Authors: Michal Ajvaz
Mii immediately sends her assistants to the island for barrels of jelly and fish from the lake. Then she begins to read Fo’s book. She is perhaps the only person in the kingdom who has not yet read it. Mii never reads books: the worlds in which she lives are so full of characters and stories that no more faces, bodies and stories could fit into them. But now she is in the company of dead Prince Fo, walking the corridors of the uncompleted palace, which is now slowly closing in on itself; the outlines of unfinished statues have befriended and merged with the spaces around them. Mii immerses herself in the vision born out of Fo’s solitude, sickness and despair.
And Mii is enchanted by the book. As in a dull metallic mirror, she recognizes her own face in the joyous child’s face of Isili and the noble gold, diamond-spangled face of Nus. In his many characters she gets to know Fo’s features and gestures, which were nothing to her while he was alive but a blurry backdrop to her nascent statues. They are made manifest not only in Dru’s wanderings and the process of his disengagement from the Earth, but also in the vigilant glances, whispers and light steps of the Vauz conspirators, and even in the elegant unfurling and recoiling of the squid’s tentacles. She identifies the rhythms of Fo’s blood in the undulation of the ocean’s surface and the dumb rotation of the stars around the centre of a distant galaxy. And this polymorphous but homogeneous pulsation, which goes deep into the bodies of the sentences and itself exploits the movements of these dark bodies, makes Mii think of something she knows from her own experience—that behind every work of art there are two things intermingling, each referring to the other: the face of the author, the features of which are drawn from the universe at large, and the universe, which appears in the mirror of the face.
It seems to her that the characters, stories and landscapes create together a picture of Fo’s mind, and that, had he never begun to write, Fo would never have encountered himself or the real world. Mii, who hears talk of separation from real life in connection with her own work all the time, knows very well that only at the bottom of our most personal myths, which we ourselves do not understand, only where these myths feed on juices flowing in the weave of real things and there recognize their cosmic names, do we encounter the true voice of the world. She wants to laugh when she reads of the wait for “a great societal statuary” after the installation of a new regime in Kass; she knows that the voice of the world speaks only through these nonsensical myths, that only its pictures, which take nothing from the world, are the hieroglyphs in which the world writes its secrets, just as it is only possible to write the word
table
using strange characters that bear little resemblance to the table itself.
Genuine reality is the birth of reality, and the birth of reality is an act that is spun out of myth and alive with spirits. We see the world in the convex mirror of a weird obsession that belongs not to us but to the monster that stalks the halls of our consciousness; all plane mirrors are blind. Fo was Dru and the squid, the admiral and the cook, Nus and Isili; he was the ocean the squid swam through, in which Isili’s body was lost; he was the multiform landscape of Umur. Fo’s character was composed by the gathering into itself of all these images, as they appeared to him over manifold, wonderful encounters. And Mii knows what sickness had consumed Fo: it was the horror and the delight evoked by his self-encounter and encounter with the world and all the figures, animals, deities, spectres, landscapes and stars that make of us what we are, and also delight and horror at the blurring of their shapes in the mute, monotonous pulsation of the great medusa of the cosmos.
Mii knows too that in his hatred Taal had made the right decision; Prince Fo was worthy of celebration in a marvellous, terrible statue made of a quivering, transparent material and full of predatory beasts. Had the king asked for a statue of marble, she would be asking him now if she could make it in jelly. Although she had tricked Taal into changing the task, she is convinced that a statue of jelly is more marvellous than a statue of water (assuming that it were possible to create such a statue), that the only material suitable for Fo’s apotheosis is one that is not of the four elements, so that it almost might not exist while being present within all the elements as an anguished, delightful possibility—the possibility of death and a return to the beginning that elicits transformation. Within solid matter there lives a shapeless porridge that is a dream of cosmic decay; within liquids it is a slow melody of turbidity; within fire it is the aspect of the flame that does not tend to the purification of the shape but to its warping, by preparing it to receive moisture; within air it is the gradual transformation of gases and vapours into a dark sediment that coats the surfaces of objects, thus healing over the wound inflicted by the blade that cut these objects free of the world.
A pity, she thinks, that I could not transform the whole book of Fo into a forest of statues that would stand somewhere out on the plain; or I could have colonized a town with statues, set statues of jelly in its streets and lanes, in its thoroughfares and in its courtyards, on the staircases of its buildings, in its bedrooms and hallways, in its cathedrals and in its mysterious, stinking public conveniences. But Mii must choose one scene only, and it takes her a long time to decide. She pictures Dru wandering about Europe, an out-of-humour Dru lying in his bed in the stargazer’s villa on a night when the sky is overcast; she considers depicting a scene of life on that other planet—one of the city’s curve-nosed sleighs, perhaps, in which Dru’s extraterrestrial lover would be sitting—or creating a group scene that would address the pages covered in the unreadable script of that other planet. She is for a long time given to thoughts of a statue that would illustrate some of the book’s later pages, where Fo’s writings coursed around the lines of the forester’s records—this statue would show both of these worlds.
But in the end Mii opts to create a statuary group depicting the scene with the giant squid, and in which she will give Dru the face of Fo. She is more and more certain that the moment the king looks into the great eyes of the monster is the secret heart of Fo’s work. She wants her statue to show a hero confronted with the greatest of all dangers, a terrible enemy that resides at the farthest point of his fear, in the last chamber of the labyrinth of his nightmares. She wants it to be apparent that the moment Dru first beheld the face of the awful beast, he saw himself in it: now he understood that what he most feared was also what he most desired—this vision of awfulness was also himself, and it was in this that he should perish. Mii wants the statue to express Dru’s hatred and also his love of the monster and himself, just as he loves and hates Isili—for indeed it seems to Mii that Dru must hate his beloved fiancée for being an obstacle on his journey to the sea bottom, to his joining the monsters that reside there, his brothers and sisters, his sweet underwater lovers with their deep eyes and beautiful undulating tentacles. Mii understands that this ironical heart is not the sort one usually finds in books: it is not a concentration of the sense of Fo’s work, nor does it reveal this sense. Rather, this encounter of the hero and the monster that smashed his world seems to subvert any possible orientation in one’s reading and instil an uncertainty in the work that anticipates its meaning and thus is always able to escape it.
Within ten days a ship appears in the harbour at Devel; out of this Mii’s assistants carry a great many heavy barrels, which they then convey up to the palace. At the place in the courtyard where the statue should stand, Mii has a great tent erected. The barrels from the ship disappear beneath its canvas. From this time on, Mii spends every day and every night in the tent. Apart from her assistants, who never speak a word, no one knows what is going on inside. Taal walks about the courtyard and around the tent, or he stands on the balcony looking down on the tent’s roof. In the evening, lamps are lit inside, and they burn all night, casting strange shadows on the tent walls. In these Taal sometimes recognizes Mii’s face, and, as the lamps travel from one point to another, the greenish shadow of an enormous Fo in profile creeps across the canvas before it dwindles away. By the light of the moving lamps it is impossible for Taal to tell which face in the mime of shadows belongs to a living person and which to a statue; he has the impression he can see his son’s lips moving and his arms reaching out toward him. The activity in the tent hardly makes any sound—just a kind of quiet squelching and slapping. But occasionally a scream of pain penetrates to every corner of the silent palace and shakes awake all its occupants. That this is the cry of a careless, sleep-starved assistant who had been bitten by a fish, no one knows. At the time Gato was preparing to enter the statue, Hios would remember these night-time wails with great anxiety.
Taal is puzzled. At first he thinks that Mii is hiding in the tent in order to conceal from him for as long as possible the fact that she is incapable of accomplishing the task; but the moving, greenish shadows, the spooky squelching sounds and the night-time screams soon make him nervous. The king begins to entertain the belief that Mii is a sorcerer able to create statues out of water, that perhaps she has summoned demons to help her in her work; but then, at other times, he tells himself that the coloured shadows are part of a trick that by way of lights and green-tinted glass, Mii is hoping to create the impression that she is carrying out Taal’s orders, while all the time she is simply waiting for the right moment to attempt an escape. Taal sends reinforcements to his guards at all the palace’s gates, though there is nothing to suggest that Mii is really planning to leave the palace in secret.
On the penultimate day of the third month Mii announces that the statue will be unveiled the next evening. Shortly before sunset, Taal arrives in the courtyard alone, although he had earlier imagined inviting the whole court to witness Mii’s defeat and humiliation, her tears and pleas for mercy, all of which he had been anticipating with relish. (Such a cruel theatre would be played out on the same spot four years later.) He is far from sure what will meet his eyes when the tent is removed. He keeps imagining himself seeing the granite paving of the courtyard and nothing more, Mii kneeling down before him and beseeching him to spare her life; but then, neither did he rule out the possibility that he would indeed see a statue made of water, which by some miracle had been fashioned into human form. Taal crosses the smooth granite of the empty courtyard, half of which is bathed in warm, reddish light. Then he steps into the shadow cast by the tent.
The sculptress and her assistants are already standing in front of the tent. When Taal stops a few paces from them, Mii gives the command for her assistants to pull away the canvas with a single tug on a rope. To his amazement, Taal finds himself looking at a statuary group atremble in the evening breeze—the terrible face of the squid with its enormous eyes, the tentacles slithering about the fragile body of Isili, and—reaching for his knife—Dru, who bears the face of Taal’s dead son. The scene depicted by the statue was played out at this very hour; the sun sinks a little lower, and its red rays serve to illuminate the green matter of which the statue is made. In the glowing bodies of its figures, magical sparks and the black shadows of moving fish can be seen.
Mii had accomplished Taal’s task: she had created a statue from a material in which fish were able to live. So enchanted is Taal by this work that his hatred quite evaporates. Having no further task for Mii, he rewards her for her work and releases her. Mii sails away from Devel, never again to return to the island. Taal orders Fo’s wing of the palace to be sealed, and his courtiers quicken their pace whenever they pass the closed doors to its empty corridors—empty, that is, except for the white statues frozen forever in blocks of white marble.
I folded the insertion that told the story of the statuary in jelly back into itself, and pushed it into its pocket in the
Book
. I was on the terrace of Karael’s house in the upper town. I knew that the plot was about to jump four years into the future, returning to Hios and Gato, who at the time I began to read of Fo’s love and death, were frozen in mid-word and gesture—as if by some fairy-tale magic—by the open window of Gato’s room, in whose frame was petrified the forked lightning of a storm fast approaching. I did not manage the transition from one level of the
Book
’s narrative to another with the same facility as the islanders; it induced in me a queasiness similar to that experienced by divers who come back to the surface too quickly. So I allowed myself a short break, during which I watched the metal jewel of the river work its gleaming course along the plateau and between the houses of the lower town. It was hot, so I spent some time walking barefoot among the steep lanes and up and down the steps of the upper town, the water flashing in the sunlight and maintaining the sublime cool of a mountain lake.
And then I returned to the
Book
and the royal palace on the island of Devel. The lightning rip in the black sky healed over and the frozen figures came back to life. Hios succeeds in procuring the jar of ointment. On the morning of the third day Gato announces to Taal that he will enter the statue and attempt to retrieve the gemstone. But Taal and Uddo anticipated that Hios would go for the duck fat and have replaced the contents of the jar with common pork lard. Taal bids Gato come to the courtyard that evening at six o’clock; he, his family and the court as a whole are looking forward to witnessing the spectacle.
As six o’clock approaches, Gato follows Hios’s instructions in smearing his wrists, ankles and neck with what he assumes to be duck fat; then he steps into Fo’s wing of the palace by the door at the end of the corridor (that day all doors are open wide) and makes his way down to the courtyard. There he sees dozens of chairs (brought by the servants from all over the palace) set in rows in front of the green statuary. The chairs are occupied by those agitated courtiers who have not dared refuse Taal’s invitation; they do not know what to expect; but as they know their king, they are not expecting anything pleasant. As Gato approaches the statuary from the aisle between the chairs, the perplexed faces of the courtiers turn towards him and then away again. He hears a murmur of voices and a scraping of chairs: it is as if he were in the theatre when a performance was due to start. On reaching the statue he turns and for a few moments allows his gaze to wander over the anxious faces of the involuntary spectators. Their eyes are lowered; across their faces there shimmers a restless green light reflected from the statue by the setting sun. As he bows awkwardly he cannot help but smile. Taal, Uddo and Hios are sitting in the front row.
