The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  So he was sent to numerous competitions, provincial to be sure and as a rule ignored by eminent sculptors. This is why we know almost everything about his fate but next to nothing about his physical appearance, because not a single portrait has been preserved of his head, his torso, or heel.

  Connoisseurs admired Cleomedes’ particular manner of fighting. Always concentrated, and peculiarly devoid of ambition; impersonal, as if submitting to a strange power that led him from victory to victory. He used his energy reasonably, with moderation, conscious it was a favor from fate and, therefore, something given to him with a short lease. His reserves of strength were suspected to be enormous but he drew from them cautiously, so he wouldn’t overstep the limits marked out by the jealous gods.

  Was he a favorite of the public? In the stadium and theater the audience wants to experience purification through fear and pity, it wants to follow the struggle of passions, blind verdicts of fate, silent defeats and noisy triumphs. Cleomedes, however, invariably carried out a solitary struggle with his own body. The presence of adversaries was indifferent to him, they formed a motionless background and from it the victor would imperceptibly emerge, always surprised, never quite believing it was he and not someone else who deserved admiration and, well, even worship.

  A modest hero is an engaging figure, and no one asks whether it is an acquired pose or if the source of such an attitude should be looked for in the deep strata of the soul. What, indeed, is a timid and pale victor? An odd hybrid, an awkward oxymoron, someone carrying an incurable flaw. It seems that Cleomedes’ flaw was his complete inability to identify with his own actions. Internally split, somewhat alarming, he was, in fact, frightfully…boring.

  This is why the famous Spartan athlete Telestes, patron and guardian of the youth from Astipalea, declared that at the approaching pan-Hellenic games, Cleomedes would enter as a boxer, even though he possessed so many other athletic talents auguring laurels. The decision was arbitrary and final. In everything irreversible we have a tendency to see the interference of supernatural forces governing the world—in reality the matter can be completely explained in human categories.

  Telestes’ intention was simple and shows his discernment in applied pedagogy. For he decided that only in a boxing match would Cleomedes achieve Form, that is, Individual Shape, and at last become someone defined who could be distinguished from others without difficulty or hesitation. For what is boxing? A battle that is open, masculine, even more an allegory of war, a prefiguration of the struggle between life and death. Telestes reasoned exactly that this would force his pupil to mobilize all his dormant forces to answer aggression with aggression, to be rid of his provincial shyness once and for all and become at last a convincing, distinct, happy victor.

  Cleomedes’ departure for the games was the greatest celebration ever experienced in Astipalea. Almost all the inhabitants of the island gathered at the port. For a long time, noisily and with effusive affection, they said farewell to the future victor (no one doubted it) who would be the first in history to cover their native land with glory.

  The opponent of Cleomedes was the famous boxer Hikkos of Epidaurus, who had come close to the victor’s laurels twice before at the Olympic Games. This time, sure of victory, he went into the encounter without guarding himself, striking with a huge open hand similar to a stern teacher thrashing an unruly pupil. A fight must be a drama with an epilogue difficult to foresee, a game in which the scales of victory sway; it ought to abound in surprises, tactical devices, stratagems, sharp attacks and lightning-fast returns—meanwhile the spectators were treated to a boring monologue. So they shouted to interrupt the match and send the unfortunate youth back to where he came from, that is, to his shabby island and sheep.

  Then Cleomedes proceeded to attack. But it was an attack in his particular style, hardly perceptible, like everything he did—not showy, sluggish in appearance.

  The reports by witnesses are contradictory and unclear. They had difficulty in grasping not so much the meaning of the event as its individual fragments.

  It was like this. At first Hikkos stood still as if struck by amazement, then he retreated several steps. Some said he looked around helplessly and suddenly toppled over in the sand with his arms outspread. It lasted a very short time. None of the spectators realized what had happened.

  The judges of the games were confronted with a difficult task, a fact without precedent that went beyond the power of judgment. For a dark image concealed everything, and images obstinately resist the efforts of interpreters. Here in full sunlight, in the middle of the arena, something heavy was lying enclosed in itself, soaked in mystery—an object. This is why the verdict of the referees is marked by frightened helplessness.

