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The Tartar Steppe
Thế
là bèn ra Vũng Tầu, thuê thuyền đi một tua, và quả là gặp con K thật.
Con quái
vật cũng già khòm, sắp đi, nó thều thào bảo, tao có viên ngọc ước quí,
chờ gặp
mày để trao, nó đây này... Ui
chao Gấu lại nhớ đến Big Minh, thều thào, tao chờ chúng mày để bàn giao
viên
ngọc quí Miền Nam, và con K bèn biểu, tao lấy rồi, cám ơn lòng tốt của
mày! Doãn
Quốc Sĩ, có chuyện Sợ Lửa, tương tự. Đây là câu chuyện một anh chàng
sinh ra
đời là bị thầy bói nguyền chớ có đến gần lửa. Thế rồi, một ngày đẹp
trời, thèm
lửa quá, bèn đến gần nó, và ngộ ra một điều, sao mà nó đẹp đến như thế. Thế
là về, và chết! Gấu
cũng thấy lửa rồi. Và đang sửa soạn về... Sự
thực, Gấu không gặp lửa, mà gặp… xác của Gấu, trôi lều bều trên dòng
Mékong,
lần tá túc chùa Long Vân, Parksé, chờ vuợt sông qua trại tị nạn Thái
Lan. Gấu
đã kể chuyện này nhiều lần rồi. Như nhiều cuốn sách yêu thích,
cuốn của Buzzati tôi đọc thuở mới
lớn, câu chuyện của Drogo, một sĩ quan trẻ được phái đi trấn giữ“Đồn
Xa”, ở tận
mép bờ sa mạc Tác Ta, và năm này qua tháng nọ, anh bị ám ảnh bởi cái
chuyện là,
phải chứng tỏ mình là một tên lính xứng đáng trong cuộc chiến đấu chưa
hề xẩy
ra, với rợ Tác Ta. The Tartar
Steppe Similar to
other "end of the world" places-Finisterre, Land's End, Tierra del
Fuego-Newfoundland has the quality of standing outside ordinary time.
St.
John's has something of the Fort in Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar
Steppe
(which I reread on my return flight): a place that seems impossible to
leave
but also impossible to reach, a place so anchored in its own routine
that
nothing from the outside can touch it. Maybe that is why I found St.
John's so
appealing. Favorite
cities: • Venice • Hobart • Madrid • Edinburgh • Bologna • Istanbul • Poitiers • Selestat • Oslo • Bogota • Tiradentes • Algiers • St. John's Like so many
of my favorite books, Buzzati's is one that I first read during my
adolescence:
the story of Drago, a young man posted to "the Fort" on the edge of
the so-called Tartar Steppe, who over the years becomes obsessed with
proving
himself a soldier in battle with the never materializing Tartars. The
Fort is
an uneasy haven; a complicated system of passwords controls its entry
and exit.
I remember feeling (I feel it again now) the terror of being caught in
Drogo's
nightmare of daily secrets-secrets entrusted to only one commanding
officer,
who might lose his memory or his way. The web of absurd rules and the
threat of
an invisible enemy echoed then all the frustrations and helplessness of
adolescence; now it echoes all the frustrations and helplessness of
more-than-middle age. Buzzati's
Fort exists within the concentric circles of its own rituals; it is a
magical
place that locks out time. It is not that time has stopped here but
that, even
more horribly, it continues at its own pace, distancing the Fort from
the rest
of the cosmos. In a place like this, everything inside you wants to
move away;
everything outside you keeps you back. There is a
memorable passage in the sixth chapter, describing Drago in his sleep
dreaming
of the seemingly never-ending journey to the Fort, which he cannot
imagine.
