The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  As he let himself be carried away by sounds and smells, he had the experience that time was no longer docile. Before, during his youth, he was its master; he knew how to stop or accelerate it like a fisherman who imposes his own rhythm on the current of a river. Now he felt like a stone thrown to the bottom, a stone covered with moss over which a mobile immensity of incomprehensible waters was rolling.

  The book would slip off his knees. He fell into torpor. More and more often the servant had to wake him for supper.

  Soon after his birthday, which was celebrated with pomp (he had turned sixty), he fell sick. The doctors diagnosed a jaundiced fever, recommended peace, and gave assurances that the patient would quickly return to health. Cautious Cornelis made a testament and ordered that debts be paid back ahead of time. The state of the firm was as follows: assets, 12,000 florins; liabilities easy to collect, 9,300 florins; 5,100 florins in valuable papers and shares in the East India Company.

  He was getting weaker and weaker; now he no longer got up from bed. The physicians prescribed herb compresses, different potions: quinine wine, tincture of aloes, extract of gentian. They also let his blood, and in the end recommended that spider heads in walnut shells be applied to the chest of the patient; if that did not help, verses from the Bible could be substituted for the spider heads. Clearly, science was discreetly giving way to faith.

  Every day around five—it was a sunny, very warm summer—an old friend of Troost would come, Abraham Anslo2, once a preacher famous throughout Holland, today a silent old man with a sparse gray beard and permanently tearing eyes. He sat at the foot of the bed. They smiled to each other, their dialogue taking place beyond words and time. The patient had a huge need to confess his doubts, spiritual perplexities, and anxieties. He could not understand the Other World at all. The empty blue skies frightened him. Very likely it was an impious rebellion of the imagination, above all of the pagan senses. He was absolutely unable to understand how one can exist without a house, without creaking stairs and a banister, without curtains and candelabra, also without the cloth that had surrounded him throughout his life. What implacable force takes away from us the coolness of coarse silk, black wool flowing through the hands like a gentle wave, linen recalling the surface of a pond covered with ice, velvet tickling like moss, laces that seemed to whisper women’s secrets?

  Anslo would leave before dusk, and touch the hand of his friend with cold fingers for good-bye.

  Not much time remained.

  Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a servant would enter with breakfast and give a short cry.

  Then they would cover all the mirrors in the house, and turn all the pictures to the walls so the image of a girl writing a letter, of ships in open sea, of peasants dancing under a tall oak, would not stop the one who wanders toward unimaginable worlds from going on his way.

  THE KING OF THE ANTS

  translated by

  John and Bogdana Carpenter,

  with additional translations by Alissa Valles

  I

  BLACK FIGURE VASE BY EKSEKIAS21

  To Joseph Brodsky

  Where is Dionysus sailing across a sea as red as wine

  what islands does he seek under the sign of grapevines

  He’s asleep and doesn’t know—and so nor do we

  where downstream the agile beechwood boat is sailing

  II

  THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS1

  H.E.O. 2

  To Kasia

  DO WE HAVE to? asks Eurydice. Hermes smiles, he is silent. As they walk, darkness parts before them and immediately closes after them. They pass through countless gates.

  —Is it necessary? asks Eurydice. Orpheus is old, I won’t live with him much longer. I have forgotten the herbs I used for his throat which was sore from singing. I have forgotten what it is to get up at dawn. Or what a man wants when he touches my belly.

  —Your memory will come back, Hermes says, gently and without conviction.

  —You want to cheer me up, says Eurydice.

  The road goes uphill, it is not a road but an obedient parting of cliffs. Flints smell like dried lightning. The small pebbles underfoot have completely forgotten the sea.

  —Does he see us? Eurydice asks with concern.

  With a motion of his head, Hermes denies it.

  —I see his back. Always, when I was alive, I was moved by a man’s back; it is helpless. But I don’t feel this any longer. Tenderness—what is tenderness?

  —The joy of touch, Hermes answers, a kind of lower ecstasy.

  —My fingers are no longer alive, complains Eurydice. I couldn’t thread a needle or remove a mote from the eye of someone I loved.

  One more turn and the descent begins. Darkness, as if slanted, leaning over another deeper darkness.

  —Eurydice, Hermes says in a low voice, I will reveal the secret of your fate. Orpheus will soon die in suspicious circumstances. You will be free and take as husband a healthy athlete with shoulders like the branches of an oak. He will be a young man, without imagination, wise enough not to desire unattainable things. You can’t imagine how invigorating it will be after a life with a talented crybaby.

  —I think, Eurydice says quickly, they would stone me to death rather than permit a second marriage. I will become a national widow, an advertisement for faithfulness and poetry. They will put me on a cliff where I am supposed to mutter inspired prophecies, or imprison me in a temple, which amounts to the same thing. Then I will die for a second time. How does one die a second time? I hope it isn’t as painful and difficult as the first.

  Orpheus hears all of this through the pouring darkness. For the first time he admires Eurydice’s wisdom. Is it really necessary to die in order to become an adult?

