THE MAGICIAN AND THE GIRL
Translated from the French by the author
He was a magician of great power and of renowned beauty. His knowledge of secrets knew no boundaries.
People came from all over the world to meet him. It was said he could do anything he wanted. People believed he had the formula for eternal happiness, and he himself claimed to possess it. “Happiness,” he would explain, “is the absence of happiness. Do you know how to walk with your eyes shut? Can you sleep forever? Do you master silence?”
People were amazed. They could not comprehend the meaning of his words. “Happiness is love, money, or power,” they declared. By coming to him, they expected to acquire one or the other. Unfortunately, they didn’t get anything from him.
As a result, a lot of people were disappointed. They went back to their countries and told their friends that the man was a fraud. “Can you imagine?” they said. “We waited for days on end to have the chance to talk to him, and all for absolutely nothing.”
Others, however, decided to stay close to him in the hope of discovering his secrets. They were probably very unhappy because they had nowhere else to go. They depended entirely on him. If he raised his arm, they immediately tried to analyze the meaning of his gesture. They organized conferences and round tables. They worked hard to grasp the deep significance behind all his movements. Whether he scratched his head, coughed, yawned, or cracked his fingers, the disciples took note of it at once. Some even made drawings of him.
They did so because the man never answered questions.
The girl arrived right in the middle of an evening of debate. The magician had just gone to bed and the disciples were sitting in a circle, discussing the significance of his many yawns:
“The master yawned twenty times.”
“No! Twenty-one, I counted!”
A brouhaha ensued and a new debate exploded.
The girl came from a family of magicians. Her father was a magician and her mother had extraordinary powers. She stayed at the back of the room and listened to each one of them. Then she decided to take a chance.
The following morning, she sat in the middle of the floor, crossed her legs, and summoned all the vital energies into herself. She closed her eyes. When she felt that she was ready, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked. The magician was standing right in front of her, watching. She waited.
He held out his hand. “What do you want?” he asked her. “Why are you here?”
“I don’t know. I am very confused.”
“You look happy, though. Your face is radiant and your energy attracts people. If you fail, you will lose what you already have.”
“I want to try. I do not know the nature of my joy. It comes and goes. Nothing seems to stay. Everything changes and I am caught in a whirl. I have lost the difference between dream and reality.”
There was a moment of silence. Then the magician smiled at her and said: “I understand. Follow me, but do not ask any questions.”
They entered a maze. The girl remained at his side. She did not know where they were going, and it was obvious she would never be able to find her way back alone. It frightened her a little.
They arrived in a room lined with thick curtains. She wondered if there were windows behind them. The atmosphere was peaceful. She noticed the bareness of the place. There was no decoration.
The man came close to her, put his arms over her shoulders, and kissed her.
Later on, she ran her fingers over the naked skin of the man who had made love to her as only a wizard could do. She stroked the nape of his neck, the deep curve of his back, and his thighs. She could feel each cell, each atom pulsating. He was sleeping in silence.
She parted from him, laid her hands on his forehead, and opened his skull. What she saw inside frightened her. It was a desert of sadness and solitude. It looked like a battlefield. There were trenches and shell craters. Corpses covered the ground. She regretted having come and with a heavy heart she started going away, when, in the distance, she spotted a lake and, beyond that, a plain on which the grass seemed green and smiling. The earth there was rich.
She closed his skull and fell asleep.
From that time on, she spent her days devising a means of reaching the valley which spread in the horizon of his mind. She wanted to roll in the grass, smell the strong scent of the wet soil, the warm and reassuring soil. It had become her obsession.
She was with the magician day and night. To avoid his constant yawning, she told him stories that, very often, she invented on the spot. She enjoyed making him burst into long laughter, his head thrown back, his neck bare and vulnerable. But what she feared most were his thick and unfathomable silences which echoed in her head like the stampeding of wild horses.
She decided to get into his skull again. However, before starting the final journey, she had to prepare herself carefully. She had to be cautious. She would have to use all her powers.
So she cracked an egg, washed her face three times, and drew close to the man who was sleeping. She laid her hands on his forehead and opened his skull.
She walked with great care but ripped her dress on thorns and hurt herself when she fell into a trap. Nevertheless, she successfully avoided the shells buried in the ground and managed to hold her breath against the smell of putrefied bodies. In the end, she reached the lake. By then, she was terribly hot and thirsty. She sat on the bank and drank some of the clear water. A light breeze was blowing. On the other side, the valley extended as far as the eye could see.
When she had regained her strength, she took a deep breath and dived.
