by Michal Ajvaz
“I don’t remember anything of the sort. You’re just making things up again,” the woman said grumpily. But it seemed that the man hadn’t heard her, that he was completely distracted by his master the prince. The puppet walked stiffly around the table, raising and then dropping its arms before calling: ‘The prince! The prince! How marvellous the times before the Reconquista, when he set out for the City of Pure Light, when we—filled with infinite gratitude and immeasurable hope that the golden age would return—bade him farewell at the kiosk whose light blazed in the dark, there at the tram terminus, the last time we drank coffee together from the plastic cup which is a timeless symbol of our brotherhood!’”
“If the prince really does exist and isn’t just some paper demon or a figment of your imagination, then he’s certainly the same kind of worthless thing as you are, the same kind of loud-mouthed coffee-house loser. You’re always using him as an excuse, you’re always rambling on about a City of Pure Light and messages from the prince, but for all I can see you spend your days just hanging around with your friends in coffee-houses sipping sweet liqueurs; all of you would be better off with a proper glass of apricot schnapps. And when you get home you don’t lend a hand with anything, you just go straight to your room and shut yourself in, saying you’ve got work to do, that you’ve got to cut animals out of plywood with a fret-saw. But I know full well what you do in there: you amuse yourself with your lovers. I’m not as big a fool as you think; I see right through you. You’ve given them dresses in the same pattern as the wallpaper in your room, and you’ve stuck wallpaper masks on their faces as if you think that’ll keep me from recognizing what they are. But I’ve known about your lovers for years; I’ve heard them laughing and I’ve seen the flash of the diamond teeth you bought them. I see them very well, and I talk to them, too. As soon as you leave for the coffee-house I go in to them and we talk about you; they ridicule and impersonate you; we all laugh at you, and their diamond teeth glow in the lamp-light and glint across the room.”
“You don’t understand anything: the wallpaper, suits and masks are of the splendid fabric used for the curtains of the chateau in the City of Pure Light in the era of its glory, before the treacherous tanks of Byzantium drove into its streets. As the city was being evacuated I managed to salvage a little of this fabric to remind me of the happy days which it was my good fortune to spend in the galaxy’s secret capital. I used it to make wallpaper and clothing for the women among my old friends and comrades-in-arms who escaped from the Byzantine despots along with me.”
The man paused and the woman said nothing. Then two curtains darted across the stage, one from each side, while two strings came down from above from which was suspended a sign bearing the words “Entr’acte: 10 minutes.” There was the sound of shuffling legs and coughing.
“Boring, isn’t it?” said an unusually deep female voice; it belonged to the woman sitting next to me, who had turned to face me. “Today’s show is pretty rotten,” she sighed. “In fact, every show is worse than the one the day before. I’m thinking of giving up on the boat theatre.” Then she asked me out of the blue whether I knew anything about old clocks. I answered in surprise that the repairing of old clocks had long been a hobby of mine, that I indulged in this esoteric delight almost every free evening I had.
“Your beautiful fingers told me that might be the case,” said the woman. “I’ve been watching them and imagining them moving about in a labyrinth of cogwheels. They look incredibly dexterous and quick.” The woman stroked my fingers shyly, giving the impression she would never tire of their touch; then she leaned towards me and whispered, “I am in great anguish and I think you might be able to help me. It’s my antique clock: a month ago it just stopped. I appreciate that your time is precious to you, but I was wondering if you’d do me the kindness of coming home with me to take a look at it. When all’s said and done, today’s play is a real disappointment with so few elevated thoughts in it, and so little nobility. Since my clock stopped ticking, my apartment has been so quiet, particularly at night, when I doze to the groaning of the building and a rustling which takes my memories captive and turns them into recollections of some ancient evil. Every night the building resounds with age-old insults and vicious mockery. The boat’s almost reached its next stop; I live close to the jetty, we’ll be there before you have a chance to stretch your legs. I’d be delighted if you’d take a look at the clock. Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to tell me what’s wrong with it. For you it’ll probably be child’s play. And it’ll be enough for me to hear your opinion on it. While we’re at it, I’ve got some rather special wine for us to drink. Friends of mine brought it back from the vineyards of Bordeaux.”
I was a little intimidated by the woman’s deep voice, and I shuddered at the thought of the rooms in which it had probably been formed, the reverberations of which could be heard within it (gleaming antique furniture, modernist lamps, Japanese electronics with fidgety little green lights). I was inclined to make my excuses but was too lazy to come up with a reason; I was also tempted by the prospect of the insides of a valuable old clock and a glass of good French wine. So I told the woman I would go with her, just for a short while. Almost as soon as I accepted the offer, the boat shook as it touched the jetty. Several other members of the audience left their seats along with us. Up on deck I saw that the fog had cleared somewhat, that the boat was at anchor between the Steel Bridge and the Palacký Bridge. There were a number of new audience members waiting to board.
