by Michal Ajvaz
“No, the signs are in body language, facial expression, on postcards and in open letters, photographs, pictures and sculptures, newspaper articles and books lying open with notes in the margin and passages underlined. In the week that the picture was on exhibition in Berlin, I managed only to identify a small part of the story-lines written using these letters, but the need to decipher them took hold of me and I longed to read the picture to the end, although I knew very well that I would be unlikely to manage this during my lifetime. But it’ll be marvellous once I have the picture hanging on my wall at home and I’m able to study it when I get in from my night-time excursions to strangers’ rooms and empty rooftops. My life will be wonderful and I’m so much looking forward to it!”
“But you’ve forgotten that you don’t have the money for the picture. Or are we to resume our fight for the necklace?”
“Don’t worry, I’m finished on this roof. But it’s a long time till morning.” With this the girl fell silent; it seemed she was waiting for Baumgarten to invite her to tell him more about the picture. But because the aesthetician, too, was silent, she resumed of her own accord.
“If I were to describe to you everything I’ve seen in the picture, we’d freeze to death up here. Anyway, I don’t have much time—as you know, there’s still work for me to do tonight. But I would like to make up for the unpleasantness I’ve caused you. I’d like to give you at least a brief description of the picture.”
Accepting that he would have to hear the girl out, Baumgarten made himself more comfortable on the tip of the “a,” while cautiously the thief changed her position from the right-hand cap of the “y” to the left so as to be closer to him. The neon tubes hummed quietly; there was something about this sound that reminded Baumgarten of his past, but he did not wish to think about that now. The girl’s mouth gave out cloudlets of vapour as she spoke; these were coloured by the purple light before they dissolved in the dark.
“The picture was four metres long and a metre-and-a-half high. Three-quarters of its surface was covered by a gently rippling sea with a blue sky above it. In the other quarter, on the right, the artist had painted a town with a harbour. It looked like it was somewhere in the Mediterranean. It was the time of the afternoon siesta and the walls were sweltering in the sun. There were suntanned tourists walking along the pier, figures in shorts and colourful T-shirts sitting on the terraces of harbour-side restaurants in the shadow of outstretched sails, on the tables beside them glasses of iced coffee, broad-brimmed straw hats, glossy magazines and half-written postcards.”
“You said you were going to keep it brief,” Baumgarten interposed as the cold continued to bite.
“But that’s why I’m not telling you what was written on the menu cards, in the magazines, on the postcards and in the diary of a history of art student from America, which was lying next to her on a wickerwork chair on a café terrace, although these were all extremely important things. On one of the postcards, for instance, written in green ballpoint…”
“OK, I won’t interrupt you again,” said Baumgarten, who was afraid the thief would go into detail about all the things she wouldn’t be mentioning.
“In narrow streets leading up from the harbour to the ruins of mighty ramparts were women wearing black dresses, sitting on chairs in front of doors which gave straight on to living rooms. In the shadows of open taprooms the wrinkled, tanned skin of natives was visible as they sipped their coffee and their anisette. As I said, when one studies the scenes in the picture, one discovers connections among them which build up into stories.”
“I’m still having difficulty imagining it clearly,” said Baumgarten, who was beginning to be drawn in by the narration.
“It might be better if I were to give you some examples of the stories which I read in the picture. How about the one about the turbine, the peanut butter and the sordid dreams? In a window of one of the apartments you could see three men, the eldest of whom was sunk in a deep armchair showing the youngest something on a sheet of paper, while the third man was sitting by the window flicking through a notebook. In a mirror hanging on the wall in the background was the reflection of the corner of an adjacent room, which was flooded with sun and had a table in it on which was lying a metal part in the shape of a cylinder, which was smeared with honey…No, the story of the sordid dreams is too long and complicated—it’d be better if I told you the one about the golden helicopter. No, not that one—I’ll tell you about the wrecking of the Zephyrus. One of the yachts at anchor in the harbour had the name Zephyrus emblazoned on its side. The last letter of the name rested against a large, brick-red paint stain in the shape of a butterfly, or rather a moth…” (Baumgarten gave the thief a look of reproach, but apparently the girl did not consider her descriptions to be too long-winded.)
