The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  So are you sitting comfortably? I shall take my time in describing to you what happened to me in Michle; there is time enough for us to return to the story of the island. And if one chapter should not suffice for my description of the events in Michle, I know you will not be angry with me if I continue it in a second. Who knows, perhaps the Michle insertion will generate a whole host of chapters, even a book within a book. Or perhaps I will tire of the description before I reach the end of the paragraph and take us straight back to Illim. But let us not concern ourselves with that for the time being—there is still some way to go to the end of the paragraph. Let us enjoy the sense of freedom the diversions grant us; let us breathe in their scent, the pure air of the uncontaminated vapours of sense and intent, the atmosphere of the myriad, always-beautiful encounters to come with monsters on the one hand and luminous beings on the other. But perhaps once again you are dubious: didn’t they always tell you that a work of art is a whole? How can a text be a whole when each of its parts grows rampant without consideration for the others? My answer to this is a quotation from a passage of the Book, where the neo-Platonic king Asa answers the complaints of his advisors that he has had the royal palace built to the plans of thirteen architects, each from a different corner of the world, by the “exquisite corpse” method (though each of the architects knew what their colleagues were contributing). “My dear, over-solicitous ministers,” says Asa. “The relations that create the true whole are those which join the ends of the rampant growing parts. The harmony of the subtle tremblings of the last outgrowths of digression suffices to establish a rhythm for the whole. Do you not see that my palace is the best-integrated work of architecture ever known?”

  When in the morning of the day before yesterday I was writing about the night-time struggle in the palace on Illim, I forgot all about the pocket of the Book that resembled Uddo’s pouch—which since my return from the island had lain at the bottom of one of the drawers of my desk. I sought it out and studied the sachets of coloured powder it contained. Their scent was so heavy that it soon gave me a headache. I thought about throwing the pocket away, but instead I put it in my bag. I left my apartment around midday; I remembered the pocket as I was crossing the bridge over the Botic in Michle, and I tossed it into the water. There was a sudden fizzing sound followed by the scattering across the surface of concentric circles in silver and violet. The system of circles drifted several dozen metres downstream before converging at a single point, out of which began to rise ribbons of luminous vapour that came together to form a gleaming silver ball about one metre in diameter. Although the ball appeared to be made of a shiny heavy metal, it soon reached the height of a two-storey building; at this point it paused for a few moments before continuing its ascent along the overgrown Pankrác side of the brook and disappearing into the clouds.

  I had no idea what to make of this flying metal ball. I was seized by the strange feeling that my stay on the island had taught me nothing. I had assumed that the strangest thing about the island was that it had no secrets at all—that the island’s greatest mystery resided in the absence of any kind of mystery on the island. Now I suspected that for the entire course of my stay the island had been keeping its secrets from me, that the seeming absence of mystery had in fact been an elaborate, deliberate act of concealment. I was not able to place the gleaming ball within the context of anything I had known on the island. As I stood there perplexed on the bridge in Michle, I thought it probable that I had stumbled across an indication of the island’s witchcraft, of whose existence the islanders had kept me in perfect ignorance. I had several times read in magazines about the theory of the Atlantis origin of the island’s culture, and I had always thought it ridiculous. Now I asked myself if these sensationalist articles and books about the legacy of Atlantis might be more truthful accounts than my own more sober one, which was based on unvarnished facts.

  Could an island on which everything takes place on the surface, where not even the mirrors and the transparent walls of water suggest any depths, where the most mysterious spaces—the shallow, gloomy caves with their gemstones—lie behind half-open doors, could such a place possibly have invisible depths? On the island I always knew that the discovery of a single hidden space would suggest the existence of a great many others. So had this fantastical possibility now become a reality? The existence of sachets of powder that transform into a mysterious flying ball was such an unexplained hollow. Might not the island be riddled with hollows, like a piece of cheese? Might it be concealing the underground temples of an unknown cult, where the islanders meet at night in secret? Or chambers carved in the rock containing the mummies of kings of old or ancient chronicles in which is recorded the island’s rich history?

  I wondered now if the islanders had been playing a game of deception with me throughout my stay, if they had always laughed at me behind my back. And I felt a sharp pain at the thought that Karael, too, had been party to this game, that she had laughed along with the others at my ignorance and naivety, that she had left the bedroom at night to participate in the playing out of the island’s mysteries. Everything I had lived through on the island acquired a new meaning; in everything I found traces of deceit and ridicule. I wondered at my inability to recognize the obvious. And it came to me that everything I had written about the island up to that point was wrong. In my desperation I accessed my computer’s directory and the file that contained my narrative about the island and pressed the Delete key. But as I was reaching for Enter, I told myself I would sleep on it.

  Achilles and Briseis

  That evening there was a report on the television news about the gleaming ball. The reporter interviewed a number of inhabitants of Michle and Pankrác who gave excited accounts of what they had seen. (All of them drew two semi-circles in the air with their hands, beginning at nose level and ending with the joining of the fingers behind the knees.) There was also an interview with the president of some society which monitored UFO activity. In addition to this the broadcast included a curious video recording made by inhabitants of an apartment house that gave onto the brook; this showed the silver ball reflected in a mirror. I spent a restless night thinking about the island’s hidden face. I had a short dream in which I played silent witness to a night-time gathering of islanders revelling in an orgy of island voodoo, waking in terror once the islanders had discovered and surrounded me and were calling in jubilation, “Kill the intruder!” whilst waving their machetes.

