The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  They have saved only two minute treasures—their own speech, and names that sound in foreign ears like the bells of a clown. Their land was snatched from them as well as the water in which they saw the faces of their god and of the invader.

  Now they are silently dying in the thin air of freedom that belongs to others.

  THE INFERNAL DOG

  To Julia Hartwig and Arthur Midzyrzecki

  SURVIVING RECORDS ABOUT the anatomy of Cerberus, and his physiological as well as psychological functions, are numerous but show alarming divergences. The ambition of the present study is to throw a new shaft of light on a muddled problem.

  According to the Archpoet1 Homer, Cerberus was simply a dog. Dante calls him a worm. Hesiod mentions Cerberus twice2 in the Theogony, but is unable to decide if he has one head or fifty. Pindar doubles this number, while Horace endows Cerberus with a mane of snakes. The tragedians are more restrained, content with three heads. Sculptors and painters represent Cerberus with three heads at most. Here an observation comes to mind—language is inclined to hyperbole and exaggeration if not lying, while a statement in marble or paint imposes a matter-of-fact simplicity.

  Because of the dim illumination at the place of action, the outcome of the struggle between Heracles and Cerberus—guardian of the kingdom of the dead—was unclear. It was the twelfth, the last and most difficult, labor of the hero. Hence the sacred semi-obscurity that befits other worlds.

  What kind of a fight was it? It is impossible to form a clear opinion based on the literary excavations; different, contradictory versions vacillate between a bloody wrestling match and something like a Sunday hunt for booty. Some say it was Kore3 who gave Cerberus to Heracles as a gift, just as parents might give a bicycle to a boy for good behavior. Others claim that Hades, ruler of the underworld, was mortally bored and arranged something like a tournament. But the animal and the man wrestled with each other—long, and painfully.

  A question remains: what was the character of Cerberus? Demonized beyond measure, he played the decorative role in Hades of a doorman in front of a hotel. The number of the dead who wanted to return to earth was insignificant. Cerberus was not overworked. He was like a sign, BEWARE OF THE DOG and NO EXIT. What kind of a demon was it that could be bribed with a honeycake? His threatening function was to wag his tail.

  Whatever happened, neither adversary was wounded. Hence the conclusion that it wasn’t a battle in the strict sense of the word but a strategic maneuver, circling the adversary and forcing him into unconditional capitulation. Most likely Heracles used the classical method of strangling. But this is a detail. It is enough that the breathless hero surfaced—together with his prize—above the ground.

  It happened…exactly where? Again sources vacillate, mentioning a number of points on the world’s map. But the problem is academic. We know from experience that in every mature civilization, descents to hell are numerous. Even more numerous than beer stands or mailboxes.

  In hell Cerberus barked with a powerful voice. On a mute amphora in the Louvre, the painter Andikos4 has seized the significance of the duel between Heracles and Cerberus: Heracles assumes the position of a runner at the start, the body thrust forward, right hand moving in the direction of the beast’s forehead, a huge chain in his left hand. Cerberus is two-headed. One of the heads is watchful and aggressive, but the other bends to the ground as if awaiting the man’s touch. Such is the beginning of the tragedy called taming.

  Cerberus is the victim of the assault. How does he feel? The initial light shock has already passed and now another shock begins, so strong, so overpowering that it threatens the dog’s heart. He is like a deepwater fish dragged onto the sand.

  Sounds, shapes, odors fall on him like an avalanche. The world appears in furiously intense colors like Fauvist paintings: the grass flaming red, trees cinnabar, limestone rocks violet and black, the sky green. Only Heracles has a gentle hue, his figure surrounded by a delicate, pulsating contour.

  Harder to bear is the deluge of five hundred thousand odors.

  The fiery sun over the dried-up earth.

  Under an oak tree, on a high hill, a dog and a man are lying next to each other.

  They do not take their eyes off each other. They are distrustful rather than hostile.

  Heracles smells of blood, leather, and slaughter; Cerberus smells of decomposing proteins. They belong to two irreconcilable worlds.

