Authors: Michal Ajvaz
For the next act, which followed after another interval, there was again a change of scene. We found ourselves on the glassed-in terrace of a villa obviously built on an elevated spot on a hillside: through the glass wall one could see to the bottom of the hill, where a peaceful river ran through a quaint old town with narrow streets watched over by domed churches. The river was spanned by a magnificent towered bridge, and immediately beyond the last houses of the town there were hills covered in deep forest. Partway up one of the hills—like a weightless, two-dimensional picture—were the ruins of a great castle. (The town in the valley was in fact produced by a colour slide projected onto a screen.) This town, hemmed in by hills on all sides, was familiar; I realized the slide was a view of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. So this had to be one of the villas on the hillside that rises sharply on the right-hand (north) bank of the Neckar.
There’s the piercing sound of the house’s doorbell. Emerging from inside the house, a white-haired old man comes on to the terrace and opens the door. Standing behind him is a young girl. She has just arrived in Heidelberg to study at the university; she has read about the availability of lodgings at the villa in the classified ads of a newspaper. So that’s how the girl came to live in the villa above the Neckar. She and the kindly old man become friends. Every day they sit together on the terrace and the old man talks about his life, which in no way has been exciting—he spent his career as a clerk at Heidelberg City Hall. His children have not lived with him for many years, and when a few years ago his wife died, he decided to rent out rooms to students.
The girl is a student of German literature. One day she confides to the man that she is trying to write a fantasy story. Over breakfast she begins to describe its plot to him. (I doubt anyone in Revnice was surprised to learn that the story was about a conspiracy among courtiers in an island kingdom—they had all suspected from the beginning that the student was a reincarnation of Isili. But the identity of the owner was not clear; I heard my fellow spectators betting on whether it was Dru or the squid.) The student believes that her imagination is creating images when they in fact arise from her memory. The old man is not surprised by the story’s plot; when his tenant—wishing to show off her storytelling skills—asks him to guess the manner of the attempted assassination of the king, which the conspirators decide upon after lengthy deliberations, he answers while breaking into his boiled egg with his spoon. “I suppose they decided to kill the king by confronting him with a giant squid,” he says. The astonished girl tries to find out how it is that he knows the plot of her story when she hasn’t even committed it to paper yet or spoken to anyone else about it. All the old man says in reply is that he doesn’t wish to speak of it at the moment, but that he will explain everything to her some time soon. When the Isili-student asks when this will be, he looks out of the window with a smile on his lips and says, “Perhaps…perhaps after the first fall of snow.”
One morning the girl descends to the terrace from her room to find that the roofs of the houses in the town below and the trees of the hills have been coated with snow. (The picture has been changed in the slide projector.) The old man is standing on the terrace already, looking pensively at the white scene with its gentle touches of grey. The girl stands next to him and they study together the snowy landscape and the cable car rising slowly through the white pass in the forest on the hillside opposite. They have been standing in silence for quite a while when the old man begins to speak of the royal court on Vauz, of that last supper by the sea, of the shameful murder in the post-mortal city, of the burning deserts of the second underworld in which he ended up after Isili and the squid killed him. He is Dru. And as he is speaking, everything comes back to the Isili-student; she rests her head against the cold glass of the window lit by the snow of Heidelberg on the Neckar, as images from her memory rise up from the dark chasm within her.
Then she weeps quietly and asks Dru for his forgiveness.
“I forgave you when I was still in the desert of the second underworld. I knew you’d show up here. I’ve been waiting for you for years, since before you were even born. And trust me, it’s not so I can take my revenge on you.”
“How did you know I would come?”
“When I was living in the second underworld, I reached its outermost frontier. There I came across a great abandoned palace—perhaps it had been the palace of some god who had left for another cosmos. I walked its corridors and studied the frescoes depicting the past and the future of the universe that adorned them. It was in one of these that I saw the two of us sitting at breakfast on this terrace; it was clear from the picture that we were not meeting for the first time. Perhaps you have heard of Heidelberg Man?”
“Protanthropus heidelbergensis. An anthropoid. Its jaw was found in Mauer—not far from here—in 1907.” The girl was quoting from a coursebook in anthropology.