  It was confirmed first of all that Cleomedes didn’t transgress any of the minutely established and strictly observed rules of combat. His adversary had not raised his right hand: the sign of surrender. And yet Hikkos had died. Hikkos was not alive. Cleomedes was cleared of the charge of intentional manslaughter, but was refused the victor’s wreath. Therefore the duel was unresolved.

  The intention of the judges can be considered understandable, morally irreproachable, praiseworthy. But from the point of view of logic, their reasoning was full of gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions, for no one established what should have been the first and fundamental premise, that is, the cause of Hikkos’s death. Can the accidental death of a participant be excluded? A poet who has died over an unfinished poem stirs generous understanding in the hearts of women and even of critics, so why refuse these tender sympathies to boxers? Further, if Cleomedes fought honestly and was judged to have no blame, why was he punished? Finally, wasn’t this rather unfortunate phrase about a duel with no victor a cowardly attempt to overthrow the laws of fate, which always decide irrevocably and cruelly—it was also true in this case—leaving only the defeated and the victor on the field?

  Cleomedes was plunged into sorrow and despair. He rejected the world, which he had never understood anyway. Therefore, perhaps the rejection was not a great one. On the other hand, it was fraught with consequences.

  It was foreign to the ancients to rummage in the labyrinths of individual souls, and they would have said his reason was darkened by the sinister goddess Ate2, disturber of the minds of gods and men. For believers, such an interpretation is sufficient. But when we describe what followed, we will try to avoid psychology as well as lofty symbolism and limit ourselves to a simple presentation of the facts, as with Pausanias3 who first recorded the story.

  So Cleomedes returns to Astipalea. He sets out in the direction of the city. A school building is next to the road, and the madness of the unfortunate Olympic athlete is vented upon it. The wooden columns collapse. Under the rubble sixty children find their death.

  The inhabitants of the island want to inflict punishment on the criminal at the place of the crime: that is, to stone him to death. Cleomedes succeeds in tearing himself away. He flees to the temple of Athena. The relentless crowd pursues him.

  In the temple is a stone chest, as large as a royal vault and reserved for the storage of sacred objects. Cleomedes pushes aside the heavy lid and slips inside.

  At just that moment the avengers appear in the temple. They carefully look at every bend of the wall, every nook and cranny. Nor do they overlook the huge stone chest. In vain, Cleomedes has vanished without a trace.

  When we read the story by Pausanias we instinctively feel a disquieting lack of a point, a moral, a…bottom. The protagonist suddenly leaves the scene and sinks from sight without a word. The Messenger and the omniscient Chorus who bring the voices of the world to the scene are silent about his fate. It is exactly this that glaringly contradicts the fundamental laws of classical drama and, even more, any art expressed in closed and understandable forms.

  In the Theater of the Absurd, Cleomedes could have counted on quite a career. Only a chronic lack of education in the men of letters working toward the multiplication of chaos expla
ins the astounding fact that they have not discovered this golden vein; they would have a ready anti-hero of flesh and blood, not watery words, also a subject shimmering with the dark colors of the absurd.

  Returning to the interrupted plot: we must emphatically stress what is essential, namely, the close kinship of Cleomedes with the elements. He was a modest athlete and didn’t know very well what to do with his great gift. He understood that nature had endowed him with strength that neither he nor anyone else knew how to master. Mastery is not the domain of genius but of barely capable individuals who possess the art of imitating passions and safely balancing over the abyss. Cleomedes lacked this ability. It is why the tale about him takes place on the frontier between human affairs and the phenomena of nature. Down the steep slope of a mountain, or a narration, crushing everything in its way, rolls a boulder. Only ruins and victims remain. But catastrophes after all are innocent.

  The bottom, the true bottom of the story of Cleomedes was absolutely real: several decaying planks on the floor of our hero’s hideout that collapsed under his weight. He crashed through. He recovered in a dark interior similar to a small, damp cave.