  In the morning I made my way to the apartment house in Michle, intending to investigate. A girl I had seen on TV the previous evening took me to the room where the recording had been made, but there was not much she could tell me about it. She had seen a shimmering silver ball which had stopped for several moments in front of the window to the room, almost as if it were looking in, and then flown off. The midday TV news would be on in a minute, she said. Why didn’t we watch it together to see if they’d found out anything else about the ball?

  And indeed there was another item about the ball. A businessman had contacted the station, viewers were told, whose company imported pyrotechnics from China that contained a special powder. When this powder came into contact with water, a gas was released that formed in the air a ball whose gleaming surface gave the illusion of metal. Standing in the garden of his villa, the businessman took the opportunity to show off his merchandise to the cameras—we saw silver, green, violet and blue balls, cylinders and cones ascending slowly into the sky. Everything fell into place: the author of this part of the Book had got the pyrotechnical powder from a sailor on one of the boats moored in the island’s harbour, and by putting it in one of the Book’s pockets he had been making a joke. Temples in the rock, witchcraft and secret island brotherhoods existed nowhere but in my imagination.

  Now that everything has been cleared up, we could choose to return to Tana and Nau on Illim. But as we’ve already been diverted from the mythical archipelago to Michle, and as we’ve accepted that the longer the digressio
n, the better, I shall tell you, dear reader, something about the video recording I saw on the television news. Indeed, it is more interesting than the whole matter of the supposed mystery of the island, which I now feel to be pretty worthless, even embarrassing. As I was saying, the video recording from Michle was rather strange. It showed the room the girl took me into the next day. The polished floorboards were bathed in a soft light; on the wall there was a large mirror in which the window and the overgrown hillside opposite were reflected; beneath the mirror there sat on a sofa of light-coloured leather a young man with neatly combed hair, wearing a brilliant-white shirt and an expensive-looking woollen suit. The young man was wordlessly fondling a girl wearing silk underwear; the girl’s hair was cut short and tinted blue, and she had a pale, motionless face and lips painted dark violet. Her eye shadow, too, was violet; the colour of her eyes was somewhere between turquoise and green. (When the next day I saw her face stripped of its make-up, with great shadows under her eyes, I did not immediately recognize her.)

  Next to the sofa there was a stand with a chalkboard on it; on the chalkboard there was some kind of geometric drawing. On the wall there were several etchings of empty town squares, probably in Italy. In the part of the room closest to the camera there was a table with a glass top and legs of curved chrome. On the table there was a bottle of bourbon. Sitting at the table was a second man, also young and also wearing an elegant suit, this time with a tie. This second man was drinking contemplatively from a glass containing a gold liquid and ice cubes. Little electronic sounds drifted softly towards me, perhaps the outer froth of some kind of music. I had the impression I was watching an advertisement for cosmetics.

  Then there was a tapping sound on the recording. The three figures looked at one another; the young woman moved in closer to her partner, but he extricated himself gently from her embrace and left the room. It was at this moment that the shining silver ball appeared in the mirror above the girl’s head and stopped. Of the people in the room, the only one who could see the ball was the ghostly cameraman, whose figure was present only in the motions of the pictures, which were now shaking slightly. Judging by the barely perceptible raising of her eyebrows, we can assume that the girl on the sofa had spotted the ball in the window. The young man with the bourbon was plainly startled; he must have caught sight of the ball’s reflection in the glass table-top. Still the three of them behaved like professionals and filming continued. In the meantime we heard the first man unlocking a door in the entrance hall, followed moments later by his voice, which sounded bitter and affronted, saying, “Welcome, heralds, messengers of gods and men; draw near; my quarrel is not with you but with Agamemnon, who has sent you for the girl Briseis.” So this was no advertisement for cosmetics: it was a modernist film adaptation of the The Iliad. (Why not indeed, if Ulysses can wander around Dublin?)

  After a while the man playing Achilles returned to the room. When he caught sight of the silver ball in the mirror he gave a start; then he turned to the window and saw for sure the ball hanging in the air above the Pankrác plain. Finally his eyes settled on the third version of the ball, in the white, horizontal reflection of the table-top. All this took but a fraction of a second. This man, too, handled the unforeseen situation very well; he turned to the man seated at the table and addressed him by the name I had been expecting: “Patroclus, bring her and give her to them, so that they may take her away.” Then he called to Agamemnon’s messengers, who were still in the hall and out of the shot. “Let these two men be witnesses by the blessed gods, by mortal men, and by the fierceness of the king’s anger, that if ever again there be need of me to save the people from ruin…” While he was talking, the silver ball started to move again. Its reflection slipped silently behind the mirror so that all that was visible in it was again the dark Pankrác hillside. It may be that there was more video footage of Homer’s tale, but here the recording stopped so that the TV news could move on to the next item.

