The Weird

by Ann

  Louis’s back straightened like a string of beads being pulled taut. Behind his glasses, I knew, his pupils would have shrunk to pinpoints: the light pained him more when he was nervous. But no tremor in his voice betrayed him when he said, ‘What do you know about it?’

  The boy shrugged. On his bony shoulders, the movement was insouciant and drop-dead graceful. ‘It’s voodoo,’ he said. ‘I know what voodoo is. Do you?’

  The implication stung, but Louis only bared his teeth the slightest bit; it might have been a smile. ‘I am conversant in all types of magic,’ he said, ‘at least.’

  The boy moved closer to Louis, so that their hips were almost touching, and lifted the amulet between thumb and forefinger. I thought I saw one long nail brush Louis’s throat, but I could not be sure. ‘I could tell you the meaning of this veve,’ he said, ‘if you were certain you wished to know.’

  ‘It symbolizes power,’ Louis said. ‘All the power of my soul.’ His voice was cold, but I saw his tongue dart out to moisten his lips. He was beginning to dislike this boy, and also to desire him.

  ‘No,’ said the boy so softly that I barely caught his words. He sounded almost sad. ‘This cross in the center is inverted, you see, and the line encircling it represents a serpent. A thing like this can trap your soul. Instead of being rewarded with eternal life…you might be doomed to it.’

  ‘Doomed to eternal life?’ Louis permitted himself a small cold smile. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘The band is starting again. Find me after the show and I’ll tell you. We can have a drink…and you can tell me all you know about voodoo.’ The boy threw back his head and laughed. Only then did I notice that one of his upper canine teeth was missing.

  The next part of the evening remains a blur of moonlight and neon, ice cubes and blue swirling smoke and sweet drunkenness. The boy drank glass after glass of absinthe with us, seeming to relish the bitter taste. None of our other guests had liked the liqueur. ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked. Louis was silent for a long moment before he said, ‘It was sent over from France.’ Except for its single black gap, the boy’s smile would have been as perfect as the sharp-edged crescent moon.

  ‘Another drink?’ said Louis, refilling both our glasses.

  When I next came to clarity, I was in the boy’s arms. I could not make out the words he was whispering; they might have been an incantation, if magic may be sung to pleasure’s music. A pair of hands cupped my face, guiding my lips over the boy’s pale parchment skin. They might have been Louis’s hands. I knew nothing except this boy, the fragile movement of the bones beneath the skin, the taste of his spit bitter with wormwood.

  I do not remember when he finally turned away from me and began lavishing his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the lust bleeding into Louis’s eyes, the pleasure wracking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.

  When I awoke, the bass thump of my pulse echoing through my skull blotted out all other sensations. Gradually, though, I became aware of tangled silk sheets, of hot sunlight on my face. Not until I came fully awake did I see the thing I had cradled like a lover all through the night.

  For an instant two realities shifted in uneasy juxtaposition and almost merged. I was in Louis’s bed; I recognized the feel of the sheets, their odor of silk and sweat. But this thing I held – this was surely one of the fragile mummies we had dragged out of their graves, the things we dissected for our museum. It took me only a moment, though, to recognize the familiar ruined features – the sharp chin, the high elegant brow. Something had desiccated Louis, had drained him of every drop of his moisture, his vitality. His skin crackled and flaked away beneath my fingers. His hair stuck to my lips, dry and colorless. The amulet, which had still been around his throat in bed last night, was gone.

  The boy had left no trace – or so I thought until I saw a nearly transparent thing at the foot of the bed. It was like a quantity of spiderweb, or a damp and insubstantial veil. I picked it up and shook it out, but could not see its features until I held it up to the window. The thing was vaguely human-shaped, with empty limbs trailing off into nearly invisible tatters. As the thing wafted and billowed, I saw part of a face in it – the sharp curve left by a cheekbone, the hole where an eye had been – as if a face were imprinted upon gauze.

  I carried Louis’s brittle shell of a corpse down into the museum. Laying him before his mother’s niche, I left a stick of incense burning in his folded hands and a pillow of black silk cradling the papery dry bulb of his skull. He would have wished it thus.

