Would I Could Own The Face of Eternity

Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland.

As a traveller it is not that you are invisible, rather that you become visible in a particular way. Everyone looks at you, or no, they do not look, they stare, but they stare at you as at a stranger and they do not expect a stranger to abide by their moral precepts and standards, nor do they know anything of your own; they may even in fact entertain the suspicion that you have none. We might think of the stranger: he has a different code of ethics, but what we mean by that is: he has no code of ethics – ours being the only one there is. And don’t we ourselves prefer to visit brothels and commit our crimes in foreign parts? The fact that no one there knows us makes it easier for us to forgive ourselves.

In itself the fact of being a stranger means being free, of experiencing the weightlessness of the self. There is no longer anyone to tell you who you are – and so you are no one. If André Malraux was right when he wrote that ‘Europe believes that whatever does not imitate its reality represents a dream,’ then that is what is so appealing about Asia, the possibility of journeying through a dream, of cutting loose from one’s identity and conscious will and abandoning oneself to other forces, of immersing oneself in the murky waters of the dream and becoming imperceptible, even to oneself. The dream of adventure and action pure and simple, of being ruled by impulse, of being moulded and tested beyond the limits of one’s entire being and becoming reborn part-felon, part-child. That is why travelling is the medium of youth, a floating venue for self-exploration and new beginnings. For the older traveller, it can be a depressing and humiliating experience to discover that the character one believed to be established and stable is actually no more than an imprint of its surroundings. But one can also be freed from an old, outmoded role; from a life that has taken a wrong turn. It is tempting to go chasing after one’s youth, to roam through nostalgia in search of chances lost, and there is always the risk that one will find them. Incognito as one appears in foreign parts, anything is possible, and the youthful appetite for life is resurrected, no longer innocent, but transmogrified into perversion and complacency. Well, why not? No one sees you anyway.

The result: embittered freedom. Feeble souls cannot cope with encountering their own potential. Robust souls can, but use this freedom to explore their own limitations and their necessity at a certain point in life. It is salutary to be faced with one’s own anonymity, because in the eyes that gaze straight through you, there lies a truth. You look at these other people, imagining yourself to be their yardstick. Then you discover that it is they who are yours, and you are cut down to size.

To me the choice seemed simple. I set out with no nostalgic illusions; I was not on the hunt for my younger self and the limitless potential of youth. I was not looking for liberation of any kind and I fancied that I knew my own limits. Nonetheless, Vietnam revealed itself to me as a land of parallel universes, continually presenting me with new ways of being, other identities, a whole string of possible selves. I was struck not by the delirious freedom of youth but by something quite different and more powerful: by a sense of my own thoroughly plastic malleability. I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime. I stress the point that it was only a small one, and yet perceptible enough to carry me across a line drawn in the sand, one that had been there throughout my life.

I have always made one rule when out travelling. No stranger may touch my person. My psyche is already under such heavy bombardment that I have to draw the line somewhere. I draw it at physical contact and believe this is a wise veto to impose. But in Vietnam, strangers were forever laying hands on my person without my feeling threatened. On the contrary, their touching moved me and made me happy, seeing it as I did as an expression of benevolent and generous tenderness. Vietnam was the only country on my travels where I never felt lonely. With every touch another layer of the onion fell away and I drew closer to the surrender inherent in the acceptance of one’s own anonymity. It did not matter that they touched me. They were welcome to do so, because I trusted them, or rather my trust grew out of these caresses. There was Tam’s head in my lap that afternoon in the Mekong delta. There was the driver of the car that took me from Danang. There was the girl who clasped my wrist in Po Na Ga. There was a woman in a small town in the north-west of the country, on my arrival late one night at a hotel, who came over to me, put her arm round my waist and stroked my arm reassuringly. I never saw her again. I have no idea why she should have bestowed this mark of intimacy upon me but I am grateful to her for doing so. There was a girl, a couple of years older than the girl in Po Na Ga, who hung out at a restaurant in Hué where I often ate. She always came over to my table and stood for a while chatting to me in English. Then one day she suddenly bent down and kissed me on the cheek. She tried out her femininity on me and I was aware that I had been kissed by a woman, even though the lips were those of a child. I felt a strange longing for this budding woman, a longing which was not, and yet was, sexual; like lusting after a picture or something hidden from the eye, the woman she had not yet become but of whom she had, fleetingly, given me a taste. To her, too, I was grateful.

