The Great Wall of China Read online

  In fact, it was not true that his sole concern was for the matter at issue; he was actually quite ambitious, and wanted financial profit as well, which in view of his large family was entirely understandable; but all the same my own concern for the matter seemed to him so trivial by comparison that he felt able to represent himself as wholly disinterested without departing too far from the truth. And indeed I could not even get private satisfaction by telling myself that the root cause of the man’s reproaches was the fact that he clung on to his mole with both hands, so to speak, and called anyone who wished to lay as much as a finger on it a traitor. For that was not the case; his attitude was not to be explained by possessiveness, or at least not by possessiveness alone, but rather by the touchiness that his great labours and their total lack of success had engendered in him. Yet even this touchiness did not explain everything. Perhaps my interest in the matter really was too trivial; as far as strangers were concerned, the teacher had grown accustomed to lack of interest, and while it distressed him in general, it no longer distressed him in particular cases; but now at last someone had come along and taken the matter up with exceptional vigour, and even he failed to understand it. Once the charge against me was pressed along those lines I had no wish to deny it. I am no zoologist; perhaps if I had discovered this case myself I might have espoused it with heart and soul, but I had not discovered it. A mole of such size is certainly a curiosity, but one cannot expect the entire world to accord it permanent attention, especially if the existence of the mole has not been established wholly beyond doubt and at all events it cannot be produced. And I had to admit also that even if I had been the discoverer of the mole, I should probably never have taken up the cudgels on its behalf in the way that I took them up, gladly and of my own free will, on behalf of the teacher.

  Now the misunderstanding between me and the teacher would probably have been soon resolved if my treatise had met with success. But that was just what failed to happen. Perhaps it was not written well enough, not convincingly enough; I am a business man, perhaps the powers needed to compose such a treatise lie even further outside my sphere of competence than was the case with the teacher, although in the kind of knowledge required I was certainly far superior to him. But it was also possible to interpret my lack of success in another way: perhaps my treatise had appeared at an unfavourable time. On the one hand the discovery of the mole, which had failed to gain acceptance, did not lie far enough in the past for people to have forgotten about it altogether, so that my treatise could have come as a surprise to them; on the other hand, however, sufficient time had elapsed to ensure that such limited interest as had existed originally was now totally exhausted. Those who gave any thought at all to my treatise told themselves, with the hopeless gloom that had characterized the debate from the outset, that no doubt the futile exertions in support of this dreary matter were about to begin again, and some of them even confused my treatise with that of the teacher. In a leading agricultural journal there appeared the following notice, fortunately only at the end and in small print: ‘The treatise on the giant mole has been submitted to us again. We remember having laughed heartily over it once before some years ago. Since then it has grown no wiser and we no more stupid. We merely find it impossible to laugh the second time. Instead we would ask our teaching associations whether more useful work cannot be found for our village schoolmasters than chasing after giant moles.’ An unforgivable confusion! They had read neither the first treatise nor the second, and the two wretched terms ‘giant mole’ and ‘village schoolmaster’, picked up in haste, were sufficient for these gentlemen to show off as the representatives of established interests. Certainly, various means would have been open to me to counter this effectively, but I was deterred from trying them by the lack of understanding between myself and the teacher. Instead, I tried to conceal the journal from him for as long as I possibly could. But he very soon discovered it, as I recognized from a remark in one of his letters, in which he announced his intention of visiting me during the Christmas holidays. He wrote: ‘It is a wicked world, and people make things easy for it’, by which he intended to convey that I belonged to the wicked world, but instead of resting content with my own private store of wickedness I was making things easy for the world, that is, I was actively engaged in enticing the general wickedness out into the open and helping it to victory.