“It looked as if someone had painted the yacht as a temporary measure after some kind of accident. On the jetty there stood a sinewy, unshaven native in a checked shirt, one of whose hands was pointing at the yacht, the other making a sweeping gesture while he explained something excitedly to a soft, pink tourist in Bermuda shorts adorned with palm groves and surfers riding great blue waves.” (Baumgarten was relieved the girl did not describe the patterns on the surfers’ swim-wear.) “He appeared genuinely interested in what the old native was telling him. Which means…”
“Which probably means that not long before the yacht had been involved in some kind of adventure which had damaged its hull, and stories of this adventure were spreading across the town.” Baumgarten was trying to interpret the scene in the picture so that he could move the girl’s account forward. Watching the luminous, phantom-like purple snowflakes, it seemed to him for a moment that he knew their full repertoire of dances, which they repeated ad infinitum.
The wrecking of the Zephyrus
“That’s right,” said the thief, nodding enthusiastically. “In one of the streets above the harbour it was possible to look through an open window into a modestly-appointed room. On a shelf on the wall I could see a number of exotic sculptures. There was a suntanned, fair-haired man of about thirty sitting at a desk; he looked like a foreigner who had lived a long time in the south. On the right-hand side of the desk there was a typewriter with rounded keys and a black case on which ‘Underwood’ was written in ornamental gold letters, and beneath this, in smaller letters, ‘Standard Four Bank Keyboard.’ Towards the back of the desk there were several pots containing pencils and pens. Against one of these a plastic frame was resting; this contained a black-and-white photograph of a young woman, laughing, sitting on a deck chair next to a swimming pool. On the left-hand side of the desk there was a folder, out of which sheets of paper covered in dense writing were spilling from the top and bottom. The folder bore the legend ‘Journey,’ which was almost obscured by the kind of drawings people do unconsciously and abstractedly; these drawings were of elephants, crocodiles, and birds of paradise among a lot of grotesque shapes and some names and telephone numbers. All the spaces were filled in with a fancy, complicated net—rather like a spider’s web—and all the figures, letters and numbers were ensnared in this. Next to the scribbled-on folder there was a glass ball used as a paperweight, where one could read distorted letters of various sizes which made up the words ‘Black Hermaphrodite will be with you very soon…’
“All these objects created a kind of rampart along three sides of the desk. In the space this marked out, thirty-eight nine-by-thirteen colour photographs were laid out like cards in a game of patience. The man was bent over these in an attitude of contemplation. Many of the photographs showed the Zephyrus. In the one at the top left-hand corner she was at anchor in the town’s harbour and her paint, white and undamaged, was gleaming in the early-morning sun. Many of the other shots showed the surface of the sea in various guises—gleaming and dark, undulating and flat, whirling restlessly, languid and passive, broken into many small, sharp-spined waves, gathered in a stodgy, formless mass, neurotically tense, listlessly dormant. Regardless
of the sea’s guise, in each of the photos it was scored through with the white lines of marine ropes. In some shots the figure of a man was visible on deck. It was the man sitting at the desk. Apparently he used a self-release mechanism. As far as I could tell, he journeyed in the boat alone.
