Authors: Michal Ajvaz
No doubt it was high time I was bringing my story to a close, but on that day the shell was rather tough; it looked taut enough to burst but the red juice was still spurting out of it. There was nothing to do except for me to continue with my invented story, to reimmerse myself in the waves of long sentences, not knowing where they would carry me. The woman was leading me through the wide, quiet streets of the Podskalí her garrulousness, which had irritated me so much on the boat, had ceased, and we walked on in a silence I found embarrassing. For something to say I explained how I had disliked the boat and how glad I was no longer to have to listen to the nonsensical dialogue carried on by the puppets, of which I had understood nothing. When the woman gave no answer to this I became even more uncomfortable. As I was searching for an excuse by which I could wriggle out of this, my guide stopped in front of a building and proceeded to unlock its front door. We climbed a dimly-lit staircase. As soon as we entered the apartment—which was exactly as I had imagined it—the woman led me over to an empire commode, upon which, propped against the wall, there stood a beautiful pillar and scroll clock adorned with cherub figurines. I opened it carefully and pushed my right hand in among its dozens of cogwheels.
“I think the fault is somewhere further back,” said the woman, who was standing right behind me. “Maybe a little spring has snapped right at the back, right up against the rear wall. You need to get in as deep as you can—I know the clock is unusually deep, but I’m sure you can manage it with those fine, slim hands of yours.” Now I heard a hint of mockery in the woman’s flattery. And I was a little put out that so far there had been no mention of French wine. Would it not be for the best if I were to disengage myself from the broken clock and make a hasty retreat from this posh, inhospitable apartment? But then again, I was truly curious about the insides of the instrument; it was as if it were making room for me to enter, and I went up to the elbow, up to the shoulder, and still I didn’t touch bottom. Was I the victim of a conjuring trick? At last fear got the better of my curiosity and passion for clocks, and I began to withdraw my arm, taking great care not to damage the delicate wheels or to injure myself on their teeth. But when my arm was still in the clock up to the elbow, there was a whirring sound and the wheels began to turn, vibrate and otherwise move about rapidly; before I had time to remove my arm the sharp teeth tore into my shirt and bit into the skin, gripping my wrist and failing to release it. I could feel how my blood was dripping onto the mechanism from many small wounds. I called out to the woman for help, but she remained standing behind me, saying nothing.
After a while she spoke in a low voice. “We’ve got you at last. My ruse has succeeded; the queen will praise me. For months now I’ve been carving puppets from wood, for years I’ve been writing a play for the puppet theatre; I used up all the talent I have on this, my moments of purest inspiration, but now I no longer regret it. I hired the best puppet players and a boat whose crew I had schooled at the naval academy in Hamburg; I patiently trained the extras who played the audience. That’s right, this whole comedy was played out for your sake, it was part of our pursuit of you, which has been going on now for several decades on all continents. And it was well worth it: the queen will be delighted, she’ll burst into tears of joy, good, noble soul that she is. After all these years, justice has at last been done. It has been proven that everything must be atoned for. Now at last you shall receive your punishment, and the stars that burned red with shame will again be as pure as before. I bet you thought you’d be able to destroy all traces testifying to your guilt, but in this you overreached yourself: everything was kept in reserve, kept for this very moment.”
She took from the wall a painting of a sombre landscape, in so doing revealing the metal door of a safe. This she unlocked before carefully drawing from it a book, which she leafed through before holding it out open for me to inspect. I saw some geometric figures and formulae; in the white margin of the page there was a clumsy drawing of a battleship. It was all somehow familiar to me. Then I remembered. “That’s my geometry textbook from when I was in Year Five or Six. It was me who drew that cruiser in the margin during a lesson,” I said, astonished.
