by Michal Ajvaz
By this time everyone at the palace is dull-witted or mad in some way. The courtiers grow accustomed to the terror practised on them by the praetorian guards and to the glassy-eyed expression of the queen; they grow accustomed to the many-hour-long re-enactments of the golden death, to the dreadful monuments, to the humiliation and stink of the amphitheatre. They are indifferent to the leaking of bodily fluids and stains on garments and upholstery—they wear the reeking splotches on their clothing like dark jewels. And the madness, stinking juices and bad dreams descend from the palace to seep into the streets of the town, the country at large, the waves of the sea. In the people of the town, fear of the guards’ patrols and raids (which often are the same banditry) mixes with joy at the general state of anarchy; in most cases, wrongdoing is tolerated when it does not affect the well-being of the guard or the princess, when its scope is limited to a house or the town, or when it happens to benefit some nobleman or other. The avarice and thirst for power of the guard is a fine complement to the disinterested, ostentatious cruelty of the queen. The people of the town blunder about stupidly in the shadows of the obscene monuments. Some days they cower in their homes and bolt the doors, listening to the sounds of carts and footfalls beyond the door; other days they are drunken participants in the looting of mansions—when a property seizure is in progress, they wait for the guard to leave before bursting into the paralysed house through its fractured doors.
Such brutal scenes as these were by no means exceptional in the Book. Mostly I came across them in deep insertions, perhaps in a pocket concealed inside another, as if I were descending to the dungeons of a building to find there the foundations of the ancient palace of a despot. Perhaps, I thought, the poison in the insertions will soak through to higher levels of the Book and the whole thing will become one obscene, cruel dream. And as the borders of all worlds were weak on the island, and the games of the islanders spilled over them, I even wondered if the evil in the Book might conquer the quiet life of the island, which would then begin to resemble that of Devel in Hios’s years.
I still wonder how it is possible that such dark images were born in the minds of the peaceable islanders. Perhaps the slow crystallization of shapes and systems into the shapeless, the various forms of which was the islanders’ main source of entertainment, was not as innocent as it seemed. The disintegration of language and order that occurred when these encountered labyrinthine shapes or passed over borders, released a playful force that built and revived different orders and languages in an endless kaleidoscope; but this force was itself a combination of many forces, whose tones sounded in it and which could render themselves independent. It is probable that a force could be distilled that would rise above matter and find its aim and its delight in the crushing of matter, without the fragments thereby created being used in new games. And this force would begin to elaborate its own figures, to write in hieroglyphs of evil, to set up its own dreadful world.
It seemed to me that the germs of dark worlds were present on the island in the breath of all things, sounds and words. As I was reading the history of the kingdom of Devel, I got to thinking about what it was that all those years ago so bewitched the European conquerors that they forgot their homelands within three generations, that they, too, came to hear voices in the island’s murmurs; I thought about the faces and figures that appeared to them in the play of the foam and the leaves. Were they really overwhelmed by the placidity of the islanders, or did they—experts on power and violence that they were—scent evil hidden at the bottom of this placidity and capitulate in admiration of its grand style? But I would be doing the islanders an injustice if I were to find in their calm, non-violent nature only the seeds of cruelty. I have said already that the force that ruled their world was woven from many sub-forces, and that each of these could separate itself from the bunch. It was possible to find in the islanders’ world the germs of many attitudes and many worlds, celestial and infernal. Images from these worlds sometimes flashed through in the islanders’ gestures and the melody of their voices. (For example, I was able to imagine very well that the admirable precision of their eyes—which was able to recognize and record the finest distinctions in shape—could be used in the development of brilliant analytical thinking.)
Families flee from Devel in ever-greater numbers. There are voices on the island’s beaches and light signals out at sea. Many of the fugitives find asylum at the court of Illim. Here a plan is hatched to invade the island ruled by the mad princess and her guard. The émigrés invite Tana to lead their flotilla, but Tana refuses: he does not want to renew the hostilities between families that was extinguished by the love of Gato and Hios, and also he is grateful for the gemstone, thanks to which Nau is now almost as soft as before (apart from the skin of her face, which has remained hard and is like a gleaming mask of metal).
The émigrés form themselves into opposing groups; each has its own candidate for commander of the army and its own plans for the invasion, which it is not prepared to give up. The groups reach no consensus until the unexpected appearance on Illim and in the Book—introduced in a subordinate clause right at the end of a very long compound sentence dealing with the fragrance of the old walls of Illim’s harbour—of Ara, whom the reader has believed would always remain in a kind of Book-world Hades into which characters descend from pages read. Above her name there is a thick pocket, probably detailing what happened to Ara after her departure from the palace at Devel. I did not open this because I was anxious to find out how the invasion of Devel would end, and quite simply I forgot to go back to it. I very much regret this, as Karael once told me that the adventures of Ara were among the most beautiful passages in the Book—she told me that Ara meets voiceless birds on her travels, which instead of singing, play long musical compositions by tapping their beaks on dripstones of differing thicknesses that grow at the mouths of caves in the hillside and give tones of different pitches. Perhaps the émigrés suspect that their planned strategy would be no match for the power of Hios, brewed as it is in a witch’s cauldron of pain, beauty, cruelty, desire, tenderness and madness. It seems they recognize in the words and gestures of Ara a power that is born of sweetness, nightmares and stifled cries; they understand that this night-time torrent of courage and evil is capable of confronting Hios and the dark army she commands.
