Authors: Michal Ajvaz
The girl was a student and her
Iliad
vision had come to her at the beginning of the summer vacation. So she was able to sit at home day after day, looking through the window at the Pankrác hillside or watching the play of the light on the furniture, all the time imagining one scene or another from her film. She said nothing to anyone else about her ideas because she thought people would laugh at her about them; indeed, the film seemed pretty ridiculous and nonsensical to her, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. On top of everything else she had no experience of making a film and didn’t know anyone who had.
Curiously enough it was her dream-soaked lounging in the Michle apartment that produced the encounter that gave her the courage to start making her Homeric film of light. So rich was this encounter that it inspired her to find people with the right experience and level of enthusiasm to work with her. The apartment was quiet at all times of the day and night. The sounds of the relatively busy Michle streets did not reach it: all its windows faced the Botic brook. This was one of those city spaces with a brook or a railway line at its heart that might have belonged to another world…
“It was so quiet that I could hear hushed voices from behind the walls, above the ceiling and under the floorboards, the practically inaudible music of the neighbouring apartments,” the girl told me. When she fell silent for a moment, I, too, heard the quiet voices like fine sand falling on the bottom of a time-glass. The girl went on to explain how she would hear—from early morning till late afternoon—a monotonous male voice from beyond the living-room wall. The voice took a great many short pauses. She imagined that it was dictating some kind of long text, and sometimes she had the impression she was hearing the quiet clack of a computer keyboard. She was curious about this endless dictation. If she pressed her ear against the wall, she could hear a little better, but to begin with she could still make out no more of the voice than its melody. But after she had concentrated hard for a while, she began to distinguish words, although all she really heard were fragments and hints from which she figured out whole words. Then she experimented with these probable words in likely sentences, which she completed with words she had heard nothing of. With great effort the girl’s sentences came together to form fragments of a plot. It was a long time before the girl was competent at this strained eavesdropping. But eventually a remarkable story began to emerge.
The girl was quite shocked by what she heard. Several times she saw the writer and his typist in the corridor—he a fair-haired young man in rollneck sweater, jacket and moccasins (and always carrying a black attaché case), she a well-groomed older woman in a suit. The girl marvelled that these two people—whose appearance suggested they had stepped out of a newspaper advertisement for a bank—could day after day roll around in the palpably sick images and utterances she heard through the wall. She had never even known that literature like theirs existed. She had read
Maldoror
and
The 120 Days of Sodom
, but her neighbour’s text seemed to her more fantastical, more brutal and more perverse. It was a novel about the life of Amélie, a prodigal daughter. In the beginning Amélie obeys her parents and wishes to be a good daughter, but the parents reproach her constantly for not loving them enough, sighing that she has fallen short of and offended their great love for her. One day they tell her they can no longer stand idly by as witnesses to her degeneracy—what pain it causes them!—so they intend to denounce her to the police.
This is a strange police force whose members are summoned from the pattern of the wallpaper, whither they return after they complete an assignment. The police and the parents take Amélie away from the town, to the place of a stinking cesspit connected to a nearby factory by a pipe from whose mouth there issues a violet dribble. There they force the wretched girl to undress before tying her to a post next to a cave where there sleeps a giant monster, whose chops protrude from the opening, showing teeth that in and of themselves are creatures of great cruelty. The teeth taunt Amélie, describing how they will sink themselves slowly through her flesh and into her guts, how they will greedily chew her up. From the damp, stinking depths beyond them, the tongue speaks up, shouting out in ecstasy its obscene vision of what it will be like to fondle the bloody flesh of the chewed-up girl; then it tries to force its way between the teeth in the hope of touching with its restless tip the flesh of Amélie’s body. The police officers have to leave because they are beginning to be transformed back into wallpaper, but the father and mother remain by the cave and converse with the teeth and the tongue about the great misfortune suffered by parents of naughty children. The teeth offer their commiserations while the tongue bursts into tears, so moving does it find their fate. Amélie is shaking with terror, pleading with her parents for mercy. The parents tell her it is too late now for tears, while the teeth declare that what is about to befall her should be the fate of all disobedient daughters.
