“There are lots of elephants,” the poet grinned cunningly. “They look quite plucky, don’t you think, uncle? The last few weeks I’ve been going to watch them, observing them for hours.”
Then he leaned over so far that his nose touched the clasps on Wu’s chest, and Wu quickly took a step back. For years he had found physical intimacy unpleasant.
“Say ‘the emperor’s an elephant’!” his nephew pleaded passionately, but then, without waiting for an answer, he granted his own request: “The emperor’s an elephant. The emperor’s an elephant. The emperor’s an elephant.”
He waited a moment, as if listening for some subtle echo, and then shook his head:
“Nothing. It has no meaning anymore. There is no helping the emperor.”
What he said was very simple. All the words he used were familiar to Wu. They weren’t even mangled. But Wu did not understand them. Not only that — in the true sense of the word Wu had not even heard them. He had never thought of them and never considered anything even close to them. Later, in the time of the parrot’s great-grandson, everyone would recognize them, and in three further generations they would be mute with age. But now they were mute with newness and Wu felt only their strangeness, a feeling so common for an old man that it told him nothing at all.
“Run along,” he said. “Go home. I want to be alone now.”
His nephew shuffled to his feet without protest. Suddenly he looked as expressionless as always, excepting the brief fever of his last speech. He gazed at length around the room, as if he had forgotten where the door was, and then said in a slight whine:
“Uncle! When will you be speaking with the Head Censor?”
Oh heavens, not again! Requests, petitions, mumbling, sniveling, muting of conversations as I come through the door, vanishing around corners, muttering behind my back, tugging at my sleeves —
“The Head Censor does not visit me!” he answered sharply.
“But couldn’t you … for old times’ sake …”
Suddenly Wu’s blood boiled in his veins.
“Out!” he roared. “Scram!”
His nephew left; Wu did not see him out. He merely watched the young man’s hunched back totter down the hall, and shook his head: how old he looks! At thirty-one I looked my thirty-one years, but I aged differently. There was a powerful current of youth, and a powerful current of old age surging against it, and their waters mixed with a roar, like a dam bursting. But him — he’s a ditch full of dried-up mud.
He saw this image with absolute clarity, but he did not think it, and if he had had to describe his nephew’s aging, he would not have found the word water, nor the word ditch, nor the word current.
When Wu entered the years of River (also known by the flowery name “midday mountain time,” signifying a man’s most powerful age, from forty to fifty), he created and discovered things with great ease. He was singularly ambitious and, thanks to his years in the monastery, remarkably disciplined. His inventiveness seemed bottomless.
The annual tradition of preparing a completely new chicken dish in honor of the emperor’s birthday began at this time and for many years seemed completely unproblematic. He felt sure that he would have new ideas as long as he lived, and that it would always be in his power to create something that did not yet exist. Wu never presented his guests with the pinnacle of his art at any particular time. In the fermenting abundance of his inspiration, he offered one of many possible versions. He saw a geyser of creation inside himself, an inexhaustible source of innovation.
At first he had no inkling that Wu’s new chicken would become a custom the whole empire would make its business. He did not even know that this era — this court, this land, this configuration of planets — worshiped tradition and misused it as a defense against its own unpredictability. Time hurtles forward, changes howl furiously at the boundaries of existence, tatters of the ages whirl in the winter wind, but one thing remains certain: year in, year out, on the emperor’s birthday, dignitaries from all seven provinces gather to taste the new chicken of Master Wu.
Chicken was as integral to the emperor’s birthday as the emperor himself. A ritual had developed around the tasting. Understandably, it was a great honor. The number of guests varied over the years, but had finally stabilized at twenty-two of the most powerful, who on that day were permitted only tepid water for breakfast, whom the heavens forbade to take lunch, and who, with the rising of the tiny autumn evening star, would finally receive a deep bowl containing five or six morsels of the new chicken. — Wu sometimes wondered whether he had succeeded in educating even one true gourmet who would esteem his art as only an expert could. Certainly he had terrorized those twenty-two people to such an extent that they slavered at the sight of the meal and did not speak until they had swallowed it.
For years Wu had no idea that, in addition to fame, this custom would earn him the title of chamberlain (to use Zenoic language), then later high chamberlain, and finally a nebulous position as one of the most powerful men in the empire, whose choleric shrieks over his skillets decided the fate of the court more surely than did any government petition.
Even Wu himself could not pinpoint when he had first lost his certainty that this year’s recipe was completely different from the last. Perhaps it was the chicken with sesame, nine years ago. The sesame was in and of itself nothing novel. Its originality resided elsewhere: from the moment it hatched, the fledgling was fed a special mixture of herbs and grains soaked in hot infusions. It was incredibly ingenious and horrendously laborious, but even so, the result did not have a particularly innovative taste. The twenty-two guests consumed their portions with no less enthusiasm than before, which relieved Wu somewhat, while arousing in him an ill-focused feeling of contempt.
After all, there had been years that were incomparably better, more inventive, more distinctive. For instance, the clerical election year, when he had found a truly exceptional flavoring, known ever since as I mourn you, lost love, my betrothed Li.