In the bed, the magician stirred. He tossed about in his sleep and then abruptly opened his eyes. He looked around the room and after a while jumped out of the sheets. The girl had disappeared. He called her name at the entrance to the maze.
The girl was being pulled down to the bottom of the lake by a superior force. She was aware of sinking deeper and deeper. Water was getting into her mouth, her ears, her nose. She could see the algae dancing. She couldn’t call out.
She could only think of the shore.
—1992
Ben Okri
(BORN 1959) NIGERIA
Ben Okri’s star-studded literary career began in 1980, when Flowers and Shadows was published. Okri was nineteen. Rooted in the fast-paced lives of many urban Nigerians at the end of the 1970s, the novel is set in the growth years of the country’s economy: after the Civil War, when the oil boom brought about rapid social change and many people were out to make a quick fortune. The novel’s realism provides a glimpse of the future direction of Okri’s writing. The flowers of the title are real, though in time they will wither and grow old; the shadows are constantly changing and elusive—perhaps untouchable.
In the fiction that was published after his first novel—a second novel, The Landscapes Within (1982), and two collections of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine (1987) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988)—Okri shifted from realism to fabulism. Many of the short stories move effortlessly between the two realms, recording incidents that are often difficult to identify as real. In the title story of Stars of the New Curfew, a young man named Arthur resists the criminal opportunities of his immediate world, yet eventually peddles quack medicine to innocent people who are looking for a quick fix for their miseries. Though Arthur himself is concerned about the gullibility of his customers, the fraudulent drug manufacturers are happy enough to take further advantage of their victims.
With The Famished Road (1991) and its sequel, Songs of Enchantment (1993), Okri’s fictive domain shifted more directly into the unseen world. Azaro, the main character of both novels, is an abiku, a spirit-child, fated to a cycle of deaths and rebirths into the same world. The Famished Road describes his mother’s almost pathological anguish that Azaro will never be of this world, though Azaro himself describes his condition in much more benevolent terms:
“There was not one among us who looked forward to being bor
n. We disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longing, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the living in the midst of simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, of all who are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
The Famished Road was the winner of the 1991 Booker Prize. Earlier, Okri had won the Commonwealth Writers’ Award for Africa and the Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction. He received the Chianti Rufino—Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize in 1994.
In 1995, Okri’s most daring novel to date, Astonishing the Gods, was published—simukaneousjy a spiritual autobiography for the author and a visionary fable for mankind in general. Okri has also served as the poetry editor for West Africa and published a volume of his own poems, An African Elegy, as well as a sixth novel, Dangerous Love, in 1996.
“A Prayer from the Living” appeared in 1993 on the op-ed page of The New York Times. In this powerful response to the famine in Somalia (and, more specifically, to the arrival of American troops in the country), Okri defines a central moral issue of our time: the justification of intervention in cultures other than our own, which too often for the West has meant misunderstanding and ignorance of other people’s ways.
A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING
We entered the town of the dying at sunset. We went from house to house. Everything was as expected, run-down, a desert, luminous with death and hidden life.
The gunrunners were everywhere. The world was now at the perfection of chaos. The little godfathers who controlled everything raided the food brought for us. They raided the airlifts and the relief aid and distributed most of the food among themselves and members of their clan.
We no longer cared. Food no longer mattered. I had done without for three weeks. Now I feed on the air and on the quest.
Every day, as I grow leaner, I see more things around us. I see the dead—all who had died of starvation. They are more joyful now; they are happier than we are; and they are everywhere, living their luminous lives as if nothing had happened, or as if they were more alive than we are.
The hungrier I became, the more I saw them—my old friends who had died before me, clutching onto flies. Now they feed on the light of the air. And they look at us—the living—with so much pity and compassion.
I suppose this is what the white ones cannot understand when they come with their TV cameras and their aid. They expect to see us weeping. Instead, they see us staring at them, without begging, and with a bulging placidity in our eyes. Maybe they are secretly horrified that we are not afraid of dying this way.
But after three weeks of hunger the mind no longer notices; you’re more dead than alive; and it’s the soul wanting to leave that suffers. It suffers because of the body’s tenacity.
We should have come into the town at dawn. In the town everyone had died. The horses and cows were dying, too. I could say that the air stank of death, but that wouldn’t be true. It smelled of rancid butter and poisoned heat and bad sewage. There was even the faint irony of flowers.
The only people who weren’t dead were the dead. Singing golden songs in chorus, jubilant everywhere, they carried on their familiar lives. The only others who weren’t dead were the soldiers. And they fought among themselves eternally. It didn’t seem to matter to them how many died. All that mattered was how well they handled the grim mathematics of the wars, so that they could win the most important battle of all, which was for the leadership of the fabulous graveyard of this once beautiful and civilized land.