  The boy has not come to me again, though I leave the window open every night. I have been back to the club, where I stand sipping vodka and watching the crowd. I have seen many beauties, many strange wasted faces, but not the one I seek. I think I know where I will find him. Perhaps he still desires me – I must know.

  I will go again to the lonely graveyard in the bayou. Once more – alone, this time – I will find the unmarked grave and plant my spade in its black earth. When I open the coffin – I know it, I am sure of it! – I will find not the mouldering thing we beheld before, but the calm beauty of replenished youth. The youth he drank from Louis. His face will be a scrimshaw mask of tranquility. The amulet – I know it; I am sure of it – will be around his neck.

  Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain…the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

  With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me – of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his. I will feel the sensations Louis felt: the shrivelling of my tissues, the drying-up of all my vital juices. I care not. The treasures and the pleasures of the grave? They are his hands, his lips, his tongue.

  The End of the Garden

  Michal Ajvaz

  Translated into English by James Naughton

  Michal Ajvaz (1949–) is a Czech novelist, poet and translator. Born into an exiled Russian family, Ajvaz studied Czech studies and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. He did not begin publishing fiction until 1989, probably due to the political repression in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) during the 1970s and 1980s. His novel Prázdné ulice (2004) was awarded the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert Prize for literary achievement (2005). English-language translations include the critically acclaimed The Other City (2009) and The Golden Age (2010). Ajvaz comes by the ‘weirdness’ in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity, as in ‘The End of the Garden’ (1991).

  As I am passing, I hear a pathetic call for help from a ground-floor window. I clamber up to the sill and jump into the room; I find myself in a room with heavy dark furniture, with tassel-edged covers, with mountains of variegated little cushions, with a darkened painting of the Bay of Naples on the wall. Behind the great double bed something or other is wrestling on the ground, you can year puffing, groaning and blows. I rush over to the fight and see: a young woman in a black evening dress with narrow shoulder-straps and a plunging back is struggling with a lizard! It is evidently a huge monitor lizard (Varanus komodoensis), which lives on the island of Komodo in Indonesia and reaches a length of as much as three metres. Zoologists reckon that these lizards were able to reach such a length on Komodo due to the fact that on this island they had no natural enemies. I jump on the lizard like Saint George, I grab it by the floppy wrinkled skin under the neck and heave it about. While I am shaking it, the lamenting call for help continues to be heard. Suddenly I realise, it is not the woman calling for help, but the lizard! I let the beast go, sit down on the threadbare carpet and awkwardly observe the struggle. It really looks as if the woman is the assailant and the lizard the assaulted. If he didn’t have any enemies on Komodo, I sai
d to myself, here it is evidently otherwise. The lizard would clearly have done better to remain in Indonesia. He would have saved not only himself from a nasty situation but also me: for I was unable to decide how to behave; on the one hand the lizard was obviously the victim of an attack, on the other it seemed morally unacceptable for me to side with a lizard in this fight between a lizard and a human being. Hegel reproaches Kant for the merely formal and abstractly universal quality of his categorical imperative, which makes it unable to guide us sufficiently in concrete situations. ‘Act in such a way that the principle of your behaviour may become a universal maxim’: should this universal maxim rather be ‘help those under attack’ or ‘help women who are struggling with monitor lizards’? Kant says: ‘In your conduct let a human being be always the aim, not the means.’ What of the lizard, can he be a means? On this subject the Critique of Practical Reason has absolutely nothing to say; as far as I know, in the whole of this extensive work there is not a single mention of monitor lizards. Kant is of course partly excused by the fact that, as is generally known, he never left Konigsberg (though he speculated whether after our death we would inhabit other heavenly spheres), so that he quite certainly never encountered a Komodo lizard; on the other hand, however, he might surely have devoted at least a couple of lines to a creature as remarkable as the three-metre-long monitor lizard. Maybe this lizard is now pursuing him across the endless empty plains of some other star.

