Free Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri

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