Travels with Herodotus (7 page)

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?”

Chuang Tzu is beset by doubts and uncertainties: “Speech is not only the exhaling of air. Speech is meant to convey something, but what that is has not been fully determined. Is there really something like speech, or is there nothing at all like it? Can one see it as distinct from the warbling of birds, or not?”

I wanted to ask Comrade Li how a Chinese would interpret these fragments, but I was afraid that they might sound too provocative in the face of the ongoing campaign to study the sayings of Mao. So I picked something innocent, about a butterfly: “Once Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and flittering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. Between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly there must be
some
distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”

I asked Comrade Li to explain the meaning of this story to me. He listened, smiled, and carefully noted it down. He said he would have to consult someone and then would give me the answer.

He never did.

•   •   •

I finished volume one of Mao Tse-tung and started on volume two. It is the end of the 1930s, the Japanese army already occupies a large portion of China and is advancing further into the interior. The two adversaries, Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, enter into a tactical alliance in order to make a stand against the Japanese invader. The war drags on, the occupier is savage, and the country devastated. In Mao’s opinion, the best tactic in the struggle against a prevailing enemy is an adroit elasticity and ceaseless tormenting of the opponent. He speaks and writes about this constantly.

I was reading a lecture about the lengthy war with Japan which Mao delivered in the spring of 1938 in Yunnan when Comrade Li, having finished a telephone conversation in his room, put down the receiver and came in to announce that tomorrow we would be going to the Great Wall. The Great Wall! People come from the ends of the earth to see it. It is one of the wonders of the world, a unique, almost mythical, and in some sense unfathomable creation. The Chinese constructed it, with interruptions, over the course of two thousand years. They commenced when the Buddha and Herodotus were alive and were still building it when Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Johann Sebastian Bach were at their labors in Europe.

The wall is variously estimated as being from three to ten thousand kilometers long. Variously, because there is no single Great Wall—there are several of them. And they were built at different times, in different places, and from different materials. They had one thing in common, however: the originating impulse. As soon as one dynasty came to power, it immediately set about erecting the Great Wall. The idea of a wall possessed China’s rulers. If they ceased construction for a while, it was only because of a lack of means—they were right back at it the instant their finances improved.

The Chinese built the Great Wall to defend against invasions by the restless and expansionist nomadic tribes of Mongolia. These tribes, in great armies, hordes, legions, emerged from the Mongolian steppes, from the Altai mountains and the Gobi desert, and attacked the Chinese, constantly menacing their nation, sowing terror with the threat of slaughter and enslavement.

But the Great Wall was only a metaphor—a symbol and a sign, the coat of arms and the escutcheon of what had been a nation of walls for millennia. The Great Wall demarcated the empire’s northern borders; but walls were also erected between warring principalities, between regions and even neighborhoods. The structures defended cities and villages, passes and bridges. They guarded palaces, government buildings, temples, and markets. Barracks, police stations, and prisons. Walls encircled private homes, separated neighbor from neighbor, family from family. If one assumes that the Chinese built walls uninterruptedly for hundreds, even thousands of years, and if one factors in the population—enormous throughout the national history—their dedication and devotion, their exemplary discipline and antlike purposefulness, then one reckons with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of hours spent building walls, hours which in this poor country could have been spent learning to read, acquiring a profession, cultivating new fields, and breeding robust cattle.

That is how the world’s energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall—and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometers through uninhabited mountains and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world—is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people in this part of the planet to communicate, to confer and jointly determine
how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect.

In these parts, the idea of coming together was but a chimera: The very first reflex in the face of potential trouble was to build a wall. To shut oneself in, fence oneself off. Because whatever comes from without, from over there, can only be a threat, an omen of misfortune, a harbinger of evil—perhaps the most genuine evil there is.