Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “Jolly interesting,” said Cameron, peering out the window. “Must say I never knew the extent of the operation. Though of course I’m familiar with the Zuyder Zee project.” That was not a polder, Van Vliet de Jonge pointed out; in a sense, it was the opposite—a man-made lake. But from the Zuyder Zee project, polders had resulted. Cameron nodded. “Increased your arable land area.” That indeed was the point. But they were slow to perceive the relevance; arable land was not created overnight. Once the sea floor had been pumped dry, it had to be de-salted, then planted with grasses for sheep-grazing. Eventually, when the sheep had done their work, it would turn into farmland, indistinguishable from the rest of Holland. “Wonderful engineers, your people,” the Bishop summed up. “Now what leads you to think that these people will be taking us to a polder, as you call it? Funny word, by the way, isn’t it? Any connection with poltergeists?” “A poltergeist, Gus, is a noisy spirit,” remonstrated the Senator. “From the German, Polter, meaning uproar, plus Geist.” The Bishop smote his head. “I’m old, James, forgive me. I must be losing my German, along with my teeth and my wits. And years back, don’t you know, I had occasion to look into poltergeists. There’s a school in the Church that thinks they’re true cases of diabolical possession. We had a parish in the diocese—in Joplin, it was—where they claimed to have one of those prankish spirits in the organ loft; struck up ribald tunes in the middle of a baptism or when the Altar Guild was doing the flowers. Rector wanted to exorcise it with bell, book, and candle. Well, I had to put my foot down. Turned out in the end, wouldn’t you know it, to be the organist’s wife. My Rachel sensed it right off, the minute she laid eyes on her. ‘There’s your poltergeist,’ she said.” “Sex!” interrupted Aileen. “She was sex-starved. I expect your organist had been too busy pawing the choir boys to take care of his spouse’s needs. We had a case like that at Lucy Skinner. Malicious mischief in the chemistry laboratory. Buildings and Grounds caught the woman at it. An instructor, frustrated lesbian. We had to let her go, of course….”

  Van Vliet de Jonge waited. “The polders,” the Bishop recalled finally. “You were going to tell us, sir?” Now that he had their ears again, Van Vliet proceeded. Northeast of Amsterdam lay the two most recent examples, popularly known as the Old Polder and the New Polder, both creations of the North Sea wall or dike, which had transformed the Zuyder Zee into a fresh-water lake. The “old” one dated back to the thirties, though work on it had been halted during the War and the Nazi occupation; it was more interesting than the “new” one because it had incorporated an island—pre-war maps still showed it that way, surrounded by water, in the middle of the “Southern Sea”—with an old fishing town and trees and what was for Holland a hill, on which stood a little church that now housed a so-called shipwreck museum. But it could hardly be interesting to the hijackers, for the simple reason that it was settled, though as yet somewhat sparsely in comparison with the rest of Holland. Whereas the New Polder, to the south of it, was virtually empty—virgin territory populated mainly by shore birds. The New Polder—Flevoland—was Holland’s Alaska. Roads had been laid out, an industrial town-complex projected, and a small airport too, if he recalled right, but, except for the roads, all that booming development was still a blueprint on the drawing-boards of the planners. Factories, cinema, shopping-center, art gallery, angular modern church lay in the future; the sheep had vanished, but cows had not yet taken their places. Here and there, barns, with typical orange roofs, had gone up or were in the process of construction from prefabricated elements, but the spick-and-span homes and bright flower gardens that would follow were no more than a prophecy, borne out by occasional surveyor’s sticks in the sedgy waste. When he had last driven through, with his family on a Sunday, bird-watching, they had noted a few isolated new farmhouses—pioneers. By now, other enterprising colonists, encouraged by government subsidies, would have made the trek and set up house under strictly uniform rooftrees as prescribed in the specifications of the central planning authority on holdings limited by law to thirty hectares: “About seventy-five acres,” supplied the Senator. “The wide open spaces.” And in such a dark-green-frame, neighborless house, with clothes-pole staked outside, like a settler’s claim, the kapers’ confederates were surely installed with arms and provisions to withstand a siege….

