In Arcadia

by Ben Okri

  And so while Lao was dwelling in the philosophies of the journey, his mind free from the anxieties of his life back home, Jim was thinking about fulfilling a double function. Getting footage for a film he was developing an increasing belief in. And following the instructions that had nothing to do with the film, but with something more unclear, but which he suspected involved money, or treasure, or robbery. Jim felt like he was in the movie of his life. Looking about him all the time, wondering if they were being followed, seeing suspicious types everywhere, Jim guided the crew through all the complications of transportation to the suburbs. For the first time ever he felt like he was at last living inside his life; living within it, not as spectator, or ironic commentator, but as the central actor, the lead, the heroic protagonist of what might be a comedy, a thriller, or a tragedy. Jim was a romantic: he hoped it would be an untragic tragedy. He wanted the impossible resolution, which life generally shuns.

  4

  Paris had a subdued air that day. As they drove in the hired van through the great city they were all aware of the mood. It was a familiar mood. There had been bombings in Paris; policemen were everywhere. There was racist graffiti on the arch of the bridge near Luke’s place, but it had been partially effaced. The crew filmed Lao and Luke as they walked through the grey area, with its grim concrete, its poor streets, its stale air, its defeated mood.

  Lao was much surprised by the hidden aspects of the famous city as they drove to the train-driver’s home. He was surprised by the run-down housing estates where the poor lived away from the public glamour of the great buildings, famous boulevards, the imposing architecture of a great civilisation. He was struck by how what is taken as the heights of civilisation can conceal modern catacombs, ghettos, hovels, despair, inequalities. He was bemused by the persistence of such poverty and hopelessness so close to such ceremonial splendour. And he understood something of the rage that fed the fires of prejudice. And he sensed how much the rulers of the world, in failing to address the poverty of their own citizens, paved the way for future outrages to private images of their greatness.

  As they went, Luke told Lao of his dream of moving farther away from the frustrations and bustle of Paris. He wanted to live in a stone house. Nonetheless, surrounded by run-down dreams, he remained optimistic about the future. Lao was struck by what a simple, hard-working, solid and dependable man the train-driver was. He was also struck by how people were deeper than their jobs suggested. For, apart from being a train-driver, Luke cultivated his garden, and on holidays he loved deep-sea diving. He often made dives to remote places under earth and sea, looking for relics of forgotten civilisations, Arcadias under the water, on sea-beds, among prehistoric fishes. He loved swimming and dwelling in such primordial dreams. He loved the quiet happiness of life beneath the deep waters. And as Lao listened to the simple train-driver he sensed something in him of the reassurance of the quiet earth and the place of labour in humanity’s balanced happiness.

  5

  They got to the train-driver’s house and found it pleasantly chaotic. They were offered drinks, and the crew members made themselves comfortable with tea and cakes. They were introduced to Luke’s wife, Odette, who was smallish, thoughtful, and solicitous. There was an air of tempered mourning about the house. There had been a recent death in the family and Odette’s eyes were always on the brink of tears. Politeness helped with the transference of her grief. Her mother had died not long before and the house was still cluttered with her belongings.

  Luke spoke of how much he hated their area. It was too noisy. He loathed the trains that rumbled past the back of the house. Lao thought it odd that a train-driver hated the noise of trains.

  Jim plied Luke with questions. It turned out that Luke travelled all over France and Belgium, and to London on the Eurostar. He never knew in advance where he was going to be sent, whether he would be driving a goods train at eighty miles per hour, or the TGV, or his favourite train, the Eurostar, at two hundred miles per hour. His spare time and holiday pursuits revolved round scuba diving with his family and the exploration of underground caves. He took his underwater exploration seriously. He had made dives into underground lakes and rivers, where he had discovered tusks of mammoths in places where human beings have never been before.

  Odette had studied languages at a university in Paris, her preference being German and English. But she was too full of grief to talk for long. Jim asked Luke how he came to be a train-driver.

  ‘I dreamed of being a train-driver from the age of seven,’ he replied, in halting English. ‘Near my grandmother’s house I first saw the beautiful billows of smoke from the passing trains and I fell in love with the idea of being a train-driver. I love driving through landscapes, particularly the landscape of Kent. I love passing through countryside. Trains are high speed nowadays. But it’s not so fast when I’m driving through England because of its laws. It’s nice that way because I see the English gardens and steal some ideas for my own.’

  The conversation passed in a general way. Luke and Odette expressed their admiration for high technology and saw no contradiction between technology and nature, if wisely balanced. But it was the garden that most drew warmth from their eyes. It was the garden that most displaced the grief that lurked behind the rims of Odette’s glasses.

  6

  As the crew set up their equipment, and did their various tests, Lao was struck again by how unified people became when they went about a task. How the individual vanishes, and the work takes over. How like a flowing jigsaw a group becomes. How the turbulences and stresses within turned quiet under the hum and necessity of activity. How the self within, with all of its confusions, becomes the engine and charioteer of labour. How differences disappeared. How Jute forgot her fear of death; how Jim forgot his fear of failing; Mistletoe got lost in her sketches and dreams of future paintings. And Lao himself forgot his masks, his angles, and found himself genial and cooperative. He momentarily forgot, also, his affected cynicism, and he flowed with all the motions of the craft of film-making.

