by Michal Ajvaz
Once I was accustomed to the island’s cuisine I stopped thinking about what was matured and what was spoiled, stopped searching anxiously for signs of degeneration and decay in its flavours, stopped wondering whether the sweet aftertaste on my palate had in it a tone of growth or a sound of the juices of death. I came to take pleasure in the labyrinth of flavours, which was perhaps still more puzzling and insidious than the maze of the island’s grammar or that of the island’s script. I learned to wander around this new labyrinth, where individual flavour-tones appeared, each with its own world, each world acknowledging, supporting and denying the others. These tones formed a complex figure in which one was mirrored by another; the reflection showed a great, lavish world of foodstuffs, with inner landscapes populated by men and beasts with flowing bodies, where things occurred which were nothing more than the fizzing of energy yet—or so it seemed to me—were no less interesting than stories of Italian lovers from feuding families or irresolute princes in gloomy Danish castles. To lose one’s way in this labyrinth was a joy; it was impossible to extract from it—as things that were foreign—tones of decay, as even rotten tones were part of the maturation of a foodstuff, which as it matured also rotted into pure tones which appeared in its dreams.
On my return to Europe I was once invited to a restaurant where food from the island was served as something very rare and special. I was incensed by the way the European gourmets chose to enjoy it but I did not attempt to explain to my table companions that they did not understand the island’s cuisine and that their interpretation of it was wrong. The flavours of the island were translated carelessly into the language of European cuisine and the result was something extremely banal. The half-rotten tones were taken to be of the same order as high game; the presence of these tones was interpreted as a sophistication that afforded a frivolous delight from being on the edge of the normal, a delight engendered by the risk implicit to being on the border between the eatable and the uneatable. I could not blame my fellow diners for this as they had only a slight knowledge of culinary hermeneutics which was born out of the world of boiled, baked and fried foods and which was of no use to them beyond this world. An islander would have eaten something different in that restaurant, even if he had served himself from the same dishes. For the islander no flavour-tone was on the edge: flavour-tones appeared in a labyrinth which had no centre and no edges.
The last island
Although, as I said, I learned to like the flavours of the island, still there were times when I could not get a morsel of the meals I was offered past my lips, when my gorge would rise at the smells wafting in from the kitchen, when I would dream of goulash and schnitzel with potato salad. Strange to say, Karael experienced such periods of disgust, too. I do not know whether all inhabitants of the island were affected like this and kept this information to themselves or whether it was Karael’s proximity to me which created disorder in how she perceived things. I have to say that it usually seemed she was as resistant to foreign influences as the islanders in general, who had succeeded in chewing up and swallowing Christianity just as they had technological civilization. That the only one on the island forgetting the assumptions of his own world was me; that only I was developing an ever-stronger liking for half-rotten food, for listening to the murmurs and observing the nonsensical, undulating shapes.
As the case may be, at dinner at her house in the upper town Karael would sometimes push away her plate of violet purée and crimson jelly and begin to complain quietly about the island, about its world, about how this was modelled by the island’s grammar, about how the island’s perspective made itself manifest, how the hands of the island touched and the tongues of the island tasted. I had to lean towards her over the bowls and plates in order to catch her quiet lament. She whispered, “Everything always congeals and runs, runs and congeals, it’s so tedious, it’s so grim.” And then, “How I hate all these disgusting purées! If there’s no difference between rotting and maturing, everything is rotten, every flavour is the flavour of death…”
Then she would plead with me. “Take me with you to Europe. Promise me we’ll leave on the next boat. I could work as a shop assistant, as a cleaner. I don’t want to live on this horrible island any longer. The time that passes here is decaying time, rotten time. Past and future ooze out of the runny present…” At her back the world trembled, dissolved in the ever-changing carpet of the wall of water. I took her in my arms and soothed her; I told her that tomorrow a boat would be leaving the harbour, in the morning we would pack our things and go down to the lower town, we would be in Europe in a few days and the island would be just a memory. But the next day we never spoke of what we had said to each other in the evening and we avoided looking towards the harbour and the white boat.
When I complained about the character of the islanders and she defended it, Karael and I would often quarrel. But at these times I never reminded her of the moments when the charges she set against the islanders were graver still than mine, when she thought the island on which she was forced to live was a hell. The moments when she saw the islanders as freaks were nothing but the dark underside of the moments of serene happiness which gave our life on the island its texture. I never saw the islanders as freaks. I had no particular love for them, but I believed them to have the same right to their way of life as we had to ours, that theirs was neither better nor worse than the kind of life we led in Europe. As I had lived it since my childhood the European way of life was closer to me, but it was not that much closer. And after I had been on the island a year, and the sources of new emotions had got into my blood and my eyes had begun to perceive the weavings of rays of light in a different way, I was aware that I was beginning to distance myself from the language of European life and culture.