  “Do you believe it?” Aileen exclaimed, turning to her neighbor. “Sounds reasonable,” said the Senator. “Can’t think of a better explanation of why they should be wanting a chopper.” He had only one objection: if a hideaway had been set up on this New Polder, why had the pilot, following the take-over, continued on a southward course, in the direction of Rome and North Africa? Van Vliet had considered this too. His answer, not wholly satisfying, was to conjecture that the polder had been prepared as a fall-back position: the hijackers’ original hope had been to be welcomed in Libya or Algiers probably. Perhaps there had been disagreement among them, the Dutch pair from the start favoring the polder solution, where familiarity with the terrain and the ways of the “host” government would give them ascendancy, while the Arabs, naturally, plumped for North Africa. “Will we ever know?” sighed Sophie. “If we come out alive,” Van Vliet promised her. One of his main interests in survival, he found, was precisely to know the peripeties of the drama. He did not want to die in a state of mystification.

  Gradually the group fell silent, as though overcome by despondency, hitting them one by one like a powerful drug. Each sat with his private thoughts. As he brooded, Van Vliet’s nostrils made out a faint new smell. The cat, he feared: Sapphire. Before long, she would stink to high heaven. And what if he had been wrong in his expectations, what if the German helicopter did not come after all? By an act of will, he refrained from looking at his watch. But it must be almost noon; in The Hague and Amsterdam, deep church bells would soon be ringing. Two hours left. The common word “deadline” was taking on an uncommon significance. He thought of Faust. At two o’clock, punctually, if the helicopter failed to materialize, would the execution of hostages begin?

  He heard the Bishop loudly clear his throat and hoped he was not going to lead them in prayer. But instead of addressing the Saviour, he was turning to Henk. “You mentioned a shipwreck museum, sir. Why don’t you tell us about that? It will help us pass the time, don’t you know.” Henk groaned at the old man’s simplicity: the last thing they should be wanting was to make time pass swiftly. But the others were nodding; like children at bedtime, they were ready to hear a story. A fairytale, laid in polderland, whose herald or bard he had become. “Please,” urged Sophie. “Entertain them. They’re scared, and you talk so well.” “The Arabian Nights,” remarked Carey. “Right on, friend.”

  Henk obliged. The Zuyder Zee museum, to give it its proper name, on the former island of Schokland, though intended for scholars and specialists, had become a popular excursion spot for Dutch families; his children preferred it to the Tropical Museum, Rembrandt’s House, the Torture Museum in The Hague, and even to Aartis, the famous Amsterdam zoo with Prince Bernhard’s new elephant house. It was the children who had named it the shipwreck museum. Though the cases contained all kinds of archaeological materials recently dug up on the island, what interested them was not the bones of prehistoric animals or neolithic axes but the finds made when the pumps had dried out the sea floor. Carcasses of sunken ships had been uncovered, ribbed hulls and bony masts, curving prows like necks; 156 vessels had been yielded up by the Zuyder Zee. On the hilly grounds, overlooking what was now fresh water, entire gruesome specimens—lessons in ship’s anatomy—were on display. It was as though a blanket had been drawn back from Father Neptune’s bed to disclose a marine graveyard. The skeletal ships had gone to eternal rest, like the ancient Egyptians and the Etruscans, with their familiar household objects for company: cooking utensils, tableware, saws, bolts and nails, cannonballs, pipe-bowls, shoes, buckles, buttons. “Doubloons?” suggested Sophie. Henk did not recall any in the showcases—probably the Nazis had got to them first—but
there were Dutch coins of course in plenty, some surprisingly recent, with Queen Wilhelmina’s portly head. And a curious find had been the skeleton of a drowned fisherman with coins lying beside it—circa 1600—that must have fallen out of a trusty breeches’ pocket slowly eaten away by the sea.

  “Shoes, you said,” mused the Senator. “Wooden, of course?” “Isn’t this wonderful, Gus?” cried the pastor. “The romance of the sea. Full fathom five.” Van Vliet de Jonge shook his head. The interesting thing about the shipwreck museum, he confided, was its lack of romance. The detritus of a commercial people brought to light by the pumps belonged to the same industrious family as the pumps. The long salty immersion had failed to effect a metamorphosis into something rich and strange. The shards of crockery and rusty pieces of metal were stoutly recognizable, still, in their function of use-objects—as though a sumptuary law of the lowland sea had decreed against extravagance of form or fancifulness of hue in the changes wrought by the element. “Why do you keep putting your country down?” Aileen objected. She was sure there must be wonderful old Delft patterns on the china. Van Vliet shrugged. Sailing ships had not used Delft but rough earthenware and wooden bowls, as was known from the characteristically detailed inventories that had gone down with them to a watery grave. The contents of Davy Jones’s locker, as laid bare by the Dutch engineering genius, ran to such “finds” as a cargo of late eighteenth-century codfish, tidily decapitated for the market.

