Authors: Michal Ajvaz
The story of the feuding families was written on a strip of paper folded into one of the
Book
’s pockets; this pocket was inserted into a story about the adventures of an island prince, a character reminding one of Odysseus and Sinbad. One night a wicked jinni steals into the bedroom of his beloved wife and spirits her away. The prince spends twenty years at sea in a fast boat called the
Dark Desperation
, searching sinister islands and ill-boding coastlines. The end of this long section is rather strange even by the standards of the
Book
. After twenty years of roaming the prince finds his wife on a distant island of rock. She has been living here for many years alone in an empty palace by the shore: the jinni lives with each of his women for one year only, and he left her long ago.
In the beginning the woman is desperate with longing for her husband and her homeland. But over the years spent in seclusion on the island, she develops a love of solitude; she spends hour upon hour watching the ever-changing surface of the sea until she believes that she understands its script. These are the most beautiful letters in the world, and she never wearies of reading their wonderful messages. And so she spends her days on the shore in a state of rapture. The sudden appearance of her husband is unpleasant to her, as are the constant, noisy perambulations of his retainers on the paths and in the gardens of the palace. She is torn from her contemplations, dislocated from her dialogue with the ocean. She sulkily prepares her departure. But when the
Dark Desperation
is about to sail, she tells the prince she will be staying on the island. And the prince does not attempt to talk his wife out of her decision: for the several days of his stay on the jinni’s island he has found her indifference and eccentricity hard to bear. He realizes that he is glad to be leaving the island without her. Thus ends a twenty-year pilgrimage.
As the wife stands on the shore watching the boat disappear over the horizon, it seems that the prince is quitting the pages of the
Book
for good. After several days of unpleasantness, confusion and discomfort she is happy to return to her reading of the great manuscript of the sea. She whispers a declaration of love and a promise of fidelity to the sea; this Lautréamontesque ode to the ocean tells of the beauty of her lonely, husbandless, childless, friendless death on the moist sands amid the murmur of the waves. (Perhaps there is a direct influence at work here, but I am at a loss to identify it. It is not inconceivable that Isidore Ducasse stopped off on the island as he voyaged between Uruguay and France.) To the anti-social, solitary islanders this ending is far less scandalous than it would be to us.
But the story of the feuding families is set sometime earlier than the curious ending of the quest for the lost wife; the prince is still dreaming of reunion with his beloved, still scouring every coastline he can find. Most of the islands where he drops anchor are populated by monsters, cannibals or walking machines in metal coats which glow in the sun. Only once does he come across an amicable people with a welcoming, shaded palace. As he rests here a while the prince tells the island’s ruler and his family—in the manner of Odysseus in the palace of the Phaiakians or Aeneas in Carthage—of his homeland and his travels. The prince is descended from one of the warring families, so his story includes an account of the feud. The
Book
states: “For three days and three nights he recounted to the king and the queen the long, sad tale of the warring families.” Those readers who chose to let this sentence be and not to open the thick pocket which was inserted here, learned nothing about the feud; they spent two weeks on the hospitable island in the company of the hero, learned of his further adventures and then of their bewildering end. But those who did choose to open the pocket, as I did, were given the history of the feuding families of the archipelago. It includes an episode I would like, dear reader, to retell.
There are two islands, Illim and Devel. On the first there lives a king called Tana, on the second a king called Taal. There exists an enmity between the two royal houses. When Tana and Taal are still children, their fathers begin to tire of the same old naval battles joined in the cold of dawn, invasions mounted on sandy beaches (which memory makes an ongoing, dreamlike struggle), punitive expeditions to the humid jungles of the hills in search of guerillas (goaded to do so by the enemy)—and so they negotiate a tired peace. With time weariness and resignation give way to a kind of tolerance and respect, and so it comes to pass that Taal and Tana spend their youth together at the court of a Gallic king and become friends. But it seems that the ill-will has never dissolved, just lain dormant in the blood; once roused, it takes sustenance from an ages-old, bounteous source—love for a woman and the jealousy and abasement with which this is imbued. Perhaps the hatred awakes of its own accord, finds a woman to please it and stage-manages a drama in which it resumes the reins of power, makes itself joyfully manifest in words and gestures and streams into all thoughts and acts. Tana and Taal fall in love with the Gallic princess Nau, who hesitates between them for a while before expressing a preference for Tana. Tana takes her with him to Illim. When some time later his father dies, Tana becomes the island’s ruler and Nau his queen.