Amélie hears a pounding which gets stronger and stronger, as if a hammer striking the pipe leading from the factory were getting closer and closer. Then a metal robot—a mechanical dog—leaps from the mouth of the pipe onto its back legs and pounces on the mother before biting into the arteries of her neck. Before he can so much as cry out, the father, too, falls to the ground with his neck violated. The metal dog bites through the chains by which Amélie is bound and bears her away. The furious teeth try to raise the dragon with their screaming, but the dragon remains lost in sleep. The tongue flies about in its dark hideaway, desperate to find out from the teeth what is going on. After this, the mechanical dog becomes Amélie’s guru. The book dictated by the voice behind the wall describes how the two of them wander across several countries and how the dog initiates Amélie into his anarchistic and amoral philosophy of life. It is not clear whether he has been programmed to think these thoughts or whether they have formed of themselves within his electronic networks. But after the dog’s batteries run flat and he stops suddenly on a boulevard pavement in the midst of one of his aphorisms, Amélie walks the towns and country alone. The text becomes a picaresque novel describing Amélie’s fantastical and erotic adventures…
The girl from Michle was scandalized by the eccentric imagination, brutality and amorality of the author, but she was also attracted by them. The more stories she heard from the life of the unprincipled heroine, the more she envied the author’s imagination, his fidelity to his vision and his courage in disregarding the opinions of others. Quite unexpectedly, her encounter with the voice behind the wall woke in her a similar kind of courage: she found the strength to commence work on her
Iliad
, no longer concerned that others might laugh at or scorn her. She convinced herself that in the light of her neighbour’s bravery in writing a novel that contravened all aesthetic and ethical norms, she would be committing an act of cowardice were she to abandon the calm light of her
Iliad
. And the courage that now burned within her shone a light for others; there was no need for her to look for anyone because all the right people suddenly presented themselves. As to those she had imagined mocking her ideas, they were asking her if they could be involved in the film.
Once she began work on her film she no longer had so much time to listen to the novel beyond the wall. But every day she found a few moments to lay her ear against the wall and find out something of the latest scandalous adventures of the novel’s heroine.
“Last month I listened to a new episode about white snakes born in the rippling movements of curtains. As ever the story-line was fantastical and nasty, and as ever I couldn’t tear my ear away from the wall. But in the end I had to leave for a meeting about the shooting of the film. When I left the apartment I saw two men in overalls in the corridor. They were pulling some kind of cable into the neighbour’s apartment: perhaps he was having cable TV installed. The door to the apartment was open, and I heard—this time with perfect clarity—the voice with the well-known intonation, accompanied by the gentle clacking of the computer keyboard. The realization that my neighbour was not speaking Czech but a Scandinavian language I didn’t understand, came to me as if in a dream. He had never spoken Czech—the words I’d thought I was hearing were in fact fragments of Swedish or Norwegian; it was I who had made of them something they weren’t and composed them into a story-line that was at once scandalous and fascinating to me. A few days later I got to talking with the typist by the mailboxes, and she told me that my neighbour, her employer, was the Prague representative of a Swedish software firm. He didn’t know a word of Czech and spent most of the day dictating to her messages in Swedish for the firm’s headquarters in Uppsala.”
I was reminded of the “language of water,” of utterances born of rustlings and murmurs, but I didn’t want to tell the girl about the island. “I thought the similarity between the novel behind the wall and your
Iliad
quite striking,” I told her instead. “The motif of the prodigal daughter was, I thought, also present in the dreams you had about your film. Your
Iliad
was about more than just the fighting between the Achaeans and the Trojans: it was also about a girl who had turned her back on her father and fallen in with some gods with low morals. Why don’t you write the novel you invented with your ear to the wall?”
“I don’t know, perhaps one day I will. The moment I realized I was the author of the novel of the prodigal daughter, that terribly obscene dream, I realized, too, that I could be the source of an endless number of stories. It seems to me that everyone has such a source of stories inside him; mostly, though, this remains hidden. Mine was stirred by fragments of Swedish and the murmur of the language and the fractured images these were immersed in. To begin with I was horrified because I thought it would be my responsibility to write down all the stories that spurted from this source and that my whole life would be too short to manage this in. Then it came to me that each of the stories contained something of all the others. You said yourself that my
Iliad
is the same story as my novel about Amélie. I realized there was no hurry to do anything—it’s always enough to tell one story, shoot one film, or paint one picture at a time for all pictures and stories to be present.”
Three weeks after the flight of Taal and Uddo, Gato returns to Illim. When she was still able to move her hardening lips a little, Nau asked Tana not to write to Gato about her illness; she did not want her son to see her transforming into a piteous, gleaming tortoise. But after a time, and in spite of Tana’s best efforts to censor this, news of the queen’s condition reaches Gaul, and Gato sets sail for his island home as soon as he hears it. Then the moment he learns of the hidden inscription and the gemstone at Taal’s palace, he announces his intention to leave for Devel; he will find and bring back the gemstone. Gato paces the sand-strewn paths of the park deep into the night. When Tano wakes from a restless sleep, he hears beneath his window the repeated crunch of the sand. In the course of this sleepless night, Gato devises a plan for how to gain entry to the palace of Taal and Uddo.
Gato’s plan is based around the fact that no one at Taal’s court knows what he looks like; also, it draws on a strange art that Gato learned in a land where his ship was once washed ashore while on its way to Gaul. Next to the name of this land there was one of those thick pockets I came to think of as “geographical-historical.” It contained details of the territory and its history, interwoven—as was common in the
Book
—with the psychopathology of its ruling family, again expressed by images from mythology—conspiracy, erotically-motivated revenge, incest, battles at sea, intrigue and uprising, sharp daggers under pillows, faithless women consorting with enemies of the family, dragons in palace gardens at night, high politics discussed in bed chambers, catalogues of poisons seeping through the closed world of the family, inscriptions on walls in scripts unknown, the rising sun shining bright on warriors’ blades. But as this is of no great importance to our story, let us leave this pocket closed.
