The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  “You’re confusing me. Was this a real dog or a bronze one?”

  “It was part of the statue, of course, so it was bronze. It was bronze and painted on the picture. The statue depicted the ideas of Leibniz in an original manner. It was similar to when someone’s visions and ideas are painted onto a picture with their figure, when the painter puts these in the space next to the figure’s head. (Usually the figure has the wide-open eyes of the visionary or his eyes are cast downwards to show that he is immersed in his inner world.) In front of Leibniz in the air (but in fact attached to the statue by thin wires) was a geometric diagram—a quadrant bounded by a horizontal line x and a vertical line y (the lines were drawn by metal bars and the letters were soldered on to these). At point I, in the upper part of the quadrant, a tangent was made, and this—at points A and B—sprouted two metal abscissae, one parallel to line x and the other to line y. They intersected at point C inside the quadrant, thus giving the catheti of a right triangle whose hypotenuse was the segment AB in the tangent.”

  “I don’t understand this at all, nor can I imagine it. I know very little about mathematics,” Baumgarten protested.

  “It’s simple, I’ll show you,” said the thief, taking off her black glove and drawing a quadrant in the snow with her index finger. But as she stretched to describe its base and sagitta, the y beneath her gave a fearful crack and in terror she grabbed Baumgarten by his dressing gown. He suggested she leave off the explanations: for the listener’s understanding of the story of the wrecked boat a knowledge of infinitesimal calculus was probably not altogether necessary.

  “You’re right,” the girl conceded. “You should just know that the right triangle ABC plays an important role in all of this and that Leibniz realized that if we reduce the horizontal base of this triangle, correspondingly we reduce the second cathetus so that the triangle will always remain homothetic; the relation of the two catheti maintains a constant value which is a characteristic of the curve of the line at point I. The infinite reduction on which Leibniz was meditating was expressed in the statue by three fine wires leading from the apex of the triangle which gradually drew nearer to one another before coiling themselves into a spiral. The coiling wires formed triangles in their midst, each smaller than the last. On one of the arcs of this spiral of ever-smaller triangles, which disappeared into the trees, sat the sculptor’s tamed parrot, which was green with a red head and was holding a date in its mouth.

  “For the story about the wrecking of the boat, the important thing was the statue standing directly next to Leibniz. This was carved in ebony and was a depiction of a hermaphrodite emerging from the waves of the sea, holding a large, open book in its hands. For sure the words in the letter on the desk of the sculptor’s flat were about this statue. (Baumgarten had no recollection of what these words were, but he was too tired to ask.) In the book one could read a poem written in letters formed from pearls and set into the black ebony of the pages. This was a poem the sculptor had written for the woman he loved, who at this moment was lying in bed with another man. I imagine that the sculptor and traveller wanted to make the woman a gift of pearls he had found in the speos on the island. He wrote a poem for her and worked on the statue of the hermaphrodite, which were also intended as presents for her (the hermaphrodite was meant to symbolize their ideal communion); then it came to him that his gifts to his beloved would be more original if he made the three into one.

  “But surprisingly the poem written in pearls had little in common with love poetry. In painstaking rhyme and regular stanzas it told that the dead do not reveal themselves at night in churchyards or old houses, as people foolishly believe, but that they like the sun, light and warm. So they walk upon sandy beaches, and many people meet their dear-departed on the beach at Waikiki, on the beaches of California, on the Epi-plage or Tahiti beaches of Saint-Tropez, even on the municipal pebble beach in Nice. The epic poem in pearls told how a middle-aged businessman goes on holiday for the first time without his wife, who has been kept at home by her career commitments. Through a travel agent he books a stay on the Aegean island of Mykonos. On his very first day on Paradise beach a suntanned girl in a swimsuit calls to him, and to his great astonishment the businessman recognizes her as a woman he once loved, who died in a car accident twenty years earlier.

  “After that they meet on the beach every day, and on a sun bed under a parasol or under the reed awning of the beach bar she tells him of life in the underworld; she shows him which of the visitors to the beach are deceased; she greets other dead folk as if they are all members of some club. She says that life in the underworld is not especially entertaining, nor is it particularly depressing. Admittedly the vast underworld spaces are a little unwelcoming and hardly abounding with comforts, but they are clean and always kept tidy. She claims that such a life is quite tolerable, that it might even be slightly better than life before death: the regime of the underworld is not very strict and the deceased are able to leave Erebus every day. If they return in the evening at a time later than allowed for by their exeat, generally all they receive is a reprimand. They can go anywhere on Earth they choose, and as many of them love warm, sandy beaches they spend whole days on the hot sand.

