Starbook (12 page)

What odd dreams she had in her father's workshop. Now she dreamt she was in a ship that tossed on the waves whipped up by the demons of the deep. She was in the ship, in its bowels, in chains, lying upside-down, or sideways, facing the feet of another, who was also chained. Blood on the chains was like rust. Her agony had passed beyond bearing and she was in pain like one dead, floating above the figures lying in opposite directions, head to foot, and foot to head, in the vile-smelling hold of the ship, tossing in the nightmare of demons. Wailing sounded everywhere in the crushed space, and women were dying, calling out the obscure names of their ancestors in languages no one understood. And death and doom was thick in the dream as she floated and saw hundreds of bodies like writhing ebony sculptures bleeding and drowning in the white waves. She howled in the dream, in a white space, and drifted away into eternity, among the stars, where forms in mists of gold led her back down to a land where dead bodies were planted and long green sweet canes grew from their bodies, and at last she saw the sea differently, and returned to her home among the giants of the stars.

What dreams she had, in her father's workshop, as she listened to his sonorous incantations used for the moulding of gold into magic objects.

And then, in the midst of evanescent dreams, she would see the spirits appear in the workshop, as if conjured out of the dark mystic atmosphere.

They appeared one by one. The first to appear was the spirit of the forge. He was made of fire, and shone like polished bronze. His face was impassive, impressive, mighty, severe, humourless, and his eyes were full of flames. Upon his appearance, crackles of heat fizzled in the air. He was silent, and awaited his instruction. The maiden's father, uttering further grim incantations, sent him to the forge at the back of the workshop, and immediately the blazing copper would be glowing on the plates and moulds. They would soon become the living busts of kings and queens soon to be dead, or the sacred forms of the almighty father god who created all things from the great word that was brought on golden tablets by the mysterious ancestors of the tribe, who came from somewhere not of this earth, who perished under the seas, and whose legacy had come down to the master, working now, with the secret of the ages, while his daughter slept.

The second spirit to appear was the spirit of making. He had a smiling face and seven hands and three heads and many eyes and was powerful and muscled and lithe and his eyes shone like moonlight. Upon receiving his instructions, with big smiles, and a happy mood, he was amongst the unmade objects, the wood awaiting their dreams, and he began carving from their raw shapes the figures that the master had outlined in their rawness. Among much chipping, hammering and carving, the second spirit was happy.

The third spirit was the spirit of inspiration. It was light as air, luminous, beautiful, mysterious. It kept changing form, and had a pure glow of delight. Its face was turned inwards, and its eyes of purest airy gems shone a clear radiance on all around, transfiguring the rough workshop into a promised land, a paradise of dreams. It seemed as if there were flowers everywhere amongst the stones and shadows, and an open sky visible through the dark rafters of the workshop, and stars in miniature among the ruins of visible forms, and all the gods as one, and all the goddesses as one also. There seemed a gentle song brimming from the heart of form, and music tinkling amongst the tools. The third spirit was a being of pure unfixed magic and enchantment, like a fluid angel, awaiting a simple instruction to turn all things into gold and all living forms into their own paradise and wonder.

The maiden was happy as a happy child at the appearance of the third spirit; and she marvelled at how, upon receiving its instructions from her father, the spirit vanished into the air and became the very glow that shone from all things, as if the great god was revealing itself in all that was.

Her father shone now in majestic splendour, his taut skin seeming to radiate a transforming light through the sweat of his brow and from his three eyes that shone so in the dark light of the workshop.

The maiden listened to the work going on in all the spheres of the workshop. She saw the glow of the blazing forge in the distance and the glimmering brilliance of gold flowing into future forms. She heard the steady sound of a head taking shape from the trunk of a dead tree. And she listened to the murmur of her father at his magic work-bench, invoking new forms into being as he worked a living face out of stone.

All over the workshop the spirits were busy. Their hands were everywhere. They went past in silence. They never spoke. They never crashed into anything, or put a foot wrong, never fell, never broke a thing, never ruined a sculpture, and they continually went to her father for further instructions, if their previous task was completed. For they ended a task with the same tranquillity as they began a new one, never tired, never elated, beginning and ending in the same spirit, as if these two phases were the same, or as if they were engaged in one long epic work in which beginning and ending were merely pauses.

How clear, how noble, how magical the spirits were during the magic hour of work, the unforgettable hours of her youth, among mysteries, in her father's dream. She saw them so clearly, and to her mind no further proof was needed. All the whispers and rumours were true. It seemed possible that her father was the invisible master of the great sculpture that had so troubled her. It seemed possible that he was the master of the most magical and subversive sculptures that had perplexed and astonished the people and made the tribe change its location three times in the last twenty years because of the hint of disasters to come. It was possible that her father worked with spirits, that they found the rare and special materials, that they sometimes brought these rare materials from the land of spirits and other times from lands across the great seas where pink humans dwelt in silver cages. It was possible that her father made these spirits work for him in secret at all hours of the day. What else could explain the genius and strangeness of the man? Where did his extraordinary notions and productivity come from, if not from the spirits? She always meant to ask him about this. And on this day, in her sleep, she remembered to do so. And so, waking gently, stirring on the bench, and noticing the spirits vanish into the dark spaces with her awakening and yet carrying on her intention in the face of no evidence, and also risking the wrath of having interrupted her father's profound concentration, she said:

'Father, is it true that you use spirits to do your work?'

