Shikasta
Page 22
The Church is the centre of the occasion, but all the village is decorated: shops, the bar, the central square. And also the homes of the villagers, who have never relinquished their own rights in the matter.
Since the last report by Agent 9, there is a new development. On the night before the main event there are fireworks and dancing in the square and the streets leading away from the square. The tourists are always in time for this - to them - most interesting part of the festival, contrasting sharply, in their good clothes and the avidity that is their mark, with the local people, who observe their rich guests with good humour not unmixed with irony.
This night of dancing and drinking is conducted by the secular authorities but the priests keep it within their grasp by appearing at sundown on the steps of the church, with emitters of sweet smoke, and songs of a solemn kind. Nearly everyone is up all night, dancing and singing, but at the first sign of daylight, they are supposed to be in their places in the church, in abasement and in fawning postures, to be threatened and admonished by the priests.
The church "services" continue all morning, the people taking each other's place in batches, for the building is too small to hold them all at once.
Exactly at midday a troupe of priests, all decked out in every variety of finery and ornament, unlocks a door at the back of the church and brings out the Child. This is a gaudy statue without pretensions to realism, with staring eyes, highly coloured hair and skin, and smothered in laces and stuffs of all kinds. This figure is placed in a small litter covered with flowers and greenery and carried out of the building by a team of children chosen by the priests. It is carried three times around the square (which is no more than a small dusty space that has a few trees around it) by the children who are dressed no less fancifully than the image, while they, the villagers and the priests, chant and sing. The statue is put on an elevated place in the porch of the church, guarded by priests, and the singing continues all afternoon until sunset.
Meanwhile, all the children of the village, including the bearers of the litter, are lined up by their parents under the orders of the priests, and are hustled forward two by two past the statue while the priests "bless" them. When this is over they are rewarded by a feast of cakes and sweet drinks as fine as the poor village can provide.
While even a few years ago this festival was entirely for the children, the economic pressure of the tourists has operated so that there are entertainments and food and drink for the adults as well. This year, for the first time, there were television cameras, and because of this, everything was more elaborate than usual. When the statue has been taken in and put away into its cupboard, dancing begins again, and continues until midnight.
This is a pleasant enough festival, and offers much needed relief to people whose lives are hard indeed.
It has not become much more elaborate since the report of Emissary 76, four hundred years ago. But we must expect that while tourism lasts, every year will show new feats of imagination.
There is no use left in this festival from our point of view.
I could not prevent myself wondering as I observed these lively (but well-policed) scenes, what would happen if I were able to stand forward and relate the real origins of the festival.
"Over a thousand years ago, a visitor came to this village. The Northwest fringes were backward, regarded as savage by other, more developed areas - such as those on the far side of the great inland sea you call the Mediterranean. These advanced cultures often sent people northwards, in various disguises, to wander from place to place in order to impart techniques and ideas that could lighten the appalling conditions. This particular visitor came with three young pupils, who were learning from him the art of bringing more advanced ideas to backward areas. Arriving at this bitterly poor place, they discovered that there were no softer influences here at all, nothing for miles around, except for some monks who lived sequestered from the lowly concerns of the villagers.
"The atmosphere of the village was appropriate, and the villagers ready to listen to tales about civilisation whose whereabouts they could not really understand, since they knew as little of geography as they did of their own origins - and future.
"The visitors stayed unobtrusively in the village for many weeks. They imparted information of a practical kind, about cleanliness, the usefulness of bathing in avoiding illness, the necessity of clean water supplies, the care of the sick, elements of medicine, all things these poor people knew very little of. When a few of the more intelligent had taken in enough to be able to pass it on, there came information on crafts like distilling, dyeing, the preservation of foodstuffs for famines and hard times, and certain techniques of husbandry and agriculture that were new to them.
"And then these visitors began to tell the villagers, in simple terms, sometimes in the form of tales, stories, songs, a little of their history, and what this meant for them - what they really were and could become.
"These people whose struggle to feed themselves, to keep themselves clothed and housed, was as much as they could sustain, heard the news without resistance, and this was already a great deal, for people whose lives are so close to an edge may very often simply refuse to listen: even good news, a message of hope, may be too much for them to bear.
"In the evenings as the light went and the villagers came back from their work in the fields to eat and rest, our visitors would sit in this place, the square - which was very like what it is now - and they talked, and told stories and sang.
"There would be smoke rising from the huts and houses. Children played in the dust. Ribby and ravening dogs scratched or scuffled. Skinny donkeys stood about.
"The villagers sat quietly in the half-dark. Women held their infants in their arms.
"A woman was sitting on a stone, rocking a child and humming to it.
