Travels with Herodotus (20 page)

Scene 9: News reaches Histiaeus that Miletus, vanguard of the Ionian uprising, has been conquered by the Persians.
After their naval victory over the Ionians, the Persians blockaded Miletus by land and sea. They used all kinds of stratagems, such as undermining the walls, until the city fell into their hands, acropolis and all, in the sixth year after Aristagoras’ revolt. They reduced the city to slavery
…

(For the Athenians, the defeat of Miletus was a terrible blow. When the playwright
Phrynichus composed and produced a play called
The Fall of Miletus,
the audience burst into tears
. The Athenian authorities imposed a draconian fine of a thousand drachmas on the play’s author and banned any future productions of it in their city. A play was meant to raise one’s spirits, not reopen wounds.)

At the news of Miletus’s fall, Histiaeus reacts bizarrely. He stops plundering ships and sails with the Lesbians to Chios. Does he want to be closer to Miletus? To run further away? But where? For the time being, he organizes a slaughter on Chios:
a garrison of islanders … refused to let him pass; battle was joined and a great many of the Chians died. Then, with the help of his Lesbians, he gained control of the rest of the island …

But this carnage does not solve anything. It is a gesture of despair, rage, madness. He abandons the lifeless land and sails to Thasos—an island of gold mines situated near Thrace. He lays siege to Thasos, but is not wanted there, and the island does not submit. Abandoning hope for gold, he sails for Lesbos—he had enjoyed the best reception there. But there is hunger on Lesbos now, and because he has an army to feed, he makes his way to Asia, to the country of Mysia, where he hopes to harvest some crops, find something, anything, to eat. The noose is tightening; he really has nowhere to go. He is trapped, he is at the bottom. There is no limit to man’s smallness. A small man immersing himself in smallness is only engulfed by it, until finally he perishes.

Scene 10:
A Persian, Harpagus, happened to be in that part of the country
which Histiaeus reached,
with a sizeable army under his command. He engaged Histiaeus just as he disembarked, captured him alive, and wiped out most of his troops
. But before this happened, Histiaeus, upon disembarking, tried to escape:
As he was running away from the battlefield, a Persian soldier caught up with him and was just about to stab him to death when Histiaeus spoke in Persian to him and let him know that he was Histiaeus of Miletus
.

Scene 11: Histiaeus is brought to Sardis. Here Artaphrenes and Harpagos order that he be publicly impaled. They cut off his head, have it embalmed, and send it to King Darius in Susa. (To Susa! After three months on the road, what must that head, even embalmed, have looked like!)

Scene 12: On learning about all that has happened Darius rebukes Artaphrenes and Harpagos for not sending him Histiaeus alive. He orders the scrap he received washed, appropriately dressed, and buried with honors.

He wants, if only in this way, to pay homage to the head in which, several years earlier, near the bridge over the Danube, arose the idea that saved Persia and Asia, as well as Darius’s kingdom and his life.

T
he events described by Herodotus so absorbed me while I was in the Congo that at times I experienced the dread of the approaching war between the Greeks and the Persians more vividly than I did the events of the current Congolese conflict, which I was assigned to cover. And the country of
The Heart of Darkness
was also taking its toll on me, of course, what with the frequent eruption of gunfights, the constant danger of arrest, beatings, and death, and the pervasive climate of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability. The absolute worst could happen here at any moment and in any place. There was no government, no rule of law and order. The colonial system was collapsing, Belgian administrators were fleeing to Europe, and in their place was emerging a dark, deranged power, which most frequently assumed the guise of drunken Congolese military police.

One could see clearly how dangerous freedom is in the absence of hierarchy and order—or, rather, anarchy in the absence of ethics. Under such circumstances, the forces of evil aggression—all manner of villainy, brutishness, and bestiality—instantly gain the upper hand. And so it was in the Congo, which fell under the rule of these gendarmes. An encounter with any one of them could be deadly.

Here I am walking down the street in the small town of Lisali.

It is sunny, empty, and quiet.