  The temple of Athena stood on a hill near the sea. The city had no defenses, but we know that wars and even pirates bypassed miserable Astipalea. It is hard to say why those who erected the temple dug a subterranean passage under the foundations that was soon forgotten.

  For a long time Cleomedes crawled in darkness. When he came out at the shore it was night. He found a boat, and the loud sea carried him away.

  Cleomedes’ wanderings abounded in all the necessary elements of an epic tale: intricate adventures, labyrinths of deserts, summits and depths, terror and vast landscapes. But a sinister shadow followed him that shattered the meaning of his sufferings and struggles, ravaged his being from within, and pushed him deeper and deeper into the domain of inhuman creation. Who was he? An atom wandering in the void of the universe.

  Our loyal compassion has accompanied the peregrinations of Odysseus for centuries; this is because the wanderings of the King of Ithaca have supernatural and, at the same time, human dimensions. They move heaven and earth, envious and friendly gods, sirens, monsters, and the hearts of listeners. But the true source of our empathy is the simple fact that all the torments and blows falling on the hero were the price paid for the return to his homeland. Cleomedes’ road runs in exactly the opposite direction—he was running away from his beloved island where only a stony death awaited him. He was a deserter from fate.

  Finally he reached Corinth, and decided to remain for some time because the feeling of fear left him—not completely but sufficiently for him to recover. He didn’t choose this place for its attractions, but simply because ships from different parts of the world landed here and, therefore, news of his beloved Astipalea would reach him, news bringing forgiveness or damnation forever. Even if this did not happen, it was the most suitable place on earth where one could disappear for the second and final time.

  The would-be Olympic victor joined the royally hospitable and voluminously bottomless class of ancient proletarians. They were different from slaves because they were not offered for sale, therefore the price of their lives and drudgery was not measurable. The adjective “ancient” is not a decorative epithet but a definition of a place in time. The face of extreme poverty is always, everywhere, equally immovable and repulsive.

  He was living, then, in a crowd of the poor cooped up under a naked sky or in wretched mud huts beyond the limits of the splendid city, in an area of abandonment without frontiers. Fires would burn here long into the night, the small lights looking like those of a large, weary, besieging army struck by inertia. Even wakefulness and sleep are not justly distributed among people.

  Cleomedes worked by the sweat of his brow. He carried clay to ceramic workshops, sometimes he was employed at the ovens casting the famous Corinthian bronzes, but mostly he worked in the port, an evil, noisy arena of deposed athletes. The city—wealthy, licentious, and huge—lay beyond the borders of his curiosity.

  So the groove of his existence was desperately narrow: from the hovel where he slept, to work, and back, that’s all. Above his head he had immeasurable time, homogeneous as the air and, like air, without promises. The earthly fate of Cleomedes was fragile, and perhaps for that reason he felt safe in the universe. Degradation gives certainty. There is no better hiding place, no better hospice, than the bottom.

  The main concern, or to speak loftily, spiritual occupation, of Cleomedes was waiting. The goal of waiting was to return to Astipalea. He knew it would happen when the witnesses of his crime had died out and as a reward for his patient fidelity, fate would favor him with the gift of death on his native island, ordinary and innocent as birth.

  In the beginning he asked all the sailors he met if they had happened to land on the shores of Astipalea. The majority didn’t even know the name. Some had seen it from a distance—a dark stone projecting above the surface of the water. Soon Cleomedes gave up his investigations. His simple philosophy was based on reasoning similar to the manner of thinking of lovers, that is, without logic: I am an inseparable part of my land, we were violently separated, if there is any order in the world our incomplete existences must be brought together again.

  How could Cleomedes’ state of mind be described? We know little about his inner life. But it seems that obvious and worn-out designations like “homesickness” and “nostalgia” can hardly be considered accurate in the case of a protagonist whose nature was marvelously uncomplicated and therefore escaped analysis.

  In one of their hermetic texts, the Pythagoreans warn against “eating one’s own heart.” It should be understood figuratively as a prohibition against sinking into fruitless despair. We can suppose that despite sensible advice, Cleomedes fed himself with his own heart—and it was continually restored, beating strongly with a healthy, hopeless, filial attachment.

