Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else

by Daniela Fischerova

  Wu knitted his eyebrows until their spiky white hairs converged beneath his forehead. He had no taste for yet another commentary on the combination of sin and sa syllables, but did not see how he could avoid it. The aroma Wu himself had named “porcelain maiden” was surely wafting along the corridors all the way to the court; in all the empire no one else had the skill to prepare the porcelain maiden. Only Wu. Only he! He and only he!

  He felt a wearisome pressure in his head, the hollow pressure of several indistinct ideas (“fame — nakedness — nowhere to hide”), but there was no time to consider them: he had just lit the flames, and with painstaking care he was swinging the pan in an arc three thumbs wide and three-quarters-of-a-thumb high. Only thus could the “maiden” truly be released.

  “Let him enter.”

  A tubby, aging youth was standing in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. He shuffled awkwardly along the wall into the room. His belly was soft and he teetered on long, thin legs like a wading bird.

  “It’s hot,” the youth said reproachfully.

  “Lots hot,” he added after a moment.

  He took off his hat and mopped his balding head and his short, chafed neck with a none-too-clean handkerchief. The odor of his sweat intermingled with the porcelain maiden, and only Wu’s six-year monastic education in controlling his inner demons allowed him to hide his distaste. He was nearly certain no one would notice that aberrant moment in the final product, but nonetheless all hope of perfection was irrevocably gone. At the most critical juncture, when the pieces of meat first mystically united with the blue-burning sauce of Jena beans and pepper, an alien stench had permeated them — and that never helped matters. Still, Wu said to himself, those two geese — meaning the empress and her oldest daughter — they won’t notice it, but as for me, I would never let it touch my tongue.

  “Thank you, exalted one, for–stooping–to–my–humble– insignificance,” he mumbled. It took far less time to say than it does to read. Centuries of misuse and age-old affectation had ground this common idiom down to a few muddled, utterly meaningless syllables. The poet looked at the round chair as if wondering what to do with it, and then sat heavily down.

  “Whatcha cooking?” he said without interest.

  What a question! It stung Wu, but lightly, like a flea. Everyone knew the porcelain maiden. Even his nephew had eaten at least his weight’s worth; he should know that aroma by now! What if I asked him: so you write poems, is that it? Never heard of them. No one recites them! — His inner demons toyed briefly with the idea of saying this out loud, but Wu did not have the time just now.

  “Dinner for the empress,” he answered calmly.

  The meal was now almost ready. All that remained was to pour it into stone bowls rubbed generously with a bitter root. Wu did not usually rub the bowls himself, but yesterday he had caught a plump little girl peeling the root with fingernails that were horrendously dirty. He was so infuriated that he whacked her with a large ladle. She whimpered for a while and this morning made herself scarce — well, she was evidently afraid, probably off complaining to some hysterical aunt of hers that she couldn’t take that old madman anymore.

  Alone! All on my own! the demons wailed, and from the height of a child’s arm Wu began precisely and ever so carefully to pour the pungent substance into the steaming bowls. When the moist maiden touched the sizzling stoneware it underwent a final, triumphant tremble. The vitreous meat writhed and congealed, as if it wanted to flocculate, but it held fast, its surface splitting slightly open. It now looked like the frozen skin of a very pale girl, with a polished tinge akin to that of old miniatures. Wu knew this was the only way to achieve a gradation of flavors. In the meat’s tiny cracks, the juices had not uniformly hardened, and the crust had become a concentrate of the concoction’s spicy apex: a plume of taste, its coloratura.

  Wu, as always at that moment, remembered the day he had discovered the trick with the hot bowl. He was not quite thirty and had run non-stop out toward the Buried Wells, nearly delirious with a high, ringing joy.

  “The empressetta eats too much,” the poet said indifferently, undoing his belt to let his belly flop out. “The princessina too. They’re glutton-guts.”