Taal returns to Devel, where shortly he marries the beautiful Uddo, whom he also knows from Gaul and who rumour has it was implicated in a poisoning affair when she was only fourteen. Such a spare characterization is of little use for my retelling. In this part of the
Book
the unknown author says nothing more about Uddo, although in the scenes in which she appears lengthy descriptions of the patterns and fabrics of her clothing and of her jewels are provided. These descriptions are made in the shadows of pockets whose contents relate the history of the lands where the fabrics are woven and give details of the lives of the artists who chiselled the jewels. (Have no fear, dear reader—I will exclude these descriptive passages from my retelling.) The faces of all the figures in the
Book
are veiled in a fog; around this void fabrics flutter, scents waft and jewels twinkle. I considered painting faces on the characters of the tale before deciding not to force masks on them and so conceal the emptiness they are used to.
Uddo hates Nau, and the evil influence she works on the embittered Taal grows stronger with the years. On Devel, well-paid court poets laud Uddo’s erudition. When at twenty-three the dazzlingly beautiful wife of the king is appointed president of the Devel Academy, an assembly of venerable old men who have dedicated their lives to science, jokes are cracked on all the islands of the archipelago. But the jesters are in error—Uddo has an extensive knowledge of chemistry, transformation in metals, runes, augury, archaeology, metaphysics, geometry, architecture, statics, boat-building and building of labyrinths, demonology, astronomy and haruspicy. In these sciences Uddo’s learning exceeds that of the academicians by far. (She acquired it at schools of the dark sciences of which it is better not to speak. All that is heard of these are rumours—and they may be nothing more than recollections of dreams—of night-time lectures delivered in whispers in dark rooms furnished with mountains of cushions and pillows for the students and teachers, who drift in and out of sleep.) There is no doubt that Uddo takes her duties at the Academy seriously—within very few years she turns it into a kind of secret society, something between an alchemist’s workshop and the Cosa Nostra.
At the time our story begins, Tana and Nau and have not seen Taal and Uddo for twenty-five years. In all that time there have been occasional discoveries on Illim of spies and mischief-makers from Devel, but the wary peace between the two islands has never fractured to such an extent as to excite open conflict. One day Tana receives a letter from Taal in which the latter expresses the wish that he and Uddo be reconciled with Tana and Nau. Tana answers immediately with a long letter of his own, in which he invites Taal and Uddo to Illim. Since the time of his break with Taal he has had no real friends, and in the evenings over a glass of wine he often looks back with fondness on the happy times they spent together in Gaul. Such is his joy at Taal’s letter that he pays no attention to various tales abroad in the archipelago which speak of Uddo’s murderous chemistry and Taal’s dark sonatas of power, whose darkest chords are played by his paramilitary guard. At this time Tana’s son Gato is twenty-four and he is a student in Gaul, where he is living with his mother’s parents. Fo, the son of Taal and Uddo, who was born in the same year as Gato, died four years ago; Fo’s sister Hios is seventeen. It seems that the names of both princes and the princess are mentioned in the text only incidentally—Gato and Hios are many miles from Illim and Fo is dead, so none of them will be playing any part in the action. Still we wonder if they might be important for the story—perhaps one of its strands will contrive for the wanderers to meet, or the action will return to a time when the deceased was still living.
Presently Tana and Nau are down at the harbour to welcome the galleon from Devel. They embrace Taal and Uddo, who for many days will be their guests at the palace. Every evening the four of them sit on a balcony above the trees of the garden, looking back on the days they spent together on Gaul and talking of their islands. It seems that these evenings serve to dissolve all remnants of resentment and ill-will between them. At this time Nau begins to be troubled by a strange illness. One morning she realizes that the skin of her right hand has stiffened, lost feeling and acquired a bluish hue; over the next few days she observes with alarm how these changes progress. Within two weeks the skin has become a smooth, grey-blue shell in which the queen is held captive: Nau is walled in in her own body. She has become a statue of herself, unable to move, unable to speak or even eat. Fortunately the hardening has not attacked her inner organs, so she can swallow pulped food when it is poured carefully into her mouth. The only feature of her outer body which is not grey and immobile is her eyes—two terrified, twitching larvae set in the heavy metal her skin has become. Whenever Tana carries his queen in his arms he watches in the smooth surface of the new metal distorted reflections of the palace—sagging columns, bloated window frames, soft networks of chequered corridors; when he leans in close to her round, gleaming, pitted face he sees in it a grotesque caricature of his own.
Tana takes meticulous care of Nau. He dresses her as if she were an enormous marionette; he carries her into the garden; every evening he bathes her and lays her next to him in their bed. He summons the most celebrated physicians, each of whom recommends a different treatment—one has Nau’s shell of a body coated in rose oil, another daubs it with ass’s milk, another fills the room with smoke produced from the wood of trees that grow on distant Formos. The physicians come and go, but the queen’s shell becomes not the tiniest bit softer. Taal and Uddo declare themselves extremely concerned. Taal summons his court physician, who applies to Nau’s body over several weeks a decoction of Develian herbs. But it seems to Tana that all these cures only serve to make Nau’s skin harder still.