  “She isn’t sure whether she is in Hell or in Paradise. She says that this is a common topic of discussion among the deceased, that everyone’s opinion on it is different. But there is no higher authority in the underworld to arbitrate their disputes. The guards who watch the gate are themselves deceased who have been in the underworld for a long time, as is the captain of the ship of the dead which takes them ashore every morning. Every evening the businessman waits with her on the cooling beach, on which most of those remaining are deceased, until he hears the distant drone of the engine of the ship of the dead and a white speedboat sweeps into the bay. Then they kiss and the girl climbs aboard with the others and gives him a last wave before the boat disappears behind the rock. When after two weeks they say their final goodbyes, the girl asks if she will ever see him on Mykonos again. The businessman replies that it is unlikely he will ever again manage to go on holiday without his wife. ‘No matter,’ says the girl. ‘You can visit me once you die. I’ll give you my address. The underworld is pretty vast and complex and you might not find me otherwise. Then we can make up for lost time. I’m already really looking forward to the time we can walk together on Paradise beach every day; in fact, we can visit all the beaches of the Aegean…’ Hey, don’t go to sleep or you’ll fall.”

  Dances in the fire

  These last words were not those of the deceased woman on Mykonos; they were meant for Baumgarten. A pleasant torpor had indeed taken hold of his body; his eyes were closing, their lashes were wet with melted snow, and he was seeing the snowflakes as foam of the waves on the Aegean beach the thief had been telling him about. When the girl saw that the dozing aesthetician was swaying precariously on the tip of the a, she shook him. Baumgarten insisted he had not been asleep at all, that he had been listening to her attentively, but immediately afterwards his head began to sink towards her lap. The girl was not pleased to stop talking about her favourite topic but she concluded that Baumgarten was too sleepy to pay her any heed and it was time to go.

  She took him by the hand and led him along what remained of the word Lafayette. When they reached the final “e,” she saw that he was a little more alert; on their way down she would attempt to tell him something more about the picture. Baumgarten, half-asleep and serene, was happy to be led; he skipped over the letters with the lightness of a somnambulist. The girl’s talk had the quality of snow-music and as such was no bother to him.

  “I thought that the story of the wrecking of the Zephyrus was one of island treasure and heartache,” the thief said, giving Baumgarten a radiant smile. “But in the fine weave of the story these were only secondary motifs. The Berlin picture was full of such confusing signs and unexpected twists. Then it occurred to me to use the magnifying glass to look into the car which stood in front o
f the house of the sculptor’s unfaithful mistress. And I saw in the car four agents of the Chinese secret service.”

  Baumgarten wished for a moment to sit on the short, horizontal line which intersected the second “t,” as this put him in mind of a seat. But the thief pulled him away.

  “Just keep going, you’ll be home in a few minutes. One of the Chinese agents was aiming a rifle with a silencer and telescopic sights at the head of the man who was lying in the bed with the sculptor’s mistress. The muscles of the Chinese’s trigger finger were tensed. Then it came to me that the red spot I’d taken for the glowing end of a cigarette was in fact the light made by the gun’s sights, and it was wandering over the man’s face. The next moment he was likely to catch the full force of the Chinese’s rifle; had the painter shown the town a second later, one would probably have seen in the room a bloodied face and a pillow stained with red. And what’s the connection between all this and the Chinese characters on the strip of paper sticking out of the book on the bedside table? Is this merely a coincidence, or does the sculptor’s mistress know more than we think about the game the secret service is playing? And what of the revolver in her handbag? What does she intend to shoot at with that? Perhaps you’d be interested to know what happened.” The girl turned to face Baumgarten, who had not spoken, because at that very moment he was giving himself up to a dream in which the violet neon letters were changing into water nymphs with glowing bodies, dancing in a woodland glade.

  “The picture didn’t show whether the mystery man in the bed escaped with his life. After all, the picture wove together thousands of story-lines, many of which went deep into the past, although all ended at the moment at which the town was captured. So it was unclear what would happen in the next fraction of a second in any of the stories. As you can see, we’ve reached the end of the word. Just a few steps along the roof of the building next door and we can climb down the fire escape and through the skylight to the staircase; I’ve tried it before. Oddly enough it was a torn poster I saw on a wall in the quarter around the harbour, a poster announcing a performance by a ballet company, that led me to answers to the questions I’d been asking myself. Among the things the sculptor had found in the cave-temple were two suits of clothing to wear during the performing of rituals. On religious festivals the priests would wear these to dance their sacred dances in the lake of red-hot lava which bubbled in the mouth of the volcano at the island’s centre. The suits were woven of special fibres which, so it seemed, were resistant to any degree of heat and insulated the body quite perfectly. Naturally certain international concerns became interested in the suits, as did the general staffs of the armies of many countries. The impractical sculptor had never imagined that the suits would become the subject of great interest, that he would be able to earn a vast sum of money by them. He gifted the suits to his friends, members of an avant-garde ballet troupe, and they wore them in the compelling final act of a ballet on the theme of Plotinus’s Enneads, the whole of which was set in the fire of the One, represented on stage by a real earthly fire.

  “For a long time I racked my brains as I sought to work out who was the man lying in bed with the sculptor’s mistress. Who was the man on whom the Chinese had their weapons trained? I’d almost given up hope of finding out when I discovered a photograph of him in a newspaper folded into a hat and worn by a man spraying the body of a car with red paint in a car-repair shop on the edge of the town. The headline told me that the sculptor’s rival was a branch director for a giant weapons concern. Was the sculptor’s mistress in league with him, had she betrayed him to the Chinese agents, or was she playing a game of her own against them all?”

