Free Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri Page A

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, the 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