“You’d never believe it was meat!” someone remarked in an absurdly deep voice, but it was clear that he was being respectful.
Wu devoted himself to tasting this first morsel. As if meditating, he concentrated all his senses on it. He marshaled his attention — the way his superior had taught him, poking Wu in the back with his short cane — guiding it in from the outside, through the gates of sense, where it anchored firmly in his mouth, and then he began to relentlessly pulverize the stimulus.
The impression the meat gave was very strange. You would never believe you were eating meat. You would swear you had a freshly cut stalk on your tongue. Neither would you find it particularly tasty. Just surprising. Its taste was weak, hidden by that moist vegetable frangibility. Its tones were strange. Wu expertly rolled the morsel around in his mouth — and suddenly froze.
“Master Wu is the empire’s blessing!” chanted a functionary from the south, once a cruel and merciless man.
The flavor was not new. Wu tensed all over. He knew this flavor from somewhere.
“Wizard!” a voice called from the depths of the hall.
Where do I know it from? Wu asked himself. He felt a tiny cramp at the thought that he had been wrong, that he had plagiarized himself and inadvertently evoked the same flavor twice.
The noise in the hall grew. As if the crowd could not bear the burden of its astonishment, the room echoed with shouts.
It isn’t possible! I used a completely new approach. And still the flavor is not new. I did not create it. It came from somewhere else.
“Genius!” the functionary shouted.
“Artist!” added Mr. Hayo.
A youthful, pliable flavor. Joyful and, in its own way, simple. Fresh like moist earth under leaves in early spring. It leapt from the dish like a sound.
Wu, the morsel still between his teeth, put all his powers on alert. Imperiously mustering every part of himself, he wracked his memory — of that moment in his mouth, at the confluence of body and soul — to yield up its secret.
“Well, you’ve outdone yourself, Master,” the old empress said, finishing her portion first, as always. “Outmastered the master. You’ve given us something unique to taste. The emperor knows.”
What is it? Wu agonized. That fragile consistency. The way it bursts between my teeth, that moist crunching. Juiciness that doesn’t splash like when someone upsets a glass, but squirts out of hidden vessels. And in the distance: the cold sound of hunger. A young, rapacious hunger.
The empress clapped. Everyone stood. Wu gave a start. He opened his eyes and suddenly, in a fraction of a second, a white flash of enlightenment swept over him. Hunger! He was hungry! For weeks he hadn’t eaten; he had only tasted. At last he knew where he had experienced that flavor.
“Music!” someone called. Small drums sounded from the hallways. Conversations rose like water in a pool. Wu indistinctly saw movements, someone waved to him, someone bowed to him. It was precisely how wild radish tastes. He heard the word ovation.
Radish. Suddenly he felt it on his tongue again, the taste of long-ago fast-days.
The servants changed the candles, and for a while the hall floated in a blinding glow. Wu was no longer in doubt. Yes, he had conjured up the taste of radish. During fasts they had secretly gone to pick them. There had been a whole field of them behind the monastery. Oh, the effort! At dawn they had chewed the radishes with children’s teeth. Sneaking along the narrow field path … dozens of identically shaven little monks, indistinguishable in the morning fog. The oh so ordinary wild radish. Grubbing in the wet soil with their fingers. Oh, the effort!
Wu remembered his half-year of despair, but also the wonder of the last night, not dissimilar to the firm happiness of youth. Just then, as if the floor had begun to slide out from under him with a clang, his seventy-eight years began to disappear beneath him. All the exertion ever channeled through him from the heavens down to the earth culminated in an agonizing effort to stand up.
A dignitary from the east, whom he barely knew, quickly jumped up from his table.
“O chosen one!” he said, offering an old-fashioned bow, almost to his knees. “O Master, I search in vain for the words … I hesitate to … I couldn’t dare to … only my position might give me the right to ask…”
Wu did not answer. He nodded absent-mindedly, to show he was listening, but he heard nothing and groped his way to a row of pillars. His head was spinning. The drummer banged loudly on his drum. The dancing began. Radish.
