He walked across the border

Luck was waiting for him when he walked across the border into a new country. Fear covered him like a cage. But the air there was cleaner, the strays were friendlier and the inhabitants didn’t look at him as though they were trying to see through his walls. They let him wander anywhere: in the square at high noon where he swelled with smugness; in the shadows of passageways where even his sins fell short of their mark. Because they looked at him with indifferent sympathy, because they questioned him out of a dead society, he asked to become their student. They told him that wasn’t the way it worked. But they let him stay. When he drank and pointed at them they let him shout. When he fought against the bottle they let him do it his way, though he fought drunk. When he refused even his own help they let him alone. When he accused them of spiritual theft and every other crime he could think of, they said, There’s nothing to steal here: everything’s already been given. The cage began to lift. He failed into their world and grew accustomed to their concept of mercy. They said that mercy must turn in on itself afresh every day. He learned for himself to draw open the curtain first thing in the morning. He learned not to mock what he saw outside his window. This was in another country where the laws that had crushed him didn’t apply, or where the same laws crushed him differently, so that he was crushed not by solitude but by mercy, and every noon, broken in his idleness, he went back to the square where he knew he’d be counted in. And every noon his initiation was complete.