by D. W. Buffa
Holderlin shook his head in amazement, but whether at what Plato had written or the strange consequence it had had for Holderlin himself, Darnell could not guess. Still standing, Holderlin turned away and looked around the darkened room the way someone on the open deck of a sailing ship might gaze up at the stars, more for what he remembered about other places and other nights than for anything he saw. The lines in his forehead deepened and grew broader, and with each passing moment the further back in time he seemed to go.
“You were about to tell me something about South America,” said Darnell, his voice in the silence the whisper of a reminder that the present, still existing, had not been buried in the past. Holderlin blinked his eyes.
“South America? – Yes, of course,” he said, coming back to himself enough to remember where he was. A shy, almost bashful smile moved with deer-like feet across his mouth. “I never thought I would tell anyone what I’m telling you; and telling it, saying it out loud instead of seeing it in my mind the way I have so often over the years, takes me back, brings me closer, to the way I was when much of what I’m telling you was still ahead of me. Perhaps I should have written it down, kept a journal; I could probably tell it better if I had. But then, if I had done that, I wonder if I wouldn’t have changed things, altered them a little, to make what happened seem more logical and coherent, to give it, the way we do any story, a sense of inevitability, when I can assure you, Mr. Darnell, there was nothing inevitable about it. To the contrary, when I look back on it, without any written record to convince me otherwise, I’m struck by how much of what happened on that strange voyage of discovery happened by chance. Peru, for example: It wasn’t reading Plato that sent me there; it was a soldier in the war.”
“A soldier in the war?” asked Darnell, wondering if he had heard him right.
“Yes, in every sense of the word; a survivor, if you can call him that, of Germany’s twelve year nightmare.” Holderlin looked at Darnell with the grim nostalgia foreign to most Americans and known at once by older Europeans. “You were in the war? You were old enough for that?”
“Yes. Toward the end of it; the war in the Pacific against the Japanese.”
“Then you have some sense of what war does to people, the memories they have to live with when it’s finally over.”
“But you weren’t in the war; you must have been just a child.”
“That’s true of course; I wasn’t old enough to be a soldier, like Jurgen Reinhardt, my teacher and my friend. But whatever age you were, if you were in Germany, you were in the war.”
“Jurgen Reinhardt – He was your teacher and he was the one who…?”
“I was a student at the Free University of Berlin in the l960s when Berlin was a divided city. Reinhardt was a professor of history with a special interest in classical architecture. He was a strange man, or perhaps I should say he was not strange at all: there were a lot of men like him in Germany after the war, desperate to lose themselves in something – anything – that would keep them from thinking about what had happened. Many of them turned to business, to the work of putting the German economy back on its feet, to rebuilding everything that had been destroyed. They used the future to shut out the past. Some others, men who had had some serious training, men who could not forget themselves in a swirl of activity, men who knew too much for that, tried to reconstruct something of Germany’s previous dedication to music, the arts, and the life of the mind. Jurgen Reinhardt tried to overcome the past by taking himself much farther back in time, making himself a home in the ancient histories of other people.
“Did you ever have a teacher when you were in university who almost overnight made you change the way you thought about precisely the things you had always taken most for granted; made you question – and not just question, completely revise – all the basis assumptions of your life? It is the greatest gift anyone can give, and Reinhardt gave it to a whole generation of German students. I wasn’t one of them; that was my misfortune. If I still say he was my teacher, it is because in the most serious sense it’s true. I only came to know him when, upon the successful completion of my doctorate, I joined the faculty and began my own career, one which still continues. Reinhardt was very much my senior – one of the lecture halls is now named after him – but in addition to his brilliance he was exceptionally kind. It was, as I came to understand later when I learned of what he had gone through as a soldier in the war, one of the few who survived Stalingrad, the kindness of a man who, if I can put it like this, had no more life to live. When I first knew him, he was not yet fifty but he was already a relic, old before his time, hobbling down the hallway on a single crutch and one good leg.
“Reinhardt was the only one I trusted, the only one I knew would not laugh when I told him my conjectures about Atlantis and the possibility of survivors. A man like Reinhardt – after what he had been through: Stalingrad, the long Russian winter, the brutal carnage he had seen…the awful things he had suffered, the unspeakable things he had been forced, ordered, to do – what would seem impossible to him? He listened, just the way you are doing now, with a thoughtful expression. He did not feel the need, as so many others would have done, to take the side of convention, of what others believed, and insist that it was all too absurd, that everyone knew that Atlantis was a fable, an invention of ancient poets and story-tellers, no more to be taken seriously than the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.”
This last phrase brought a pause as Holderlin suddenly realized why had used it. A mirthful look of shrewd curiosity passed through his eager eyes. With the back of his fingers, he scratched the side of his face.
“The fable of the fleece was no more a fable than Atlantis. That was the first thing Reinhardt told me, the example he used to encourage me to go forward with what I planned to do. The Golden Fleece – sheepskins dipped in a Thracian river to collect the tiny particles of gold that washed down from the mountains. With perfect patience, Reinhardt explained the solid ground on which that, and other so-called legends, came to be. He listened to everything, the summary of all my research, the different conjectures, the various contradictions, the inconsistencies, the false starts, the false hopes, and through it all, the single thread that had never quite been broken, the belief that all of it made more sense than the alternative; that Plato had been right, that Atlantis had not been a dream, and that instead of vanishing entirely it was still there, islands above the surface and God knows how many tribes of men.