  And in silent moments between takes, Lao allowed himself to survey the empire of his mind, to see which of the dominions within were in strife or threatening disorder. And he was surprised to find order and general calm throughout the vast dominions of his spirit. The internal governments were in reasonable harmony. A wise democracy reigned in all the realms. No tyrants had emerged, no dictators had begun usurping neighbouring states, and a universal concord prevailed. And he concluded that the gentle ideal behind his Arcadian quest was slowly filtering into and spreading through the vast empire of his spirit, and gradually returning the many nations to their true oneness, their natural unity.

  Lao smiled at how temporary peace was in the realms without and the realms within, but he savoured the tender moments of sunlight in the train-driver’s garden.

  7

  Sitting at an iron table, Lao contemplated the little garden with a smile. He wasn’t sure why it moved him so. There was nothing particularly spectacular about the garden, but a certain spirit prevailed. It was the spirit of care and humility, of shaping beauty within life’s chaos.

  Lao saw the terracotta pots of flowers on empty wine barrels. He saw the forsythias, the apple tree on the left next to the gate, the wisteria on the front fence, and the grape vines trailing from the railings. Lao marvelled at the variety of flowers and their cheerful intermingling. Luke had made a detailed study of English gardens and had created his own unique combination of flowers. His wife made it clear, with a gentle pride, that there had been nothing there before. That when they first came to the house the front was bare, plain stone and wood. Their love had transformed it so that it was now impossible to imagine that there had been nothing before. Such was the way of the creative hand, flowering life where bare stones lay, domesticating barrenness, beautifying concrete.

  Lao gazed on the brilliantly blended colours of petunias and Ionian marigolds, of jasmine and chylous, of lavender and dahlias and geraniums
. Lao, Luke and Odette were sitting round an iron table, under the meditative shade of a beech tree which Luke had planted eighteen years before. In the garden there were also apricot trees and silver birches and a cherry tree.

  Lao smiled at the humorous notion of trees and gnomes growing together. They had been made to look as if they emerged from the same roots, the same earth. There were gnomes all over the garden, giving the place a jovial feel. It was as if nature was smiling, enjoying a joke under the sun, always laughing, always aware of the essential humour of all living things. The gnomes seemed to be laughing at all stress, all fretting, all inflation of human things to levels of greater importance than they truly deserved. They seemed so like the domesticated representatives of Pan, of the satyrs, of the mischievous nature spirits. They reminded Luke and Odette that a secret smile hovers over all things mortal. And that beneath and above all tragedies there is a higher comedy that we can’t be aware of because such divine smiling belongs to the greater perspective of nature and the nature gods, gods that transcend even history. For their sense of the essential comedy of all earthly things goes all the way beyond the stars and constellations to the immeasurable heavens.

  8

  Surrounded by the dahlias and Ionian marigolds, Lao told Luke and his wife a little about their Arcadian journey. Lao asked if they thought that humanity had lost its way and if it was possible to find some sense of paradise in a world so riven with wars, chaos, unbelief, and confusion. Luke’s answer was simple: because of the impact of technology in all our lives, he felt that we needed to return to our origins, to nature. We needed space to work the earth, to rediscover our roots, to find some peace, and yield good fruits.

  Jim liked the plain and simple answer. The crew helped with the clearing up. Gifts were exchanged. The couple’s two children returned suddenly from a visit to friends. With a sense of sadness the crew gathered into the van, and drove off slowly, waving with so many hands from so many windows. Luke and his family waved back warmly as the crew journeyed onward.

  As they left it occurred to Lao that the little family was a touching example of how very many people manage to create their own modest Arcadias. Theirs took the form of a simple garden amidst the noise, pollution, and stoniness of the modern age.

  But Jim was all along also looking for secret clues. And in seeing too many, he found none.

  9

  It was when they went back to Paris, and settled into their hotel rooms, that the shadow of Malasso struck again. No one was sure how it happened. When the crew converged at the hotel desk for dinner in the evening, it was discovered that Husk had gone missing. The hotel staff hadn’t seen her leave. Her key was not on the rack, but Sam said that he had seen her talking to a strange-looking man with hooded eyes and a black hat earlier in the evening. She had seemed distressed, he said, but he hadn’t been alarmed because she had been that way for most of the journey, agitated about something, and extremely irritable. Husk’s disappearance was very serious because she had all the schedules, the filming times, the appointments, and even the dinner arrangements for the evening at a nearby restaurant.

  Husk’s disappearance caused a tremendous sense of unease among the crew. The strange man she’d been seen with brought fears of abduction, kidnapping, and possibly worse. The name Malasso was whispered again amongst the crew. Propr took it very badly indeed. He began grumbling and pacing up and down the hotel lobby in his shorts that revealed his bandy legs. His wrinkled face with comic moustache became very peevish. He muttered bad-temperedly about the dreadful company he was keeping, the stupid idea behind the journey, the incompetence of the crew, about Jim’s complete lack of leadership qualities, and the unprofessional nature of the whole expedition.

