Travels with Herodotus Read online

  What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

  And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

  And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

  Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

  What did his father do? Halicarnassus was a small port town lying on the trade route between Asia, the Near East, and Greece proper. Phoenician merchant ships from Sicily and Italy stopped here, as did Greek ships from Piraeus and Argos, and Egyptian ones from Libya and the Nile delta. Might Herodotus’s father have been a merchant himself? Perhaps it was he who kindled in his son a curiosity about the world. Did he disappear from home for weeks and months at a time, leaving his wife, questioned by her child, to answer that “Father is in …”? And here one can imagine a list of place-names from which he drew one lesson—that somewhere, far away, there exists an omnipotent world which could take his father away from him forever, but also (thank the gods!) can bring him back again. Is that how the temptation to get to know this world was born? The temptation and the resolve?

  From the few facts that have reached us, we know that little Herodotus had an uncle whose last name was Panyassis, and that he was the author of various poems and epics. Did this uncle perhaps take him on walks, instruct him in the beauties of poetry, the arcana of rhetoric, the art of storytelling? Because The Histories is the product of natural talent but also an example of writerly craft, of technical mastery.

  While still a young man—and it seems for the first and only time in his life—Herodotus gets embroiled in politics, thanks to his father and uncle, who take part in the revolt against the tyrant of Halicarnassus, Lygdamis. The tyrant succeeds in suppressing the rebellion. The mutineers take refuge on Samos, a mountainous island two days of rowing to the northwest. Herodotus spends years here, and perhaps it is from here that he sets forth around the world. If he reappears now and then in Halicarnassus, it is only briefly. What would he do that for? To see his mother? We do not know. One can probably assume that he did not return here again.

  It is the middle of the fifth century B.C.E.; Herodotus arrives in Athens. The ship reaches the Athenian port of Piraeus; it is eight kilometers from here to the Acropolis, a distance traversed on horseback or, as was often the case, on foot. Athens is then a world metropolis, the most important city on the planet. Herodotus is provincial, a non-Athenian, and thus something of a foreigner, and while such individuals are treated better than slaves, they are not treated as well as native Athenians. Athenian society was highly sensitive to race, with a strongly developed sense of superiority, exclusivity, arrogance even.

  But it appears that Herodotus adapts quickly to his new city. The thirty-something-year-old man is open, friendly, a hail-fellow-well-met. He gives lectures, appears for meetings, author evenings—he probably makes his living that way. He establishes important contacts—with Socrates, Sophocles, Pericles. This isn’t that difficult. Athens, with a population of one hundred thousand, isn’t large in those days, and is tightly, even chaotically built up. Two places only stand out and distinguish themselves: the center of religious cults, the Acropolis, and the center of meetings, events, commerce, politics, and social life—the Agora. People gather here from the early morning. The square of the Agora is always crowded, full of life. We would surely find Herodotus here as well. But he does not stay in the city for long. At approximately the time of his arrival, Athenian authorities pass a draconian law, according to which only those both of whose parents were born in Attica, the region immediately surrounding Athens, are entitled to political rights. Herodotus is unable to obtain Athenian citizenship. He sets off once again, and finally settles permanently in southern Italy, in the Greek colony of Thurii.

  Opinion differs as to what happens later. Some believe that he did not budge from there again. Others claim that he later visited Greece once more, that he was sighted in Athens. Even Macedonia is mentioned. But in point of fact nothing is certain. He dies at age sixty, perhaps—but where? Under what circumstances? Did he spend his last years in Thurii, sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree and writing his book? Or maybe he could no longer see well enough and dictated it to a scribe? Did he have notes or was he able to rely on memory alone? People in those days had great powers of recall. He could well have remembered the stories of Croesus and Babylon, of Darius and the Scythians, of Persians, Thermopylae, and Salamis. And so many of the other tales that constitute The Histories.

  Or perhaps Herodotus dies on board a ship sailing somewhere across the Mediterranean? Or perhaps he is walking along a road and sits down on a stone to rest, never to get up again? Herodotus vanishes, leaves us twenty-five centuries ago in a year that is impossible to pinpoint precisely and in a place we do not know.

  • • •

  The newspaper office.

  Field trips.

  Assemblies. Meetings. Conversations.

  In my free moments I sit amidst dictionaries (a proper English one has finally been published) and various books about India (the imposing work of Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, has just come out, the great autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, and the beautiful Panchatantra, or the Wisdom of India, Five Books. After Stalin’s death, censorship had eased and books that for years had been kept under lock and key started to appear).

  With each new title I read, I felt as if I were undertaking a new journey to India, recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings, of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip—in an iconographic journey such as this, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance.

