Authors: Michal Ajvaz
The part of the
Book
that described the wanderings of the unhappy Prince Fo was extremely long, although it included hardly anything that had a particular bearing on the main story-line. The author gave a long-winded description of Fo’s encounters with country-dwellers who fail to recognize the wayfaring stranger who speaks with them. I read details of the country Fo passes through. The
Book
acknowledged Fo’s entering new districts with pockets in which the author wrote at length about the flora and fauna of the new territories or told a variety of boring or interesting tales from the locality. But the islanders made no distinction between the main story-line and its adjuncts; once when I was speaking with Karael about the unexpected digressions the islanders were always willing to give in to, she came out with something like an aphorism. “The main thing,” she said, “is that which is incidental.” (Another of her aphorisms was: “If you wish to encounter something that is exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.”) For a long time I found these labyrinthine insertions and diversions quite intolerable, but as you now know, dear reader, in the course of time I learned to appreciate the charms of nonsensical encounters on minor routes and confused returns to a world my absence had made strange to me. In these encounters our most intimate and important life goals suddenly become diversions that lead us away from a path that is unknown, monstrous and endlessly alluring, a path that is spun from materials we have always known to be diversional but at whose end there shines the highest, most blissful Goal, the correction of everything that has ever bothered or distracted us.
One afternoon in the woods, Fo gets caught in the rain. He takes shelter under the branches of a tree and watches the bushes as they shiver in the torrents of water. Then he catches sight through the leaves of some kind of building. It is a small cabin, built perhaps by woodsmen for their own use; since the woodsmen abandoned it, it has no doubt been used as a night shelter by various vagabonds. The cabin has no proper windows or door, just openings cut into the walls. On its floor there is a palliasse, its rotting straw poking out at several places, and cinders in a grate. (The smoke leaves the cabin through a black-edged hole in the roof.) Having laid himself down on the palliasse, Fo watches the woods grow dark through the door and listens to the lovely song played by the rain on the leaves. Before long he falls asleep. At dawn he is woken by the cold. He goes off in search of brushwood so that he can get a fire going. As he is laying rain-drenched twigs in the grate, he notices in there between the sooty logs a piece of blackened paper—the fire-ravaged page of some book. He reads the only sentence that is still legible. (It is this: “For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish.”) He looks about the room for something to light the fire with. In the corner of the room there is a pile of paper, bearing on one side of each sheet records on the felling of trees. Fo crumples up several sheets, pushes them in among the twigs and lights the fire.
Then he pulls the palliasse closer to the fire, lies back down on it, looks through the door at the play of the mist above the roots of the trees, and listens to the crackling of the flames. He is expecting to see Mii in his mind’s eye, and it is indeed so that her face and hands (working the stone) appear to him at once. But this time the images do not develop in accordance with the established ritual: they have got stuck; some kind of obstacle has forced itself between him and them. To his surprise and displeasure Fo realizes this obstacle is the sentence he read a while earlier on that piece of singed paper. For the time being this aggressive sentence has blocked the transmission of the film of painful bliss he was so looking forward to; images of Mii have paled and buckled. Fo is furious that something as inconsequential as a couple of banal words about a vegetable can come between him and his grand passion, but still he is helpless to resist thoughts of the king and the radish. His mind churns out one question after another, and of these questions he cannot rid himself. What could possibly be the reason for a king’s long contemplation of a radish? Of course, if it were a particularly fine example of its kind his eyes might be drawn to it, but why would he need to look at it for a long time? Did he not have enough on his plate with all the affairs of state? If it were a fine example of its kind, perhaps he was shown it at an agricultural fair he had cause to visit. But Fo finds this answer unsatisfactory: not even the most marvellous vegetable can be studied and contemplated for long, and it is inconceivable that a ruler would do so. He had a vague notion that the meaning of the radish was somehow bound up with the position of the king in society: there must be some connection between the radish and the fate of the state or the life and death of the king or someone close to him.
Fo takes a walk in the woods, where he picks some red berries. Thinking of turning back, he finds himself hoping he will be unable to find his way to the cabin where he was troubled by the radish in such an absurd manner. Just as he is beginning to think himself lost, and to feel relief at the prospect, the back wall of the cabin emerges from the bushes right in front of him. He returns to his new dwelling with a sigh and lies back down on the palliasse. He tells himself the words on the singed sheet of paper are so intrusive because they make no sense. If he thinks hard for an hour about the king-radish sentence, he is sure to hit upon some meaningful connection, and thus will he succeed in breaking its power and rid himself of it. Then once again he will dedicate himself to the blissful suffering of his lovesickness.