"The older man asked if they might take the baby from her for a short while, and she assented. He sat with the baby on his knee. It was drowsy and blinking, and he hushed his voice so that it might not be roused, and all the villagers had to lean forward to listen. He asked them to regard this child, which was one they all knew, was not set apart in any way from others, a child like any other, whose life would be like everyone's here, no different in any way, just as his children's would be, and his children's children...
"At which the woman leaned forward to say apologetically that this child was a girl.
"But this child, went on the visitor, was not what she seemed - no, it did not matter in the least if she was a girl, for a girl was as good as her brother... Ignoring the slight restlessness that occurred at this point, he went on. This child, girl or boy, was not what she seemed. No, what mattered was that she - or he - was the equal of anybody in the village, or in the villages around about, or even in the big town (which few of them had visited, though they had heard about it) or in the towns across the seas (which they had heard about, for a boy from the village had become a sailor and returned to tell them amazing and improbable tales which on the whole they thought it safer to disbelieve) or anybody, anywhere at all. They did not know it, but this village, which seemed to them so large, containing their lives and everything they knew, was only a tiny part of a great world. They must multiply this village by as many times as there were wheat grains in that field there, and the great towns by as many times as there were stones on that hillside - the light had almost gone, the moon was rising, and the hillside glimmered with white stones. The villagers were sitting silent, listening, listening... by now they trusted these people who had arrived 'like angels' among them, had taught them so many useful things which had already proved themselves. They all felt that amazing and wonderful things were being told to them, but it was all so difficult, so hard to understand. When the next town was the limit of their imaginations, how to believe in many such, and in cities a thousand times larger...
"There were cities in the world... cities of people as many as stars in the sky. People like angels, for it must not be thought that
these visitors of theirs were in any way remarkable or out of the ordinary.
"The villagers listened, trying hard.
"There were cities in the world where people had all they wanted to eat and more. They had clothes, enough to warm them and keep them dry. Their houses were many times the size of these houses here, in the village. Yes, all this was true. But what mattered was that there was space and time in the lives of these wonderful people to learn all kinds of things, not just cheese-making and how to keep a cow from falling ill of the stagger-disease. No, people had room in their lives to study, to think, to dream. They knew all kinds of extraordinary and true things - yes, true, true, what was being said tonight was true.
"These people were able, for instance, to study the movements of the stars, which were not so far away as might be thought here, in this village, or in other poor villages. No, each star up there was a world, each one, made of substances everyone here knew as well as he, she, knew their hands, or feet, or the hair on their heads. Those stars up there, they were made of earth - like this; and of rock - like this. And of water. And of fire, yes, of fire swirling and turning.
"Next evening, and the next, and the next, our visitors sat, and borrowed a child from the crowd, any child, insisting that it did not matter whose child, or whether a boy or a girl, or what age, and, holding this child before the people, they insisted that this child, if it were to be taken away - no, no, that was not the intention (because the crowd suddenly stirred and muttered), the child was sitting here on this knee, in these arms, just to remind them of something - if this child or any other was taken away and brought up in one of these fabulous cities where people did not have to spend every minute in labour, but had time to learn, to study, then this child would be just the same as those. And if he, or she, were taken off on a visit to - let us say that little star up there? Yes! That one! Or that one! - then...
"The people were laughing as they looked up, their mouths falling open as they gazed at the heavens, which on this evening were floury and thick with stars.
"Yes, that one. If this baby sleeping here was taken off to that star there, then he would be a star baby, would become a giant perhaps, who knew? Or grow wings, and feathers - who could tell?
"They laughed. Great shouts of laughter went up. But it was a marvelling and trustful laughter.
"Or become a child who could live in water, or in fire, perhaps!
"And this is the point, you see, this is always the point which they must remember: that every child has the capacity to be everything. A child was a miracle, a wonder! A child held all the history of the human race, that stretched back, back, further than they could imagine. Yes, this one here, little Otilie, she had in the substance of her body and her thoughts everything that had ever happened to every person of mankind. Just as a loaf of bread holds in it all the substance of all the wheat grains that have gone into it, mingled with all the grain of that harvest, and the substance of the field that has grown it, so this child was kneaded together by, and contained, all the harvest of mankind.
"These words and ideas, that were like nothing these people had ever heard or imagined, came into them, evening after evening, and always a child was held up in front of them.
"Remember, remember, that after a long time, not in your time, or your children's, or even your grandchildren's - but it will come, this time - your labours, and your hardships, and the burden of your lives, all will be redeemed, will bear fruit, and the children of this village and of the world will become what they have it in them to be... remember this, remember it... it will be just as if men came down from that little star there, twinkling away above those dark trees, yes, that one! and suddenly filled this poor village which is so full of hardship and of trouble, with good things and with hope. Remember this child here is not what he seems, is more, is everything, and holds within her, or within him, all the past and all the future - remember it.
