Conrad Meyer’s The Marriage of the Monk and the Challenge to Truth

I confess I only read The Marriage of the Monk (“Die Hochzeit des Mönchs”) because it was mentioned a few times in the general criticism on German novellas in the 19th century I’d been reading and it sounded like it would be a good fit for my exams at the end of next year. But, all things considered, there’ve been worse reasons I’ve read books. And worse books I’ve read for better reasons. For it actually turns out that The Marriage of the Monk was actually worth reading to begin with, even in the original German as I did. I thought I’d share a few of its interesting features here, since it’s impossible to find a translation online and hard enough in the real world too, and they aren’t worth being lost along with the novella.

A photo of Conrad Meyer
Conrad Meyer (1825 – 1898) is chiefly known outside of the German-speaking lands for nothing, because hardly any translations of his works exist. But The Marriage of the Monk is one of his many well-crafted little historical stories

The Frame Narrative

The story is made up of a frame narrative, the outer layer of which takes place in Verona, where a group of friends are gathered round the fire and telling stories. Their head is Cangrande della Scala, an Italian nobleman best known now for his patronage of the poet, Dante. He summons Dante from the back of the room and asks him to tell the group a story, and the story of The Marriage of the Monk is his choice. How does a monk get married? The title already contains the central tension – a monk is someone who has renounced worldly passions including love and marriage, so it is only by breaking one’s vows of chastity that such a man can return to the world. Dante details the consequences of this.

A painting of Dante, the story's primary narrator
Dante Alighieri, world famous poet. By choosing him as a narrator Meyer already raises questions about what kinds of “truth” he as a writer can represent.

The Marriage of the Monk – Plot Summary

Dante’s tale begins with the sinking of marriage boat as it goes along a river in Padua. The husband and almost every male in his family is on board, in the chaos they all perish. Diana, the wife, is rescued by the monk, Astorre, who appears from one bank of the river just as from the other there comes the famed tyrant, Ezzelino III da Romano. It turns out that the monk is the last male heir of the groom’s family, and the old patriarch, on his deathbed, begs the monk to renounce his vows and return to the world, so that his accumulated worldly wealth will not be wasted. A Papal letter grants permission to return only if Astorre agrees to by his own free will, but he is against it. Only with pressure from the old man does he eventually relent and agree to marry his brother’s widow.

Obviously, love in those days counted for very little. A date is set for the exchange of rings, and the marriage itself. Astorre meets old friends and finds himself more than a little out of his depth in the world of cutthroat tyrants and backstabbing. But he successfully goes and buys a ring for his future wife, only to realise that he doesn’t know her finger size, so he gets two gold rings instead of the one. As he walks home he drops one of these rings, and this finds its way into the hands of a young girl, Antiope, who he had once met at the beheading of her father. Her mother, driven mad by the incident, declares that the monk must wish to marry her daughter, and decides that they must go to his parties to see him.

This happens, and a fight takes place between the three women of the story. As Astorre walks the young girl home, however, it becomes clear that he loves her instead of his betrothed. His friends are against it, especially since the widow’s brother is one of them. But eventually the widow relents, agreeing to give return the old ring to Antiope so that the monk no longer has any divided loyalties. But there is a condition. At the fancy dress party taking place that evening Antiope must come to the widow, Diana, herself and take the ring off, humiliating herself in front of high society. When she comes, however, Diana (who is dressed as her divine namesake) takes an arrow and kills Antiope. The monk, arriving too late to save her, tries to get revenge but is cut down. They die in each other’s arms.

That’s the plot, so now for the cool things about how The Marriage of the Monk is made.

Interpretation: Playing with Truth

Storytelling

Even if you didn’t get that Cangrande was a real figure, it’s hard not to have heard of Dante. Meyer uses real figures in all of his novellas, but we should immediately ask ourselves the question – Why? It is easy enough to answer why Ezzelino is included: he is a splash of local colour, tying the story down to a concrete place and time and thus adding to the verisimilitude of it just as namedropping a few landmarks helps in modern historical novels. But why use Dante and Cangrande?

