Travels with Herodotus (2 page)

My route sometimes took me to villages along the border. But this happened infrequently. For the closer one got to a border, the emptier grew the land and the fewer people one encountered. This emptiness increased the mystery of these regions. I was struck, too, by how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me. I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side? It must certainly be—different. But what does “different” mean? What does it look like? What does it resemble? Maybe it resembles nothing that I know, and thus is inconceivable, unimaginable? And so my greatest desire, which gave me no peace, which tormented and tantalized me, was actually quite modest: I wanted one thing only—the moment, the act, the simple fact of
crossing the border
. To cross it and come right back—that, I thought, would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my quite inexplicable yet acute psychological hunger.

But how to do this? None of my friends from school or university had ever been abroad. Anyone with a contact in another country generally preferred not to advertise it. I was even cross with myself for this bizarre yen; still, it didn’t abate for a moment.

One day I encountered my editor in chief in the hallway. Irena Tarłowska was a strapping, handsome woman with thick blond hair parted to one side. She said something about my recent stories, and then asked me about my plans for the near future. I named various villages to which I would be going, the issues that awaited me there, and then summoned my courage and said: “One day, I would very much like to go abroad.”

“Abroad?” she said, surprised and slightly frightened, because in those days going abroad was no ordinary matter. “Where? What for?” she asked.

“I was thinking about Czechoslovakia,” I answered. I wouldn’t have dared to say something like Paris or London, and frankly they didn’t really interest me; I couldn’t even imagine them. This was only about
crossing the border
—somewhere. It made no difference which one, because what was important was not the destination, the goal, the end, but the almost mystical and transcendent act.
Crossing the border
.

A year passed following that conversation. The telephone rang in our newsroom. The editor in chief was summoning me to her office. “You know,” she said, as I stood before her desk, “we are sending you. You’ll go to India.”

My first reaction was astonishment. And right after that, panic: I knew nothing about India. I feverishly searched my thoughts for some associations, images, names. Nothing. Zero. (The idea of an Indian trip originated in the fact that several months earlier Jawaharlal Nehru had visited Poland, the first premier of a non-Soviet-bloc country to do so. The first contacts were being established. My stories were to bring that distant land closer.)

At the end of our conversation, during which I learned that I would indeed be going forth into the world, Tarłowska reached into a cabinet, took out a book, and handing it to me said: “Here, a present, for the road.” It was a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus,
THE HISTORIES
.

It was an old twin-engine DC
-3
, well-worn from wartime forays along the front lines, its wings blackened by exhaust fumes and
patches on its fuselage. But it flew, and headed, with only a few passengers, almost empty, to Rome. I sat by the window, excitedly looking out to see the world from a bird’s-eye view for the first time. Until then I hadn’t even been to the mountains. Beneath us slowly passed multicolored chessboards, motley patchwork quilts, gray-green tapestries, as if stretched out on the ground to dry in the sun. But dusk came quickly, then darkness.

“It’s evening,” my neighbor said in Polish, but with a foreign accent. He was an Italian journalist returning home, and I remember only that his name was Mario. When I told him where I was going and why, that this was my first trip abroad and that I really knew nothing, he laughed and said something to the effect of “Don’t worry!” and promised to help. I was secretly overjoyed and felt slightly more confident. I needed that, because I was flying west and had been taught to fear the West like fire.

We flew in darkness; even inside the cabin the lights were barely shining. Suddenly, the tension which afflicts all parts of the plane when the engines are at full throttle started to lessen, the sound of the engines grew quieter and less urgent—we were approaching the end of our journey. Mario grabbed me by the arm and pointed out the window: “Look!”

I was dumbstruck.

Below me, the entire length and breadth of the blackness through which we were flying was now filled with light. It was an intense light, blinding, quivering, flickering. One had the impression of a liquid substance, like molten lava, glimmering down below, with a sparkling surface that pulsated with brightness, rising and falling, expanding and contracting. The entire luminous apparition was something alive, full of movement, vibration, energy.

It was the first time in my life I was seeing an illuminated city. What few cities and towns I had known until then were depressingly dark. Shop windows never shone in them, there were no colorful advertisements, the street lamps had weak lightbulbs. And who needed lights anyway? In the evenings the streets were deserted: one encountered few cars.

As we descended, this landscape of lights drew nearer and assumed enormous proportions. Finally the plane thumped against the tarmac, crunched and creaked. We had arrived. The Rome airport—a great, glassed-in lump full of people. We drove into the city on a warm evening through busy, crowded streets. Bustle, traffic, lights, and sounds—it worked like a narcotic. I became disoriented at moments—where was I? I must have looked like a creature of the forest: stunned, a little fearful, wide-eyed, trying to take in, understand, distinguish things.

In the morning I overheard a conversation in the adjoining room and recognized Mario’s voice. I would find out later that it was a discussion about how to dress me, seeing as how I had arrived sporting fashions à la Warsaw Pact 1956. I had a suit of Cheviot wool in sharp, gray-blue stripes—a double-breasted jacket with protruding, angular shoulders and overly long, wide trousers with large cuffs. I had a pale-yellow nylon shirt with a green plaid tie. Finally, the shoes—massive loafers with thick, stiff soles.

The confrontation between East and West took place not only in the military realm but in all other spheres of life as well. If the West dressed lightly, then the East, according to the law of opposites, dressed heavily; if the West wore closely fitting clothes, then the East did the reverse—everything had to stick out by a mile. One did not have to carry one’s passport around:—one could see at a distance who was from which side of the Iron Curtain.