He now turns to face the statue. The fish have taken notice and are swimming towards him from all areas of the jelly. The sight of this restless swarm is far from encouraging, but this time Gato is sure that Hios has not betrayed him. He steps into the statue, amid the horde of fish. To begin with, the fish scatter themselves to all corners. At the statue’s edge, Gato is standing up to his waist in jelly. The furrow his body has ploughed closes behind him; he has the feeling he is walking through an enormous dessert. In his choice of path he attempts to cause as little damage to the statue as possible. He comes to the gelatine table, which reaches up to his neck. Here he chooses to take a rest, and it appears to the onlooking courtiers that his head has left his body and is lying among the bowls of food. Gato studies the jelly plate of bread and cheese that is close to his face; he can see the imprint of Isili’s little teeth on the cheese. He turns his head and sees the famous sculpted radish, a working in miniature of the contents of the statuary as a whole. Then he continues on his way—the gemstone sank into the body of the squid, which is at the very centre of the statue.
Through the clear jelly Gato sees the fish swim back towards him and begin to circle around him. The first fish bites into his thigh and he cries out in pain; suddenly he knows that he has been betrayed. Taal and Uddo steal a look at Hios, who is sitting next to them; they are disappointed to see she does not move a muscle, that the expression on her face does not change. But Hios understands very well what must have happened, and Gato’s cry has not only shattered her world but flooded her mind with hate and a thirst for revenge. From this point on an expression of hard indifference will be on Hios’s face always; it is a precious mask she will wear with pride.
The blood from the wound seeps into the jelly and the fish circling around Gato are suddenly wild. They fly at him and rip joyously into all parts of his body, tearing off the hunks of flesh and gulping them down. Gato, behung with fish, staggers about the statue. The courtiers jump from their chairs and cry out in horror, unable to tear their eyes away from the head whose mouth is screaming with pain, from the body covered with great, terrible clusters of fish, from the pall of blood spreading throughout the statue. Perhaps Prince Gato would have survived had he turned and tried to fight his way out of the statue. But his mind is focused on the gemstone still more keenly than the physical pain. On the final stretch of the journey towards the longed-for gemstone—which consists of the swollen waves of the sea and the body of the squid—the statue is taller than Gato. Gato takes a deep breath before plunging into the jelly with his eyes open. He catches sight of the gemstone, glinting as a ray of sun pierces the jelly. Gato struggles towards the flash of red in the green gloom, his body a flame of pain.
Now the sharp teeth rip into Gato’s cheeks and neck; he is overwhelmed by the need to cry out, and the jelly gets into his mouth. He begins to choke. He has to jump up in order to catch his breath. The courtiers see his head break the surface—a bloody head with fish hanging in bunches from its cheeks—before it sinks back into the jelly. Not even Uddo can keep herself from exclaiming in horror. Only Hios remains silent and motionless. The glinting gemstone is now close enough for Gato to close his hand over it—a hand which has been gnawed down to the bone. He then forces his way through the squid. Between the last of the waves and the shore, the surface of the sea brings the statue to its lowest point. The courtiers look on as this is breached by the body covered with blood and behung with fish—with red and black bunches of death. The prince takes in breath and staggers a few steps more; then he loses consciousness and pitches back onto the jelly table with its jelly food, deep into the statue, which closes over him. In the courtyard a silence settles; nothing is heard but the distant calls of birds flying high above the palace. In silence the king, the queen, Hios, and the courtiers watch the shadow of the prince’s body in the jelly, how it is enveloped in a great cluster of black, how it continues to make slight movements (whether these are the final motions of departing life or are effected by the furious tugging of the fish, is unclear). After a while the great bunch of fish dissolves. On the bottom of the translucent jelly there lies a white skeleton with a red gemstone sparkling in its hand.
The performance is at an end. Wordlessly the spectators get to their feet; again the scraping of chairs across granite begins. The king and Uddo are well satisfied. But they are bothered by Hios’s detachment—after all, the performance was staged largely to punish her for betraying the family. Taal and Uddo wished to see her weep and wail. But by the time Hios rises from her chair, hatred of her parents has burned into her brain; henceforth the spectre of revenge will live on the ashes of her reason and sensibility. In the days that follow Hios continues to behave calmly. But everyone begins to fear her.