Tales of Freedom (10 page)

The Secret
Castle

THE BUS DROVE
past telegraph poles in meadows of blue. In the bus, on that beautiful Italian day, there were boys returning from school, and working men. The bus came to a stop. A woman with several men came on. She was a young woman who carried herself gracefully. One of the boys helped her into the bus and gave up his window seat to her. She had an exquisite complexion, clear eyes, and uncanny composure. The boy, called Reggio, made friendly conversation with the young woman. The men she was with regarded Reggio with suspicion. He was just a boy, coming home from school, and he meant nothing by it. He was drawn by the mystery of the young woman, who sat impassively, staring straight ahead, as if she were dead, or going to die.

Her face, or, rather, her eyes lit up only when the boy spoke to her and asked questions, to which answers were not necessary. The questions were not necessary either, but life would be duller if he hadn’t asked them.

‘Do you like those hills?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like that cloud?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like that horse in the field?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like that car going past us?’

‘No.’

‘Do you like this bus?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like school?’

She paused. Her face clouded a little. Then she gave a tiny smile, like a snowdrop, and said:

‘Yes.’

The boy was silent for a while. He was not thinking of any new questions, but just turning over in his mind the clarity of her answers. Somehow, darkly, he found he deduced a great deal from her slender answers, but he wasn’t sure what. Decorum made him silent for longer, but the strangeness of her answers made him want to know more.

The young woman remained impassive, staring straight ahead, barely moving, barely breathing. He didn’t look at her, but he
seemed
to see her. She gave him the peculiar feeling that she was like a calf being led off to the slaughter.

Then he noticed that she moved. It was a movement so odd, full of such contained intensity, that it seemed to demand him to speak some more.

‘Do you like fields?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like rivers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like roads?’

‘No.’

He paused. He wasn’t expecting that answer at all. He couldn’t see anything wrong with roads. He quite liked roads. But now that he looked at roads through her spirit, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was something unnatural about them after all. He wandered off in thought. Then, after a while, she made the same odd movement.

‘Do you like houses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like moonlight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like mirrors?’

‘No.’

This arrested him. For the first time he turned and gave her a quick look. He thought it strange that someone so beautiful should not like mirrors. He pondered this a long time. And time became elastic as he pondered. He lost himself in thought, and he lost himself in space. He was no longer in the bus, but in a magical world, a world that made him smile. He was within happiness itself, within its secret castle. When he came to, he found that the bus had stopped. It was the end of the journey. They all filed down. The men she was with regarded him darkly. When they had all got down on the dusty road, one of the men turned to him and asked what he meant by talking to the young woman.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

Then he apologised. The man grew angry at the apology: it seemed to confirm guilt. He got steamed up, he talked in a loud voice. He addressed the other men, and appealed to their common roots. The men crowded the boy. They were all shouting. Then a tall gangly man among them, a bit of a fool, set up his fists like a boxer in a comic movie. He began to jump around the boy. The men egged him on.

The boy was perplexed. He had no idea how things had come to this point. While the shadow-boxing went on around him, he caught a glimpse of the young woman. She was hidden behind the men. Confused, he felt a punch whistle past his face. Swiftly, he set up his fists too. Before he knew it he was grappled to the ground, his feet kicking the air. A heavy weight and smelly work clothes pressed down on him. Bad breath fanned his face. Bristles stabbed his cheek. There were voices all around, hollering.

Then, suddenly, he found himself standing up. His father, who was the bus driver, was beside him, shouting, waving his arms, defending his son.

‘My son meant nothing by it. What does he know? Harmless questions. A polite young man. Gave up his seat. Meant nothing by it.’

‘So you say,’ one of the men cried. ‘He’s old enough to do enough damage. They start earlier and earlier these days.’

The voices flew back and forth. The boy stood there, a boy among men. The other school boys were a short way off, staring, whispering among themselves.

Then Reggio’s father found a solution.

‘I will solve this problem,’ he said. ‘I will solve it now.’

‘How?’ they asked.

‘Get back on the bus. Everybody get back on the bus.’

After much discussion, in which nothing was really discussed, just voices flying out of mouths, they all trooped back on the bus. Then Reggio’s father got into the driver’s seat, started the vehicle, and they soon set off.

The young woman sat in the same place as she did before, near the window. Next to her was the man who shouted the loudest. He had a big jowled face, and severe eyes. He was squinting. He was a hard working man. Working his jaw. He looked like the word ‘honour’ in ragged clothes. He stared straight ahead. The young woman looked sideways out of the window. They did not speak. There was now a strange silence in the bus. Reggio was at the front, near his father.

The bus chugged across a bridge, past an orchard, an isolated villa, vineyards, a crumbling castle, and a field with a white horse staring at the sky. The bus drove past telegraph poles in meadows of blue.

Then the voices began again:

‘Where is he taking us?’

‘Yes, where is he going?’

They went on like that till they found themselves approaching a familiar place. The bus came to a halt. They were at the precise bus stop where the young woman and the men had first got on the bus. Reggio’s father swung open the door.

‘This is where you got on,’ he said to the men. ‘This is where you get off.’

There was a stunned silence. No-one moved. Then the young woman stood up. The man next to her was obliged to stand up too. She made her way down the aisle and when she got to the bus driver she stopped. Reggio did not look up at her. His father said:

‘Everything should be simple.’

The young woman smiled; and when she smiled something beautiful shone from her, like the purity of that limpid sky. Then, with a barely perceptible movement, she passed something into the boy’s hand.

‘Yes,’ she said, and gracefully got down from the bus.

The other men trooped after her morosely. They said nothing. They were
working
men, just trying to uphold their honour. The last to get down was the gangly fool who had wrestled young Reggio to the ground. He too was silent. But when the bus started to move he set up his fists again, as if challenging the departing bus to a fight.

Only then, as they departed, did Reggio look out of the window. Then, to his father, he said:

‘But I meant nothing by it, Papa. Only harmless questions.’

‘I know, my son,’ the driver said. ‘But they are the ones that can cause trouble.’

Reggio silently stared at the young woman as she grew smaller in the distance. When he could no longer see her he opened his hand, and beheld her presence forever in a flower.

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 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. And 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.