Forty-five years ago, my mother gave me life. She died the year before last. Last year, my father died. I, their only child, am walking along the evening streets in Athens, streets they never saw and never will. The fruit of their love, their poverty, their slavery in which they lived and died— their son walks free. Since he doesn't bump into them in the crowd, he realizes that he is wrong, that this is not eternity.
1 9
What did Constantine see and not see as he looked at the map of Byzantium? He saw, to put it mildly, a tabula rasa. An imperial province settled by Greeks, Jews, Persians, and such—a population he was used to dealing with, typical subjects of the eastern part of his empire. The language was Greek, but for an educated Roman this was like French for a nineteenth-century Russian nobleman. Constantine saw a town jutting out into the Sea of Marmara, a town that would be easy to defend if a wall was just thrown around it. He saw the hills of this city, somewhat reminiscent of Rome's, and if he pondered erecting, say, a palace or a church, he knew that the view from the windows would be really smashing: on all Asia. And all Asia would gape at the crosses that would crown that church. One may also imagine him toying with the idea of controlling the access of those Romans he had dropped behind him. They would be compelled to trail across the whole of Attica to get here, or to sail around the Peloponnesus. "This one I'll let in, that one I won't." In these terms, no doubt, he thought of his version of the earthly Paradise. Ah, all these excise man's dreams! And he saw, too, Byzantium acclaiming him as her protector against the Sassanids and against our—your and my, ladies and comrades—ancestors from that side of the Danube. And he saw a Byzantium kissing the cross.
What he did not see was that he was dealing with the East. To wage wars against the East—or even to liberate the East—and actually to live there are very different things. For all its Greekness, Byzantium belonged to a world with totally different ideas about the value of human existence from those current in the West: in—however pagan it was—Rome. For Byzantium, Persia, for example, was far more real than Hellas, if only in a military sense. And the differences in degree of this reality could not fail to be reflected in the outlook of these future subjects of their Christian lord. Though in Athens Socrates could be judged in open court and could make whole speeches—three of theml—in his defense, in Isfahan, say, or Baghdad, such a Socrates would simply have been impaled on the spot, or flayed, and there the matter would have ended. There would have been no Platonic dialogues, no Neoplatonism, nothing: as there wasn't. There would have been only the monologue of the Koran: as there was. ByzanHum was a bridge into Asia, but the traffic across it flowed in the opposite direction. O f course, Byzantium accepted Christianity, but there this faith was fated to become Orientalized. In this, too, to no small degree lies the root of the subsequent hostility of the Roman Church toward the Eastern. Certainly Christianity nominally lasted a thousand years in Byzantium, but what kind of Christianity it was and what sort of Christians these were is another matter.
Oh, I am afraid I am going to say that all the Byzantine scholastics, all Byzantium's scholarship and ecclesiastical ardor, its Caesaro-papism, its theological and administrative assertiveness, all those triumphs of Photius and his twenty anathemas—all these came from the place's inferiority complex, from the youngest patriarchy grappling with its own ethnic incoherence. Which, in the far end where I find myself standing, has spawned its dark-haired, leveling victory over that incredibly high-pitched spiritual quest which took place here, and reduced it to a matter of wistful yet reluctant mental archeology. And—oh, again—I am afraid I am going to add that it is for this reason, and not just because of mean, vengeful memory, that Rome, which doctored the history of our civilization anyway, deleted the Byzantine millennium from the record. Which is why I find myself standing here in the first place. And the dust stuffs my nostrils.
20
How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated. This is where old cars come to die, and instead become dolmuflar, public taxis; a ride in one is cheap, bumpy, and nostalgic to the point of making you feel that you are moving in the wrong, unintended direction—in part, bccause the drivers rarely speak English. The United States naval base here presumably sold all these Dodges and Plymouths of the fifties to some local entrepreneur, and now they prowl the mud roads of Asia Minor, rattling, throttling, and wheezing in evident disbelief in this so taxing afterlife. So far from Dearborn; so far from the promised junkyard!
21
And also Constantine did not see—or, more precisely, did not foresee—that the impression produced on him by the geographical position of Byzantium was a natural one. That if Eastern potentates should also glance at a map they were bound to be similarly impressed. As, indeed, was the case— more than once—with consequences grievous enough for Christianity. Up until the seventh century, friction between East and West in Byzantium was of a standard, l'll-skin- you-alive military sort and was resolved by force of arms, usually in the West's favor. If this did not increase the popularity of the cross in the East, at all events it inspired respect for it. But by the seventh century what had risen over the entire East and started to dominate it was the crescent of Islam. Thereafter, the military encounters between East and West, whatever their outcome, resulted in a gradual but steady erosion of the cross and in a growing relativism of the Byzantine outlook as a consequence of too close and too frequent contact between the two sacred signs. (Who knows whether the eventual defeat of iconoclasm shouldn't be explained by a sense of the inadequacy of the cross as a symbol and by the necessity for some visual competition with the anti-figurative art of Islam? Whether it wasn't the nightmarish Arabic lace that was spurring John Damascene? )
Constantine did not foresee that the anti-individualism of Islam would find the soil of Byzantium so welcoming that by the ninth century Christianity would be more than ready to flee to the north. He, of course, would have said that it was not flight but, rather, the expansion of Christianity which he had—in theory, at least—dreamed of. And many would nod to this in agreement: yes, an expansion. Yet the Christianity that was received by Rus from Byzantium in the ninth century already had absolutely nothing in common with Rome. For, on its way to Rus, Christianity dropped behind it not only togas and statues but also Justinian's Civil Code. No doubt in order to facilitate the journey.
22
Having decided to leave Istanbul, I set about finding a steamship company serving the route from Istanbul to Athens or, better still, from Istanbul to Venice. I did the rounds of various offices, but, as always happens in the East, the nearer you get to the goal, the more obscure become the means of its attainment. In the end, I realized that I couldn't sail from either Istanbul or Smyrna for two more weeks, whether by passenger ship, freighter, or tanker. In one of the agencies, a corpulent Turkish lady, puffing a frightful cigarette like an ocean liner, advised me to try a company bearing the Australian—as I at first imagined—name
Boomerang. Boomerang turned out to be a grubby office smelling of stale tobacco, with two tables, one telephone, a map of—naturally—the World on the wall, and six stocky, pensive, dark-haired men, torpid from idleness. The only thing I managed to extract from the one sitting nearest the door was that Boomerang dealt with Soviet cruises in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, but that that week there were no sailings. I wonder where that young Lubyanka lieutenant who dreamed up that name came from. Tula? Chelyabinsk?