The Freedom Artist

by Ben Okri

  He ran from tree to tree, crouching. He reached a wall, climbed over it and found himself on the back streets. He went on running, still crouching, till he saw a fox near a tree. It regarded him with glimmering eyes. He felt reassured by its presence.

  He made his way across the empty road and kept to the shadows. Running and crouching, he came to a neighbourhood he knew. The howls and screams sounded through the closed windows. He listened with a new dread as he made his way home.

  In his room he tried not to think about the day. He could not bring himself to face what had happened, what he had witnessed. For the first time in his life, Karnak was confused.

  He had been made to believe that the world was the best way it could be. He thought like everyone else. He behaved like everyone else. He had fallen in love the same way everyone else had. He expected his life to be like everyone else’s. He expected to get married, to have children, and to scream at night without knowing why.

  He never expected that he would have to concern himself with problems. He had accepted that it was forbidden to think or to speak certain words. He accepted it all as the wisdom of the race, the wisdom of the fathers and the mothers.

  But he never expected the person he loved most in the world to be taken from him before his very eyes and that he’d be unable to do anything.

  He never expected that he would have to ask questions. He didn’t know how to ask questions. This was confusing. He had no one to share the feeling with.

  Then he began to think about the people he had seen that night running across the field and leaping over the fences. Maybe they could answer some of his questions. Maybe they could help, without getting him into trouble.

  13

  It was told in a story that one day a boy standing by himself in a garden of sunflowers saw a ladder he had never seen before. Out of curiosity, he climbed the ladder. It grew longer as he climbed. Eventually he found himself in a world where there was no freedom. The people were in chains, but the chains were invisible.

  The people were curious about the world the boy had come from. He told them stories about his world and the stories infected people with new ideas. It wasn’t long before the authorities heard of the boy from another world who was spreading ideas that caused unrest. The boy was arrested and left in the infinite dungeons, lost and lonely and unmissed.

  He might have perished but for the fact that he remembered the magic ladder. After a time in that limbo, he found the ladder, and climbed back down to the world he had come from. But the world he knew had changed in his absence.

  When he had climbed the ladder up to that other world, the other world had climbed the ladder down to his. And the other world had infected his with ideas it had never known before, notions of despair, infinite prisons, and a horror of freedom.

  The boy learnt too late that to infect a world is also to be infected by that world.

  14

  Around that time the authorities began prosecuting a ruthless campaign against the question-askers. The brighter minds in the Hierarchy came up with a method of ensuring a spirit of productive obedience. It was the most fiendish and the simplest idea they had had in a long time. They decided to have the old myths altered.

  The most prominent scholars in the land, who had been given the highest honours, were commissioned to reinterpret the ancient myths. New versions appeared in the state bookshops and libraries. These were the only bookshops and libraries allowed to exist at that time. The old fairy tales were given new glosses, new clothes. The older versions went out of print. They were no longer relevant. The old myths, in the newest version, were made relevant, brought up to date. Now they anticipated the problems of the day and justified contemporary solutions.

  One of the old myths which told the story of a long and difficult homecoming was transformed into a spiritual support for the land in its present time of crisis. Another myth about the voyage of heroes to find a golden pelt came to be about the soldiers of the land finding the golden key to peace, using whatever methods were necessary. The tale about the Emperor’s new clothes was rewritten to show the boy praised for noticing how beautiful the Emperor’s new clothes were. All tales about people climbing ladders to other worlds quietly disappeared from the bookshelves. Tales that intimated a belief in God or gods or in anything invisible were destroyed. Any tale, ancient or modern, that extolled originality was forbidden.

  New tales were encouraged. New myths were created by the most highly decorated artists of the land. To be like everyone else was the highest distinction a citizen could hope for. All the new myths promoted this ideal. Uniqueness, individuality, curiosity, became invidious qualities. They made enemies of the state. Anyone who stood out in some way was suspect. To be different was to condemn your fellow citizens. Those who were tall learnt to walk with a stoop. The intelligent learnt to be foolish.

  It didn’t take long before the old myths vanished. The old fairy tales were forgotten. Children were taught the new tales, the new versions, and didn’t know any different. Those who were older had to re-acquaint themselves with the new versions. They didn’t notice the subtle shift in tone.

  By this means, without doing anything visible, the water that people drank, the water of understanding, was radically altered.

  15

  Nobody knew where the question-askers came from. The most advanced forms of surveillance had failed to reveal them spraying their question everywhere.

  Elaborate plots to catch them had also failed. Spies could not find their network, or penetrate their groups. It was as if they didn’t exist.

  Posters offering information about them yielded nothing.