“A confession!” the woman exclaimed in triumph. “Not even I could have imagined it would go as smoothly as this! This forms only part of the charge, although it is serious enough in itself. He who sullies white paper with his drawings could demolish the temple and smash its marble statues; he could rip out the strings of the piano and leave them out in the evening wind to jangle a nonsense song about cities consumed by jungles; he could deny the existence of the stars and the great, beautiful beasts which thirst for flames, run to conflagrations and bathe in fire. This crime is enough to get you life imprisonment on the cold staircases of apartment buildings, staircases with handrails made of metal flowers; enough for a thousand-page novel to be written about you in which you spend your days in solitude in an apartment by the railway line, where deep within the dresser the cutlery rattles at night whenever a train goes past. Your guilt will suffice to have all the islands of the icy sea which bear your name renamed, or at the very least to have some of their sounds changed so that the islanders are incapable of remembering them; they will curse you and their fur-clad arms will gesture threatening in the direction of the place where you were born; they will use your name with derision to describe the evil walrus so that over time your name will become the natural-historical term for the walrus, a term which will survive into the age of happiness which is still many years ahead of us, an age when people will forget your crimes as they forget your existence. Is not the thought of this almost-certain future enough to persuade you to reflect on your despicable acts? Perhaps you are not yet altogether depraved. And as I’ve indicated, we know still more about you. Was it not enough for you to draw cruisers and Red Indians in the margins of the pages of books? ‘The more one has, the more one wants,’ as one of our highest-placed devotees pointed out recently at the dawning of the age in which the seals that had lain for centuries on the teachings of the East were removed. Let us see what you have to say about this.”
Again she leafed through the book before placing it in front of my eyes, now open at a page which bore a geometric representation of Thales’ theorem—a circle with a right-angled triangle inserted above the diameter; next to this I could see the clumsy, childish picture of a bear with a bow around its neck. Perhaps this, too, was one of my drawings, but I had no recollection of it.
“We wished to spare the queen the sight of this blasphemy,” my captor continued. “But she is a brave woman and she told us that as the mother of her people she had no right to evade even such awful tests as this. My God, how could you do such as thing? Surely you knew that it was she who assisted Thales in his discovery of the theorem, when amid the bathing beauties in the circular pool of the gardens of her palace in Asia she stretched and tightened the string of a musical instrument on which she had threaded pearls? A string which reached across the centre of the pool and touched the side at three places? The moment when silently she pointed out to Thales a great emerald which was glittering in the early-morning sun among the pearls, at the very point where the string made its right angle, is captured in many paintings and frescoes; pictures of the Demonstration—many of them touchingly artless—hang on the walls of the poorest cottages, immediately next to the Golden Snake, and the shepherds at their evening firesides sing songs of this bright moment in our history. But what did you think of when you saw the sacred figure? Did you think of the good name of the royal institute of geometry and those who run it? Did you think of the honour of the nation, of the glory of the dynasty, of the sufferings and hurt with which our history has been marked? No. You thought of a bear with a bow around its neck.”
Having said this the woman slid quietly down to the carpet, where she rested her sobbing frame against the commode. After a while she recovered herself somewhat, dried her eyes and stood up. “After the queen saw your picture of the bear,” she went on, “for many weeks she closed herself up in her chambers and allowed no one near her. Her only companion was her little dog. Then this dog fell gravely ill at the sight of its mistress’s suffering, and shortly thereafter it died. It was at this time that the people gave you the name Dog Killer. The dog’s body—which had been stricken with the most dreadful illnesses—was laid in a modest grave in the grounds of the chateau; from this grave there grew a plant with a poisonous yellow flower, whose breath killed the birds which flew over it and the gardener who tended to it. They say that the gardener’s ghost appears at night among dormant machines in factory halls. The yellow flower erodes and blinds mirrors in which it is reflected, and if someone thinks of it the neurons in his brain become so excited that a short circuit might result and the brain catch fire. This phenomenon, known as “burning brain syndrome,” was defined and interpreted by the queen’s court physician, my lover. His professional achievement is the more remarkable for his having been forbidden to imagine the yellow flower for the course of his researches; had he done so, his brain, too, would have ignited. He was given the Nobel Prize for his work; to begin with he was supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but the committee of the Swedish Royal Academy, a group of elegant, dark-complexioned young men with fine hands, decided to give him the Nobel Prize for Peace as he’d brought calm to many troubled souls; no longer does the ghost of the murdered gardener roam the factory halls at night in such a rage. At that time there was an uprising among the generals, who were against the queen giving up her overseas dominions. It had never been clear whether these were merely figments of a dream, or perhaps groups of divine spirits that were around at the time. One night the plotters broke into the palace, intending to murder the queen; then one of them suddenly thought of the poisonous yellow flower and his brain burst into flames. When the other plotters saw the flames flaring from his eyes and ears, lighting up the halls of the sleeping palace, reflected to infinity in the great mirrors, they fled. So it is thanks to you that the generals’ plot foundered: it was you who saved the queen’s precious life. She will never forget this; I had to promise her I would search the world for you so that she may express to you her boundless gratitude and bestow on you a bountiful reward. She asks you to come to her. She will make her beautiful sister, for whom the mightiest lords have given their lives, your wife. You will live in a palace, which the queen will have built for you opposite her own and which will be a mirror image of her own…”
At this moment there was a gentle whir and the wheels of my clock-prison sprang back into motion; as they released their grip it seemed to me they gave me a friendly tickle. I could still hear the excited voice of the woman.