Crime and punishment
No doubt it was high time I was bringing my story to a close, but on that day the shell was rather tough; it looked taut enough to burst but the red juice was still spurting out of it. There was nothing to do except for me to continue with my invented story, to reimmerse myself in the waves of long sentences, not knowing where they would carry me. The woman was leading me through the wide, quiet streets of the Podskalí her garrulousness, which had irritated me so much on the boat, had ceased, and we walked on in a silence I found embarrassing. For something to say I explained how I had disliked the boat and how glad I was no longer to have to listen to the nonsensical dialogue carried on by the puppets, of which I had understood nothing. When the woman gave no answer to this I became even more uncomfortable. As I was searching for an excuse by which I could wriggle out of this, my guide stopped in front of a building and proceeded to unlock its front door. We climbed a dimly-lit staircase. As soon as we entered the apartment—which was exactly as I had imagined it—the woman led me over to an empire commode, upon which, propped against the wall, there stood a beautiful pillar and scroll clock adorned with cherub figurines. I opened it carefully and pushed my right hand in among its dozens of cogwheels.
“I think the fault is somewhere further back,” said the woman, who was standing right behind me. “Maybe a little spring has snapped right at the back, right up against the rear wall. You need to get in as deep as you can—I know the clock is unusually deep, but I’m sure you can manage it with those fine, slim hands of yours.” Now I heard a hint of mockery in the woman’s flattery. And I was a little put out that so far there had been no mention of French wine. Would it not be for the best if I were to disengage myself from the broken clock and make a hasty retreat from this posh, inhospitable apartment? But then again, I was truly curious about the insides of the instrument; it was as if it were making room for me to enter, and I went up to the elbow, up to the shoulder, and still I didn’t touch bottom. Was I the victim of a conjuring trick? At last fear got the better of my curiosity and passion for clocks, and I began to withdraw my arm, taking great care not to damage the delicate wheels or to injure myself on their teeth. But when my arm was still in the clock up to the elbow, there was a whirring sound and the wheels began to turn, vibrate and otherwise move about rapidly; before I had time to remove my arm the sharp teeth tore into my shirt and bit into the skin, gripping my wrist and failing to release it. I could feel how my blood was dripping onto the mechanism
from many small wounds. I called out to the woman for help, but she remained standing behind me, saying nothing.
After a while she spoke in a low voice. “We’ve got you at last. My ruse has succeeded; the queen will praise me. For months now I’ve been carving puppets from wood, for years I’ve been writing a play for the puppet theatre; I used up all the talent I have on this, my moments of purest inspiration, but now I no longer regret it. I hired the best puppet players and a boat whose crew I had schooled at the naval academy in Hamburg; I patiently trained the extras who played the audience. That’s right, this whole comedy was played out for your sake, it was part of our pursuit of you, which has been going on now for several decades on all continents. And it was well worth it: the queen will be delighted, she’ll burst into tears of joy, good, noble soul that she is. After all these years, justice has at last been done. It has been proven that everything must be atoned for. Now at last you shall receive your punishment, and the stars that burned red with shame will again be as pure as before. I bet you thought you’d be able to destroy all traces testifying to your guilt, but in this you overreached yourself: everything was kept in reserve, kept for this very moment.”
She took from the wall a painting of a sombre landscape, in so doing revealing the metal door of a safe. This she unlocked before carefully drawing from it a book, which she leafed through before holding it out open for me to inspect. I saw some geometric figures and formulae; in the white margin of the page there was a clumsy drawing of a battleship. It was all somehow familiar to me. Then I remembered. “That’s my geometry textbook from when I was in Year Five or Six. It was me who drew that cruiser in the margin during a lesson,” I said, astonished.
“A confession!” the woman exclaimed in triumph. “Not even I could have imagined it would go as smoothly as this! This forms only part of the charge, although it is serious enough in itself. He who sullies white paper with his drawings could demolish the temple and smash its marble statues; he could rip out the strings of the piano and leave them out in the evening wind to jangle a nonsense song about cities consumed by jungles; he could deny the existence of the stars and the great, beautiful beasts which thirst for flames, run to conflagrations and bathe in fire. This crime is enough to get you life imprisonment on the cold staircases of apartment buildings, staircases with handrails made of metal flowers; enough for a thousand-page novel to be written about you in which you spend your days in solitude in an apartment by the railway line, where deep within the dresser the cutlery rattles at night whenever a train goes past. Your guilt will suffice to have all the islands of the icy sea which bear your name renamed, or at the very least to have some of their sounds changed so that the islanders are incapable of remembering them; they will curse you and their fur-clad arms will gesture threatening in the direction of the place where you were born; they will use your name with derision to describe the evil walrus so that over time your name will become the natural-historical term for the walrus, a term which will survive into the age of happiness which is still many years ahead of us, an age when people will forget your crimes as they forget your existence. Is not the thought of this almost-certain future enough to persuade you to reflect on your despicable acts? Perhaps you are not yet altogether depraved. And as I’ve indicated, we know still more about you. Was it not enough for you to draw cruisers and Red Indians in the margins of the pages of books? ‘The more one has, the more one wants,’ as one of our highest-placed devotees pointed out recently at the dawning of the age in which the seals that had lain for centuries on the teachings of the East were removed. Let us see what you have to say about this.”