  It was the poet’s habit to mutilate the most common of words, as if he didn’t even know his own language. And to think his teacher had been one of the empire’s most famous grammarians! At fifteen Wu’s nephew had put out his instructor’s eye in a scuffle and was immediately exiled to the provinces. Only his family connection to Wu and, at the time, Wu’s strong hand, had enabled him to return years later.

  The poet stuck his hand under the silk.

  “Have you spoken with the censor?” he asked, yawning. From the wild rippling of the ribbons he appeared to be scratching his belly most energetically.

  Ah, so that’s why you’re poking around here! Wu thought, irritated. You’ve come to find out whether this year they’ll finally have a public reading of your … your … He hesitated, but the only thing that came to mind were some words mutilated in his nephew’s style, so he stopped trying to pin down the concept. Well, you can wait, boy, you can wait. I think I already do more for you than I should by letting you parasitize the family name — and heaven knows it’s never done anything for me. But for me to dishonor it further by advancing your … your … It was the same problem as before, and Wu abandoned his ruminations.

  “The censors,” he said severely, “are drowning in work just now. Over a hundred poems came in for the emperor’s birthday celebration contest. The censors have locked themselves in the library and have been studying them for days.”

  His nephew stared sleepily at the smoke-stained ceiling as if this answer had nothing to do with him. The porcelain maiden became more delicate by the moment; it evaporated into oblivion like a dream before waking, and what was left behind was a taste just as evanescent, haunting and hollow. His nephew could probably no longer smell it, Wu realized, and soon, after twice the time, it would desert Wu as well. How many times have I lost her already, and where does she disappear to? I’ll never know.

  “The emperor will probably disappear,” his nephew said suddenly, in the expressionless tone he always used. “I figured it out by doing a structural analysis of the last hundred years of court poetry.”

  Here there should be a brief aside. It concerns the translator’s responsibility for the words structural analysis, for the words censor, parasitize, coloratura and, in the end, for the majority of others.

  There are two basic ways to translate what has not yet come to be and what no longer is. One is with the eternal present’s abbreviated arc, in the belief that the sense of words and things endures and, like Zeno’s arrow, hangs in flight. The other keeps to Babel’s model, clinging anxiously to the literal meaning of individual words confined to the solitary cell of their place and time. We choose the first method, but this does not mean it is the better one. Wu’s nephew definitely did not say structural analysis, but if we were to take this to extremes, then he was not a nephew, but a second left blood with male sound, because that is how the language in question characterizes this relationship.

  The word censor, in its professional sense, is roughly the same as we picture it today. Head censor — so we know in advance what is meant — is not a profession, but a title, a pedestal of honor and imperial might, and, it must be said, quite a high pedestal indeed.

  “What did you say?” Wu sputtered. He was not asking about the emperor’s fate; he refused so thoroughly to take this seriously that he forgot it at once. “Where did you happen on the last hundred years of court poems?”

  “I have them.” The poet shrugged.

  “Where did you get them from?” Wu pressed him.

  “From the bibliotheca. It’s not like anyone reads them; the dust on them was a finger deep. I simply took them.”

  Wu raised his eyes to the heavens. The poet suddenly became wary. He glanced around and then leaned over.

  “I figured
it out!” he whispered in a theatrical whisper. “If only it’s not too late! Sit down, let me explain.”

  Wu did not sit down. He was an old man and deeply disliked getting up again afterward. At this hour, when the servants had taken the dishes away and swept out the drifts of ash, the kitchen was quiet for the first time all day. Tense, vigilant, Wu devoted his nights to experimentation. He slept little, and many a time it was only when the stars had left their fatal conjunctions and the great crimson parrots had begun to squawk over the eastern gates, that he finally put aside his bowls and ingredients and plunged his worn, slender tongue into water.

  “They’ve compared him to an elephant eight hundred twenty-two times already!” the poet announced with a passionate fervor Wu had not seen before — at least not since the time when, as a boy, he had shouted at Wu that he’d been in the right in that argument with his teacher and a poke in the eye couldn’t alter this basic fact. Except then he’d been fifteen.