I think, at least in part, it has to do with a sceptical attitude towards truth that runs through the whole of the story. When I imagine Dante, it’s as a grand poet, dressed in his magnificent red robes, as in the portrait. By having him be a slightly scrawny figure, uncomfortable in the world, Meyer undermines our idea of Dante, leaving our footing uncertain. The same is true of his story – this is a simple tale, hardly comparable in scale or scope to the Divine Comedy. As Dante himself says, “I am developing this story from an inscription on a tombstone”. Is this what Dante would tell? I think we are supposed to be left dissatisfied and questioning.

A woodcut of Ezzelino III da Romano, one of the novella's characters
Ezzelino III da Romano, another one of the historical figures used by Meyer. Is he just a splash of colour or does his inclusion mean something more?

More importantly, there is the question of how Dante would tell a story. I don’t mean in tercets. The Marriage of the Monk does some other cool things that challenge our usual idea of stories and storytelling. For one, Dante often admits that he doesn’t know something or a concrete detail. He challenges his own authority as the teller by drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that his story is only one of many possible interpretations of the event. There are also regular interruptions from other characters in the frame narrative, either to challenge something that Dante said, or even just so that people can shuffle about by the fire. The cumulative effect, though, is to make us aware both that this is really just a story, and that it is being told in a way that is far from any Truth.

There are other contributing factors to this critique of truth. For one, Dante takes the names of the characters around the fire for the characters within the story. Naturally, Ezzelino retains his name, but there is a Germano in both the frame narrative of The Marriage of the Monk and in its main story. The same is true of the women. Though Dante freely admits “I leave your innermost feelings untouched, since I can’t see into them”, the use of names still strikes us as strange. It means that the characters within the story are obviously not entirely the people they are supposed to be, because when we imagine people their names are a big part of their identity. Once again, we’re only getting a half-truth as a story.

Dante also leaves out the moral at the end of the story, a key element of fireside tales. After finishing he just stands up and leaves. This is particularly jarring because he is otherwise a very chatty storyteller, regularly listening to the interruptions and giving his opinion on them. The ending, then, comes as a shock and leaves us alone to decide for ourselves why it is that the monk is punished. Is it just because he removed his cowl? Or because he went against society by abandoning the woman he was supposed to marry?

Authority and Truth, inside and outside of the narrative

This critique of truth, indicated by the various formal features of the narrative, now lets us look at the story in a new light as we try to answer the question of Astorre’s fate. The consciousness of authority’s weak support base in truth is now revealed. In part the story does this by regular use of doublings. To the sinking boat come from one side the monk, representing a pure and Christian world view, and from the other Ezzelino, representing a worldly and scheming world view. There are two women. Antiope is pure and loved while Diana is the daughter of a rich man and so has more worldly value. The two rings bought by Astorre convey a sense of his divided loyalty to both the world and the divine.

When Dante describes Antiope finding the ring, he draws attention to his own sceptical storytelling by asking the listeners why they would believe in the fantastic overturning of the boat, but would not believe that from Antiope’s perspective she was perfectly correct in taking the gold ring as a sign that Astorre loved her and wished to be married. Dante shows that the worldview where we build stories around coincidences often leads us down paths that can be fatal, as in Antiope and Astorre’s case. He seems to suggest that is dangerous to believe too much.

Conclusion

What then kills Astorre? I think it is his divided loyalty between too many different truths. He cannot decide whether to commit to love, or whether to commit to worldly power and his duty as a nobleman. As one of his friends says before the monk dies, “Go back to your cloister, Astorre – you never should have left it”. The man is right – by leaving his cloister Astorre has to make a choice about what truth he believes in, while so long as he stays inside he is safe with only his duty to God. The Marriage of the Monk thus becomes a cautionary tale about the danger of naivety in a world where truth no longer matters. In our own modern world, where considerable scepticism is necessary to survive the modern news landscape, it remains surprisingly relevant in its message. If you can read German, give it a go.

James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and the Problems of Peace

Introduction: Adventure and its Contexts

Lost Horizon is an adventure novel by James Hilton and the origin of “Shangri-La”, the mythic lamasery in the Himalayas. But as is the case with many of the best examples of this genre, though in Lost Horizon adventure means an escape from the everyday world it certainly doesn’t mean an escape from its concerns; instead, we find that it is only when we’re far away from the world that we can truly understand it, and indeed ourselves and where our place in it should be – in it, or out. For this isa book concerned at its heart with how far we can escape the world we all live in, and whether or not we should.

