The Golden Age (21 page)

The next part of the
Book
described Gato’s stay at Taal’s palace. It is not difficult for Gato to discover the whereabouts of the gemstone: everyone at the palace knows that it is in among the other jewels in the royal treasury, which is in the corridor leading to the main hall. To Gato’s surprise there is no guard at the door to the treasury; he is surprised also by the fact that there is a metal panel mounted on the door, into which has been carved a complicated, square-shaped labyrinth composed of passages represented schematically that intersect at right angles and lead into an empty central space. There is only one entrance to the labyrinth, and in this there is a game stone, which appears to be a piece of a magnet. It seems that this game stone is waiting for someone’s hand to take it and push it along the intricate passages.

Gato wonders if there is some connection between the route taken by the labyrinth and entry to the treasury. He puts his hand on the game stone and is about to move it when a cry of horror rings out behind him. He turns to see a lady courtier running towards him down the empty corridor. She leads him away from the treasury and proceeds to tell him about it. The prince learns that everyone has the right to attempt to open the door, and whoever succeeds may take whatever he wishes from the treasury. The door is said to open when the game stone reaches the centre of the labyrinth on its thirty-sixth move, although so far no one has succeeded in making this happen. One false move and a trap-door opens in the floor, sending whoever is standing in front of the door tumbling into a chasm in the rock on which the palace stands, into the icy waters of the subterranean river that flows down below. Since the death of Prince Fo, only Taal, Uddo and Hios know the right moves.

Though he cannot rid himself of the image of his solidified mother, Gato is afraid to ruin things by his impatience. He makes a drawing of the labyrinth in his attempt to work out which thirty-six moves to take in order to reach the centre. He has plenty of time for this; although it is his task to weave a garden of paradise and he receives frequent visits from Taal in supervision of his progress, it is only possible for him to work in the early morning, when the spider’s fibres display their colours. This means he can devote the rest of his time to the labyrinth. He rarely leaves his chamber, but this suffices for him to notice that all the corridors on one side of the palace end in locked doors. When he comes across the lady courtier who explained to him the secret of the treasury and asks her what is beyond these doors, she pulls him towards her and whispers, “The castle of the spirits. Dusty Fo-land. The palace of the dead prince.”

Princess Hios, too, develops the habit of going to Gato’s chamber each morning, so that she can see how the work is progressing. There is another curious thing about a dreaming carpet: so fine is the material used that it allows detailed work on the tiniest parts, and this means that parts are in constant rebellion against the whole. Motifs are conceived—which often go unperceived by all but the most observant eye—that not only have no connection with the whole but may even serve to subvert it in some amusing or eccentric way. The coloured fibres encourage playfulness and small-scale subordination. The irony alive in the carpets and so much connected with their weaving has settled in Gato’s fingers to such a degree that his hands compose the fibres of the garden-carpet in scenes unexpectedly grotesque, his sadness, restlessness and anxiety notwithstanding.

Should one take a close look at the group of monkeys cavorting in the tree-tops, for example, one would see that one of them is not part of the game; instead he is sitting comfortably on a branch some way off, reading Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
and writing in the margin of one of its pages the word
Absurd
! The observant student might notice, on the calm waters of the lake, the reflection of a house on whose veranda there is a rocking-chair in which a retired naval captain is sitting. Yet neither next to the lake nor elsewhere in the picture is there any such house. Taal fails to notice details such as this, but Hios finds them straight away and they are a source of great pleasure to her. Every morning she looks forward to finding something new in the shrubs of the garden or the gloom of a summerhouse.

Then she begins to notice other things, too. She suspects that the lines described by the spreading branches and the twisting lianas are a kind of trail left by a heavy, sad current that flows across the carpet from one form to the next. At one point the grey-blue surface of the lake resounds with a silent pain; at another, in a whirl of silver leaves stirred by the breeze, there is the sound of a music that borders on madness. And Hios asks herself who this stranger is. Who can this person be who repeats one hundred and twelve times—with the pertinacity of the melancholic at times of heaviest depression—a complicated oval motif in the ornamental relief work of the cornice of a summerhouse, before placing the goggle-eyed face of a bespectacled, pipe-smoking rabbit exactly where one expects the hundred-and-thirteenth to be? The princess has a dear friend called Ara, and it is around this time that Ara becomes painfully aware in the moments she and Ara spend together that Hios returns in her mind to the magic garden. No longer do Hios’s touches represent the crests of waves of desire that course through her body; her fingers continue to pursue old paths, but they do so abstractedly and mechanically, or—and this for Ara is more humiliating still—they follow courses suspiciously reminiscent of those taken by Gato’s carpet.