Time disappearing into time, so many years of self-denial. Those years of effort, plunging into time like a knife into wet clay, had finally yielded up a flavor as simple and old as the world. This madness for the new, this obsession with uniqueness, which had cast him onto this steep path, defying everything that did not yet exist … Wu staggered along the hallway.
“Lead the emperor away!” said the censor back in the hall, in a quiet but very sharp voice.
When Wu had fumbled his way down to the foot of the stairs, he heard a shout from the palace. Dimly he saw the shimmering lights cast someone’s distorted shadow across the staircase. He did not care what was happening, but before he could pass through the gate, someone gently blocked his path.
“Wu,” an all too familiar voice whispered carefully, “follow me. Quietly. Don’t turn around.”
Wu followed. It was night again, the first night in many years that he had nothing he needed to do. His mind a blank, he paced after the tall figure, strangely slender in the dark, until they reached the garden by the pond. Finally the shadow stopped amid the shadows.
“Wu,” it said again, “I don’t have much time. Has your nephew gone?”
Wu nodded. He stared at the black ball of branches swaying in the night breeze. Leaves rustled.
“Good. Wu, I managed to alter the charge. He’s only been convicted of illegal possession, for removing materials from the emperor’s library.”
The night, alive with its own life, spoke in screeches.
“It’s better this way. That poem … I destroyed it. No one besides the two of us knows about it. You won’t say anything about it, of course. It’s a solution.”
A veiled question was hidden in the censor’s words, but Wu merely stared into the gray moonlight.
“Your nephew is lucky,” the censor continued. “The emperor is on his deathbed. I think he will not live till morning. Tomorrow there will be confusion everywhere, and before anyone remembers, the boy will be beyond the Five Rivers.”
Wu suddenly felt cold. Repetition, it occurred to him, but without the word. He hid his hands in his long sleeves. Multiplication, proliferation. Nothing can wrench from existence that which it does not contain. Although only autumn, it was nearly freezing.
“It’s truly better this way,” the shadow repeated with a hint of pleading in its voice, which only someone who had studied it diligently would recognize. “I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”
“Yes,” Wu said absently. Searching. The source, the spring of desire. And all rivers flow to the sea.
“Wu, I have to go back. Will you forgive me?” the censor asked humbly. He retreated a step. Wu nodded. The other old man suddenly placed his hand on his heart and bowed to him in a mute farewell. Wu did the same. For a moment they stood like that in the darkness, bowing to each other, and then the censor turned and quickly vanished among the cherry trees.
Wu sat down on the grass. It was already moist with morning dew. His nephew, meanwhile, was wandering along the shore of an unknown river, slipping along its muddy embankment, and because he was a person whose destiny was impatience and yearning, he sobbed loudly, breaking his nails on the icy stones. Wu sat, eyes closed, and with strict attentiveness followed the slow disappearance of time beneath his feet until morning, when the long palace trumpets informed the realm of the emperor’s death.
Daniela Fischerová (b. 1948) is a leading Czech writer of the generation born after the Second World War. She is best known for her plays, whi
ch have been staged around the world, including in the United States. She is also known for her children’s books, screenplays, and radio plays.
Her first play, Dog and Wolf, caused such a political scandal that she was banned from having her plays performed for eight years. Dog and Wolf and Sudden Misfortune have both been translated into English and performed in the U.S.
Fischerová lives in Prague.
The book’s translator, Neil Bermel (b. 1965), teaches Czech and Russian at Sheffield University in England. He has translated two novels by the noted Czech writer Pavel Kohout: The Widow Killer (1998) and I Am Snowing (1994). A graduate of Yale University, he received his doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from University of California, Berkeley. He grew up in New Rochelle, New York.
The jacket illustrations were done by Irena Šafránková, a Czech artist living in Prague.
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