Authors: Michal Ajvaz
The sculptor is happy to accept Hios’s assignment. Never before has he made a large statue out of gold, and he is excited by the prospect of creating a work whose greatest part will be a depiction of another statue and which will portray living beings (the upper half of Gato’s body emerging from the jelly and the predatory fish biting into his flesh) in one place only. So the time comes when, in place of the work in jelly, there stands in the courtyard a statue of gold, showing Gato with his face twisted in pain, his body behung with predatory fish, as he emerges from Mii’s statue of jelly, which is leaning slightly to one side in the evening wind. Day after day in the early morning Hios sits herself in front of the golden statue; the burning, dazzling sunlight is reflected from its curves into the princess’s eyes, turning them into fireballs that whizz about like meteors in the dark inner universe behind Hios’s aching lids.
One night Hios has a dream in which she is again witness to the final moments of Gato’s life. But this time the prince’s death is played out in a world where everything is made of gold. A golden figure with the face of Gato steps into a golden statue on a golden courtyard, struggles through the statue to the golden head of a giant squid, and when he re-emerges from the golden jelly he is behung with golden fish. When Gato at last falls, a golden surface closes over him. When the Hios of the dream looks about herself, she sees that the terror-stricken courtiers, too, are made of gold, and she thinks that her eyes will not withstand so great a glare. She lifts her arms to cover her eyes and hears a clang as her golden palms strike against her golden face, and this wakes her.
The next day at luncheon she retells her dream, lamenting that the statue of gold can never be made to move. Sitting at the table next to the commander of the praetorian guard is Nubra, and this talk of an impossible statue immediately rouses his attention. As we know, Nubra loves a challenge. He turns to Hios and informs her he will make a moving statue that will depict her golden dream. As he is saying this, he has no idea how he will accomplish the task. The next week he never leaves his chamber; he lies on the bed, contemplating how he will keep the promise to Hios and complete the assignment he has set for himself. His gaze roams about the flower-pattern motifs that are endlessly repeated on the paper covering the walls of his chamber. He has a great many ideas, but all of these he gradually rejects. At one moment his eyes light on the stylized drawing of the bud of a lotus next to a lotus whose petals are already open; Nubra has the feeling he is seeing the flower open. And then the solution to his assignment comes to him. In order that the viewer see how the golden Gato dies and how the golden fish thrash about, it is not necessary in the least that the statue itself move. All that there remains for him to do is to construct a mechanism whose real but invisible movements will give the (false) impression that the statue is moving.
He presents his plan to Hios, and she promises to get for him everything he needs. Having worried that the princess would find his vision too grand and too costly, Hios is taken aback to see that she considers it too modest a memorial to Gato and her pain and hatred. Nubra cannot know that on first acquaintance with his idea, she sees in it the germ of a work far more wide-ranging—a golden statue that will be a second-by-second representation of the whole of Gato’s stay at the palace, beginning with Gato showing the chamberlain the carpet with the fairy-tale castle, followed by his work on the carpet commissioned by Taal, his night-time lovemaking with Hios, the moment when he stands anxiously before the labyrinth on the door of the treasury. But for now Hios charges the sculptor only with building in the palace gardens an amphitheatre which will be part of the moving statue.
The monstrous work, in which Hios’s incipient madness is joined and complemented by Nubra’s cold, technical reason, is ready within the year. Nubra produces several dozen statues to represent individual phases of Gato’s course through the statuary, from the moment he first stands before it to the moment he falls back into the jelly. This series also includes original statues in gold. The rest of the statues are gold-plated only, as Devel does not possess enough gold. Nubra has the statues built on a great turntable he has placed in the palace gardens, in front of which he orders a wall built with an opening where it meets the turntable, out of which rises the auditorium of the amphitheatre.
It is possible to close and re-open this hole in the wall by means of the two lightning-fast wings of a sliding door, which come together with a heavy impact (the sound of their colliding is softened by upholstered strips stuck to inside edge of each wing), then slide swiftly into cavities in the wall. All motions of the mechanism are unified by an ingenious transmission system. In the fraction of a second for which the door is closed, the turntable moves to bring round a statue representing the next phase of the action. When the doors re-open—again, this takes but a fraction of a second—the new statue is before the audience, and this is followed by a statue representing the next phase of the action, and so on. These rapid-changing statues create a grisly golden film about the death of Prince Gato.