“One of the photographs showed the yacht lying pitiful on a sandy beach with a hole in its side, its backdrop the dark wall of a jungle of palms. Others provided various views of the coast and interior of an island which appeared to be uninhabited. There were several of the entrance to a cave which was overgrown with lianas. But the majority of the photos there on the desk were of the inside of the cave, its gloomy recesses lit harshly by an electric flash. Evidently the cave had many years earlier been transformed into a speos. Pictures of gods emerged out of the darkness, carved in the rock of the walls. There were inscriptions in an unknown, angular script, altars practically covered with sculptures and objects whose meaning could only be guessed at. Among them I noticed the figurines which now stood on the shelf at the man’s back. All these things led me to believe that the man at the desk was the owner of the Zephyrus, in which he had embarked on a solitary expedition on the seas…”
“…and washed up on an uninhabited island, where he discovered in the jungle a hitherto unknown speos. And now he was writing a book about his adventures and discoveries, which the town’s locals were already regaling the tourists with. At the moment captured by the master from Berlin he was in the process of choosing the photographs for its illustrated supplement.” These last words were from Baumgarten, in whom stretches of apathy and moments of interest in the monstrous picture were fighting for the upper hand.
“I didn’t find anything else of interest in the traveller’s room, so I turned my attentions to the streets of the town,” the girl continued. “My eyes travelled around the maze of streets in the quarter around the harbour until they reached a grouping of houses on a rise hard by what remained of the town’s mighty ramparts. Beyond the half-open shutters at one of the windows I recognized the face of the girl in the black-and-white photograph on the traveller’s desk. She was lying in bed with her eyes closed, with a strip of light across her face which had slipped past the shutters and extended across the otherwise dark room, illuminating a closed book on a bedside table to the left of the sleeper’s head. I wasn’t able to read its title because on top of it there was an open cigarette packet with three cigarettes in it. But I did see a strip of paper sticking out of it which had Chinese characters written on it. To the right, the sleeve of light passed over the hirsute chest of a rather plump young man, who was half sitting, half lying in the bed next to the woman of the photograph. His face was melting into the gloom which enveloped the rest of the room. Otherwise there were only two weak points of light—a red spot on the man’s face—apparently the glowing end of a cigarette—and then a suspicious grey sheen in the half-open handbag of the sleeping girl. Might this be the barrel of a small ladies’ revolver?
“I saw the next scene in the series of pictures connected with the journeying of the Zephyrus through the window of a building which looked like an abandoned Venetian palace rebuilt as a residential house. The window revealed a room whose back wall was covered by a bookcase. There were three men in the room. One of them had a well-groomed grey beard and was sitting in a deep armchair whose covers bore pictures of romantic castles and roses. He was showing something on a sheet of paper to a thin young man in glasses, who was leaning towards his elder in an attitude part curious, part servile. Written in a column on the left-hand side of the sheet were the pointed letters I’d seen in the photographs of the speos; the right-hand side was covered in letters in Latin script. On the windowsill there sat a third man, whose face was obscured. He was reading with interest something someone had written in very small letters in a large notebook. This was written in the Latin script, although there were question marks next to some of the words, and brackets which contained groups of the angular letters.”
“But you’ve already told me about this room. You said that it was part of the story of the turbine and the margarine,” recalled Baumgarten, in whom sleepiness and coldness were struggling against a desire to know the sense of all these long-winded descriptions.
“Of the peanut butter, not the margarine. At least you know now how the stories in the different spaces intersected with one another. I attempted to draw a chart showing how the individual scenes were part of a system. What I ended up with was pretty similar to a plan of the Paris métro. The places where the stories crossed corresponded to interchange stations. And the plots developed in the painted scenes were of a great variety of genres: in the picture I found stories of adventure, stories of love, detective stories, surrealistic stories, stories moral and immoral, mystical, pornographic, humanistic, sado-masochistic and didactic stories, stories of l’art pour l’art, satanist, socialist and Buddhist stories, stories sophisticated and childish, stories of incest, cynical stories, stories sentimental and stories naturalistic. The only thing in this room which belonged in the story of the turbine was the reflection in a mirror of the room next to it, and this had nothing at all to do with the story of the wrecking of the Zephyrus.
