by Michal Ajvaz
I remember us talking about The Castle when we were having a picnic on the rocky headland by the lower town. We were sitting above the sea on a hot, fragrant rock; I was looking down on the town’s first houses, into the empty, shadowy rooms whose windows were only two or three metres distant from the stony incline; I was looking at the wide boulevard, how it ended nonsensically at the foot of the rock, how it led somnambulistically in a single direction across the whole town until in the distance of the far side it sunk itself into the sand dunes. In the meantime I told Karael about the wanderings of the land surveyor in the snow-covered village. And I thought about how I could answer Karael’s objections. By this time I had reached a certain understanding of the nature of the islanders, so I knew that there was no point in talking of a desire to hear the original word of law. So I said that at the very least K. was spurred on in his efforts by the ambition to perform the work of a land surveyor in the village. But Karael was surprised that he should think the work of the surveyor so much better than the work he was given, that of the school janitor.
I said to her, “Fine, I’ve been on the island long enough now to understand the point you’re making, that a king’s ruling is something created in conversation, that we need take no interest in the words the king actually pronounces. I also understand that this need not be important to the king himself, that he, too, finds his true rulings in words born out of the echoes of his words and the whisperings of the water and the wind. But this changes nothing in the fact that down there in the royal palace there lives—sometimes, at least—a real person whom you cannot identify. Perhaps the main reason for my wish to meet the ruler is curiosity, but I would say that curiosity is not the worst of all reasons on which to base a desire.”
Laughing, Karael asked, “Would you like to pay a visit to the king today?”
“What nonsense is this you’re uttering?” I was astonished. The island’s king seemed to me such a vague and distant notion that it had never crossed my mind I might get to meet him.
“Once we finish eating, let us head to the palace.”
Although I was baffled I swallowed quickly my portion of shell wrap (you will read more about this in the chapter on the island’s cuisine) and waited impatiently while Karael finished eating. Did she have some kind of special pass that would get us into the palace? I knew that at that time no one was altogether sure who the king was; indeed, I had heard conjecture from a variety of sources on the ruler’s identity. How could we possibly gain such easy access to a figure of such mystery? When Karael at last finished eating, we ran down the track which threaded its way through the rock of the bluff, like a continuation in parody of the broad, empty boulevards which passed through the town. Before long we were in the street where the royal palace was; the entirety of one side of the street was occupied by the palace’s facade, which now was bathed in shadow.
The palace looked onto the street through a uniform row of high windows, which—in common with all windows in the lower town—had no glass. We walked the length of the building’s seemingly unending front. It was as though there was a noiseless conveyor belt bringing the windows on the far side of the palace’s empty rooms to the windows at the near side, filling them with the clear seascape and the glaring blue of the sky. It took us quite a long time to reach the arched entrance. Here a cold wind was blowing. We mounted a stone staircase to the first floor, where we passed a series of identical rooms, all without furniture, all with drifts of sand in their corners, all piled high with old papers from the distant past, when reports were still submitted to the king in writing and the royal commands were also issued thus. The dust was swirling in sloping columns of sunlight.
I asked Karael if she had ever been in the palace before.
“No,” she said, “But I still hope we’ll be able to find the king.”
As we walked on and breathed the smell of old, cracked wooden floors, and the remains of faded paintings appeared on the walls like phantoms, she explained to me that anyone could enter the palace, it was just that no one chose to do so because no one was particularly interested in the king. It was true that at that time there was a lot of talk in the upper town about who was king, but the fact the question of the king’s identity was an interesting topic of conversation did not mean that it awoke in people the desire to take a look at the royal palace, particularly when the days were as hot as this.
“It may be that the king is not here today,” she told me. “But you can come here on your own whenever you feel it.”
But I was in luck. By the window of one of the rooms there was a heavy desk that had almost certainly come to the island on a ship, and sitting at this with her back to us, looking out to sea, deep in thought, was a young woman. When she heard our footsteps the woman turned round and smiled at us. I smiled back and Karael waved. I had the impression the girl was pleased to see us; ruling the island must have been agonizingly boring, and I believe she would have been happy to invite us into the room but was too shy to do so. When in the next room I asked Karael if she had known that her friend was queen, she told me she had suspected so.
The very next day I met the queen in the upper town, and I spoke to her on several occasions after that, but I never mentioned our encounter at the palace. It seemed to me it would have been tactless to do so; I thought I read a certain embarrassment in her expression. I realized that the position of king of the island was the most worthless, the least substantial, the most powerless position of all, as it was furthest removed from the final wording of the law. The king’s only privilege was the opportunity granted him to spend his days walking through a long series of rooms scented by the sun, looking at the sea and the white boats entering and departing the harbour. I believe that the queen was glad we failed to mention her position. Although the person who was king enjoyed respect on the island, this respect was mixed with pity and—I believe—a certain contempt.
