The Return of the Young Prince

by A. G. Roemmers

  But the boy, who had started running towards the white shape, shouted, ‘Today you taught me that there is always something we can do, even if we don’t believe it ourselves!’

  His words rang in my ears as I bent down to check that the only visible damage was a dent in the bumper. The Young Prince had managed to show me, if only for a moment, that my heart was as hard as that strip of metal which, cold as it might have been, had at least had the decency to yield to the blow.

  Feeling a little guilty after my rebuke from the boy, I walked towards him. As I approached, I saw an enormous white dog with its head lying in the boy’s lap, which he was holding and stroking.

  Despite the moans of the dying animal, it was a scene of real tenderness.

  I looked up and saw a thickset man making his way over to us from a nearby hut, his face darkened and threatening. I realized he must be the dog’s owner. I thought it would be prudent to leave and avoid a pointless argument, and told my young friend that we had better be off. But he didn’t move, and carried on stroking the terrified animal, which by all accounts seemed to be dying. The man was still coming towards us, and so, sensing danger, I thought it would be best to offer him some compensation. When he had reached us I took out my wallet and mumbled some words of apology, but he gestured with disgust that I shouldn’t move, and for a few painful minutes the three of us were silent.

  The image of that dog is still engraved in my memory today. My new friend had been right. Of course there was something we could do. As the Young Prince looked lovingly into his eyes, the enormous white dog became less afraid, because he didn’t feel so alone. I had the feeling that this rural man felt the change too. Eventually, the dog, with an almost human look, seemed to be thanking the boy. First his left eye closed, then his right. Then his whole body gave a shudder, just once, and he stopped moving.

  The Young Prince stroked him for a few more minutes. When it was clear that all life had left the dog, the boy turned to look at the man for the first time, his eyes brimming with tears. The man, with unexpected tenderness, placed a weathered hand on the boy’s golden hair, and after lifting the dead dog carefully, gathered it up in his arms.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said to the boy. When I made a movement to follow them, he stopped me, saying, ‘No, not you. Just him.’ And then, to reassure me, he added, ‘Don’t worry. There are things you can’t put a price on.’

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s impossible to describe the feelings I was overcome with at that moment. I felt aggrieved and misunderstood – after all, my reaction had been the usual one in the unthinking society we live in. In fact, most people wouldn’t have stopped at all, or if they had, instead of offering an apology and some financial compensation as I did, they would have reprimanded the animal’s owner for letting him run loose and pose a danger to drivers. I also worried about what might happen to the boy, as though being in the company of another human was more dangerous than leaving him abandoned by the side of the road where I’d found him that same day. I reflected that we often act out of fear and mistrust, instead of letting ourselves be led by a love that we mostly repress. Humanity has the curse (or blessing) that all human beings are interconnected. As long as any one of them is suffering, none of them will be completely happy. Nothing in the world is unknown to us, neither its pain nor its joy, because ours is a world that still suffers even though there is bliss, which is still joyful even though there is pain. The more we know our suffering, the more we will enjoy our happiness. And so share what you feel, be it song or scar. Don’t be a stranger!

  As the sun sank majestically into the dark, there was a new dawn rising in my heart.

  Suddenly I saw the Young Prince coming back alone, walking as though he had something in his arms. As he came up to me, I could see that it was an adorable white puppy. I could scarcely believe it: the man from whom we had just snatched the life of a beloved companion was giving us a new life as a gift.

  It was a miracle of love, and the first lesson I learned from the Young Prince. I had shared my experience with him in words, and he, like a true master, was showing me wisdom in silence. At that moment it was clearer to me than ever that a thousand books on the art of loving add nothing to a simple kiss, nor a thousand speeches on love to a single affectionate gesture.

  ‘It’s a Kuvasz puppy,’ he said. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘they come from Tibet, and today there are also some in parts of Eastern Europe.’

  ‘The man thought I’d look after him well,’ he explained to me, still stroking and gazing at his new friend. ‘I will call him Wings, in memory of my aviator friend, because he is as white and fluffy as the clouds.’

  The boy’s voice had taken on a new sweetness that I hadn’t noticed in him before. And so the three of us, feeling comforted, got into the car and set off again towards the little hotel where we would spend the night. The Young Prince started to regain his natural cheerfulness with amazing speed.

  After we had eaten supper, we got them to let Wings sleep in our room with us. The puppy only calmed down when my young friend took him up on to the bed and hugged him to his chest. Soon the two of them were asleep. A little smile crept on to the Young Prince’s face. I knew that as he flew up into his dreams, Wings would be going with him.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning we hit the road again early, amazed at the vast expanse opening up before us. Even though it was arid, it was still lovely to behold – perhaps because deep inside ourselves we were open to its beauty. The Young Prince had Wings curled up in his lap, and was stroking him distractedly. I could see something was worrying him, but I respected his silence.