“I was unable to decipher the tiny letters in the notebook which the man sitting on the windowsill was holding, so I asked the owner of the gallery for a magnifying glass. With her help I read part of a mythological tale about the goddess of the glitter of gold and a poor fisherman. It seems that the man in the armchair was a linguist or an historian, a university professor perhaps. The other two might have been his assistants or students. I think it was the owner of the Zephyrus who had given the professor the photographs of the inscriptions in the speos and that his research had enabled him to decipher their script and to translate some of them. Now he had invited his colleagues or pupils to him so he could familiarize them with the results of his work.
“The text carved into the rock, a translation of which was written in the notebook, told of the goddess of the glitter of gold, who falls in love with a fisherman. The fisherman refuses her because he loves a girl in the neighbouring village. The goddess, insulted and angry, turns the girl into a shoal of thirty-three crabs. For a long time the girl cannot get used to living in so many bodies; she runs to and fro on the sand of the shore on her hundred-and-sixty-four legs, desperately pressing all her crab-bodies together as if willing them to grow together. But they remain separate. She goes to the fisherman’s shack in order to watch him; she turns on him sixty-six sad eyes on stalks; pathetically and tenderly she extends all her claws towards him. The fisherman becomes used to the crabs and whenever he returns from his fishing he throws them some fish from his catch.
“The girl doesn’t want to reveal who she is because she is ashamed of her crab form and still more of the loss of her singularity. But one evening she is so lovesick that she knows herself to be able no longer to live in anonymity alongside the man she loves. When the fisherman returns from his work the crabs gather in front of his hovel and there in the sand form their bodies into a letter, and then into a second and a third. Astonished and deeply moved, the fisherman reads in the crab-letters the sad news of what has become of his lover. From this moment on the girl transformed into crabs shares the fisherman’s home. She teaches herself to do light housework so she can be at least a little useful. Every day she waits patiently for him to return from the sea, and when in the evening he reaches the shore she runs down to meet him. Then they talk together long into the night, just as they did when the girl was still in a single, human form, but with the difference that the girl now writes her answers in letters she forms with her crab-bodies, dashing around from place to place on her reversible legs. When the goddess finds out about this, she is so angry that she takes her revenge on the fisherman by turning him into the left ear of a small woodland rabbit. The text ended in the middle of a sentence; the story must have continued over the page, but this could not be seen. So I didn’t find out whether the thirty-three cr
abs and the left ear of a rabbit found a way to communicate and to declare their love for each other.”
Leibniz and the hermaphrodite
“After that it took me quite a long time to find another scene which belonged in the story of the wrecked yacht. In the old quarter by the harbour there was a house built into the ruins of a cloister. The columns of the erstwhile cloister, which no longer had weight to bear, stood in the house’s not particularly well-maintained interior garden among bushes and large, colourful flowers. Leading into this interior garden was a door and the wide window of a sculptor’s studio on the ground floor of the house. In the gloom of the studio the outlines of sculptures could be seen, and there were several of them in the garden itself. Labels bearing titles had been attached to the plinths of some of these. A bust standing on what was left of a stone column was labelled ‘Self-portrait’ this was a likeness of the owner of the Zephyrus. When he wasn’t sailing the seas he was a sculptor, and he worked in this garden studio.
“Glinting in the rays of the sun which had found their way through the leaves was a bronze statue. On its pedestal I read ‘Leibniz discovers infinitesimal calculus.’ And indeed the statue was a life-size likeness of Leibniz, deep in thought and wearing a periwig. The philosopher was seated on a low stool, resting his chin on one hand and holding in the other Pascal’s “A Treatise on the Sines of a Quadrant of a Circle,” the reading of which Leibniz declared to have led him to the theory of infinitesimal calculus. ‘I have discovered here a light which the author did not glimpse,’ Leibniz wrote to Guillaume de l’Hôpital. In his contemplation the philosopher had relaxed his grip on the book and it was slowly slipping from his fingers, which perhaps was supposed to symbolize his gradual disentanglement from the original mathematical theories of Pascal. There was a small shaggy dog waiting intently for the book to fall from Leibniz’s hand so it could claim it for itself…”