  The crew members split up and went searching for Husk in the environs of the hotel. When they couldn’t find her they wanted to call the police. But Jim wanted to wait before taking such a drastic step. The last thing he needed was investigation and probing when so much was still uncertain, when any news in the press could wreck the entire project and end his film career which was already ending, it seemed, in disaster.

  He tried to get everyone to calm down and suggested that they order drinks for themselves. No one calmed down. Sam kept fretting. Riley was jittery. Jute, convinced that tragedy was about to strike, began to see things, and spoke of catching glimpses of strange men spying on them, following them around. She claimed that they’d been followed all day, and that she had noticed a man with a black hat, hooded eyes, and a long scar on his left arm going into the train-driver’s house just after they left. No one paid her much attention.

  Mistletoe sat at a table, sipping orange juice. She drew, in her large sketchpad, variations of a man in black with an exaggerated scar on his left arm. Lao remained oddly serene through all this, hardly saying a word, smiling in that faintly cynical manner of his. A profound unease dwelled among the crew. They avoided looking at each other. It could be said that because of so much that was unstated they had never disliked or distrusted one another as much as they did at that moment.

  10

  It was a sultry evening. The sickly fragrance of decaying roses wafted in from the derelict garden of the French hotel. It was a run-down place, the walls crumbling, the wall-paint murky and disgusting, the stench of stale heat and suspect latrines drifting down the stairwell. It was the sort of establishment that reminded one of the flea-pits that one reads about in nineteenth century French novels, establishments where hard-eyed prostitutes do brisk business. The odour of cheap sex, unwashed bodies, disintegrating condoms, and musty walls circulated freely. The rooms stank, and were small, and miserable, and conducive to the grim melancholy that prods the suicidal into terminal action. The rooms invited the occupants to evict themselves from life.

  The languid warmth of the evening, the dispiriting odours, the unfriendly hotel staff, the abysmal conditions of their hotel rooms, the complete absence of the glamour associated with film-making all combined in the minds of the crew to produce a state of group stupor and despair. Slowly, paralysis crept over them. They sat there in the thickening gloom, tortured by hunger, crushed by an overwhelming sense of failure, and weighed down with shame.

  Only Mistletoe was unaffected. The gloom provided her with dark shapes, the sense of failure with Hades-inspired images, and hunger fuelled the flight of her mind into a realm of enchantment. It was a realm she was able to enter at will because she had lived a life so rich with misery, mistakes and love that she had gradually found an art of creating pleasant places in her mind where colours are astonishing, where life sings, and where possibilities lurk behind all evil shapes. Unhappiness had taught her the art of happiness. And art had taught her the saving graces of escape into the enchanted countrysides of her mind.

  11

  Lao steamed and boiled with rage. After a long time in the gloom, waiting for Husk to reappear, waiting for Jim to do something one way or another, he could stand it no longer. He said, very loudly:

  ‘We all deserve to stew in hell, because we dare not create heaven.’

  It wasn’t what he wanted to say. This is what he wanted to say:

  ‘You are all incompetent bastards. You deserve to stew in hell, because you are all such hopeless defeated indifferent cynical lazy-minded bums!’

  He didn’t say what he really wanted to say because, unknown to him, he was changing. The journey was changing him. The theme of the film was gently invading him. He was undergoing a slow contamination with a longing for a new way of being, a better way of living, a sense of peace and harmony. This, of course, in the future, would lead to civil war within. But for now he was being overtaken, gently, with a deep desire for a multiplication of his creative powers through serenity and quiet fearlessness.

  He wasn’t becoming moderate. He wasn’t and would never lose his sharp edges. He was simply becoming a more effective human being. Nonetheless, his outburst disturbed the group. Propr responded first, standing up suddenly, his bandy legs fram
ing the gloomy light that filtered in from the lobby. He began shouting.

  ‘I’ve just about had enough of you and your smug pseudo-bohemian ways! Who do you bloody think you bloody are anyway!’ he stuttered. ‘What have you done to bring heaven or even decency to anyone, you lazy bastard pretending to be a bloody artist. I bring more decency to society tending my sheep than you do getting drunk and being sarcastic about everything…’

  Then it was Sam’s turn.

  ‘I work harder than anybody in this damned room. I’m not going to be told to stew in hell by anyone, just because just because just…’

  Jim broke in.

  ‘Everyone shut up!’

  ‘No, you bloody shut up!’ bellowed Propr, eyes bulging.

  ‘I’m quitting this hopeless film now, this very minute, I’m quitting…’ cried Sam, sitting there, not moving.

  ‘I’m quitting too. I quit before you quit. Bugger all of you. I’m leaving,’ crowed Propr, not moving either.

  ‘The film is dead, finished, end of story, end of Arcadia, end of everything, I never want to see any of you bastards again,’ shouted Jim.

  Then, suddenly, there was a strange silence, a profound silence. Nothing creaked in the entire hotel. The moment held its breath. Lao felt a shudder pass through him. Mistletoe stopped drawing in the dark, and listened. Jute drew in her breath. The fragrance of flowers thickened in the gloom, and in the dark a voice said: