Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (8 page)

‘Do the commons envy the captains their power and superior talents?’

‘On the contrary, they pity a man like the one you saw just now for having to live without home or family; and they know that he’s entered the estate only because of a talent or obsession for leadership – to which they feel the instinctive need for obedience. I imagine that the same sort of feeling must be aroused in your age by celibate priests?’

‘Well, yes – I suppose so – by those who are serious in their profession and live free from scandal. Are your priests celibate too?’

‘A few. A film of oil, as we say, separates the priest from his congregation, if only because he belongs to a different estate. You see, in the servant class the prevailing system is three-clan marriage: a woman sleeps with members of an associated clan, without having a constant mate. Her children remain in her own clan, but form alliances with a third clan, to avoid incestuous unions. Servants’ children, once they’re weaned, aren’t left with their mothers, though the tie of affection remains fairly strong, and they don’t know their fathers: they’re communal property and begin their life of service at an early age. The most devoted, slow-pulsed, tractable and simple-minded of all are directed to the priesthood. In regions where the commons are unusually high-spirited and need a steadying influence we give them a celibate priest; they seem to have greater respect for a celibate priest than for a three-clan marriage one.’

‘Are there any women priests?’

‘No, only High Priestesses. All ordinary priests are men; but religious instruction, which consists in teaching children prayers and myths and other religious formulas, is given only by women, also of the servants’ estate. All children without exception have to learn these rudiments by heart, and the teachers explain them in the same set words, revised every three generations or so to conform with changes of language.

‘I should like to see a school of that sort in action.’

‘There’s one behind those houses over the stream. The children have only just gone in.’

The school-room walls were white-washed and bare – no blackboard, no maps, no pictures – nothing to distract the children’s attention from their lessons, which were given orally. They sat in a semi-circle around the schoolmistress – the boys in black overalls, the girls in white and blue ones – and behind them a window opened on a hill crowned with a circle of trees. The schoolmistress was installed in a high-backed chair; on one side of her was the fire-place, filled with the flowers of midsummer; on the other a carved and painted statue of the Goddess Mari, in white robe and blue mantle. The Goddess nursed a fair-haired, blue-eyed child in the crook of the right arm, a dark-haired, brown-eyed child in the crook of the left; the head and hands of a wrinkled hag appeared over her shoulder; a girl about twelve years old nestled against her skirt. Her breasts were bare: she held a snake in the left hand and a cross-cut apple in the right, and on her yellow hair was a coronet of stars. The hag wore a high, black conical cap like the one used by Sally at my evocation; the girl was garlanded with flowers and carried a bow and arrows.

The schoolmistress, a fat middle-aged woman with a deep emotionless voice, seemed not so much to be instructing as delegating for an unseen instructress – who, as I soon found out from her frequent sideway glances, was the Goddess Mari. The children, who were all between the ages of five and eight, addressed their replies to the statue rather than to her.

‘Chant, children, after me, the story of Dobeis and Nimuë!’ said the schoolmistress.

She struck the lowest bell of a chime fastened beside her chair, which acted as a tuning-fork for the chant. The story was in verse, of which this is a rough rendering. It is not my fault that it reads, in part, like a passage from one of Blake’s
Prophetic Books
.

Dobeis was a young man, fat, bald and bad.
Dobeis did magic with wheels of gold,
Stamping them with pictures of creatures and men.
He lay on his bed at the open window,
He said to the gold wheels: ‘Out into the world,
Be the world’s ruin!’

 

Everywhere they rolled, into every house and farm,
Bewitching the people, rousing them to hate,
Death was in those wheels, plague and misery.
They rolled against custom, they rolled over love,
All the five estates into confusion fell.

 

The wheels assumed captainship,
The wheels recorded all,
The wheels clamped the commons in golden fetters,
The wheels forced the servants to serve without love,
The wheels annulled the magic of the magicians.

 

Dobeis, lying there by the open window,
Laughed as he saw the ruin of the land
Cut up and wasted by the golden wheels,
Laughed as he saw the ruin of the town
Crushed into rubble by the golden wheels,
Laughed as he heard the discordant cries
Of hate and despair that rose all about.