And when I returned there were many things I no longer understood. All the complex syntaxes which determined roles within the family and within society as a whole seemed to me as distant and tedious, as bizarre and incomprehensible as the islanders’ grammatical categories and the rules of their games, and somewhat more stuffy and awkward. It was only after I returned to Europe that I found myself on the most distant and strangest of islands, an island from which there is no return because it is home. This was the Ithaca of the Odyssey, which someone had rewritten as a silent-screen comedy. (Screenplay: Odysseus, having for ten years consorted with monsters and demons, is himself more of a monster/demon than a man, and he discovers that he no longer understands much of the language of his homeland.) On the last of the islands all that home can provide is the role of the confused ethnologist, looking on as all around him perform mysterious rituals, some inducing depression, others imbued with a moving, nonsensical beauty.
But whoever thinks I am complaining, is wrong. I neither invented nor chose the protagonist who reaches out to the world through my mixed-up gestures, but I am happy with it and have no intention of exchanging it for any other; after all, it has grown out of my travels and encounters, out of the spaces outlined in my memory which perhaps only opened up at stations and in harbours in order to help in its making. I have heard the slow growth of this protagonist within the cocoon of landscapes; it is of no particular importance whether this long, patient childhood was the gradual genesis of the Self in the body of a stranger or some kind of macabre transformation within a monster. It is important to fuse with the rhythm of these changes, to be in thrall to the time when we are born on the islands and in the towns and countries we visit; it is not important to think about the legitimacy of a motion which makes sense only in and of itself, in the development of its rhythms, in the melody which leads up to no finale. This motion cannot accept vindication from anything outside itself: probably it is one of the very first beams of current to pass through the nothingness, which formed on their way the universe of stars, rocks, plants, bodies and consciousness.
Perhaps psychologists and psychiatrists would consider themselves competent to comment on my island in central Europe, but both would be
wrong. The loosening and unravelling of the tissues of the world to reveal the womb beneath is a motion older than Man and, I believe, older than life itself. It is one of the motions that explains, among other things, psychology and psychiatry; for certain it is not the other way round.
Apart from all this, the silent-screen Ithaca is a great place to live; I am ever more aware of how much I like this last island, and I tell myself I would not wish to live anywhere else even if it were possible for me to leave it. It is true that nothing here makes any sense, but this is no great misfortune; I learned from the islanders that sense is not of any particular importance, that its presence may even disrupt the clean lines of certain pictures and cast a cloud over their fine light, while laments on the absurdity of being struck me as self-indulgent and objectionable even before my stay on the island. Once you get a little used to a terrain cleansed of sense, you realize that there is amusement enough to be had here, and that only in its emptiness can the magic crystals of beauty originate. And in this space something is revealed: the silent dignity of people, animals, plants and objects, that is able to stir graciousness, compassion and reverence.
Fungus and shell
But the evenings that turned into heavy dreams were rare, both for Karael and for me. The island feasts usually gave cause for delight; indeed, I would look forward to them far in advance and I still remember them fondly today. In the middle of the table there was often a pliant, white material which at first I took to be some kind of fungus. In fact it was the solidified secretion of a type of cuttlefish which was hunted in the warm, shallow waters above the coral reef which encircled the island’s shoreline.
Several times I was one of an expedition which went in quest of the cuttlefish’s white ink. The hunter floats in the clear waters above the bright-coloured coral garden, holding in his hand a kind of ratchet. As soon as he catches sight of the cuttlefish he begins to turn the wheel of the ratchet; the sound this makes frightens the cuttlefish and forces it to flee, but before it does so it releases a cloud of white fluid which twists and curls in the water, sending out projections and winding them back in, all the time solidifying quickly. This solidification starts in the middle and takes only a few seconds to reach the furthest points of white, which become slower in their movement, change gradually to a paste, then stiffen and go still, petrified in a gesture of flight or return.
The very first hunt I took part in presented me with an unforgettable experience. Having floated around the coral reef, Karael and I startled a school of cuttlefish, which disappeared in a flash, leaving white clouds in its wake like the souls of drowning men. As we swam about in the clouds we saw how they were transforming themselves. I fancied I saw in them human faces I knew well, but these would disappear immediately. When the transformations were over and the solidified cloudlets began slowly to sink, Karael and I caught them and threaded them—like soft metals—onto lines ending in a silver barb, which each of us had coiled around our waist.
This white ink fungus is treated in a number of different ways. Sometimes it is cut into slivers for use in a cuttlefish salad (I once saw in Paris how these slivers were laid on thin slices of a white baguette, lightly toasted on the grill and drenched in olive oil). Sometimes it is forced through a utensil which looks like a garlic press, out of which it emerges in the form of long, white spaghetti. Cuttlefish spaghetti are dressed in a red sauce from the pantry made of berries grown in the apartments of the lower town in the close, dark spaces between walls and the backs of rotting cupboards which have been there since the time of the European invasion; in addition to mines, the islanders also have gardens in their apartments. It was easy to carve the solidified ink of the cuttlefish into any shape one chose. The islanders would often ask me about the food where I came from, so once I used several cuttlefish mushrooms to fashion for them the fare on the table of a Czech pub, with plates of goulash and dumplings, a smaller plate with brawn, a basket of bread rolls, several half-litres of beer and glasses of rum, adding while I was at it, an open pack of cigarettes and an ashtray with cigarette ends in it. After the islanders had studied my creation, we ate it together.