I was searching for my family and my lover. I wanted to know if they had died or not. If I didn’t find out, I intended to hang on to life by its last tattered thread. If I knew that they, too, were dead and no longer needed me, I would die at peace.
All my information led me to this town. If my lover, my brothers, my family are anywhere, they are here. This is the last town in the world. Beyond its rusted gate lies the desert. The desert stretches all the way into the past; into history, to the Western world, and to the source of drought and famine—the mighty mountain of lovelessness. From its peaks, at night, the grim spirits of negation chant their awesome soul-shrinking songs. Their songs steal hope from us and make us yield to the air our energies. Their songs are cool and make us submit to the clarity of dying.
Behind us, in the past, before all this came to be, there were all the possibilities in the world. There were all the opportunities for starting from small things to create a sweet new history and future, if only we had seen them. But now, ahead, there lie only the songs of the mountain of death.
We search for our loved ones mechanically and with a dryness in our eyes. Our stomachs no longer exist. Nothing exists except the search. We turn the bodies over, looking for familiar faces. All the faces are familiar; death made them all my kin.
I search on, I come across an unfamiliar face; it is my brother. I nod. I pour dust on his flesh. Hours later, near a dry well, I come across the other members of my family. My mother holds on tightly to a bone so dry it wouldn’t even nourish the flies. I nod twice. I pour dust on their bodies. I search on. There is one more face whose beautiful unfamiliarity will console me. When I have found the face, then I will submit myself to the mountain songs.
Sunset was approaching when, from an unfinished school building, I heard singing. It was the most magical sound I had ever heard and I thought only those who know how sweet life is can sing like that, can sing as if breathing were a prayer.
The singing was like the joyous beginning of all creation, the holy yes to the breath and light infusing all things, which makes the water shimmer, the plants sprout, the animals jump and play in the fields, and which makes the men and women look out into the first radiance of colors, the green of plants, the blue of sea, the gold of the air, the silver of the stars. It was the true end of my quest, the music to crown this treacherous life of mine, the end I couldn’t have hoped for, or imagined.
It seemed to take an infinity of time to get to the school building. I had no strength left, and it was only the song’s last echo, resounding through the vast spaces of my hunger, that sustained me. After maybe a century, when history had repeated itself and brought about exactly the same circumstances, because none of us ever learned our lesson, or loved enough to learn from our pain, I finally made it to the schoolroom door. But a cow, the only living thing left in the town, went in through the door before I did. It, too, must have been drawn by the singing. The cow went into the room, and I followed.
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead. But here the air didn’t have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses out side. The dead in the school were—forgive the paradox—alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against a wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race.
I prayed—knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time—but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well. And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover’s—I sang all through the recognition. I sang silently even when a goodhearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world—and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
And the dead were all about me, smiling, serene. They didn’t urge me on; they were just quietly and in
tensely joyful. They did not ask me to hurry to them, but left it to me. What could I choose? Human life—full of greed and bitterness, dim, low-oxygenated, judgmental and callous, gentle, too, and wonderful as well, but … human life had betrayed me. And besides, there was nothing left to save in me. Even my soul was dying of starvation.
I opened my eyes for the last time. I saw the cameras on us all. To them, we were the dead. As I passed through the agony of the light, I saw them as the dead, marooned in a world without pity or love.
As the cow wandered about in the apparent desolation of the room, it must have seemed odd to the people recording it all that I should have made myself so comfortable among the dead. I did. I stretched myself out and held the hand of my lover. With a painful breath and a gasp and a smile, I let myself go.
The smile must have puzzled the reporters. If they had understood my language, they would have known that it was my way of saying goodbye.
—1993
Alexander Kanengoni
(BORN 1951) ZIMBABWE
The past—particularly the recent struggle for freedom—looms ominously in many of Alexander Kanengoni’s short stories. The title of one of them (“Things We’d Rather Not Talk About”) itself suggests the tortured lives of men caught up in the resistance activities that led to Zimbabwe’s independence. In another powerful story, “The Black Christ of Musami,” the narrator seeks comfort in his own ancestry, also against the backdrop of guerrilla activities. The story concludes: “There was a huge old mukamba tree watching silently over our home from a small hill in the east which never seemed to shed any of its brittle, evergreen leaves. It was a towering giant that marked our home from miles around. Each time I came home from the city, I went up the hill and crouched under the tree, talking to it, talking to my deceased grandfather … .”
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