  After a while, he finally said, ‘I don’t want to be a serious person.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I replied.

  ‘But I need to grow up,’ he continued.

  ‘That’s true,’ I agreed.

  ‘So how do I grow up without becoming a serious person?’ the Young Prince asked, revealing what was on his mind.

  ‘That’s another good question,’ I replied. ‘So good, in fact, that I’ve never found a decent answer. When we’re young we go out into the world and find it’s very different from the one we got to know through our parents – at least those of us lucky enough, who were read fairy tales about people with magic powers, stories of princes and princesses in enchanted castles. And at that moment, we come up against selfishness, incomprehension, aggression and deceit. We try to defend ourselves and hold on to our innocence, but injustice, violence, shallowness and lack of love torment us. And then, instead of spreading light and joy around it, our spirit starts to tremble in the face of reality’s painful but unstoppable advance. Some end up abandoning their treasured dreams, and root themselves in the false security of rational thought. They become serious people, and they adore numbers and routines as those give them a sense of security. But because nothing is ever entirely secure, they are never quite happy. They start amassing possessions because they are always lacking something. “Having” doesn’t make them happy – because it stops them from “being”. They look so hard at the means that they forget about the end.’

  ‘So if it doesn’t make them happy, why do adults devote most of their lives to having more and more things?’ asked the Young Prince, quite logically.

  ‘Thinking that happiness depends on piling up possessions is a reassuring self-deception. As more importance is given to having and not having, the search is aimed at something that lies outside of us, which allows us to avoid having to look inside ourselves. According to that rationale, we can be happy without changing, just by getting this or that.’

  ‘And people don’t realize?’ the Young Prince wanted to know, resisting the conclusion that people could be so blind.

  ‘What has happened, my young friend, is that our society has invented so many things for us to own that people don’t realize they’ve gone down the wrong road until they fail to get that last thing. You’ve alre
ady seen how they’ll cling to the slightest support, however small, before admitting that they’re wrong and need to change. The problem is that by the time they get that last thing, they’ve lost some of the initial, fundamental things. They’re like those jugglers who keep seven hats in the air at once. And just think: they’re only doing it with seven! What’s more, as soon as people get close to the thing they were after, they only know what it is they want next. So what they thought was their final goal isn’t that after all, and they fritter their lives away on a useless search, jumping from one thing to the next as though all those objects were so many stepping stones in a river they’ll never finish crossing. On the whole, people who are always going after more get trapped in the future. They never live in the present, never enjoy it, because their attention is always focused on something that’s yet to happen.’

  ‘And what should they do instead?’ asked my young friend, stroking Wings, who was still dozing in his lap.

  ‘Nothing but dive head first into the reality of being, and let themselves be carried along by it. They should concentrate on living, being and loving in every moment, and not get so obsessed with their final destination. When obstacles come up, they could adopt new forms of being which would reaffirm their essential qualities, like a river whose depth and direction are always changing. The most important thing is to be as attentive and aware as possible, with our senses awakened and our ability to love utterly intact, so that we can exist right here and right now, and enjoy life and be creative, trapped in neither the past nor the future.’

  ‘So should we give up all our memories?’ the Young Prince suddenly cut in, I suppose because the memories of his flower and his friend were very important to him.

  ‘No. All the good memories and gratifying experiences you carry with you can be of comfort in difficult moments, or when you feel alone. What you should avoid is clinging to that past, that secure place, because you could end up trapped in it and stop yourself from living your experiences in the present. The past is secure because it’s closed, dead. Despite that, some still prefer the peace and security of death to the uncertainty of life, with all its possibilities for joy and suffering.’

  A moment later, I added, ‘Another way that memories conspire against your happiness is in making you want to feel things you have felt in the past, that will never happen. Just as the water in a river is never the same, situations in life are never repeated in exactly the same way. Despite that, it’s amazing to see how many people get trapped trying to relive the same experiences. It stops them enjoying new ones that might be just as good or better. This is where a person is just like an animal that goes back again and again to a place where it once found food, until it dies of hunger simply because it never explored a little further afield.’

  For a long while, the two of us were lost in our thoughts, with nothing to interrupt them, as that landscape is graceful enough to remain respectfully in the background.

  When the Young Prince finally spoke, he took me by surprise.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you thanking me?’ I asked.

  ‘For saving me from unhappiness,’ he replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about what you said and I’ve discovered I had a thought deeply rooted in my mind: I would never be truly happy again until I found another friend like the aviator I miss so much. However, that thought contains all three obstacles to happiness that you mentioned before. First of all, the need for “someone like him” that would stop me from considering other people, different from him but perhaps just as interesting and noble. Secondly, the question of “security”, because I’d never be totally secure in the thought that I’d found someone identical to him. And thirdly, “the search”, which would make me focus on the future, on someone I might yet meet, and not value the people already around me.’

