Travels with Herodotus Page 4

  After pressing the buzzer I would start to pray fervently: God, please have them buy something, have them buy at least one! I was actually engaged in a form of begging, trying to arouse pity. I would enter an apartment and say: Please, madam, buy a soap from me. It costs only one złoty, winter is coming and I have no shoes. This worked sometimes, but not always, because there were many other children also trying to get over somehow—by stealing something, swindling someone, trafficking in this or that.

  Cold autumn weather arrived, the cold nipped at the soles of my feet, and because of the pain I had to stop selling. I had 300 złoty, but Mr. Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy the shoes. If one wrapped one’s leg with a piece of flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear them even in the worst frosts of winter.

  I returned to Delhi, where my return ticket home was due to arrive any day. I found my old hotel, and even got the same room as before. I explored the city, went to museums, tried to read the Times of India, studied Herodotus. I do not know whether Herodotus reached India; given the difficulties of such a passage at that time, it seems highly unlikely, although one cannot rule it out definitively. After all, he came to know places so very far from Greece! He did describe twenty provinces, called satrapies, of what was then the greatest power on earth, Persia, and India was the most populous of those. Indians … are by far the most numerous people in the known world, he asserts, and then talks of India, its location, society, and customs. The Indians live further east in Asia than anyone else—further east than any other known people about whom there is reliable information—because beyond them the eastern part of India is sandy and therefore uninhabitable. There is a large number of Indian tribes, and they do not all speak the same language. Some, but not all, are nomadic; some live in marshes formed by the river and eat raw fish which they catch from cane boats…. These marsh Indians wear clothes made out of rushes; first they cut the plant down and gather it from the river, and then they weave it as one would a basket and wear it like a breastplate.

  Another tribe of Indians, called the Padaei, who live to the east of these marsh Indians, … are said to have the following customs. If any of their compatriots—a man or a woman—is ill, his closest male friends (assuming that it is a man who is ill) kill him, on the grounds that if he wasted away in illness his flesh would become spoiled. He denies that he is ill, but they take no notice, kill him, and have a feast. Exactly the same procedure is followed by a woman’s closest female friends when it is a woman who is ill. They sacrifice and eat anyone who reaches old age, but it is unusual for anyone to do so, because they kill everyone who falls ill before reaching old age.

  There is another Indian tribe, however, with different habits: they do not kill any living thing or grow crops, nor is it their practice to have houses. They eat vegetables, and there is a seed … which they collect, cook… and eat. If any of them falls ill, he goes and lies down in some remote spot, and no one cares whether he is dead or ill.

  All the Indian tribes I have described have sexual intercourse in public, as herd animals do. Also, they are almost as black in colour as Ethiopians. The semen they ejaculate into their women is as black as their skin, not white like that of other men; the same goes for the semen Ethiopians ejaculate too.

  Later I traveled to Madras and Bangalore, to Bombay and Chandigarh. In time I grew convinced of the depressing hopelessness of what I had undertaken, of the impossibility of knowing and understanding the country in which I found myself. India was so immense. How can one describe something that is—and so it seemed to me—without boundaries or end?

  I received a return ticket from Delhi to Warsaw via Kabul and Moscow. I landed in Kabul just as the sun was setting. An intensely pink, almost violet sky cast its last light onto the dark navy-blue mountains surrounding the valley. The day was dying, sinking into a total and profound silence—it was the hush of a landscape, a region, a world that could be disturbed neither by the bell on a donkey’s neck nor by the fine patter of a flock of sheep passing by the airport barracks.

  The police detained me because I had no visa. But they could not send me back because the plane on which I’d arrived had already flown off and there was no other aircraft on the runway. They conferred among themselves before driving off to town. Two of us remained, the airport guard and I. He was an enormous, broad-shouldered fellow with an anthracite beard, gentle eyes, and an uncertain, shy smile. He wore a long military coat and carried a Mauser rifle from army surplus.

  Night descended suddenly and at once it grew cold. I was trembling; I had flown here straight from the tropics and had only a shirt on my back. The guard brought some wood, kindling, and dry grasses and started a fire on a slab of concrete. He gave me his coat and wrapped himself up to the eyes in a dark camel-hair blanket. We sat facing one another without uttering a word. Nothing was happening around us. Some crickets awoke in the distance and later, farther still, a car engine growled.