Sitting on the palliasse, he sets about a deconstruction of the situation described by the sentence. The king cannot afford to fritter away his time in the study of radishes: he must rule, and if at any given moment he happens not to be ruling, there are surely means of diversion available to him other than the contemplation of vegetables. No, implicit in the radish there must be something important, a message of the utmost significance. But if this were hidden inside the radish, the king would not find out what it was just by studying and contemplating it, regardless of how long he spent in doing so. Unless, of course, the message was on the very surface of the radish, in someone’s handwriting or perhaps carved into it. But even this made little sense: if the message were in a script or a language the king understood, it would be unnecessary for him to study and contemplate it for a long time, and if it were in a script or language unknown to him, even the longest imaginable study of the text would be no help to him in deciphering it unless other things were done besides. On top of all this, why would anyone carve an important message (concerning, perhaps, the security of the kingdom or the life of the king) into the surface of a radish? It was practically impossible to imagine a situation where someone was required to write to the king on a radish rather than a piece of paper.
But perhaps the message is not carved into the radish; perhaps it is conveyed by the radish’s colour or shape. What if the colour or shape of the radish were unnatural? Perhaps the radish is dyed or its shape somehow altered. Perhaps someone has cut pieces out of it. By this time the radish and the insistent questions it keeps putting have driven the image of Mii from Fo’s mind completely. Perhaps, Fo tells himself, it is impossible to decipher the message by a complex search for its code; perhaps the relations by which it holds together are revealed at a single moment. Then it might make sense for the king to study the radish and try to discover these relations so as to set the radish in some kind of meaningful whole.
The outlines of the trees are beginning to fade in the gloom; the cut-out seen through the door opening looks like a dingy tapestry hanging on a wall. Fo realizes that the fire went out long ago, that he has spent the whole day thinking about the radish and the king. Although there is no reason for him to hurry and time has no value to him, still he is annoyed to have devoted a whole day to an activity so trivial. He determines to quit the accursed cabin first thing in the morning and continue on his travels: pastures new would be bound to dispel the irksome radish and the peculiar king from his thoughts. And as soon as he reduces the intensity of his concentration, the construct of logic on which he has worked the whole day but which has yet to form any recognizable shape, is pushed silently aside by a vision that has long been forming itself beneath all his questions and answers.
In his mind’s eye Fo sees a king whose long study of a radish has—the king believes—enabled him to grasp the message it has for him. (But has he understood it right? Fo sees in his interpretation a fatal mistake, which will change the history of the kingdom.) For Fo the image of a king contemplating a radish has entered the network of relations; it is as if he was holding a solitary piece of a jiggle puzzle when the rest of the puzzle came into view, complete with an opening that matched the exact contours of the first piece; as if the shapes and colours of a landscape have emerged through a quick-dispersing fog, complete with places and characters. He can see the sea and gleaming rocks, a blazing sun, a palace above the sea, a king dressed in white who is hand in hand with a girl; he sees the cold marble corridors of the palace, boats afloat on clandestine missions, betrayal, intrigue, meetings of conspirators behind closed blinds; he hears sinister whispers behind curtains; he smells rooms in the early morning and evening, the salt wind off the sea, rocks baking in the sun. While a few moments earlier the king and the radish were surrounded by emptiness and had no place in any story, now the image of a king contemplating a radish is flooded with hundreds of other images, and this inundation straight away forms itself into an inviolable web that constitutes a self-contained world.
And it is impossible to stop this great birth of people, objects and landscapes; all Fo can do is look on in astonishment. The thought flashes into his mind that once he knew someone who told him of the genesis of a world like this, that then he barely understood a word of what the other was talking about. But now there is no room in his mind for reminiscences: it is fully engaged with this great birth, which is now painful and blundering, now easy and smooth. Throughout it beats out its shape with incredible power, a power impossible to resist and which sweeps all other thoughts and memories aside.
Even the thought that this new world has no meaning, purpose or idea, that it has no knowledge to convey and is entirely unnecessary, cannot hinder its rampant growth. It is neither a symbol nor an archetype, neither more interesting nor more boring than other worlds. To Fo its very senselessness is a source of delight the like of which he has never known before. All night long he lies on the palliasse and follows the genesis of this world. There are times when he must prepare the way for the images it brings, others when all he needs to do is watch them arrive without his assistance. As day begins to break, he takes one of the sheets from the pile of paper, and on its blank side he begins to write his dispatch from this new world.
The
Book
made no mention of whether Fo has a pencil with him or whether he finds this, too, in the cabin. But there is plenty of paper in the cabin on which Fo can write everything down in careful detail. And I have no doubt that this is indeed what he does, with a pedantry common to all the imaginary authors who tell their stories and stories within stories on all levels of the
Book
, with their endless descriptions of the patterns on the dresses of princesses and the ornamentation of the walls of palaces. At this point in the text there was a pocket that contained Fo’s writings from the cabin; this pocket was so full that when I unstuck it, it burst open like an over-ripe pod and the paper folded within it tumbled out, compressed concertinas falling to the ground, there continuing to unfurl. I was reminded of the festoons of a fancy-dress ball.
