Authors: Michal Ajvaz
Months later the news reaches Taal that Hios has become the lover of the commander of the palace’s praetorian guard. Taal flies into a rage and determines to question Hios at luncheon that day, but when he does Hios does nothing to refute the allegations. While her father rants and rages, she sits there calmly eating a peach. Suddenly Taal falls silent, begins to wheeze, and falls face-first into the crockery. Hios continues to bite into her peach, watching her bewildered mother flap around Taal. When no further sound comes from Taal, Hios throws the peach stone into her bowl and leaves for her room. Once it becomes clear to Uddo there is nothing more she can do for Taal, she runs through the long corridors in pursuit of her daughter. But at the door to her daughter’s chamber her way is blocked by two praetorians. She screams at them that she is the queen, but the guards hold their silence and do not move. She runs to her own chamber to find there six more guards going carefully through her things. Nor do they respond to her threats, and when they leave they take with them all the apparatus of her evil kitchen—all the flasks and jars of poisons, potions and drugs, all the instruments of her prowess as a chemist, which she would sit over for hour upon hour and compose for as though they were the most sophisticated musical instruments, concertos filled with pathos or dreams, nocturnes and preludes of evildoing. It seems that the putsch is proceeding along carefully prepared lines. As the praetorian guard takes the palace, others of its units occupy the Academy; but this is nothing more than a futile gesture of perfectionism on the part of the putschists, a small, unasked-for present to Hios from the praetorians, or perhaps a settling of old accounts. (There has always been a certain tension between the guard and the Academy, the two real centres of power on Devel.) Owing to the gradual disappearance over the past twenty years of centres of resistance to the government, the Academy has become somnolent; it has ceased to be a feared nest of the dark sciences and forces to such a degree that occasionally it returns to the innocent researches of old.
Surprisingly the command of the army puts up as little resistance as the weakened Academy. Years ago Taal promoted the palace guard to the position of most powerful force in the state, and this resulted in the
de facto
subjugation of the army. The guard does not have a hierarchy; it has the character of a strong but elastic web woven from dark bonds, impure dreams and complicity in old crimes. The guard has no code nor central idea, nor any specific purpose in the running of the state. The motto on its coat of arms is composed of incomprehensible, magic words for which everyone has his own interpretation. The guard is the ideal means of disseminating and enforcing decisions that should be spoken of only in whispers and ambiguous terms, decisions that grow from dark roots and grope about for means of implementation, even for guiding aims. The guard does not act by the passing down of clear commands through a hierarchy, but in such a way that its instructions—or rather the dark movements of its consciousness and emotions, spoken in low voices behind locked doors, in high galleries or the alleys of parks, in which tone of voice and accent play important roles—enter immediately the filiform web from which the body of the guard is woven; once these instructions are in circulation, the imagination of the great body sets to work on developing the dark themes within them, while simultaneously—as if in a single movement—turning them into action. This was the chemistry by which Taal exercised power; it was in many ways similar to his wife’s more intimate compositions, whose lifeblood was poison.
Only subsequently, once everything is in motion, are a design and a plan fashioned, and these are really little more than hallucinations. These visions, of which the guard takes so little notice, set the army in motion. The army itself has no sensory organs by which to perceive the tangle of forces, desires and chaos that glimmer behind these phantom constructions; the commanders of the army do not realize that orders are born out of whispers, twitches and dreams, that indeed they never move very far away from them. So the putsch under the leadership of Hios and the commander of the praetorians is not so very different from the way things have been for many years up to this point. Even while the coup is in progress, a sense of normality sets in, stirring in the army command a sense that law and order are at work. After all, Hios is the daughter of the late king, and it has always been so that the commander of the guard mediates between the palace and the army. Hence the army—whose intervention Uddo is relying on—does nothing. The system of power established by Taal is turned against Uddo, and the queen discovers that she is powerless to resist it.
Hios does not attempt to disavow the rumours that claim it was she who poisoned the king. The commander of the guard is prepared to do whatever Hios asks of him, and so are his men. Since the deaths of Gato and Taal, Hios has grown so beautiful that she seems to have pillaged all the jewels of hell. Her dark splendour holds the praetorians in thrall; any of them would willingly undergo torture and death for the sake of their lady. Life at the palace becomes uncanny and dreamlike. The guards now walk its corridors, sprawl on its expensive upholstery in their high riding boots, enter its halls and chambers without invitation. Everyone gets out of their way. Hios glows with an icy, deathly beauty; fear abounds in the chambers of the palace. Uddo retires to ever-more remote rooms, waiting for Hios to strike against her. Hios leaves her mother alone while she considers how to dispose of her. One night Uddo gathers her jewels and makes an attempt to leave the palace by a side gate, but the guards there silently refuse to raise the barrier. Uddo shouts at them, then breaks into sobs and offers them jewels and money, but none of them speak or step aside, so Uddo returns to her room.
