by A. S. Byatt
Professor Sun rose at the back of the hall to address a question. There were at least three other Professors Sun in the lecture theatre, probably more. Names, the British Council had explained, are restricted in variety in the Far East. Westerners could not or did not learn the whole names of Easterners. Easterners patiently and courteously provided versions of their names which approximated to Western forms. So there were many Suns and many Moons also. This Professor Sun had considerable presence and a large, round, open-seeming face that it was tempting to read as good-humoured and amused.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Well.” He paused. His tone was censorious. All interventions began with this pause, and with a summary “Well” which sounded as though the lecturer had been judged and found more or less wanting. “You will have been told,” the English had been assured, “that we are always very polite, that we never say what we think. We shall make a great effort not to be polite. We shall try to tell you very much what we think.” What Professor Sun thought was that Celia’s understanding of Milton’s virtuous figures would have been considerably improved by greater understanding of the English Revolution and God’s Englishman, of commonwealth and hierarchy in seventeenth-century England. He spoke fluently and well of these English-historical events, smiling engagingly but severely at Celia, not quite placatory. He quoted, not eloquently but accurately, from Milton. Milton’s words were a field in which he travelled with ease, unlike Celia’s students. He had authority. He was clearly a very senior professor. The English had been told that the senior professors would speak and the younger teachers keep silence, out of deference. When they spoke, all the women, and some of the men, held the right hand at a delicate angle, across the mouth, producing a boxed and hesitant sound which could have been read as embarrassment, or reluctance to communicate, or some extreme form of courtesy, protecting any interlocutor from breath itself. Professor Sun displayed this gesture at the beginning and end of his speaking. His compatriots displayed considerable approval of his erudition, or incisiveness, or grasp — nothing so indecorous as applause, but the faint pleasured hum and shifting of torsos which must be a lecture-room universal.
Celia’s other lecture was about George Eliot. George Eliot, the idea of the large mind and long serious face, was modified even during those few days by the oriental attentiveness, by the everywhere-and-nowhere of Room 1840 with its sachet of bath fragrance, by the absence of English news in the paper that was pushed under Celia’s door. George Eliot, Celia said, had believed in her time that human nature was governed by universal and discernible laws, in exactly the same way as the law of gravity governed the movement of the heavenly bodies. Celia spoke of George Eliot’s skill in demonstrating the workings of these hypothetical laws in the minute particulars of individual lives. George Eliot did not lapse from the picture to the diagram. She said, “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of a tender kinship for the face of the earth.” Out of the high window a cold sun shone on the bald chalkiness which was all Celia had seen of this remote spot of the face of the earth, and which had given her no sense of it. Inside the room everything could have been anywhere, Japanese microphones, American-style presidential lectern, neon strip-lighting, Bauhaus-derived armchairs, modestly opulent. Always when she quoted this passage a kind of simplified image of flat, ploughed Warwickshire crossed her inner eye, a few hedges, a few elms, heavy Constable-dense clouds in a wet sky, a characterless particular space. Here the image persisted but was tiny, a miniature negative, at the end of a long optic tube. What did they see, those scholars of English, what spot of time or place represented those vanished brown fields?
They had drinks in the British Council’s compound, housed behind a fortress-wall heavily patrolled by the military who, except always for their faces, resembled other militaries in other places, khaki and jungle camouflage, pistols and machine guns.