I could pick out individual words written on all this paper—words telling of monsters of the deep and of palaces on planets in distant galaxies, words that tempted me to delve into this insertion. But I decided not to let myself be detained by a never-ending novel about a radish; I would not let the wily
Book
draw me into the wretched labyrinth of insertions. I would read the insertion that told of the origins of the statue in jelly, I told myself, and then I would make an orderly return to the story of Gato, Hios and poor, hard Nau: I wished to find out at last whether Gato succeeds in getting the gemstone out of the statue and whether his mother is restored to health. So I proceeded to stuff the fallen paper back into its pocket. But when its billowing end was about to reach the table-top, I realized my resolve was no match for my curiosity; the accursed radish had befuddled me, just as it does Fo.
I was worried that after my return from the island the radish would appear to me on wakeful nights, and when at last I fell asleep it would turn itself into a monster and pursue me around a never-ending labyrinth. I would forever be in its power just because I had failed to read about what happened between it and the king. To return to the island in an attempt to make this good would be to no avail—in the ever-changing
Book
, the story of the radish and the king would be long gone. With a heavy sigh I pulled the long strip of paper back out of the insertion and set to reading Fo’s work. I shall do what I can to rebuild my memories of what I read in it; I would ask for your forbearance, dear reader, as I embark on this journey into the bowels of the
Book
.
Consider yourself the experienced leader of a speleological expedition. I am well aware of the great demands that this descent to the lower levels of the text places on you (I wouldn’t wish to worry you, but I suppose you know that this will be followed by an ascent less pleasant still). I appreciate the need to make this as easy as I can for you; perhaps each level of the
Book
could be printed in a different colour to make orientation simpler. But then again, this might be too expensive. Better still (and even less realizable) would be to distinguish the different levels by the same method the islanders use to tell time: the text could be printed on paper saturated with a different scent at each level. (A difficult task for printing the work, but it need not be difficult for you; those readers made dizzy by the use of different colours for different levels may find it relatively simple to produce a scented book.)
On the very edge of the archipelago on the island of Vauz, there lives a king called Dru. Dru is a celebrated patron of the arts and sciences, and in his youth he, too, was a scientist—he is the author of a number of books on mathematics and astronomy. These are the first sentences Fo writes in the cabin. Festering wounds left by real and imagined slights overlaid with etiquette, age-old feuds between families that are incurable because their roots are long forgotten, the tangles of minor grudges and the bitterness that is always abroad in the fine dust of the atmosphere of a hierarchical society—when all these things ripen into treason, a conspiracy against the king is conceived in the royal court. The conspirators desire the king’s death, but to kill the king is no simple matter for he is attended at all times by a well-armed, dependable entourage; nor is it possible to use poison against him, as one of his retainers always tastes his meals before him. Only certain members of the military command are involved in the plot, and the conspirators know that it is possible to move against those divisions loyal to the king only in the confusion that would follow the king’s death. The admiral of the royal fleet devises a plan that the other plotters at first consider eccentric and fantastical, but in the end they are forced to admit that it is probably the only way in which they can kill the king. The plan is founded on the knowledge that the king has a weak heart. His physicians have warned him that a great shock of any kind could bring about his immediate death. The admiral has spent his life sailing the seas, and he knows where to find a deep underwater valley that is the resting place of giant squids; he knows that the scent of a certain plant will draw this animal out of its lair and can be used to make it follow a ship; he knows, too, that the squid springs up out of the water when it hears a certain sound.
With his young fiancée Isili, his friends, members of his household and a group of musicians, King Dru likes to dine on a little platform carved into the face of the sheer, smooth rock at whose top stands the royal palace. The platform is only half a meter above the sea, and it is reached from the palace by a zig-zagging flight of steps that is also carved into the rock. The sheer wall of rock continues beneath the surface; the water here is so deep that no diver has ever succeeded in reaching the seabed. It is to the deep waters near the little platform that the admiral wishes to lure one of the squids. While the king is sitting at dinner, one of the musicians will sound a horn with a peculiarly deep tone; as soon as the squid hears this, nothing will be able to stop it from plunging itself above the surface. The admiral and his fellow conspirators are hoping that the sudden appearance of the giant, monstrous head with its mad eyes, will be enough to give the king a heart attack and to bring about his death. Another advantage of this plan is the unlikelihood that anyone will make the connection between the sounding of the horn and appearance of the squid, meaning that the conspirators will not come under suspicion should the plan fail and the king remain alive.
To begin with everything goes according to plan: the giant squid follows the boat, from whose helm a sack of fragrant herbs is hanging. From time to time the admiral, who is standing on deck, catches sight of the creature’s great round eyes deep in the water. The boat drops anchor by the royal palace and the squid remains nearby, many meters beneath the surface. On the day of the attempt on his life, as usual the king meets his fiancée, his friends, his household and the musicians, plus his two large dogs, on the terrace at the foot of the stone staircase above the sea. The company sits at the table in its usual places, everyone on one side of the table so that all can watch the play of colours on the sea at sunset. From the palace kitchens a basket with the first course has just been lowered down the rock face and onto the terrace. The dogs are resting contentedly under the table. The soft light, with just a hint of red in it, is lying across the bowls of fruit. There is a light breeze coming off the water.