  (Here, I think, lies the misfortune of philosophy: always we encounter on our travels some exceptional freak to which the philosophical rules are found to be non-applicable. Which are right – the freaks or the philosophical principles? I once had a lecture on this problem in a lift, inlaid with amber. On the one hand we are somewhat loath to dispose of the whole thing merely by saying ‘so much worse for the freaks,’ on the other we are also reluctant to accept that the whole of our fine system of thought be dependent on some ugly old freak. At the same time we fail to grasp the relativity of the concept of ‘freakishness’ – if there were no human beings with their evaluating criteria, there would be no ‘freakishness’ either – also we ignore the vicious circle of reasoning to which we fall victim: freakish for us is that which falls outside our own sense of order, but simultaneously we proclaim that this breaching of our own sense of order proves nothing against its truth value, since after all we are simply dealing with a freak.)

  So I followed this struggle, full of feelings of confusion and ambivalence, until finally I tapped the woman strangling the fretful lizard on the shoulder and said in an uncertain voice: ‘Please leave the lizard alone,’ and when that did nothing, I added: ‘He’s a rare creature from Indonesia, everywhere else these lizards are only tiny.’ Eventually the woman let the lizard go, he shambled off, head drooping into the farthest corner of the room, where he huddled up against a glass-fronted cabinet with shelves displaying china dogs and sea shells and began to sob loudly. The woman slowly got up from the floor, straightened her dress and looked at me severely. She had wavy black hair and an extraordinarily lovely, sharply sculptured face with an aquiline nose, her eyes were so vivaciously painted in various hues of turquoise, purple and green that it looked as if an exotic butterfly with outspread wings were perched on the top of her nose.

  She went up to a glass-fronted bookcase holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval, printed sometime at the turn of last century. She turned the key in the lock, and the doors opened with a gentle creak. She reached confidently inside, pulled out a thick old book with gilt edging, covered in dust, and handed it to me. With astonishment I read my own name on the cover, set in a rounded fin-de-siecle typeface interlaced with tendrils of plant decoration which swirled across the entire binding in inextricably tangled swathes; below was the book’s title: At the End of the Garden. I have never written a book in my life, although I have always wanted to be a writer, because I would enjoy working on a book in the mornings – I used to imagine it would be something between Phenomenology of Mind, The Three Musketeers and Les Chants de Maldoror (nothing funny in that!) – and in the afternoons I’d sit in a café, sip sweet coffee and watch the faces of the passers-by in the street through the glass like fish in an aquarium. Now I gazed in surprise at the book whose binding held my name. Do demons execute for us works we have dreamt of and never created? Do our hidden literary projects ripen in the dark depths of other people’s libraries? Are the books we regard as our own creations only copies of texts engraved on glass sheets and deposited in a library situated in a labyrinth of malachite passageways beneath the city? In any case it seems that someone carries out unfulfilled tasks for us. I recalled how a musician friend once whispered to me in a pub about hearing beneath the surface of an evening pond in a desolate landscape the symphony he had resolved to write when he was studying at the conservatory, but of which he had only composed a few bars.

  I opened the book, the work of a demon, and began to leaf through it. But wherever I opened the pages, though I saw the printed text, the letters immediately began to turn pale and vanish like ancient frescoes from the catacombs, exposed to fresh air, I only managed to glimpse a couple of words on each page; together they made up a mysterious sentence, oddly beautiful in its absurdity. It spoke of great railway-station halls, river embankments of marble, and the glass-fronted veranda of a mountain lodge. Beneath the melted text there remained only yellowed, melancholy fragrant paper, a few brown marks, only occasionally an isolated letter was left on the page or the fragment of a word.

