Authors: Michal Ajvaz
When I went over the whole Rue des Beaux-Arts story again, I reached the conclusion that probably it was not true, even though I could not imagine the reason why my Paris acquaintance would have invented it. It was not merely that the story-lines were implausible: in the descriptions of the motionless objects, for example, there was a heavy whiff of French literary influences, and the commentaries in the last part of the story were suspiciously reminiscent of Roussel and Perec. In conjuring up in the café pictures of snowflakes swirling in the light of violet neon, the narrator so befuddled me that I did not for one moment doubt the veracity of his stories. But next day, when I noticed that the lettering bearing the name of the Galeries Lafayette department store had no resemblance to the lettering of the narrator’s description, I began to suspect I had been duped. And now I am almost certain that nothing I was told in the café actually happened.
And what is worse, I realized with regret that the story was not particularly well thought out. I have described already how there were two sets of identifiers of things with letters, each the mirror image of the other—in the farmyard, where things were transformed into letters, and on the roof of the department store, where letters were transformed into things. Each of these carried the hero to a new world; I think that the more radical encounter with a new world was in the neon labyrinth of the roof. Admittedly it may seem that the Homeric inscription in rusty tools is in complete defiance of the logic and order of our world, but the peculiar spectacle in the farmyard is blurred by the fact that we can only find a place for it in the categories known to us, those of the miraculous, the mystical and the supernatural; these are still components woven into our world (and as such are traps for those who seek other worlds). The material power of words, however, which the chase on the roof stirs into life, opens up a strange space between things and letters, a space that eludes categorization, a space that is neither in the world nor out of it but in a strange, impossible place opened with the help of this power. Through the gap it is possible to catch a glimpse of a certain disquieting action that perhaps reaches back to the sources of action in our world, an action that marks the birth and death of all worlds. In this sense the episode on the roof was closer to the islanders’ identification of objects with letters than the episode on the farm. The islanders were not in the least excited by the supernatural; if an angel were to appear in a deserted street in the lower town, the inhabitants of the island would not be particularly interested, although they would admire the rippling of its robe and listen to the murmur of its wings.
These two related motifs were interwoven cleverly in the story, but the promised identification of letters with objects regrettably remained isolated and barren—in the remainder of the story nothing grew from them. The state in which simultaneously we see a thing, react to it and read it as a letter casts us into an unimaginable, yet real space, in which it is not clear whether seeing, reacting and reading are parts of a single primary action or it is their incompatibility that has set the dizzying vortex in motion. And so this unsatisfactory state, which was tied to the object-letter motif, called for climax and catharis, but such a maturation of this motif in the plotline of the story was not achieved. Although the motifs of the crab’s letters and the pearls on the Berlin picture were a repeat of the object-letter drama, they showed it in weakened form rather than developing it further, just as the ornamentation of a frame is sometimes a simplified repetition of the motifs on the canvas.
Of course it was possible to accuse all the motifs of the story of being self-absorbed, isolated and fragmentary. Incidents came to an end and were replaced with others to which they bore no connection; the goddess Ino, for example, who entered Baumgarten’s thoughts in the farmyard, disappeared from the story never to return, even though there were plenty of opportunities for her to do so. Having thought these incidents up, a storyteller ought to take the trouble to join his beginnings to his endings in an elegant circle. He could say: “While the thief was sitting on the
y
describing to Baumgarten the Berlin picture, a vision came to the aesthetician in the whirling snow of a garment of billowing white. Shortly afterwards the white figure of a woman appeared before him in the violet neon; she looked at him with sadness for a few moments before vanishing into the darkness of the boulevard. Baumgarten had read in her expression the reproach that he had scorned her advice, that he had quite forgotten about her in the buffet bar on rue d’Odessa and hence had come to grief by becoming the well-respected head of a family and a citizen held in high esteem.” Then he might have continued: “In a fit of despair over his wrecked life, over the book he never succeeded in writing to completion, over the emptiness whose purity he never managed to hold on to, he pulled the necklace from the pocket of his dressing gown, handed it to the thief, and then threw himself down into the boulevard. But before his body could hit the pavement he felt a pair of gentle arms wrap themselves around him and bear him upwards. Ino had saved him and was carrying him off to distant shores…”
I was also perplexed by how the narrator had the girl simply disappear at the end of the story. A lovely solution had presented itself: Baumgarten could have fallen in love with the thief, whose world reminded him of the world of the rooftops, sleeping houses and undersea caves where strangers dwelled, a forgotten world of emptiness, waiting for nothing, and all the bliss these things entailed; the figure of the thief would be identified with Ino Leukothea (naturally it would be better if this were not stated explicitly, but the unity of the two characters be left to the listener to discover), and in this way, too, the analogy of the lettering in the yard and the neon inscription would be emphasized, an analogy into whose force field the smaller motifs of the pearl and crabs’ letters would be drawn, so that these were no longer superfluous ornamentation. The circle of the action might be further sealed by putting in the painting described by the thief a room on whose wall there hung a picture of Odysseus holding on to his raft as he was beaten by the waves.