Somehow I feel that all of this ties in with what happened at My Son: my small crime. That too involved a longing for something untouched, the desire to possess and be possessed, to be swallowed up by something great; a dream of permanence in the midst of impermanence.

My Son lies about sixty kilometres from Danang. Once it had been to the Chams, later to prove so forgetful, what Angkor had been to the Khmer: a spiritual and religious centre and, above all else, an architectonic achievement. For more than a thousand years this city had been inhabited and then, in a way so typical of Asia, it was abandoned and what we mistakenly refer to as time could start the job of demolishing it. But it was not time that had torn down these temples, it was plundering armies trampling back and forth over the temple city, there being very few spots in this long, narrow and war-torn country that have not been trampled underfoot. The last to trample all over it were the Americans, who razed the thousand-year-old buildings to the ground because the area, a well-protected valley encircled by jungle-clad hills, happened to be a Vietcong stronghold. After the destruction of one of the loveliest temple sites Philippe Stern, an expert on the Cham civilisation and chief curator of the Musée Guinnet in Paris, wrote an open letter to the then president of the United States, Richard Nixon, in which he begged him to suspend the bombing raids on these unique buildings. Nixon promised, much in the spirit of the neutron bomb invented some years later, to leave the buildings alone and confine himself to carrying on killing Vietnamese.

Time would have to find other ways of doing its job.

This was where I came into the picture.

Four or five kilometres outside of My Son the road petered out. A couple of booths had been set up here and there was a policeman sitting underneath a table in the shade of an awning. He asked for my passport and copied down the number of my visa. Then a lanky young man wearing a yellow safety helmet appeared and offered to drive me the last few kilometres on his motorbike.

The green slopes shimmered blue in the heat haze but there was not much left of My Son. Here and there a pillar of rusty red brick reared up into the air, but most of the time it was a matter of wending one’s way round bomb craters and flattened buildings. Shattered masonry and stone blocks several feet long were scattered all around. Severed tree trunks jutted out of a little temple partly in ruins. One building, furnished with a corrugated iron roof and with gratings across its doorways, served as a storehouse for sculptures and fragments of the decorations that had adorned the temples. There was a sign stating that the preservation work had been sponsored by the German Mercedes concern under the slogan ‘Preserving the past for the future’.

The bombs had done their bit but it was obvious that My Son, unlike Angkor, had never constituted the hub of a great empire. There was an air of gentle tranquillity about the place, so much so that the city seemed almost to have been born out of that tranquillity.

I was the only visitor to the valley. Which may be why it happened. Two guards with rifles resting on their knees were seated at the entrance to the temple city. When I returned from my tour of the place they waved me over and held out an object wrapped in newspaper. I caught a glimpse of red sandstone. They beckoned invitingly, their smiles were encouraging and their manner familiar. A little souvenir? They smiled ingratiatingly.

The reaction this elicited from me was one of anger. It was as if they had pawed at me, had hinted that they could see right through me and knew my secrets. But I wanted nothing to do with their corrupt fraternity. I was not one of them. My features contracted in disgust and repulsion. These men were crooked public servants, selling off the treasures they had been charged with guarding. They were simply continuing the wanton destruction begun by the war-crazed Americans, with the same disregard for the past and history. And I thought of this country, which had so little and yet was not even allowed to hold on to whatever remnants of its history had been left to it once the bombs had done their work.

Faced with my negative stance the guards changed their tactics. Their fawning manner was shed and now they were just plain friendly, as with a meeting of equals. Tea? they asked. It was hot, I had been walking around in the sun for an hour or two, so I accepted the proffered cup. They offered me a stool at a little table. We sat there for a while. They asked the usual questions. I was seized by the urge to communicate and forgot my outrage. Suddenly one of them placed the paper parcel on the table in front of me. I looked down, but by then it was already too late. In the blink of an eye I learned that beauty is the strongest ally of corruption.

