Authors: Michal Ajvaz
When he woke up it was just getting light and everyone else at the farm was still asleep. Soon the cock began to crow, the only sound to be heard in the village. Baumgarten lay on the straw and looked into the yard through the open door of the barn. For a while he thought of his book, but soon he emptied his mind of these thoughts and left it empty. He let his eyes wander over the objects leaning against the blind wall of the building; most of these were farm tools the names of which he did not know, or parts of things of which it was impossible to say what they had once belonged to. By now there was a pink strip of light across the top of the wall, but all the tools and parts remained submerged in the cold shadow that covered the yard. To the left of the gate leading to the square there was a rusty instrument composed of four poles fastened together by rivets out of which there projected soil-covered prongs; he told himself that this was probably a harrow, though he knew very little about the subject. Leaning against the wall to the right of this were two dark beams, crossed, beaten together at their centres to look like a great “X” he imagined these forming part of a framework used in the cutting of wood. Resting against this rotten saltire were the remnants of a dilapidated door, upon which were quivering the flakes of a cream-coloured varnish with which the door must once have been painted; the door’s centre panel still bore a brass handle. Surely, thought Baumgarten, the farm’s manager was an exceptionally frugal character to hold on to junk such as this; at the same time it struck him that what was left of the door looked like a large “E.” He began to see amusement in a game in which one read letters in farm tools etcetera, so he moved on to the next object, a triangular wire sand sieve, but he could not think of a letter to compare this with. Next to the sieve there was the handle of a shovel, an obvious “I,” followed by a rusting construction of some kind made of the type of pipes used in scaffolding, a passable approximation of the letter “H.” The last item in this group of objects comprised three planks propped against the wall, which for some reason had been nailed together; it was not difficult to will himself to see in these the letter “N.”
Baumgarten ceased to find amusement in the game. He had not succeeded in his attempt to transform all objects into letters, nor did “XE” or “IHN” have any meaning to disclose. He was almost ready to get up and walk into the yard when something dawned on him: the harrow and the sand sieve did not resemble any letter of the Latin alphabet, but it was possible to see in them perfect representations of
sigma
and
delta
. Which would mean that “X” was in fact “CH” and the “H” of the scaffolding was “É,” so that the complete group of old objects read
schedién
, the accusative form of the Greek word for
raft
. Baumgarten resumed his game, this time reading the object-letters in Greek. The first item in the next group was a metal stand that was held stable at the bottom by a transverse bar and had a metal spool attached to its top in which was gathered a steel cable with frayed ends; all this was covered in rust, like all the metal objects in the yard. The stand was a fine representation of the letter “A.” Next to this were two wooden poles joined at an angle by insulating sleeving, whose purpose he could not imagine and which formed the letter “N” (the second in this curious notice); to the right of this was the broken lid of a crate in the shape of an “E,” and in two columns of some kind of plastic that were joined by a rubber belt gone slack, an “M” was clearly visible. At this point Baumgarten became truly agitated: the murmur of a text was beginning to take shape in his head, a text drawn out from the depths of his memory. He closed his eyes and caught hold of the words, which he uttered in a muted voice.
Then it came to him what the text was, and with eyes closed he whispered, “Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe…” When he opened his eyes again he was not surprised to see next to the plastic columns in the shape of an “M” a concrete full-round form (“O”), then a stake (“I”), a tool whose function he could not identify (
sigma
) and another stake (“I”). The tops of the object-letters were by now touched by the pink light. After the last stake there was a gap—a stretch of white, plastered wall which put him in mind of a sheet of paper sticking out of an enormous typewriter whose opening line was covered in typescript. Then came another group of objects:
phi
was represented by a small gate stood vertically, which on a round piece of scratched tin appeared to bear the remains of the legend “No Entry” the next “E” was a portion of a window. All thirty letters and three gaps were where they should be.
Theta
was particularly well done in a wooden hatch from which all the laths but the one in the centre had been ripped out, while
pi
had been produced in a block and tackle.
Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe
. Leave your raft to drive before the wind. When the gods order the nymph Calypso to set Odysseus free, and after he drifts away from her island on a raft, Poseidon unleashes a fearful storm. With the last of his strength Odysseus clings to the raft as it is tossed hither and thither. As the waves roar all around him, he hears a woman’s voice. Ino, also called Leucothea, the goddess of the slim ankles, has risen before him from the waves. Odysseus was expecting her to come to his aid, he was hoping she would calm the storm, would repair his disintegrating sail, or that she would carry him away to shore. But to his surprise Ino demands of him the most nonsensical thing imaginable in the circumstances. She tells him to quit his raft, his last hope, to give himself up to the wild water. Odysseus is slow to obey; he is hesitant, asking himself if this is a trick the gods are playing on him. In the end the decision is taken out of his hands by Poseidon, who smashes the vessel and casts Odysseus to the waves. Is not Poseidon, who would have Odysseus roam the seas, truly his friend? This is a difficult question to answer. As the case may be, the sea carries Odysseus to the shore of the island of the Phaeacians, where he meets Nausicaä and from where he sets sail for Ithaca, where Penelope, Telemachus and Argos are waiting for him.
Baumgarten smiled. He did not take long to consider what this strangely conveyed message meant for him. And its content did not surprise him as it had Odysseus because he had known it all along. What had befallen him was quite plain: the book he was writing had grown out of the pain of emptiness and gradually it had filled this emptiness, but in so doing it had destroyed the ground that nourished it, and died; such things happen. And the solution, too, was simple: it was enough to return to the territory of the void, to let himself be carried by its waves and to wait. So rather than thinking about the content of the message, he thought about who could have sent it to him. There was no point in his suspecting any of the people of the village. Being a sceptic he told himself that this was nothing more than a strange coincidence; it was improbable but not impossible. Quite simply he had dreamed that a local deity, lord of sad villages around Prague, demon of abandoned bus stops, had spoken to him. In the end he decided to understand the notice composed of objects as a message from Ino of the beautiful ankles, daughter of Cadmus, founder of the seven-gated city of Thebes, who had been transformed into a marine divinity and had now, for his sake, descended on the yard of this farm.
He decided, too, to follow immediately the advice Ino had given him; he threw the part-written book in the dustbin, shortly afterwards abandoned in his Prague flat all books and papers with notes and extracts on the subject, and left the country. He settled in Paris because it seemed to him that this was a place where one could easily lose oneself, and this he wished to do. It was not his intention to become a
clochard
; he wished to live in a foreign city and try again to be faithful to the void he had once betrayed, to wait for a glimpse of new motions as nonsensical and marvellous as the hymn about the embryology of being he had composed on the dusty streets around Prague and in country pubs.
As he walked the wastelands of the great city, as the faces of men and women unknown to him floated past in the streets like so many incurious fish, as his gaze wandered the facades of buildings and climbed through windows into flats whose furniture was angular and hostile, as he felt on his cheeks the cooling mask of a wind saturated in incomprehensible smells both foul and fine, a new joy was born within him. He changed his job often: he was a messenger and a gallery attendant, a custodian in a museum, a sales assistant. He glimpsed nothing that promised to be the germ of some kind of task; he took joy from the purity of emptiness, from its great airy halls, which he passed through light-footedly. He realized that the most important thing was not the task—a task born, perhaps, out of the emptiness, whose fineness and fragrance it preserved in itself—but the tranquil shelter of waiting for nothing. In this shelter a note of happiness was sounded and gained in strength. Perhaps his task in the great game was to make this realization.
One evening as he was dining in a cheap Chinese bistro in Montparnasse’s Rue d’Odessa, a familiar face appeared in the mirror in front of which he was sitting. It belonged to an associate professor from the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Prague when he was still working at the university. They talked for a while, and then the associate professor remembered that he was looking for someone to translate into French selected essays by Jan Mukařovský. Baumgarten thought the offer over for a while, and in the end he agreed to take the job on. This marked the beginning of his Paris career. After publication of the Mukařovský anthology he went on to edit his own anthologies of Czech structuralism, to which he wrote extensive introductions. He himself began to teach Aesthetics at the Sorbonne. He married a Frenchwoman and they had a son; they lived in a large penthouse on one of the great boulevards. The royal castle of emptiness dissolved. He never wrote the book he had intended to write in Prague. Only rarely did he remember the larva-like motions of being, the lost fragments of the Origins of Beauty and the period of his solitary walks on the fringes of Prague.
