Tales of Freedom (11 page)

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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