So it comes to pass one starless night that all ships of the invading force push off from the harbour at Illim and out to sea. Ara is aboard the command ship, watching the flashing of the white, red and blue signal lights on all sides. The darkness begins to change to a grey mist, through which the outlines of dozens of phantom-like sails can be seen. (I meditated on what Ara would actually be able to see from the bow of her ship. I imagined a forest of masts in various shades of grey. But the Book was so indefinite in its references to time, in the boldness or carelessness with which it mixed the props of various ages, and by the dearth of words its authors employed in describing the main shapes of things—even though it was able to describe over dozens of pages the adornments on a house facade or the network of cracks in the plaster of an old wall—that out of the mist of dawn there might just as well have emerged the funnels of steamers. Or perhaps the ships slid lightly through the waves powered by some marvellous fuel unknown to our world—perhaps the milk of the silver mountain tiger was bubbling in the glass cauldron of a magical engine room.) The mist before the bow is an ever-thickening, ever-expanding pall of dark-grey, which suddenly develops cracks to reveal the streets of Devel’s capital. Ara wades through the cold water. All around her, grey figures step out, plunging their feet into the wet sand of the beach. Out of the mist comes the clank of metal and screaming. Ara and the others climb the steep lanes of the harbour area, which she knows well from her childhood. The lanes open out into a square, where dreadful monuments rise out of the mist. The mist is filled with points and blades of metal; as if in a dream, Ara beats these off with dagger and sword.
By midday the invading forces have broke
n down the gates of the palace. Dagger in hand, Hios joins the battle in the corridors of the palace, incurring many wounds and killing many of the enemy. After the death of the commander of the praetorian guard it becomes clear that the palace is about to fall. Hios leaves the action by a secret corridor and goes into the palace park, where she sets the golden theatre in motion. This is the first time a performance has been given to an empty auditorium. Devel’s princess sits there alone and stares rapt at the golden images of Gato’s demise. She has left a trail of blood in her wake and Ara has followed this to the theatre. Then the unknown author described a scene that might have been from a film: for a long time Hios and Ara, each armed with a long dagger, engage in wordless, hand-to-hand combat, threading their way up and down the empty aisles of the amphitheatre. Two slim bodies, which once would join in nights of love, move to the dumb dance of death in front of revolving scenes of Gato’s death and rebirth, death and rebirth. Steel daggers flit about before the golden dumbshow; the ringing of metal mixes with the thud of the wings of the door as they slam together and the purr of the mechanism that drives the turntable. At last Hios falls in the aisle between two rows of seats. Ara wipes her dagger on Hios’s clothes and goes back to the palace, where a great victory celebration is in preparation. Before an empty auditorium, Gato dies and comes back to life in the golden statue again and again. That evening someone stops the mechanism that drives the statues of the theatre, but Hios lies among the seats in a pool of dried blood for several days more. There was no mention of whether her shadow and Gato’s were embracing in the underworld.
Ara briefly serves as queen of Devel, but then she leaves the island and sets out on new adventures that take her to a great many lands. (These were described in another part of the Book.) Meanwhile, on Devel and Illim two boys from other sides of the feuding families have grown to maturity, and one day a new war breaks out between the two islands…
Journey’s end
So ended the story of Tana and Nau, Taal and Uddo, Fo and Mii, Gato, Hios and Ara—one of the many episodes of the transforming, disappearing Book, one of the works of art created by the islanders, or perhaps a constellation of thousands of works of art, in which the reader forever encounters new books and fragments of old books no longer in existence and lost to the past like the fragile scrolls of the Egyptians. But the reader also encounters sonatas and symphonies for string, wind, water and fire instruments, and ballets, in which the dancers are people, animals, phantoms and mechanical dummies; and he encounters statues made of water and jelly, pictures painted on canvas, in sand and in water, mosaics composed of gemstones, luminous beetles and hallucination-inducing lights.
I can imagine that in today’s Book there are none of the figures I read about when I was on the island: no Tana, no Dru, no Gato, no Hios. They have been replaced by other characters, whose stories perhaps bear echoes of the heroes I knew. And certainly in the features of these new heroes, the faces of the heroes who will replace them will be germinating. The giant squid has disappeared. So, too, has the statue in jelly. Perhaps the whole archipelago has been claimed by the sea, and new islands and continents have sailed out onto the Book’s pages. Perhaps new stars are shining in the galaxies of its universe, and there are new planets on which unknown civilizations will thrive and expire, circling in this imaginary universe born out of the practically imperceptible breath of its script, for as long as it takes for the Book to devour them. And because islanders have bad memories, the heroes, towns and islands, planets and galaxies that were described in the Book at the time I sat on the terrace of Karael’s house, do not even exist in anyone’s mind.