  So here I am, becoming increasingly engrossed in India’s extraor-dinariness and riches, thinking that with time this country will become my thematic homeland, when one day in the fall of 1957 our omniscient secretary, Krysia Korta, called me out of my office at the newspaper and, looking mysterious, agitated, whispered to me:

  “You’re going to China.”

  CHAIRMAN MAO’S

  ONE HUNDRED FLOWERS

  Autumn 1957

  I reached China on foot. Well, I flew to Hong Kong via Amsterdam and Tokyo. In Hong Kong, a local train took me to a small station in an open field—where, I had been told, I would be able to cross into China. In reality, however, when I stepped down onto the platform, it was only to be approached by a conductor and a policeman, who gestured toward a bridge on the far horizon. “China!” the policeman said.

  He was a Chinese man in a British police uniform. He walked with me a ways along the asphalt road, then wished me a good journey and turne
d back for the station. I continued on alone, carrying my suitcase in one hand and a bag full of books in the other. The sun beat down mercilessly, the air was hot and heavy, flies buzzed aggressively.

  The bridge was short, with a diagonal metal grating, and below it flowed a half dried-up river. Further on stood a tall gate covered in flowers, with signs in Chinese and on top a coat of arms—a red shield and five yellow stars, four small and one large. Guards stood near the gate. They carefully inspected my passport, wrote the relevant data down in a big ledger, and told me to keep walking—toward a train which was visible perhaps half a kilometer away. I walked on in the heat, with great effort, perspiring, amidst swarms of flies.

  The train was empty. The cars resembled those on the train from Hong Kong—seats arranged in rows, no separate compartments. Finally, we were on our way. The landscape we traversed was sunny and green, the air coming in through the windows felt warm and humid and smelled of the tropics. It all reminded me of India, the India from the area around Madras and Pondicherry. Through these subcontinental analogies, I began to feel at home. I was among landscapes I knew and liked. The train stopped frequently and more and more people got on at the little stations. They were dressed alike, the men in dark blue denim jackets buttoned up to their chins, the women in flowery dresses identically cut. They sat straight-backed, silent, facing forward.

  At one of the stations, when the train was already full, three people in uniforms of bright indigo came on board—a young woman and her two male helpers. The girl delivered a rather long speech in a decisive stentorian voice, after which one of the men handed everyone a cup and the second one poured out green tea from a metal pot. The tea was hot; the passengers blew on it to cool it and drank in small gulps, slurping loudly. Other than that, the silence continued. No one spoke so much as a word. I tried reading the passengers’ faces, but they were frozen, seemingly without expression. Plus, I didn’t want to scrutinize them too intently, for fear that this would be deemed rude or perhaps even arouse suspicion. Certainly no one was looking at me, although among all these work jackets and flowery percales I must have cut quite a queer figure in my elegant Italian suit purchased a year earlier in Rome.

  I reached Peking after a three-day journey. It was cold and a chill dry wind was blowing, covering the city and its inhabitants in clouds of gray dust. Two journalists from the youth newspaper Chungkuo were waiting for me at the barely illuminated station. We shook hands, and one of them, standing stiffly, almost at attention, declaimed:

  “We are pleased about your arrival because it is proof that the politics of One Hundred Flowers, announced by Chairman Mao, is bearing fruit. Chairman Mao recommends that we collaborate with others and share our experiences, and that is precisely what our respective editorial offices are doing in exchanging their permanent correspondents. We greet you as the permanent correspondent of Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth) in Peking, and in exchange our own permanent correspondent will, at the appropriate time, travel to Warsaw.”

  I listened, trembling from the cold, for I had neither a jacket nor a coat, and looked about in vain for someplace warm. Finally we piled into a Pobieda and drove to the hotel. We were met there by a man whom the reporters from Chungkuo introduced to me as Comrade Li. He was to be my permanent translator, they explained. We all spoke Russian to one another, which from now on would be my language in China.

  Here is how I had imagined it: I would get a room in one of the little houses hidden behind the clay or sand walls that stretched without end along Peking’s streets. There would be a table in the room, two chairs, a bed, an armoire, a bookshelf, a typewriter, and a telephone. I would visit the editorial offices of Chungkuo, get the news, read, go out into the field, gather information, write and send articles, and all the while, of course, study Chinese. I would visit museums, libraries, and architectural monuments, meet professors and writers, in general encounter countless interesting people in villages and in cities, in shops and in schools; go to the university, to the marketplace, and to the factory; to Buddhist temples and to Party committees—and to dozens of other places worth knowing and investigating. China is an immense country, I told myself, joyfully thinking that besides my work as a correspondent and reporter I would have the opportunity to gather an infinite number of impressions and experiences, one day to depart from here enriched by new insights, discoveries, knowledge.

  Full of these high hopes, I followed Comrade Li upstairs to my room, while he entered one directly across the hall from mine. I went to close my door and at that moment noticed that it had neither doorknob nor lock, and, moreover, that its hinges were so positioned as to force the door to remain permanently open onto the hallway. I noted, too, that the door to Comrade Li’s room was similarly ajar and allowing him always to keep an eye on me.