  Neighbours denounced neighbours they didn’t like or thought were acting suspiciously, but torture failed to yield confessions. It seemed incredible to the authorities that no one knew anything about the question-askers. It seemed equally incredible that the populace would shield them in any way.

  For the first time the authorities began to harbour doubts about the populace. It had therefore been decided that everyone would be spied upon, that everyone would be placed under surveillance. The most sophisticated devices for spying on people had been deployed.

  This posed a problem. It became clear that the people spying on the populace had themselves to be thoroughly trustworthy and there seemed no foolproof way of ensuring this.

  16

  Mirababa had dived in and emerged wet and exhilarated and perplexed. The voice had said ‘Go in’. He had gone in and was now wet and shivering.

  The moon was no longer clear on the surface of the lake. He sat and waited a long time. He watched till the moon returned to the surface of the water. Watching the moon made him drowsy. Before he knew it, he was asleep.

  When he woke up he found one of the bards standing in front of him.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ the bard asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘I heard a voice.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It said “Go in.”’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I jumped into the lake.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I got wet.’

  ‘Did you learn anything from that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That it was not the right thing to do.’

  ‘What is the right thing to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The old bard seemed satisfied. He retreated into the night, leaving the boy as perplexed as ever.

  17

  Karnak returned to the common field late the next evening, with the hope of seeing the question-askers again. The neighbouring streets were cordoned off as if it were a disaster area.

  The streets were empty but the young lover sensed eyes everywhere. He walked as innocently as he could through an area he now felt teemed with spies. It felt like a trap.

  He went towards the field. There were eyes in the trees, e
yes in the grass, eyes behind hedges.

  Evening had begun to fall. The muted noises began to give way to the silence which pervades the world before the screams are heard.

  He didn’t linger. He went on walking, trying not to think about all that was pressing on him to be thought about. He could not avoid thinking about the girl he loved, whom he had lost.

  18

  They revised the original myth about the prison. The world was not a prison. It was a garden. In the beginning man was placed in the garden. He had charge of the earth and all that was above and below it. The garden was the world and man was born a gardener. But one day man fell in love with an idea, and out of that idea came the beauty of woman.

  The garden now had everything they needed, except for one thing. This one thing led to man and woman’s unhappiness. They conceived the idea of freedom and ate from the tree of originality, and were thrown out of the garden into the fury of history.

  In the revised version, man and woman have been slowly working their way back to the grandeur of their beginnings. The new ideology is the way. The authorities are the guardians. Obedience is the key. Dedication to the ideals of society is the route by which the original garden will be recovered.

  But never again must the citizen think of freedom. Never again must they want to be different. The way to paradise lies in being like everyone else. The secret of happiness lies in doing what one is told.

  This myth was recounted in many different stories. The variations only served to highlight the unchanging core. In books, comics, digital games, on television and on the radio, and through all the means of telepathic broadcasts, this revision of the myth was disseminated.

  Philosophers elaborated on its ethical value. Using the myth’s infinite applicability, scientists proved the Hierarchy’s version of the future was inevitable. The new myth penetrated every level of society, into all deeds, all teachings.

  No one knew that it was possible to ask questions. The people had forgotten how to ask questions.

  19

  Mirababa stayed by the lake in his wet clothes. He watched the moon in the water. In the space between watching the surface of the water and watching the moon he paid attention to what he felt, what he sensed. Sometimes he dreamt a strange dream in the lucidity of his gaze. He dreamt with his eyes wide open. What he dreamt eluded him. He wondered whether he had dreamt or whether he had seen.

  The night did not seem to change. The moon did not seem to alter. He noticed the forest noises, the bird cries, the whistles, hoots, the wind among the trees. He heard footsteps coming towards him. They never arrived. Words drifted past him disembodied. He studied the glimmer of the false moon in the lake and the shining blackness of the water. None of it changed. Even the forest stayed the same.

  The stars did not move. They were listening or watching. But the wind changed, blowing now one way, now another, making the earth hiss and the trees whistle.

  Sometimes the boy thought he heard his grandfather’s voice reading aloud from the ancient book of the original myths. He felt the old man’s death keenly in those moments when his presence seemed to be in the wind. Snatches of words reached him.

  ‘Go in… find what we have been seeking… share it with the world… go beyond…’

  Mirababa stared into the darkness with a new sense of awareness, as though he were in mortal danger.

  20

  Those who smiled did not smile any less because the world had changed. They read the new versions of the old myths with irony. They read them with humour.

  Apart from the pleasure they took in reading the new versions, there was no way of separating the ones who smiled from those who did not smile.

  There was another difference between these two kinds of people. Those who smiled, smiled inwardly. Those who did not smile, smiled outwardly. This distinction was too subtle for the authorities.

