The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  The islanders liked the barely perceptible shapes made by the waves of the sea and the leaves as they moved in the wind, but the geometry of the town the foreigners had built presented them with no problems; the straight lines and right angles seemed to them like the parting of the same forces that draw and then erase white figures of foam on the sea and wake in the treetops a silvery surf. These forces created all shapes and all shapes exhaled them; the forces were the same, whether they played with elusive traces of smoke or drew a straight line and then broke it into a right angle. Through the eyes of the islanders the straight lines of the lower town were transformed into a dreamlike web, whose lines sounded like thin strings in a music of empty, apathetic or liberated time that was heading nowhere. And so a town that was soaked in dreams when it first came into being, now lost its last remnants of substantiality: it transformed from a dream to a dream. For the foreigners it became a tormentuous labyrinth of hot walls from which there was no escape, while the natives were able to settle in, take walks about the squares, and relax in the shade of the great colonnades and on the magnificent granite embankments with their statues of sphinxes and lions.

  The native women submitted to the foreigners, but the foreigners acquired the habits and the gestures of the natives and their children spoke the natives’ language better than their own. It seems that by the third generation, the conquerors had merged with the natives: they had forgotten their language, abandoned their books, machines and their god, and were listening to the murmur of the sea and the scratching of the sand, or watching shadows move across walls on hot afternoons. All that remained of the foreigners were certain features in the faces of the islanders—like the letters of a forgotten alphabet, the sense of which has been lost. Of the foreigner’s language, a few roots remained, which the language of the natives absorbed and used in its games; they were good for prefixes and suffixes. The shapes of the instruments the conquerors brought to the island can still be seen today in the adornment of facades—in simplified, distorted and endlessly repeated form. And thus the conquerors disappeared. What remained of them was the lower town—their dream of home that had become a stifling labyrinth, overgrown with reeds and smothered in sand.

  I believe that this breakdown in the thinking of the foreigners after years of torment, homesickness and anxiety brought with it a deep, unexpected joy, and that in its final phase the foreigners accelerated the process themselves. To their astonishment and delight, they began to understand that the labyrinth they had built for themselves and that had them in its grasp, was after all the home they had yearned for while at sea, that it was more of a home to them than the distant cities of Europe whose systems had been dissolved for them beyond all reconstruction in the winds of the tropics. Out of the town the foreigners had built as a memorial, the natives had fashioned a new town—a labyrinth-town—in which, so it proved, it was possible to live in contented tranquillity; it was at once Ithaca and the island of the Lotus Eaters. But in the birth of the new town the foreigners also played their part—by how they saw it, by how they responded to it in gesture, by the paths they pursued in it. Now they saw the same town as the natives did. For the foreigners, too, all shapes had the same importance; their feet, too, made of the town’s geometric ground plan an intricate mandala of futility. They came to understand that the force echoed in the motions of machines and the procedures of logic and mathematics could be accepted and delighted in, that the cosmic ballet they had had such an abhorrence of, could be seen as a performance of endless fascination. I imagine them sitting on the patios of their palaces, just watching, filled with a joy growing like the weeds and shrubs produced by scattered seeds, like the sand that blew gently into their living spaces. I think they forgot all about Europe, but the cities of the north were transformed in the joyful dream of the moment, which floated among the hot walls and was just as much a part of this place as the roar of the sea. A golden age began with stains, rustlings and aimless journeys.

  I understood them because I, too, got a taste on the island of the lotus of effervescent chaos. Perhaps this was not even chaos, but something beyond chaos, a space of calm, swirling forces from which shapes, images and some sense of order rose up before sinking back without regret or memory. I would say to Karael almost daily how much I was irritated by the indifference and laziness of the islanders, but still I let one ship after another sail away without me, until the time arrived when I realized that my own transformation had progressed so far that in a few weeks or days I would be unable to leave the island, ever. So return home I did, but I will be forever marked by my stay on the island. I feel the island present within me still like an incurable disease a traveller brings back from the tropics in his blood, like a stifled fever that silently marks every gesture and glance. And I know that forever more every shape I see will be lost in the repulsive yet delightful network of mazy, tangled lines; forever more words will be somewhat higher waves on the endless, unbroken surface of the rustlings.

  The hidden king

  I have already mentioned that the king had his seat in the lower town. It is a problem to identify the islanders’ political systems. The ruler of the island was appointed for an indefinite period by means of institutions which were something between elections, dreams, referenda, small talk and a proliferation of knocks. In the conversations the islanders carried on within the family and among close friends, they spoke of who might be king; some of those present at these conversations were then present at other conversations with other people, at which suitable candidates for the post of king were discussed. The opinions expressed here were formed in other conversations still, were influenced by others still, and flowed into others still. In this spillover names broached the surface of the conversation and then disappeared again; a name would sound in almost every utterance but shortly thereafter it was no longer spoken at all, except perhaps in a rapid whisper. Names were spoken loudly and then more quietly, unambiguously and in vague observations and woolly allusions; names would gather in clusters, then disperse. All this would happen without more than three or four people ever having met at any one time.

