by Michal Ajvaz
The fumes which escape from the shell have a mildly intoxicating effect, which in my presence often caused the story one of the guests was telling to assume characteristics of the fantastic. I remember that Karael in particular was able to invent really good stories at such a feast. And she liked to plot her tales around books I had told her about. Once, for example, she wove this crazy tale out of Remembrance of Things Past, The Castle and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The hero of the story, a young Parisian called Marcel, was on board an ocean-going steamship when in mysterious circumstances it was hit by a torpedo from a submarine and sunk. Marcel succeeded in swimming to the undersea vessel, which he was able to get inside of. The submarine was called the Nautilus, and in its spacious rooms the sailors and their officers lived with their families. The crew was commanded by the Duke of Guermantes, also known as Captain Nemo. Marcel took pains to work himself into the circle which had formed around the captain and his wife. The cabin boy Barnabas, whose job it was to establish contact between the senior officers and the new passenger, was not able to help him. The captain’s nephew Saint-Loup, whom Marcel befriended, was full of goodwill, but his efforts were no more productive than those of Barnabas; the company which gathered around the captain and his wife was a closed one. The captain’s brother Baron de Charlus, however, maintained a steadfast interest in Marcel; he took him for trips in his mini-submarine and invited him to join an exclusive society of seamen, whose members included famous submarine captains and senior officers.
Marcel fell in love with Albertine, the daughter of the Nautilus’s engineer and the lover of Klamm (one of the senior officers), whom she left in order to go to Marcel. The ties that bound Albertine to Klamm were strong, and for this reason Marcel did not trust her and was constantly suspicious of her; he had her followed and eventually held captive in her cabin…Once the intoxicating fumes began to work their effect, the story became more zany still. Karael described in detail Elstir’s seascape mosaics, which he composed from fragments of shell, and, most dramatically, Swann’s fight with a shark. Then the story slipped the shackles of the three books it had grown out of and sea monsters swept in with pointed spines on their backs and sagging jowls; in the end we were taken to great undersea cities populated by sluggish, apathetic demons.
Once the shell has given off its gas, it goes slack, the cracks in it close, and for about two hours its surface is still. Then the shell does nothing but give an occasional shudder, while from time to time a barely-audible rumbling and sighing comes from its inside. After that the shell again begins to swell up. At this point the storyteller falls silent and the guests gather around the table, on which the bowls of solidified white ink stand at the ready. Quite suddenly the openings reappear in the shell and vermilion geysers of juice spurt forth, which the guests catch in their bowls. Once the fountain desists, the guest sip this delicious liquid; among its dozens of flavours are discernible mango, smoked salmon, ginger, figs, lobster, pineapple and dill. While they drink, the guests nibble on their ink bowls. At the end of the feast the now-flat shell and its remnants of jelly and fruit are cut up and each of the guests is given a piece; this looks a little like apple strudel.
The fog
I, too, would tell stories to while away the waiting, until the first red geyser spurted out of the swelling shell. I did not have to agonize over what I was going to say: the islanders were a grateful, attentive audience whether I was narrating the contents of The Three Musketeers, From Russia with Love or Night Cab by Souvestre and Allain, whether I was telling of the Greek myths, reminiscing about rambling in the Bohemian Forest in summer, or describing the dream I had had the previous night. I imagine they would have listened with interest if I had retold the listings of the Prague telephone directory, finding in the sounds of the names the germs of a gripping tale which they could develop in their minds; they would assess the individual telephone numbers by the nature and composition of their digits and consider them silently with the same pleasure as some people take from the study of minerals arranged in rows in the display-cases of museums. Mostly I would invent a tale of fantasy, as this was easier than piecing together the details of real sequences of events or recalling the contents of books as the intoxicating pink vapour was spreading itself throughout the room, insinuating itself into my words and releasing clusters of other words, images and story-lines from each word I spoke.
I remember in particular an afternoon in Karael’s room in the upper town. I was sitting over a whispering, gurgling, shuddering shell and telling a story. I could not think of a single book I had not spoken of already, and I was not in the mood to invent, so I returned in my thoughts to Prague, to a chilly and damp autumn day. I had myself walk the foggy streets. As I described myself following the winding paths up the Petín Hill, its landscape dotted with bare trees, I was drawn into the greyish fabric of the scene. The blurred Laputa of the Strahov Monastery floated above my head, then disappeared. I made my way down Úvoz street, looking down on the bay in a white sea which became the Seminary Garden before the facades of the grand houses of Neruda street rose out of the mist and then sank back into it, like fairy-tale sketches drawn in a secret ink on a sheet of white paper. As I told my story I made the sad realization that I was forgetting Prague; my feeble memory confused the buildings, so that the stone Moors at the doorway of the Morzinský Palace appeared above the Jánský Vrch Castle, the Church of St Kajetan was on the other side of the street and the Golden Wheel Hotel moved down to take its place. And on top of all this my forgetting was littering the streets with empty plots bathed in the white fog. This was one of the moments I promised myself I would be leaving the island at my earliest opportunity.