  Well, I had made all the necessary decisions in advance; I could calmly await him and calmly observe him when he came, as he greeted me even less politely than usual, sat himself down opposite me in silence, carefully drew out the journal from the breast-pocket of his curiously padded overcoat, opened it and pushed it across to me. ‘I’ve seen it,’ I said, and pushed the journal back unread. ‘You’ve seen it,’ he said with a sigh; he had the old schoolmasterish habit of repeating other people’s answers. ‘Of course I won’t take this lying down,’ he went on, tapping the journal excitedly with his finger and looking at me sharply as he did so, as if I was of the contrary opinion; very likely he had some inkling of what I was going to say; indeed this was not the first time that I seemed to detect, not so much from his words as from other signs, that he could often sense my intentions with great accuracy, but then resisted his intuition and allowed himself to be distracted. What I said to him on that occasion I can reproduce almost word for word, for I made a note of it shortly after our discussion. ‘Do what you will,’ I said, ‘from this day on our ways divide. I imagine that that is neither unexpected nor unwelcome news to you. This notice in the journal here is not the reason for my decision, it has merely finally confirmed it; the real reason is that while I originally believed I could assist you by my intervention, I am now forced to recognize that I have damaged you on every side. Why things should have taken this course I do not know, the causes of success and failure are always open to a variety of interpretations, do not seek out only the ones that are unfavourable to me. Reflect on your own case: you also had the best intentions, and yet, when one considers the whole thing in perspective, you have failed. I do not mean it as a joke, for the joke would be at my own expense, when I say that your association with me must unfortunately be counted among your failures as well. My withdrawal from the affair at this point is neither cowardice nor treachery. Indeed it is not without a struggle that I can bring myself to do so; my treatise is sufficient evidence of the high regard in which I hold you personally, in a certain sense you have become a teacher to me, and I have even almost become attached to the mole. Nevertheless, I now step aside; you are the discoverer, and despite all my efforts I constantly obstruct the possible fame that might come your way, while at the same time I attract failure and transmit it to you. At least that is your own opinion. Enough of that. The sole expiation that I can make is to beg your forgiveness, and – should you require it – to repeat publicly, for instance in this journal, the confession that I have made to you here.’

  These were my words; they were not entirely sincere, but the sincerity in them was easy to see. My decision had roughly the effect on him that I had anticipated. Most old people have something deceptive, something mendacious about them in their dealings with those younger than themselves; one lives beside them peacefully, imagines the relationship to be secure, knows their prevailing opinions, receives unremitting confirmations of harmony, regards everything as a matter of course, and then suddenly, when something decisive does happen and the time comes for the long-cultivated state of calm to prove effective, these old people rise up like strangers, they possess deeper and stronger convictions, they positively unfurl their banner for the first time and with terror one reads upon it the new device. The reason for this terror lies chiefly in the fact that what the old say now is really far more just, more sensible, and – as if there were degrees of self-evidence – even more self-evident than before. But the supremely deceitful thing about it is that they have basically always been saying what they now come out with, and that even so it is generally quite impossible to see it coming. I must in
deed have probed deep into this village schoolmaster, seeing that what he now said failed to take me wholly by surprise.

  ‘My child,’ he said, laying his hand on mine and rubbing it amicably, ‘how did you ever take it into your head to get involved in this affair? The very first time I heard about it I discussed the matter with my wife.’ He pushed his chair back from the table, spread out his arms, and stared at the floor as if his miniature wife was standing down there and he was conversing with her. ‘ “For so many years,” I said to her, “we have been fighting alone, but now it seems that a noble benefactor in the city has taken up our cause, a city business man, a Mr So-and-so. Now that should make us very pleased, shouldn’t it? A business man in the city is a person of some importance; if some ragged peasant believes us and says so, that’s of no use to us, for what a peasant does is always improper, and whether he says ‘The old schoolmaster is right’ or whether he perhaps spits in an unseemly manner, the effect is the same in both cases. And if instead of one peasant, ten thousand peasants should stand up for us, the effect would be if possible even worse. A business man in the city, on the other hand, is quite a different thing; a man like that has connections, even his casual remarks become known to a wide circle of people, new patrons will interest themselves in our case; one of them may perhaps say ‘There is something to be learnt even from village schoolmasters’, and the very next day a whole crowd of people are whispering it to one another, people from whom one would never expect it, to judge by their appearances. And now funds for the cause begin to roll in, one gentleman starts collecting and the others press their money into his hand; they decide that the village schoolmaster must be hauled out of his village; they come, they pay no heed to his appearance, they gather him up, and since his wife and children cling to him they take them along as well. Have you ever observed people from the city? They twitter unceasingly. When there’s a whole row of them together the twittering goes from right to left and then back again, to and fro. And so, twittering, they hoist us into the carriage, there’s hardly time to nod to everybody. The gentleman on the coach-box adjusts his pince-nez, flourishes his whip, and away we go. They all wave farewell to the village, as if we were still there and not sitting in their midst. Some carriages with particularly impatient people come out from the city to meet us. As we approach they stand up from their seats and crane their necks to see us. The gentleman who collected the money directs everything and makes an appeal for calm. By the time we drive into the city we form a long procession of carriages. We suppose the reception is now concluded, but no, it is only just beginning outside the hotel. After all, in the city a single announcement is enough to bring a great crowd together in a flash. One man’s concern becomes instantly the concern of the next. As they take each other’s breath away they take each other’s views away too and adopt them. Not all the townsfolk could afford a carriage, so these are waiting in front of the hotel; others could well have driven out to meet us but were too self-important to do so. They are waiting too. It is astonishing how the gentleman who collected the money manages to keep an eye on everything.”’

