Mrs. Jarvis hailed a pedicab. In the pedicab she put up her parasol—it was a red one of glazed papier-mâché, the kind sold by hawkers on street corners during the rainy season—and I wondered if she did this for protection from the sun or from the beggars who plaintively detained us at every turn. Once the roofs of a temple were pointed out, once a desolate park surrounding an unkempt shrine, but there was no suggestion that we should visit either. The road became less commercial and less crowded, and turned at last toward the river.
The Jarvises lived with the European community of Canton, on the island of Shameen in the Pearl River. This “island,” which had long ago been formed of a mud bank reinforced with granite, lay in a bend of the river and was at one point so closely connected to the bank that the bridge there seemed to be spanning a mere moat—a token separation of East and West. The Japanese, Mrs. Jarvis informed me, had filled in the moat with earth when they occupied Canton during the war, but it had since been dug out again. By whom, I wondered, and on whose orders? It was a strange time to reactivate a moat.
Shameen was forbidden to traffic. Mrs. Jarvis and I crossed the causeway on foot and walked down a shaded road, past sober Western buildings, none large but all substantial. I remember the silence, the freshness of the trees after the squalid streets we had just come through, and the immediate sense of boredom—for here once more was the enclosed colonial life, in this case divided by a moat from the uproar of reality. Perhaps it is too much to say that this atmosphere was only emphasized by the fact that the British Consulate had recently been burned. It had been burned, not as a manifestation of universal change but in what might be called the old spirit—as a reprisal for a local incident involving disputed territory near Hong Kong. Roofless, its gray façade still stood, mounted on wide steps and surmounted by a charred “Honi soit…” The incident, in retrospect, has the antiquated air of a self-contained protest that had little reference to the world in general.
Mrs. Jarvis’s apartment was on the third floor of a small compound, and looked onto a courtyard of trees. A houseboy let us in, but there was no sound within the house and little light. Hot sunshine came dimly through rattan blinds. Ceiling fans revolved in every room.
A narrow bed had been made up for me in Mrs. Jarvis’s own bedroom; it was, she explained, the coolest room in the flat. A mosquito net was looped above her double bed. At the far side of the bed, on a night table, lay a pipe and a copy of Forever Amber. These were the first—and last—details I ever learned about the person of Mr. Jarvis.
The living room, where we had tea, had been densely furnished with camphor chests and with blackwood chairs and tables, among which a jagged incision had been made by means of a folding screen. The walls were covered with photographs, and the floor with mats of some glossy reed. The room opened into a second salon, more gloomy than the first, where the dark outline of a grand piano could be dimly seen, sailing without lights like a ship at war.
Mrs. Jarvis brought photographs over to the tea table and identified them. This was Jeremy, shown here in his flight sergeant’s uniform but now in a London bank; that was Philip, studying to be an engineer; and here was Janice in color, a rosy version of her mother, charming beneath her nurse’s cap.
To the casual observation that she must miss them, Mrs. Jarvis responded with silence and a motion of the head that shook back tears.
The evening, like the afternoon, was an oddly domestic one to offer a visitor in a strange and ancient city. We passed it sitting by the screened windows when the blinds had been drawn up to let in the dusk, Mrs. Jarvis writing letters and I reading Rebecca, which I had found in a bookcase. I was struck by the loneliness of Mrs. Jarvis’s life. Was it different when Mr. Jarvis was there? Did this gloomy drawing room ever resound to the hearty (or even sinister) laughter of cronies? Was it ever fully lit of occupied? One somehow felt not.
Mrs. Jarvis kept early hours. It was strange to be going to sleep at ten o’clock in the very heart of that most sleepless of cities, stranger still to be camped, as it were, in this immaculate clearing of a man-made jungle. While the city fought for its jostling, noisy, desperate existence, Mrs. Jarvis and I sat up in our white beds reading, the fan turned off lest we catch—unlikely word—cold, a thermos of boiled water beside each of our beds. Before putting out the light, Mrs. Jarvis got up and adjusted her mosquito net so that it fell right around the bed. She put lotion on her lands. She did not say she was glad to have me there or that I reminded her of Janice, both these things being apparent. She merely kissed me and climbed back beneath her stifling tent.
My situation, as I look back on it, seems quite extraordinary, but at the time I found it less so. At the age of sixteen one expects almost anything of life, including much more straightforward drama than is likely to materialize; for all I knew, the position in which I found myself, if not commonplace, was a fair sample of what one might reasonably expect. It would please me to be able to say, in retrospect, that I had begun to feel repugnance for the object of my visit, but I think this was not the case. I was not an unduly callous child, but scruples of this sort develop against the background of experience and are not, I imagine, commonly found in adolescents in a spontaneous form. Mrs. Jarvis was a parent—that is to say she was of parental age and aspect, and that her touchingly maternal attitude toward me (illustrated even by the presence of my bed in her room) confirmed her in this role; I was still at an age that views almost any deception of a parent as not only permissible but even essential to mutual survival. Above all, I was conditioned by a wartime childhood to think of such missions as mine in terms not of violation and duplicity but of honor and even valor.