  “Sailors’ knitting needles?” hazarded Carey. Van Vliet turned in his direction, startled. Here was one who understood. Their minds were meeting, as if in connivance, over the heads of the others. “Any trace of a captain’s parrot?” “I should hardly think so, Senator,” put in Cameron. “Bird bones and feathers would decompose quite rapidly in salt water.”

  “Have you written a poem about that museum?” Aileen wondered. Again Henk was startled; her perceptions were sharper than one would have guessed. “The Mariner’s Knitting Needle” was one of the best-known pieces in his first collection of verse. “Recite it for us, why don’t you?” “Oh, yes, do,” they struck up, in choir. But he found himself demurring. He was hesitant to make his poetic self known to the other man in the presence of all these figurants. “Then the Senator can give us one of his poems,” Aileen went on. He met Carey’s eyes. No. The spark that had passed between them was male in gender and private. “He writes in Dutch, dear lady,” reproved Mr. Charles. “Like his grandfather.” There, of course, it was, the always valid excuse of his hermetic language; mournful experiences had taught him the truth of the saying that poetry was untranslatable. “Well, recite something,” said Aileen. “Don’t you know any poems in French or English?”

  Van Vliet was tempted. In his well-stored memory, ready to hand, lay a poetic prose fragment on the shipwreck theme. By the Japanese poet Basho (1644–1694), in an English rendering. The poet had made a journey to the eastern provinces of his islands; he stood on a precipice looking down to the shore of the Inland Sea, where a famous battle had taken place, in which the young lord Yoshitsune had vanquished the Taira, and all their people had perished. Standing on the historic precipice, the scene of Yoshitsune’s downhill rush, the poet pictured the ancient battle and the splendid finery of the warrior court sinking to the sea bottom. On the mournful promontory of Schokland, Van Vliet had more than once declaimed the passage to Durgie and the children. Now he raised his head and began. “‘The great confusion of the day, together with other tragic incidents of the time, rose afresh in my mind, and I saw before me the aged grandmother of the young emperor taking him in her arms, his mother carrying him on her shoulders, his legs pitifully tangled in her dress, and all of them running into a boat to escape the onslaught of the enemy. Various ladies of the court followed them, and threw into the boat all kinds of things—rare musical instruments, for example—wrapped in sheets and quilts. Many things of value, however, must have fallen overboard—imperial food into the sea for the fish to feed upon—’” Suddenly, he could not go on; a lump had come into his throat and tears to his eyes. “‘The compacts,’” Carey’s rich voice prompted: “‘…and ladies’ vanity boxes on to the sand to be quite forgotten among the grass.’” Van Vliet resumed: “‘This is probably why, even today after a thousand years, the waves break on the beach with such a melancholy sound.’”

  There was a soft clapping of hands. The Bishop wiped his eyes. Henk’s were now dry. He was moved by the fresh proof of a kinship with the American Senator but more confirmed than surprised. In the back of his mind, he must have wagered that Carey would know the Japanese poet too. He had brought out his bit of Bashō—from “Travels of a Well-worn Satchel”—like a broken coin or a single earring in an old tale, on the bold premise that Carey, if he cared to, would produce the earring’s mate, the other half of the coin. And it had happened; the brothers, long separated (had Henk, the cadet, been stolen at birth by a kabouter and spirited to Brabant?), had recognized each other across the gulf of an aisle. Yet the witnesses of their mutual recognition, far from being wonderstruck by the marvel, seemed to feel that it was only natural that two poet-legislators should be acquainted with the same “secret” author and go on spouting him together like “To be or not to be.”

