Starbook (29 page)

That morning, passing into the gaps that were like afterglows, the prince, in disguise, made his way through the forest and past the yellow valley and back into the blue shade of woods near the village of the artists, and went directly to the workshop of the maiden's father. He sat outside its unremarkable door, and he sang an ancient song that went like this:

'If you cannot find it

On earth

Seek for it in the

Sea

If you cannot find it

In the sea

Seek for it in the

Sky

If you cannot find it

In the sky

Seek for it in the

Fire

And if you cannot find it

In the fire

Seek for it in your

Dreams

If it isn't there

Then it is nowhere.

This is nowhere

And I like it here ...'

The prince sang this peculiar song in a sweet poignant voice that was unused to singing and indeed betrayed no talent for song, but the mood of it soothed him as he waited. And he sang himself to sleep, and sang gently in his sleep, with his head resting against a pole in front of the door of the workshop. And when the maidens father arrived that morning for work he saw a strange and strangely beautiful youth at the entrance to his secret workshop, singing in his sleep, singing words that moved him somewhat. And before the young man woke up, before he spoke, the maiden's father knew that this young man was going to play an important part in his life. He knew, instantly, in fact, that this inexplicable youth had already altered his life, and the life of his family, and the life of the tribe. He saw the future in the frail form of this youth who had now awoken and who had solemn smiling eyes like one who has not yet decided whether to live or die.

'What do you want?' he asked the youth gruffly.

'Sir,' said the youth, smiling shyly, 'your fame is great, and your art is greater, and I have travelled a long way, past the regions of death, sir, just to come and serve you. I ask nothing in return. I do not even ask to be instructed. I dare not, sir, ask so great an honour from so great a master as you. I desire only to serve you in any way you want and in the evenings I will return to my land; this I would like to do till you no longer wish it, sir.'

The maiden's father stared at the youth. He was quite mesmerised by his inexplicable frailty and beauty. There was something profoundly unusual about the youth; and some whisper told the father of the maiden that he couldn't refuse this modest request, even from a total stranger. The older man sensed the youth was of unique birth, and might even be something other than he seemed. And so unusually feeling himself under the sway of a kindly invisible power, and without knowing why, or what he was saying, he said:

'I accept. You shall serve me as I instruct you to do. But you must only do as I instruct you. Nothing else in my household is your business. You learn nothing of my art. I will teach you nothing. You will sit and serve till I decide otherwise. I have no need of a servant and I don't know why I am doing this. In the evenings and at night you may do as you wish, except don't disgrace me in any way. And you must not reveal anything of what you see here. Silence and discretion I demand of you. And you must not speak to my daughter.'

The prince bowed his head gracefully.

'Thank you, sir,' he said. 'This is the greatest honour of my life.'

The older man stared at him in puzzlement. His feelings were mixed and confused. He had not felt like this for a long time indeed. He felt in some obscure way that it was he who should be thanking the youth, and that it was he who was honoured. This confusion somewhat annoyed him. Few things ever did. The master was encountering something that baffled him, that eluded the powers of his intuition, that silenced his guiding spirit. And he knew for the first time in years a delicate kind of fear, a terror that bordered on illumination.

'Who are you anyway, where do you come from?' the older man asked sternly, in that complicated state of mind.

The prince smiled gently.

'I am a poor lost person, sir, separated from my family during our journeys, and I found myself here.'

'I thought you said you had come a long way because ...'

'A long way, sir, have I travelled because of your art and your fame, past the land of death even. The earth itself can bear witness to this. And the wind will speak for me. The stars watched my journeys with keen eyes. You may ask them, sir, when I am not around, and they will bear me out.'

The older man fell under the grip of a disquieting amazement.

'Who is your father?'

'One who laughs, sir.'

'I see. And your mother?'

'She is happy among the stars. She flew to heaven when I was young.'

There was a pause. Then the older man said:

'You begin today.'

'May you be blessed, sir, for the greatness of your heart.'

The older man stepped into his secret workshop with his new servant.

When the maiden came to see her father that afternoon she did not notice the new servant. He sat in a corner, under the wall, among the statues and images. Light poured in from a space in the wall above his head. He sat in absolute stillness, as he had been instructed, and breathed the way that bronze statues do, inaudibly without motion. The maiden didn't notice the new servant but she noticed the form of a new notion in wood that her father had half dreamt into space. Her father worked in silence, among stones, among chunks of wood, at a table, dreaming with quiet intensity new beings into form, as if he were praying, or conjuring in deep silence. Meanwhile his daughter sat at her favourite chair and spoke thoughts that came to her mind, partially aware that her voice had a nice effect on the mood of the workshop, and made the statues in the dark listen, as if to one beloved. She had been to the river that day, she said, and had found it barren ...