I wrote that last paragraph, dear reader, late yesterday evening. Now it is nine in the morning and I’m sitting at my computer over a cup of strong, hot coffee. I would be glad if you would try to visualize for a moment the inconspicuous division between paragraphs, the negligible white space between the night-time period applied in resignation and encroached upon by the foam of sleep on the one hand, and the tense and impatient early-morning capital on the other, and to see these as a negative of last night, so that you might summon from this negative all its blackness and push it between the paragraphs. Otherwise what I write here will seem disconnected and illogical to you. All manner of things changed during the night; I lay in bed thinking about what I had written and I realized I had run straight into the trap the Parisian narrator had set for me.
Now I believe I did not understand the story. At the beginning its protagonist encounters the motions of elusive order and chaos, motions that escape from every code they help to appoint. But in so doing they create a curious unity, and any other unity, connection, and circular enclosure would violate the unity introduced at the beginning, while every violation of the unity and connectedness—and the story was composed practically entirely of such violations—would affirm and complement it. This means that everything in the story was exactly where it should be; its connectedness was formed by its disconnectedness and its unity by its fragmentariness.
By now you are perhaps asking yourself, dear reader, why I do not just drop the story told by the Parisian, as I have so many doubts about its veracity. It may seem strange to you, but a lack of veracity in the story is for me a more persuasive argument for telling it here than its veracity would be. All manner of things occur in it, and these are of no special significance, but the fact that the story of the letters is a fiction is surprising at the very least; that someone in Europe is thinking of the same things as the islanders seems to me something almost as unbelievable as a Greek goddess fluttering down towards the hero of the story on a Paris roof.
I remember the games the islanders used to play. They were fond of board games. The extraction of precious stones from the mines of their homes did not take up too much of their time, and apart from their dreamy attention to the sounds of the water and the murmur of the leaves interwoven with the squawking of birds, apart from their meals and their occasional reading and writing of the
Book
, they practised only one form of popular entertainment. I would often see them two and two sitting in the shadow of a colonnade in the lower town or on a stone terrace in the upper town, leaning over a game-board. It took me a long time to get used to these games, but eventually I learned to take pleasure in the long, puzzling matches with their ever-changing rules and uncertain outcomes. Even today when the rain keeps me in my Prague flat on a Sunday afternoon, I fold out the game-board I brought back from the island and challenge myself to a game. (I have failed to find anyone here who finds amusement in the islanders’ games.)
The games, too, gave vent to the islanders’ fascination for things which for us do not even exist. By this I mean the shapes of the formless and the surfaces of boundaries. It was as if these games had been born out of the need to create new borders while disputing their existence. The borders were not violated in the name of some kind of (primary or definitive) continuity or freedom. In referring to the islanders’ love of the formless I have allowed myself to be ensnared by language. The fact is that the islanders had no notion of
continuous
or
formless
: where we say
formless
they used a word whose literal meaning is “the dance of demons and animals in the early morning and evening.” For the islanders, even a white surface was a vortex of nascent and expiring shapes, full of monsters and fantastic fauna and flora; while the real bodies of humans and animals and real flowers were for them produce of a single species which exercised no particular privileges in relation to other species. And the gaps between species were not for them, as they are for us, so much empty space into which a monster will occasionally stray: they were inhabited by a great number of beings, whose bodies assumed all manner of transitional shapes. The islanders were well aware that such creatures do not occur in the real world, yet for all that they thought them no more bizarre than real species (not least the animals I told them about; they considered the distinction between existence in words and existence in the imagination a negligible one).
In the beginning I was exasperated by the fact that all the boards on the island were—to differing degrees—out of focus. At first glance you might mistake one for the common type of board we use, but the dividing line between two squares was blurred, and for at least a fraction of a second a moving piece would pass through an area which was neither white nor black but was so much part of the game that it needed to be taken into consideration. Elsewhere on the board there might be a zone in which several squares had indistinct edges; this would put me in mind of a volcano spewing an ever-changing molten lava which, before it was solidified in the black-and-white squares, dreamed wild dreams about games of sameness and difference. There were boards on which all the borders were blurred and boards on which all the squares had practically dissolved. (The surface of the latter was grey with lighter and darker areas which recalled a world of borders.)