  But the pictures did not vanish. When the whole text had evaporated, I started to inspect them at last. I liked them, because they reminded me of the naïve wash illustrations from the books of Karl May which I read in my childhood when I was ill, lying by myself at home in an empty flat. All the pictures showed a monitor lizard in some situation or other, displaying him as a perfect scoundrel without a single jot of honour in all his long body. Here with lascivious paws he assails an innocent girl as she prepared in her translucent night-dress to lie down in her virginal bed, here we see him on top of the pyramid of Cheops, disguised as a bedouin, knocking over with his rifle butt a gentleman in a light-coloured colonial suit, who loses his balance and hurtles into the terrible abyss, his tropical helmet has fallen off his head – in the picture it hangs in the air a foot or two above the top of the pyramid. Another illustration is especially fine: we see a gloomy dark underground cavern, flooded with water, gushing in a great current out of the mouth of some pipe projecting from the wall. To the pillar supporting the vault an elegant mustachioed young man and a nice young girl are tied with a strong rope (the girl is maybe the same as the one in the picture of the bedroom); the water has reached up to their waists. The monitor lizard is standing over them at the top of the stairs, opening the door, through which rays of daylight penetrate, and turning his head towards the unfortunates. The text beneath this picture lasted a bit longer, so I managed to read all of it. It said: ‘I am sorry, my dear Count, that we shall not have occasion to finish our interesting debate on Kant’s moral philosophy, begun during those unforgettable days in the gardens of El Amarna,’ said the lizard with a devilish leer leer on his horrid face –p.427.

  When I had finished looking through the illustrations, I glanced in surprise at the monitor lizard, huddled in the corner. He had covered his face with his paws, as though he were terribly ashamed, and tried to secrete himself right into the hollow between the display cabinet and the wall. He now surely regretted that his ancestors had attained such a length in Komodo. The woman took the book from my hand and placed it on a low round table, covered with a crocheted cloth. She looked at me frowningly and shook her head rebukingly. Although she was younger than I, she now looked like a school teacher. I began to feel ashamed too, I felt like crawling behind the cabinet after the lizard. Will this school teacher not complain to my parents that I make friends with lizards, that I am incapable of carrying out the categorical imperative in spite of goi
ng on about Kant all the time in Prague’s Mala Strana restaurants, that I haven’t written the book I was set to do as homework, that instead of working on this I spent my time aimlessly walking along past garden walls and fences, that my brain has produced nothing but incompletely crystallised thoughts, still half just the scents of places and inconsequential rhythms?

  Now the monitor lizard got up and, still squinting timidly at the woman in the black dress, he opened a case lying on the cabinet. He took out of it a viola d’amore and tucked it under his lower jaw, after first pushing aside the obstructing flap of skin. He caught the bow in his other claw and started playing a waltz. Into the quavering sounds of the strings he mingled his unabated wailing lament, sometimes reminiscent of the whining of a dog. I went up to the woman, bowed slowly and grandly to her and took her round the waist. We started to dance, clumsily we circled the leather armchairs and lamps on long metal standards. The room echoed to the melancholy notes of the viola and the lizard’s whimpering and whining.

  But in his playing the lizard evidently forgot his pain, the music engrossed him more and more, the whining gradually ceased and the notes of the viola became louder, more emphatic and joyous, the melody became ever more boisterous and aggressive. He rose from his corner and, with the viola under his chin, he approached us, playing like the first fiddler at a gypsy ball after midnight, he whooped and thumped the beat with his tail on the floor. His boisterous smile gradually changed into a devilish leer. A change also came over the woman. Her face was no longer that of a school teacher, rather the face of a terrified little girl, she gazed in horror at the grinning monster and pressed herself timidly against me. I stroked her hair soothingly. Don’t be afraid, I’m here with you, I won’t let the lizard eat you up. She whispered to me: ‘I love you very much, if we manage to escape the claws of this terrible beast, we’ll go off together somewhere where no such horrid lizards live, there must be such a place, not long ago three-metre-long lizards were only to be found on Komodo, and now they’re everywhere; when I ride in the metro, they’re sitting opposite me, dozing, I have to spend the whole journey looking at their thick faces, at work they’ve made a lizard my new boss, he keeps coming up and pawing my shoulders when I’m typing, he makes lewd suggestions…’ The lizard stood close beside us, his jaw hanging open, with ghastly teeth flashing, he played a wild Hungarian tune, he stamped his foot till the walls shook and cracks appeared in them, like branching roots, and he whooped loudly. But the tension fell away from me too, I wasn’t afraid of the lizard’s teeth, I no longer felt the need to give an account of myself, to apologise for not fulfilling my task, I knew now that no such task existed, there was only the quietly flowing river of being with its currents and scents, the unknown and the unenvisaged that ripens within the flow.