(A note: these names were not Wu’s doing; it was the emperor’s literary office that thought them up, or more accurately classified them according to a classical key. The betrothed Li came from a fable, probably connected in some complicated way with the ruler’s ancestry and thus especially in favor. But Wu himself did not know the story; it did not interest him and he had certainly never mourned her.)
Li owed her fame primarily to the fact that she was made from chickens not raised in their land. Wu had imported them from the south. Their long necks gave them a foreign air, true, but above all it was the masterly work Wu had done on them.
En route, several of Wu’s chickens had expired from the tremendous heat. When he discovered this, a fearful rage overcame him, and he nearly beat to death the two laggards sauntering alongside the wagon. He was around fifty at the time, quick-tempered and quite brutal. However, after incalculable effort, hours suffering over the slow flame of enlightenment, he realized how to make use of the chickens’ slightly spoiled tinge, and created a dramatically unusual dish.
It was then he learned the secret that as a deviation from the norm, a mistake serves just as well as anything. For a time he even flung himself into new experiments involving deliberately spoiled ingredients, and it must be said that, despite the morbid domain, he made some interesting discoveries.
Equally splendid was the year of the princess’s engagement, when he had mixed the meat with the sweetly pungent juices of a local tree and made what was almost a dessert; and then the year (he could not remember which) when he froze the chicken until the pieces tinkled delicately in the bowls; and the year of chicken mousse whipped into a stormcloud. There were years when all he had to do was concentrate and an idea came as quickly as a cringing servant handing him a fork.
But for four years now his inspiration had lain mute. Five, actually, since the celebration was just around the corner. In five years he had not managed to find a new flavor.
There were moments when Wu thought he
could not bear his impotence anymore. He did not give in to despair, because he was foremost a man of battle, but for the first time he was faced with the very worst: battle with the nonexistent. If he had seen a way forward, he would have followed it till he dropped, but for five years now it seemed he would drop right where he stood.
Many a time he had been willing to believe that the circle had closed, that there were no new flavors to find. Incidentally, there was a sect of astrologers, right in the palace, trumpeting the coming end of the world, “once all the words have been said,” but the attitude toward them was one of silent reserve.
Wu still lived in the hope that once more the circle would break, that he would resist the grip of the nonexistent and find an herb that no mortal had ever tasted. He would get hold of something banal, something right in everyone’s view, but hidden by the magic of its obviousness. Then the source would be forced to yield and to gush forth from the center of its being. But the celebration was approaching, and as the sun rose he would stand over a pile of dirty bowls and then fall reluctantly into the fitful sleep of the elderly, of which he rarely remembered a thing.
There was a certain comfort in the fact that he did not really have to expend the effort. He knew full well that not one of the guests had a gustatory memory that could span thirty-six years.
Over time Wu had realized that it was he who was abnormal. But he had not yet fathomed that aside from his exceptional culinary imagination, he was a rather ordinary person. His tongue was a miraculous floating island in a sea of superficial education, unrefined sensibility, and quite unexceptional intelligence. He was like those feeble-minded twins from Košice who can multiply five-digit numbers in their heads but will never understand how a toilet flushes. Or — going further back in history! — like the Paris garage attendant who speaks thirty languages fluently but only reads comics and invoices, because his spirit reaches no farther than the metal grating of his garage. — Wu knew that he could offer any of the last thirty-five chickens without anybody recognizing them, but that option still seemed impermissible.
All it took to make him soak his deathbed in sweat was to remember how last year he had stood all day in the Meadow Pavilion, staring for hours into the water. The low, heavy sky turned gray toward night, and the raging river carried with it wrecks, carcasses, beaten trees, and drooping clusters of water narcissus.
Here is how this ignoble story unfolded. He had announced chicken stuffed with stalks of river greens, but the day before the celebration the river flooded and the plans had to be abandoned. Everyone understood, and no one even raised an eyebrow. Wu alone knew why specifically river greens, which, incidentally, were sour and unpalatable. Eight days before — eight days in which he had depopulated the hen-house, like Herod, slaughtering a generation of chickens — a certain foreigner had come uninvited to the court. More precisely, it was a suspicious-looking friend of his nephew’s, most likely in flight from some arm of the law, who in the dead of night had begged Wu for shelter. He said that floods had begun on the Five Rivers and that whole villages had fled wailing into the mountains. Early the next morning he disappeared without a goodbye and no one ever saw him again.
Wu had lived long enough to know how to seize the day. With considered trepidation, he announced his river-greens plan the morning after the boy took off. Then there was no alternative but to wait. He did not know who would come out on top, he or time.
He stood for hours, eyes fixed on the horizon. For the first time in his life he burned the porridge. He did not speak for four days.
At least the heavens granted him this one belated favor. The flood came a day early. The celebration ground to a halt, the whole court was thrown into terror, an evacuation was planned. On a day of impatient surrogate celebration, Wu left the palace early and spent the whole day by himself in the Meadow Pavilion, until the empress herself sent a message, telling him to forget about the stupid chicken and to come make her a handful of beer-roasted almonds.