  There was a further distinction. But this required access to everyone’s privacy, even their interiority. And while the authorities contemplated this as a possibility in the future, even perhaps a necessity, they had not yet developed the technology needed for such secret and inward surveillance.

  Here was the real difference between these two kinds of people. Those who did not smile read the revised myths seriously, solemnly, importantly. Those who smiled read them with hidden laughter.

  21

  Karnak made the finding of the question-askers one of the chief missions of his life. After catching glimpses of them in the field at night, he often returned there with the hope of seeing them again. But he saw only the increasing presence of the police.

  It didn’t occur to him that people wanted by the authorities never returned to the same place. He fell into the same superstitious thinking as the police, expecting the question-askers to repeat themselves.

  After returning fruitlessly to the field several times, he began to think as people do who have failed in a quest. He began to think that the question-askers did not exist. He began to think he had imagined them. Seeing something once was not enough to make him believe. He needed to see them again before he could believe.

  But he went on seeking the question-askers. He thought of them as an underground group. Their elusiveness made them mythical. Being unable to find them made him demote the uniqueness of his experience.

  When the newspapers referred to them as an urban myth, the young lover, being inexperienced, believed what the newspapers said. The effect of this was to diminish his hopes.

  He had lost his lover without resistance and now the object of his quest was proving an illusion.

  22

  How do you find people who do not want to be found? How do you find people who have made themselves so invisible that they have become an urban myth?

  Karnak exhausted all attempts at finding them. He prowled all manner of streets at dusk. He scoured the newspapers, seeking clues. He listened to conversations with a double mind. He saw hints everywhere, but the hints were enigmas. Like everyone else he saw the legends painted in big black letters on the walls of the city.

  WHO IS THE WATCHER?

  This made him feel that he was being watched by invisible omnipresent eyes. Images of giant cyclopean eyes appeared on pavements, on government buildings, on billboards, on the sides of lorries, on long stretches of walls. Square bits of paper fluttered down the streets. On them were images of prison bars with a solitary face, images of a single luminous eye, or simply the words:

  WHO IS THE PRISONER?

  People did not pick up these flyers, but it was impossible not to see the images or the words at a single glance. Karnak picked up a few of these flyers, as discreetly as possible, and studied them for clues. They gave no information of any kind. They had no other signs on them. The young lover was convinced that their neutrality held a clue, if only he could decipher it.

  He noticed that as soon as the flyers floated down the streets they were cleared away by figures in white whose express job was the elimination of anything dangerous to the state.

  Karnak grew frustrated. As he had nowhere to turn for information or hope, he decided one day to try something he had never thought of before.

  23

  It was the worst time of the night. Mirababa had been sitting on the bank of the lake. He was fine; he had made an accommodation with his perplexity. He had shivered in his wet clothes, but had grown used to the dampness. The moon hadn’t moved from the centre of the lake. The stars hadn’t moved in the sky.

  He remembered tales his grandfather used to tell him of nights that lasted a week. He had heard about nights lengthened by the gods for their secret purposes. He had also heard tales about the time to come when night would descend on the world and stay forever. This had been the greatest fear of the people.

  Tales of the never-ending night were seldom told and never told to children for fear of poisoning their minds. But sometimes when Mirababa slept he overheard those tales told at night when the old ones drank outside, under the eave
s. They told stories about how the prison came to be. They spoke of the fall of their great ancestor, of the loss of his immortal white garment and his shining immortal spear made of the timeless elements of mercury, sulphur, and salt.

  He heard tales of how this ancestor was once master of all creation, neither man nor woman, and higher than all the angels. He learnt how this ancestor, who conceived an immortal lust which broke the spell of his uniqueness, was put into a magic sleep from which he awoke into the prison of all nature. By his side was his mortal mate, that beautiful woman at the beginning of time, who might have been time itself.

  The boy, in his sleep (for he was a light sleeper), heard snatches of these fantastic legends whispered by the old ones. It was this that awoke his interest in myths.

  The night he heard the myth of the longest night to come was one of the most frightening of his life. He had nightmares about it for a week. He told his nightmares to his grandfather, who replied with this riddle:

  ‘The longest night will end with the longest night.’

  The boy had not understood. The grandfather said:

  ‘An eternal night will descend on the world. But it will end.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It will end when one person wakes up.’

  ‘Wakes up from what?’

  ‘From sleep.’

  ‘Will we all be asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If we are asleep how will we know it is the longest night?’

  ‘Because people will be asleep and yet awake.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘It happens all the time.’

  ‘Are we asleep now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I’m awake. I’m talking to you.’

  ‘How do you know you are awake?’