'There was nothing there, father, and I could not understand. The river was the same, or maybe it wasn't; the shore was the same, though I am not sure; the sky hadn't changed, and all my favourite flowers are in bloom, but it was all empty, as if the spirit of things had gone away from them. When my companions sang, they did not please me. When they danced, they were clumsy. I did not feel like anything. The wind wasn't sweet. The river was like stone. I wandered into the forest alone. It was without colour. I couldn't see the green of leaves. Everything was flat. Sometimes a butterfly lands on my shoulder. Sometimes I see a snail on the path and we have something to say to one another. Sometimes, while walking, I have a diamond dream, and some fairy has made me a queen, or a princess, and I am smiling among the trees. Sometimes, father, I see in front of me a perfect image that I can make in bronze or wood. And when it goes away it reappears in my dreams. Sometimes I hear the song a suitor sings on the edge of a dream while I am coming home. But these days, and today especially, nothing happens. The world is flat. The stars don't shine, and even my heart beats as if everything is normal. Has something changed in the world that I haven't noticed?'

And then she was silent. Her father was silent too, and worked quietly, only now and then moving wood on the table, breathing as wooden statues do, gently, as if not wanting to trouble the air. The maiden stared at the statues in the workshop, stared without seeing, and in that abstracted semi-dreaming state she made out the shapes of spirits going about their tasks of slowly bringing new forms into being, under the precise instruction of her father, their master. She watched the dimly visible forms of the spirits out of the corner of her eye and for a moment noticed a new one amongst them, but when she looked to ascertain, it was gone, faded into the mysterious half-light of the workshop where the most important events happened in the shadows, in an insubstantial light, not possible to gaze on, in a dark mist, where things become real and unreal like shadows moving in a darkness.

The maiden didn't notice the new servant even when she sat in her chair and dozed and dreamt that one of the statues was alive. Sometimes when she was awake and listening to her father carving shapes in the air, describing forms to his spirit-servants that he wanted them to make out of the wood that he had long prepared for their new life as art, the new servant would stir under the wall, and cough gently, as though breathing in the dust that floated from the wood were mildly choking him. Even then the maiden didn't notice. Once while the maiden dozed with eyes half open the new servant crept across her field of vision and received instructions from her father and went out and returned and whispered in his ear and passed her reclining form in the chair and he went and resumed his stillness in the dark, among the statues under the wall, and still she did not notice or see him. It was as if her father, the master, had cast a spell of invisibility over the new servant so that he would not be seen by his daughter; or as if he had cast a spell of incomprehension over his daughter so that she would not see the new servant, or notice him at all. Or it may have been that the new servant cast a spell on himself, that he would not be seen or noticed by her, following the principle of the heron but raising it to the pitch of an enchantment.

When he sat there in the dark, under the wall, many things came to the mind of the new servant. He fell often into a dreaming state and passed through a golden gap in his sleep and found himself in a place where he was a slave. He had no idea what had brought him to this condition. He was in a faraway land, among those whose skin was the colour of the sky just before evening comes, and he was a slave working in a field from dawn to dusk, along with many others, singing poignant lamentations for a life that was gone. Sometimes he was half naked in a marketplace, being sold for the price of a dog. Sometimes he had three children that were not his colour and his wife's eyes were cold like the eyes of a dead fish. Sometimes it was hard for him to find the golden gap and return to the workshop, in the dark, awake. In silence, when he returned, he was puzzled.

Many thoughts and fragments of lives, many notions fantastical and real descended on him as he sat there among the stones and structured wood.