  A basalt landscape opens before him, as stately as a burnt forest, motionless as the eye of a volcano or the inside of thick matter. Azure of night burnt by nothingness.

  I sang dawns the coronations of the sun

  the journey of colors from morning to evening

  but I forgot about you

  eternal night

  Orpheus suddenly turns toward the shadows of Eurydice and Hermes and shouts in rapture—I’ve found it!

  The shadows disappear. Orpheus comes into the light of day. He bursts with joyful pride that he has experienced a revelation and discovered a new kind of literature, called, from now on, the poetry of reflection and darkness.

  ANTAEUS

  ANTAEUS WAS THE son of Poseidon and Gaea. To put it gently, not a very harmonious couple. What else could be expected from the elements of sea and earth, fighting each other fiercely? It is probable that Antaeus was a neglected, abandoned child—but how difficult it is to imagine the childhood of a giant! The savage quarrels of his parents certainly had a negative influence that shaped his character.

  All sources agree that Antaeus grew up to be a crude, violent man, with more than human strength. His intellectual resources were modest, but his body was exuberant. Although he never went to any school, he drew a logically correct conclusion from this disproportion: he became a sportsman.

  It is difficult to place Antaeus on the map of the world. In the old myths his home was Libya, it was there that he met Heracles. But later, with Greek colonization of the northern shore of Africa, this fairy-tale-like figure was pushed farther west, all the way to Mauritania where Punic merchants drove the Greeks away. Colonizers do not create myths, but instead labor tirelessly on their geography. They simply locate monsters on terrain occupied by their competitors. This procedure has survived commendably to our own times.

  We know little about Antaeus himself, except that he was nourished with the meat of lions he killed with his bare hands. He scorned modern civilization—the cudgel, the spear, the trap dug in the ground. His favorite occupation was challenging wanderers he met to a wrestling match. The adversary was forced to fight, and these struggles inevitably ended with his death.

  Such a way of life cannot awaken our sympathy or our a
pproval. But a poet—this is unusual—hurried to Antaeus’s rescue. The eminent poet Pindar defended him from the accusation he was simply an ordinary assassin, a repulsive murderer. In one of his Isthmian Odes, Pindar1 tried to discover a meaning in the criminal activity of Antaeus, or at least to make it comprehensible.

  The region where Antaeus lived was poor in stones, and only the wind sometimes erected deceptive monuments of sand. Imaginary cities of marble sometimes appeared on the dry horizon. Pindar wrote that Antaeus dreamed of erecting a temple to honor his father. He humanized Antaeus, and endowed him with the praiseworthy virtue of filial love. The only solid materials at his disposal were the terrestrial remnants of his unfortunate adversaries; there was nothing to do but take advantage of this building material. The idea—rather macabre in itself—is not, after all, so far removed from baroque aesthetics.

  So Antaeus collected the bones of those he killed just as a good builder lovingly collects stones, bricks, and wood. He took care to preserve them safely from the sun, the omnivorous sand, and humidity.

  He changed the plan of his edifice many times. He wanted the mausoleum honoring his parents to have the ideal proportions of the human body.

  The apses were made of ribs, he also used ribs for the temple’s vault. Beady wrist bones hung down, creating an illusion of lamps and chandeliers.

  The columns were made from the bones of spines. He tied several together to give necessary strength to the building.

  Each year, during the season of winds and rains, the temple would collapse. All the builder’s labors recalled an abandoned camp of hyenas. Bones lay in disorder on the sand. It was as if the gods sneered at those who try to become higher, destroying them.

  And every year Antaeus began anew with the same stubbornness, piety, and hopeless love.

  Seen from a distance, and illuminated from above, Antaeus resembled a boulder slowly moving through the wilderness. His gait was like the mannered way actors move in Westerns, but in the case of the giant it was a hard necessity, not a mannerism. He drew all his energy and strength from the earth—from physical contact with rock, with clay, even with dust.

  If he were not a child of the gods—no one dared question this—one would think that nature treated him unfairly, refusing him a definite spot in the chain of being in a moment of distraction. Who knows whether the form of a tree, a cedar for example, would not be the most appropriate shape for his existence. But Antaeus was an above-ground creature; he was deprived of roots, and marked by fear of the abyss of air surrounding him on all sides. The birds and stars suspended above filled him with revulsion. Each jump or leap made his head turn, and he would feel faint.

  Antaeus did not have a home or permanent stopping place. Nights in the desert fall fast: the gray lightning of dusk, and then—right away—darkness. When the sun was about to set, Antaeus would build a shelter: a deep underground corridor so narrow there was only room for his supine body. He would squeeze into this murky, humid refuge like a huge worm, falling into blissful, nourishing sleep.

  One can explain these nightly practices of Antaeus symbolically, as a nostalgic search for origins or a return to the mother’s womb. But why multiply hidden meanings when everything can be explained in a simple way: by cycles of vegetation.

  Everyone who has been in the dessert has noticed clumps of twigs and leaves that appear completely dead, rolled by the wind. At first glance they seem like the trash of creation, crumbs from Mother Nature’s table. But as soon as the first rains come, a sudden metamorphosis takes place. What seemed to be forever thrust away from life sends down roots, blooms, intoxicates with fragrance, bears fruit—in a word, lives wonderfully in a powerful, lavish way.

