by Helen Dewitt
Five terms passed and it was time for Mods.
The night before the first exam other candidates went over the arguments for and against a single author of the Iliad and Odyssey while HC and RD sat over a chessboard with HC saying Opening middle game end game and RD saying it’s not the same and HC saying 5 minutes.
HC and RD had now come to the part of the course which concentrated on history and philosophy. HC wanted to change courses & study Arabic & dazzle the Oriental Institute, but not only had RD taken to heart the words of Fraenkel and Socrates, he had also taken to heart the words of Wilamowitz, and he said in anguish that Wilamowitz had said that the study of history and philosophy was an essential part of Altertumswissenschaft and what was he to do? HC said they should study Arabic and dazzle the Oriental Institute, but RD said the core of the subject was the exploration of valid modes of reasoning about the subject. Whether this carried weight with HC is not known. He was not one to take things to heart, but he was a sportsman, and he could not bring himself to go into a course where he would have no competition.
Seven terms went by and it was time for Greats, the last exams of the course. RD came to HC’s room. RD felt that having spent two and a half years learning valid methods of argument it was contemptible to cast them aside just as though he were a 19-year-old entrance candidate with no real training in philosophy, and on the other hand he thought he must be missing something since philosophers and historians did after all set the exams and appeared to expect the candidates to take them. He walked up and down talking about Socrates & Wilamowitz & Mommsen waiting for HC to get out the chessboard, & sure enough HC brought out his chessboard.
They began to play without a word. The timer went before RD had made his fifth move. HC set the clock back & began putting the pieces back. RD put his head on his hand.
He said: It’s not the same.
He said: Is there no END to this?
HC said: You’ll never have to take an exam again.
HC said: Well maybe just one.
What? said RD.
All Souls! said HC, who hoped to be the youngest fellow in a hundred years.
RD said: I can’t do this any more. I can’t do this to PHILOSOPHY. I can’t write some piece of rubbish in half an hour and say they MADE me do it.
HC said: Opening middle game endgame.
RD said: I can’t do this anymore. He said in anguish: What am I to do?
HC set out the game. He set the clock. RD raised his head. He stopped saying what am I to do. He played rapidly and confidently. He won in 23 moves and he said
But it’s not the same.
They played, and RD won 10 games out of 10.
He said: But it’s not the same.
5 minutes, said HC.
RD won 10 games out of 10. He did not say But it’s not the same. He did not say What am I to do?
The first exam was the Plato and Aristotle paper.
RD put on a black suit and white tie. He put on his scholar’s gown. The icebergs bore down on him. Socrates stood silent at his shoulder. He looked silently down at the paper.
Looking up he saw that the invigilator was JH, a man who had been working for the last 20 years on a book on Republic X. In those days it was possible for a man to be the finest Platonist of his generation and not publish for 20 years. There was a question on Republic X. Now RD saw what he must do.
He wrote: I am not so presumptuous as to attempt in 40 minutes what Mr. JH has not achieved in 20 years. That took a minute. The implication of the sentence, however, was that Mr. JH had been wrong to set the paper, & it took him 2 hours and 57 minutes to decide that it would be more insulting to spare a philosopher what he believed to be the truth than to hand in the notebook with this sentence on the page.
He spent the rest of the week punting on the Cherwell.
HC got the top first that year, and RD got no degree of any kind.
Now as soon as HC saw the list of vivas he knew that he had got a very good first and RD had not, because RD’s name was not on the list. There were three days of vivas after HC’s: he had three days in which to enjoy his victory.
Then the class list went up and he discovered that RD’s name was not on it. He had TRICKED HC into going on with the course with all his talk of Wilamowitz, and then he had cheated. Now the congratulations of the examiners seemed empty and stupid. HC stalked up and down shouting, he said no one would give RD a job, no one would give him teaching, he would end up working on a dictionary or an Oxford Companion, he’d get kicked off for missed deadlines, he’d end up marking A-levels and getting kicked off the board, he’d end up teaching English as a foreign language. RD was rather tired. Everyone can imagine a life’s regret for a moment of cowardice, but you could just as easily regret a moment’s courage; RD thought that everything HC said might well be true (as in fact it was), and the years after this moment of courage might make him capable of regretting it. Still, it was done.
HC stalked out of the room. He got a Fellowship at All Souls at the age of 19 but all the fun had gone out of it.
RD got a job at a crammer’s.
I said I thought a crammer was a place that helped people to pass exams.
Sibylla said Yes.
I: Wasn’t that a problem?