"Is it far yet? No, you have to cross the river down below there, climb
those green hills .... Another ten miles-people will say-just over that
river
and you'll be there. Instead you never reach the end." I wonder if this
is
what Alejandra Pizarnik (who certainly had read the novel) had in mind
when she
wrote that poem I love remembering: "And it is always the garden of
lilies
on the other bank of the river. If the soul asks, is it far? you shall
answer:
on the other bank of the river, not this one but that." Compared to
the rain in Newfoundland, the winter rain in France feels warm. Drogo needs
to believe that the Tartars exist and that they pose a threat, so that
he can
long for the chance to fight them. He needs to believe in the Enemy. In the paper
last week: against the decision of the United Nations, eight European
leaders
have given their signed approval to Bush-including Vaclav Havel, whom I
so
admired. Maybe, now that the Communist threat has vanished, he needs to
believe
in some other Enemy. Buzzati and
Kafka (I): Perhaps it is not only impossible to achieve justice.
Perhaps we
have even made it impossible for a just man to persevere in seeking
justice. Drogo is
aware that time will not stop, that time in the Fort is made of
consecutive
present moments and that he is a different man in each of those
moments. In one
of these he wishes he had never come, in another he accepts his
condition, in
yet a third he hopes he will be a warrior on the battlefield, in a
fourth he
realizes that none of these present moments will continue to be
"now." He describes his mother's attempt "to preserve the time
of his childhood" by shutting up his room, and adds, "She was
mistaken in believing that she could keep intact a certain state of
happiness
which had vanished for ever, that she could hold back the flight of
time, that
if she reopened doors and windows when her son returned, things would
be as
before." My first
sense of time passing: age six or seven, returning to our house after
the
holidays and finding that not everything was exactly the same. On the
flight back from St. John's I made these lists: On the theme
of time suspended: • Bioy
Casares, "The Perjury of the Snow" • James
Hilton, Lost Horizon • Kobo Abe,
Woman in the Dunes • Perrault,
"Sleeping Beauty" • Washington
Irving, "Rip Van Winkle" • Alfonso el
Sabio, the fable of the singing bird that makes a hundred years seem
like a few
minutes, in Las Partidas On places
that cannot be left: • Leon Bloy,
"The Captives of Longjumeau" • Bunuel,
The Exterminating Angel • Sartre,
Huis Clos • Hans
Christian Andersen, "The Snow Queen" • Tennyson,
"The Lotos-Eaters" On places
that cannot be reached: • Lord
Dunsany, "Carcassonne" • Andre
Dhotel, Le pays où l'on n'arrive jamais • Sir Thomas
Bulfinch, My Heart's in the Highlands • Book of
Genesis, the Promised Land (for Moses) • Kurt
Weill, "Youkali" • Kafka, The
Castle Buzzati
notes that, from the very beginning of his writing career, people heard
Kafka's
echoes in his work. As a consequence, he said, he felt not an
inferiority
complex but "an annoyance complex." And as a result, he lost any
desire to read Kafka's work. I've just
discovered that Lord Byron's dog, Boatswain (for whom he composed a
moving
epitaph), was born in Newfoundland. The
passwords to get in and out of the Fort are contingent on time. Because
they
change daily, any soldier who forgets them is in danger of being left
outside
forever. Coded words must regulate every soldier's existence. The coded
language of the military, the conventional language of war, attempts to
posit
the world in an arbitrary and clear-cut context. Without it, conflict
would be impossible. Buzzati's
method of passwords joins Bush's vocabulary of unambiguous terms: good
and
evil, them and us, black and white, right and wrong. In the
twelfth-century
Chanson de Roland: "Paiens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit." Ernest
Bramah, in Kai Lung's Golden Hours: "It is scarcely to be expected that
one who has spent his life beneath an official umbrella should have at
his
command the finer analogies of light and shade." War seems at
the same time imminent and yet impossible. The view of the conflict
offered by
the European newspapers is merely allegorical: American power in the
shape of a