  As I said, the names of the islanders were often subject to change. These changes of name made the electoral process still more complicated as it was often less than clear who was being spoken about. One could say that many of the names were introduced in error, though of course it was possible to find in the tangle of echoes an element of truth which would serve to distort the error, and in any case the islanders considered error a sound reason for the existence of the things it begot. As a consequence of such errors, after some time people began to speak of a candidate for the post of king as of a person who did not really exist. Not even this did the islanders find alarming.

  Naturally people nominated as candidates took part in the conversations; to greater and lesser extents they expressed resistance to the idea. I do not believe that any islander was too keen on the prospect of entering kingly office. All this was spread by means of knocks, tale-telling and indirect reports, which distorted both purposely and unwittingly what really happened and what was really said. But the islanders understood this distortion not as a malfunction of the electoral mechanism, but as something which was part and parcel of the royal election process. If the changing flow of names in conversation played its part in the appointment of a king, so too did chance and fate. And an argument founded in a slip of the tongue had a power equal to that invested in a discussion of character and achievement.

  It cannot be said that this series of conversations had any kind of end. But there were moments when the process reached a phase where the powers effective on it were temporarily in balance. Many of the various strands outlined within it came together in a single person, and for a short time the pressure applied by the persuaders and the resistance put up by the subjects of persuasion, fuelled by fatigue, argument, error and slips of the tongue, cancelled each other out.

  If a king were to be enthroned, the phase at which
a fragile balance obtained needed to be exploited; if the opportunity were missed—not an uncommon occurrence—the knots would begin to work themselves loose, before tangling themselves up in confusion, forming once again many centres. And it would be necessary to wait for a new balance to emerge, for the tips of the star-shaped scales, with their many arms and pans, to meet once more, however briefly, and indicate a name. The islander who gained the impression that it was he who stood at the centre of this temporary balance of forces, took himself off to the royal palace in the lower town, where he performed the king’s office until new conversations formed in him the impression that his government had ended.

  Reports of or conjecture on the ascension of a new ruler were also broadcast as a network of echoes, knocks and confusing mirror images, and thus it could happen that conversations on the election remained ongoing several weeks after a new ruler had been installed in the royal palace; conversely, the impression could establish itself that the election had reached its conclusion—while the conversation petered out, the royal palace remained unoccupied. It is no wonder that in these circumstances the islanders were never quite sure at any given time who their king was, or, indeed, whether the island had a king. And as the kings themselves never made much show of being kings (I believe they were always slightly embarrassed by it), and as generally speaking their stays in the royal palace were interspersed with stays elsewhere (some kings visited but once a week), it might happen that an islander had no idea that the king was someone close to him, perhaps even a family member. Indeed, it might be the case that a wife did not know that her husband had been ruler of the island for several years.

  The islanders were supported in such ignorance by the fact that they had little sense of family. The bonds they took on were loose, they never held for very long, and it was not required that they join two members only. This is not to say that the islanders did not know love, although they did not always distinguish the body from the landscape, so that their love contained much of the space and the moment. This sense of being rooted in the landscape saturated moments of love with precious essences, but one of its consequences was that the flame of love never burned long or strong. Connected with this was the fact that islanders—male and female alike—never declared fidelity; they made no attempt to conceal from their partners relationships with other men and women. At a sepia banquet, for example—of which I shall speak more later—Karael was surprised by my look of distress at her withdrawing to the bedroom (which was separated by nothing more than the wall of water) with one of the guests. The thought of being faithful to me seemed to her eccentric, but so as not to cause me pain she never embraced anyone else in my presence as other women of the island tended to do in front of their partners.

  In a certain sense the power of the king was absolute, but in another he was practically powerless. In reaching his decisions he sought no counsel, but as his decrees were broadcast by the same network of whispers and allusions that had brought about his election, it was quite natural for the directive generated by the network to have little in common with the king’s original command. The decrees of the ruler were put into circulation by the friends and relatives who visited him in the royal palace or in whom he confided when he was living in his own house. It was quite common that a decree took on a meaning which was the opposite of the one intended, as the islanders expressed negation by placing the particle ul before a word, something which was easily missed amid the background noise of the island; or it was heard in places where it had not been spoken. Hence the meaning could change many times in the course of one conversation, and if there was an even number of changes, the declaration or directive comprised the same words as those spoken by the king.

  I had the impression that this strange sameness—which was dependent on an even or odd number of mistakes and mediated by many mishearings caused by the murmur of walls of water and the roar of the sea—actually set the utterances that finally reached me still further from the originals than would have been the case with a deliberate lie or a purposeful misrepresentation, as these might be pervaded with the (perhaps false) hope that the king’s original meaning could be hunted down, while this network of haphazard, apathetic changes and shifts from affirmation to negation showed that the identity of the king’s words and how they were differed from, was not important.

