The Story (Ondaatje)
The Story, by Michael Ondaatje (1943-)
1.
For his first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives.
Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.
Some are born screaming,
some full of introspective wandering
into the past — that bus ride in winter,
the sudden arrival within
a new city in the dark.
And those departures from the family bonds
leaving what was lost and needed.
So the child’s face is a lake
of fast moving clouds and emotions.
A last chance for the clear history of the self.
All our mothers and grandparents here,
our dismantled childhoods
in the buildings of the past.
Some great forty-day daydream
before we bury the maps.
2.
There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.
In the last phase seven of us will cross
the river to the east and disguise ourselves
through the farmlands.
We will approach the markets
and befriend the rope-makers. Remember this.
She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.
After a month we will enter
the halls of that king.
There is dim light from small high windows.
We have entered with no weapons,
just rope in the baskets.
We have trained for years
to move in silence, invisible,
not one creak of bone,
not one breath,
even in lit rooms,
in order to disappear into this building
where the guards live in half-light.
When a certain night falls
the seven must enter the horizontal door
remember this, face down,
as in birth.
Then (he tells his wife)
there is the corridor of dripping water,
a noisy rain, a sense
of creatures at your feet.
And we enter halls of further darkness,
cold and wet among the enemy warriors.
To overcome them we douse the last light.
After battle we must leave another way
avoiding all doors to the north…
(The king looks down
and sees his wife is asleep
in the middle of the adventure.
He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watches her face as it catches a breath.
He pulls back a wisp across her eye
and bites it off. Braids it
into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)
3.
With all the swerves of history
I cannot imagine your future.
Would wish to dream it, see you
in your teens, as I saw my son,
your already philosophical air
rubbing against the speed of the city.
I no longer guess a future.
And do not know how we end
nor where.
Though I know a story about maps, for you.
4.
After the death of his father,
the prince leads his warriors
into another country.
four men and three women.
They disguise themselves and travel
through farms, fields of turnip.
They are private and shy
in an unknown, uncaught way.
In the hemp markets
they court friends.
They are dancers who tumble
with lightness as they move,
their long hair wild in the air.
Their shyness slips away.
They are charming with desire in them.
It is the dancing they are known for.
One night they leave their beds.
Four men, three women.
They cross open fields where nothing grows
and swim across the cold rivers
into the city.
Silent, invisible among the guards,
they enter the horizontal door
face down so the blades of poision
do not touch them. Then
into the rain of the tunnels.
It is an old story — that one of them
remembers the path in.
They enter the last room of faint light
and douse the lamp. They move
within the darkness like dancers
at the centre of a maze
seeing the enemy before them
with the unlit habit of their journey.
There is no way to behave after victory.
And what should occur now is unremembered.
The seven stand there.
One among them, who was that baby,
cannot recall the rest of the story
— the story his father knew, unfinished
that night, his mother sleeping.
We remember it as a tender story,
though perhaps they perish.
The father’s lean arm across
the child’s shape, the taste
of the wisp of hair in his mouth…
The seven embrace in the destroyed room
where they will die without
the dream of exit.
We do not know what happened.
From the high windows the ropes
are not long enough to reach the ground.
They take up the knives of the enemy
and cut their long hair and braid it
onto one rope and they descend
hoping it will be long enough
into the darkness of the night.