wilful monster attacking other monsters. Since we don't believe in
dragons, the
allegory is useless. An editorial in the London Daily Telegraph tells
us that the
"World Economy requires the War Machinery." We are in the realm of
ornamental capital letters. Ron Wright
called this morning from Port Hope. He argues that Bush's bully tactics
mark
"the end of democracy." I agree. But I wonder whether we can ever
witness such titled events on a huge scale ("The Fall of the Roman
Empire," "The Conquest of America," "The Holocaust")
or whether we are always left with a tiny comer of the picture from
which, in
the best of cases, we can intuit the whole. It may be that we have to
resign
ourselves to dealing in details. Voltaire:
"Curse the details, posterity is blind to them all." The suspect
intentions of all sides in this conflict make it difficult to consider
it with
any clarity. One would require Buzzati's ability to maintain coherence
in the
midst of constantly shifting points of view. For Buzzati, even the
reader's
perspective must be brought into the story, since we too must be made
responsible for the events. "Look how small they are," Buzzati tells
us, pointing at Drogo and his horse, "how small against the side of the
mountains, which are growing higher and wilder." The looming
war has nothing heroic about it; we know that the motives driving the
Anglo-American forces are less humanitarian than financial. In
Buzzati's story,
on the other hand, the tragic feeling of absurdity that overcomes the
reader
stems largely from the utter futility of the heroic enterprise. No
humanitarian
or financial reasons can be invoked. The frontier gives no trouble, the
Tartar
Steppe has not seen Tartars in living memory, the heroes are never
granted the
chance of being heroic. Drogo:
"So the Fort has never been of any use whatsoever?" The Captain:
"None at all." Someone told
me this joke: Moishe meets his friend Jacob on the way out of their
shtetl.
''I'm leaving for America," says Jacob. "Soon I'll be far away."
Moishe: "Far away from what?" Brilliant
sunshine, crisp cold. My neighbor comes over with a gift of fresh eggs
and
stays for twenty minutes discussing the conflict in Iraq. How strange
for an
Iraqi farmer half a world away, ifhe were to know that his fate is the
subject
of a conversation here, in a small, almost invisible French village. Looking at
the soldier who supplies him with the rules and laws governing the
passwords,
Drogo wonders what is left of him after twenty-two years in the Fort.
"Did
[he] still remember that somewhere there existed millions of men like
himself
who were not in uniform? Men who moved freely about the city and at
night could
go to bed or to a tavern or to the theatre, just as they liked?" "The
eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me," noted
Meister Eckhart. From an
apocryphal book of devotions: "God reveals in utter clarity that which
we
can't understand; that which we can understand He lays out in riddles." I have often
had this idea: that the (false) impression of being able to see in
front of us
the entire chart of action, the totality of a situation, leads us to
believe
that other choices are open to us. I say to myself, "I am sitting here,
in
my room, writing, but I could be elsewhere, doing something quite
different," which is like saying, "I could lead another life, I could
be someone else." Buzzati and
Kafka (2): Drogo is seized by the unfulfillable desire to escape. "Why
had
he not left at once? ... Why had he given in?" Drogo's questions
reaffirm
the ineluctability of his condition. He can imagine escaping only
because it is
impossible. Kafka in his Diaries: "Should I greatly yearn to be an
athlete, it would probably be the same thing as my yearning to go to
heaven and
to be permitted to be as despairing there as I am here." In the
ninth-century Life and Times of Pai Chu-yi: "Walking
towards the scaffold, Li Tzu turned to his son with these words: 'Ah,
if we
were in Shanghai, hunting hares with our white hound!'" I note that
the philosopher John Rawls, who died last year, has been remembered by
his
publishers with this quotation: The
perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place
beyond the
world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a
certain
form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the
world.
