by Michal Ajvaz
Mii had accomplished Taal’s task: she had created a statue from a material in which fish were able to live. So enchanted is Taal by this work that his hatred quite evaporates. Having no further task for Mii, he rewards her for her work and releases her. Mii sails away from Devel, never again to return to the island. Taal orders Fo’s wing of the palace to be sealed, and his courtiers quicken their pace whenever they pass the closed doors to its empty corridors—empty, that is, except for the white statues frozen forever in blocks of white marble.
Vicious fish
I folded the insertion that told the story of the statuary in jelly back into itself, and pushed it into its pocket in the Book. I was on the terrace of Karael’s house in the upper town. I knew that the plot was about to jump four years into the future, returning to Hios and Gato, who at the time I began to read of Fo’s love and death, were frozen in mid-word and gesture—as if by some fairy-tale magic—by the open window of Gato’s room, in whose frame was petrified the forked lightning of a storm fast approaching. I did not manage the transition from one level of the Book’s narrative to another with the same facility as the islanders; it induced in me a queasiness similar to that experienced by divers who come back to the surface too quickly. So I allowed myself a short break, during which I watched the metal jewel of the river work its gleaming course along the plateau and between the houses of the lower town. It was hot, so I spent some time walking barefoot among the steep lanes and up and down the steps of the upper town, the water flashing in the sunlight and maintaining the sublime cool of a mountain lake.
And then I returned to the Book and the royal palace on the island of Devel. The lightning rip in the black sky healed over and the frozen figures came back to life. Hios succeeds in procuring the jar of ointment. On the morning of the third day Gato announces to Taal that he will enter the statue and attempt to retrieve the gemstone. But Taal and Uddo anticipated that Hios would go for the duck fat and have replaced the contents of the jar with common pork lard. Taal bids Gato come to the courtyard that evening at six o’clock; he, his family and the court as a whole are looking forward to witnessing the spectacle.
As six o’clock approaches, Gato follows Hios’s instructions in smearing his wrists, ankles and neck with what he assumes to be duck fat; then he steps into Fo’s wing of the palace by the door at the end of the corridor (that day all doors are open wide) and makes his way down to the courtyard. There he sees dozens of chairs (brought by the servants from all over the palace) set in rows in front of the green statuary. The chairs are occupied by those agitated courtiers who have not dared refuse Taal’s invitation; they do not know what to expect; but as they know their king, they are not expecting anything pleasant. As Gato approaches the statuary from the aisle between the chairs, the perplexed faces of the courtiers turn towards him and then away again. He hears a murmur of voices and a scraping of chairs: it is as if he were in the theatre when a performance was due to start. On reaching the statue he turns and for a few moments allows his gaze to wander over the anxious faces of the involuntary spectators. Their eyes are lowered; across their faces there shimmers a restless green light reflected from the statue by the setting sun. As he bows awkwardly he cannot help but smile. Taal, Uddo and Hios are sitting in the front row.
He now turns to face the statue. The fish have taken notice and are swimming towards him from all areas of the jelly. The sight of this restless swarm is far from encouraging, but this time Gato is sure that Hios has not betrayed him. He steps into the statue, amid the horde of fish. To begin with, the fish scatter themselves to all corners. At the statue’s edge, Gato is standing up to his waist in jelly. The furrow his body has ploughed closes behind him; he has the feeling he is walking through an enormous dessert. In his choice of path he attempts to cause as little damage to the statue as possible. He comes to the gelatine table, which reaches up to his neck. Here he chooses to take a rest, and it appears to the onlooking courtiers that his head has left his body and is lying among the bowls of food. Gato studies the jelly plate of bread and cheese that is close to his face; he can see the imprint of Isili’s little teeth on the cheese. He turns his head and sees the famous sculpted radish, a working in miniature of the contents of the statuary as a whole. Then he continues on his way—the gemstone sank into the body of the squid, which is at the very centre of the statue.
Through the clear jelly Gato sees the fish swim back towards him and begin to circle around him. The first fish bites into his thigh and he cries out in pain; suddenly he knows that he has been betrayed. Taal and Uddo steal a look at Hios, who is sitting next to them; they are disappointed to see she does not move a muscle, that the expression on her face does not change. But Hios understands very well what must have happened, and Gato’s cry has not only shattered her world but flooded her mind with hate and a thirst for revenge. From this point on an expression of hard indifference will be on Hios’s face always; it is a precious mask she will wear with pride.
The blood from the wound seeps into the jelly and the fish circling around Gato are suddenly wild. They fly at him and rip joyously into all parts of his body, tearing off the hunks of flesh and gulping them down. Gato, behung with fish, staggers about the statue. The courtiers jump from their chairs and cry out in horror, unable to tear their eyes away from the head whose mouth is screaming with pain, from the body covered with great, terrible clusters of fish, from the pall of blood spreading throughout the statue. Perhaps Prince Gato would have survived had he turned and tried to fight his way out of the statue. But his mind is focused on the gemstone still more keenly than the physical pain. On the final stretch of the journey towards the longed-for gemstone—which consists of the swollen waves of the sea and the body of the squid—the statue is taller than Gato. Gato takes a deep breath before plunging into the jelly with his eyes open. He catches sight of the gemstone, glinting as a ray of sun pierces the jelly. Gato struggles towards the flash of red in the green gloom, his body a flame of pain.