“That jaw belonged to you. Way back when you and I lived together in the forests here. It wasn’t a bad life—indeed, it was every bit as beautiful as your life in the ocean deep, which I also saw in the frescoes. I always expected to meet the squid in Heidelberg, too. I asked myself for ages who it might be; there was a time when I believed it to be Professor Gadamer from the university, but one evening when I was sitting in the Florian wineroom, its owner came in and I knew straight away that he was the one. And he recognized me as well; he joined me at my table and had a good bottle brought up from the cellar. We sat there drinking together until morning. He told me about your life together in the ocean; we made good our differences and became friends. These days we take walks together in the woods above the city. We’ve both been waiting for you here. You must go and see him—he’ll be delighted to see you. Don’t worry, in future lives we’ll love each other again; we’ll also persecute and hate each other, fight and kill each other on both sides of the frontier of death. But for the time being, we can spend a few years here in tranquillity. Hölderlin wrote—a long time ago, admittedly—that Heidelberg was the most beautiful of Germany’s smaller cities. And just look at the peace that rests in its streets and the squares of the old town. The walls breathe with a silent joy, and it is a joy to walk its hills and sit in its university library studying from volumes whose pages are bathed in a calm light. Let us pass here our short golden age, an age we’ll often look back on during the trials and in the despair of our lives to come.”
The play at Revnice had not finished yet, but by this time I was tired; at the end of the Heidelberg scenes I slipped out of the audience and went down to the station. As I sat under a glaring bulb in an empty carriage of the late train, I thought how strange it was that the Revnice play had grafted motifs from the island’s
Book
onto philosophies of reincarnation and pessimism, ideas very distant from the islanders’ view of the world. I had written down the name of the company that produced the play, thinking I would get in touch with the actors at their Prague base and ask who the author was and where they discovered him, but then I dropped the idea. I was pretty sure what they would tell me: either the play was written by someone who had spent some time on the island, come across the
Book
there, and used some of its motifs in his work, or else some visitor to the island had told the natives about the play and then part of its story had been incorporated into the
Book
. The
Book
was open—it drew in stories from other books, plays or films and transformed them, and naturally it was willing to release its own story-lines and images for use in the literatures of other nations. Perhaps many motifs in works of literature of international renown have their origins in the
Book
; there is no way of knowing this for sure—the
Book
changes so quickly that whatever escapes from it to find lasting form on the pages of other books or theatre stages, transforms and then perishes in the
Book
.
Fo was carried into the palace with his book. After Fo’s death, Taal has his son’s work published in many thousands of copies and instructs everyone on the island to buy it. In addition to this, the king has several copies produced on the finest handmade paper as facsimile publications; these are kept in leather cases set with red, green and violet gemstones. Fo’s lettering is faithfully transcribed in all its transformations, and on the back of the sheets Fo’s text is woven around the lines of the forester’s records, just as it was in the cabin. The facsimile describes not only the story of the unfortunate Dru but also the story of Fo’s script, which is beautiful in its early guises but becomes ever more distorted as the fever takes hold. The letters were infected by the diseases of Fo’s thoughts, but perhaps the letters stirred the sickness in Fo by the piercing gaze they fixed upon him. The facsimile told of the fates of letters that became more and more akin to demons; these demons became lords of the text, shuddering, fraying and shrivelling until they were transformed into the monstrous letters of Umurian (woven somnambulistically around the clumsy letters of the woodsmen). Taal has Fo’s original manuscript placed in a gold box that he has specially made for it, and this is placed in the treasury guarded by the deadly, impassable labyrinth.
The king’s pain suddenly transforms into hatred for the woman he believes to be the cause of Fo’s death. One day he summons Mii to the audience chamber. This vast darkened hall seems to Mii to be empty as she makes her way across it; only when she is almost at its end does she see a slight movement in the gloom. Taal speaks. Since the death of his son, Taal has avoided the light. Curtains are drawn across windows and shawls thrown over lamps. The weary voice that comes out of the nest of shadows tells Mii it wishes her to honour Fo’s memory by the creation of a statue that depicts one of the scenes in his novel. This time the sculptress lacks the courage to refuse. She senses that Taal wishes to destroy her, that Taal would welcome her refusal as justification for her imprisonment or execution. There is a long silence during which nothing moves in the gloom. The audience appears to be at an end, so Mii curtseys and begins her retreat across the long, empty hall.