  Suddenly it occurs to Heracles that if Cerberus wants to leave him, he cannot prevent it. He decides to speak. In such cases the sound of the word has a captivating force.

  Heracles: Listen to me, beast. You are my prisoner. If you try to escape, I will smash your head—heads, he corrects himself—according to international law.

  Cerberus gives a prolonged growl.

  It is night now. There is a big moon.

  Cerberus rises on his hind legs. Heracles reaches for his bloodstained club.

  At this moment a song is heard. There is little sense in describing music—only those who have listened to the voice of a wolf on a snowy plain during winter nights can conceive of the cantata of Cerberus. For those who have not experienced this wonder, we give a rough transcription of the original, as inept as a newspaper reproduction compared to an original Rembrandt. The following paraphrase is from Alexander Schmook, Der Wolf—sein Wesen und seine Stimme, Tübingen, 1848:

  Hurr hau-u-uh

  hau hau

  U-i-jaur-huuu

  Ho hau

  Hurrrrr ho hauuuh

  Jau jau ho hurrr hau-uh

  Resounding silence, then repetitions at equal intervals of time.

  Heracles is carried away by Cerberus’s voice as if on a powerful ocean wave. As he listens he wants to howl with him. But he knows he would discredit himself, for he is unable to draw such pride and despair from his throat. In vain would he try to describe with his voice the chains of land, abysmal spaces, the innumerable springs of blood hidden in bodies of animals, secrets of water and thirst, the hiding places of light and immense blackness.

  The road leading to King Eurystheus, who was to free Heracles from his curse, was long. Cerberus began to be attached to Heracles. His character of a monster underwent a metamorphosis—he became like a dog.

  People of a sentimental disposition might discover something moving in this. But the hero had a temperament devoid of feeling yet impulsive at the same time. He noticed that whenever he raised his head, Cerberus did the same, and a barely restrained fury grew in him. The dog became the mirror of his master, a distorted mirror, we should add, because of the difference of postures.

  But the worst was yet to come. Cerberus began to speak. Awkwardly at the beginning, with much saliva, he would pronounce words like “myum” or “beddy,” but his vocabulary became richer from day to day, his syntax more complicated.

  Especially at night, Heracles forgot he was wandering with a dog. He kept his feelings in check, remembering that his role was to guard a captive.

  Heracles: I don’t like you. I don’t like you at all.

  Cerberus: Not everyone can be Heracles.

  Heracles: If you at least pretended to be a normal dog. I suppose you wouldn’t be very popular with the females.

  At this point Heracles stopped talking—he had touched on a delicate subject. On the road they had passed female dogs, but Cerberus paid no attention to them.

  Cerberus: If you had lived like me among decaying bodies, you would lose appetite for everything.

  Heracles: Why do you eat grass and smell flowers, but you don’t hunt rabbits? It makes no sense. Maybe you could howl. Do you remember our first night under an oak tree? Lord how time is flying; you howled beautifully.

  Cerberus: How could I howl now? What did you tame me for?

  Heracles: Mongrel, every idiot knows how to speak. You must howl, do you understand?

  Cerberus: I won’t howl.

  Heracles: Well then, sleep.

  Heracles thought feverishly: this absurd relationship has
to be broken. When King Eurystheus sees Cerberus, he will notice right away he is not a threatening figure but comical. He will find one more labor for me, while people will see for themselves that life after death has completely…gone to hell. What, then, will become of the fashion of death, of its discrete presence so full of insinuations?

  Dawn. Heracles and Cerberus wake simultaneously, as if their sleep and waking are tied by a common thread.

  Heracles: Listen, I haven’t made any sacrifices for a long time, and it is because of you.

  Cerberus: Why because of me?

  Heracles: I have to guard you.

  Cerberus: It’s nice of you.

  Heracles: Not at all. I am neglecting my religious duties. Do you see that temple in the distance?

  Cerberus: I don’t see very well; so many years in the darkness….

  Heracles: Don’t feel sorry for yourself. The temple is far away, I will reach it by sunset. Tomorrow at dawn I will make a sacrifice, and I will return at midnight, maybe later. Stay here and keep watch; don’t budge from the spot. I don’t want to have to search for you, is it clear?