And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together
into
one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at
regulative
principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each
from his
own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to
see
clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view. The
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "I am myself alone an entire
generation." My friends
Gottwalt and Lucie sent me a magnificent illustrated book on the "Dance
of
Death" in the Marienkirche in Lubeck, which we visited together a year
ago. Against an unremarkable landscape of cities, ports and
countryside, every
one of society's members is carried away in a macabre chorus line,
linking arms
with skeletons draped in shrouds. The ordinary atmosphere seems to
contradict
the monstrosity of death; in fact it grounds it in our daily business,
a
reminder of what we carry within. That reminder is present all along in
Buzzati's work. Buzzati in
his notebooks: "All writers and artists, however long they live, say
only
one same thing." In "The
Death of Ivan Illich," Tolstoy describes Ivan's progress towards death
as
like being on a train and having the sudden impression of travelling in
the
opposite direction, and then being proven wrong. This is the feeling I
have
throughout The Tartar Steppe, that I am afforded the description not so
much of
a long death but of a sleep that sometimes resembles wakefulness. Death and
his brother, Sleep: the first version of this image I find in the Epic
of
Gilgamesh, 2000 B.C.: "The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are,
like
painted death." The Tartar
Steppe suggests a familiarity with death. I suspect that, in spite of
the
hundreds of deaths we see every week on our television screens, we have
become
utterly unfamiliar with it. We hide our dying in hospitals and
retirement
homes, we make believe that we step from being there to not being there
with no
transition, as if the screen went suddenly blank. We make no allowance
for
passage. I think the
skulls which medieval scholars kept on their desks as memento mori were
useful
acknowledgments of something we will become but which we already carry
within
us. I'm not sure why we speak of transformation when we refer to dying;
we
don't change, we merely expose the dust within. Henri
Michaux: "Man, his essential being, IS but a speck. It is this speck
that
death devours." The
newspaper today describes the work of a German surgeon turned artist
who
exhibits cadavers of humans and animals in various positions.
Apparently,
several people have offered to donate their bodies for him to use after
their
death. Now the surgeon has announced that he will perform a dissection
publicly, as a performance piece. The banality of such an exhibition is
astonishing. It is that very banality of his use of the dead that
renders this
man's work obscene. Tomas Eloy
Martinez told me that the actress Norma Aleandro was once visiting a
ranch
somewhere in Patagonia. The wealthy landowners, proud of their
property,
displayed for her many of their treasures: valuable paintings,
ceramics, books.
Encouraged by Aleandro's polite enthusiasm, her hosts said they would
show her
their favorite piece, and put a small copy of Goethe's poems in her
hand.
Aleandro commented on the soft, delicately tooled binding. "Yes, that's
it," they said. "It's bound in human skin." I loved
someone who died. The last time I was with him, death made him look as
if he
had woken up in the past, magically young, as he had once been when he
was
without experience of the world, and happy because he knew that
everything was
still possible. A cold,
crisp, sunny day. A friend who
has been writing a novel for the past eight years is afraid of
finishing it.
Draft after draft, revision after revision, she postpones the day of
handing it
over to the publisher, knowing of course that, once it is printed, all
hope of
it resembling the novel in her mind will be extinguished, and she will
be left
with the reality of a creation independent from her will and her desire. Buzzati and
Kafka (3): Drogo hears the news that a battalion of Tartars may at last
be
approaching the Fort. Feeling too weak to fight, he tells himself that
the news
will prove mistaken. "He hoped that he might not see anything at all,
that
the road would be deserted, that there would be no sign of life. That
was what
Drogo hoped for after wasting his entire life waiting for the enemy." I finished
The Tartar Steppe yesterday. The last pages are astonishing. I walk in
the
garden as they echo in my mind. The cat follows me. When Drogo
dies (as an old man with his wish to fight the Tartars unfulfilled),
Buzzati is
there to console him. At the death of Don Quixote, Cervantes finds no
words to
take leave of his mend, his creation or his creator, and can only
stammer,
"His spirit departed; I mean to say, he died." At Drogo's death,
Buzzati tells his creature that there is still another, better fight
waiting
for him, not against Tartars, not against "men like himself who were
tortured as he was by longing and by suffering, with flesh that one
could
wound, with faces one could look into," but against "a being both
evil and omnipotent." And Buzzati has this to add: "Be brave, Drogo,
this is your last card-go to death like a soldier and at least allow
your
mistaken life to end well. Finally take your revenge on fate; no one
will sing
your praises, no one will call you a hero or anything like that; but
for that
very reason it is worth the effort. Step across the shadow line with a
firm
step, erect as if on parade, and, if you can, even smile. After all,
your
conscience is not too heavy, and God will certainly grant you pardon." At the hour
of my death, these are the lines I would like to remember. |