This is the proposition: by 189 B.C., Greeks have ruled in Bactria for over 100 years by right of Alexander's conquest; recently they have also undertaken a conquest of India; their king and his army have set off a few years ago and have been making fabulous conquests since. As a result, the conquering Greek army, a very small minority in Bactria, has now dwindled as a proportion of the empire to a point at which it was simply no longer possible to rule using the Greek element alone. Demetrios, the conqueror king, resolves to admit all talent, regardless of ethnicity, to positions of power; he thereby proposes what is in effect a constitutional revolution: to make all his citizens legally equal to Greeks. He expects Bactrian Greeks won't like it and fears a revolt. He sends his Indian policeman to prevent it from happening.
Parnicki probably wrote the book in Russian Central Asia where he had the chance to observe the Soviet multi-ethnic state at work. Parnicki's feelings about the Soviet state are not difficult to divine; but he did seem to like the multi-ethnic, nationality-blind pretense of it. To him -- a man of confused national identities -- he had not learned to speak Polish until his teens -- and international exposure -- he had grown up in Moscow, Siberia, and China -- there must have been something attractive about it. The arguments in favor of King Demetrios' scheme, offered in the novel by the kings' various functionaries, seem quite convincing.
As a very young man, Parnicki decided to become a Polish writer; but his writing -- all about far away places -- Egypt, Byzantium, Bactria, Vinland -- and his life -- he actually lived less than half his life in Poland -- indicate that he refused to become typically provincial and domestic; and that he wanted to think of life's bigger problems outside of the box of a particular nationality.
The following is a fragment of the novel.
I have translated it to see whether it could at all be translated; whether a translation would at all be legible in English. This short text, like all of Parnicki's texts, is extraordinarily complex. It is a thinking man's prose: prose written for someone who can follow its twists and turns and -- enjoy them.
Now, reading over this translation I have the impression that this text can at least be followed in English, even if it can hardly be enjoyed as it stands. Yet, I cannot help thinking that the Polish text seems easier to follow. Why this should be makes for an afternoon of interesting speculation.
Another day, perhaps.
Dramatis Personae:
Heliodoros, Greek, chief of Bactrian police, in the administration of the The Great King Demetrios
Antimachos, Greek, king of Margiana, brother and subsidiary of the Great King; he has just declared himself god, a move which Heliodoros suspects may be a preliminary to rebellion
Spitamenes, Sogdian (ie. non-Greek), special envoy of the Great King, freshly arrived from India
Mancuras, Indian, special envoy of the Great King, freshly arrived from India
Dioneia, very young Greek wife of Heliodor
Action takes place on board of a ship called The Harmony of Nations, sailing down the river Oxos, in Bactria, part of the Greek empire in Asia. Heliodor had planted a scroll which he hopes Antimachos will discover.
Three days already has the Harmony of Nations sailed from Tarmita towards Thera and nothing as yet seemed to suggest that Antimachos had found the tube which had been hidden in the base of the statue of the god of silence. There was of course a very simple method of discovering whether the tube had been discovered by the god-king, but Heliodor hesitated to resort to the method, fearing that it might lead to a meeting with Antimachos precisely in the one moment in which it would be most undesirable: in the moment of the discovery of the tube. He therefore preferred not to approach even the semicircular room, so similar in shape to his and Dionea’s marital bedroom, and to make sure that no one else approached either. And because it was practically impossible to stand guard all alone, he secured the help of Mancuras, to whom he did not reveal the nature of his plan, but with whom he had shared the previous day his supposed concern for the safety of the King of Margiana, undoubtedly threatened – or so he told the Indian – by a plot of a handful of men incensed by his act of his self-deification. He did inform Spitamenes to the same effect, by the way; since, from the moment of his first daytime conversation with Antimachos, held in the presence of the Sogdian, he was no longer as sure as he had been before, that the three – he, the Indian and the Sogdian – really represented a solid front -- defending the same interests, identically understood -- against the mysterious scheme of the brother of The Great King.
He lost this certainty thanks to Spitamenes’ constant presence at the side of the common enemy, often one on one. Of course, one could interpret it as observation, and as such part of the joint action of the three allies, but only seemingly so; for the most striking thing was not so much that Spitamenes constantly sought out the presence of Antimachos, but that the same desire – perhaps even more readily observable – seemed to be requited by Antimachos himself. One might assume of course that on his part it was only cunning defense – that suspecting that he is being observed, he himself observed back – suspected, he suspected back. But this possibility was undermined by the only one sentence which made up the spoken part of Spitamenes in the long daytime conversation – that first daytime conversation – between Antimachos and Heliodor. It was: “I will do it” and in itself was in fact quite innocent, for in itself it was no more than the offer of manual aid for his royal – er – divine -- majesty; but from the exchange of glances between the king and the Sogdian at the time when the sentence was spoken, Heliodor took the unpleasant impression that the two were signaling to each other their readiness to cooperate against the idea by the way of which the hidden tube would, as if accidentally, fall into the hands of Antimachos. Because this “I will do it” was a reply to the announcement, first by Heliodor that there is not a single mortal being on board who would dare to carry out Antimachos’ order to remove his bust from its current honored location and to place it in an obscure corner; and then by Antimachos himself, that if indeed all have such qualms, then he is most moved by this collective expression of divine worship for him, but his command must be carried out one way or another, and since no one from the nearly two thousand people on board would dare do it, he would therefore do it himself – with his own royal hands, without regard for how heavy the two may prove – his own bust, and the bust of the god of silence; not to mention their two plinths.