The royal palace has a square ground plan. Its rooms are on seven floors and entered from seven arcaded galleries joined by a staircase. The galleries enclose an inner courtyard, where a fountain surrounded by palm trees spurts water continuously. The tops of the palms reach to the third gallery. One warm night of a full moon Tana is unable to sleep, and he sees from the movements of Nau’s eyes that she, too, is awake. So he carries his hardened queen from the room with the same care as if she were a priceless statue. Their bed-chamber is on the seventh, highest floor of the palace. In the dark gallery Tana leans his queen against the wall and lets her breathe in the fragrance of the summer night. He sits down on a stone bench beside her, takes up his telescope and studies the moon, which is illuminating the slim columns of the arcades and is reflected in the metal statues of the galleries. The room of Taal and Uddo is on the opposite side of the gallery, and next to this, in an alcove, there is a circular aquarium in which the water is rippling and lit blue by a medusa. This was a gift to Nau from an envoy of the Emperor of China and she keeps it as a kind of living jewel. Apart from the glow of the moon and weak blue light of the medusa—which is like the flame of a gas burner in the wind—the sleeping palace is in complete darkness. (That one story of the
Book
should tell of Gaul, galleries and telescopes, alchemy and chemistry is an anachronism characteristic of all its parts. The authors of the
Book
do not use anachronism with any particularly sophisticated intent; they do not use it in conjuring tricks like Jünger or Gracq. Anachronism in the
Book
tends to be employed carelessly, even naively, and at times it is not even clear whether it appears through negligence, playfulness or a simple ignorance of history.)
Suddenly Tana becomes aware of a muted conversation. Then two shadows appear in the gallery opposite; they flitter about for a while before coming to rest next to the medusa’s aquarium. Tana recognizes the voices of Taal and Uddo. His guests from Devel are too far away for him to understand what they are saying, but he identifies in their tone an evil gaiety which regularly gives way to quiet laughter. Tana is shocked to hear them laughing at a time when all voices in the palace are muffled in sadness. The suspicion is roused in him that the visit of Taal and Uddo to Illim is a mission of evil, an act of treachery that will bring in its wake a new war. There is no way of his approaching his guests so that he might eavesdrop on their conversation—any movement in their direction would be picked up by the moonlight. They would be alerted, too, by the calls of the birds whose cages line the arcades.
Then he makes the happy realization that there is one way in which he can find out what his guests are talking about. Once he, Nau, and Gato were standing in a dimly lit room admiring the beautiful, luminous dance of the medusa when they noticed that the medusa gave an answer to every sound by means of a special movement. Plainly it was able to distinguish the ripple frequency of different sounds and for some reason it would react to a given wave with the same movement each time. (At this point in my reading, the text sprouted one of its “zoological” pockets. These were attached to a page wherever a new species of animal made its first appearance in the
Book
. There were insertions in these pockets that described the anatomy of the animal, its behaviour and habitat, and how it hunted its prey. Sometimes recipes were recorded in which the flesh of the animal was the main ingredient.) Tana, Nau, and Gato often played a game in which one of them stood next to the aquarium and whispered something while the others tried to work out from the movements of the medusa what had been said. So now, from the other side of the gallery, Tana trains his telescope on the aquarium and sets to reading the luminous blue transcript of Taal and Uddo’s conversation. The medusa delivers this tirelessly, carefully, and always accurately.
Within a few moments Tana is quite appalled. He learns that Taal and Uddo’s amiability is a disguise. His evil guests conspired to put powder from Uddo’s witch’s kitchen in Nau’s wine-glass, and it is this that has turned Nau into a gleaming blue-grey statue. It seems that the plan was devised by Uddo, who has never desisted in her hatred of Nau, and that she persuaded the hesitant Taal to put it into practise. Up there in the gallery Taal asks Uddo if one day a physician might appear on Illim who would find a cure for Nau; laughing, Uddo assures him this is quite out of the question. The formula of the medicine that would restore Nau to her original form is known by her and her alone; it is composed of forty-four ingredients, and if but one of these is missing the medicine has no effect whatever. Then she begins to itemize the ingredients. Tana quickly pulls off his ring, then takes the telescope in his left hand and puts it to his eye; his right hand moves across one of the marble panels laid in the wall, inscribing into it the names of the substances by means of the diamond set in the ring.
When Taal and Uddo start to make fun of Nau’s carapace, referring to her as the Illim Tortoise, Tana’s anger gets the better of him; he sprints through the dark gallery towards his enemies. On reaching them he grabs Taal by the throat and pushes him to the floor before proceeding to choke him, all the time shouting that the despicable plan will fail because he has recorded all ingredients of the antidote in the marble of the wall. The medusa’s frantic, luminous letters write Tana’s cries into the dark, but no one takes the trouble to read them. For a few moments Uddo stands over the two kings as they scramble about the floor in each other’s clutches, just watching. Then she lifts from the wall one of the bronze shields that an unimaginative palace decorator has had hung in each of the corridors and dashes it against Tana’s head.