Suddenly, I spot two policemen approaching from the opposite direction. I freeze. But running away makes no sense—there is no place to run to, and, furthermore, it is dreadfully hot and I can barely drag one foot after the other. The gendarmes are in fatigues, with deep helmets which cover half their faces, and bristling with armaments, each carrying an automatic rifle, grenades, knife, flare pistol, truncheon, and a metal implement combining spoon and fork—a portable arsenal. Why do they need it all? I wonder. And there is more. Their imposing silhouettes are also encircled with all kinds of belts and detachable linings, to which are sewn garlands of metal circles, pins, hooks, buckles.

Dressed in shorts and shirts, perhaps they would have seemed pleasant young men, the sort who would greet you politely and pleasantly offer directions if asked. But the uniform and the weaponry altered their nature and stance, and also performed yet another function: rendering difficult, even impossible, any normal human contact. The men walking toward me were not ordinary people to be casually encountered, but dehumanized creatures, extraterrestrials. A new species.

They were drawing nearer and I was dripping with sweat, my legs leaden and getting heavier by the second. The key to the entire situation was that they knew as well as I did that to whatever sentence they might impose there was no appeal. No higher authority, no tribunal. If they wanted to beat me, they would beat me; if they wanted to kill me, they would kill me. I have only ever felt true loneliness in circumstances such as these—when I have stood alone face-to-face with absolute violent power. The world grows empty, silent, depopulated, and finally recedes.

Furthermore, it is not merely two gendarmes and a reporter who are participating in this street scene in a small Congolese
town. Also present is a huge swath of world history, which already set us against one another many centuries ago. Here between us stand generations of slave traders; the myrmidons of King Leopold, who cut off the hands and ears of the grandfathers of these policemen; the overseers of cotton and sugar plantations, whips in their hands. The memory of those torments was passed down for years in tribal stories, and the men whom I am about to encounter would have been reared on those tales, on legends ending with a promise of a day of retribution. And today is that day—both they and I know it.

What will happen? We are close already, and getting closer and closer. Finally, they stop. I too stop. And then, from under that mountain of gear and scrap iron, emerges a voice that I will never forget, its tone humble, even pleading:

“Monsieur, avez-vous une cigarette, s’il vous plaît?
”

What a sight it must have been, the zeal and the haste, the politeness, the servility even, with which I reached into my pocket for a pack of cigarettes, my last, but what does it matter, take it, my dear boys, take them all, sit and smoke the entire pack, right away, until not a puff of smoke is left!

Doctor Otto Ranke is pleased at my good fortune. These encounters often end very badly. The gendarmes have killed many people already. White and black both come to see Doctor Ranke about their injuries; the badly tortured must be carried in by others. The policemen spare no race, and massacre their own as readily as, even more frequently than, they do the Europeans. In this way they are occupiers of their own country, men who observe no moderation and no boundaries. “If they do not touch me,” says the doctor, “it’s only because they need me. When they are drunk and have no civilian handy upon whom to discharge
their rage, they fight amongst themselves, and then they are brought here, for me to sew up their heads and set their bones.” Dostoevsky, Ranke says, described the phenomenon of pointless cruelty. So it is with these gendarmes, he says; they are cruel without reason or necessity.

Doctor Ranke is an Austrian and has been living in Lisali since the end of World War II. Slight, fragile-looking, yet still lively and indefatigable approaching his eightieth year. He owes his relative good health, he says, to his taking each day in the morning, when the sun is still gentle, a walk out into the green and flowering courtyard, where seated on a stool, he has a servant wash his back with a sponge and a brush so vigorously as to produce from the doctor actual little moans of both satisfaction and pain. These moans, snorts, and the laughter of overjoyed children who have gathered around the doctor to watch the rubdown, awaken me, because the windows of my room are nearby.