 

Nimuë awakened, Mari’s daughter,
From her sleep in the branches of the catkin-willow,
Soon she was aware of what Dobeis had done.
Her beautiful face grew pallid and stern.
Slinging her bow across her slender back,
She strode along the path to the house of Dobeis,
The golden wheels circling giddily about her
And locking together, wheel with wheel,
As a shield to protect the house of Dobeis.

 

Nimuë leaped across the gold shield,
Her white foot alighting on the window sill.
She addressed fat Dobeis in reproachful words:
‘Dobeis, Dobeis, what mischief is this?
What have you contrived against the five estates?
Call back your wheels while yet there is time,
Lest you forfeit the pardon of Mari and Ana.’

 

Dobeis laughed loudly from his silken bed,
Reclining at ease upon his left elbow:
‘I am bad, I am bad, I am bad,’ he said.
‘I would have all the world resemble myself.
Away, little Nimuë, lest I do you harm.’

 

Nimuë called to the blackthorn-tree:
‘Blackthorn, lend me a white-flowered branch
To humble the power of Dobeis the bad!’
The blackthorn lent her the white-flowered branch;
A magpie brought it to Nimuë.

 

Dobeis watched laughing as she trimmed the point
With a flint knife knapped in the crescent shape.
‘Back to your dolls, little Nimuë,
Back to your dolls, before worse befalls.’
Suddenly she struck, weeping for sorrow.
Since never before had she taken life.
She struck at the hollow under his breastbone.
She did not pierce Dobeis, she drew no blood,
The magic lay in the wind of the blow.

 

Dobeis lay back upon the silken bed
His face was doleful, his frown was deep,
Dilated his nostrils, his dark eyes dull,
Profoundly sunk within their orbits;
Black shadows gathered all around.
His face and arms were white as marble,
His lips turned blue, his brow cold-sweated,
A chill spread over his trunk and limbs.

 

Then, in a voice, that was weak and hollow
‘Alas,’ he cried, ‘Little Nimuë,
Who would have thought that the wind of the blow
Struck by a girl could have caused my death.’
Nimuë, weeping, addressed Dobeis:
‘Let your vengeance fall on the blackthorn-tree,
On the magpie’s claws, on the crescent knife;
But recall the course of your golden wheels,
I conjure you in my Mother’s name.
Do so, and I will bury you.’

 

Dobeis called back the golden wheels,
And the ruin of man was thus arrested,
When the last bright wheel came rolling home
He died, and Nimuë buried him.
She brought the wheels to the witches’ queen,
Who rid them, by long evocation,
Of the evil magic of Dobeis.
Then smiths with hammers beat them flat,
Into sheets of gold, into books of gold,
Of the sort that noble poets use
To make a record of Nimuë –
Of Ana, Mari and Nimuë.

How much of this piece of mythology – it was repeated three times – the children were capable of understanding, I could not judge. Certainly they seemed to be word-perfect by the time that the lesson was over. I noticed a girl of the magician estate weeping in sympathy with Nimuë each time that the line recurred: ‘Never before had she taken life.’

The estate of the children was shown by the number of bands on the cuffs of their overalls. Estates sat together, though I noticed that one or two girls were sitting out of place. At a signal from the mistress all shouted a greeting to the statue of the Goddess and ran into the playground, where they began to play games in the same disorganized way that children do now. The mistress stayed behind, praying. She did not kneel, however, nor pray upright with palms spread out at the height of the thigh, as I later saw the priests pray, but stood with arms akimbo and a pleasant smile on her face as if respectfully chatting with the Goddess. She reminded me of fat Fanny, my grandmother’s faithful cook, respectfully asking her permission to make the mushroom-sauce according to my great-grandmother’s favourite recipe. I found that it was a general rule for men to address the Goddess with an adoration compounded of love and fear, whereas women addressed her familiarly as a friend, colleague or mistress, according to their estate.