The land on whose coast Gato disembarked was celebrated for its carpets, which were more magnificent than the most beautiful works of Persia and Bukhara. Its people wove carpets from fine but strong fibres spun by a special species of spider which lived off great butterflies in mountain forests. The spiders had two means of attracting the butterflies: by giving off an intoxicating scent, and by a chemical reaction that was actuated in their fibres by early morning sun (when the butterflies flew out), causing the webs to take on the most glorious colours. Each spider would spin fibres of a different colour, as the colour of a web also had the function of marking its territory. The fineness and strength of the fibres made it possible to portray on the carpets the subtlest of details. The people of this land wove into their carpets
vedute
of towns in which it was possible to count the number of stones on the bracelets of women walking in the streets; there were carpets with battle panoramas in which were clearly visible teeth in the grimacing mouths of warriors, and carpets showing jungles where each stalk of grass and each colour in a parrot’s crest were carefully distinguished.
A popular genre was the so-called “lost portrait.” Having commissioned a master weaver to produce his likeness, the client would some time later receive a carpet that showed, for example, a large town in which there were thousands of figures in the streets and at the windows. One of these figures was a portrait of the client, but in order to find it, it was necessary to look very hard. The longer this search took—and it might take months or even years—the more highly the work was prized. The carpet weavers employed a number of tricks: after several years of intensive searching, one client found his own face reflected dimly on the lid of somebody’s snuff-box, while another found himself painted on a crumpled chocolate-bar wrapper lying on a rubbish heap. A carpet which made use of Poe’s principle of the “Lost Letter” was particularly celebrated. This depicted a painter showing his girlfriend a picture mounted on his easel, that of a town. The town was extraordinarily elaborate and there was a fantastic number of figures in the streets and parks and on the squares and bridges. The client studied the picture for many years, taking in every figure and every nook and cranny, until one morning he found his portrait in the large face of the painter in the foreground.
Yet the carpets fascinated most by their marvellous daily metamorphoses. The fibres retained all characteristics of the spider’s web: all night and for most of the day they were snow-white in colour, but when the first dim rays of sun heralded the dawn they gave off their acute scent and then wonderful pictures began to paint themselves across the white surfaces. The first marks to appear on the white fabric were red and white, but they were followed slowly by the rest of the colours. Each picture would shine for an hour or so, after which time the colours would begin gradually to fade, until the carpet returned to white and remained thus until the next morning. Poetically, the natives called such works “dreaming carpets”: they imagined that for a short time at dawn the carpets had colourful dreams before falling back into the heavy, dreamless sleep of objects.
Gato was enchanted by the carpets. Because of them not only did he remain in this strange land for a whole year but he undertook to learn the subtleties of the carpet-maker’s art in one of its most celebrated binder’s workshops. When he sails away he takes his journeyman’s work with him—its picture that of a castle perched atop a rock which rises out of a lake. The castle has many towers and turrets, one growing out of another and all joined to little arched bridges. (On one of these bridges Gato has depicted himself as a figure standing by a balustrade contemplating the bizarre shapes of the clouds in the distance.)
Gato sails off to Devel in disguise, over his shoulder a rolled-up carpet whose white fabric conceals the picture of his dreamlike castle, in his travel bag a collapsible weaver’s loom and a ball of spider-spun fibre. As in the half-light of evening the ship pulls in to port at Devel, Gato is standing at the prow, leaning on the rail, looking at the grey, hostile town with its steep, winding streets that reach from the harbour to the walls of the gardens of the royal palace. All but one of these streets turns back the way it has come; this street has succeeded in extricating itself from the tangled knot, reaching beyond the last houses of the town right to the gates of the great gloomy palace. Having passed the night on the jetty, Gato sets off for the palace before sunrise. The day begins early at the palace, and Gato is immediately admitted to the presence of a chamberlain; there he rolls out the carpet moments before the red flags on the turrets of the castle and the masts of the boats on the lake become visible together with the great red flowers and emerald-green leaves of the trees on the bank.
The chamberlain watches with delight as the magical castle emerges; before the last of the coloured marks has appeared he rushes to show this wonder to the king. The king has Gato brought to him and immediately buys the carpet. By the time the castle and the lake begin to dissolve an hour later, Gato has been appointed court carpet-binder and a servant in livery has led him along a long passage to his chamber, where he is to work on his first commission. Taal wishes him to weave for his daughter Hios a carpet that will show a garden of paradise with fountains, artificial waterfalls, alleys, summerhouses, gaily-coloured birds and winsome beasts. Once Gato is alone in the large, well-lit room he steps to the window. He sees below him the tops of the trees of the palace gardens, and further below still, the grey pitched roofs of the houses in the streets that slope down to the harbour, and beyond these the light strip of the sea.