Heliodor had counted on this announcement; indeed, had waited for it from the very beginning of their conversation – and more: after all, the whole conversation had been designed and guided by him for no other purpose but the extraction of just this announcement from Antimachos. It crowned his, Heliodor’s, plan for the tube, a plan simply perfect in its simplicity, perfect in its apparent accidentality of execution. By the lights of this scheme, Antimachos, having moved with his own hands his own bust into an obscure corner, would then set about moving back into its former place the statue of the god of silence, and during the performance of this task would have to, unavoidably, notice the tube, either at the moment when he dropped it on the floor, when the opening in the base of the statue cleared the edge of the plinth (if he were to start moving the statue by first sliding it off it) or else noticing it on the plinth itself (if he began the moving of the god not by sliding it but by directly lifting it up). Whether he’d recognize it immediately as a tube well known to him from the past or not – did not matter. Once he noticed it, it would catch his attention. He’d take it into his hands. Noticing that tusk of one of the many minute elephants which ring the lid of the tube – that tusk which had been broken off by his own hands in childhood, he’d now certainly recognize it. But even if he still did not recognize it, the natural consequences of constantly mounting curiosity would be enough. It was practically impossible that he would not open it. It was even less likely that having opened it, he would not unroll the scroll. And, once having unrolled it, and having run his eyes over the text, he would now never be able to forget that if indeed he were preparing a coup d’etat, he’d have to reckon that against a family member violating the principle of family loyalty, the dynasty would not hesitate to use a terrible, but guaranteed to be effective weapon: it would open the borders of the kingdom to the northern barbarians.
And now this excellent in its simplicity plan of Heliodor was threatened by the only sentence spoken by another of the members of the triple alliance against Antimachos. There was even a moment when Heliodor considered his plan already in ruins. But he had been mistaken and how glad he was of that mistake! How thankful he was to Antimachos, when the last, folding his lips into a subtle, somewhat strange smile, said:
“Many thanks, but are we not a federation of kingdoms whose central motto is “Harmony of Nations of the Heart of Asia”? Surely, it would be a contravention of this rule if a person not recognizing the existence of gods other than Ahura Mazda were called upon to perform the undoubtedly unpleasant for him task of placing in places of sacred cult of the simulacra of beings about whom others say blasphemously: ‘they are divine’”.
The Sogdian did not reply, only offered a deep bow. Heliodor for a moment dispassionately pondered the strangeness of the subtle smile which accompanied Antimachos’ declaration of support for one of the central policies upon which his family based their rule over the heart of Asia – rule which with each passing decade seemed to earn ever more acceptance from the ruled. One could interpret this smile in a number of different ways, but of all possible interpretations the most likely seemed to Heliodor the suspicion that the words of Antimachos were an irony; not so much poking fun at the policy itself, but rather at Spitamenes personally, as if, with his smile, the king of Margiana were saying: “You are cunning, but it is I who figured you out, not you me; and it is not you who made fun of me, but I who made fun of you.” For, most likely, the readiness of the Sogdian to perform a task which no Greek on board dared was intended to say: “Neither you, nor the boy with a finger pressed to his lips are gods. So what difference does it make to me to move two prettily carved lumps of rock? And I will do it all the more gladly because it is amusing to push into an obscure corner the portrait of a madman, or perhaps a fool, who says about himself ‘I am god’”. And it was precisely to this decoded meaning that Antimachos replied with his mysterious smile: “I will not give you the pleasure of playing with that which I have declared worthy of the worship of the Greeks, but of course I do want you to know that I am aware of precisely how much my divinity is worth to you.” But even in the light of this interpretation – which Heliodor recognized as the most likely of all – that exchange of glances remained alarming, that exchange which took place between the two precisely in the moment in which the words “I will do it” fell from the Sogdian’s lips. As if they were saying to each other:
Spitamenes: “You have not forgotten how you are supposed to reply to my ‘I will do it?’”
Atimachos: “Relax. I have not forgotten.”
Or:
Spitamenes: “Look out. Heliodor wants nothing else but that you personally and with your own hands move the bust and the statue.”
Antimachos: “I know. (Or: You are right.) But do not worry. It is necessary that he should think me a greater fool than I am. Let him think that he had caught me.”
But then he could be worried for no good reason – this, too, he considered. After all, a person bearing the ring of The Great King may, due to his special commission, communicate with the Great King’s brother also in some other matters about which no one other than a member of the dynasty should know, and the exchange of glances may well have had to do only tangentially with the task of moving the statues. After all, even Heliodor had once experienced just such a thing: several times in his conversations with Dioneia they discussed the obesity of Teophilos, saying that there was about it something monstrous; and on some occasion Dioneia’s mother, speaking about one of her ancestors said that according to a family tradition in old age – and he lived very long – he had grown monstrously fat; and barely had those words fallen from her lips when her daughter and her son in law exchanged a meaningful glance. “You thought about Theophilos in that instant, did you not?” asked him Dioneia later.
Etc.
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