  The network of falsehood also drew in the original utterance, which itself had arisen through mishearing and error. There was nothing one could do but listen in silence to words born out of mishearings and expiring in the murmur of the water and the wind, and, after the words had died away, listen to the murmur itself while dreaming a dream about a king in whose court one could find asylum, a dream which was so intoxicating because it could never become reality.

  In the murmurs it was of course possible to hear all kinds of things, not least because the islanders spoke so quietly. Just as at dusk in the lower town crouching, elongated, emaciated, melting, delicate, fracturing figures would flit about in the cracks and stains of the walls, it was not unusual for the manifold murmurs to beget phrases which no one had uttered—known to the islanders as “the speech of the water” in this way every conversation was a weave of real utterances whose wording was transformed by the rustlings and murmuring of the island and hallucination-like utterances made by the water or the wind, out of which often bad words and dark images would emerge. This was how words never uttered by the king could enter a conversation as a king’s ruling. Whether or not this ruling had its origins in the words actually spoken by the king was of no great importance, as generally these were changed so radically that the outpourings of the speech of the water may have been closer to the king’s intentions (at least to those of which he himself was not yet apprised).

  These changes to the rulings of the king did not, of course, come to an end by the forming in conversation of some kind of final version. Rulings continued to change for as long as they were circulated in the conversation network, until they dissolved and died. Nor was it possible to divide this long series of changes into a phase of formation and a phase of disintegration; laws came into being, reached maturity and began to decompose in a single act. I could not reconcile myself to the fact of the islanders’ unconcern that a ruling would enter a neighbour’s house in a form different from—or, indeed, opposite to—the one in which it entered their own; it enraged me that they felt no need to investigate which of the versions was the true one, or at least which corresponded most closely to the words of the king; I found it astonishing that they did not attempt to get the two versions somehow to agree. All this might give the impression that the islanders’ attitude to laws was a relaxed one and that they were not much concerned with upholding them. But this was not so: the islanders needed laws and had a highly developed sense for them. For the islanders there was nothing arbitrary about the wording of a law, its interpretation and the manner in which it was discharged. They were conscientious and meticulous in their attempts to interpret a law correctly, although this correctness was the correctness of a particular phase of the law’s transformation; not only was there nothing in it to rule out the emergence in a later phase of a law of completely different character, it actually demanded this.

  In the royal palace

  From all this it is easy to conclude why it mattered so little whether the royal palace, the seat of the ruler, was occupied or left empty. Rulings and laws were always generated in conversation, regardless of whether their origins were in the words of the king or the roar of the sea. In such circumstances the institution of king seemed to me to a great extent pointless. I wondered why it was that the islanders had not got rid of it long ago. Conservatism was not the reason, to be sure: the islanders were no respecters of history and tradition. It was not that they disliked the past, but for them it was nothing more than a dreamlike area of the present, populated with interesting, blurry ghosts. To begin with I thought the institution of king might be an expression of the islanders’ subconscious
desire for some kind of centrepoint and meaning, whose ever-beating pulse would underpin their love of chaos. But once I got to know the islanders better, I knew I was mistaken in this: I realized that the islanders’ resistance to a fixed order was underpinned by a yet firmer resistance to order and an old, unassuageable distaste for meaning.

  The real reason for the islanders’ keeping the institution of king was most likely the sense it gave them that the absence of a centre would itself, if secure and neither disputed nor threatened, become a centre of a kind. Although for the creation of rulings and laws the conversation had no need of a king, if the only ruler was the hum of conversation, over time the illusion might spread that this state was a mere preparation for the establishment of some kind of centre and beginning, that the absence of a king was in fact a wait for a king. But because there already was a centre, because a king had his seat in a great palace in the lower town, the suggestion was made that this centre could exist as nothing other than an empty place in which every beginning was dissolved; as there was a king there already, it was evident that no one was waiting for the arrival of a king to fill the void, that the king could exist only as this veiled, dwindling figure and his laws only as the speech of dreams, phantom words quivering on the bottom of an echo, in the chatter of water; it was clear that there was nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.

  When I talked of the island’s monarchy in Prague, some of my listeners understood this order of government—in which it was possible to make contact with an unknown ruler only by means of a network of illusory echoes which knew no end—as the accomplishment of a Kafkaesque Atlantic vision. I tried to explain to them that the way things operated on the island was diametrically opposed to the world of Kafka. When I described to Karael the plot of The Castle, she was completely incapable of grasping it. On the one hand she considered the secrecy of the ruler as something altogether banal, on the other as something pleasing that was part and parcel of the good functioning of a state and the well-being of its people; with amazement she asked me why the land surveyor squandered so much energy on attempting to change this common, desirable state of affairs—wasn’t the real, inaccessible Count Westwest better than the phantom in K.’s head, better than a bunch of village gossip?