Words and rustlings
The speech of the islanders was one of the things I liked most about the island. Before I was able to understand the language, I used to enjoy listening to the fluent stream of sounds from which all sharp edges had been smoothed, in which all impacts had been softened, how they mixed peacefully with the chatter of the sea and the palm leaves on the shore and the gentle trickling and dripping of water in the upper town. The chatterings and rustlings of the island were tenderly accepting of the sounds. When a word sounded, it was never as it is with us in the north; in our own towns and countries a sound suddenly and without portent penetrates an empty silence, where nothing is waiting for it and where it has nothing to catch hold of, or else it sinks itself into a strange, hostile noise, which it must then drown out and suppress. On the island, words tended to emerge in crystallized form on the surface of rustles, sounding as if they had long been in preparation at their core. The finished word-crystal seemed to be of the same fabric as the other sounds, and there was no fundamental difference between what they had to impart and what the words were saying.
All this might give the impression that the speaker of the language was indifferent to his listener, that speech was incapable of genuine dialogue. But things were more complicated than that. It is true that I often had the feeling the islanders spoke more for themselves than for others, that they tended to listen more to the sounds around them than to what their conversation partner was saying. But the country and the moment gave up to them so many sweet juices, which gathered and solidified in words; by their tantalizing appeals and magical suggestions again and again these drew the speaker away from the realm of ready-made, already-dying thoughts, so that sounds embedded in the landscape ultimately granted the listener more than he gleans from conversations in our part of the world, where all we attend to is the words of the other, severed from their roots and drying out, while we remain indifferent to and indeed erase all other sounds. And in this way we are so completely taken in by the childish exchange of ready-made thoughts and dried-out words that we would fail to notice
—were it to resound right next to us—the most wonderful piece of music that held in its notes the germs of magical answers to our questions and possessed the ability to tell us what angels and demons thought of our affairs. The islanders were convinced that such a marvellous musical composition, in which fluttered sources of questions which were also germs of answers, resounded around us all the time; at any given moment in a conversation they were prepared to submit themselves to this surface of clear sounds.
And so, although I often had the feeling that the islander with whom I was in conversation was not really listening to me, curiously enough I learned to find in words born out of the whispers of places and moments more answers to my questions than my discussions in the north tended to grant me. Perhaps the islanders did not listen to the words of the other person directly; they did not concern themselves with his thoughts in their final state, rather persisting in turning their attention outward, to the murmuring sounds—and also the shapes—of the country in which the dialogue was taking place. In these murmurs and shapes the words and thoughts of the other re-appeared, transformed. The sounds, lines and colours of the landscape undermined thought. Words and thoughts—when they came into contact with the music of the landscape and the magical script of rough shapes still free of the prison of things—began to disintegrate, to release old rhythms that had been present at their birth; movements unfurled whose unrest contained the beginning of a question, whose mysterious gravity held the germ of an answer.
And because speech was of the same matter as the other sounds of the island, the meanings carried by words were merely an appeal issued by the material of sounds. Speech was a dream of noises, and from these noises it did not move very far. The islanders knew that the murmurs were really composed of hundreds, perhaps thousands of utterances made simultaneously, that they were generated by the unfolding of an infinite number of stories all told at the same time. They were aware that a murmur was a wise, blissful richness which held words in contempt and shut itself off from them, but they felt, too, that every murmur contained an urgent longing for the liberation of at least one of the story-lines of its blend, that the thread of one plot at least should be unravelled from its fabric. This is why the islanders listened in silence to the sounds of the island, and this is why they spoke.
Another consequence of this homogeneity of speech and sounds of the island was that there existed on the island no sound which did not communicate something in some way akin to speech. The sounds of the island were germs of speech or traces left by it, reverberations of words which were not only the decline and disappearance of meaning but also its liberation and cleansing, as it is when in a broken, decaying, no-longer-usable thing a hidden scent is aroused that expresses the truth of that thing’s existence. For this reason there was no silence on the island. After some time, I, too, learned to perceive that which I had taken for silence as an open country of subtle sounds, as speech, as the whisperings of a faceless god.
And for this reason it seemed to me that conversations on the island had no beginning and no end, and that they contained no pauses. A dialogue was the continuation of noises and murmurs, weaving its somewhat darker thread into their fabric; and moments when the communication desisted were just moments when this thread was lost without any split or break appearing in the tissue. Even at those moments when the quietest sounds were subsiding, I felt that the fabric was continuing to unravel; now it was completely white, although it was still of the same smooth, unbroken material. For a time the words dissolved into the murmur, giving up their meanings to it and satiating it by them, perishing blissfully in the murmur and allowing their silent current to crystallize into new words. The islanders did not speak to fill the silence, as they knew no silence; they spoke because in the river of rustles they discovered the germs of words, utterances and images, because in the sounds around them they discovered the thoughts most inherent to them—thoughts which before then they had not known.