The new servant that he was, he sat there quietly, and obediently, and still. He learnt the art of statues. He learnt their stillness. He learnt their repose. He learnt how to absorb all things, all energies, all memories, all thoughts and moods around him into his unresisting being. He learnt to give off his mood, his thoughts, and energies too, in silence, such as they were. He learnt the absorbency of statues, and learnt their radiation too. He learnt to be present the way they are, without insistence, and yet unforgettable, not moving, and yet seeming to move, never changing, and yet changing with the light, or the angle of being viewed. He learnt the simplicity of statues, and how this simplicity makes them monumental in the mind. He learnt the immobility of statues, and how this immobility makes them able to travel to a vast number of minds who haven't even seen them. He learnt the humour of statues, how they keep their best secrets to themselves, smiling inwardly at the unreality of their outward form, their true mystery dwelling within. He learnt like statues to dwell in the mystery within and to live in its secret light and listen to the truths whispered in the silence inside the forms of things. He learnt the openness of statues too, and offered himself to all eyes, all souls, to be gazed upon without being understood, and not minding. He learnt the tranquillity of statues, content simply to be, to give or receive, to waste no energy in that which is not, to be unconcerned about being or not being, but in being to so clearly be. He also learnt the power of statues, he learnt how to occupy and not to occupy the space he did, he learnt how to feel every part of his being, and to be aware of all that he was, and to be aware of all that is, all that is the case, in the universe.

He learnt from statues that all things participated in all things in the universe, and no one thing or object or being was isolated from another. He learnt the indestructibility of statues, for they can't be destroyed, and when statues are burned or broken down their form remains, even in their formlessness, and what they once were persists for ever in the memory of the invisible space, and in the eternal book that dwells among the stars.

Many things the new servant learnt from the statues without knowing it. And one of them was the unteachable art of happiness; for statues, in all that they are, know happiness as a by-product of their inner certainties about the higher this and the lower that. And so whatever they are, this they appear to be, along with the inner art, which they reveal only in the dark, among themselves, when no one else is around or watching; when they can be most true. It took some time before they admitted the new servant to their hidden exalted ranks. And first he had to be tested and initiated into their condition, into their philosophy, into their mysteries.

His time among the statues, as a statue, was one of the greatest adventures of his life.

And so the prince, in order to serve, became a statue. He became a statue in the maiden's father's workshop. He seldom moved.

Meanwhile, the clamour of the suitors grew worse. Their competitiveness intensified. Many of them had been in the village, putting forth their individual suits, through elaborate, influential and often unorthodox intermediaries. Herbalists had been recruited into the ranks; and they, on the payroll of one of the suitors, would insinuate their way into the maiden's parents' house and whisper hints laden with suggestions as to evil things that might befall the family if so-and-so were not chosen as bridegroom. Or if there were an illness in the family, and in secret a witch-doctor were consulted, it would often be hinted that such-and-such a suitor was responsible, or that if a favourable decision were made in the direction of such-and such then the epidemic, of which the illness was merely a forerunner, might be spared the family, if not the tribe.

On all sides the maiden's family was pestered and hounded, bribed and threatened by the increasingly frustrated suitors. Their frustration had begun to have an unwholesome effect on the village, on the artistic life of the people, even on the good will in the air. One way or another people of the village found themselves being drawn into one camp or another, into supporting one influential suitor or another, into being used by them. In the marketplace those who sold fish, or the butchers, or the sellers of trinkets, of mounds of vegetables, of bales of dyed cloth, would whisper to anyone from the maiden's household the name of a suitor that would be much favoured by the majority; this name would make its way, via circuitous routes, to the mother, and then eventually to the maiden herself, who wouldn't hear it, nor hear any other names, nor hear the word suitor, because she had developed a graceful eccentric deafness to the whole subject and in its place had acquired a lovely drifting absent-mindedness. She would be often singing, often dreaming of a moment, shrouded in golden mystery, by the river.

The more the suitors clamoured, the stranger and more elusive the maiden became. She grew more beautiful in her awkward way, and yet more invisible. She learnt the art of passing by people without being seen, or slipping through crowds without being noticed. She also learnt to stop seeing what she didn't want to see. And as the suitors began to make themselves an unavoidable part of the village, she learnt to see less and less, and to hear less and less, till she almost wholly withdrew into a way of dreaming and a way of wandering.

The suitors so infected the village with their obnoxious rivalry that the families of other young girls of marriageable age began to complain. Often they could be heard, with daggers in their voices, saying:

'Why doesn't she choose one man and let us have peace in the village? Is she the only girl in the world? Why doesn't she think of others? Because of her this village is being ruined by strangers.'

The Mamba, her chief suitor, who made this theme popular, now increased the pitch of his campaign. He slandered the other suitors, and maintained that their wealth, their presence, their alien ways were corrupting the spiritual integrity of the village; and that the maiden's inability to make a sensible choice would bring fragmentation and even death to the village, if care was not taken.

This kind of talk grew in force. Many picked upon it, and even the secret masters were alarmed enough to feature it in their obscure meetings.