by Michal Ajvaz
When, for example, he was commissioned to produce a portrait of the family of the chancellor of one of the island kingdoms, he began his work by setting himself to ensure that the fingertips of each of the figures described the circumference of a precise, if imaginary circle, whose radius he determined by the throw of a dice; after this he three times opened a dictionary with his eyes closed, thus finding the names of three objects or beings he would have to work into the composition of the statuary group. These were a pineapple, a bat and a hand of a clock. It was Nubra’s task somehow to establish connections among them and also between them and the members of the chancellor’s family, related to what the subjects thought about and the kind of lives they led. Such incipient connections as these draw other objects and animals into the statue, providing outlines for situations in which they might be inserted. Once a statue is finished, it is common that those who view it find in its composition and the objects and scenes it depicts symbolic meaning and deep philosophical thought. In addition to this, Nubra likes to experiment in the creation of a variety of moving, mechanical statues, some of which are driven by wind or water, others by springs concealed in their insides and wound up by a great key protruding from the back of the plinth. It is possible that these experiments have their origins in Nubra’s work on the statuary in jelly.
Incidentally, Nubra was deeply dissatisfied with Mii’s execution of Taal’s task. Although her statue corresponded exactly to the task set by the king in its amended, definitive version, it was Nubra’s opinion that the small changes to the assignment secured by Mii undermined the purity of her design and with it her achievement as a whole. Nubra believes that the conditions set at the outset should not under any circumstances be changed—that if the chess player is unable to defend his king it does not give him the right to move his rook as if it were a bishop. So years later Nubra decides to correct Mii’s error and create a statue that really is made of water. The principle on which he bases this is relatively simple: springlets of water are sprayed through a dense web of holes drilled into horizontal panels placed at a variety of pre-determined heights, thus creating a relief. Of course, this system has one significant defect; perhaps, dear reader, you have hit upon it yourself: it does not allow for overhangs—as the lines of the water statue work their way upwards, they are bound to narrow. It is not even possible to create in the common position something as simple, yet important as the human nose. But Nubra finds a solution to this problem, too: he designs his water statue in such a way that it requires no shape whose highest point is wider than its lowest.
And so he sets to work. He and his assistants drill into a panel with the dimensions 3x3x3 metres—which will serve as the statue’s plinth—1,920,000 small holes to create a regular web that has 1,600 holes along its length and 1,200 holes along its width. The underside of each hole is attached to a tube; the holes are divided into two hundred groups of varying numbers of holes, and all the tubes attached to the holes of one group come together in a single bigger tube. The bigger tubes are fed horizontally beneath the statue’s plinth and leave the room by a hole in the wall. In the adjacent room these are attached to more tubes, each of which has a different diameter and goes upwards at a different angle. Each of these tubes is fed into a tank of water, which is located in the upper part of the room at the top of a metal construction; water from the river above a great waterfall enters this by force of gravity through an opening in the ceiling. Owing to differences in the diameters and biases of the tubes connected to the tank, the water flows through the flat-lying tubes beneath the plinth at various strengths and speeds, and when it reaches the hole in the panel, geysers of various heights rise out of the panel. Nubra has arranged things so that these come together to create the effect of a statue in water. The water is then drained into the gutters that line the plinth, and another pipe carries it out of the room and the building.
The statue portrays the corpse of the royal land surveyor, with a dagger in his breast, lying on his back in the desert; it is but an hour since he was murdered and his body is half-covered in sand. Next to him, jutting out from the sand, are some objects: a locked chest, a belly-shaped bottle, a bell, the front of a regular icosahedron, a cone. It is possible to trace in the sand a geometric figure—it is a circle, with a trapezium inside it. Next to this figure we can read what the murderer has written in the sand with his finger—“The dances on the silver bridge have not yet started.” Although this inscription evidently continues, subsequent letters have been washed away by the sand. There are also the merest traces of small footprints—obviously made by a woman—which, like the remainder of the inscription, the circle with the trapezium, the corpse of the unfortunate surveyor and all the objects around him, soon disappear beneath the sand.