  I pretended not to notice anything and started to unpack my books. I took out Herodotus, near the top in my bag, then three volumes of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, The True Classic of Southern Florescence by Chuang Tzu, and several titles I had purchased in Hong Kong: What’s Wrong with China, by Rodney Gilbert; A History of Modern China, by K. S. Latourette; A Short History of Confucian Philosophy, by Liu Wu-chi; The Revolt of Asia; The Mind of East Asia, by Lily Abegg; as well as textbooks and dictionaries of the Chinese language, which I decided to start learning at once.

  The following morning Comrade Li took me to Chungkuo’s editorial offices. For the first time I saw Peking by day. In every direction stretched a sea of low houses hidden behind walls. Above the walls protruded the tops of dark-gray roofs, whose tips curled upward like wings. From a distance they resembled a gigantic flock of motionless black birds awaiting the signal to take flight.

  I was given a warm welcome at the paper. The editor in chief, a tall, thin young man, said that he was happy at my arrival, for in this way we jointly fulfilled Chairman Mao’s prescription—let a hundred flowers bloom!

  I answered that I, too, was very glad to be here, that I was aware of the tasks awaiting me, and that I wished to add that in my free time I intended to study the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, which I had brought with me in a three-volume edition.

  This was greeted with great satisfaction and approval. The entire conversation, in fact, throughout which we also sipped green tea, came down to such exchanges of pleasantries, as well as to praising Chairman Mao and his politics of One Hundred Flowers.

  After a while, my hosts suddenly fell silent, as if following an order. Comrade Li rose and looked at me—I sensed that the visit was at an end. Everyone said his farewells with great warmth, smiling and with wide open arms.

  The entire visit was arranged and conducted in such a fashion as to accomplish nothing in its course—not one single concrete subject was touched upon, let alone discussed. They had asked me nothing and had given me no opportunity to inquire how my sojourn and my work were to be structured.

  But, I reasoned, perhaps such are local customs. Perhaps it is considered impolite to get to the point quickly? I had certainly read, more than once, that in the East the rhythm of life is slower than what we westerners are used to, that there is a time for everything, that one must be calm and patient, one must learn to wait, grow internally calm and tranquil, that the Tao values not motion but stillness, not activity but idleness, and that all haste, passion, and frenzy arouse distaste here and are interpreted as symptoms of bad upbringing and a lack of refinement.

  I was also well aware that I was but a mote of dust in the face of the vastness that is China and that I, as well as my work, meant nothing when compared to the great tasks facing everyone here, including the staff of Chungkuo, and that I simply had to wait until the time was right for arranging my affairs. Meantime, I had a hotel room, food, and Comrade Li, who did not leave me alone for even a moment; when I was in my room, he sat by the door of his, observing me all the while.

  I sat and read the works of Mao Tse-tung. This effort coincided nicely with the decree of the moment: huge banners all
over town proclaimed DILIGENTLY STUDY THE IMMORTAL THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN MAO! I was reading a lecture delivered by Mao in December of 1935, during a meeting of the Party’s hard core in Wayaopao, in which he discussed the effects of the Long March, “the first of its kind in the annals of history,” as he called it. “For twelve months we were under daily reconnaissance and bombing from the skies by scores of planes, while on land we were encircled and pursued, obstructed and intercepted by a huge force of several hundred thousand men, and we encountered untold difficulties and dangers on the way; yet by using our two legs we swept across a distance of more than twenty thousand li through the length and breadth of eleven provinces. Let us ask, has history ever known a long march to equal ours? No, never.” Thanks to this march, in which Mao’s army “cross[ed] perpetually snow-capped mountains and trackless grasslands,” it escaped the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and was later able to mount a counteroffensive.

  Sometimes, tired of reading Mao, I would pick up Chuang Tzu’s book. Chuang Tzu, a fervent Taoist, scorned all worldliness and held up Hui Shi, a great Taoist sage, as an example. “When Jao, a legendary ruler of China, proposed that he should assume power, he washed his ears, which had been defiled by such a notion, and took refuge on the desolate mountain of K’i-Shan.” For Chuang Tzu, as for the biblical Kohelet, the external world was nothing, mere vanity: “In conflict with things or in harmony with them, they pursue their course to the end, with the speed of a galloping horse which cannot be stopped;—is it not sad? To be constantly toiling all one’s lifetime, without seeing the fruit of one’s labor, and to be weary and worn out with his labor, without knowing where he is going to: is it not a deplorable case? Men may say, ‘But it is not death’; yet of what advantage is this? When the body is decomposed, the mind will be the same along with it: must not the case be pronounced very deplorable?”