But I never thought that the islanders had discovered some kind of paradisiacal state of language. They were so afraid of losing the live source of thought that they never removed themselves very far from it; the vaults of their thoughts were not characterized by courage, the desperation of blind fumbling and the anguish of work; they resounded with sounds from the depths and shone with the lustre of life, but even so I could not help holding them a little in contempt. It is necessary first to lose the music of beginnings before it can return as a dreamlike echo in the architecture of thought. Although the language of the islanders was beautiful, it was a beauty which made weary.
The silence that was lost on the island never returned to me, even after I returned north. The ability to perceive an unbroken, endless fabric of sound stayed with me and became both a source of torment and a well that nurtured a strange happiness. During the day there are so many images woven into the fabric that absorb my attention, that I am hardly aware of the feel of its material; but at night when I am unable to sleep I feel it pass over my face, over my whole body in a slow, gliding movement. Just for a moment I would like to extricate myself from it, to enter the space beyond it, a space unknown to me; I have a desperate longing for silence. But in the material there is no opening, no chink, and now at night there are no pictures against it that might draw my attention away from the fabric; all there is here is a scattering of small, featureless and vague shapes that remind me of the patterns on the duvet cover. At night I appreciate how everything mutters and whispers, how the things of the world rustle, giving sound to the flow of time; I appreciate that all sounds, of the day and of the night, bear the same monotonous, nonsensical message.
But sometimes the disagreeable sense that I am unable to tear through the fabric of sounds in which I am wrapped like a mummy, is transformed to delight; then it seems to me that the murmur of being is the most beautiful music one could ever hear and I feel joy and gratitude that it is given to me to listen to such a concert. Of course, what I hear is no longer the beautiful sounds of the island, the call of the waves and the babbling of springs falling from rocks; now in the dark I hear the sounds of the rain, the trams and cars in the distance, the roar of an aeroplane, and also the sounds of my building at night, its wheezes and groans. But another thing I learned on the island was that the character of sounds is not so important: all sounds are parts of a single musical composition.
The panopticon of grammar
The language of the islanders overflowed with an unbelievable quantity of prefixes and suffixes and these encased the roots of words front and back, denoting peculiar features of reality which to begin with I completely failed to grasp, or at least I did not understand why such trivialities were considered important enough to merit their own forms in the language. For example, there was a suffix which described how the thing indicated by the root of a word gave off a heavy scent of decay; a further suffix could be stuck onto this to make it clear that although the surface of a thing was now taut, it would soon begin to slacken; and a prefix might be attached to the front of a root form to communicate that the thing was submerged in shadow, and that this shadow was of either a mauve or a greenish colour.
In this way, the root of a word was smothered by prefixes and suffixes so that it gave the appearance of a mere appendage, while the thing itself disappeared beneath all the designations and determinations, all the shadows, lights, vibrations and rhythms, odours and degrees of tension and laxity communicated by the prefixes and suffixes. The prefixes and suffixes that came together in a particular word carried so much determination that it might seem that this in itself was enough for the designation of a thing and that the root of the word was no longer necessary. The determination indicated by the root of the word presented itself as a feature at once inessential and dispensable; and it was true that one’s failure in conversation to catch the root of a word was of no great consequence. (The roots of words were about as important for the island’s lexicon as the king was for its political organization.)
I believe that the language of the islanders was in a phase of transition, that it was heading towards a state where the roots of its words would disappear altogether and words would be formed only from clusters of prefixes and suffixes that would collide in the middle of words, although perhaps a hyphen or a weak vowel would serve as a kind of memorial to the now-extinct root. I do not think, however, that this tendency to eradicate its roots reigned over the history of the island’s language as a whole. Not only things themselves were subject to constant change on the island, but the manner of these changes was also constantly evolving. It is quite likely that once their language has reached the stage at which words are formed of nothing more than clusters of prefixes and suffixes, other longings and dreams will be awakened within the islanders, and perhaps the long-changing edifice of prefixes and suffixes will collapse, to be replaced by short, concise words to which it will be impossible to attach any prefix or suffix, as anything these could possibly indicate will already be contained in the words.
And as if all this were not enough to deal with, at the end of the series of suffixes there sprouted bunches of case endings. To this day I remain unsure of quite how many cases the island’s language had. I had the impression that the case system was constantly swelling; I counted seventeen cases, but after I had been on the island a year I discovered another, as if an inflexion had suddenly put out new shoots. I do not know whether an old, little-used grammatical form had risen back to the surface or whether someone had invented a new case because he had needed it or simply liked it. But other cases were dying off, so it seemed there was no danger that the case system would proliferate so as to contain an immeasurable quantity of endings.