A painting of a few climbers above the ice on a mountain ridge.
A painting by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian artist working in India’s Himalayas at the same time as Lost Horizon is set.

The book was published in 1933 – the year that Hitler came to power in Germany – and the bulk of its action takes place in 1931, a year no more confident in itself. Wars between China and Japan, and the beginnings of the end of the British Empire, are also key points of context. But perhaps the most significant is the First World War and the experience there of grinding slaughter, which in large part contributed to a great feeling of decline, both cultural and spiritual, which permeate Lost Horizon. Our main character, an Englishman named Conway, suffers acutely from his time in the trenches. But more on him shortly.

Plot and Structure

Lost Horizon begins with a frame narrative, detailing an after-dinner discussion between old school friends that leads, as these things often do, to questions about mutual friends and what has become of them. Rutherford, a novelist friend of the narrator’s, enquires about a plane hijacking that took place in Baskul in Persia, and learns that – as he suspected – their mutual friend from Oxford,  “Glory” Conway, was on board. But nobody knows where the plane was taken to after it was commandeered – the passengers mysteriously disappeared. However, once they are alone the novelist confides to his friend that he does know what happened to Conway, and provides him with a manuscript recording what Conway told him when they met afterwards. This manuscript makes up the rest of the story.

Four people are on board the hijacked plane – there is a woman, a Christian missionary; Conway, a soldier who had taught at Oxford after the war and now aimlessly works in the Consular Service; an American businessman; and a young and impetuous soldier, Mallinson. Though they try to get into the cockpit, their pilot is armed and is able to defend himself, and eventually they leave off and enjoy the journey. They are flown high into the Himalayas, where eventually their pilot crashes in the middle of a high and alien plateau. Without food or water, and with the hijacker dying from his wounds, they await their own deaths.

But instead rescue comes in the form of a mysterious Chinese man, who introduces himself as Chang, and his servants who bear him on a chair. He offers to lead these helpless people to the lamasery of Shangri-La, where they have everything that the others could possibly want. With no other choice, all of the outsiders agree, and they undertake the arduous journey up to the lamasery with the group.

Shangri-La

What is the new world like to which the characters of Lost Horizon are brought? The first thing they notice is that the lamasery has central heating, which is quite extraordinary given its geographical isolation. But it offers much more than that. The central tenant, Change explains, of the lamas is “moderation”. They work, but not too hard; they obey the rules, but not all the time. They live in a world of ultimate relaxation, because their demands upon themselves are only “moderate” too. It is, from a mental point of view, already sounding like paradise. But things get better still – the lamas, who are all hidden within the lamasery, Chang not yet being fully admitted, are also gifted with extraordinarily long lives, further reducing the pressure upon them. They can take their time with their goals.

A Painting of a lama standing alone in front of some mountains as the sun sets
Peace and all the time in the world to read and think and enjoy life – this is what Shangri-La offers. But is it really “life” when it is so far removed from the outside world?

Each of the characters reacts to this little utopia in their own way. The missionary decides to learn Tibetan so as to convert the locals who live in the valley by the lamasery; the American decides to make use of the gold reserves of the valley, and its women – who are only “moderately” chaste; Mallinson spends his time planning his escape; and Conway seems to spend his time relaxing and thinking. In Shangri-La, hidden away, he has time for thought. He says that the whole place reminds him of Oxford, it doesn’t seem so far away from an ideal version of my own time at Cambridge either. I was in fact given Lost Horizon by a friend from uni as a parting gift, since both of us enjoy our studying too much, perhaps dangerously so.

Against the outside world, whose continuous decline towards coming cataclysmic war is evident to all the characters, Shangri-La offers a world without connections, without obligations. Nothing here has any effect anywhere else – nobody leaves, and the system by which the lamasery receives books and other objects from the outside world remains shrouded in mystery – but all this is its great weakness, just as it is its great source of strength. The characters learn that they will have to decide for themselves whether to stay, or to make the hazardous journey back to the rest of the civilized world. And it is not an easy decision to make.