By the time I reached the Malá Strana square the shell was getting taut, and as I approached the Kampa island cracks were forming from which the vapour was beginning to leak; the shell was transforming itself into the pink porcupine. Before long I could feel the intoxicating fumes working on me. I first suspected this to be the case because of the sudden concentration of close detail in the images that presented themselves to me; I knew that these images were only masquerading as memory. Above the entrance of a house on Kampa, for example, I saw a painted sign which depicted a knight ramming a lance into the jaws of a dragon with a girl in a white dress chained to a rock right next to this scene. I described to the islanders the oily, iridescent lustre of the dragon’s scales, the reflection of the setting sun on the knight’s armour, I took my time over the long golden waves of the princess’s hair. These were the kind of pictures the islanders liked best; I am sure they would have managed to listen to me all afternoon if I had spoken only of the way the pleats of the princess’s dress were drawn and of the tissue of fine cracks on the painting.
But I could sense in the fog—this mysterious egg—the germs of pictures wholly new, pictures that were about to fight their way out. I told the islanders how I turned towards the river; there I saw the floating jetty where the steamboats land and a group of about ten people standing on it. They were silent and motionless, looking at the mist hovering over the water. A moment later two lights appeared, one on top of the other in a vertical line, above which there was a point like the dot of an i. As the lights got bigger, around them greyish marks began to penetrate the fog; the marks soon joined up to form the outline of a boat. It looked like the service boat of the river authorities. Above the entrance to the under-deck a lamp was burning, and this was reflected in the water. As the boat came to a halt the jetty shook slightly. Several passengers disembarked, then the people on the jetty climbed aboard in orderly fashion.
I paused for a moment, considering whether to join the people on the boat or let it sail off into the fog without me so I could continue my exploration of Kampa. I told myself that if the shell stirred in the next three seconds, I would get onto the boat. The islanders sat there motionless and attentive; Karael was lost in her thoughts, writing something into the wall of water with her forefinger. The shell heaved a sig
h and then shook. “I hesitated for a moment before tagging along behind the people climbing aboard.” I resumed the story without knowing what was expecting me on the boat. One after another new passengers were passing through the doorway beneath the lamp; most of them had to bend in order to do so. I followed them below deck, down the metal staircase which began immediately beyond the door. I found myself in a smallish room which was rather dark and where—in front of the illuminated stage of a puppet theatre—there were armchairs in rows. Most of these armchairs were unoccupied, their seats up. The newcomers sat down in the empty seats, producing the creaking of stiff joints as the armchairs opened out unwillingly and the whisper of faded plush; there remained many unoccupied seats. I sat down at the end of a row, where a strong perfume wafted towards me; I was put off by this, but I did not wish to move to another seat and in so doing appear foolish. Out of the corner of my eye I studied the profile of the young woman next to me; she was wearing heavy make-up and around her bare neck a pearl necklace shone pale in the semi-darkness.
I turned my attention away from my neighbour and towards the stage. It was about a metre long and three-quarters of a metre deep, and it depicted realistically a very normal-looking living room with upholstered armchairs and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with vases, cups and photographs. The window showed the dark sky of evening and beneath this a row of tower blocks whose windows were lit and then blanked thanks to some special equipment. Moving about continuously beyond the window, and making a light rustle, was a transparent plastic sheet on which were painted little white dots meant to represent snowflakes. In the middle of the room there was a table, and on this I could see two cups, a porcelain coffeepot and a nickel-silver tray with half a marble cake on it. Sitting at the table were two wooden puppets, one depicting a man, the other a woman. Judging by their facial features (which were not particularly well carved), both were about fifty years old. The man was dressed in shapeless blue sweatpants and a white undershirt and the woman had on a light-coloured nylon slip. The puppets’ hands and feet were attached to strings which disappeared high above the stage, from where one heard the voices of the actors who were speaking for them.