They sat in a bright evening on a lawn much sprinkled and dried by a hotter sun, amongst a herbaceous border of nameless flowers. The representative’s wife became animated on finding that Celia knew exactly the corner of the northern English cathedral city she came from, could retrace her route along the rattling river and over the great bridge, knew the suburb of new bungalows where home was. She was an infant teacher and said she would recommend the books of Beatrix Potter to anyone. Mr MacGregor’s garden, the bluebell-wood, Mrs Tiggywinkle’s hillside. Unnamed black butterflies or moths swooped across the fairy lamps in that garden, when night came suddenly ultramarine and then inky. The visiting critical theorist, Dr Wharfedale, talked to the Council Grammarian and Professor Sun about Chomsky’s transformational grammar and the hypothesis of a universal deep structure. The English language is a major growth area in our exports, said the Council-man. Of course Beatrix Potter uses rather long words, said the representative’s wife, but the pictures are lovely. Wordsworth thought the real language of men was derived from the great and permanent forms of nature amongst which the lucky peasant naturally found himself. I wish I had seen the countryside here, Celia cried, I wish I knew what it was like, even a little. “We hardly know ourselves,” said Professor Moon gently at her elbow. “Our city is terrible and without any character. If you would like it, we will take you to our Folk Village.” He had a narrow, serious face, without the genial attack of Professor Sun. “I do not know how we let it happen, this city,” he said. “But it is very solid, very durable.”
That night there was a curfew. Celia, forewarned, sat in 1840 clutching the heavy rubber torch provided by the management, along with bath cap, miniature toothpaste, sterilized oriental men’s slippers, the sayings of Buddha, the Gideon Bible, and a circle of shining miniature bottles of vodka, Bourbon, Scotch and gin. The building sighed and gave up the ghost. The digital clock-radio no longer glowed purple. The room seemed blackly elastic. The misnumbered lifts must also be stilled. She was darkly lifted up with no egress. She moved aside the heavy flutes of curtain on her box-wall and looked out. The tall towers, which had been disembodied pillars of lighted squares, became heavy canyons. The serpent of traffic became sluggish, moved sideways, lost its gloss and in two minutes was inert. The sky changed from hectic yellow ochre to darkness visible, in which the stars momentarily sprang to life before they were reaped by huge scissor-blades of white light. Through air-conditioning and soundproofing Celia heard the busy hum and rumble. Shadowy tanks, nose to tail, filled the clefts below. Helicopters clicked and whirred out of the dark, stooping down over the crawling monsters between the dark towers. Such alerts were frequent in this country. The enemy was just restrained beyond the border; it was rumoured that he had already tunnelled successfully several kilometres into the land, and could send advance troops and spies through the hidden portals of his passes, to infiltrate, to mingle, to destroy. Penalties for breaking the curfew, for glimmering lights or roving pedestrians, were severe. Celia tried to read the Sayings of Buddha by the light of the rubber torch, and was shocked, when it rolled away, by her inability to retrieve it in the black. When it was over, the liquid purple figures confidently proclaimed a time unreal in this country, unrelated to dawn or dusk, and the radio, which had resonated with rattling and repetitive military instructions, sang out a soothing Viennese waltz.
There was trouble about the visit to the Folk Village because an edict had gone out that only cars bearing even registration numbers could travel on the highway that day, so as not to impede the manoeuvres. Professor Moon had obtained a dispensation. He and a second Professor Sun drove the English along motorways that could have been in Texas, or the valley of the Rhône, in Birmingham or Kalgoorlie, no doubt also in Saskatchewan and Outer Mongolia. They saw tarmac and a few foothills. The absence of a central crash barrier, said Professor Moon, meant that the highway could be instantly converted to a landing-strip in times of trouble. For jump-jets, for fighter planes, for helicopters. The sky whined from time to time with mechanical wings. They discussed the curfew. Professor Mo
on said he had enjoyed it. Our city is lit with an infernal glow, he said. Always. And polluted, very heavily. Last night I came out of doors as I used to do in childhood and looked at the Milky Way. Normally now it is invisible through the pollution. I used to study the stars, as a boy, he said. Celia felt it would be impolite to ask how old he was, what world he had grown up in. Instead she asked how immediate was the threat against which the military manoeuvres were directed. All is uncertain, said Professor Moon. We are always threatened, by nature of our geographical position. Our country is perpetually threatened with occupation, and has been perpetually occupied. For nearly a century a foreign power ruled here and prohibited even our language. We developed patience and a kind of cunning. Myself, I believe the manoeuvres are designed to conduce in us a sense of national unity. You had the spirit of the Blitz, did you not?