As their fifteenth wedding anniversary approached he went to a jeweller’s and bought his wife a valuable diamond necklace. It was January; his wife and son were skiing in the Savoy Alps and would be returning in three days’ time. That day he worked in his room through the evening and deep into the night. Before going to bed he opened the window to air the room of his cigarette smoke. For a while he watched the snowflakes, whirling madly and illuminated by the light of the room, and the fresh snow on the sloping roof into which the window was set. Then he switched off the light and went to bed.
A light sleeper, he was woken by a faint rustling coming from the next room. Through the half-open door, in the weak light reflected from the snow he made out the slim figure of a woman. She was wearing black overalls, their pockets swelling in a number of places. Above her head—which was covered with a black mask with three holes in it (two for the eyes and one for the nose)—the cold air entering through the open window caused the white curtain to ripple. The woman in black was leaning over the jewellery box into which that evening he had placed the necklace; carefully yet briefly she felt around inside it. When she withdrew her black hand Baumgarten saw a thin, glittering string dangling from the leather-clad fingers. What he was watching reminded him of a scene from a bad thriller. He took his revolver from the drawer of his bedside table; then he jumped out of bed. Catching sight of him, the woman slipped the necklace into one of her pockets, jumped up onto the windowsill and then out of view. Baumgarten grabbed his dressing gown from the armchair next to his bed and quickly pulled it on over his pyjamas. He put his bare feet into his shoes before climbing out of the window and onto the sloping, snow-covered roof.
To his right the yellow light of invisible street lamps rose from the abyss of the boulevard like sulphur emitted by the crater of a volcano; to his left, in the darkness and through the blizzard he could just make out a black forest of aerials on the ridge of the roof; in front of him, light from the window of his sleepless neighbour spilled out on to the snow. The black-clad figure was dashing through the high, fresh snow. Baumgarten was angered by the thief’s sheer cheek. He pursued her in spite of the danger to himself: in his low shoes he might easily have slipped and taken a dive into the boulevard. And now the sensation of being in a cheap thriller was stronger—and more embarrassing—still; he even caught himself making moves that characters in pursuit over roofs were wont to make in such films.
A short while later the thief in black reached the end of the roof. The adjacent building was that of a department store. Beneath the sloping roof of Baumgarten’s building there began a narrow ledge on which the legend Galeries Lafayette burned in big letters. The violet neon flooded the snow, throwing the outlines of the thief’s footprints into sharp relief. Now the woman would have to climb along the narrow, snow-covered ledge with the neon lettering. Baumgarten saw the figure in black take hold with both hands of the upper arc of the letter “G” before carefully placing the tip of her right shoe into the shallow bowl at the bottom of the letter, where the neon was buried in snow that radiated violet. On the narrow, horizontal stroke that split the lower arc of the “G,” the thief sat down, as if in a snow-covered chair, before letting go of the letter’s top and grabbing with her right hand the upper arc of the lower-case “a,” which was reaching out to her like the beak of an inquisitive, snowbound bird.
Baumgarten took the revolver out of the pocket of his dressing gown; he fired it to scare the thief. He aimed at the upper tip of the “G” and to his satisfaction saw that he really managed to hit it: the letter flickered and then went out, sending from its crest a small avalanche down on the thief’s head. She grabbed the “l,” which, under her weight, took a perilous tip forward over the boulevard and sent down another cap of snow, this time into her face. Seemingly she was blinded for a few moments: she had to use one hand to wipe her eyes. But the letter held and the woman succeeded in grasping the horizontal line of the central “e,” which appeared quite firm. She slid across the face of the “e” and reached for the horn of the “r” as if it were some kind of handle.