  The wonder came from another source. Unnoticed, the Arab guard had moved closer during the recitation. He now touched Van Vliet’s elbow. “I hear this poem before. Yes. Many times. From a Japanese comrade—Japanese Red Army.” Old Tennant was the first to recover his wits. “You know Japanese? How clever of you. Such a difficult language. We used to go there, porcelain-hunting, my friend and I, between the wars. Staying in the charming Japanese inns, where they took such good care of us—” “No,” interrupted the Arab. “He translate.” “Into Arabic? Dear me!” “English. Japanese know only English. Not Arab tongues, not French.” “Vous êtes francophone, monsieur?” Aileen asked, adopting a social tone too. “Yes. No. For us, French is colonial tongue.” His face darkened. “And you, Deputy, how you know this poem? My comrade love it very much. He love this Yoshitsune.” The gaze turned on Van Vliet was accusatory. In the face of that scowl—and of the submachine gun swinging from the plump shoulder—he felt unable to explain how he had come into possession of the “poem,” which in fact was a travel sketch in prose. From the Arab’s point of view, he had stolen it, he supposed, in his character of colonialist. And actually he could not remember where and how he had acquired the little Penguin Classic, with a wash drawing of Bashō, wearing a sort of nightcap, on the cover-probably in an airport bookstall. “How you know it?” the Arab repeated. In his terms, of course, he had the right to ask; he had established his own claim to those lines—they had come to him, by inheritance, from a comrade-at-arms. With compassion, Van Vliet pictured the circumstances: a training camp in Lebanon or Syria, tents or improvised barracks, long, cold desert nights, the moon, a homesick Japanese youngster wrapped in a burnoos or army blanket, chattering of a feudal warrior-hero betrayed, in the end, by his wicked half-brother. He looked for a soft answer to turn away wrath. The gruffness and fat were misleading; this was a youth, not a full-fledged man. “I think I must have found the book in a shop.” Diplomatically he avoided the mercantile word “bought.” “And you must not be surprised. We Dutch are a curious people and we are curious about Japan, which has much in common with Holland.” “Sea people,” said the Arab, nodding. “Sea people are imperialistic. River people not so much.” Having laid down the general statement, he showed his white teeth in a large, quite friendly smile. Contact had been made.

  “And your comrade?” asked Sophie. “Where is he now?” “In prison,” the Arab said curtly. “They torture him.” The pastor made a clucking noise indicative of sympathy. “Who?” “The Israeli.” “Come now,” Aileen protested. “The Israelis don’t torture prisoners.” “You ought to qualify that, Miss Simmons,” put in the pastor, with a quick inter-faith smile for the Arab. “We don’t know that they don’t.” Charges to that effect, he reminded her, had been m
ade by the Syrians before the UN. “Charges aren’t proof,” she retorted. “I’ll take the Israelis’ word any day over the Syrians’.” “I’d prefer to take their word,” said the pastor. “I guess we all would. I mean, as a Christian, I don’t want to think that anybody is torturing anybody.” “What does that mean, Reverend?” Aileen said irritably. “Why ‘as a Christian’?” The Reverend gave one of his boyish laughs. “Heck, I’m all tangled up. What I’m trying to say is that if we do incline to take the Israelis’ word, it’s not because we don’t believe the Syrians.” “Then what is it, man?” exclaimed Cameron. The Bishop held out an oar to his floundering disciple. “Frank means that our faith teaches us not to be over-ready to believe the worst of our fellow-men, whoever they are. In charity, until we know more, he would like to give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt.”

  The Arab had moved off—out of hearing, Van Vliet trusted. He wished the Americans would close the debate or adjourn it sine die. But Aileen, like a wailing echo, persisted. “I never heard that the Israelis were torturing Japanese prisoners, did you, Senator Jim?” “Let’s leave it that they’re just torturing Syrians—all in the family. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you? And now be quiet, can’t you? Our friend’s flash point may be lower than you guess.”

  Van Vliet’s fondness for the Senator was increasing by leaps and bounds. Aileen and the dominie, in their obliviousness, were illustrating the worst of what he had heard of the American character. A people given to argumentation, someone had said. And, whatever the subject, the debate was always between themselves—as though only their own opinions counted—and was settled when they reached a conclusion or simply got tired, as the world had watched them do in Vietnam. At least Sophie had held her peace; perhaps, being Jewish, she lacked the authority to pontificate conferred on the others as a birthright. No one had asked him his opinion, but his work with Amnesty had convinced him that all prisoners were tortured; the difference was one of degree. Prison itself was a torture, and especially excruciating to violent revolutionaries of today’s school, who lacked the patience of the old revolutionaries; they could not accept incarceration as a stage, like puberty, in their political development. This young gunman, for example, would never be able to “mature” quietly, pent up in a Western jail while awaiting trial by authorities whose legitimacy he did not recognize. To him and his comrades, detention was per se unjust.