“Glory” Conway and the legacy of the First World War

Conway’s nickname comes from his schooldays, when he was one of those talented, lovable people in private education who seem to be able to do absolutely everything that they set their mind to. But the war breaks him, leaving him mature before his time, and he hides among the ivory towers of Oxford afterwards. Then, when his stint in the Consular Service comes, there is still a sense of dislocation very much apparent. He floats between far flung territories without ever reconnecting with the world – he has no ambition to drive him in his work, and his relationships just fizzle out. Whether he is satisfied or not is hard to say, but it is clear that his glory days from school and before the War are behind him.

In Shangri-La he has a place where he can work to his heart’s content. He can study and learn and play music and make idle chit chat. He can do all of those things that he would do in the outside world, but in a protected environment where his actions would no longer be challengeable for being derelictions of his duty. If he stays in Shangri-La there is no duty, except to yourself and your own whimsy. And the world that such an attitude has created is wonderful – it is a place of bliss and peace. But we know from the frame narrative that Conway doesn’t stay, and the question then becomes “Why did he go?”

Values in a World of Decline

O Public School. I have good memories of Winchester, where in the toilets an oversized phallus could be scrawled next to the words “Sic transit gloria Monday” (a pun on “sic transit gloria mundi” – thus passes the glory of the world). The education I received went far beyond learning how to do well in exams – it also encompassed things like having an appreciation and understanding for culture in general. Though it is unfair that I received what others did not, I am certainly glad that I had the chance. I would not be the person I am otherwise.

A Painting of a blue mountain
The mountain that rises above Shangri-La is called Blue Moon by the locals. Here is perhaps how it would have appeared to the travellers.

Public school has not changed much since Conway was there, though the people who go there have. I mention all of this because in the battle to find something worthwhile in this world where everything is falling apart, Lost Horizon seems to hit upon public school and something akin to “British public school” values as the answer. Conway represents something of an enlightened representative of this group of old boys, able to indicate what is good and what is not good. He regularly comes down against racism and notions of racial superiority, and he is also critical of the attitude that the “bally Empire [be] the Fifth Form at St Dominics”.

But at the same time, it is notions of honour and duty that finally spur him out of his self-confessed idleness into action. All of us who have been to private school have the choice between hiding from the world and acting self-interestedly, or acting in service of the world out of respect for the gifts we have been given by our fortunate position. Shangri-La offers the best chance of achieving the former, but it cannot come without a sense of guilt, however small, for the duty we are failing to fulfil. The world may be approaching the greatest conflict it has yet known, but Conway is not going to avoid it by siting around in the mountains, pretending it is not going on. Such are the views and the values he choses to set his store by. I like to think he is right.

Conclusion

The other characters react in different ways, and Lost Horizon contains many more mysteries than those I have described here. It is also a surprisingly funny book, with lots of jokes about British attitudes and ways of thinking that made me laugh. It has its serious message about the dangers of turning our backs on the world, but if you just want to enjoy a story about a magical lamasery hidden in the Himalayas, then it absolutely works on that level too. It’s good fun.

My friend James, who recommended Lost Horizon to me, has a blog here. He’s very talented and has been doing this for much longer than I have

Crossing the Zbruch by Isaac Babel – Translation and Commentary

This is my translation of “Crossing the Zbruch” by Isaac Babel. It is the first story in Konarmiia, or Red Army Cavalry, a collection of his stories on the Polish-Soviet war in the early 1920s. In other translations it has been rendered as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”. Following the text there are a few comments on the meaning of the piece.

Crossing the Zbruch

The leader of the sixth division had announced that Novograd-Volynsk was taken this morning at dawn. The headquarters moved out of Krapivo and our convoy, a noisy rear-guard, spread itself out along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of countless peasants by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the virgin buckwheat rises like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn river bends, she flows away from us into the pearly fog of birch groves, she creeps among the flowery little hills, and with weakening strength she gets lost in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a head after a beheading, and a tender light illuminates the canyons in the clouds, as above our heads our unit’s standards blow in the sunset. The smells of yesterday’s bloodletting and dead horses drip into the evening coolness.