Hios begins to rule over the palace and the island as a whole. She refuses the title of queen, although the praetorians, who love the lustre of ceremony and the sight of gaily-coloured uniforms in the light of the sun, persist in proposing a magnificent coronation. It is enough for Hios that everyone fears her. She has the gemstone fished out of the statue and sent to Tana on Illim; using this, Tana is able to wash the red coating off the marble panel and thus prepare the remedy for Nau, who begins to get softer as soon as the first drops are applied. But when Tana asks for the return of his son’s remains, Hios refuses to give up Gato’s skeleton. She commands that this stays in the statue, and every evening when it is lit by the setting sun and Gato’s silhouette comes into relief like a puppet in an Adriatic shadow theatre, she walks across the deserted courtyard and sits on a granite paving stone in front of the statue, where she remains until it is immersed in shade and Gato disappears.
One afternoon it suddenly grows dark and above the sea there appears a black column approaching the shore. The superstitious town-dwellers, whose streets are infected by the silent horror flowing from the palace, tell one another that the Devil has come for Hios. But it is nothing more than a tornado. When the whirling dance reaches the town, it rips off several roofs and tosses them into the air. It shakes the ships in the harbour, and—on reaching the palace—bores into the jelly statue like a giant screw, gathers it unto itself, bears the statue off towards the skies, then drops it—jelly, Gato’s skeleton, the predatory fish, and all—into the streets. Before the fish die of fright they manage to sink their teeth into a number of people who try to pick them up from the ground. Hios orders the collection of Gato’s remains, and these she has placed in the gold box, out of which she first ejects the manuscript of her brother’s book. Now she detests whoever has the same blood as she, whether living or dead. Then she gives the order that Mii be found and told that Hios has work for her. But Mii, who has experienced a religious crisis and become terrified of the world that gave birth to her visions, is by this time living somewhere in northern Europe, on the tundra and deep in the forest, making ephemeral statues out of ash, then watching the wind reshape them until they disappear. So Hios’s envoys bring to Devel the sculptor Nubra of Kass. When Mii was working on Fo’s palace and the statue in jelly, Nubra was one of her assistants, and after her departure he took over her workshop.
Hios asks Nubra if he is able to create a sculpture in gold that would show the moment when Gato, behung with predatory fish, emerged from the jelly for the last time before falling back into the statuary. The figures in gold should be of the same size as the jelly and living figures in the scene that is the subject of the gold statuary. The sculptor tells Hios straight away how much gold he will need. Hios promises him all the gold from the state treasury, and in addition to this she issues a decree that all noblemen and wealthy merchants should exchange their gold for state bonds. No one believes in the validity of these, but no one protests.
The sculptor immediately gets to work on his design. He, too, is work-obsessed, but unlike Mii he does not create great visions, worlds that grow out of a confrontation between one’s eyes and a space, a void filled with endless content. He concentrates always on one statue only, and he works on this until he has solved the rebus or complex mathematical equation it presents him with. As a rule Mii would reject any conditions set for a commission (unless her failure to meet them would result in her death, as was the case with the statuary in jelly); she would create her worlds gradually by her own themes, laws and rules, and in her own style, none of which were known to Mii before she started work. With her successor, on the other hand, the stricter the rules the client sets, the better; when this is not the case, he sets advance conditions of his own, which he must respect at all costs, even though these sometimes verge on the impossible and he is the only one who knows of them.
When, for example, he was commissioned to produce a portrait of the family of the chancellor of one of the island kingdoms, he began his work by setting himself to ensure that the fingertips of each of the figures described the circumference of a precise, if imaginary circle, whose radius he determined by the throw of a dice; after this he three times opened a dictionary with his eyes closed, thus finding the names of three objects or beings he would have to work into the composition of the statuary group. These were a pineapple, a bat and a hand of a clock. It was Nubra’s task somehow to establish connections among them and also between them and the members of the chancellor’s family, related to what the subjects thought about and the kind of lives they led. Such incipient connections as these draw other objects and animals into the statue, providing outlines for situations in which they might be inserted. Once a statue is finished, it is common that those who view it find in its composition and the objects and scenes it depicts symbolic meaning and deep philosophical thought. In addition to this, Nubra likes to experiment in the creation of a variety of moving, mechanical statues, some of which are driven by wind or water, others by springs concealed in their insides and wound up by a great key protruding from the back of the plinth. It is possible that these experiments have their origins in Nubra’s work on the statuary in jelly.