This is a scene from a well-known Kassian legend. For a long time Nubra inspected this image in his mind’s eye. To his great satisfaction he discovered that it contained no overlapping or overhanging shapes, no protrusions or pendant lobes. Perhaps, dear reader, you would like me to tell the story of the royal land surveyor, so that you might take a break from the dismal affairs of Devel (and it would be well worth the effort—it is a legend with a long, convoluted plot that is set in many towns, in which there appear the sly emissaries of a padishah and a beautiful, mysterious woman). But you must forgive me, as I am not really in the mood for such an undertaking. You know that I have tried to oblige you whenever I can; indeed, I have pampered you. But please acknowledge that it is impossible for me to indulge your every whim. Let me propose another course: why not create for yourself a story to fit the scene in the desert into? You will experience the joys and ironies of fabulation; you will learn that fabulation is a drug to be wary of—even where the most honourable and moral of stories are concerned—as always it eats away at the good intentions and noble ideas that are its impetus, of which it supposes itself an obedient instrument. What fabulation does is transform its subject into a purposeless and joyous cosmic dance driven by ancient, entirely treacherous rhythms.
Fabulation is an adventure of encounter and homecoming; it carries you to landscapes where there is a murmur of stories hitherto unknown, where faceless figures take shape, where the bodies of inarticulate beings—great larvae—rub against yours in the dark. You realize that this landscape is not only the birthplace of the story; it is a home for your own gestures, actions and thoughts. Only in stories born of this landscape do you encounter your true self. Remember how Fo saw himself in the faces of his characters and the mysterious letters that recorded his true name. You will realize that your life is in some strange way a copy of the stories that arise from this landscape. And you will smile when I tell you of the literature of the authentic diary because you will know that you never encounter yourself until you leave yourself behind for the world of magical stories. Even the most candid diary is an embarrassing conceit, as the I of such literature is always a pitiable, fantastical figure who is less real than all the kings, princes and princesses of the island’s Book.
Performance
The sculptor is happy to accept Hios’s assignment. Never before has he made a large statue out of gold, and he is excited by the prospect of creating a work whose greatest part will be a depiction of another statue and which will portray living beings (the upper half of Gato’s body emerging from the jelly and the predatory fish biting into his flesh) in one place only. So the time comes when, in place of the work in jelly, there stands in the courtyard a statue of gold, showing Gato with his face twisted in pain, his body behung with predatory fish, as he emerges from Mii’s statue of jelly, which is leaning slightly to one side in the evening wind. Day after day in the early morning Hios sits herself in front of the golden statue; the burning, dazzling sunlight is reflected from its curves into the princess’s eyes, turning them into fireballs that whizz about like meteors in the dark inner universe behind Hios’s aching lids.
One night Hios has a dream in which she is again witness to the final moments of Ga
to’s life. But this time the prince’s death is played out in a world where everything is made of gold. A golden figure with the face of Gato steps into a golden statue on a golden courtyard, struggles through the statue to the golden head of a giant squid, and when he re-emerges from the golden jelly he is behung with golden fish. When Gato at last falls, a golden surface closes over him. When the Hios of the dream looks about herself, she sees that the terror-stricken courtiers, too, are made of gold, and she thinks that her eyes will not withstand so great a glare. She lifts her arms to cover her eyes and hears a clang as her golden palms strike against her golden face, and this wakes her.