  “I’m sure as sure can be! I’ve checked it over countless times! No one must ever do it again, ever! It’s … it’s death!”

  Wu stared in surprise at his nephew’s pockmarked skin: agitation had made a childhood scar reemerge like a long-gone, wind-blasted epitaph on a gravestone.

  “Why shouldn’t they?” he said evenly. “I’m not an expert on poetry, but as a simile it seems to me both accurate and respectful.”

  The poet clenched his fists.

  “The devil take accuracy! To hell with respectfulness! They’ve gone too far! And soon there will be retribution!”

  Wu had no idea what his nephew meant. His allegations seemed likely, even though it would never have occurred to Wu to count. Comparing the emperor to an elephant was so common that no one gave it a second thought. The elephant’s suitability derived from its beauty as well as from its strength, not to mention the esteem it had enjoyed in the empire since time immemorial. The commemorative poems all the empire’s poets entered in the emperor’s yearly birthday contest positively teemed with elephants, every time. But Wu still could not conceive what anyone could have against this. It had always been thus, ever since he could remember, under the emperor’s father, grandfather, and probably even beyond, until the past’s thread was broken by war or earthquake.

  “Poets don’t create anymore!” his nephew hissed. “They just steal from each other! They’re worse than grave robbers. They’re hyenas!”

  “Careful, boy! Take care!” Wu raised his voice. “No celebratory poem was ever stolen! The emperor’s censors are ever so strict on that point! The punishment for stealing a contest poem is worse nowadays than for trespassing!”

  His nephew, seated, stomped his feet on the floor.

  “Last year Mr. Hayo won with the poem: ‘The emperor’s might is like the elephant leading his herd’! Does he think we’ve forgotten that twenty-eight years ago Asum’s verse ran: ‘The emperor’s might bursts forth like a raging elephant’?”

  “There’s no comparison!” Wu adamantly insisted. His profession had given him a fine sense for the subtleties of variation. “An elephant on his own behaves completely differently from one leading a herd. Everyone knows that!”

  His nephew’s pale eyes grew ever so slightly paler.

  “It’s a conspiracy!” he whispered. “Betrayal by intellectuals. They want to destroy the emperor!”

  There had been times, entire decades, when the force of these words would have swept the kitchen clean, but just now the empire lounged in a sort of political siesta. There had been no war for almost twenty years. This was mostly because the emperor was an old man (Wu, by the way, was exactly one day younger), and the most faithful of his men had kept their posts and grown old along with him. The law of the jungle and hungry battles to the death now raged further down, among the younger clerks, who were still freshly predacious and thankfully far from power. But here, at the top, where a few fading elders quivered like silken flags, the scales of danger and guilt expressed themselves in symbols, not in deeds. Here battles were fought with smiles and insults, transgressions of etiquette and double entendres. A glance averted at the right moment could change the course of history. For years no blood had boiled.

  “Uncle! Uncle!”

  His nephew hoisted himself up to his full shapelessness, like a prophet.

  “Uncle! Do you know how to write the word thaut?”

  He pulled a piece of paper from a fold in his robe and shoved it under Wu’s nose. On it was the character emperor. Well, fine, it was also the character for thaut.

  Wu scrunched his wrinkled eyelids quizzically. He sensed this was a trick question, the sort of riddle the poet had loved as a child, and Wu had no desire to be tricked. In their language, the words emperor and thaut — the second signified some sort of half-forgotten mythical beast — were not pronounced the same, but for unknown reasons shared the same character. Everyone knew this, and because thaut appeared very rarely in ordinary speech, it did not cause the least confusion. No one gave it the slightest thought.

  “See? See?” his nephew whispered, and his scar darkened with blood. “It was such a beautiful beast! It had golden horns and could fly through the air! It’s an eternal shame. Is this how the elephant will end up?”

  Wu shoved the paper away.