  He was patient, concentrated as always, enclosed within himself, and self-sufficient. He humbly submitted to the powerful force of time. He well knew that hard labor, the flogging of frost, rain and heat would finally change his skin, furrow deep clefts in his face, bend his back, and give him an uncertain, wobbly step. Then he would be able to return safely to Astipalea. He was waiting for the torn costume of an ancient vagabond from nowhere.

  If he had worries, there was only one: he was aging too slowly. In spite of the laws of nature and his own efforts, he still resembled the youth who departed on that memorable morning for a victor’s laurels.

  Years passed.

  Modern poetics rejects similar sentences with disgust; they are just as suspect as, for example, a statement that “the last rays of the setting sun fell on an old house hidden in the shade of centennial lindens,” or, “the shapely breast of the countess Julietta was shaken by strange sobs.” Aesthetes say they are ugly and banal. That may be. But is it fitting to decorate matters that are profound and ordinary—that is to say, universal—with the artificial flowers of style? And so, years passed.

  Chance—the other side of the coin conventionally called necessity, or its capricious variation, horribly unsystematic and absentminded—chance caused our hero to meet quite unexpectedly in the port a man who had seen Astipalea with his own eyes and was there not long ago. Cleomedes was delighted and invited him that evening to his fire.

  The man’s name, Heliodorus, should be interpreted as a pretentious pseudonym attached to a small, active, sweaty figure condemned to the eternal torment of throwing out of himself an unending number of words and sounds. Those who have been in the Piraeus and seen the sellers of fortunes know what this is.

  By profession he was a wandering peddler of devotional objects. When business in this line weakened or became disappointing, he was also an unlicensed poet. There is no contradiction in this. Both these professions have gone hand in hand for thousands of years.

  An inventory of Heliodorus’s jumble of odds and ends: Egyptian (or facsimiles of Egyptian) am
ulets, Babylonian love elixirs, clay figurines that caused sudden death to a hated person when pierced with pins—or, if it was desired, a long and painful one. He also interpreted dreams. He always explained them to the advantage of the dreamer (little caring about the subconscious, that idol not yet invented) because he knew that people crave comfort.

  He treated the world as a phenomenon with a certain shade of indulgence and even contempt. He thought it an absurd joke of the Demiurge, and foretold its approaching end. This also comforted those who despaired. And he was an execrable poet. At this time the art of the wandering aodists was in complete decline; the few who had something to say recorded their thoughts and stanzas on papyrus rolls.

  So they met at night and, either from his heart’s need or perhaps giving in to the prompting of naive cunning, Cleomedes asked Heliodorus to describe Astipalea as accurately as he could. His description agreed exactly with the real topography. Our hero was calmed, dreamy—he made himself a comfortable place near the fire and covered himself with a coat. Tales that grow from the earth are best listened to in a lying position.

  The rhapsode moved along smoothly, apart from a number of obstacles typical of the genre such as literary devices, recurrences, descriptions of nature, retardations, and moaning apostrophes to the Olympian deities. Aside from these everything was true: the mysterious death of Hikkos, the hecatomb of the children, the chase, the escape to the temple. Then came the turn for the second part, and as Cleomedes listened about Cleomedes he was plunged into a story he didn’t know at all.

  From the hoarse, epic tale of Heliodorus, we will try to pick out only the essentials, the mood of the crowd, and the facts.

  This is how it was. When the inhabitants of Astipalea discovered beyond any doubt that Cleomedes had disappeared without a trace, like a dissolving cloud, they were struck by an astonishment so great it took away anger and the desire for revenge. It was not the naive, human astonishment we experience at the sight of a calf with two heads or falling stars, but something leading to the depths, and toward the threatening abysses of final matters. The color of the crowd’s feeling became darker, the anxiety turned to fear, fear became terror. A great covering of mystery stretched over the little island. Everyone waited for the end and believed that the deluge, pestilence, fire, and beasts were standing at the gates of Astipalea.