  In the morning the policemen returned with an elderly man, a merchant who bought cotton in Kabul for the factories in Łódz. Mr. Bielas promised to see about a visa; he’d been here for some time already and had connections. Indeed, he not only secured a visa, he also invited me to his villa, pleased to have some company for a while.

  Kabul is dust upon dust. Winds blow through the valley where the city lies, carrying clouds of sand from the nearby deserts. A pale brown, grayish particulate matter hangs in the air, coating everything, pushing its way in everywhere, settling only when the winds die down. And then the air grows transparent, crystal clear.

  Every evening the streets look as if a spontaneous, improvised mystery play were being staged on them. The all-pervasive darkness is pierced only by oil lamps and torches burning on the street stalls, whose feeble and wavering flames illuminate the cheap and meager goods laid out by the vendors directly on the ground, on patches of road, on the thresholds of houses. Between these rows of lights people pass silently—hunched, covered figures whipped on by the cold and the wind.

  When the plane from Moscow started to descend over Warsaw, my neighbor trembled, squeezed the arms of his chair with both hands, and closed his eyes. He had a gray, ravaged face, covered in wrinkles. A musty, cheap suit hung loosely on his thin, bony frame. I looked at him furtively, out of the corner of my eye. Tears were flowing down his cheeks. And a moment later I heard a suppressed but nevertheless distinct sob.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t believe that I would return.”

  It was December 1956. People were still coming out of the gulags.

  RABI SINGS THE UPANISHADS

  India was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. Yes, the world teaches humility. I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how ill read I was. I realized then what now seems obvious: a culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand; one has to prepare oneself thoroughly and at length for such an encounter.

  My initial reaction to this lesson, and to the implied necessity of an enormous amount of work on my part, was to run back home, to return to places I knew, to my own language, to the world of already familiar signs and symbols. I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormity and diversity, its poverty and riches, its mystery and incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again I was glad to travel only around Poland, write about its people, talk to them, listen to what they had to say. We understood each other instantly, were united by common experience.

  But of course I remembered India. The more bitter the cold of the Polish winter, the more readily I thought of hot Kerala; the quicker darkness fell, the more vividly resurfaced images of Kashmir’s dazzling sunrises. The world was no longer uniformly cold and snowy, but had multiplied, become variegated: it was simultaneously cold and hot, snowy white while also green and blooming.

>   When I had free time (slivers only, as there was much work at the paper) and some spare change (unfortunately, an even rarer commodity), I searched for books about India. But my expeditions to ordinary bookstores and antiquarian dealers ended fruitlessly most often. In one used-book shop I found Outlines of Indian Philosophy, by Paul Deussen, published in 1907. Professor Deussen, a great German specialist on India and friend of Nietzsche’s, thus explained the essence of Hindu philosophy: “This world is mâyâ, is illusion … All is illusive, with one exception, with the exception of my own Self, of my Atman … [man] feels himself everything,—so he will not desire anything, for he has whatever can be had;—he feels himself everything,—so he will not injure anything, for nobody injures himself.”

  Deussen reproaches Europeans. “European idleness,” he complains, “tries to escape the study of Indian philosphy”—though perhaps “despair” is the more accurate motive since, in the course of four thousand years of uninterrupted development, this philosophy has evolved into a system so immense and immeasurable as to intimidate and paralyze all but the hardened daredevil and enthusiast. Furthermore, in Hinduism the sphere of the unfathomable is boundless, and the rich variety of what lies within it is characterized by the most bewildering, mutually contradictory, and stark contrasts. Everything here turns in the most natural way into its opposite, the boundaries between material things and mystical phenomena are fluid and fleeting, one becomes the other or, simply, eternally is the other; being is transformed into nothingness, disintegrates and metamorphoses into the cosmos, into a celestial omnipresence, into a divine way that disappears into the depths of bottomless nonbeing.

  There is an infinite number of gods, myths, and beliefs in Hinduism, hundreds of the most varied schools of thought, orientations, and tendencies, dozens of roads to salvation, paths of virtue, practices of purity, and rules of asceticism. The world of Hinduism is so great that it has space enough for everyone and everything, for mutual acceptance, tolerance, harmony, and unity. It is impossible to count all the holy books of Hinduism: one of them alone, the Mahabharata, numbers some 220,000 sixteen-syllable verses, which is eight times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined!