Celia thought of art as a work of rescue. These fragments, said T. S. Eliot, I have shored against my ruin, speaking of various electically framed morsels of Dante, Wagner, Middleton, the Upanishads, Hamlet and so on, having equally eclectically neglected to canonize others. Realist novelists are humbler magpies of significant things. Aunt Pullet’s unworn silk bonnets, forever fair and still to be enjoyed, splendidly démodé in the 1830s seen in 1858. David Copperfield’s carving knives, Emma Woodhouse’s purchased lengths of ribbon. The Folk Village, seen from this point of view, was a work of art as well as a tourist attraction. Here was collected everything that was poised silently to vanish away, each excellent in its kind, country mansion, municipal gaol, funereal monument, working craftsmen, weavers and fanmakers, live hens in immemorial wicker hen runs, a female shaman with a sulky face sitting on a reconstituted verandah with her fortune-telling tools laid out before her. Every stone of these houses had been moved and re-erected, Professor Moon explained, every wooden slat and thatched roof. These were real houses, not ersatz, they had been lived in, they had their histories. Celia peered into spotless kitchens with huge storage jars standing darkly, with built-in boiling-pans and griddles, at floor level. Professor Moon explained the chimney. It could fill the whole kitchen-quarters with smoke on a wet or windy day. Not pleasant at all for the people in there. Only women were allowed into these quarters. No males, ever. Not even little boys? Celia asked. Only when they were very little, said Professor Moon. Was there an altar? Celia asked, thinking of something she was writing about lares and penates, about hearth spirits. The houses were graceful and bare. There were chests, carved, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, there were rolls of quilts, there were low tables and nothing else. They gave no clue to the thoughts or habits of their vanished inhabitants. Professor Moon chose not to answer Celia’s question. He moved away, a little distance, and looked away, further. You do not realize, he said, that it was in houses like these that most of our people grew up. I myself grew up in such a house. Celia was aware that she had trespassed. She persisted, briefly. And were there parts of the house into which women could not go? she asked. Certainly, certain parts, said Professor Moon, vaguely. They were walking round the house, peering in at every aperture. He made no attempt to indicate which parts these might be. Outside folk-dancers danced in weaving circles, to the tune of two little hand-drums and a huge flow of flute-song relayed on a tannoy through feathery acacialike tree boughs. They wore beautiful white linen clothes, tossing streamers of brilliantly coloured ribbons, daffodil, royal blue, puce, leaf-green. The people watching them wore blue jeans and sloganned tee shirts over boat-like plastic shoes. “Their clothes have no style,” said Professor Moon, with forceful distaste. “Those horrible shoes are completely without grace or character.” His English became more fluent, idiomatic and graceful as the afternoon went on. He bought them rice-wine cooled in an earthen flask and pillow-like white rice-cakes, mildly sweet, with a ghostly rice flavour and a weightless melting texture. He took them to the crafts’ stall where the fans and rice-bowls, horseshoes and quilts made by the visibly displayed craftsmen were sold, priced in dollars and yen. Here he picked up a kind of hexagonal wooden cage on a long spindle, and asked, did they know what this was? “No,” they said, and he told them. “This is for flying kites. When I was a boy, I was champion in our village. We competed ferociously.”
He picked the object up, as an instrumentalist will pick up a violin or a clarinet he understands, which will in his hands sing, or as a good cook will weigh this knife or that.