Now the sharp teeth rip into Gato’s cheeks and neck; he is overwhelmed by the need to cry out, and the jelly gets into his mouth. He begins to choke. He has to jump up in order to catch his breath. The courtiers see his head break the surface—a bloody head with fish hanging in bunches from its cheeks—before it sinks back into the jelly. Not even Uddo can keep herself from exclaiming in horror. Only Hios remains silent and motionless. The glinting gemstone is now close enough for Gato to close his hand over it—a hand which has been gnawed down to the bone. He then forces his way through the squid. Between the last of the waves and the shore, the surface of the sea brings the statue to its lowest point. The courtiers look on as this is breached by the body covered with blood and behung with fish—with red and black bunches of death. The prince takes in breath and staggers a few steps more; then he loses consciousness and pitches back onto the jelly table with its jelly food, deep into the statue, which closes over him. In the courtyard a silence settles; nothing is heard but the distant calls of birds flying high above the palace. In silence the king, the queen, Hios, and the courtiers watch the shadow of the prince’s body in the jelly, how it is enveloped in a great cluster of black, how it continues to make slight movements (whether these are the final motions of departing life or are effected by the furious tugging of the fish, is unclear). After a while the great bunch of fish dissolves. On the bottom of the translucent jelly there lies a white skeleton with a red gemstone sparkling in its hand.
The performance is at an end. Wordlessly the spectators get to their feet; again the scraping of chairs across granite begins. The king and Uddo are well satisfied. But they are bothered by Hios’s detachment—after all, the performance was staged largely to punish her for betraying the family. Taal and Uddo wished to see her weep and wail. But by the time Hios rises from her chair, hatred of her parents has burned into her brain; henceforth the spectre of revenge will live on the ashes of her reason and sensibility. In the days that follow Hios continues to behave calmly. But
everyone begins to fear her.
Putsch
Months later the news reaches Taal that Hios has become the lover of the commander of the palace’s praetorian guard. Taal flies into a rage and determines to question Hios at luncheon that day, but when he does Hios does nothing to refute the allegations. While her father rants and rages, she sits there calmly eating a peach. Suddenly Taal falls silent, begins to wheeze, and falls face-first into the crockery. Hios continues to bite into her peach, watching her bewildered mother flap around Taal. When no further sound comes from Taal, Hios throws the peach stone into her bowl and leaves for her room. Once it becomes clear to Uddo there is nothing more she can do for Taal, she runs through the long corridors in pursuit of her daughter. But at the door to her daughter’s chamber her way is blocked by two praetorians. She screams at them that she is the queen, but the guards hold their silence and do not move. She runs to her own chamber to find there six more guards going carefully through her things. Nor do they respond to her threats, and when they leave they take with them all the apparatus of her evil kitchen—all the flasks and jars of poisons, potions and drugs, all the instruments of her prowess as a chemist, which she would sit over for hour upon hour and compose for as though they were the most sophisticated musical instruments, concertos filled with pathos or dreams, nocturnes and preludes of evildoing. It seems that the putsch is proceeding along carefully prepared lines. As the praetorian guard takes the palace, others of its units occupy the Academy; but this is nothing more than a futile gesture of perfectionism on the part of the putschists, a small, unasked-for present to Hios from the praetorians, or perhaps a settling of old accounts. (There has always been a certain tension between the guard and the Academy, the two real centres of power on Devel.) Owing to the gradual disappearance over the past twenty years of centres of resistance to the government, the Academy has become somnolent; it has ceased to be a feared nest of the dark sciences and forces to such a degree that occasionally it returns to the innocent researches of old.
Surprisingly the command of the army puts up as little resistance as the weakened Academy. Years ago Taal promoted the palace guard to the position of most powerful force in the state, and this resulted in the de facto subjugation of the army. The guard does not have a hierarchy; it has the character of a strong but elastic web woven from dark bonds, impure dreams and complicity in old crimes. The guard has no code nor central idea, nor any specific purpose in the running of the state. The motto on its coat of arms is composed of incomprehensible, magic words for which everyone has his own interpretation. The guard is the ideal means of disseminating and enforcing decisions that should be spoken of only in whispers and ambiguous terms, decisions that grow from dark roots and grope about for means of implementation, even for guiding aims. The guard does not act by the passing down of clear commands through a hierarchy, but in such a way that its instructions—or rather the dark movements of its consciousness and emotions, spoken in low voices behind locked doors, in high galleries or the alleys of parks, in which tone of voice and accent play important roles—enter immediately the filiform web from which the body of the guard is woven; once these instructions are in circulation, the imagination of the great body sets to work on developing the dark themes within them, while simultaneously—as if in a single movement—turning them into action. This was the chemistry by which Taal exercised power; it was in many ways similar to his wife’s more intimate compositions, whose lifeblood was poison.