One such memory is more than enough, and the year was again mercilessly drawing toward autumn. The festivities began tomorrow. There was nowhere to call for help. Wu’s “where” — more than just a place inside him — had vanished with the same inaudible treachery as his inventiveness.
When Wu was very young, he had been a large hungry container the whole world poured itself into. Later (around fifty, when he was proudest, fiercest, and also unexpectedly powerful, which took some getting used to) he had formed the impression that he and the world were equal partners. It was a matter of his will what and whom he opened up to, and he would take the first move, extending his hand, accepting things rationally and voluntarily. But now the end had come. There was nothing to contain. He had had what there was to have. He was living off himself alone. The world’s nozzle had gradually shut off. These days no one gave him anything at all.
His outside world had narrowed to the smallest possible dimensions, the mere shell of a corporeal body which moved with him through space. But recently even this had been further constrained. He never left the kitchen, banquet hall, and the two adjoining corridors. In the day as he slept, at night as he paced from corner to corner like a wild beast, he was plagued by the imminence of his fate. Day after day, time lost its patience. The world was as cramped as a small shoe. In addition, Wu was extremely nearsighted, although no one even suspected it, and thus he had learned to live in the immediate, ever more strictly attuned only to what was within his reach.
They had already painted the great staircase vermilion in honor of the emperor’s birthday. Wu locked the kitchen and transferred the burden of daily work onto his staff. Once or twice he sent out for spices. He had them bring large quantities of ice. He requested a bucket of river sand and a tiny vessel of white ointment used only for cosmetic purposes.
In the final three days nobody saw him. A cloud of black smoke would occasionally pour from his windows, and then a cloud of white smoke. Bowls were frequently heard smashing against the wall.
Night had begun. Wu was tossing out a greasy ladle. The basket by the door — as always at this time — overflowed with similar utensils. Suddenly there was a quiet knock.
With a glass stick slightly flattened at one end, Wu scooped up some red porridge. Then he closed his eyes. He had heard the knocking, but still did not react. It had been many years since anyone visited him at night, and there was no reason suddenly to start believing in ghosts.
Carefully, he wiped the porridge onto the middle and, a second later, onto the tip of his tongue. For a moment he stood with his tongue stuck straight out at attention and imbibed the waves of his breath, then began sibilantly to roll them back up. Just as the taste poured over his upper palate like a carpet of sparkling colors, someone banged on the door again.
Freeze, Wu thought. Freeze like a lizard on a greensward. There’s no one I want to see. No one has the right to take away my final night.
Quietly he rinsed out his mouth and, with a hunter’s concentration, set off on the trail of the taste still quivering on his palate. He had often done this. Mornings would find him walking from wall to wall, mouth agape like a gargoyle, flicking his tongue to dispell the last impression, which often slipped to the very edge of pain.
He knew himself exceptionally well. The monastery had given him a thorough and — except for a couple of insignificant trifles — an anatomically correct understanding of his body, but he knew the worn honeycomb of his tongue best of all. He and his tongue, in fact, had embarked on a strange dual relationship, as when the ego distances itself from one of its parts to be able to experience it better — even at the price of having that part abuse its deceptive autonomy and take on its own life. It was a relationship that could take over one’s soul or nature, a relationship full of emotions, naive guardianship, anger, and lack of understanding.
There might have been happier moments in Wu’s life, but none were more fulfilling than these minutes spent between shimmering shadows, when he stood in taut concentrat
ion, scraping his tongue against his eager gums, trying with all his might to understand. To feel, distinguish, know, assimilate. And again he would set out on his usual route from wall to stove, his fiery tongue flicking out of his mouth like some frenzied divinity.
“Wu?” said a hesitant voice from the darkness. And then again: “Wu?”
Wu froze. Something in his saurian stillness moved slightly. In the whole court, in the whole palace and the whole wide empire, there was no one aside from the shades of the dead who was allowed to call him by name alone. As he raised the latch, he sucked back his sharp saliva with a hiss.
“I knew,” said his guest, making a gesture of greeting with one narrow palm, “that I would find you here at this time, Wu.”
Wu stood silently, his hands in his sleeves, watching the empire’s Head Censor fold up the material of his robe with precise, academically spare movements and then sit down facing him. For a few minutes both old men remained silent.
Outside an angry beak squawked. In the darkness there were many sounds Wu did not recognize. The sentence the censor had just spoken was the first one between them in thirty-three years.
“Wu,” the censor eventually said — impersonally, as if relaying an unclear message — “tomorrow your nephew will be executed.”
The role of this imperial censor in the history of the empire’s poetry — and, in a way, of the whole world’s poetry — was far from insignificant. In his fertile years he ruled his language’s marketplace. History traditionally pigeonholes him as “a co-founder of subjective poetry,” but that “co-” is deceptive, for the others who co-founded it missed our censor by hundreds of miles and dozens of years.
Now the censor slowly slipped his hand underneath his robe. He drew out a sheet of paper.
Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Page 12
