courtesy of The Kensington Rocking Horse Company
When I was a little girl in Vietnam I lived in an orphanage in a Buddhist monastery. There were many of us there who had lost our parents either in the war or from the terrible cancers which followed it. In that ravaged country, only the monks still had communities in which to look after us.
It was not a bad place; it was the only place I could remember and I was too young to know what I lacked. We were well fed and we had each other for company and for warmth and security as we slept. There was a school room where the monks taught us what we needed to know and a river ran along the bottom of our world, in which we swam and across which, in the far distance, stood vast green mountains behind which, without fail, the sun would set, rising again as reliably from beyond an impenetrable forest.
We would imitate the monks at their meditations, raucously chanting nonsense as we sat, cross legged, palms upturned, the concept of quiet contemplation quite alien to us. A piece of cloth found lying about would be pounced on rapturously and wrapped around the body of the finder, who would swan about, far superior to the rest of us barefoot scruffs in shorts or nappies, more serene than the Buddha himself, until some older child came and claimed the prize by virtue of physically greater bargaining power. The very small children used to rage and cry at the injustice, but as we grew older we bore it with equanimity, not so much as a result of the monks' teachings as because we knew we were no longer at the very bottom of the pecking order.
Apart from us and the monks, there were men there, most of whom we had little to do with. Often they seemed angry or sad or frustrated which, apart from their ragged trousers, set them aside from the calm and berobed monks. They worked, as did the monks and the oldest children, in the gardens and with the animals, in the kitchens and the yards, but they took no part in our care or education and we, for our part, took little interest in them.
One of these men, though, stood out from the rest. He had eyes full of joy and a face full of wisdom which the monks, despite their lives of meditation and prayer, could not attain. He was neither old nor young, a tall, thin man who smiled frequently and bestowed wooded jewels and toys upon us children: carved birds and animals, little round balls, spinning tops, beads for our hair, dozens of tiny treasures. We were drawn to him, fascinated by his skills, watching in awe as his knife blade flashed rays of magic, bewitching the wood so that his hands could simply mould those things from it.
We had long been taught not to ask questions: something which I never quite got the hang of. I was not as boisterous as the other children but I was certainly the most inquisitive and I loved, even then, to tell stories. We would sit talking together for hours and he and I became close friends. I learned that he wasn't well. He had an illness, he said, which the war had given him and which ate away at him from within. That was the reason why he was so thin and could spend his days carving instead of having to work like the other men.
He began carving a rocking horse out of part of a tree trunk, a fantastic creature with a fiery mane and long, streaming tail and, as he carved, we would tell one another stories of the world beyond those mountains. We painted a wild array of roaring waterfalls and lush singing valleys, of animals so fierce that even the bravest hunters dared not venture after them, of children who grew tails and trunks and could swing through the jungles, communing with the birds and the monkeys, of the spirits which lived in the trees, how ancient and wise they were and how their bodies resembled in human form those of the trees which they protected, of the water nymphs who lived lives of unfettered joy dancing in the spray of tumbling rivers, diving in and out of the water, sunning themselves on rocks. We wove a world which freed us both even from the bodies in which we lived.
One day, when the rocking horse was almost finished, it occured to me to wonder why he had come to the orphanage. He laughed at the question, a deep, warm laugh.
"I'm a prisoner," he said.
"What's a prisoner," I asked.
"It's a person who is kept in a prison," he replied. "A prison is a place where people are sent as a punishment. The person cannot leave the prison and must stay there for a certain length of time."
"But this isn't a prison, is it?" I asked.
"Amongst other things," he said, his eyes dancing, "yes, it is."
"Then am I a prisoner too?" I wanted to know.
"No," he laughed. "You are an orphan. You children are here so that the monks can look after you, because you have no parents."
"Then the monks are not prisoners either," I queried.
"No. They choose to come here. For them, to be here is the reward for living a very good and pure life."
I paused in my questioning to consider this: it seemed strange that some people were here as a reward and some as a punishment. "But," I pointed out, "everyone lives together in the same way. Except that it's only the monks that look after us."
"That's right. We are in the same place, but it has different meanings for some of us."He winked, as if to let me in on a great secret. "Life," he added, "is very often like that."
That evening, finally, as the sky burned and the sun sank behind the mountains, the rockinghorse was finished. Clambering onto the horse's back, the first to try it out, with every other child watching in envy, I felt ten feet tall. When everyone had had a turn and it was time for bed, he whispered to me, "Remember, only believe, and the rockinghorse will grow wings and together you will fly. If you can fly, then walls don't matter; no one can ever take away your freedom."
I never saw him again. Too young to understand death, I believed that he had simply grown wings and flown away. I felt triumphant that my friend had escaped his imprisonment for whatever they were trying to punish him for. The other children fought for turns on the rockinghorse; I rode on him only when no one else was around. They had been given a wooden horse with rockers; I had been given a magical one with wings.
Years later and thousands of miles away, in a prison cell of my own, I understood why my friend had smiled so much. With my body confined between walls six feet square, as a punishment for fighting against injustice and violence, my mind grew wings, reliving the journeys with the betrunked and betailed little jungle children and the headlong flights down waterfalls with shimmering nymphs.
I laughed because they had got it so completely wrong, because I knew that
my freedom could never be taken away; because one day this would end and even
my body would be released; because, though there were walls to hold me, they
held me less securely than the uniforms which held my captors. They were given
keys to open the doors and cars in which to drive away. I had been given a magical
horse with wings.