See-a-Bird told me that education after the age of eight was the affair of the estates to which the children belonged. By then it was usually clear from the child’s performance and preferences whether he was to continue in the estate into which he had been born; though some children developed unexpected powers or inclinations some years later when they had already been provisionally accepted as working members of a particular estate. It was a practical education outside the schoolhouse, the children being free – within the limits of custom, which exacted a very high standard of good manners from them – to wander through the villages and observe all that was going on in field, workshop, office or kitchen, and acquaint themselves with their neighbours for miles around. This freedom was conceded only for a few hours a day; the rest of the time they picked up, orally, the traditions of their estates and ran errands, or helped their parents or guardians. At puberty they were apprenticed to a trade or, if they belonged to the magicians’ or recorders’ estates, taught to read or write. (The captains, the commons and the servants were forbidden by custom to do either and both the magicians and recorders were strictly limited in their use of writing.) At sixteen or so they were free to start their love life, and when fully grown to travel or engage in wars, becoming full citizens. When they had ‘more white hairs than coloured’ they could become elders if they pleased and were then treated with peculiar respect; they were emancipated from custom while in their club-houses but required to behave, elsewhere, with appropriate dignity and reserve.

As we walked home, I asked See-a-Bird: ‘What year are we in?’

‘The year before leap-year.’

‘Yes, but what’s the date?’

The Interpreter intervened. He explained to See-a-Bird that in my age we counted the years publicly and celebrated every first of January with a postmortem on the Old Year and speculations on the New.

‘Here we have no public date,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The Chief Recorder keeps a count of years in the archives, but it isn’t published and nobody but he and his assistants could calculate how many have elapsed since the foundation of New Crete. We also consider it highly improper to mention anyone’s age or to count the number of years that he has held office or been married. In the same way we make no record of hours and minutes, as I believe you do with clocks and watches. We observe the phases of the moon; we distinguish morning from afternoon and afternoon from evening; we keep the days of the week; we mark the passage of the seasons; and the two parts of our double year end with the first full moon after the longest day and the first full moon after the shortest day. But time in an absolute sense was abolished on the same occasion on which it was agreed to abolish money; for the poet Vives pleaded passionately:

Since Time is money,
Time must be destroyed:
His sickle and hour-glass
Are in pawn to evil.
Nimuë, save us with your bow again.’

 

‘Then at what time do children go to school in the morning?’
‘When the bell rings.’
‘And when does it ring?’
‘When the first three children have arrived.’
‘And how long do you boil an egg?’
‘Until the sand’s run out of the egg-glass.’

That same day, which was a Sunday, an alarming and quite inexplicable event happened, just before I had lunch with See-a-Bird and Sally.

It was a vegetarian meal, by the way: I found to my chagrin that custom forbade magicians to eat either meat or fish – only fresh cheese and an occasional egg, and no spices or pickles or even onions. No wonder they were so clear-headed, clear-skinned and humourless! Their irreproachable diet went far to explain their fanciful theories of love and amatory sympathy. Also the facility with which they shed tears: I once had an operation for a fistula, followed by a week of nothing but tap-water and barley sugar, and by the time the doctor consented to put me on milk and mush I was so unlike my usual self that one evening I shed tears at a waifs-and-strays appeal on the radio, and then lay in bed, still sobbing uncontrollably, and watched an imaginary but most realistic battle being fought on the window-curtain between stags and swans. Not that I was on an insufficient diet now: the food was plentiful and probably contained all the vitamins and calories needed for perfect health, and the glass of lager – though they didn’t offer to fill my empty glass – was every bit as drinkable as the one I had been given before. But what my stomach expected was a real Sunday dinner with joint, Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes, introduced by a couple of dry Martinis; it did not get any of this, and I felt like someone who has gone to the wrong restaurant, and finds himself confronted with nut-cutlets and hoax-in-the-hole.

What had happened was this. I told Sally that I proposed to stroll out by myself in the park for a few minutes, if that was allowed. She made no objection, so I took the other direction from the one we had taken that morning, crossed the orchard and made for a low ridge about a hundred yards from the house, where I stopped to take my bearings.