.
Books are displayed on long tables, with their pages open, and with crushed flowers on their open pages. The books scent the air with gentle dreams. There is indeed a mysterious mood about the place, a dawn-coloured enchantment, on account of the open books.
The lady who runs the fair wears a silk scarf and is a lady of great devotion and tenderness. She is much loved in the community of booksellers and publishers. She goes about unobtrusively, wandering among the stalls as between paths in a delightful garden of many-coloured flowers. She is responsible for the books, the attendances, the display of rare illuminated manuscripts, and she does it all with exquisite taste.
The main focus of interest this season are the Lewis Carroll books. There are many items being shown for the first time. It is a charming collection of manuscripts, photographs and pages of correspondence. One of his family’s descendants is attending, to lend an extra quaintness to the festival.
This year, also, an immaculate fraud has been perpetrated. A delicate scandal scents this rarefied air of books. No one talks about it openly. It is there, floating about in the charmed mood, and only the lady who organises the fair appears not to know about this delicious scandal. It seems that a writer has been rigged into winning the prestigious festival prize with forged nomination letters. It seems this forgery has put everyone under suspicion. A secret investigation is launched. All the publishers co-operate.
It is a lovely fair, and my first time attending. The lounge is beautiful, the restaurant restful, and browsing through the exhibition of books proved to be one of the most magical experiences I’ve had.
I gazed into books that took me away to distant kingdoms where I was instantly happy. In the world of these special books there is no stress, only a kind of peace, and a freedom, and a sense of having been redeemed into a weightless condition of pure beauty. The imagination renews the world like dawn does.
And yet this whispering scandal grows. Someone here, amidst all these flowers, has ruined the innocence of our faces. In this labyrinth of beauty, under a clear sky, there is someone whose face is not what it seems.
I linger among the pages of distant realms. Books from all over the universe are here. The tethered balloons are all outside. Most of us have come here in usual modes of transportation, but this year balloons borne aloft are the most favoured way.
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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.
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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 th
e 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, thunderstruck. 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 Legendary Sedgewick
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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. 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….
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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. 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
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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 foulness 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.
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