“…in the morning the virgin queen will breakfast on her balcony while you and her sister do the same on the balcony opposite. The queen will raise her right hand to you in greeting and you will return the greeting with your left. The birds will sing. It will be beautiful. I can hardly wait for your arrival; flags will fly throughout the town in your honour.”
Fortunately this was the moment at which the first red geyser spurted from the swollen shell. Karael jumped up nimbly and was the first to catch the juice on the ink sponge. The shell ruptured in other places, too, and the juice burst forth in torrents which the guests caught in their bowls. So I ceased to think of clocks adorned with cherubs, of a poisonous flower and a queen; I, too, took up my bowl and caught the delicious juice; I, too, sipped the liquid and nibbled on the bowl. The sun had almost reached the level of the sea and the wall of water blazed an incredible crimson. Thus ended one of my days on the island.
The story I told at the feast was no doubt influenced at least a little by the island’s
Book
, although for a long time I found this maze of adventure stories, fairy tales and myths about rabbits, princes and princesses, whose descriptions, insertions, digressions, improbabilities and anachronisms knew no end, quite insufferable. It took me far longer to find in it something that appealed to me than it did to get used to the island’s cuisine and its board games without rules. Now is perhaps the time for me to say something more about the
Book
, which I have mentioned a number of times already. I confess that I have kept putting off talking about the
Book
because I don’t have much of an appetite for it, but having discussed board games and food I can’t think of anything else of particular interest: I will just have to tackle the
Book
here and now.
The main reason for my avoiding writing about the
Book
was the fear that I would lack the strength to negotiate its labyrinth, which has become yet more intricate since the time it left the island and settled in my brain. I found the
Book
puzzling enough when I read it on the island, and then I had no idea of its extent; indeed, it is unlikely that I even discovered what was its main part. Since then it has become even more difficult to survey, having become something of a hybrid, in which pages woven from the fine fibres of memory and pages born in the realm of dreams sit side by side. When I think of the
Book
I see its long insertions emerging from the blurred landscapes of memory, stretching to infinity as they grow around tremulous pictures produced by the imagination. Dear reader, I believe I told you in the first chapter of this book that I was looking forward to wandering in ghostly realms ruled by the triumvirate Memory, Dream, and Desire, and to having adventures there; but now, having reached the twenty-ninth chapter, I am feeling very tired. I hadn’t realized how exhausting it is to wade about in the swamp of memory.
As I said, the islanders took no great interest in art. After the apotheosis of the Stain, when the building efforts of the Europeans in the lower town ceased, no architecture existed on the island. The islanders needed no temples or offices. Sometimes they would build a simple house on the islet of rock on which the upper town was accommodated, but, as the island population was in decline and no new houses were needed, they tended to repair old dwellings instead. The islanders had no painting and sculpture (which is perhaps surprising considering the great roles these play in the story-lines of the
Book
); they were satisfied by the shapes of stains, the movements made by the shadows of leaves on walls, the ever-changing white figures described by the foam of the waves of the sea. They had no music because it was enough for them to listen to the rustlings of the island; indeed, in the tapestry of island sounds there was no tear by which music could enter.
For a long time I believed that the islanders cultivated no art at all. But one morning, having awoken in Karael’s house, lying there with my eyes closed, listening to the chatter and trickle of water, I realized I was hearing occasional sounds which escaped the classifications I had established for familiar island sounds. A sound kept returning that reminded me of the opening of a Velcro, or a cookie being bitten into, and this was usually followed by the kind of sound made by a cloth fluttering in the wind or the rapid flapping of a bird’s wings; the third sound was a light swish or perhaps a quiet sigh. I tried to guess what was making these sounds, but the only idea that came to me was the improbable one of a sorrowful bird groaning in pain, pecking intermittently at a cookie and flapping its wings. I got up and walked through the wall of water to the stone terrace. There I saw something that surprised me more than the sight of a sorrowful bird nibbling cookies would have done: Karael was sitting on the terrace reading from a large book which was lying on the stone table in front of her.