  There are reasons to believe that the encounter between Antaeus and Heracles was accidental. This is why it was not engraved on the bronze tablet that describes the main labors of Heracles. It was not planned on the hero’s calendar—well, it was one of his guest performances.

  All sources agree about the results of the duel, but the way it took place has been reported differently. Diodorus Siculus2 describes it as a wrestling match combined with a wager that required the loser to forfeit his life. (But he does not say if it was by his own hand or that of the victor.) This is a flat, vulgar version, bringing to mind the rules of gladiators’ fights or—even worse—Russian roulette. Other accounts, not very edifying either, say that Heracles blocked the entrance to the underground refuge with his own body, what might be called “starving out the city.”

  Antaeus was humanized not only by Pindar but by Plato himself, who endowed him with professional intelligence and the invention of certain wrestling grips. Thus poetry, time, and philosophy all labored to endow the fight with the features of a real agon in which adversaries had statistically equal chances.

  In reality it was an open, manly duel: mano al mano, and murderous.

  Heracles understood right away that he was engaged in a fight without precedent. Battles and wrestling matches are based on the attempt to deprive the enemy of an upright position—to reduce him to a supine object. But each time Antaeus was thrown on the ground he sprang up more and more vigorously, ready and raucous, aggressive.

  The hero had to abandon normal tactics. He had to overcome the concept, deeply rooted in us all, of what we call high and low, the elevation of the victor and the throwing of the defeated down into the dust. For every time Antaeus was lifted up, it meant death for him.

  Literary accounts of the encounter are few and this is why it is difficult to recreate the course of events. By their nature, mosaics, sculptures and paintings record a moment, not a sequence of events. I believe that the content of the duel—its raw essence—was best represented by the Renaissance painter Antonio Pollaiuolo3. His painting is small, almost a miniature that can be covered by the hand, but has such an amount of pent-up energy that its power of expression surpasses yards of garrulous frescoes.

  Pollaiuolo did not succumb to the temptation of presenting Antaeus as a giant. The rules of humanism forbade such expressionistic whims, so both adversaries have human proportions. They also lack classical beauty; instead they are a well-matched pair of similar broad-shouldered, long-haired savages. This was an accurate intuition, for in reality the duel was brutal, its ending naturalistic, ordinary, without a trace of noble simplicity or quiet greatness.

  The hands of Heracles tighten around the hips of his adversary like iron clasps. Similar to a peasant with legs apart, struggling with a sack and trying to lift it over his back, he tears him from the ground and raises him to the level of his shoulders.

  Antaeus no longer defends himself. He presses his clenched fists against the elbows of Heracles—he throws his head back, drawing his legs up. His helpless defense recalls a big fish thrashing in a net, flinging his entire body backward and flinging it forward, until the pendulum becomes completely still.

  His mouth is wide open, but he does not shout. Asthmatics, breathing in crumbs of air with difficulty, do not waste strength on screams and curses. In a moment, it will be the end.

  Heracles will carefully wait for the moment when his adversary’s arms fall along the body and his legs dangle limply like the legs of a hanged man. Then he will listen attentively to Antaeus’s silent heart. With relief he will throw the burden to the ground. For a moment he will stand above him. Perhaps he will think with a bit of melancholy that Greek mythology does not know the word resurrection.

  Yet Antaeus keeps returning. He strives after our memory. No longer savage and elementary but devoid of violence, almost nostalgic.

  In upper Egypt Antaeus was given the posthumous title of a god. A city was baptized in his name. Who would have thought that from a chthonic4 monster, he would be completely transformed into an apostle of civilization and the middle class?

  A mound was discovered near the Mauritanian city of Tingris5, and it was generally believed that the terrestrial remains of the giant lay underneath. It was a tomb but also a place of witchcraft. It was enough
to dig up some dirt from the topmost layer, and it would produce atmospheric precipitation. An amazing career indeed—from a brigand to a conjuror of rain.

  It is possible to risk the assertion that the meaning of the myth of Antaeus is attachment. It is a feeling rather than an ideology, and surely this is why it is impossible to communicate it to others. It is extremely difficult to convince someone that it is worthwhile to love a meager plot of land as small as a donkey’s shadow, as the shadow of a poplar, a broken house, or a destroyed city on a dried-up river. In a word, the place where we were born, and which was unable to feed or protect us.

  For the nomads of civilization and the tenants of jet planes, Antaeus will remain forever the symbol of a primitive barbarian. They succumb to the illusion that the breaking of ties and a sickly mobility are necessary conditions of progress. But they forget that chasing after the sun and global utopias must end in catastrophe. In the last analysis everything is reduced to the choice, or the assignment by others, of a place in the cemetery.

  All those strange refugees who take on the shapes of incomprehensible mutants or even monsters in the pitiless eyes of the natives will find gracious shelter in the shadow of the outspread arms of Antaeus.