Before me lay the head of a Buddha. It was of red sandstone and the marks of the chisel that had once summoned up the features of its face from the stone could still be discerned like open pores in the skin where sand had silted up over the centuries. The ear lobes were elongated and the hair with its ornate curls arched into the shape of a pagoda. The voluptuous curve of the upper lip tilted upwards in a little smile and the eyelids, half-closed over the sloping slits of the eyes, gave the face a look of spiritual grandeur.

I picked it up and grew strangely solemn. It fitted neatly into my cupped hand while possessing some hidden weightiness that made it seem twice its actual size. It was a wonderful face, so full of eternity and the realisation dawned on me that it could be mine. I could live alongside it every single day for the rest of my life, witnessing each day this smile which seemed to me to harbour a mystery far richer and more profound than that of the Mona Lisa: Buddha, ‘who has forgotten those things that we experience and experiences things we never attain’.

My desire to own this head was most certainly desperate, inasmuch as it was the desire to possess eternity and thus insure myself against my own passing. In my hand I held forty to fifty generations and through this head, so it seemed, I could live through forty to fifty generations to come. It had all the pulling power of a moonstone, a chunk of the universe that had landed, out of the blue, in my hand; testifying to a place beyond time. Secreted within it lay a glorious promise and yet it was quite clear to me that what the Buddha was smiling at, regarding with such indulgence from beneath those half-shut eyelids, was nothing other than the sure and certain transience of all things. But so beautiful was this face that it, too, exerted all the seductive magnetism of that same transitoriness. No sooner did I lay eyes on that head than I had to have it, because I could not bear the thought of never seeing it again. What I wanted to halt with my hands was time.

The back of the head was missing and the throat too consisted of one great gash. It had been mounted on a temple wall as part of a larger frieze and had been lopped off, like the heads I had seen at Angkor. Grains of red sand nestled in the gash. It must have happened long ago.

‘Americans,’ said the guards, pointing at the throat. ‘Tenth century,’ they went on, ‘eighty dollars. Cheap.’

They had grown cocky now. They had seen the corruption inside me.

‘Sixty dollars,’ I said. I didn’t mean it. What I meant was: Save me from buying this exquisite head because I cannot cope with the image of myself such an act would hold up to me. But I am too weak to say no. So I am going to leave the decision to chance. If you two concede I will buy the head and leave this place a changed, a lesser, man. But you won’t. Because you’re right. It is cheap. Eighty dollars is nothing for a chunk of eternity. And you’re obviously selling it cheap because you have a job finding buyers for your ill-gotten wares in such an out-of-the-way spot. So you’ll stick to your guns, as I’ll stick to mine and in a minute or two I’ll take my leave, quietly and with a clear conscience.

‘Eighty dollars,’ they reiterated. ‘Cheap.’

‘Sixty dollars.’

They shook their heads. I stood up, relieved, and made to go.

‘Seventy dollars.’

Before I could stop myself I had turned around and nodded, yes.

They wrapped the head in the newspaper again and handed it to me. I thought of the policeman stationed at the road end. ‘No problem,’ they said and shook their heads. With a practised hand the guy in the yellow safety helmet took the wrapped head and slipped it into one of his capacious pockets. They winked at me. I was one of theirs now. They’d got me.

We drove past the policeman and screened by a car door I took possession  of the head. That done I drove off, feeling in truth like someone else, not a better person but a better judge of my own character. I had been cured of my clear conscience. I had overstepped a boundary, gone over to ‘them’, the others, the bomb throwers, the despoilers, whom I had always viewed from the safe side of irreproachability, and become one small link in the great chain of destruction.

André Malraux cut whole blocks out of Bantey Srei, I took away a tiny sliver of My Son. Malraux’s hero, Perken, dreamt of leaving a scar in the landscape, the Americans had realised this dream, drawn up to full industrial scale, leaving behind a land as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. And when enough time had passed people would refer to the traces of war as the ravages of time and no longer see the ruthless hand of man or hear the tramp of the armies’ feet. But it was this tramping which had found an echo in my little transaction and, paradoxically, I was now more legitimately a part of the human race for having crossed the border into the realms of destruction and learned that beauty had its price and that the seventy dollars I had paid for it was but a fraction of that price.