Again she leafed through the book before placing it in front of my eyes, now open at a page which bore a geometric representation of Thales’ theorem—a circle with a right-angled triangle inserted above the diameter; next to this I could see the clumsy, childish picture of a bear with a bow around its neck. Perhaps this, too, was one of my drawings, but I had no recollection of it.
“We wished to spare the queen the sight of this blasphemy,” my captor continued. “But she is a brave woman and she told us that as the mother of her people she had no right to evade even such awful tests as this. My God, how could you do such as thing? Surely you knew that it was she who assisted Thales in his discovery of the theorem, when amid the bathing beauties in the circular pool of the gardens of her palace in Asia she stretched and tightened the string of a musical instrument on which she had threaded pearls? A string which reached across the centre of the pool and touched the side at three places? The moment when silently she pointed out to Thales a great emerald which was glittering in the early-morning sun among the pearls, at the very point where the string made its right angle, is captured in many paintings and frescoes; pictures of the Demonstration—many of them touchingly artless—hang on the walls of the poorest cottages, immediately next to the Golden Snake, and the shepherds at their evening firesides sing songs of this bright moment in our history. But what did you think of when you saw the sacred figure? Did you think of the good name of the royal institute of geometry and those who run it? Did you think of the honour of the nation, of the glory of the dynasty, of the sufferings and hurt with which our history has been marked? No. You thought of a bear with a bow around its neck.”
Having said this the woman slid quietly down to the carpet, where she rested her sobbing frame against the commode. After a while she recovered herself somewhat, dried her eyes and stood up. “After the queen saw your picture of the bear,” she went on, “for many weeks she closed herself up in her chambers and allowed no one near her. Her only companion was her little dog. Then this dog fell gravely ill at the sight of its mistress’s suffering, and shortly thereafter it died. It was at this time that the people gave you the name Dog Killer. The dog’s body—which had been stricken with the most dreadful illnesses—was laid in a modest grave in the grounds of the chateau; from this grave there grew a plant with a poisonous yellow flower, whose breath killed the birds which flew over it and the gardener who tended to it. They say that the gardener’s ghost appears at night among dormant machines in factory halls. The yellow flower erodes and blinds mirrors in which it is reflected, and if someone thinks of it the neurons in his brain become so excited that a short circuit might result and the brain catch fire. This phenomenon, known as “burning brain syndrome,” was defined and interpreted by the queen’s court physician, my lover. His professional achievement is the more remarkable for his having been forbidden to imagine the yellow flower for the course of his researches; had he done so, his brain, too, would have ignited. He was given the Nobel Prize for his work; to begin with he was supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but the committee of the Swedish Royal Academy, a group of elegant, dark-complexioned young men with fine hands, decided to give him the Nobel Prize for Peace as he’d brought calm to many troubled souls; no longer does the ghost of the murdered gardener roam the factory halls at night in such a rage. At that time there was an uprising among the generals, who were against the queen giving up her overseas dominions. It had never been clear whether these were merely figments of a dream, or perhaps groups of divine spirits that were around at the time. One night the plotters broke into the palace, intending to murder the queen; then one of them suddenly thought of the poisonous yellow flower and his brain burst into flames. When the other plotters saw the flames flaring from his eyes and ears, lighting up the halls of the sleeping palace, reflected to infinity in the great mirrors, they fled. So it is thanks to you that the generals’ plot foundered: it was you who saved the queen’s precious life. She will never forget this; I had to promise her I would search the world for you so that she may express to you her boundless gratitude and bestow on you a bountiful reward. She asks you to come to her. She will make her beautiful sister, for whom the mightiest lords have given their lives, your wife. You will live in a palace, which the queen will have built for you opposite her own and which will be a mirror image of her own…”
At this moment there was a gentle whir and the wheels of my clock-prison sprang back into motion; as they released their grip it seemed to me they gave me a friendly tickle. I could still hear the excited voice of the woman.
