The Comic Destiny

by Ben Okri

  They eventually woke up to the dead cow and the drowned books and the dead bodies in the great gutter in front of the house that was a country. A world-famous popstar took an interest in the house and drew more attention to it. This made the house more conscious of itself. It took a lot of time for this to happen. Children played near the gutter and caught a mysterious illness and died. For a long time no-one did anything. All pretended the problem wasn’t there. Or that it wasn’t a problem.

  On the tables and pallets women were naked and dying in the nightmare grip of the merciless disease. One woman was making sexual motions, writhing and making love to the air. This is not because it was what she wanted to do, but because the motion eased her agony.

  There was a mist over all these bodies writhing like the condemned in a hell that no one has ever imagined. Millions of them were on the path to perishing. The world watched them die in their lonely mute agony.

  Someone’s thought circulated in the air, but was not expressed. Someone inwardly evil. The thought went: they should all be killed.

  Who can harbour such a holocaustal notion, such a genocidal vision?

  3

  We had to watch them in their long lonely deaths. We tried to prevent more people from joining their numbers. So many thoughts circulated in the air. Some extreme, some spiritual, some practical, running in the underworld of our grief:

  ‘We must change. Sex cannot be the angel of death of a whole people. If we master desire we will be transformed. We will become masters of ourselves, the magnet of a beautiful new future.’

  4

  It came about that one day the people in the house had simply had enough. A woman borrowed some boots and went into the gutter and began to probe and heave. Foul water ran into the boots, the stink was intolerable, but she was undeterred. She worked hard at clearing the mess. She worked alone. We watched and did not watch her. And then, gradually, people joined in. They waded into the great gutter. They lifted up the hospital bed and pulled out the sunken books. They hoisted out the dead cow and lowered it onto the back of a truck. They took it far away, and dug a very deep hole, and buried it. Some thought it should have been burnt. Others couldn’t bear the thought of death in the air they breathed. They dug out corpses in the gutter and gave them decent burials too.

  It was plenty for a day’s work. A symbolic day. The gutter had other grim secrets, though. The hospital bed was still there, on the mud and detritus. But the gutter was less clogged than before. Fewer people were dying. Fewer people caught the mysterious disease. The people felt better about themselves. The long denial was over. Something was being done at last. Children could begin, tentatively, to play again in the house that was a country.

  The Secret Castle

  The War Healer

  1

  He set himself in the middle of the battleground, between the two fighting factions. And there, with bullets whistling past, he patched up the wounded and buried the dead.

  He had been a photographer, an onlooker, in a war-torn region. And one day, overcome by frustration at being so powerless to stop the fighting, he underwent an obscure conversion. He gave up his job, and became a sort of healer and a burier of the dead.

  It was bloody work indeed. He laboured alone. He performed this solitary unacknowledged task for years. He would wake up in the morning and go to the battleground and set about his grim blood-soaked work. He would arrive in a clean white shirt at dawn, and he would be blood-spattered by noon, and by the evening his glasses would be steamed over with blood and gore. His hands would be dripping with fat and the messy tissues of the dead and those hopelessly shot to pieces. He worked at healing and burying all day, in that hot place, in that no-man’s land, in the desert, between two implacable enemies. It was a wonder he wasn’t killed.

  From day to day he survived all the shooting, bombing and shelling. No one joined him there. He was not paid for his work. No international organisations softened his task or knew what he did there alone. None of the warring sides knew what he did there either, what services he rendered so tirelessly, burying their dead, patching up their wounded.

  2

  Then one day he decided he needed to get married, and he took himself a wife. She was a good woman. His one wish was that he wouldn’t have to work on their wedding day. So he chose a holy day when he hoped there would be no fighting; a day holy to both sides.

  The day arrived. They were in their finest apparel. His wife was beautiful in her white wedding dress. He was simple in his black suit. But he was quite heart-broken when, on the day, the enemies struck up the fighting again, like an infernal orchestra. He had to leave the wedding service and hurry to the middle place in the fighting zone, and heal the wounded and bury the dead.

  On this day his wife joined him. She was a sad vision in her bridal dress, her white bridal gown, and her white gloves. Together they worked very hard in the war zone, till her white nuptial attire had turned all bloody and darkened with gore, mud, blasted brains and intestines spewed up from all the shelling.

  By the evening they were quite a sight in their filthy wedding outfits. They were shattered by the betrayal of the holy day by the implacable enemies. They never really recovered from the peculiar ferocity of the day’s bloodshed.

  They were so distraught that they were tempted never to return to the war zone again. But the day passed and they had become man and wife. She told him that he may as well continue his thankless job as no one else knew what horrors happened there in the middle place between the two warring enemies. No one else could render the important services that he did. It was a condition he had accepted, she said.

  And so, with a broken heart, he continued to work there in the middle place. He buried the dead, fixed up the wounded, from dawn to dusk. But he was not so alone any more. It still remained a wonder he was never killed or hurt by all those bullets, all that bombing. This fact never occurred to him as he did his work, nor afterwards.

  3

  He carried on his grim vocation. The years passed. A child was born to him by his good wife. The world changed. But still the fight continued between the unforgiving enemies. He worked as long as the war raged. While they murdered one another, he restored, buried, healed.

  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, t
he 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.

  T he Comic Destiny

  Ben Okri won the Booker prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. He has published ten novels, four volumes of short stories, four books of essays, and four collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than twenty-six languages. He also writes plays and filmscripts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a vice-president of English PEN and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London.

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