Sib: Well, it wasn’t a problem in one sense in that RD thought it was perfectly acceptable to take an exam to get INTO a place where you might improve your logical faculties, he just thought once your faculties were improved you shouldn’t trample underfoot what you had learned and accept an accolade for doing so, but it was kind of a problem in that the students found the chess rather hard to follow. RD would start talking about Lucretian elements in the Aeneid & go to the board & talk about developing the argument on the queenside under the impression that he was helping the students with their exam technique, or he would say Now let’s look at some basic mating positions & have trouble with discipline. So he lost the job and got another job.
HC & RD still went to Fraenkel’s classes. Afterwards they would come out into the front quadrangle at Corpus, there is a statue of a pelican on a pillar in the centre of the quad and RD would pace in anguish around the pelican. HC was getting more and more depressed. Each day he went into the Bodleian at 9:00. At 1:00 he went back to college for lunch, and at 2:15 he was back in the Bodleian. At 6:15 he went back to his college unless of course it was the day of the seminar. Sometimes he worked in the Lower Reading Room, and sometimes he called up a manuscript and worked in Duke Humfrey. There would never be anyone to compete with ever again.
He was weary of philology, weary of tracing the corruption of sounds in their written relics. He wanted to go where a language was not written. He wanted to go where all utterances died with breath.
Then he heard that there was a strange silent tribe in the desert of Kyzylkum. They refused to let anyone who was not of the tribe know its language and any member of the tribe who repeated a word in the presence of a foreigner was punished by death.
HC did some research and he eventually came to the exciting conclusion that the references to a lost silent tribe in four or five separate historical traditions might be to the same tribe which being nomadic had ranged over thousands of miles for thousands of years. He decided to find it.
He spent seven years learning Chinese and Uralic and Altaic and Slavic and Semitic languages, and at the end of his Fellowship he set off for the desert.
It was not easy to get to Kyzylkum. He tried to fly to Moscow but he could not get a visa. He tried to get over the border into Turkmenistan from Iran & was turned back. He went to Afghanistan & tried to cross the border into Uzbekistan & was turned back. Then he thought perhaps he could go to Pakistan and cross the Pamirs to Tajikistan and so trek on to Kyzylkum but he was turned back again.
Then he decided to start his quest at the other end. His theory was that the tribe ranged all the way from the Mongolian plateau to the desert of Kyzylkum and he now decided to make for Mongolia instead.
&nbs
p; He travelled to China, pretending to be a simple tourist.
HC joined a package tour to avoid suspicion. The tour included a visit to Xinjiang, a province in the far northwest of the country; his plan was to leave the group at Ürümqi and make his way to the Mongolian border. On the second day of the tour it was announced that the Xinjiang leg of the tour had been cancelled to allow more time for celebrated landscapes of art and poetry.
The group took a train to a town in the south. The buildings had posters of Chairman Mao on their sides. No one in the town had a copy of the Dream of the Red Chamber. There were no books in the town or if there were no one would tell HC. There was no jade, there were no pictures. It was an odd place he said for the children all seemed to be boys. The people there seemed to work very hard, but on a field outside the town the parents and the little boys would gather to fly kites, and these were the most beautiful kites he had ever seen. They were a brilliant red, and each had a picture of Chairman Mao on the body of the kite, or two or three characters representing one of the sayings of the Chairman. A steady wind always seemed to flow across the field, and the fiery dragons shot up into the air as soon as they were released.
He did not think he would find the silent tribe, but if he did not go forward where else was there to go? As long as he felt that he had turned his back on England he was all right, but if he turned his face to it he thought that he would turn to stone.
He pretended to be sick, and when the group went on he stayed behind.
One day he stood watching as the kites flew far overhead, the Chinese characters tossing this way and that in the air. The written language was constructed of ideograms compatible with many spoken realisations of the words & he felt that people spoke here any way they liked, while the written language flew on kites overhead. He felt at last free of philology. He thought Why should I inspect the lost silent tribe are they not just as silent if I am not there? But what was he to do if he had no quest?
He watched the kiteflyers and he saw that there was a child with no kite. The child would run now to this group now to another and be pushed away. Once the child ran by HC. It was snivelling and covered with sores and it looked different from the other children in the village. He said something and the child said something he could not understand, he thought that it must be the dialect. He said something else and the child said something else and suddenly he thought that he understood a word here and there, but if he understood them they were Turkic words made strange by the Chinese intonation. He said something in Turkish and he tried it in Karakalpak and Kyrgyz and Uighur and the child looked at him as though it understood. He asked someone if he could meet its parents and he was told it had no family. He thought that the child might come from some Turkic tribe in Xinjiang or perhaps it came from the lost silent tribe itself, but what difference did it make.
At last one day in despair he walked out of town, and he came to a cliff overlooking a valley. The floor of the valley was absolutely flat, a deep bright green. Through it curved a river, flat as a ribbon, a dull silver twisting back and forth. And from that plain thrust the sheer bare rock cliffs of mountains, each a boulder thousands of feet high breaking through the flat green.