Gato soon comes to see in Hios’s joyous expression an understanding of the carpet that is very different from Taal’s. He begins to weave for her scenes with crazy animals and living objects. This early-morning dialogue between pictures and gazes, held day after day without the uttering of single word, is the only source of joy for Gato in the hostile palace where the task he is pursuing is practically hopeless and his being found out and killed is a constant threat. Hios, too, enjoys this wordless communication of conspiracy, which takes place before the unsuspecting Taal’s very eyes. And the images that Gato creates for Hios become more personal and tender with each passing day…

Dear reader, I shall not make myself ridiculous by leading you to a certain event which I would then present to you as a twist in the story. You have certainly guessed what is about to happen, just as I did when I was reading these passages of the
Book
. (In terms of psychology, the
Book
did not have much to boast about.) Naturally enough, Hios falls in love with Gato, and so she will play in the story the somewhat trite role of an Ariadne (in a proper, non-symbolic, albeit miniature labyrinth, what’s more). After several pages on which the unknown author describes how the motifs of Gato’s carpet become ever more erotic messages to Hios, the much-anticipated moment arrives and the princess and Gato embrace. After this Hios goes every night to Gato’s chamber, where she stays until morning. Several times she has to avoid being seen by Taal (who is coming to see what is new in the garden-carpet) by concealing herself behind a potted palm in an alcove of the corridor. Unhappy and insulted, Ara leaves Devel and disappears for a long time from the pages of the
Book
. Indeed, in my reading of the
Book
I came to believe she would never reappear; then she turned up unexpectedly after many more folds in the concertina so as to play a telling role in the Devel tale’s bloody finale.

The night Gato finishes work on the carpet, Hios is in his chamber. The day has been humid, but after midnight the atmosphere cools and from the palace gardens there comes the gentle murmur of rain falling on leaves. The princess throws a blanket around her shoulders and goes to sit on the windowsill. Gato sits down next to her, and together they look down at the town, up at the starless sky and across to a place where land and sea are joined. In the dense, dark mass of the town all that is visible is ragged strips of streets illuminated by street lamps and the distant fire of the lighthouse in the harbour. Gato turns to Hios and tells her who he is and why he has come to the palace. All Hios asks of him is that he should take her with him when he leaves Devel; then she tells him that the red gemstone is on the highest shelf of the treasury, in a small box which is made of the wood of the terebinth tree and has a picture of a basilisk on its lid. She tells him what to do in order to get it.

“Do not try to seize the stone unnoticed,” she says. “You may believe the corridor to be empty before the door to the treasury, but in fact there are many peepholes manned by many unseen eyes. Observe the handles of the closed doors of the corridor and you will see that none of them is still: they are held from the inside by the hands of watchers. Listen well at the thin walls and the folds of the curtains and you will hear the whisper of secret commands passed from mouth to mouth. The palace corridors are long, and you would not be the first to disappear in them without a trace. Death awaits in the gloom of nooks and empty corridors; you must do your dealings in the glare of the chandeliers of the great halls. Tomorrow my father will hold a celebration in the main hall. You will announce to him before all those present that you wish to solve the problem set by the door to the treasury. Thus shall everyone know of it. It is highly likely that the eyes of curious courtiers will follow you about. That you shall be under surveillance is good: those curious eyes might spare you from the knife or the bullet.

“In moving the game stone about the labyrinth, naturally it is impossible that one should be guided by written instructions. You will need to know each of the thirty-six moves by heart. Thirty-six times you must decide whether to move the stone to the right or to the left. I shall now teach you the story of the caliph of Baghdad. This you shall have no difficulty in remembering, as each of its events is linked to the next. Disguised as a merchant, the caliph walks the streets of Baghdad, where he has thirty-six encounters that correspond to the thirty-six moves. As you move the stone you will tell the story to yourself. Whenever the caliph meets a man, you move to the right; when he meets a woman, this means you must move to the left.”

And there at the window above the sleeping town the princess proceeds to tell the story of the caliph, who one warm night mounts the side gate of his palace and sets about walking the narrow moon-and-starlit streets. There he has encounters with a wise man, a robber, a magician, a ferryman who works the Euphrates, a fig-seller, a woman whose face is concealed by a veil. The woman then disappears and reappears in a great variety of guises. The caliph last comes across her in his chamber after he has returned to the palace. The mysterious woman is the daughter of his vizier. The caliph embraces her, delighted to have captured the apparition that escaped him time and again in the Baghdad night. The last move of the stone is to the left, after which it meanders about the passages for a while before it suddenly reaches the centre of the labyrinth, whereupon a hidden mechanism opens the door. Hios teaches Gato the story of the caliph all night long. Only when the dawn-time scents of the carpet reach their nostrils does she steal from Gato’s room.