There was a long silence as the silence spoke in the workshop. What did the silence say? The silence said: Child, you should not ask questions till you know the answers. Child, questions can never be answered. Child, questions do not ask the questions you really want to ask. Child, ask questions in silence if you want answers in sound. Child, questions disturb the order of things. Child, questions destabilise the world. Child, questions bring answers that would trouble you for ever. Child, questions change the world. Child, questions bring answers we wish we had not brought forth. Do you know what you are doing asking questions, child? Terrors hide in questions, and the end of your happy days, the beginning of the days of knowledge, and the sadness that comes with it, till the day of light, long in the distance, after much suffering is overcome. Child, it is too late to be silent now, and to prolong your happiness, in the years of enchantment, when all was well in the dark groves of childhood, where dreams are as real as rivers.

All these things the silence said, as the maiden listened to the cobwebs increasing in the dark, and the lizards scuttling among the thinking forms of stone heads. Many years passed before the silence was over. Many dreams. She had been raped by a slave-master across the seas; repeatedly, she endured it, at noon, when the house slept. She had borne three children to two slave-masters. She had run away one night and had walked six hundred miles to join a colony of freed slaves. She had grown old telling stories of her magical childhood to incredulous children. She was dying by candlelight. She was with the ancestors, at peace, and joyful at the mysterious understanding of the rich meaning and purpose of her life's suffering and forgotten beauty, before the silence passed and she heard her father, in gentle sonority, answer the question she thought she had asked.

'Do you see spirits?" he said.

The maiden had awoken now. She heard time's gentle flight in the silence; its wings brushed past her face, ageing her tenderly, beginning her long and silent bloom. She could not see the spirits; she could never see the spirits this way, though she was sure they were there.

'I see them when I sleep,' she replied.

'In your dreams?'

There was a mocking smile in her father's interrogation.

Not mocking. Amused. An amused smile in his voice. Are you ready for revelation, child? the air seemed to say after he had spoken.

'Yes, I think in my dreams.'

'So you dream of spirits?'

'Yes, I think so, but they are real, and they are usually here, working for you.'

'But in your dreams.'

'Yes, father, in my dreams, I think so, but they are real.'

'But you are dreaming them.'

'Yes, father.'

'So you are responsible for them.'

'No, father.'

'Why not?'

'Because, father, in the dreams it is you who command them, it is you who they obey.'

'Do I create your dream?'

The father was smiling broadly now in the question. Are you ready to be enlightened, child? the silence seemed to say.

'I don't know, father.'

'You mean you suspect I can do it if I want?'

'It seems to me, my dear father, that you can do anything.'

A profound silence descended on the maiden, like a mantle of calm. A cooling sensation. Did the world change a little? She felt so, but didn't know how, as if an inaudible vowel had altered the spaces in the workshop and transported her across time to a place where only magi lived, among ancient mysteries. Her father suddenly seemed gently transfigured, as if on the verge of becoming invisible, as if he were a work of art himself, whose meaning ever eludes, and which is not seen by most even when looked at intensely by all.

'Your questions and all the questions you will ever ask were answered before you were born, my child. All you have to do is remember, or return.'

'But, my father, you confuse me. How can it be?'

'We of our tribe create out of dreams but we make in broad daylight. Our works have more meaning and more truth than we realise at the time, but it is not meaning or truth that we seek.'

'What do we seek?'

'We seek to serve that which directs us to create. Hence we are somewhat indifferent to what we create, since it serves a purpose higher than we understand. The person who creates is not important, only what they create, what they make. Those who are the best servants of the higher powers have more servants to help them do the work. That is why some have the power of ten while others have only their own power, which is, in the long run, the power of nothing, of dust, of oblivion. Through our works must shine not the power of the person, but the power of the power. True fame should belong to the power which guides us in the dark.'

The father stopped; the maiden had found herself somewhere else. She had been listening to another lesson which was being spoken to her while her father was speaking. It was only through the transported distraction of her father's words that she could hear the other secret words. It was as though her father's voice were a sort of a bridge to another realm, where the real learning is done, a realm of universal knowledge, where masters whisper secrets into the ears of their unknowing pupils as if into the petals of flowers. And when her father stopped, her lesson seemed over. A bizarre joy encompassed her heart. Had she heard a word of what her father said? Only later, much later, in another land, in the fragrance of honeysuckle, on one of the few days of her adult life when she knew true happiness, did she hear what her father said, and more; but she heard it only because she repeated it, as if she were saying it from her own power, to her child, who would one day change the world, invisibly, through the secret power of art.

Deeply her father breathed; deeply the maiden listened. She was back now in the workshop, among shadows, and iroko heads dreaming only of war, and wall geckos scuttling, and cobwebs gathering dust, and eyes that look but do not see, and faces that will carry into the future the only living traces of a tribe vanished from the earth for ever.

She was back now, and listening. Her father did not speak a while. Then he spoke in disconnected fragments, as if repeating words whispered in his mind, words destined for the ears of his daughter, and through his daughter destined for those in the wide world, through time, for whom they would have significance at the special moment that they are encountered. The father, as if in a dream, said:

'We are listeners at the oracle. Some listen, but do not hear. Some hear, but do not listen. Those who hear are touched and changed.'

Then he said:

'Free to be truthful to their dreams.'

Then:

'How they live invisibly.'

Then:

'After the suffering, gold.'

Then:

'When they don't notice, best work is done.'

Then:

'Obscure life of a master.'

Then:

'When they see you hide again.'

And as he spoke, as if he were somewhere else, but also somehow here, the maiden fell under the spell of the strange fragments. They seemed to join, dance and separate in her mind. They seemed also to be words spoken not just by her father but also by the spirits she could no longer see, and by the stone heads and the bronze busts and the figures brooding and breeding in the nocturnal spaces of the workshop.

And the fragments became words crystallised from stars and dreams. She listened as her life changed.