  Cerberus: I will keep watch.

  Heracles ran blindly ahead. Sometimes he stopped and looked, listening, peering anxiously behind. He weaved as he ran, changing directions, walking against the wind, wading through marshes and streams to lose his tracks. He wanted to obliterate that stubborn smell of a master and his dog that clings to each blade of grass, each sand grain, and is immediately recognized by every four-legged creature as a unique, peculiar, divine odor.

  Well, one can flee not only from an enemy but also from a burden of attachment. Everyone does it, or knows the temptation very well.

  At dusk Heracles made a sleeping place in the branches of an old elm. When he fell asleep he was on a tower, beyond the sphere of apprehension.

  In the morning, two pairs of eyes were watching every movement of the awakened man.

  They continued their journey. But can one call a journey an unrelenting chase to a destination at the limits of a human’s and a dog’s heart?

  They stopped only briefly for the night or meals. Heracles was bored and decided to give Cerberus some lessons on natural history, taking the latest scientific discoveries into account.

  A partisan of the descriptive method, he thrust his hand into grass as if into green water.

  —You see, this is Trifolium pratense, popularly known as clover. It grows in meadows; its perennial root is spindle-shaped and bifurcating. Papyli grow on delicate, hairy offshoots. They contain bacteria that assimilate azote (like all plants in the Papilionaecae family). Its flowers are light red or dark scarlet. They have round heads, surrounded at the base by leaves.

  He rummaged in the grass again and pulled out an oval, red object.

  —Here is Dorcus paralellopipedus. It is voracious. It lives in deciduous forests. The larvae develop in rotten oaks and beeches. Are you following me?

  Tomorrow we will speak about photosynthesis and the early work by Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Now go to sleep, blockhead.

  They reached Mycenae the next evening. The city was deserted. It was close to autumn and a cold, stubborn drizzle was drifting down. They walked through empty streets, along walls the color of liver; Heracles walked in front, with difficulty assuming the look of a victor. Behind him Cerberus, content with himself, idiotically happy, tried to walk in step like an obedient recruit.

  Not a trace of a triumphal entrance. Yet it was an unusually dramatic event that happened only once in the world’s history—it deserved a wreath, applauding crowds, trumpets and pealing bells.

  From beginning to end a worm had been gnawing at this beautiful flower of victory, and the severest fate—the fate of banality—hovered over the hero. It stripped away all glory and flattened everything, pushing a beautiful deed low, very low, into the realm of the anecdote.

  When he was fighting his way through rain and mud with his freakish monster, it might have been a consolation for Heracles to know that King Eurystheus was watching him from his palace window with growing alarm.

  Cerberus went berserk. In all his life he had never seen so many people smelling of wine and garlic; he terrorized the vegetable markets, devouring countless quantities of cauliflowers, artichokes, and cucumbers, and rampaged among market stands smelling of celery, frightening the vendors. Children adored him and rode on his back.

  King Eurystheus did not want to see either Heracles or Cerberus. He asked them to leave the city.

  —Mongrel, Heracles said, I am bored by this constant, hungry wandering from town to town. We should start a circus. You will walk on your hind legs in front of the gaping spectators, I will threaten you and crack my whip. Do you know how to walk on your hind legs?

  —Of course, said Cerberus, a little bit hurt. He liked the idea.

  One day Heracles brought a gray hemp sack from a nearby town. He casually mentioned to Cerberus that he would sleep on it because his bones ached from sleeping on the bare ground. Cerberus accepted this unquestioningly. The thought didn’t dawn in either of his two heads that the tragic finale of the whole story was approaching.

  The nagging question will remain unanswered forever, how could Heracles push this damp, dirty sack deep into the dark opening full of helpless screams and the howling of disappointed love.

  TRIPTOLEMOS

  HERE IS A myth for those weary of the world’s cruelty (the thoughtless cruelty of humans and the calculated cruelty of gods), a myth flat as a plain, a soothing myth, which is why narrators thirsty for blood and intrigue tend to avoid it.