During my stay on the island I learned from its inhabitants many bad and also several good things. But I have never been able to welcome change and extinguishment with the same joy as they did. It was my secret hope that the characters disappearing from the island’s Book would live on at least in my report about the island. But my memory is the not the best either; it was so often mistaken that I am afraid the characters and deeds of my telling have little in common with those I read about on the island. It sometimes happened while I was writing that I remembered something from the text of the Book as I first experienced it; but when I returned to the passages I now believed to be wrong in the hope of rewriting them, I had to laugh at the futility and ridiculousness of such efforts. It dawned on me what nonsense it was to strive for fidelity in something that was constantly changing shape, that no one could confirm, that lived on only in my memory, which had failed me several times already.
Karael no longer telephones or writes, so I have no news of what has happened to the Book since my departure. It is possible that its stories have crumbled, leaving nothing but isolated sentences and words. It is even possible that they have been erased by the soaking into its pages of the water of the upper town or the waves of the sea, that the islanders now pass from hand to hand a Book with blank white pages filled only with phantoms, on which the contours of new shapes and bodies are beginning slowly to beat out the rhythms of new stories.
Was the Book a genuine work of art? Now I would probably hesitate before I answered that. Part of art is constancy and invariability, but not because it should raise itself above time and approach the world of eternal shapes and values: art must descend to constancy because only from the chasm of this descent, from the misery of non-variability, can it face the challenges of the endlessly transforming, which is what art yearns for, adores and sings about; only a motionless statue that immerses itself in the current of time can address the undulations of transformation. And a work of art should have a single author. It cannot be written by a multitude of anonymous islanders—not because it is an expression and a celebration of individuality, but because it must descend to the poverty of a single voice; only out of this poverty can it respond to the abundance of voices of the world, in which it wishes to dissolve itself. Only in its misery and impotence can the uncertain echo of these voices arise, and all the sonorous voices of the world can reveal themselves only as the tremor of sadness in a single voice for its inadequacy.
As a work of art, the island’s Book was a failure from the very beginning. It is fairly certain that it was this failure the islanders were striving for. There was no need for Ino of the white ankles to fly to the island: the people that lived there knew very well what she had to impart, it was written in their blood. Now I believe that the Book was ridiculing art, was a parody of art. The islanders did not like art because its shapes stood in the way of their eddies of shapelessness, and its sounds drowned out the music of silence. To begin with I wondered if Mii, Fo and all the other artists who kept appearing on the pages of the Book, were the expression of some kind of islanders’ dream of real art, a permanent, unchanging work of art, but then I realized that for the islanders such characters were laughable or pitiful, that their often woeful fates were meant to show where a yearning for shape could lead. I know now that the Book was not just a parody of art; it was a parody of our world as a whole, fragments of which would arrive on the island in each ship that came into port.
The supposition that the Book was a work of art was also based on the view that the island’s literature was a response to the summons of shapeless murmurs and eddies that yearned for the release of the images concealed in them. But having returned to the Book and drawn from my memory certain of its passages, I was no longer sure that its roots contained the desire of the shapeless for shape, and if so, then only as a part of the circling that both the shaped and the shapeless contain and overlap with. Now I would explain the origins of the stories of the Book more simply and in a way more in keeping with the character of the islanders: at the core of the shapeless there is a blind, irresistible pressure to expel images, so that after some time the purity of the shapeless is clouded by a sediment of images, which are at various stages of development. If this were so, the writing and reading of the Book would be a cleansing process by which the shapeless would rid itself of sediment, draining aw
ay all the shapes and images that had settled in it. Renewing the limpidity of the Book would make it possible for the islanders to bathe in pure streams of the shapeless. The Book was not an end in itself but a mere by-product; it was a filter that caught the dirt of shapes and images.
On my travels around Prague I have yet to spot in a travel agent’s window a colour photo of the island. It seems that there is still no modern hotel on its shores. But even if there were, this would not have to mean the destruction of the island’s culture. I have written of how hitherto the islanders have always been cunning victors over the culture of Europe. Perhaps this time it would be different; perhaps in time the streets of the lower town would fill with restaurants, souvenir shops and ice-cream stands; perhaps loud music would drown out the island’s murmurs and rustlings. But it might happen that a fresh encounter with Europe would lead to another victory on the part of the islanders; let us remember that the islanders have always won as easily and unwittingly as they draw breath. We know how the European invasion of long ago ended, and it is more than likely that the colourful emblems of multinational corporations would penetrate the streets of the lower town only to transform in the same way as the conqueror’s geometric drawings and devotional pictures—they would be overwhelmed by stains and webs of cracks, the music playing in the streets would be infiltrated more and more by rustlings and murmurs, so that all would be overgrown as surely as the once-proud buildings were covered in creeping plants. And things might not end here—the changes might spread to Europe and America, they could transform whole continents; whole world civilizations might come to resemble the life of the island. And then my book would be for nothing, as it would speak of banalities known by all.