Only subsequently, once everything is in motion, are a design and a plan fashioned, and these are really little more than hallucinations. These visions, of which the guard takes so little notice, set the army in motion. The army itself has no sensory organs by which to perceive the tangle of forces, desires and chaos that glimmer behind these phantom constructions; the commanders of the army do not realize that orders are born out of whispers, twitches and dreams, that indeed they never move very far away from them. So the putsch under the leadership of Hios and the commander of the praetorians is not so very different from the way things have been for many years up to this point. Even while the coup is in progress, a sense of normality sets in, stirring in the army command a sense that law and order are at work. After all, Hios is the daughter of the late king, and it has always been so that the commander of the guard mediates between the palace and the army. Hence the army—whose intervention Uddo is relying on—does nothing. The system of power established by Taal is turned against Uddo, and the queen discovers that she is powerless to resist it.
Hios does not attempt to disavow the rumours that claim it was she who poisoned the king. The commander of the guard is prepared to do whatever Hios asks of him, and so are his men. Since the deaths of Gato and Taal, Hios has grown so beautiful that she seems to have pillaged all the jewels of hell. Her dark splendour holds the praetorians in thrall; any of them would willingly undergo torture and death for the sake of their lady. Life at the palace becomes uncanny and dreamlike. The guards now walk its corridors, sprawl on its expensive upholstery in their high riding boots, enter its halls and chambers without invitation. Everyone gets out of their way. Hios glows with an icy, deathly beauty; fear abounds in the chambers of the palace. Uddo retires to ever-more remote rooms, waiting for Hios to strike against her. Hios leaves her mother alone while she considers how to dispose of her. One night Uddo gathers her jewels and makes an attempt to leave the palace by a side gate, but the guards there silently refuse to raise the barrier. Uddo shouts at them, then breaks into sobs and offers them jewels and money, but none of them speak or step aside, so Uddo returns to her room.
Hios begins to rule over the palace and the island as a whole. She refuses the title of queen, although the praetorians, who love the lustre of ceremony and the sight of gaily-coloured uniforms in the light of the sun, persist in proposing a magnificent coronation. It is enough for Hios that everyone fears her. She has the gemstone fished out of the statue and sent to Tana on Illim; using this, Tana is able to wash the red coating off the marble panel and thus prepare the remedy for Nau, who begins to get softer as soon as the first drops are applied. But when Tana asks for the return of his son’s remains, Hios refuses to give up Gato’s skeleton. She commands that this stays in the statue, and every evening when it is lit by the setting sun and Gato’s silhouette comes into relief like a puppet in an Adriatic shadow theatre, she walks across the deserted courtyard and sits on a granite paving stone in front of the statue, where she remains until it is immersed in shade and Gato disappears.
One afternoon it suddenly grows dark and above the sea there appears a black column approaching the shore. The superstitious town-dwellers, whose streets are infected by the silent horror flowing from the palace, tell one another that the Devil has come for Hios. But it is nothing more than a tornado. When the whirling dance reaches the town, it rips off several roofs and tosses them into the air. It shakes the ships in the harbour, and—on reaching the palace—bores into the jelly statue like a giant screw, gathers it unto itself, bears the statue off towards the skies, then drops it—jelly, Gato’s skeleton, the predatory fish, and all—into the streets. Before the fish die of fright they manage to sink their teeth into a number of people who try to pick them up from the ground. Hios orders the collection of Gato’s remains, and these she has placed in the gold box, out of which she first ejects the manuscript of her brother’s book. Now she detests whoever has the same blood as she, whether living or dead. Then she gives the order that Mii be found and told that Hios has work for her. But Mii, who has experienced a religious crisis and become terrified of the world that gave birth to her visions, is by this time living somewhere in northern Europe, on the tundra and deep in the forest, making ephemeral statues out of ash, then watching the wind reshape them until they disappear. So Hios’s envoys bring to Devel the sculptor Nubra of Kass. When Mii was working on Fo’s palace and the statue in jelly, Nubra was one of her assistants, and after her departure he took over her workshop.
The n
ew sculptor
Hios asks Nubra if he is able to create a sculpture in gold that would show the moment when Gato, behung with predatory fish, emerged from the jelly for the last time before falling back into the statuary. The figures in gold should be of the same size as the jelly and living figures in the scene that is the subject of the gold statuary. The sculptor tells Hios straight away how much gold he will need. Hios promises him all the gold from the state treasury, and in addition to this she issues a decree that all noblemen and wealthy merchants should exchange their gold for state bonds. No one believes in the validity of these, but no one protests.
The sculptor immediately gets to work on his design. He, too, is work-obsessed, but unlike Mii he does not create great visions, worlds that grow out of a confrontation between one’s eyes and a space, a void filled with endless content. He concentrates always on one statue only, and he works on this until he has solved the rebus or complex mathematical equation it presents him with. As a rule Mii would reject any conditions set for a commission (unless her failure to meet them would result in her death, as was the case with the statuary in jelly); she would create her worlds gradually by her own themes, laws and rules, and in her own style, none of which were known to Mii before she started work. With her successor, on the other hand, the stricter the rules the client sets, the better; when this is not the case, he sets advance conditions of his own, which he must respect at all costs, even though these sometimes verge on the impossible and he is the only one who knows of them.