  One day at an antiquarian bookshop I found a dog-eared, disintegrating work by Yogi Ramacharaka, published in 1905 and entitled The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath: A Complete Manual of the Oriental Breathing Philosophy of Physical, Mental, Psychic and Spiritual Development. Breathing, explains the author, is the most important activity performed by man, because through it we communicate with the world. If we stop breathing, we stop living. Therefore the quality of our breathing determines the quality of our life, and whether we are healthy, strong, and wise. Unfortunately, says Ramacharaka, most people, especially in the West, breathe poorly, and that is why there is so much disease, disability, sickliness, and depression.

  I was especially interested in the exercises for developing the creative powers, because of my own great difficulties with this objective. “Lying flat on the floor or bed,” the yogi recommended, “completely relaxed, with hands resting lightly over the Solar Plexus (over the pit of the stomach, where the ribs begin to separate), breathe rhythmically. After the rhythm is fully established will that each inhalation will draw in an increased supply of prana or vital energy from the Universal supply, which will be taken up by the nervous system and stored in the Solar Plexus. At each exhalation will that the prana or vital energy is being distributed all over the body….”

  I had barely finished reading The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath when Glimpses of Bengal by Rabindranath Tagore, published in 1923, fell into my hands. Tagore was a writer, a poet, a composer, and a painter. He was compared to Goethe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. When he was a child, little Rabi—as he was called at home—the descendant of a princely family of Bengali Brahmans, distinguished himself, he writes, by his obedience toward his parents, his good grades in school, and his exemplary piety. He recalls that in the morning, while it was still dark, his father woke him to memorize Sanskrit declensions. After a while, he continues, dawn would break, and his father, having said his prayers, would help him finish the morning milk. Finally, with Rabi by his side, his father would turn once more to God and sing the Upanishads.

  I tried to imagine this scene: it is dawning, and the father and small, sleepy Rabi stand facing the rising sun and singing the Upanishads.

  The Upanishads are philosophical songs dating back three thousand years, but still vibrant, still present in India’s spiritual life. When I realized this, and thought about the small boy greeting the morning star with stanzas from the Upanishads, I doubted whether I could ever comprehend a country in which children start the day singing verses of philosophy.

  Rabi Tagore was a child of Calcutta, born in that monstrously huge city in which the following thing happened to me. I was sitting in a hotel room reading Herodotus when through the window I heard the wailing of sirens. I ran outside. Ambulances were screeching by, people were running into doorways to shelter, a group of policemen burst out from around a corner, thrashing the fleeing pedestrians with long sticks. One could smell the odor of gas and of something burning. I tried to find out what was going on. A man sprinting by with a stone in his hand yelled, “Language war!” and rushed on. Language war! I did not know the details, but had been made aware earlier that linguistic conflicts could assume violent and bloody forms in this country: demonstrations, street clashes, murders, even acts of self-immolation.

  Only in India did I realize that my unfamiliarity with English was meaningless—insofar as only the elite spoke it here. Less than 2 percent of the population! The rest spoke one of the dozens of other languages. In this sense, my not knowing English helped me feel closer, more akin to the ordinary folk in the cities or the peasants in the villages I passed. We were in the same boat—I and half a billion of India’s inhabitants!

  While this thought gave me comfort, it also troubled me—why, I wondered, am I embarrassed that I don’t know English but not that I don’t know Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, or any of the many other languages spoken in this country? The argument of accessibility was irrelevant: the study of English was at the time as rare a thing as that of Hindi or Bengali. So was this Eurocentrism on my part? Did I believe a European language to be more important than those languages of this country in which I was then a guest? Deeming English superior was an offense to the dignity of Hindus, for whom the relationship to their native languages was a delicate and important matter. They were prepared to give up their lives in the defense of their language, to burn on a pyre. This fervor and resolve stemmed from the fact that identity here is determined by the language one speaks. A Bengali, for example, is someone whose mother tongue is Bengali. Language is one’s identity card, one’s face and soul, even. Which is why conflicts about something else entirely—about social and religious issues, for instance—can assume the form of language wars.

  Searching for books on India, I would ask if there was anything about Herodotus. Herodotus had started to interest me—I took a downright fancy to him, in fact. I was grateful for his being by my side in India during moments of uncertainty and confusion, for helping me with his book. Judging by how he wrote, he seemed a man kindly disposed toward others and curious about the world. Someone who always had many questions and was ready to wander thousands of kilometers to find an answer to any one of them.

  When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm ba
y shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

  Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

  The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.