Incidentally, Nubra was deeply dissatisfied with Mii’s execution of Taal’s task. Although her statue corresponded exactly to the task set by the king in its amended, definitive version, it was Nubra’s opinion that the small changes to the assignment secured by Mii undermined the purity of her design and with it her achievement as a whole. Nubra believes that the conditions set at the outset should not under any circumstances be changed—that if the chess player is unable to defend his king it does not give him the right to move his rook as if it were a bishop. So years later Nubra decides to correct Mii’s error and create a statue that really is made of water. The principle on which he bases this is relatively simple: springlets of water are sprayed through a dense web of holes drilled into horizontal panels placed at a variety of pre-determined heights, thus creating a relief. Of course, this system has one significant defect; perhaps, dear reader, you have hit upon it yourself: it does not allow for overhangs—as the lines of the water statue work their way upwards, they are bound to narrow. It is not even possible to create in the common position something as simple, yet important as the human nose. But Nubra finds a solution to this problem, too: he designs his water statue in such a way that it requires no shape whose highest point is wider than its lowest.
And so he sets to work. He and his assistants drill into a panel with the dimensions 3x3x3 metres—which will serve as the statue’s plinth—1,920,000 small holes to create a regular web that has 1,600 holes along its length and 1,200 holes along its width. The underside of each hole is attached to a tube; the holes are divided into two hundred groups of varying numbers of holes, and all the tubes attached to the holes of one group come together in a single bigger tube. The bigger tubes are fed horizontally beneath the statue’s plinth and leave the room by a hole in the wall. In the adjacent room these are attached to more tubes, each of which has a different diameter and goes upwards at a different angle. Each of these tubes is fed into a tank of water, which is located in the upper part of the room at the top of a metal construction; water from the river above a great waterfall enters this by force of gravity through an opening in the ceiling. Owing to differences in the diameters and biases of the tubes connected to the tank, the water flows through the flat-lying tubes beneath the plinth at various strengths and speeds, and when it reaches the hole in the panel, geysers of various heights rise out of the panel. Nubra has arranged things so that these come together to create the effect of a statue in water. The water is then drained into the gutters that line the plinth, and another pipe carries it out of the room and the building.
The statue portrays the corpse of the royal land surveyor, with a dagger in his breast, lying on his back in the desert; it is but an hour since he was murdered and his body is half-covered in sand. Next to him, jutting out from the sand, are some objects: a locked chest, a belly-shaped bottle, a bell, the front of a regular icosahedron, a cone. It is possible to trace in the sand a geometric figure—it is a circle, with a trapezium inside it. Next to this figure we can read what the murderer has written in the sand with his finger—“The dances on the silver bridge have not yet started.” Although this inscription evidently continues, subsequent letters have been washed away by the sand. There are also the merest traces of small footprints—obviously made by a woman—which, like the remainder of the inscription, the circle with the trapezium, the corpse of the unfortunate surveyor and all the objects around him, soon disappear beneath the sand.
This is a scene from a well-known Kassian legend. For a long time Nubra inspected this image in his mind’s eye. To his great satisfaction he discovered that it contained no overlapping or overhanging shapes, no protrusions or pendant lobes. Perhaps, dear reader, you would like me to tell the story of the royal land surveyor, so that you might take a break from the dismal affairs of Devel (and it would be well worth the effort—it is a legend with a long, convoluted plot that is set in many towns, in which there appear the sly emissaries of a padishah and a beautiful, mysterious woman). But you must forgive me, as I am not really in the mood for such an undertaking. You know that I have tried to oblige you whenever I can; indeed, I have pampered you. But please acknowledge that it is impossible for me to indulge your every whim. Let me propose another course: why not create for yourself a story to fit the scene in the desert into? You will experience the joys and ironies of fabulation; you will learn that fabulation is a drug to be wary of—even where the most honourable and moral of stories are concerned—as always it eats away at the good intentions and noble ideas that are its impetus, of which it supposes itself an obedient instrument. What fabulation does is transform its subject into a purposeless and joyous cosmic dance driven by ancient, entirely treacherous rhythms.
Fabulation is an adventure of encounter and homecoming; it carries you to landscapes where there is a murmur of stories hitherto unknown, where faceless figures take shape, where the bodies of inarticulate beings—great larvae—rub against yours in the dark. You realize that this landscape is not only the birthplace of the story; it is a home for your own gestures, actions and thoughts. Only in stories born of this landscape do you encounter your true self. Remember how Fo saw himself in the faces of his characters and the mysterious letters that recorded his true name. You will realize that your life is in some strange way a copy of the stories that arise from this landscape. And you will smile when I tell you of the literature of the authentic diary because you will know that you never encounter yourself until you leave yourself behind for the world of magical stories. Even the most candid diary is an embarrassing conceit, as the
I
of such literature is always a pitiable, fantastical figure who is less real than all the kings, princes and princesses of the island’s
Book
.