I make these points not to excuse myself but to explain what follows in its true light—as it really was, an insight into my own character. As I lay that night in Canton in my hot little bed it became perfectly obvious to me that, whatever revelations there might be concerning the Jarvis household, I was not the one to make them; that whatever astute question might bring forth an avalanche of significant detail, I was not the one to ask it; that I had no aptitude for such a task, and that were I to remain a week, a fortnight, a month in the Jarvis ménage, I would be none the wiser. This discovery about myself, far from bringing any satisfaction, was dark with the sense of failure. My desire to accomplish my mission and ingratiate myself with my superiors was very great; the prospect of returning empty-handed cast a pall of desperation over the whole experience. It now seemed to be repeating, in some way I could not determine, the characteristics of the Van Heutz affair—in which I had displayed an inability to consider all the possibilities. Wondering what the missing possibilities might be in this case, I fell asleep.
The following morning I sat on the living-room floor and read Rebecca. The weather, very usual for the time of year, was an alternation of glowering sunshine and sudden downpour that sent up a steamy odor of vegetation from the garden. The Jarvis’s apartment had its own contrasting smell—a shuttered smell of mildew and insect spray, of furniture polish and face powder, the smell of colonial houses in the Orient. There was about this, as about the apartment in general, something so true to form, so representative of the British community, as practically to exonerate the Jarvises there and then from any suggestion of foul play. Someone operating against his country’s interests would, one imagined, hardly have found it possible to align himself so uncompromisingly with its attributes—might even have introduced a note of interest, some telltale innovation of taste or atmosphere. Such conditions as those in which the Jarvises lived could not be reproduced by contrivance; their most outstanding feature was their complete lack of premeditation.
In the afternoon we took the ferry some distance up the river to visit friends of Mrs. Jarvis. “They are Germans,” she told me. By this time I was sunk into a despondency from which not even the promising word “Germans” could rouse me, and when she added “Missionaries,” it was no more than I expected.
The Pearl River, which at Canton is
approaching its estuary, is of a precariously alluvial color and a consistency sometimes closer to that of flowing land than water. Before it reaches the sea, the river must in fact pass through a narrow, steeply banked channel, but here at Canton one can easily imagine that it has completed its course and that the ocean is at hand, so great is the sense of a harbor. On this illusory harbor, dense suburbs of sampans rose and fell with the river, so thickly gathered that they seemed to be swarming ashore and to have mingled with the dun-colored habitations on land. Families had even made temporary settlements on the rafts formed by logs moored at the docks of timberlands. Our ferry, a game and grimy little affair, kept to a central channel more or less cleared for river traffic, and soon left all this behind.
Mrs. Jarvis’s friends lived within sight of the river, in a straggling, almost rural suburb. They were a white-haired couple, simple, resigned, and kind, who had spent most of their lives in China. They talked of change, and of what it had been like to live in Canton throughout the Japanese occupation (during which they had, embarrassingly, not been interned like the rest of one’s European acquaintance). Their house was set in a curious little plot of land, almost a farm, where there were vegetable gardens, a chicken coop, and a small orchard. The house itself was wooden and rather run-down; the porch on which we sat had a frieze of wooden fretwork and was floored by uneven boards, long unpainted. The place had an inconsequential, forgotten air, like the provincial setting of a Russian novel, so that one’s eyes constantly wandered toward the river for confirmation of one’s own existence. After tea, the old man fell asleep in his chair. We took our leave in whispers, and the ferry carried us back to Shameen.
In the end, I suppose, the prolonged hush of the weekend got the better of me. Or possibly, since I had come to Canton for revelations and no one else had provided them, I felt an urge to do so myself. That evening, when Mrs. Jarvis and I sat down by the windows, I talked a great deal. Her very reticence invited confidences, a vacuum to be filled, and I told her about my attachments and amusements—whom I knew, in fact, and where I went. I think I even told her about my school days. That is stopped short of enlightening her about my presence in her house may have been due to good luck rather than discretion—for although she was a sympathetic listener, she saw no reason to postpone her bedtime. As on the previous evening, we were in bed by ten.
It was Feng who took me to the plane the following morning. Mrs. Jarvis and I said goodbye to one another at the Shameen causeway. We promised to be in touch soon, and she gave me Rebecca to read on the plane. She asked Feng to take good care of me—which, after his fashion, he did, driving me frantically to the airport and seeing me safely on board the famous plane.
I did not see Mrs. Jarvis again, although we exchanged a letter or two, for the Jarvises moved to Manila a few months later, taking with them their blackwood and camphor trappings from Canton. Perhaps they are living there still.
My employers showed understanding about my lack of success. Perhaps their expectations had not been great, or they were relieved that I had not proved troublesome. In any event, after the first report, no inquiries were made of me and I was allowed to go on with my war-map in peace. I did not, of course, say that I had failed; I tried to convey a sense of mystery.