Stunned, Tana falls flat on his face. The calls of the birds ring out and the palace is stirring from sleep; in the lower galleries strips of light appear and then vanish; there is the sound of voices and footfalls on the stairs. When he sees guards running up the stairs towards them, Taal begins to panic, but Uddo—for whom villainy has always been an exact science—keeps a cool head. Within seconds the troops are in the seventh-floor gallery. Uddo tells them that thieves have broken into the palace; it was they who inflicted the injury on Tana when he caught them red-handed. Now they are hiding in the rooms of the lower floors. As soon as the men leave, Uddo picks up the aquarium with the luminous medusa as if it were a lantern and carries it to the opposite side of the gallery. In the restless blue light she examines the wall. Nau is still propped up against the wall like a broken beam. Uddo lifts the aquarium to the level of her adversary’s face and watches with satisfaction as the terrified eyes flit to and fro in the distorted, radiant-blue mirror. Then Uddo continues her inspection of the wall until she finds the inscription in the marble.
Uddo always wears a little white pouch on her waist. Theories and rumours abound as to its contents. I can divulge that it contains a first-aid package for use in everyday situations of difficulty in which Uddo might have cause to find herself. For Uddo everyday situations include betrayal, intrigue, blackmail, poisoning and mortal combat. Concealed in the pouch are five sachets made of fine paper, the colours of their powders showing through. Among these is the white powder that brought about Nau’s illness. Now Uddo pulls out a sachet of red powder. Then she fishes the medusa out of its aquarium and drops it onto the paved floor. For a few moments the medusa squirms pitifully; then its light goes out. Uddo pours the powder into the aquarium before throwing its transformed contents at the marble panel.
As it trickles down the panel, the red liquid obscures the ingredients of Tana’s transcription. The red solidifies rapidly until all that remains of the inscription is thirteen isolated letters on islets of grey. Uddo might easily obliterate these, but she leaves them exposed as an act of malice, imagining Tana standing over them, trying desperately to piece together the words they grew out of. Uddo looks approvingly on her work, this poem of hate made up of thirteen lost letters; then she turns to Nau and leans against her, knocking her over. The queen hits the slabs with a boom and proceeds to roll along the corridor; Nau rattles down the first staircase and then the second, knocking the marble and bronze statues of the galleries out of her path as if they were skittles. Soon she is pursued by a booming herd of rolling statues. The last of the staircases flings her towards the fountain; she is dashed against its metal base, which rings like a bell, then caught and deluged by statues.
At the place which told of Uddo’s pouch, there was an unusually fat pocket. I opened this in the expectation it would contain details of the countries of origin, composition and preparation of the medicaments concealed in the individual sachets. But there was an altogether different explanation for the pocket’s bulk. The author was having a joke at the reader’s expense: instead of describing the contents of the sachets, he had filled the pocket with small-scale representations. (The reader’s initial confusion was compounded by the fact that the pockets of the
Book
were practically the same colour and shape as Uddo’s pouch.) The five sachets of the
Book
reminded me of tea-bags; powders of five different colours were visible inside them. Having read this passage, Karael decided she would change it. (Her replacement was more of a thriller, in which the struggle was joined by two tamed cheetahs kept by Tana in the palace.) While she was at it, Karael tore off the pocket with the miniatures of Uddo’s sachets. I kept it as a souvenir and I still have it packed away somewhere.
While Tana is still unconscious, Taal and Uddo leave the palace and head back to Devel; in all the confusion no one spares them a second thought. As soon as he regains consciousness, Tana sets up a search party for Nau, which scours the palace all night before discovering Nau under the pile of statues by the fountain. It soon becomes apparent that there is no tool in existence that is powerful enough to scratch the coating of red from the marble panel nor any solvent that is effective against it. Tana offers a reward to anyone who can invent such a tool or solvent, yet still he does not lose hope that he will remember the ingredients he was told by the blue light of the medusa. Gradually he calls to mind thirty of them, but of course this is not enough for the creation of the antidote. He wanders the palace oblivious. Before his eyes there are thirteen swirling letters; these summon other letters in an unceasing swarm, forming thousands of real and non-existent words that always disintegrate. One day a fugitive Devel academician arrives on Illim. This scientist has some familiarity with Uddo’s murderous chemistry and is able to give Tana details of a solution guaranteed to dissolve the red coating on the marble panel. The substances needed for the production of the solution prove relatively easy to find, but the liquid becomes active only after a certain red gemstone has been submerged in it for several days. Only one such gemstone is known to be in existence, and sad to say this is in a casket that belongs to Taal.