“We kept glass dust, for smoothness, we dipped our hands in it,” he said, miming this unimaginable gesture. Then he tossed the wooden cage into the air and caught it, turning the wooden spindle rapidly, rapidly, between elegant palms. Faster and faster it spun. He tossed and caught, faster and faster. His professorial face took on a new smile, not a polite smile, but a craftsman’s smile of pleasure, a child’s smile of surprise at skill. He smiled with closed lips and narrowed eyes, all the angular lines of his face slanting up to his composed eye corners. Celia felt delighted and excluded by his absorption. She tried to work out how a kite would be wound on this reel and failed. She summoned up an imaginary hillside full of small boys in white linen, all tossing and spinning, all smiling gravely, and above them dipping and hovering and swooping aerial fleets of dragons, suns and moons, all in the clear strong folk-colours. The visionary kites were Chinese, and the hill was Box Hill, where she flew kites with her small son. She fanned herself with her new fan, inked in soft blue on oiled creamy paper, spread on delicate wooden ribs, still smelling of the oil into which it had been dipped. She had been three days in the intermittent company of Professor Moon and knew nothing at all about him.
They were almost late, on their return from this cleanly festive ghost town, for the final banquet. Banquet is an odd word, suggesting perhaps to the English some municipal function in an industrial city where the New Left has not yet done away with robes and silver plate. The Chinese have adopted this word for their more convivial formal meals in their socialist state, where delicate flavours succeed each other with none of the brutality of paving-stone steaks and sickly chocolate-sauced pears. Milton’s desert Christ, rejecting classical learning, rejected also the Tempter’s proffered Banquet of Sense, a fantastic feast which had manifested itself from classical Mediterranean cultures through to this final Puritan flourish. The food for the symposium in English Literature was offered in an inner room in a restaurant, where the guests sat shoeless and cross-legged around a low, L-shaped table. Celia was here separated from Professor Moon who now had a shape in her mind, not of what she knew about him, but of what she was aware of not knowing, a form of absence, like a glass box under a clear light. The exhaustion of the strange came upon her, the sudden refusal of mind and senses to take in new faces, new words, new foods, new courtesies, or old ones whose meanings had shifted and become dangerous or void. Everyone smiled, there was warmth, food came and more food, long amber tentacles of salty jellyfish to be gathered delicately with fine stainless steel chopsticks whose slipperiness reminded her of childhood knitting-needles.
Her neighbour on her left was only half-visible as she concentrated on her chopsticks. He had a large round face like Professor Sun, but he was not Professor Sun, he was younger, gentler, more shy. “And what are you currently teaching?” she asked this man, gathering her forces. “English pastoral,” he told her. “From the Elizabethans to the nineteenth century.” He seemed mildly offended at the question, but Celia persisted. This was their lingua franca, Eng. Lit., pedagogy. She had not seen a student in this foreign land. She had stood in the murky sky on top of the Press Centre and had spoken, not knowing those to whom she presumed to speak. Any academic knows the hazard of verbal slippage in such situations. A slight shift in the tension of the mesh of discourse, an increase or decrease of perhaps fifty words in the selected technical vocabulary, a shift in the selection of what must be explained and what may be presumed to be understood, can wholly change the perception of the speaker — from the trenchant to the inane, from the illuminating to the déjà-vu. Now, belatedly, she sought orien
tation. They talked about Arcadia and the English Lakes, and the jellyfish was replaced by fiercely cold white cabbage in blood-red pepper sauce and vinegar. Across the table Professor Sun the second recounted his tearing desire for this dish, exiled in Buffalo, working on Joyce’s Dublin, walking the streets in search of a compatriot or a non-existent ethnic restaurant with its own casks of pickle. Dr Wharfedale, a young and uninhibited truth-seeker, was finally clearing up points of anxiety. The tower, he enquired, in the middle of the city, the tower with the red numbers, what did that refer to? That, said Professor Moon, was a symbol of national pride. It displayed the number of days left to go before the city hosted the World Games. We are very keen on gymnastics, but we never win. Our bodies appear to be the wrong shape, our legs too short, our trunks comparatively heavy, but lately, since our nourishment has improved, since we have become richer with our economic miracle, this is changing. The young have longer legs and higher hopes.