The next day at luncheon she retells her dream, lamenting that the statue of gold can never be made to move. Sitting at the table next to the commander of the praetorian guard is Nubra, and this talk of an impossible statue immediately rouses his attention. As we know, Nubra loves a challenge. He turns to Hios and informs her he will make a moving statue that will depict her golden dream. As he is saying this, he has no idea how he will accomplish the task. The next week he never leaves his chamber; he lies on the bed, contemplating how he will keep the promise to Hios and complete the assignment he has set for himself. His gaze roams about the flower-pattern motifs that are endlessly repeated on the paper covering the walls of his chamber. He has a great many ideas, but all of these he gradually rejects. At one moment his eyes light on the stylized drawing of the bud of a lotus next to a lotus whose petals are already open; Nubra has the feeling he is seeing the flower open. And then the solution to his assignment comes to him. In order that the viewer see how the golden Gato dies and how the golden fish thrash about, it is not necessary in the least that the statue itself move. All that there remains for him to do is to construct a mechanism whose real but invisible movements will give the (false) impression that the statue is moving.
He presents his plan to Hios, and she promises to get for him everything he needs. Having worried that the princess would find his vision too grand and too costly, Hios is taken aback to see that she considers it too modest a memorial to Gato and her pain and hatred. Nubra cannot know that on first acquaintance with his idea, she sees in it the germ of a work far more wide-ranging—a golden statue that will be a second-by-second representation of the whole of Gato’s stay at the palace, beginning with Gato showing the chamberlain the carpet with the fairy-tale castle, followed by his work on the carpet commissioned by Taal, his night-time lovemaking with Hios, the moment when he stands anxiously before the labyrinth on the door of the treasury. But for now Hios charges the sculptor only with building in the palace gardens an amphitheatre which will be part of the moving statue.
The monstrous work, in which Hios’s incipient madness is joined and complemented by Nubra’s cold, technical reason, is ready within the year. Nubra produces several dozen statues to represent individual phases of Gato’s course through the statuary, from the moment he first stands before it to the moment he falls back into the jelly. This series also includes original statues in gold. The rest of the statues are gold-plated only, as Devel does not possess enough gold. Nubra has the statues built on a great turntable he has placed in the palace gardens, in front of which he orders a wall built with an opening where it meets the turntable, out of which rises the auditorium of the amphitheatre.
It is possible to close and re-open this hole in the wall by means of the two lightning-fast wings of a sliding door, which come together with a heavy impact (the sound of their colliding is softened by upholstered strips stuck to inside edge of each wing), then slide swiftly into cavities in the wall. All motions of the mechanism are unified by an ingenious transmission system. In the fraction of a second for which the door is closed, the turntable moves to bring round a statue representing the next phase of the action. When the doors re-open—again, this takes but a fraction of a second—the new statue is before the audience, and this is followed by a statue representing the next phase of the action, and so on. These rapid-changing statues create a grisly golden film about the death of Prince Gato.
When Nubra is building the amphitheatre, Hios has the palace park closed so that preparations for the Golden Statue Theatre can be carried on in secret. She forbids the workmen engaged on it from speaking about the work on pain of death. It is unnecessary for her to impose any prohibitions on Nubra: the surprise his inventions will excite is an inseparable part of the work, and besides, absolute silence is a central feature of his manner of working. The courtiers look with anxiety towards the closed gates of the park, at the constant comings and goings of covered wagons; they listen day and night to the workmen’s blows and think nothing good can come of it. Then the noise in the park ceases and the wagons disappear. Shortly after this, all the ladies and gentlemen of the court receive an invitation to a performance in the palace park. Uddo, too, receives an invitation—one look at the guards who deliver the invitation is enough to dissuade her from refusing it. The performance is due to commence after nightfall. With foreboding, the courtiers take their seats in the auditorium. It is barely two years since they were made to participate in another wicked performance at another place in the palace grounds. They have no idea what it is that is about to be presented to them, nor whether they will have to sit through more deathly ballets and bloody operas in the future. Uddo tries to hide in the back row, but when a guard comes to her a short while later and orders her to move to the front next to Hios, she allows herself to be led to an empty seat before the grey door in the wall.