Some of the island’s game-boards attained such a state by a process of natural development. I often saw islanders playing with boards which must once have been standard, European chessboards but on which time had worked to erase or obfuscate borders, to lose them in a confusion of lines and a swamp of stains; the board was flaking, crumbling, dripping wet, its squares had paled in the light of the sun, had peeled off, developed cracks, its colours had run into one another, washing over the web of scratches wrought by all the moves and the stains left by all the liquids which had seeped into its pores over many years. The islanders sat over such boards and moved about them decaying pieces thick with mould, with which they wandered the labyrinths of scratches and stains; it was never quite clear to what extent they were searching for traces of squares long-gone or how far their moves and stops were forming a new game-board web both fanciful and vague. Often a game was in progress when the pieces disintegrated to irrecoverable effect; the players would gather together the dust which was all that remained of them, and, after the wind blew this away, continue the game using imaginary pieces. As the end approached there were more imaginary pieces than real and the game crossed seamlessly into the realms of memory and night-time dreams, becoming a game of phantoms.
I played on boards whose squares changed in the course of a single game. They were made of squares of darker and lighter sand sprinkled on the board. In the course of the game the wind would blow the sand about, into long patches run through with different colours, until the board became a whirl of darker and lighter twists, stretching and transforming, wrapping themselves into other twists, reminiscent of the jaspé bindings of books come to life in dreams; and the pieces would pick their way through them, before crumbling and blending in with the sand of the squares.
I taught myself to understand a little the peculiar delight to be had from taking up a position on a blurred border, where none of the segments into which the space is divided have any particular claim on us, where suddenly we encounter the existence of something neither left nor right, neither the same nor different, a third thing which is impossible yet real; we encounter a space the world does not know and that no world would allow, but which provides a strange, rather pleasant place to stay. I believe this space’s magical charm is somehow reflected in all the border territories we pass through on our travels, that it gives both shelter and danger, is at once a citadel and a trap. It is there in the city’s mysterious edges, where the fringes of a garden give sanctuary to ghosts woven of moisture and shadow, in the strip between road and field, perhaps in that unlit café on the seashore I happened across that night in Naoussa on Paros, whose last tables and chairs were being claimed by the waves as they rose and fell.
Often the pieces were of an indefinite colour, and this would change in the course of a game. Some of them crumbled or melted in the sun and thus became different. Sometimes a player would realize that the piece he had in his hand, with which he was about to make his final, victorious move, had transformed itself into one of his opponent’s pieces. As they underwent such transformations pieces would go through phases where it was impossible to say what they were like and to whom they belonged, but however monstrous they were still it was necessary to play with them, to move them about the fluid, borderless squares. Stranger still was the fact there was no clear boundary between piece and board; a piece might melt and become a square, or a square of the water-board, which was popular in the upper town, might take on a firm shape which then would be moved about the playing surface.
Nor were there set rules for the game. The rules would change in the course of a game, usually by appendices attaching themselves to edges and exceptions undermining from the inside the existing rules, which themselves would become a collection of appendices and exceptions and as such would dissolve. It is to be presumed that a new state of affairs on the board called for new rules. This provoked no argument between the players, who continued to sit over the board in silence; while one was interpreting the new rules from the positions of the pieces and the moves of his opponent and adapting his play accordingly, the other was trying to find the rules in the configuration of the board and the moves of his opponent, which themselves were informed by moves he himself had taken. Even in this complicated manner, which we can compare to an attempt to reflect nothing between two mirrors, in time some kind of tacit harmonization of the rules might have been reached; but around the time new rules were becoming fixed, the impression was created that they were out of tune with the new state of affairs on the board, so again they began to change.
In the beginning the games of the islanders were a cause of boredom or exasperation to me. Once when Karael and I were sitting at the board and after my thirtieth move I remained clueless as to what was going on, I threw a tantrum and scattered the pieces across the board. When I offered her a shamefaced apology, Karael laughed and said this act of mine had in no way spoiled the game and that it was still in progress; I had not fought free of the game or its rules. The rolling of the pieces about the board was simply an expression of a new version of the rules which was immediately assimilated by the game, which thus caught me in its snare.
And so would the island’s players sit over their game-boards of blurred squares with fuzzy borders that shifted in the course of a game, moving pieces which changed into other pieces and disintegrated in their hands, playing by rules which originated from the game in progress and underwent constant change. How strange it is that I, too, should come to find pleasure in a way of playing which looked infinitely complicated and laborious! But whoever explored it more deeply discovered that there was a simplicity in it, that the ground it moved us across was ground we knew intimately, and that the simplicity was a source of delight.
I don’t know the origins of the island’s games. It may be that they came to the island by way of the Europeans and that the islanders adapted them in accordance with their own tastes. It is also possible that board games originated on the island, that the way the islanders play them is the original way, that only later did they find their way to Europe and Asia, where their fluid rules became fixed rules and the borders between squares became calmer and more distinct, paving the way for the games we play today. But what if the boards of Europe were merely dormant, what if some disturbance of the modern age should wake them so that their borders were fluid once again and their squares began to pulsate?