When Nubra is building the amphitheatre, Hios has the palace park closed so that preparations for the Golden Statue Theatre can be carried on in secret. She forbids the workmen engaged on it from speaking about the work on pain of death. It is unnecessary for her to impose any prohibitions on Nubra: the surprise his inventions will excite is an inseparable part of the work, and besides, absolute silence is a central feature of his manner of working. The courtiers look with anxiety towards the closed gates of the park, at the constant comings and goings of covered wagons; they listen day and night to the workmen’s blows and think nothing good can come of it. Then the noise in the park ceases and the wagons disappear. Shortly after this, all the ladies and gentlemen of the court receive an invitation to a performance in the palace park. Uddo, too, receives an invitation—one look at the guards who deliver the invitation is enough to dissuade her from refusing it. The performance is due to commence after nightfall. With foreboding, the courtiers take their seats in the auditorium. It is barely two years since they were made to participate in another wicked performance at another place in the palace grounds. They have no idea what it is that is about to be presented to them, nor whether they will have to sit through more deathly ballets and bloody operas in the future. Uddo tries to hide in the back row, but when a guard comes to her a short while later and orders her to move to the front next to Hios, she allows herself to be led to an empty seat before the grey door in the wall.
When the lamps in the auditorium are extinguished and the door opens, the spectators are presented with a golden statue that depicts a statue of jelly. The door closes swiftly and then re-opens, the turntable turns, and before the eyes of the astonished courtiers a statue begins to move. To begin with this movement is little more than a gentle wobbling in the breeze, but then a fish jumps above the surface before disappearing back into the jelly. (In fact, fish modelled at various points of their jump are attached to the statue of the jelly statue by thin metal rods at points in consonance with the movements of the breeze.) From the left-hand side of the wall there then emerges a golden figure. When this figure reaches the statue, it turns to the auditorium and bows, just as the bewildered Gato did two years earlier. As if in a nightmare, the stupefied courtiers follow the familiar story: the golden figure of Gato steps up to Mii’s (golden) statue; the golden figure enters the golden statue, which is wobbling in the (imaginary) breeze; for a time the figure is out of sight, but then it re-emerges and turns to the audience with a look of anguish on its face, lifts up its arms fringed with golden fish, then falls back into the golden statue, which itself is a representation of a table set between the royal castle of Vauz and the sea.
Believing the performance to be at an end, the courtiers allow their horror to subside. But the turntable continues to turn. Once again the golden figure approaches the golden statue; again he steps into it, battles with the fish, and falls back into the gold. The monotonous golden film lasts five hours, after which time Hios makes a signal of command and the wings of the door crash shut for the last time that night. No one—not even Uddo—has dared to leave before the end of the performance. Although Hios and Uddo have been sitting next to each other throughout, not once has the daughter turned to look at the mother. Once the film has ended, Hios stands up in front of the closed door and announces that the spectators may go to bed, adding that the next performance will begin at the same time tomorrow.
Thus does the grim serial begin. Performances are held every night. And every night the courtiers are forced to watch the death of a golden Gato, over and over, so that they begin to fear for their minds. Every night Hios is present from beginning to end; she always sits next to her mother and watches the stage with a rapt expression. The guards stand in the aisles, drawing amusement from the discomfort of the courtiers. Before each performance starts, no one knows how long it will last—not even Hios, who always makes this decision when it is in progress. Often it lasts until morning, but still the guards allow no one to leave before the end, not even those who are taken ill or need to go to the toilet. Anyone who falls asleep is woken by a guard. For many years afterwards, the awful memory of daybreak in the palace park will return to the courtiers in their dreams. When at last the dim light of day washes over the amphitheatre, it is accompanied by cries, wails and groans; someone might howl for several minutes before falling silent; there is a stink of sweat, urine, faeces and vomit. Soon all these liquids have soaked into the velvet cushions of the seats, and every evening the blend of stinks greets the involuntary spectators as they make their way to the amphitheatre; soon this has penetrated the palace and it seems it will descend to the town and settle in its streets.
As soon as Nubra finishes work on the golden theatre, Hios—by now at the deepest point of her madness—sets him on another task. She dreams of a great golden drama that will celebrate her and Gato’s love, but first it is necessary to punish her mother. Hios presents Nubra with her design of a monument that is to stand on all the squares of the capital. These monuments are to depict executioners who are torturing, raping and otherwise humiliating Uddo by the vilest means the dark thoughts of the princess can invent. Nubra is horrified; as a lover of games and rebuses, he has no liking for commissions such as this, and he despises Hios’s dreary, clumsy hate that is slowly developing into the purest form of madness. But he is no more able to decline this order than Mii was able to decline the order to produce a statue in liquid for Taal. Once the dreadful monuments are in place, every morning Hios takes her mother around the squares on a tour of hate; Hios orders the coach to stand for at least an hour in front of each statue. Hios never addresses her mother, and whenever Uddo closes her eyes at a statue, Hios strikes her across the face and neck with a riding whip until she opens them. From these trips Hios escorts her mother directly to an all-night performance in the palace park. After a while Uddo abandons all resistance: she weeps no longer, but follows dumbly the changing scenes of the day-time and night-time statue performances.