But she knows how cunning Taal can be and of his liking for the staging of dark, sinister acts, so the feeling of disquiet does not leave her. And before she reaches the door, Taal speaks again.
“There’s something important I forgot to mention. I spent a long time considering which material you should work in.” Mii has stopped and turned back. She knows she is about to learn what evil plan Taal has thought up. “I ruled out all varieties of stone and metal. I spent a lot of time considering rare woods, but all of them seemed too crude for a statue that should be an expression of the soul of my son. In the end I decided to have the statue made of water. You have three months in which to complete it. You may start work immediately.”
“You wish me to make a statue out of water?” Mii’s dismayed voice calls out into the dark towards where she believes Taal to be.
“Indeed. And of course I don’t mean snow or ice. Nor will I allow the water to be in any container that gives the statue its shape. But I suppose the material needn’t be water. Any liquid will do. I would quite like a statue made of aromatic oils, but I shall leave the choice to you. There’s surely no need for me to tell you that failure to obey the royal command is punishable by death.”
Mii knows this very well. She knows, too, that there is no point objecting that it is impossible to make a statue out of water or any other liquid, so she does not even attempt this. There she stands in the middle of the hall thinking desperately what she should do, but it seems to her she has no alternative but to wait in Taal’s palace for three months for death to arrive. But then something comes to her from deep in her memory; it contains the germ of an idea (at first foggy, but becoming ever clearer) for how Taal might be outsmarted. Mii knows that she must somehow get Taal to modify the task without ever suspecting there is a trick involved. She must induce the king to make a small change to the commission that will appear to him as nothing more than a meaningless elaboration, and she must get him to do so before she quits the hall. She begins to speak before she has a clear idea of how to proceed; her plan comes into being as she describes it in words. She walks back through the hall towards Taal; her voice is weak because she is more used to whispering to marble statues than to conversing with people. To begin with she is practically shouting, but still the king must lean forward so that he can hear her, and in so doing his face emerges from the darkness. The closer Mii gets to the king, the quieter her voice becomes. The king falls back into his armchair and the darkness.
“Very well, Your Majesty, I’ll try to make a statue out of some kind of liquid,” she says as she walks. “But there is one thing I need to get straight before I start working. There are thicker liquids and runnier pastes, aren’t there? What I mean to say is that it is not always clear where to draw the line between what is a liquid and what is a solid, and I wouldn’t like to think we might argue this point once the statue is finished. I suggest we agree beforehand what we consider a liquid on the basis of a simple and clear criterion, such as…” (as she walks, Mii pretends to be pondering on this) “…such as whether fish are able to live in the material the statue is made of.”
By now Mii is again standing before Taal’s chair, hidden though it is by the dark. Her plan for how to escape death was completed when she spoke her last word and took her last step. Taal is mistrustful and he takes a while to consider her proposal, but he finds nothing in it that could make the statue any easier to produce and thus jeopardize his intentions; on the contrary, it seems to Taal that in her panic Mii has made the task still harder for herself. So he replies, “Very well, it is your task to create a statue from a material in which fish are able to live.” He promises Mii that no one apart from her assistants will see the statue until it has been completed. Then he dismisses her.
As she stood before the king, Mii was remembering a marvellous lake that was hidden high in the hills of the small island on which she spent her childhood. After thousands of years of a gradual drying out, the water of this lake thickened into a kind of jelly. In the lake there lived predatory fish that darted out of the water to feed on birds that came too close to the surface. The fish would bite into the birds and pull them into the jelly, before stripping off all the flesh so that only the skeleton remained. Because it had taken such a long time for the water to thicken, the fish had had plenty of time to adapt to the changing conditions. Unlike the African lungfish (protopterus annectens)—which has created some kind of ersatz lungs for itself and will soon drown in water if it cannot get to the air above the surface—they did not convert to the breathing of atmospheric oxygen; the fish of the lake still breathed with their gills, which had adapted themselves entirely to the jelly and were very well able to exploit the small quantities of oxygen the jelly contained. It was difficult to decide whether the nimble movement of the fish in the jelly was swimming or burrowing. (The burrows disappeared immediately, of course, because the jelly closed as soon as the fish had passed through it—if you find this difficult to picture, try moving a spoon about in a blancmange.) Mii knows that the jelly is solid enough to make a statue out of, as the villagers living around the lake make quaking jelly statues for sale at the market in the capital.