  “I don’t know what you have against elephants. The emperor enjoys being compared to them. Our emperor is quite fond of elephants.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” his nephew announced. He stood up, crumpled the sheet of paper, and threw it in the fire. “You I can tell, you won’t betray me. In the time of one of the emperor’s ancestors or, to be more precise, at the end of his grandfather’s reign, the most common simile was that the emperor was like a thaut. Handsome as a thaut, wise as a thaut, and miraculous as a thaut. They went on and on, poets and others too. Then the emperor himself took the title Thaut.”

  “Where did you learn this?” Wu challenged him.

  “I told you. At the bibliotheca.”

  “Who let you borrow poems from the reign of the emperor’s ancestors?”

  “I borrowed them on my own!” his nephew said in exasperation, as if unable to concede that there was anything odd about this. In truth, it was as shocking as borrowing the princess to study at home.

  “No, I will not protect you! Never! I won’t lift a finger for you!” Wu shouted.

  His nephew bent over toward him secretively.

  “I’ve discovered something no one else knows. Even my teacher didn’t tell me about it. Once, you see, the word thaut was written differently. It had its own separate character!”

  “Don’t count on me once you’re in hot water! I’ll disown you! I should have done it long ago!”

  “It was only when the emperor started calling himself Thaut that the two words came to be written with the same character. And at the same time this metaphor vanished from poetry, at once, instantly, as if the earth had swallowed it up! Don’t you see? How could anyone still write: the emperor is like a thaut? Such a sentence would be pointless! Not only would it have been incomprehensible — it would have looked awfully clumsy as well!”

  In spite of himself, Wu remembered that his nursemaid had once told him about the thaut. She swore she had seen it with her own eyes. If he remembered correctly, it was something like a chamois, but more clever, and able to fly. An elephant is much stronger.

  “Then they began to compare the emperor to many other things. To the buffalo, to the sun, even — once! — to wheat. It was a great time for poetry!”

  Oh no, Wu sighed inwardly. Sin and sa syllables. If I don’t throw him out, he’ll start reciting his latest brainchildren.

  “But for fifty years now they’ve been babbling: the emperor’s an elephant! The emperor’s an elephant! They haven’t learned from what happened before. You can’t repeat anything too often, or it destroys itself. Back then it just happened, do you hear me! just happened to destroy the thaut. But this time it will destroy the emperor!”

  Two th
ings struck Wu during this tirade. First: what an unendearing person his nephew was! Second: the monastery superior would have made short work of him. The boy would have stopped his trickery, one two three!

  “We think…” Excited, his nephew leaned right over to him and swallowed his final consonants, like a country boy. It was a bad habit picked up in the provinces. “We believe that the thaut never existed. That it’s just a beast from old fables. But how do we know that, eh? What if it did exist, back then, what if it soared through the mountains and had golden horns? Who in God’s name can say? What if it only disappeared when the emperor appropriated its name, whipped it out from under the thaut’s nose, as if he had the right to it, as if it belonged to him? What if it had to disappear just because they were already so similar, there wasn’t room in the world for both of them, and the thaut simply lost out?”

  Wu’s nephew thumped his fist against his knee.

  “But the elephant is strong. He won’t give way. Not the elephant!”

  Wu still could not understand him. His nephew didn’t even completely understand himself, because he was trying, tediously and without the necessary intellectual apparatus, to define a concept that had not yet come into existence. It was — let’s call it — the concept of redundancy, and with it the allied concepts of innovation, informational esthetics, and possibly the exhaustibility of repertoire. Not only did these concepts not yet exist — there was not even a hint of the force which, in time, would coil in a loop around one of these matters and by sheer pressure compel the word into being.

  Neither Wu nor his nephew could know that this would only come to pass in their part of the world a good two or three hundred years hence. But by then this palace would be overgrown with grass from end to end, and the great-grandson of the eastern gate’s parrot would have died of homesickness in a foreign land no one in the palace had ever heard of. Both knew only this: that Wu’s nephew was bitterly humiliated by his insignificance, and that he would never achieve fame — and he himself understood his own words less and less the more these feelings clogged them up.