  As he continued along the snow-covered roof Baumgarten became more alert, but still he did not pay much attention to what the girl was saying. He heard some words to the effect of “…at a secret meeting in Singapore in which all parties were involved, it emerged that…”, and “…next day they found the body of the Amsterdam diamond dealer in the bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer…”, and “…Doctor Xiang Liu’s number was circled in the telephone directory.” Once again Baumgarten’s drowsiness was chopping the whole which the girl had so painstakingly composed in Berlin into disconnected fragments. They reached a kind of shelf where the thief rummaged in the snow for a moment or two before lifting a metal hatch and pushing the half-sleeping aesthetician into a dark opening. Soon they were descending the unlit staircase of the silent building. There was a sound of snoring from behind one of the doors. Before long they reached the empty street. Baumgarten saw the display windows of the department store, how they illuminated the snowflakes dancing above the pavement, and behind them he saw the door of the building, which he passed through every day. He was surprised to see how close it was; on the roof, the breadth of the department store’s facade had seemed to him greater than the distance required by an expedition across Greenland.

  He gathered his senses and said to the girl, “You should get some sleep. I need to put my head down, too. Tomorrow I’ll come to the gallery and lend you the money for the picture. And there’ll be no hurry for you to pay it back.”

  The thief hesitated, then gave him the address of a gallery on the Left Bank of the Seine. She accompanied Baumgarten to the door of his building before waving down a taxi whose lights emerged from the swirling snow and disappeared. Back in his flat the aesthetician changed into dry pyjamas and set his alarm clock. Then he dropped onto the bed and fell asleep immediately. The next day at eleven o’clock he was at the gallery the girl had described to him. He learned that there would be no auction there that day, and no one knew anything about a picture of a harbour town. The thief did not come, nor did he ever see her again. Later he asked colleagues at the university who lectured on contemporary painting about the picture, but all they did was shrug their shoulders. He described it to some art critics from Berlin who were in Paris for a symposium, and they all listened with amazement to his tales of the statue of Leibniz, the crabs, the Chinese agents and the ballet-dancing Enneads. But none of them had seen the picture or knew of the drowned painter…When my Paris acquaintance finished his story, he checked his watch, made his apologies, and left me alone in the café with a story with no point and no moral.

  Fragments and wholes

  When I went over the whole Rue des Beaux-Arts story again, I reached the conclusion that probably it was not true, even though I could not imagine the reason why my Paris acquaintance would have invented it. It was not merely that the story-lines were implausible: in the descriptions of the motionless objects, for example, there was a heavy whiff of French literary influences, and the commentaries in the last part of the story were suspiciously reminiscent of Roussel and Perec. In conjuring up in the café pictures of snowflakes swirling in the light of violet neon, the narrator so befuddled me that I did not for one moment doubt the veracity of his stories. But next day, when I noticed that the lettering bearing the name of the Galeries Lafayette department store had no resemblance to the lettering of the narrator’s description, I began to suspect I had been duped. And now I am almost certain that nothing I was told in the café actually happened.

  And what is worse, I realized with regret that the story was not particularly well thought out. I have described already how there were two sets of identifiers of things with letters, each the mirror image of the other—in the farmyard, where things were transformed into letters, and on the roof of the department store, where letters were transformed into things. Each of these carried the hero to a new world; I think that the more radical encounter with a new world was in the neon labyrinth of the roof. Admittedly it may seem that the Homeric inscription in rusty tools is in complete defiance of the logic and order of our world, but the peculiar spectacle in the farmyard is blurred by the fact that we can only find a place for it in the categories known to us, those of the miraculous, the mystical and the supernatural; these are still components woven into our world (and as such are traps for those who seek other worlds). The mate
rial power of words, however, which the chase on the roof stirs into life, opens up a strange space between things and letters, a space that eludes categorization, a space that is neither in the world nor out of it but in a strange, impossible place opened with the help of this power. Through the gap it is possible to catch a glimpse of a certain disquieting action that perhaps reaches back to the sources of action in our world, an action that marks the birth and death of all worlds. In this sense the episode on the roof was closer to the islanders’ identification of objects with letters than the episode on the farm. The islanders were not in the least excited by the supernatural; if an angel were to appear in a deserted street in the lower town, the inhabitants of the island would not be particularly interested, although they would admire the rippling of its robe and listen to the murmur of its wings.

  These two related motifs were interwoven cleverly in the story, but the promised identification of letters with objects regrettably remained isolated and barren—in the remainder of the story nothing grew from them. The state in which simultaneously we see a thing, react to it and read it as a letter casts us into an unimaginable, yet real space, in which it is not clear whether seeing, reacting and reading are parts of a single primary action or it is their incompatibility that has set the dizzying vortex in motion. And so this unsatisfactory state, which was tied to the object-letter motif, called for climax and catharis, but such a maturation of this motif in the plotline of the story was not achieved. Although the motifs of the crab’s letters and the pearls on the Berlin picture were a repeat of the object-letter drama, they showed it in weakened form rather than developing it further, just as the ornamentation of a frame is sometimes a simplified repetition of the motifs on the canvas.