  Now that the mystery of the silver ball had been settled, I asked the girl what this video recording was supposed to mean. She explained that she and her friends were shooting a film which was an adaptation of The Iliad. All the action took place inside buildings in Michle. The rooms of the apartment represented the tents of the Greeks and the chambers of Priam’s palace, while the battles were fought on crepuscular staircases and in dim-lit corridors and the assemblies of war of the Achaeans were held in entrance halls and courtyards. When I told the girl I had thought at first that the film was for advertising purposes, she was obviously delighted. The film was inspired by advertisements for ladies’ cosmetics, the pictures of Giorgio de Chirico and Plotinus’s Enneads, she said.

  It appeared that the Michle Iliad was mostly the work of the girl. She explained to me that the first impulse to make the film was a dream she’d had, in which Achilles and Hector were fighting with heavy swords in front of a bookcase of dark polished wood in the living room, the Persian carpet muffling their footfalls. The glass doors of the bookcase reflected the neo-renaissance facade of the building opposite with its dusty mascaron. When she awoke, the calm light of early morning lay across the things in the room, and she had the impression that the characters of her dream and the calm light began a dialogue, in the course of which their voices merged into one. And the vision of her Iliad—filmed, if possible, from the first line to the last—was born; from Agamemnon’s return of Chryseis to the agony of Hector and beyond, in the style of a television advertisement, in expansive, well-lit rooms where the emptiness of simple modern luxury was masked neither by object nor ornamentation; this emptiness pervaded Chirico’s spaces, inhabited by ghosts of the past and the future, and Plotinus’s spaces, formed from light which was not yet darkened by shape nor materialized as object. She envisioned all these light-filled voids merging into one, the three lights becoming a single white glare-free glow.

  And in this glow the girl wanted to see Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon and Odysseus—characters for whom a world controlled by the whims of the gods was the source of acute anguish and even greater joy. This was the joy of the great Game, part of which was an acceptance of whatever each throw of the dice would bring, when one never knew whether it would fall on its black or its white side. An unhappy throw of the dice—a revelation of divine animosity—meant anguish for sure, but this anguish was part of a joy greater still, the joy of the Game. The girl believed this world called for the calm light she had known first in her dream, then on the walls and floor of her room; she longed for the bodies and objects of the world of the great Game.

  The voice behind the wall

  The girl was a student and her Iliad vision had come to her at the beginning of the summer vacation. So she was able to sit at home day after day, looking through the window at the Pankrác hillside or watching the play of the light on the furniture, all the time imagining one scene or another from her film. She said nothing to anyone else about her ideas because she thought people would laugh at her about them; indeed, the film seemed pretty ridiculous and nonsensical to her, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. On top of everything else she had no experience of making a film and didn’t know anyone who had.

  Curiously enough it was her dream-soaked lounging in the Michle apartment that produced the encounter that gave her the courage to start making her Homeric film of light. So rich was this encounter that it inspired her to find people with the right experience and level of enthusiasm to work with her. The apartment was quiet at all times of the day and night. The sounds of the relatively busy Michle streets did not reach it: all its windows faced the Botic brook. This was one of those city spaces with a brook or a railway line at its heart that might have belonged to another world…

  “It was so quiet that I could hear hushed voices from behind the walls, above the ceiling and under the floorboards, the practically inaudible music of the neighbouring apartments,” the girl told me. When she fell silent for a moment, I, too, heard the quiet voices like fine sand falling on
the bottom of a time-glass. The girl went on to explain how she would hear—from early morning till late afternoon—a monotonous male voice from beyond the living-room wall. The voice took a great many short pauses. She imagined that it was dictating some kind of long text, and sometimes she had the impression she was hearing the quiet clack of a computer keyboard. She was curious about this endless dictation. If she pressed her ear against the wall, she could hear a little better, but to begin with she could still make out no more of the voice than its melody. But after she had concentrated hard for a while, she began to distinguish words, although all she really heard were fragments and hints from which she figured out whole words. Then she experimented with these probable words in likely sentences, which she completed with words she had heard nothing of. With great effort the girl’s sentences came together to form fragments of a plot. It was a long time before the girl was competent at this strained eavesdropping. But eventually a remarkable story began to emerge.

  The girl was quite shocked by what she heard. Several times she saw the writer and his typist in the corridor—he a fair-haired young man in rollneck sweater, jacket and moccasins (and always carrying a black attaché case), she a well-groomed older woman in a suit. The girl marvelled that these two people—whose appearance suggested they had stepped out of a newspaper advertisement for a bank—could day after day roll around in the palpably sick images and utterances she heard through the wall. She had never even known that literature like theirs existed. She had read Maldoror and The 120 Days of Sodom, but her neighbour’s text seemed to her more fantastical, more brutal and more perverse. It was a novel about the life of Amélie, a prodigal daughter. In the beginning Amélie obeys her parents and wishes to be a good daughter, but the parents reproach her constantly for not loving them enough, sighing that she has fallen short of and offended their great love for her. One day they tell her they can no longer stand idly by as witnesses to her degeneracy—what pain it causes them!—so they intend to denounce her to the police.