I am telling you the story just as I learned it on the island, in the full knowledge that little of this
Book
island, if anything of it, remains today. First to change was its environment. I remember receiving a telephone call from Karael several months after I had left the island; in those days we were still phoning and writing to each other quite often. When my cellphone rang I was walking under a leaden sky along a mud-spattered sidewalk among the tower blocks of Prague’s Jížní msto housing estate, looking for an electrical repair shop. Among other things, I asked Karael about the
Book
, and she told me something of its most recent changes. I learned that the town on Devel had in the course of several rewrites become gradually flatter, until it became a town of humble dwellings scattered about a marshy delta, the old camp of nomads who had stopped there on their way to the sea. The town was strung together around the mouth of a shallow brown river, where the tents reluctantly gave way to imperfect houses. In this version the conversation in which Hios advises Gato how to negotiate the labyrinth does not take place above the town but on its fringes; the princess and her lover are sitting at a ground-floor window from which they look upon the steppe, lit by the moon to the distant horizon. But I am not able to think of the town’s face as ever-changing, as the islanders can. My memory needs to select one face, one town from the many metamorphoses. So that time on the Jížní m
sto estate, as a wind that reminded me of the island gusted between the tower blocks, I decided to take no notice of the town on the delta and to preserve in my memory the image of the town I had taken from my own reading of the
Book
.

The next day Gato hands the garden-carpet over to Taal. In the afternoon the celebration in the great hall is declared open, and Gato wastes no time in approaching the king and declaring his wish to negotiate the labyrinth on the door of the treasury. News of the wish expressed by the stranger travels in whispers in all directions and to every corner of the hall, killing all conversation so all that is heard is a murmur of curiosity, astonishment and dismay. Taal’s face has darkened; he says that anyone has the right to attempt to conquer the labyrinth, that Gato should remember the trap-door and the subterranean river, but he says nothing more. Gato leaves the hall immediately and makes his way along the corridor, which seems to him endless. A procession of silent courtiers tiptoes cautiously behind him, stretching back beyond the bend in the corridor. Whenever Gato turns, they stop mid-step, some of them leaning forward with a foot raised, the outstretched toes just touching the gleaming parquet. Gato remembers reading that the moment after death the soul recalls the last image it saw in life, and he says to himself, “What strange theatrics I shall look upon in the underworld if I confuse one of the moves!” But once he reaches the door to the treasury, he does not turn again. He takes the magnetic stone in his hand, and begins to recite the story of the caliph.

His anxiety does not leave him. At one moment he suspects the stone is moving away from the labyrinth’s centre and into a blind alley, and he asks himself if Hios has not betrayed him, if she has taken the side of her family against the stranger. Perhaps her coming to him in the night was part of a plan devised in collaboration with Uddo and Taal. He thinks back to some of things she told him, which seem to him now ambiguous and disquieting; he imagines Hios leaving his chamber and going straight to her father, how they share in laughter at his expense just as cruel as the laughter of Taal and Uddo over Nau’s sickness and Tana’s desperation. When in Hios’s telling the caliph climbed through a hole in the wall into the garden of a stranger’s house, where he was addressed from the dark of the summerhouse by an old Persian merchant, it almost seemed to him that she had changed the story on purpose: would it not have been more logical for the caliph to encounter a woman, not a man in a garden at night? He suffers anguish akin to torment as he considers whether to move the stone to the left rather than to the right, before at last he obeys Hios and goes right, and the floor beneath him remains firm.

But the caliph had many more encounters that night, with men and with women, and Gato has many more decisions to make and junctions to negotiate. After every move he waits for the floor to open up beneath him, plunging him down into the subterranean river; he feels something akin to disappointment when this does not happen, as he will have to persist in this unbearable anxiety. The thirtieth move has been made and still Gato stands on the polished parquet, but this is no comfort to him. He knows very well how cunning Taal can be, and becomes ever more certain that Hios and Taal are in league, that he has been told thirty-five right moves but that the thirty-sixth will open the trap-door to the chasm when he feels victory to be in his grasp.

When the moment arrives for him to make that last move, when the caliph has returned to his chamber and the clear Baghdad sky is bright with stars, Gato pauses with the stone in his hand. What if the figure in the semi-transparent veil waiting in the caliph’s bed is not the lovely daughter of the vizier? What if the story Hios has kept from him has the caliph pull back the bed-drapes to find a thief, who has broken into the palace that night and is waiting for the caliph with a sharp dagger in his hand? Gato stands there for a long time with the stone in his hand, deliberating whether to go left or right. But in the end he goes left, as Hios told him to, and closes his eyes. There is a creaking sound. Gato attempts to hold on to the relief work of the door, although he knows full well that this will do nothing to save him from the long fall. His hands slip on the smooth, rounded surfaces. His eyes closed, he falls. He feels the chill of the cave and he hears the chattering of the subterranean river.