Most commonly, however, cuttlefish fungus forms part of a dish known as the “pink porcupine.” For the preparation of this meal one also needs the shell of a certain marine snail. One night in the year this snail leaves the sea to shed its shell of twelve months and also to celebrate its lover’s ritual in a state of nakedness. Hundreds of snails come ashore, onto the sandy flats of the lower town, where they arrange themselves in the shape of a star with sixteen regular beams. Once the snails have assumed their places they wriggle out of their shells and their soft little bodies glow in the bluish light.
The ritual of their courtship is founded on a game of many-coloured lights and geometric figures. Watching this game from the upper town was an enchanting experience. First the beams of the great star down there on the flats bent themselves into S-shapes while the blue light of the odd beams turned green and then yellow and the blue of the even beams turned violet and then red. The next moment the individual, rippling beams began to change colour from yellow to red and vice versa; this they did in such a way that it looked from above as if the beams of the star were revolving rapidly around its centre. The rippling beams disintegrated before the fragments came together again to form eight fixed circles. Then a new game of lights set up, with the apparent motion coming from the centre and moving to the edge and back again.
After this the circles transformed themselves into eight-beamed stars, which went on to become an evenly-proportioned cross. This cross shone violet and its arms coiled themselves towards its centre before changing into four spirals. These then became entwined and began to form complicated, moving ornaments. Their movement was the result of the meshing of the real motion of the snails and the illusory motion born out of the perfect harmonization of the changes in colour. (Imagine a billboard on which moving pictures arise not only from the lighting-up of individual points, as is common, but also from the real movement of these points.)
After these games, which take the whole night, the snails return to the sea and there begin to grow new shells. On the shore they leave behind enough shells to stock the islanders’ stores until the next snail-courtship ritual is played out. It is necessary to gather the shells while the gala of lights is still in progress and to immerse them immediately in a herbal marinade, for soon they harden and once they are hard there is nothing one can do with them. This is why the islanders move carefully among the dancing snails, walking on tiptoe and collecting the cast-off shells, as if complementing the snails’ ballet with a dance of their own. I remember how I got to know Karael after my first snail festival. It was a month after my arrival; I knew no one on the island and was living on the very edge of the lower town in an empty house whose windows—every one of them—had a view of the sandy flats. When one night the dark plain was lit up by a moving pattern of lights, among which ever-changing figures were dancing on the tips of black shadows, I had not the slightest idea what was going on. I just stood there at the window watching the dance of the lights and shadows. There was a moment when the crooked beams of the stars straightened and one of them reached the wall of my house; I looked on in amazement at the luminous animal beneath my window. This snail was glowing with a green light which reminded me of the neon of Prague. It was in this light that I first became aware of Karael, who was among those islanders gathering shells. Since my return from the island the pictures of Karael in my memory have been extinguished one after another (just as I have forgotten all her other names), so that now only this first picture remains. Whenever I write of Karael, the face that bobs up out of the dark is bathed in this green light.
The feast at which the ink of the cuttlefish and the shells are served has a strong element of ritual, and as such it is one of the things which was subject to least change in the course of my stay. From the time of my arrival on the island to my departure three years later, half of its alph
abet changed and a new grammatical case appeared in its language, but the preparation of the stuffed shells continued in the old way. To begin with the shell is filled with a green jelly made from the leaves of a climbing plant which crawls over the walls of the inner courtyards of the lower town and enters apartments through their windows. In the middle of the night the flowers of this plant open themselves up to the night moths one after another, in so doing making a quiet sound like a finger brushing against the strings of a musical instrument. These tones of different pitches—stars in the realm of sound—are submerged in the chattering of the water. The leaves of the climbing plant are steeped in water and left to mature in the pantries for several weeks.
The shell—filled with a mix of leaves and berries and sealed with a resin—is laid in the centre of the table. Each of the guests chooses one of the prepared pieces of ink-fungus and uses a special spoon to scoop out its inside; this is the origin of the soft, pliant bowls (reminiscent of white rubber balls cut in half) the guests hold in their hands. Then everyone waits until the meal is ready. Someone tells a story to while away the time. The green jelly and fruit inside the shell ferment and work on the casing in such a way that it soon begins to soften, coming to resemble wrinkled skin. From within there is a muted gurgling. After an hour or so the process within the shell reaches its most turbulent phase; the gurgling is more urgent and the wrinkled shell swells so that its surface is so taut I was always afraid that the pressure applied from within would tear it open or that the covering of hardened resin would shoot off, injuring one of the guests. But the sides of the shell and its resinous lid are remarkably solid. A short while later small openings in the taut surface do indeed begin to appear, letting out a pink vapour and a hissing. The pink vapour forms itself into columns which look a bit like the spines of a porcupine, and it is this moment in the meal’s development which gives it its name.