“Reinhardt was not sure he could go that far. As I say, he had seen too much to dismiss anything as impossible, but, for the same reason, he was cautious in his judgments. I can still see him sitting there, in that small, Spartan office of his; a cubbyhole, really, barely big enough for his small desk and two wooden chairs; everything, all his papers, his few books, neatly arranged, nothing ever out of place. It was late in the afternoon, in January, just after the Christmas holiday, and so bitter cold we wore coats and sweaters inside. When I finished telling him what I thought I had discovered, after he told me that it was an interesting line of speculation and that I should follow my instinct and pursue it, he lapsed into a profound silence. I remember glancing out the window at the falling snow, thinking how quiet everything had become. And then, finally, Reinhardt spoke.
“‘That would explain something I’ve never understood. If you’re right, this may be a way to prove it, or at least to lend what you say some tangible support, and perhaps, more importantly, give you an idea where you need to go next. You know about the Incas?’
“I didn’t know much: indigenous natives of South America, an unusual religion; a cruel, violent, and barbarous people, I guessed. With his usual kindness, Reinhardt showed me how truly ignorant I was.” There was a sparkle in Holderlin’s eyes as he recounted Reinhardt’s subtle procedure. “He didn’t tell me what he knew; he pulled a book off the shelf behind him as if he was himself not quite sure. He read aloud about ‘cyclopean ruins of vast edifices, apparently never completed,’ a
bout works that ‘appear to have been erected by powerful sovereigns with unlimited command of labor, possibly with the object of giving employment to subjugated people, while feeding the vanity or pleasing the taste of the conquerors.’ Reinhardt then looked right at me to repeat the next line he read: ‘Of their origin nothing is historically known.’
“You can understand how intensely interested I became. No one knew for certain how these great works had come into existence. Someone had built them, or started to build them, but why they were built, what their purpose was – it was all conjecture. What was known was that the Incas – the ‘People of the Sun,’ as they called themselves – had conquered the region and, to provide against attack, occupied the mountains that surround the valley of Cuzco and Lake Titicaca at an elevation of twelve thousand feet. Would anyone do that who wasn’t used to living on mountains? Would anyone do that who didn’t feel a need, passed down through the generations, to be as close as they could to the sun, the god they worshipped? The more Reinhardt read from that description of the Incas, the more certain I was that he was right, that I had to go to Peru and see for myself what they had done.
“There were other things that Reinhardt told me, other things he read from that book of his, which gave me encouragement and hope. When the Incas first come into history, that is to say, when we first have any record of them, they already were in possession of a considerable civilization. Their empire extended from north of Quito to the river Maule in the south of Chile, a region which they ruled with a system of roads and post-houses over mountain ranges and deserts, and an attention to administrative detail that included the use of accurate statistics. Where did this learning come from? Was it possible that it just sprang up, by itself, in the midst of a primitive people? And then there was this – and when Reinhardt read it to me, I knew I was right. I later borrowed his book and went over every line of it. This is what was written about the things they built:
‘The edifices displayed marvelous building skill, and their workmanship is unsurpassed. The world has nothing to show, in the way of stone-cutting and fitting, to equal the skill and accuracy displayed in the Inca structures of Cuzco.’
“That isn’t all, Mr. Darnell. In a few short words, a few astonishing words, a comparison is drawn between what the Incas did and the achievements of contemporary Europeans:
‘As workers in metals and as potters they displayed infinite variety of design, while as cultivators and engineers they excelled their European conquerors.’
“Yes, conquerors: at the beginning of the l6th century, when Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish came. The question then would be whether the survivors of Atlantis, the generations that had kept moving west, had moved again. But first, I had to go to Peru, to find out what I could. Six months later, when I ended my classes for the year, I took a leave from the university and began my journey. I did not come back until two years later.”
At the mention of how long he had been gone, how long that fateful exploration had taken, Holderlin straightened his shoulders and, as if he did not need support of any kind, let go of the back of the chair. He stood there, tall and proud, his perfectly balanced face shining with the faded brilliance of his own achievement, an achievement more impressive because it had all these years remained a secret.
“I had no money; not the kind that someone would need to mount a serious expedition. I was alone, a young scholar who had never expected more than to live a life of what used to be called shabby gentility. There are, however, certain advantages to being relatively impoverished. It did not occur to me that I could not travel as cheaply as I lived. Nearly every summer I had gone on long walking tours of Germany and France; I could certainly find my way around South America. I wonder, Mr. Darnell, if the key to human progress isn’t human ignorance. If we knew in advance all the trouble, all the hardships we would face, would we ever try to do anything? I didn’t have money to book passage on an ocean liner; I worked my way across the Atlantic on a tramp steamer.”