"One morning very early a girl came running to the hut, where the four men slept, and knocked hard on the door saying breathlessly that she worked in the monastery as a servant in the kitchen, and the monks had heard of these visitors, and they had sent a messenger to 'the king himself,' and soldiers were coming. Yes, they were on their way...
"When the soldiers came, there were no strangers in the village, they had gone away into the dangerous forests leaving behind them a pattern of stones on the hillside, a necklace around a child's neck, some designs drawn with coloured clays and earth on the walls of the only stone building in the village, which happened to be a storehouse. The villagers said that it was a false rumour, the talk of a foolish girl who wanted to make herself important, for of course it was the girl herself who had talked in the monks' kitchen, and then had become afraid of the results.
"When the soldiers had gone, a band of monks arrived.
"They visited the village perhaps once a year. They despised the villagers, though they were not much better themselves, being almost as poor, and not much less ignorant. This was when men, and women, might crowd together in shelters of various kinds calling themselves monks and nuns, as protection against the brutalities of the time.
"The monks had been instructed by the soldiers in the king's name to make sure undesirable vagrants did not shelter in the villages.
"This the monks impressed on the villagers, and returned to their stone rabbit warrens over the mountain.
"The villagers agreed with everything that was said to them.
"But they were as if stars had come closer and lived in their homes, their lives, and then suddenly disappeared. They kept what had happened close and secret, treasuring the crafts they had been taught, which soon spread among the villages around about - and even more, what had been told them.
"They would take a child up, and hold it, and repeat to each other what they could remember.
"None of the people who had been in the village in those days ever forgot. The children who had been held in the arms of the strangers were pointed out for all their lives. Something truly amazing had happened, and every one of them knew it, and soon the villages nearby knew it, too.
"The children of the children who had been held up before the little crowd in the village square kept a little of that quality in them or about them.
"But now it was not remembered exactly what had been said, or done, and who it was who had come - angels, was it?
"One evening, after a hot, dusty summer's day, when people sat around in their doorways, while the children ran about, the dogs scratched, and some ribby donkeys tried to find fresh grass where they would find none for weeks yet, they were saying: Do you remember? - No, it was not like that - Yes, my mother said - But that was not what - when a man who was the son of one of the baby girls held up before everyone picked up his own son and held him prominently on his knee and said, 'Let us try and remember exactly what was said, and then we will repeat it, and we will do it regularly, so that we will always remember.'
"Every year, this man held up his child before everybody, and they repeated to each other what they remembered, and looked up at the skies, laughing and shaking their heads. 'That star there!' 'No, that star there!' 'People made of fire!' 'Or of feathers!'
“This was kept secret, as many things were kept apart from the monks and the soldiers, but of course the ceremony came to be known. At first the monks forbade it and punished, but this made no difference. Every Year, on a certain evening, in one of the homes of the village, a child was chosen, and held up, while they repeated the phrases they had decided must be remembered.
“By now much of this sounded like the envious talk of the poor about the rich anywhere on Shikasta - or anywhere else, for that matter.
" 'I am as good as he, my child is as good as that rich man's, dress me up in her clothes and I'd be a fine lady, too.'
"Then monks and soldiers came and several people were taken away, and were put to death for rebellion, talk against the king, disobedience to the monks.
"The monks
then instituted, on orders from above, the Ceremony of the Child, which took place every year, and which they conducted. A small church was built in the village, which previously had had none, and this was afterwards built and rebuilt many times. The Child was the Christ-child, the monks said, but the ceremony never lost its roots in that visit so long ago, for there was still force enough to make the people hold stubbornly to the knowledge that they, not the monks, had been blessed, that they, not the monks, had been shown the Child. By whom, though? By what? People who came from the stars? No, no, that could not be. People from the moon? What nonsense! But there had been someone, or several, and these had come, and had promised, and been chased away...
"And one day they would come again, and then there would be an end to these burdens and this labour and this terrible hardship which holds us all down in the dust and prevents us from rising...
"And this, good people, and visitors, and priests and tourists, and campers, and people from the neighbouring villages, this was the origin of the festival which you hold every year. This is how it was. And now I shall run for my life...."
[During the course of Johor's transmissions in this phase of his embassy he supplied information of a factual kind not requested by us believing (and he was not without reason) that our Colonial Service does not always appreciate certain local difficulties. The long view of planetary maintenance and development does not need, nor can depend upon, the sympathies, the empathies of the near, the partial, views. Yet to find oneself on Shikasta (two of the Archivists responsible for this note have themselves undergone the Shikastan experience) is to become affiliated with powerful emotions which have to be shed on leaving. We submit this piece, and another, believing that students may find them of use in more ways than one. Archivists.]