When the lamps in the auditorium are extinguished and the door opens, the spectators are presented with a golden statue that depicts a statue of jelly. The door closes swiftly and then re-opens, the turntable turns, and before the eyes of the astonished courtiers a statue begins to move. To begin with this movement is little more than a gentle wobbling in the breeze, but then a fish jumps above the surface before disappearing back into the jelly. (In fact, fish modelled at various points of their jump are attached to the statue of the jelly statue by thin metal rods at points in consonance with the movements of the breeze.) From the left-hand side of the wall there then emerges a golden figure. When this figure reaches the statue, it turns to the auditorium and bows, just as the bewildered Gato did two years earlier. As if in a nightmare, the stupefied courtiers follow the familiar story: the golden figure of Gato steps up to Mii’s (golden) statue; the golden figure enters the golden statue, which is wobbling in the (imaginary) breeze; for a time the figure is out of sight, but then it re-emerges and turns to the audience with a look of anguish on its face, lifts up its arms fringed with golden fish, then falls back into the golden statue, which itself is a representation of a table set between the royal castle of Vauz and the sea.
Believing the performance to be at an end, the courtiers allow their horror to subside. But the turntable continues to turn. Once again the golden figure approaches the golden statue; again he steps into it, battles with the fish, and falls back into the gold. The monotonous golden film lasts five hours, after which time Hios makes a signal of command and the wings of the door crash shut for the last time that night. No one—not even Uddo—has dared to leave before the end of the performance. Although Hios and Uddo have been sitting next to each other throughout, not once has the daughter turned to look at the mother. Once the film has ended, Hios stands up in front of the closed door and announces that the spectators may go to bed, adding that the next performance will begin at the same time tomorrow.
Thus does the grim serial begin. Performances are held every night. And every night the courtiers are forced to watch the death of a golden Gato, over and over, so that they begin to fear for their minds. Every night Hios is present from beginning to end; she always sits next to her mother and watches the stage with a rapt expression. The guards stand in the aisles, drawing amusement from the discomfort of the courtiers. Before each performance starts, no one knows how long it will last—not even Hios, who always makes this decision when it is in progress. Often it lasts until morning
, but still the guards allow no one to leave before the end, not even those who are taken ill or need to go to the toilet. Anyone who falls asleep is woken by a guard. For many years afterwards, the awful memory of daybreak in the palace park will return to the courtiers in their dreams. When at last the dim light of day washes over the amphitheatre, it is accompanied by cries, wails and groans; someone might howl for several minutes before falling silent; there is a stink of sweat, urine, faeces and vomit. Soon all these liquids have soaked into the velvet cushions of the seats, and every evening the blend of stinks greets the involuntary spectators as they make their way to the amphitheatre; soon this has penetrated the palace and it seems it will descend to the town and settle in its streets.
Terror and invasion
As soon as Nubra finishes work on the golden theatre, Hios—by now at the deepest point of her madness—sets him on another task. She dreams of a great golden drama that will celebrate her and Gato’s love, but first it is necessary to punish her mother. Hios presents Nubra with her design of a monument that is to stand on all the squares of the capital. These monuments are to depict executioners who are torturing, raping and otherwise humiliating Uddo by the vilest means the dark thoughts of the princess can invent. Nubra is horrified; as a lover of games and rebuses, he has no liking for commissions such as this, and he despises Hios’s dreary, clumsy hate that is slowly developing into the purest form of madness. But he is no more able to decline this order than Mii was able to decline the order to produce a statue in liquid for Taal. Once the dreadful monuments are in place, every morning Hios takes her mother around the squares on a tour of hate; Hios orders the coach to stand for at least an hour in front of each statue. Hios never addresses her mother, and whenever Uddo closes her eyes at a statue, Hios strikes her across the face and neck with a riding whip until she opens them. From these trips Hios escorts her mother directly to an all-night performance in the palace park. After a while Uddo abandons all resistance: she weeps no longer, but follows dumbly the changing scenes of the day-time and night-time statue performances.