The sky when he came there was grey, and shreds of mist snagged on the rock and floated motionless above the ground. It was the strangest and most beautiful place he had ever seen. England seemed far away, it contracted until dead Fraenkel and the pelican in the quad were tiny, the Bodleian and the lives buried there were no bigger than a postage stamp. Although there was no wind he saw that the rags of mist had moved, they hung now a yard or two from where they had been. He wanted to say something—he felt so far away. The opening of the Odyssey came to his mind. Odysseus could not rescue his companions.
They perished by their own recklessness, the fools. They ate the cattle of the Sun God who took from them their day of return, νóστιμον μαρ he thought, nostimon emar—What must I do so that I need never return? Shall I eat the cattle of the Sun?
He felt it would destroy him if he were to put himself back in the matchbox.
What must I do? he said.
The valley floor could not be seen. It was covered with a mist as thick and white as cloud. Out of the cloud rose the barren rocks. The sky had cleared above, as if a solution of air and fine rain had separated until the heavier of the two had silted the valley in thick white mist leaving the clear pure air above. The backs of the rocks were in black shadow, and at the edge of the black ran a glittering line of gold, as though each was a moon just past the new. On the summit of each was a little cluster of trees, black against the setting sun, and liquid flame welled through.
I can’t go back, he said. What shall I do?
As he sat there a great wind suddenly blew up, so that high above he could see the branches of the trees streaming in the ferocious air. From behind him in the distance he heard a great noise, as of many people shouting—and when he looked back & then up he saw a huge dragon shooting up into the darkening sky: the best kitemakers in the village had been working on it for weeks, & now it had escaped. The field where they launched the kites was far away, but in the slanting afternoon light all the figures stood out clearly: five or six were staring up at the kite which had escaped, and further back another group was struggling to haul a kite in. One person had caught the body of the kite, and another was reeling in the line.
Suddenly the wind snatched at the kite; the lineman tripped, tearing the kite from the other man’s hands; and as the kite began to lift a child ran forward and flung itself onto the frame. The kite dragged along the ground for a few feet, the tiny figure still clinging—and then the wind snatched it high into the air while the line went flying far out of reach.
Now the kiteflyers looked up in silence, while the brilliant red kite bore the child away. It sailed above HC, and when it reached the cliff a current of air tossed it high above.
The villagers stopped at the edge of the cliff. The kite began to descend. The wind snatched it this way and that, and at last hurled it at the top of one of the mountains HC had been looking at just before. The wind was blowing away from them, but in a sudden sharp twist it tossed at them a snatch of sound, the howling of a child, before wheeling away again.
The villagers looked at the mountain & HC, feeling they might now be more communicative, asked sympathetically: What is to be done?
But though he found the dialect very difficult what they seemed to be saying was that nothing could be done.
HC was sure he had not understood, but later someone explained that though of course they could request assistance it would not come and the request would count against them.
HC said: But couldn’t someone climb up and get it?
And everyone said at once that this was impossible because no one had ever climbed the mountain and anyone who tried it would die.
That settled it.
HC said at once:
I will rescue the child.
He looked up at the flaming trees and laughed, and he said:
I will eat the cattle of the Sun.
Night had fallen. The moon was the colour of a pumpkin, low on the horizon, sullen brother of the Sun. Under its baleful light the white mist glimmered, and the black of the mountains was more solid than rock.
He went back to town and he said that he needed a lot of silk. He was told that this could not be had but he kept insisting. He explained what he wanted to do and now the local people took an interest. In all the terrible times they had been through they had kept their interest in kites, and almost everyone in the town took an interest in aerodynamics and in what could be done with the silk. He gave hard currency to the right people and he was given 100 or so square metres of brilliant yellow silk, and a woman sat up all night sewing it for him on an old black Singer with a foot pedal.
In the morning the mist had cleared. The green fields ran straight to the base of each rock, unbroken by any path, and so he walked straight across a field to th
e wall of rock. The air was still & the occasional cries of the child could be heard.
HC had done some climbing as a boy. The fact that he had climbed before meant that he had some idea of what he was taking on; sometimes he thought he could do it, and sometimes he knew that he knew the form his death would take.
He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.
After an hour his hands were scraped and there was a shooting pain in his shoulder. His face was scraped on one side where it was against the rock, and a trickle of blood and sweat ran by the corner of one eye and could not be wiped away.
Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimetre and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimetre and the toe of his other boot a centimetre.
For ten hours he moved up the face of the rock centimetre by centimetre. He looked neither up nor down. But in the tenth hour he put a boot up a centimetre and as his head rose a centimetre the green leaf of a vine dangled by his nose. He looked up and the fringe of the top was a few feet above him. Still obstinately, though his hands were bloody and his face was bloody he climbed centimetre by centimetre.