  Triptolemos was the son of Keleos, king of Eleusis, at whose court Demeter stayed.

  He was a modest local hero, but his significance grew considerably beyond the framework of any Gotha almanac1.

  Thankful for the help the house of Triptolemos had offered in her search for Persephone, Demeter initiated the family’s young son into the ritual of sowing.

  And Triptolemos went into the world and spread the gospel of sowing, the gospel of harvest, the gospel of wheat, the gospel of rye, the gospel of oats. And he spread the gospel of corn, carried through the world on a chariot drawn by two snakes.

  Indeed, the sight of the gatherer peoples aroused pity mingled with disgust. Let us imagine a great herd of scruffily dressed vagabonds of both sexes, children, adults and elderly people, roaming the fringes of prehistoric forests, meadows and groves, bending over and tearing out tufts of grass, picking up something sticky from the ground, putting it hastily into their greedily opened oral cavities and then chewing with an expression of extreme discouragement. The gatherers’ favorite grazing spots were nature’s garbage dumps, the ragged edges of ravines, swamps, mysterious crevices in the earth swarming with frogs, scorpions and spiders.

  That’s what the gatherers were like.

  If anybody wished to paint a portrait of one, he would have to put in the right hand a bunch of uprooted plants and have the left arm against the body, wrist bent in a gesture of resignation.

  It is precisely to those hands, arms, and shoulders that Triptolemos appealed; he roused them to fight, instilled the habit of purposeful movements. He grafted a sowing motion onto slavishly bent backs—a narcotic motion, shoulders moving like a pendulum as at the time of a great battle.

  Triptolemos was a historical necessity at that time. Every resignation menaced the gatherers with a process of regression, a retreat down the ladder of species, to a family of anthropoid scum.

  Only at one moment did the gatherers rise to a higher level. Toward evening they would sit at the entrances to their lowly dwellings, squatting together and observing the sunset. Ecstasy took hold of them and they wet themselves. At those times they were defenseless. Belonging by nature to the unbeautiful beings, they sought to soar into the spheres of beauty; that is why an aesthetics desperately seeking a raison d’être should hold them in grateful memory.

  The hunting class looked quite different.

&
nbsp; The hunters devoted their lives to hunting. Elegantly clad in the bright uniforms of every colonial army, they brought back their trophies to manor houses laid out on wood-fringed meadows, hung skins and horns on the walls of their spacious rooms like ex-votos, which was less a sign of their piety as of their splendid wealth. They themselves:

  —fell by turns into periods of enthusiasm and melancholy, and also succumbed to the dangerous habit of noting down their thoughts.

  —were marked by a tendency now to asceticism, now to a life of unbridled excess and a descent into extremes of moroseness and despair.

  —were completely indifferent to the fate of the gatherers, with the exception of one day in the year when a ritual massacre of their cousins took place.

  As the higher primates adapted, front teeth gradually lost their dominance to molars as a consequence of the easy access to food.

  Triptolemos set out on his apostolic travels presciently equipped with an ample scholarly library and also with everything we call the basics of a good workshop: charts, tables, maps, laboratories.

  The gatherer elite came to Triptolemos’s lectures and lab sessions first with hesitation, later in droves. And the wheat apostle’s heart swelled. He knew the adoption of agrarian culture would refine their customs.

  But we can’t confine ourselves to the figure given to us by myth: an inspired agronomer traveling through the world teaching people the useful art of dropping seeds in furrows of earth in order to reap the hundredfold fruits, marking out his own ‘way of life’ whose pillars rested on industry and frugality.

  One assumes, though we have no proof of it, that Triptolemos was carrying out the will of the old goddess Demeter to the letter, but for him teaching became a process of inward perfection. He became pedantic in his actions and teachings, to which was added a certain mania, particular to pedagogical bodies. Ideological tendencies and unfounded expectations turned into a faith that they would make of man a more perfect creature—and that there was pride in belonging to the order of peasants, which was supposed to be significantly above any other calling or profession, any orientation of hands and minds on which future allegiances would be founded.