Holderlin stared down at his feet, an expression of wistful mocking, the felt affection for the lost certainties of his vanished youth, dancing softly in his eyes.
“It was the hardest work I’d ever done,” he said, laughing. “But I got there, the western shore of South America, and made my way into the mountains, up to Cuzco and the Inca ruins, where I was disappointed. Disappointed? I was depressed. There were ruins all right, and even my untrained eye could see that there must once have been something that was truly monumental; but I wasn’t trained, an archeologist who can tell from a few broken shards of pottery what a whole culture might have looked like. In my eager desire to find the proof of Atlantis, I had expected some clear sign of the thriving civilization Reinhardt had described to me: buildings shining gold and silver in the sun-drenched mountain air, projects that dwarfed the imagination of what Europeans had ever tried to do, even, I suppose, the ghosts of engineers and warriors still at work; but instead I found, among those crumbling ruins and pathetic excavations, a few rumpled Indians with flea-bitten llamas selling trinkets in the square.
“Had I been wealthy, had I come there at the head of some well-financed expedition, I would have done the intelligent thing and simply gone home; but I didn’t have money and, worse yet, I was young and didn’t worry that I was wasting time. I was also, to give my youth more credit, resilient; which only means that I still knew how to forget my initial disappointment. I taunted myself with my arrogance, my unreasonable expectations. What had I thought would happen? That someone would run up to me and tell me that everyone there knew all about how the Incas first arrived and had only been waiting for me to show up so they could tell me? I began to make inquiries.”
Holderlin searched Darnell’s eyes for common ground, the sense that men of their age shared for the travesty of logic that formed the unwritten biography of their early lives. A huge grin engulfed his buoyant face.
“Inquiries? Like I was some careful, methodical researcher, sent to South America on a grant to make detailed observations of a native culture! I talked to native Indians in their own idiom – I had a certain gift for picking up any language I needed – about the everyday necessities of finding a place to eat and a place to sleep. I spoke to the local authorities with their drowsy manners and their eyes full of calculating avarice. I ate bad food in dirty taverns and drank things that, if I drank them now, might cause blindness. And all the time I learned more about how these people thought and the myths, the legends, that had become so much a part of who and what they were, so much a part of their language and the way they spoke, that they didn’t know it.”
“Didn’t know it? I’m not sure I…?”
“It’s not that difficult, Mr. Darnell. A quick example: How often do you hear it said that someone has embarked on some odyssey of his own? People who have never read a line of Homer, who don’t even know who Homer is, tell his story in their language every day. It is the way in which the language of the present, if you consider it closely, can throw a light on ancient origins. At any rate, that was what I tried to do: Discover in the speech of these people, during the months I stayed there, some hint about the past. I found certain words, variations of what in English is called Antillia. Buried at the bottom, so to speak, of what they claimed to know about the early gods of the Incas were words and descriptions invoking a place beyond the clouds, high up in the sky. That seemed to suggest that the Incas – or perhaps the men who conquered the native tribes and formed then into what became the Inca civilization – had come from other mountains far away; mountains that became islands when Atlantis sank, if all my conjectures were correct.
“But if that were true, had it all come to an end here, in the mountains of Peru, when the Spanish conquistadores destroyed a civilization for the sake of gold and in the name of God? I could not believe that had happened, not if those same people, the descendants of Atlantis, had survived the worst disasters the world had ever seen. Some of them must have gotten away. No, that was
n’t what I believed. They were too bred to a different discipline, a way of life we can scarcely imagine, to be caught waiting by some foreign force of mercenaries. It was just a feeling, but a feeling produced by long familiarity with what, I was certain, were the main tendencies of a superior civilization. I was convinced that for a long time – maybe since Atlantis, but for thousands of years – these people were a lost tribe that instead of settling in a single place, kept moving. I don’t mean changing places all the time, but with some frequency, every few hundred years perhaps; that like a race of visiting gods they would first subjugate a population, then teach it the rudiments of their own, advanced civilization – the science and the arts needed not just to live, but to live well – and then, after mixing some of their own blood with theirs, move to another place and lay the foundations for another sudden, otherwise inexplicable, appearance of a high culture. All the history books are full of the story of the European conquest of the western world; I was convinced that story had started thousands of years earlier and that, in recent times, there had on occasion been a convergence, if usually a violent one, between what the new Europeans were bringing and what the descendants of Atlantis had left behind.”
“And you found something?” asked Darnell, following every word. He had reached the point of certainty. Holderlin was either telling the truth or was completely insane. There was no middle answer to explain the utterly astonishing claims he was making. Darnell had seen, and examined, every kind of witness, and had developed an instinct for knowing when someone was trying to deceive. Holderlin was not lying. Darnell was certain of that. But that did not mean that Holderlin was telling the truth, only that Holderlin thought he was doing so.
“You found something,” Darnell repeated, this time not as a question, but as a symbol of his confidence, the assurance that he would not have listened to as much as he had if he had not become convinced of the importance of what Holderlin was saying. “You found the island, the one that, forty years later, Captain Johansen rediscovered. But how - How did you get from the mountains around Lake Titicaca to an island more than a thousand miles out in the Pacific?”