By this time everyone at the palace is dull-witted or mad in some way. The courtiers grow accustomed to the terror practised on them by the praetorian guards and to the glassy-eyed expression of the queen; they grow accustomed to the many-hour-long re-enactments of the golden death, to the dreadful monuments, to the humiliation and stink of the amphitheatre. They are indifferent to the leaking of bodily fluids and stains on garments and upholstery—they wear the reeking splotches on their clothing like dark jewels. And the madness, stinking juices and bad dreams descend from the palace to seep into the streets of the town, the country at large, the waves of the sea. In the people of the town, fear of the guards’ patrols and raids (which often are the same banditry) mixes with joy at the general state of anarchy; in most cases, wrongdoing is tolerated when it does not affect the well-being of the guard or the princess, when its scope is limited to a house or the town, or when it happens to benefit some nobleman or other. The avarice and thirst for power of the guard is a fine complement to the disinterested, ostentatious cruelty of the queen. The people of the town blunder about stupidly in the shadows of the obscene monuments. Some days they cower in their homes and bolt the doors, listening to the sounds of carts and footfalls beyond the door; other days they are drunken participants in the looting of mansions—when a property seizure is in progress, they wait for the guard to leave before bursting into the paralysed house through its fractured doors.
Such brutal scenes as these were by no means exceptional in the
Book
. Mostly I came across them in deep insertions, perhaps in a pocket concealed inside another, as if I were descending to the dungeons of a building to find there the foundations of the ancient palace of a despot. Perhaps, I thought, the poison in the insertions will soak through to higher levels of the
Book
and the whole thing will become one obscene, cruel dream. And as the borders of all worlds were weak on the island, and the games of the islanders spilled over them, I even wondered if the evil in the
Book
might conquer the quiet life of the island, which would then begin to resemble that of Devel in Hios’s years.
I still wonder how it is possible that such dark images were born in the minds of the peaceable islanders. Perhaps the slow crystallization of shapes and systems into the shapeless, the various forms of which was the islanders’ main source of entertainment, was not as innocent as it seemed. The disintegration of language and order that occurred when these encountered labyrinthine shapes or passed over borders, released a playful force that built and revived different orders and languages in an endless kaleidoscope; but this force was itself a combination of many forces, whose tones sounded in it and which could render themselves independent. It is probable that a force could be distilled that would rise above matter and find its aim and its delight in the crushing of matter, without the fragments thereby created being used in new games. And this force would begin to elaborate its own figures, to write in hieroglyphs of evil, to set up its own dreadful world.
It seemed to me that the germs of dark worlds were present on the island in the breath of all things, sounds and words. As I was reading the history of the kingdom of Devel, I got to thinking about what it was that all those years ago so bewitched the European conquerors that they forgot their homelands within three generations, that they, too, came to hear voices in the island’s murmurs; I thought about the faces and figures that appeared to them in the play of the foam and the leaves. Were they really overwhelmed by the placidity of the islanders, or did they—experts on power and violence that they were—scent evil hidden at the bottom of this placidity and capitulate in admiration of its grand style? But I would be doing the islanders an injustice if I were to find in their calm, non-violent nature only the seeds of cruelty. I have said already that the force that ruled their world was woven from many sub-forces, and that each of these could separate itself from the bunch. It was possible to find in the islanders’ world the germs of many attitudes and many worlds, celestial and infernal. Images from these worlds sometimes flashed through in the islanders’ gestures and the melody of their voices. (For example, I was able to imagine very well that the admirable precision of their eyes—which was able to recognize and record the finest distinctions in shape—could be used in the development of brilliant analytical thinking.)
Families flee from Devel in ever-greater numbers. There are voices on the island’s beaches and light signals out at sea. Many of the fugitives find asylum at the court of Illim. Here a plan is hatched to invade the island ruled by the mad princess and her guard. The émigrés invite Tana to lead their flotilla, but Tana refuses: he does not want to renew the hostilities between families that was extinguished by the love of Gato and Hios, and also he is grateful for the gemstone, thanks to which Nau is now almost as soft as before (apart from the skin of her face, which has remained hard and is like a gleaming mask of metal).
