by Michal Ajvaz
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.
The roofs of Paris
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 articl
e 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.
Spilled sauce
On the island I often encountered a peculiar shape—asymmetric stains out of which there grew several long, broad lobes; this shape reminded me of a bison on the attack with its head bowed, or perhaps even more so of a lady’s glove hanging limp. I saw flat stones which had been carved into this shape and set on a plinth so that the end of the narrowest of the projections on its bottom side was resting on this. These mini-monuments—examples of a kind of “stain” sculpture—channelled streams of water at the centre of fountains in the upper town, and they stood high on promontories of rock. In the lower town the shape appeared as a bas-relief on the escutcheons of palaces or in faded frescoes; some inhabitants of the upper town would set small coloured stones in their walls and mirrors in this shape reminiscent of a bison or glove. I asked several islanders about the shape: once I learned that it represented a monster that many years ago had devastated the island, another time that it described the outlines of magical, luminous flowers that had grown one night on the floor of the bed chamber of a queen who had lived long ago and whose name was forgotten.
I had little doubt that they thought up such explanations on the spot. It was highly unlikely the islanders knew the origin of the shape. To say that they were lying to me would be imprecise; it was rather that for them the past was of the same realm as dream and imagination, and thus they treated fabulation and vague traces of dreams in the present as legitimate means of penetrating the world of the past, from which objects would emerge still breathing, like pleasant fragrances. This approach was born out of their requirement for a certain exactness, albeit of a kind different to the one on which our own sciences pride themselves. The islanders were offended by the notion of historical research, considering it on the one hand practically indecent (obscene behaviour towards the past), and on the other a strange, even comical bypassing of the task at hand. Karael—who, like most islanders, knew English—once spent a long time browsing a history book in English I had brought with me before laying it aside and announcing, “It puts me in mind of an expedition that goes off to hunt animals that don’t exist, taking a few cooking pots for use as hunters’ tools.” In order to hold on to my good name, I felt it necessary to conceal from the islanders that I was researching the history of the island, although the dearth of available sources coupled with the infectiousness of the islanders’ worldview meant that my research was more about dreaming than comparing, categorizing, judgment and proof.
Evidently objects in which the mysterious shape was repeated had once had a sacral significance. That religion should have existed on the island seemed to me curious. The islanders were of a nation that felt no need for the spiritual and the transcendental; it was extremely difficult for me to imagine a religious islander. Missionaries of various religions were constantly arriving on the island. Naturally the islanders would hear them out willingly enough and were prepared to repeat after them all manner of things (meaning the islanders would draw the visitors into their games). When the missionaries realized what was happening in these games to the articles of their faith and the identity of their god, they thought it better to leave the island. Many considered this the Devil’s island.
I attempted a reconstruction of the lost religion of the islanders, which had perished long before the European invasion, but in my investigations I was not helped along even by the sand-strewn documents in the royal palace. I had very few clues to go on: certain present-day practises of the islanders, the mysterious carving of a man with a fish’s head in a rock overhanging a mountain lake, short dispatches posted by Arabian travellers in the Middle Ages (which I had read before coming to the island), notes in a little-known tractate by Averroes. There are so few of these clues, and their value as documents is so dubious, that my reconstruction of the island’s religion—and its origins, development and end—had more about it of a dream or vision than the revelation of a fragment of the island’s history.
The Arabians write that the inhabitants of the island of Phoenix (which, for some reason, was the name they gave the island) regard marks on walls as a script used by their god to impart his messages and commandments. Some of these communications are reputed to be important—addressing fundamental principles of the universe and ethics—but others are surprisingly vapid, even embarrassing, containing gossip or indiscretions concerning the domestic practises and unspoken thoughts of the islanders; some of these divine inscriptions would be best described as slander. The travel writings of the Arabians also contain a lone, curious mention of how the prophet who founded the island’s religion fought on a rock above the sea with a god or demon with a fish’s head and killed it.
On the basis of these scraps of information I tried to imagine how the island’s religion came into being. It may have been like this: the islanders had once worshipped a deity with the head of a fish; the history of this archaic religion has been lost, leaving behind it nothing more than a carving in the rock in the wilderness of the mountains that is reflected in the water of a lake. I imagine that the prophet of the new religion lived at a time when the original faith was losing strength and changing into dogma, that the vanquishing of the old faith in a struggle to the death between the prophet and the demon with the fish’s head had left traces in the tales of the Arabians. Perhaps the prophet had been a priest of the old religion for whom prayers had become sounds without meaning and the script of the sacred texts had lost the power of speech. The silence of this world abandoned by the gods weighed upon him heavily. One evening his despair was so great that he thought to take his own life. In his abstracted state he upset a bowl containing a red sauce over the open pages of one of the sacred books. As the sauce soaked into the paper it formed a stain that was slightly reminiscent in shape of a bison or a glove. As he studied the stain he realized with astonishment that, unlike the other characters, this mark was not
mute; it was whispering something to him with great urgency. He saw the red stain as a hole burned into the cool fabric of the world. What is this? he asked himself. Had he perhaps discovered a secret, divine script?
Then he realized that the whispering of the stain was not the only voice he could hear, that other stains on the walls and on objects had begun to speak; there came a drone from the cracks in the dry earth and seams in the rock. This great awakening of the world went further: all shapes were soon learning the language of stains—shapes, too, were stains, but either they had forgotten this or man had convinced them otherwise. The red stain on the page of a book had fought free of the language man had forced on shapes. Suddenly they were reminded of the ancient shape language and their present understanding of the world was overthrown. And the shape language re-opened the world and filled it with joy.
This was the beginning of the prophet’s mission. He taught the islanders to listen to the voices of stains—perhaps the prophet saw a god behind the stains, perhaps islander disciples of the prophet imagined a new deity who was the author of the text of stains. (It may be that in those days the islanders were unable to imagine something that today is marvellously easy for them to imagine—that the murmurous text of the stains is forever writing and erasing itself.) Maybe this was when the Stain of Awakening—the stain designed by the sauce, the mysterious alfa, the initial of a divine text—began to be shown and worshipped.