By this time Baumgarten, too, had reached the lettering. He stuffed the revolver back into his pocket so as to keep his hands free, then made for the first word. As he was gingerly touching the extinguished “G,” the thief was overcoming with ease the “i,” “e,” and “s,” thus reaching the word’s end. Then she stopped for a few moments; it seemed she was making up her mind how to bridge the gap between the two words. In the meantime Baumgarten found that his crawl along the word “Galeries,” with its extinguished initial capital, was made easier by the footmarks the thief had left; there was no need for him to grope beneath the snow for the outlines of the letters, so he moved more quickly than she. The distance between them was closing. He was heavier than she, however, and under his weight the letters tipped and creaked ominously, the damaged “l” in particular. This tilted yet further forward and its upper end worked itself free of the wall, revealing some cables and producing a flash. Now the letter was unlit and it jutted out like a black pole without its flag from the building into the snowstorm. This was a highly unpleasant course to take. Baumgarten was blinded by the violet light of the letters and the blizzard was beating against his face; his pyjama bottoms were soaked through, their legs ice-cold and heavy.
Just as it seemed he had negotiated the first word successfully, he made a serious error. He was reaching for the snow-covered dot of the “i” as he could not see this, he could not know that it was attached only by a thin, aluminium bar to the lower part of the letter, not to the wall like the other letters. The bar buckled under his weight and was now leaning like a wilting flower; Baumgarten’s feet slipped from the narrow ledge, and there he was, dangling over the boulevard, both hands clinging for dear life to the dot, which itself was sinking towards the abyss, where snowflakes were swirling around in the light of the street lamps. With the last of his strength he succeeded in grasping the lower arc of the neighbouring “e” and so clambered back onto the ledge. The thief now had both hands on the line of intersection of the “f” and was casting about with her right foot in the hollow of the “a” which followed. Baumgarten recovered himself; he made a risky leap from the first word to the second, then clung to the severe initial capital, which to his great good fortune held firm.
As the thief was attempting to place her foot in the snow-filled lap of the “y,” which was in the dead centre of the second word, with its lower part protruding from the ledge and into space, she slipped. Baumgarten watched with horror as the woman slid down the “y” and towards the abyss. Though she was clinging to the letter with both hands, its slippery surface eluded her grip; not until the hands reached the ball at the lower tip of the “y”—the very lowest point in the whole legend—was the downwards glide arrested. What luck that they had used a serif typeface, thought Baumgarten. He remembered an article on typography published pre-war in an avant-garde magazine, in which Karel Teige advocated that letters be stripped of elements of the calligrapher’s art and other bourgeois flourishes, claiming that the modern age demanded sans-serif lettering. Fortunately this had not come to pass, and Baumgarten was able to hurry along the avenue of violet-glow lettering to the aid of the thief who was dangling wretchedly over the boulevard. On reaching the middle of the word he took the “a” in his left hand and leaned over the abyss, where the snow was swirling about in the lamplight, and held out his free hand to the woman. Happily she was nimble enough to climb, with his help, back up the “y.” As she made it to the letter’s fork, he pulled the snow-drenched mask from her face.
He was confronted with the face of a girl of about twenty, whose blonde curls were fighting themselves free. She sat down on the back stroke of the “y,” leaning her elbows on the front stroke; her breathing was heavy. She made no attempt to conceal her face. She undid the Velcro fastener of her pocket and handed Baumgarten the necklace; this may have been a means of thanking him for saving her life, or perhaps it was his trophy for emerging victorious from this race over the roofs of Paris. The aesthetician put the necklace in the pocket of his dressing gown, next to the revolver. He, too, was exhausted; he sat down on the rounded roof of the “a” and got his breath back. From down below in the street, he thought, a late-night walker would see us as two rather puzzling splodges in the glowing lettering.
Dear reader, you may be interested to learn what Baumgarten and the Parisian she-thief talked about on that snowy roof. It was a long conversation, which my Parisian friend reported to me in full in the pleasant warmth of the café on Rue des Beaux-Arts. But we have occupied our minds with tales of the Czech aesthetician abroad for quite long enough. I have now described the two scenes in which letters and objects are joined, which was the reason for my telling the story of this Czech émigré. You are sure to have noticed that these scenes are those in the yard at the farm (where objects are transformed into letters) and on the roof of the department store (where letters are transformed into objects). Let us now return to the island.