The émigrés form themselves into opposing groups; each has its own candidate for commander of the army and its own plans for the invasion, which it is not prepared to give up. The groups reach no consensus until the unexpected appearance on Illim and in the
Book
—introduced in a subordinate clause right at the end of a very long compound sentence dealing with the fragrance of the old walls of Illim’s harbour—of Ara, whom the reader has believed would always remain in a kind of
Book
-world Hades into which characters descend from pages read. Above her name there is a thick pocket, probably detailing what happened to Ara after her departure from the palace at Devel. I did not open this because I was anxious to find out how the invasion of Devel would end, and quite simply I forgot to go back to it. I very much regret this, as Karael once told me that the adventures of Ara were among the most beautiful passages in the
Book
—she told me that Ara meets voiceless birds on her travels, which instead of singing, play long musical compositions by tapping their beaks on dripstones of differing thicknesses that grow at the mouths of caves in the hillside and give tones of different pitches. Perhaps the émigrés suspect that their planned strategy would be no match for the power of Hios, brewed as it is in a witch’s cauldron of pain, beauty, cruelty, desire, tenderness and madness. It seems they recognize in the words and gestures of Ara a power that is born of sweetness, nightmares and stifled cries; they understand that this night-time torrent of courage and evil is capable of confronting Hios and the dark army she commands.
So it comes to pass one starless night that all ships of the invading force push off from the harbour at Illim and out to sea. Ara is aboard the command ship, watching the flashing of the white, red and blue signal lights on all sides. The darkness begins to change to a grey mist, through which the outlines of dozens of phantom-like sails can be seen. (I meditated on what Ara would actually be able to see from the bow of her ship. I imagined a forest of masts in various shades of grey. But the
Book
was so indefinite in its references to time, in the boldness or carelessness with which it mixed the props of various ages, and by the dearth of words its authors employed in describing the main shapes of things—even though it was able to describe over dozens of pages the adornments on a house facade or the network of cracks in the plaster of an old wall—that out of the mist of dawn there might just as well have emerged the funnels of steamers. Or perhaps the ships slid lightly through the waves powered by some marvellous fuel unknown to our world—perhaps the milk of the silver mountain tiger was bubbling in the glass cauldron of a magical engine room.) The mist before the bow is an ever-thickening, ever-expanding pall of dark-grey, which suddenly develops cracks to reveal the streets of Devel’s capital. Ara wades through the cold water. All around her, grey figures step out, plunging their feet into the wet sand of the beach. Out of the mist comes the clank of metal and screaming. Ara and the others climb the steep lanes of the harbour area, which she knows well from her childhood. The lanes open out into a square, where dreadful monuments rise out of the mist. The mist is filled with points and blades of metal; as if in a dream, Ara beats these off with dagger and sword.
By midday the invading forces have broken down the gates of the palace. Dagger in hand, Hios joins the battle in the corridors of the palace, incurring many wounds and killing many of the enemy. After the death of the commander of the praetorian guard it becomes clear that the palace is about to fall. Hios leaves the action by a secret corridor and goes into the palace park, where she sets the golden theatre in motion. This is the first time a performance has been given to an empty auditorium. Devel’s princess sits there alone and stares rapt at the golden images of Gato’s demise. She has left a trail of blood in her wake and Ara has followed this to the theatre. Then the unknown author described a scene that might have been from a film: for a long time Hios and Ara, each armed with a long dagger, engage in wordless, hand-to-hand combat, threading their way up and down the empty aisles of the amphitheatre. Two slim bodies, which once would join in nights of love, move to the dumb dance of death in front of revolving scenes of Gato’s death and rebirth, death and rebirth. Steel daggers flit about before the golden dumbshow; the ringing of metal mixes with the thud of the wings of the door as they slam together and the purr of the mechanism that drives the turntable. At last Hios falls in the aisle between two rows of seats. Ara wipes her dagger on Hios’s clothes and goes back to the palace, where a great victory celebration is in preparation. Before an empty auditorium, Gato dies and comes back to life in the golden statue again and again. That evening someone stops the mechanism that drives the statues of the theatre, but Hios lies among the seats in a pool of dried blood for several days more. There was no mention of whether her shadow and Gato’s were embracing in the underworld.
Ara briefly serves as queen of Devel, but then she leaves the island and sets out on new adventures that take her to a great many lands. (These were described in another part of the
Book
.) Meanwhile, on Devel and Illim two boys from other sides of the feuding families have grown to maturity, and one day a new war breaks out between the two islands…