  ‘I can see that you’ve understood me perfectly,’ I conceded, with the pride of a master who has found his best pupil.

  ‘You can never be attentive enough,’ said the Young Prince.

  ‘No, never,’ I repeated, and we both smiled.

  In the silence that followed, I could tell there was something lingering in his expression that tied him to the past, but I decided to wait before I was sure.

  While the car carried on calmly devouring the road as though it were one endless grey string of spaghetti, my anxiousness to arrive fell away – because I was starting to enjoy every moment of that journey.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As it was almost time to eat, and because I feared Wings would lay a princely gift in my friend’s lap, I decided to stop at a restaurant with a few vehicles parked outside that appeared suddenly at the side of the road. As we went in I noticed, at a table where a family was eating, five pairs of young eyes staring in astonishment at the Young Prince’s outfit. I quickly steered us towards a table that was right over on the other side of the room, but even that didn’t end the hullabaloo, which was as loud as if one of the three wise men had come in without his camel.

  I realized the children’s reaction was getting to my friend, who sat down with his back to them. Their father’s efforts to calm them down, waving around the chicken leg he was holding, weren’t exactly fruitful, given that he too was trying to solve the mystery of our quaint appearance. The mother, who was sitting with her back to us, carried on eating without paying the slightest attention, as though a sort of selective deafness allowed her to shut herself off every now and then from the uproar those rascals were mounting. Everything I said during the meal was aimed at bolstering my friend’s self-esteem, which was a little bruised by this reaction to the trivial matter of clothing. I spoke to him about the importance of differences and variety, the things that enrich a group.

  ‘If we couldn’t tell flowers apart by their scent, their shape or their colour, we would never stop to look at any one in particular. Differences,’ I added, ‘are the first things that attract us, and when we admire that flower, we make it unique.’

  Privately, I was lamenting the fact that those same things that interest us and complement us are also used to separate and divide us. As we tucked into a dish of succulent grilled meat with potatoes and salad, I remarked that many of the geniuses of history had suffered the rejection of their contemporaries, even though humanity would not have evolved if those people had not held fast to their beliefs. I attacked the mediocrity of those who, the moment they see a spark of creativity being lit, rush to put it out like a troop of firemen, instead of letting the air feed its transformative fire.

  ‘My dear friend,’ I said to him, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘you have to forgive people for their first reaction being to judge appearances. But if you’re sure of yourself and keep faith in the values that guide you, they will accept you in the end, even if it’s just to show off to their circle of friends that they know someone as special as you.’

  Then, leaning back in my chair, I said, ‘Of course there’s a much simpler, easier way of relating to people…’

  ‘And what’s that?’ the Young Prince wanted to know, a little more interested now.

  ‘Doing just the opposite. Instead of getting their attention with your external appearance and trying to show them how you are inside, you can choose to blend in with them, try and look like them, and then mark yourself out as someone unique and special on the strength of your values alone,’ I explained.

  ‘What would you do?’ he asked, looking at me intently.

  I thought about it for a while before answering. ‘If you choose the first option, people will either get close to you or keep their distance, and build up positive or negative prejudices, without really getting to know you, basing it all on your appearance. The good side to that is that you’ll get lots of people’s attention; the drawback is, some of them will distance themselves from you for good. While the second option will mean you won’t stand out, and a lot of people won’t even kn
ow you exist – or they’ll only find out later. If I had to choose, I’d take the second one. It’s slower and more discreet, but more profound too. Either way, the important thing is that you don’t stop being yourself in order to fit with what other people want.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you worry that your message would be lost and that a lot of people would never even know you’d passed through this world?’ asked the boy.

  I realized he was trying not to show how afraid he was of never finding the person he was looking for. I remember answering that I only believe in a person’s greatness if he is recognized as great by the people who know him, because if you manage to communicate something truly important, even if it is only to the small group around you, you can be sure that that light will forge its way through a whole horizon of shadows, just as the glow of a distant star travels thousands of years of darkness to reach us.

  ‘And as for people,’ I added emphatically, looking him in the eye, ‘I’m convinced that the ones we’re destined to meet will always cross our paths. It’s up to us to spot them, though, to tell them apart from the rest.’

  And that was how the Young Prince decided to change the way he dressed. When we came out of a little shop in the town, he was wearing kids’ clothing, trainers and a cap put on backwards, the golden curls of his beautiful hair poking out. You couldn’t have picked him out from a thousand other boys of his age.

  ‘When all’s said and done, you were born a prince,’ I concluded with a smile, hoping to make him feel special on his first outing into our world of marvels and misery.

  But he answered, ‘We’re all born princes; it’s just some don’t know it and others forget…My kingdom only exists in me.’

  And he ran and kicked a ball that had rolled away from a group of boys who were playing in the street, with Wings following him and nipping at his ankles.