The Zbruch, now grown black, sloshes and twists the foamy loops of her rapids. The bridges have been destroyed so we have to fjord the river. A majestic moon lies on the waves. The horses, end to end, enter the water, its noisy currents trickling between a hundred horses’ legs. Someone goes under and loudly curses the Virgin Mary. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts; she is filled with murmurs, whistles and songs, rumbling above the lunar shapes and shining depths.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the flat that I’ve been allocated, and two ginger Jews with thin necks; a third is asleep, hiding his head and lying close to the wall. I find a looted cupboard in the flat I’ve been allocated, and on the floor scraps of women’s coats, human shit, and shards of pottery from the special crockery used by Jews once a year – at Passover.

“Clean it up.” I say to the woman. “How can you live in such filth, and when it’s your own home too…”

The two male Jews get up from their spot. They jump onto their felt soles and clean up the pottery from the floor; they jump around in silence, like apes, like Japs in the circus, their necks swelling and twisting as they go. They place a scruffy feather bed on the floor, and I lie towards the wall, right by the third, still sleeping, Jew. A timid poverty closes in around my pillow.

Everything is dead with silence, and only the moon, with the blue arms of night wrapped around its shining, carefree head, wanders above the window.

I loosen up my numb legs; I lie on the scruffy bed and fall asleep. The leader of the sixth division comes to me in a dream. He is on a heavy stallion and chasing after the leader of the brigade, and then he places two bullets into the other’s eyes. The bullets make holes in the brigade leader’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. “Why have you turned the brigade around?” Savitsky, leader of the sixth division, shouts at the wounded man… And there I awake, because the pregnant woman is groping at my face with her fingers.

“Sir,” She says to me. “You’re shouting in your sleep and throwing yourself around. I’ll make your bed up in the other corner, because here you are kicking my dear father…”

She picks up her thin legs and round belly from the floor and takes the blanket off the sleeping man. It is a dead old man that lies there, thrown onto his back. His throat has been torn out, his face is chopped in half, and dark blue blood lies in his beard, like a piece of lead.

“Sir,” the Jew says as she shakes out the feather bed. “The Poles cut him down, and he begged them: kill me in the yard outside in the dark, so that my daughter doesn’t have to see me die. But they did what they thought was necessary – he died in this room, thinking of me… and now I want to know,” said the woman suddenly, and with a terrible strength, “I want to know where else on the whole earth you might find another such father as my own…”

Commentary

The River: Border and Baptism

“Crossing the Zbruch” has also been translated as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”, and this is a good place to start when considering what exactly we can get out of the text. The river Zbruch is a river running in Western Ukraine, which at the time of Red Army Cavalry was part of Poland. For that reason, the title can use either the Polish name of the river, or the Russian/Ukrainian one. I chose the second primarily because that’s what is the case in the original, but in using the former option the sense of strangeness, of non-Russianness is heightened. Either way, we are moving, just as the Russians of the story do, from a familiar world into an alien one, both ideologically and culturally. Poland was a democratic country in the 1920s, and Western Ukraine contains a large number of Jews and Catholics compared to the East.

A Picture of the River Zbruch
The River Zbruch looking particularly mysterious and misty. Crossing this river brings the Soviets and their worldviews into a challenging conflict with the outside world.

The image of the river as a border has a long history. The Styx comes to mind, and the images of death as the army crosses, such as the dead horses, give this suggestion a particular resonance here. A river marks a division, and divisions are central to Red Army Cavalry as a whole. Partially they are cultural divides – between the old world and its culture as seen predominantly in the Jewish characters, and the new world of the Cossacks – but there are also divides between night and day, fathers and mothers, and plenty more besides. Entering the water also denotes baptism, made more obvious by the full immersion of one of the soldiers (who then curses the Virgin Mary in a reversal of the sacredness of the baptismal act).

Ambiguous Descriptions

What we have is a profane crossing and an entry into the unknown. The suggestion that the Soviets were in some way fulfilling a divine (or at the very least a fated – think Marx’s conception of historical development) role would have been welcomed in Soviet literature in the 1920s, but Babel undermines the purity of the idea by corrupting the Christian image. This is one of the ways he works in Red Army Cavalry – no image or idea is permitted without being questioned simultaneously. Indeed, one of the main metaphors employed by Babel in the collection is the idea of “rot” or “mould” – at the centre of what we take to be perfect there is a hostile element. Another example of this in “Crossing the Zbruch” is the standards. Though they suggest military glory, they are tainted by their association with the horrific decapitated head of the sunset.