We started making rounds of the shops, accompanied by Mario’s wife. For me, these were expeditions of discovery. Three things dazzled me the most. First, that the stores were full of merchandise, were actually brimming with it, the goods weighing down shelves and counters, spilling out in towering, colorful streams onto sidewalks, streets, and squares. Second, that the salesladies did not sit, but stood, looking at the entrance doors. It was strange that they stood in silence, rather than sitting and talking to one another. Women, after all, have so many subjects in common. Troubles with their husbands, problems with the children. What to wear, one’s health, whether something burned on the stove yesterday. And here I had the impression that they did not know each other at all and had no desire to converse. The third shock was that the salesclerks answered the questions posed to them. They responded in complete sentences and then at the end added
“Grazie!
” Mario’s wife would ask about something and they would listen to her with sympathy and attention, so focused and inclined forward that they looked as if they were about to start in a race. And then one heard that oft-repeated, sacramental
grazie!

In the evening I summoned the courage to go out alone. I must have been living somewhere in the center, because Stazione Termini was nearby, and from there I walked along Via Cavour all the way to Piazza Venezia, and then through little streets and alleys back to Stazione Termini. I did not notice the architecture, the statues, the monuments; I was fascinated only by the cafés and bars. There were tables everywhere on the sidewalks, and people sat at them, drinking and talking, or just simply looking at the street and the passersby. Behind tall, narrow counters the barmen poured drinks, mixed cocktails, brewed coffee. Waiters bustled about, delivering glasses and cups with a magician’s legerdemain, the likes of which I had seen only once before, in a Soviet circus,
when the performer charmed a wooden plate, a glass goblet, and a screeching rooster out of thin air.

One day I spotted an empty table, sat down, and ordered a coffee. After a while I became conscious that people were looking at me. I had on a new suit, an Italian shirt white as snow, and a most fashionable polka-dotted tie, but there must still have been something in my appearance and gestures, in my way of sitting and moving, that gave me away—betrayed where I came from, from how different a world. I sensed that they took me for an alien, and although I should have been happy, sitting there beneath the miraculous skies of Rome, I began to feel unpleasant and uncomfortable. I had changed my suit, but I apparently could not conceal whatever lay beneath it that had shaped and marked me as a foreign particle.

A
stewardess dressed in a light, pastel-colored sari was greeting passengers in the doors of the four-engine Air India International colossus. The subdued hues of her outfit suggested that a peaceful, pleasant flight awaited us. Her hands were arranged as if in prayer; the anjali, I would soon learn, was a Hindu gesture of greeting. In the cabin was a strong and unfamiliar aroma—surely, I thought, the scent of some eastern incense, Hindu herbs, fruits, and resins.

We flew by night, only a small green light twinkling at the tip of the wing visible through the window. This was still before the population explosion, when air travel was comfortable, with planes often carrying but a few passengers. So it was this time. Passengers slept, stretched out across several seats.

I felt that I wouldn’t be able to shut my eyes, so I reached into my bag and took out the book that Tarłowska had given me.
The Histories
of Herodotus is a lengthy tome of several hundred pages. I found such thick books alluring, and I began with the introduction, in which the translator, Seweryn Hammer, describes Herodotus’s life and introduces us to the meaning of his work. Herodotus, writes Hammer, was born in 485
B.C.E
. in Halicarnassus, a port city in Asia Minor. Around 450 he moved to Athens, and from there, several years later, to the Greek colony of Thurii, in
southern Italy. He died around 425
B.C.E
. He traveled extensively during his life. And he left us a book—one can assume it is the only one he wrote.

Hammer tried to bring to life a man who lived two and a half thousand years ago, about whom we know little, and whose appearance is difficult to imagine. Even the one thing he left behind was, in its original version, accessible to only a handful of specialists who, in addition to possessing a knowledge of ancient Greek, had to know how to decipher a very specific kind of notation: the text looked like one unending, undifferentiated word stretching across dozens of rolls of papyrus. “Individual words or sentences were not demarcated,” wrote Hammer, “just as chapters and books were unknown; the text was as densely woven as a tapestry.” Herodotus concealed himself behind this verbal fabric as behind a screen, which we are even less well equipped to penetrate than his contemporaries were.

The night ended and day came. Looking through the little window, I was able to gaze for the first time on an enormous expanse of our planet. The sight brought thoughts of infinity to mind. The world I had known until then was perhaps five hundred kilometers in length and four hundred in width. And here we were, flying seemingly forever, while the earth, very far below us, kept changing colors—for a while it was burnt, brown; then green; and then, for a long while, dark blue.

It was late evening when we landed in New Delhi. I was instantly awash in heat and humidity, and stood dripping with sweat. The people with whom I had been flying suddenly vanished, swept away by the colorful, animated crowd of friends and relatives that had been waiting for them.

I was left alone and had no idea what to do. The airport building
was small, dark, and deserted, a far cry from Rome’s. It stood all by itself cloaked in night, and I didn’t know what lay beyond, in the depths of the darkness. After a while an old man in a white, loose knee-length garment appeared. He had a gray beard and an orange turban. He said something I did not understand, although I assume he was asking why I was standing there alone, in the middle of the empty airport. I had no idea what to answer and looked about me, pondering—what next? I was quite unprepared for this journey. I had neither names nor addresses in my notebook. My English was poor. I was not entirely to blame, though: my sole desire had been to achieve the unachievable—
to cross the border
. I wanted nothing more. But in expressing that wish I’d started the chain of events that had now deposited me all the way here, on the far side of the world.

The old man thought for a while, then motioned with his hand for me to follow him. To one side of the entrance stood a scratched-up, dilapidated bus. We got in, the old man started the motor, and we set off. We had covered only several hundred meters when the driver slowed down and began honking violently. Before us, where the road should have been, I saw a broad, white river vanishing somewhere in the thick blackness of the sultry, sweltering night. The river was of people sleeping out in the open, some on wooden plank beds, others on mats, on blankets, but most directly on the bare asphalt and the sandy banks stretching on each side of it.