The doctor has a little private hospital—a white-painted barrack standing near the villa where he lives. He did not flee with the Belgians, he says, because he is old already and has no family anywhere. Here people know him and he hopes that they will protect him. He took me in, he says, for safekeeping. As a correspondent, I have nothing to do, because there are no means of communication with Poland. Not a single newspaper is being published in this part of the country, there is no functioning radio station, no government. I am trying to get out of here—but how? The closest airport—in Stanleyville—is closed, the roads (now in the rainy season) are swamped, the ship that once plied the river Congo has long ceased to do so. I do not know what it is exactly that I am counting on. A little bit of luck, I suppose, and the goodwill of the people around me. Most of all I am hoping
that the world will change for the better, a chimerical idea to be sure, but I must believe in something. Still it does not keep me from walking around tense and nervous. I feel anger and helplessness—by turns familiar states of mind in this line of work, in which so much time is given over to fruitless waiting for a way to communicate with one’s country and with the world.

If one happens to hear that there are no gendarmes in town, one can venture an expedition into the jungle. It is all around, rearing up in every direction, screening out the world. One can enter the forest only along the laterite road that has been cut through it. There is no entrance to this otherwise impregnable fortress, a green mass of branches, vines, and leaves; legs sink into slimy, foul-smelling bogs, as all sorts of spiders, beetles, and worms begin to rain down upon one’s head. The inexperienced in any event do not dare plunge into the virgin forest, and the idea of hacking one’s way through it is unthinkable to the locals. The jungle no less than the ocean, or a range of high mountains, is a closed, discrete, independent entity, not to be idly entered into. It always fills me with fear—that from its thickets a predator will suddenly pounce, that a poisonous snake will with invisible speed strike me, or that I will hear too late the swish of an approaching arrow.

Usually a group of children catches up with me just as I’m setting out toward the green colossus—they want to accompany me. At the outset they are in high spirits, laughing and frolicking about. But when the road enters the forest, they grow silent, serious. Perhaps they imagine that somewhere, in the darkness of the jungle, lurk phantoms, wraiths, and witches that kidnap disobedient children. It is well to be mindful of what even children understand, to be quiet and pay attention.

Sometimes we stop along the road, right near the edge of the jungle. It resembles twilight here, and the air is thick with aromas.
There are no animals on the road, but you can hear the birds. And the sound of drops falling on leaves. Unaccountable rustlings. The children like to come here, they feel at home and know everything. Which plant one can pick and bite into, and which one cannot so much as touch. Which fruit is comestible, and which poisonous. They know that spiders are very dangerous, and lizards not at all. And they know that one must look up at the branches, because a snake might be lurking there. The girls are more serious and more careful than the boys, and so I observe their actions and order the boys to follow suit. All of us are subject to the same sensation, that which reminds me of entering a great, lofty cathedral, in which a human being feels minuscule and conscious of how much larger than himself everything else is.

Doctor Ranke’s villa stands beside a wide road that cuts through northern Congo and, running close to the equator, leads through Bangui to Douala on the Gulf of Guinea, where it ends roughly at the height of Fernando Po. But that is far from here, more than two thousand kilometers away. A portion of this road had been paved, but only shapeless scraps of asphalt remain today. When I have to walk here on a moonless night (and tropical darkness is thick, impenetrable), I advance slowly, dragging my feet along the ground, to feel, testing the way as best I can—
shur-shur, shur-shur—
vigilantly, carefully, because there are so many invisible holes, pits, depressions. When columns of fugitives pass this way at night, one sometimes hears a sudden cry—of someone having fallen into a deep hole and probably broken a leg.

Fugitives. Suddenly, everyone has become a fugitive. The Congo’s independence in the summer of 1960 was accompanied by the eruption of tribal strife, and eventually warfare, and ever since the roads have been filled with fugitives. Gendarmes,
soldiers, and ad hoc tribal militias engage in the actual fighting, whereas civilians, which usually means women and children, flee. The routes of these flights are often difficult to re-create. Generally, the goal is to get as far away as possible from the battle, though not so far as to lose one’s way and later be unable to return. Another important consideration is whether or not one will be able to find something to eat along a particular escape route. These are poor people, and they have but a few belongings: the women, a percale dress; the men, a shirt and a pair of pants. Other than that, perhaps a piece of cloth for cover at night, a pot, a cup, a plastic plate, and a basin in which to carry everything.