A Divided Narrator: Misanthropy and Poetry

The narrator, who we learn later on in Red Army Cavalry is called Liutov, also seems uncertain in his role. We go from the formal language of the first paragraph into the lyrical second paragraph, and then back round again. The poetic beauty of the landscape is stressed, but then suddenly its horrors come to the fore. I take the image of the decapitated head to mean that it is impossible, even as you try to focus on the splendour of the natural world, to escape the violence and destruction that penetrates it throughout – even the sky is not safe from blood.

Liutov arrives at the flat he has been allocated, and here the main action of the story takes place. After the dream-time earlier on, where each paragraph seems to move at breakneck speed, here everything slows down. The formal tone returns as Liutov repeats the phrase “I’ve been allocated”, as if he is trying to take responsibility away from himself for what he sees and place it onto his superiors. The initial scene is dreadful, with only the image of the moon providing a sense that there is a better world out there. A sense of misanthropy permeates Liutov’s interactions with the Jewish inhabitants of the flat. He calls them “apes”, and when he describes the pregnant woman she seems to be a body before she is a human being – the image of her picking up her own body from the floor is particularly repellent.

Heroisms

But even here there is a tension. Liutov’s hostility towards the Jews is countered by his own Jewish nature, which is at this point only hinted at through his recognition of the Passover crockery. And even as he tries to order the other inhabitants of the flat around, his own nightmare makes his apparent confidence and leadership seem very much feigned, or at least unnatural. This is then contrasted with the pregnant woman. Her very nature as someone pregnant in a warzone suggests great suffering and asks questions about how she became so.

But instead of cowering away, she alone of the other characters is given a voice to express herself, and she does so at length and with self-assurance. This is in sharp contrast to Liutov’s speech, which is marked by the uncertainty of its closing ellipsis. She has experienced death – just as we, seeing her father’s body described in grim and unusual detail, have too – and for that she has come out stronger. Her own speech ends the story, and the message of her words is ultimately a positive one, stressing love for her father and also praise for his heroism. Her language, memorialising her father’s memory within the story, defends heroic death over cowardice, even as his body repels us. In Red Army Cavalry we see time and again that language’s power is transformative, giving us protection against the hostile world around us. It makes the woman herself a hero.

Conclusion

“Crossing the Zbruch” is the first story in Red Army Cavalry and it sets out immediately the main thematic currents of the collection. The nature of suffering and heroism in the form of the woman and her father, the dehumanising effects of war through the other Jews, and also the counterpoint to all this, the glorious loud and boisterous army – all are given attention. Key to the representation of all of these themes is Babel’s lack of judgement about them – the story, after all, ends with the woman’s words, not the narrator’s. As a result, the reader is forced to consider for themselves what they think the woman’s speech means – should we find it uplifting, or is horror a more sensible reaction? It is also important that images are always undermined, such as the connection between beauty and blood, and water and a distorted baptism.

Picture of Babel after being arrested.
Ultimately Babel was murdered by the Soviet secret police for his writing. But Red Army Cavalry comes from an earlier time, and portrays an uncertain if cautiously hopeful attitude towards the Revolution.

Nothing is ever clear in Babel’s world. The challenge of finding one’s way in the new and tragically flawed ideology of the Soviet Union makes itself manifest in the competing impulses of the narrator of Red Army Cavalry and the collection’s world. But these confusions were present in Babel’s own life too, and his death in 1940 at the hands of the secret police. We have to make up our own minds here instead of going in with our opinions already iron-cast, and repeated readings of Red Army Cavalry only give more food for thought. The intelligence of Babel’s stories, and their ambiguity, is something that I hope is captured here in my translation of this one.

For my essay on Red Army Cavalry as a whole, look here. Another Soviet writer whose attitude towards the new state was dangerously ambiguous is Andrei Platonov – see my review of his Soul and Other Stories here. For more Russian translations, check out my work on a Tolstoy short story here, or some Leskov here.

Picture of the Zbruch by Arts at pl.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of Babel after being arrested is in the public domain.