PAPYROLOGY AT NAPLES
Over thirty years ago, the Italian poet Eugenio Montale hoped—unavailingly, as he knew—for at least one Italian city of silence, which, immune to the profitable hubbub of current attractions, would allow visitors serene contemplation of its beauty and antiquity. Naples is far from silent. Yet the city’s apparent unconcern with tourism is possibly part of a larger Neapolitan indifference to processed “event” as contrasted with distinct occasion. When it chooses, Naples can meet an occasion in resplendent style. And at such moments it is as though in a moldering theatre a curtain rises on a solemn and beautiful scene whose actors move with complete assurance and whose charm and majesty pervade the audience itself. It was in this spirit that Naples, last spring, gave hospitality in a series of historical settings to a gathering peculiarly congenial to the city’s temperament and story.
A novice attending the Seventeenth International Congress of Papyrology during that alternately hot and stormy week of May might not have expected to find in the five hundred participants the animated and generally youthful assembly—of men and women in almost equal numbers—who discoursed on themes derived from the ancient writings that form their life study. Their discussions ranged from the most consequential events of the ancient world to the humblest details of its daily life: from Homeric texts to the salt tax; from the epigrams of imperial Rome to the composition of a remote Roman garrison; from the price of slaves in the second century before Christ to the installation of Egyptian bishops five centuries later; from ancient musical notation to the tax exemption enjoyed by acolytes of the crocodile god. The names of Plato and Epicurus, of Simonides and Menander, of William Hamilton and Joseph Banks were familiarly invoked as speakers moved from one chosen millennium to another.
Presentations were brief and intense; questions in themselves revealing. (A number omitted from an arithmetic lesson by a forgetful schoolchild of ancient Egypt drew the inquiry “Was the number in Roman or in Ptolemaic?” and the response “In Ptolemaic.”) A Greek text in Latin characters, or a Latin text in Greek, posed special difficulties, as did the dating of ostraca. Formidable erudition was imparted with an amiability whose very disclaimers were stylish (“I am not myself a demoticist”). Papyrologists from virtually all countries of Western Europe, and from the Middle East and the United States, delivered talks, without interpretation, in Italian, English, German, or French. A sprinkling of other participants had travelled from Canada, from Australia, from Argentina to present their papers. The presence of East European and Soviet scholars (whose expenses, in case of need, are guaranteed through the International Association of Papyrologists for attendance at these triennial meetings) was apparently precluded by their governments, in pursuance of a recurrent pattern; and this offense against humanity and scholarship was formally deplored by the congress in its closing motions.
Papyrology—a word that, taken literally, would refer to the medium rather than the message—properly designates the study of papyri written in Greek or Latin, papyri in Egyptian script being considered a branch of Egyptology. The vast preponderance of extant classical papyri derive from Egypt—and are in Greek, since Greek remained the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean from the time of Alexander the Great until the close of the Roman Empire. Throughout that period of a thousand years, immense quantities of papyrus shipped from Egypt, where the material was exclusively produced, supplied the needs of Europe. (As late as the seventh century, according to a surviving document, Egyptian papyrus was being procured by Frankish Gaul.) The manufacture of rag paper, long practiced in China and conveyed by the Arabs to the Western world, became usual in Europe only in the Middle Ages.
Use of the papyrus reed by the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations as a device for receiving and retaining script so proliferated as to leave, in that resistant medium, a multitude of surviving documents. In the age of the Antonines, as Gibbon tells us, “Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on the banks of the Rhine and Danube,”1 and the literary legacy was accompanied by detailed records of empires, communities, and individual lives. Failure of the Egyptian papyrus crop could mean to the Roman world a paralysis of commerce and affairs of state, and suspension of work for innumerable scribes who carried on the enormous labor of transcription. Many of the scribes were, like the father of the Emperor Diocletian, literate slaves; while the cultivated members of Roman society commemorated literacy, as had the Egyptians before them, by occasionally displaying in portraits their diverse writing materials—which, in addition to papyrus, included parchment, wax tablets, and board. (In the fifth century, St. Augustine felt obliged to apologize to a correspondent for a letter written on vellum rather than papyrus.2)
&nb
sp; The huge deposits of Greek papyri recovered in Egypt during the late nineteenth century by foreign archeologists and clandestine local diggers dramatically extended the scope and nature of papyrology, and transformed the study of ancient history. Significant new discoveries of ancient writings—such as the leathern Dead Sea Scrolls, or the first surviving complete play by Greek poet Menander (who, by a pleasing irony, appears in a frescoed depiction at Pompeii, manuscript in hand)—continue to fire the public as well as the scholarly imagination, for written evidence from the human past exerts human fascination. In this regard, as with much else at Naples, the city’s associations are peculiarly dramatic—from the narrow survival of Virgil’s epic exaltation of the Neapolitan ambience to the systematic burning by the Germans in the Second World War of capital portions of the city’s ancient archive. Through more than twenty centuries of Neapolitan turmoil, the greatest writers have emerged to report the city’s story with thrilling immediacy. The contemporary historian Roberto Pane (himself, at eighty-six, a Neapolitan legend) once drew my attention to a curious literary “pairing” of two cataclysmic events at Naples described in celebrated letters by two men of genius—the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, recounted to Tacitus by the younger Pliny; and the destruction of the port of Naples in the deluge of 1343, magnificently related by Petrarch, within hours of the occurrence, in a letter to his friend Cardinal Giovanni Colonna.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 18