  I had listened to him calmly; indeed I had grown ever calmer as his speech went on. On the table I had piled up all the copies of my treatise that were still in my possession. Only a very few were missing, for I had recently issued a circular demanding the return of all the copies I had sent out, and most of them had come in. I had in addition been informed very politely by a number of correspondents that they had no recollection of ever having received such a treatise, and if it should be that it had reached them after all, then it must regrettably have been lost. Well, that solution was quite satisfactory too; basically that was all I wanted. Only one reader asked to be allowed to keep the treatise as a curiosity, and he pledged himself in the spirit of my circular to show it to no one for the next twenty years. The village schoolmaster had not yet seen this circular; I was glad that his words made it so easy for me to show it to him. I had no qualms about doing this in any case, for I had been most circumspect in drawing it up and had kept the interests of the schoolmaster and of his cause in mind throughout. The crucial passage in this document ran as follows: ‘I do not ask for the return of the treatise because I retract in any way the opinions advanced there or because there are any particular sections which I now regard as erroneous or even as undemonstrable. My request is made for purely personal reasons, which are, however, most compelling; but it permits no conclusions whatsoever to be drawn as regards my attitude to the actual matter of the treatise; I beg to draw your special attention to this, and would also be glad if you would kindly pass the information on.’

  For the moment I covered this circular with my hands and said: ‘Do you want to reproach me because things did not turn out as you describe? Why do you want to do that? Let us not embitter our parting. And do try at last to see that though you’ve made a discovery, this discovery doesn’t necessarily surpass everything else, and therefore the injustice you suffer doesn’t surpass everything either. I’m not acquainted with the statutes of our learned societies, but I don’t believe that in the most favourable circumstances you would have been given a reception even remotely resembling the one you seem to have described to your wife. If I myself had any hopes that my treatise might achieve something, I suppose that the attention of a professor might perhaps be drawn to our case, that he might set some young student the task of looking into the matter, that his student might come to see you and check your inquiries and mine once again on the spot in his own way, and that finally, if his results seemed to him worth mentioning – one must bear in mind here that all young students are full of doubts – he might publish a treatise of his own in which your account would be put on a scientific basis. But even supposing this hope had been fulfilled, still not much would have been achieved. The student’s treatise, in defence of such a curious case, might well have been held up to ridicule. You can see from the example of this agricultural journal how easily that can be done, and academic journals are even more ruthless in this respect. And that’s understandable, too; professors bear a great responsibility towards themselves, towards scientific knowledge, towards posterity, they can’t fling themselves straight into the arms of each new discovery. We others have the advantage of them there. But I’ll leave that aside and assume that the student’s treatise had found acceptance. What would have happened next? Your name would no doubt have received honourable mention a few times, you would probably have done some service to your profession as well, people would have said: “Our village schoolmasters keep their eyes open”, and this journal here would have had to offer you a public apology, if for the sake of argument journals had a memory and a conscience; some sympathetic professor would then have been found to secure you a scholarship, and it really is possible that an attempt might have been made to get you to the city, to provide you with a post in a municipal primary school, and so give you the opportunity to make use of the scientific resources offered by the city in order to improve yourself. But if I am to be frank I must say I doubt whether it would ever have got further than the attempt. You would have been summoned here, and you would have come, but it would have been as an ordinary petitioner like hundreds of others, without any question of a festive reception; they would have talked to you, would have acknowledged the honest worth of your efforts, but at the same time they would have recognized that you were an old man, that at your age it was hopeless to embark on academic study, and above all that you had arrived at your discovery more by chance than by design, and that you did not even intend to carry your researches beyond this one particular case. For these reasons they would probably have left you in your village. Your discovery would no doubt have been taken further, for it is not so trifling that it could ever be forgotten again once it had achieved recognition. But you would not have heard much more about it, and what you did hear you would barely have understood. Every discovery is at once absorbed into the great universe of scientific knowledge, and with that it cea
ses in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears; if one is still to recognize it then, one needs a trained scientific eye. It becomes immediately attached to principles of whose existence we have never heard, and caught up in scientific controversy it is hoisted by those principles into the clouds. How can we expect to understand that? If we listen to a debate of that kind we may for instance imagine that it is about your discovery, while all the time it is about something quite different.’