I sat down next to her and watched. I saw that the pages of the book were neither stitched nor glued to a spine, that they were gathered like those of a children’s foldout picture book, and that they were written on one side only. At a number of places on a page there was some kind of paper patch-pocket attached; these pockets looked a little like ears or mushrooms. At certain places in the text there was another kind of attachment: a thin strip of paper which became wider and thicker two or three centimetres along to form a kind of oval (the cap of a mushroom) whose axis (the stalk of the mushroom) was perpendicular to the paper strip. The upper side of the oval was sealed along its whole length and contained a number of slits. Although Karael paid no attention at all to some of the pockets, others she opened (this was the sound that had reminded me of Velcro or the crunching of cookies) and pulled from them a small pleated strip of thin paper. This strip, too, had attachments like those I’ve just described, and some of these (somewhat smaller) ears, too, Karael opened, pulling out more paper concertinas with ears. I looked on in amazement, trying to work out how many levels the book had. I counted six, but even at the sixth level there was a little ear jutting out; there was no way of telling how many more concertina strips with ears were hidden within it.
At some moments all the concertinas were folded inside the pockets; at others Karael would have left open several pockets simultaneously, having opened out not only the strips which they had contained but also some of the strips which these gave issue to. Whenever there was a gust of wind, all the concertinas were lifted up and began to flutter (explaining the sounds of bird’s wings), reminding me of those little flags we used to wave on May 1
st
. When the wind dropped, the concertinas lay limp across the table, their ends hanging over its edges and shivering (the murmuring, whispering, sighing sound).
A short time later Karael carefully folded all the concertinas back into the pockets and closed the book. But her agitation remained inside the book; indeed it was even more obviously present when Karael’s hand was not on it. Inside the closed book, the ears formed a bump which reached its highest point in the book’s centre. The front cover—which was not joined to the back cover by means of a spine, only by the round shape of the largest paper concertina (the only one which did not belong in a pocket)—rocked from side to side ceaselessly. I was concerned that the book would topple, and this indeed happened, the front cover tipping over slowly to the ground, the paper concertina unfurling in an arc, leaving the ears so shamelessly exposed that I turned my eyes away.
Karael told me this was the island’s
Book
. I’ll write it with a capital letter because the islanders have only one book. I was surprised to discover that
any
form of art existed on the island, and that this should be literature was astonishing to me. Why should the islanders, who have such a love of formlessness, choose an art form that works with words? Words are surely more hostile than colours, lines or tones to a formless life. But once I familiarized myself with the
Book
and its history I realized it could not have been any different. I have already mentioned—in the chapter on the phonetics of the island’s sounds and rustlings—that the shapeless whirling the islanders love to watch is really the life of many waning and emerging images and shapes, that the whirring they listen to is the voice of a thousand fused stories. In this whirring the islanders recognize the appeal to protect the formless from a humiliating lapse into form; and they hear in it another appeal, too: to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there, and to show these off to the world. It seemed to me that the islanders thought the formless resounded with the quiet plea to expose at least some of the pictures that glimmer through the whirring, thus releasing at least some of the plots and stories whose telling weaves the murmur of stillness. The appeal to keep silent and the appeal to tell become entwined, revealing a single, formless longing—a longing to unfurl the monstrous, stupefying whirling of which it has long been part and product. A whirling in the life of the formless dreams of shape that allows itself to give birth to a complicated architecture, but this soon caves in, disintegrates and crumbles to formlessness so that the process can start again at the beginning.
But a new beginning is only possible at the very end of the shaping process, not until it seems—no doubt deceptively—that the last trace of the formless has been eradicated. Tones and colours would not be able to maintain the progress of this ages-old cycle: their borders do not stretch to the most distant headland on the continent of shapes. Tones and colours would not be able to bring about the glorious re-emergence of the formless because they would be unable to eradicate these traces completely. For this you need words, sentences and stories. The murmurs, rustlings and blurred shapes of the island did not dream of pictures, sculptures and tones; the murmurs and rustlings of the island could bring forth nothing but a book. I have mentioned already that the islanders loved border territories; life on the island was played out on two borderland strips—the world of shapeless murmurs and whirls and the world described in the Babylonian architecture of the
Book
. Each of these territories worked on the other; the one was born out of the other and they were astonishingly similar—the monotonous murmurs and whirls were really a complicated mesh of many shapes, pictures and actions, and in the intricacy of the
Book
’s architecture it was not difficult to trace the monotonous principle that determined the inserting ad infinitum of one into the other.