The man-puppet heaved a sigh and said, “When I went to buy a newspaper this morning I found that they’d printed it in a foreign language again…But at least I was able to listen again to the rustling of the paper, to read words, even if those words were meaningless to me and their sounds were dark and threatening. Recently instead of a newspaper they’ve been giving me rabbit skins, crudely stitched together to make a single sheet. I always look hard at the newsagent to see if she’s going to mention it, if she’s going to give me an explanation, but as she never says a word, perhaps it’s as it should be, perhaps there’s a new law which says rabbit skin is to replace newspaper, and we haven’t heard about it, that’s all. Maybe everyone else knows how to manage a rabbit-skin newspaper, but I don’t, I scan the skins desperately in search of news, at least once; I turn them upside down, I run my fingers along the smooth little rabbit hairs, but still I don’t know what I’m supposed to be reading, no one gives me any advice, even those who find in the rabbit skins wonderful, informative stories and laugh while they’re reading them or else weep with emotion. How I envy them! Once when I asked for a newspaper the newsagent gave me a live rabbit. Actually it was more dead than alive, but it was still breathing, just about…”
What sort of performance have I ended up watching? I asked myself in irritation. I had no interest in the problems the characters of the play would be addressing; the unhappiness of a man who is given rabbit skins in place of a newspaper had nothing to say to me. But I couldn’t just leave because I was on a boat. God knows how long it will be before the boat pulls up at the next stop! What am I going to have to sit through? How many more wooden figures will be coming on stage? The only mild comfort I took from this involuntary artistic adventure came from the fact the actors were puppets, which meant that I did not have to look into the faces of the actors, which were bound to be dull and disagreeable. Looking at live actors would certainly have upset me. In resignation I sank into the plush of the seat.
Waiting for the prince
The head of the second puppet, which until now had been looking fixedly ahead, turned abruptly to the man-puppet; the body stayed where it was. “Fool,” said the woman angrily. “Why don’t you bring the rabbit skins home? We could collect them and after a while I’d have enough to make a fur coat with. And it’s so damned cold, we’ve been having blizzards for months.”
“I can’t bring the skins home because I keep losing them. They won’t let me into the coffee-houses with them, I have to give them up at the cloakroom. And when I leave they always give me something else in their place. I’ve had some strange tools, thick books on economics in German from the nineteenth century, plaster-cast busts of Roman statesmen, stuffed birds. They always claim they’re mine, and they always find about ten witnesses who saw me leave in the cloakroom a treatise on the railways in Styria or a stuffed owl. What I am supposed to do? I pick up the owl and make my way home through the blizzard. Sometimes I can’t help but weep, and so I walk along sobbing, my tears turning to ice.”
“I keep telling you not to go to coffee-houses. All you do there is spend money, and I’ve got nothing to wear. Coffee-houses are terrible places for spreading illness. They’re always saying on the radio that someone has gone mad in a coffee-house and started singing that long-drawn-out song about the end of conventional mathematics in some new, evil empire. The waiters are heretics and most of them are former or future killers of women. You can cry over a stuffed owl, but you don’t give any thought to me as you spend day after day in your coffee-houses, sitting on your ass with your friends while I’m sitting here all alone staring at the wall.”
“I go to coffee-houses because I have to. There’s nothing much there that makes me want to go in. In fact, I hate coffee-houses, and you’re quite right, they are incubators for the worst epidemics. The waiters beat the customers and strip them naked; this is particularly upsetting for the women, some of whom are even considering avoiding coffee-houses altogether. I’d far sooner be at home with you, especially with the weather as it is now, when it’s dark all the time and it never stops snowing, and the meteors whizz by on the blizzard. But what can I do about it? I simply have to go to the coffee-houses, I have to sit it out there in case the prince’s messenger arrives. I have to be ever prepared to receive his dispatches and instructions.”
“And how many of these dispatches have ever reached you, you fool?”
“None so far. Because enemies have got to the messenger and doped him, very discreetly. They rewrite the messages letter by letter, transforming them into something else altogether, like the service manual for a microwave oven or an advertisement for a second-hand-car dealer’s. But still I am able to identify in them distant traces of the voice of my master, and I can hear it calling for help. I know that the expedition to the City of Pure Light came to grief, that for a long time the prince wandered the swamplands, that he was taken captive by evil women who did him harm. Why, they even turned him into a woman and made him dance ballet in a little white skirt, in some sordid Not-Petersburg, a city born on the plains out of the murk of despair, a city which is cursed, a city within whose walls no saviour will ever be spawned. How my prince must be suffering! If I could I’d drop everything and set out in search of him. I’m sure he’s waiting for me, asking what’s taking me so long. But all his dispatches reach me in such violated form that I have no way of telling where they were issued. All the signs are so ambiguous; at one moment I’m sure that he’s in the Gobi Desert and I begin to plan my journey and learn Mongolian, then it appears he is being held captive in a certain apartment in Prague 8. I asked a prophet for advice, and he thought long and hard before telling me, ‘Gobi Desert or Prague 8, it is all the same.’ I feel that this holy man speaks the truth, but unfortunately my education is so poor that I am unable to grasp the pro
found import of his words.”
“I don’t believe there is any such person as this prince of yours. I think you made him up to explain your hanging around in coffee-houses all day, or else you dreamed him. At best he’s some kind of demon made of small strips of paper.”
The male puppet jumped up before stomping about the stage, waving his arms like Mr Punch. “How can you say such a thing! That there’s no such person as the prince! The prince is more real than any of us. Without him our lives would lose all sense and order; our letters would disintegrate so that once again they would be no more than fragments of the little letters from which they are glued together, and these would slowly gather in the Gospel of the Metal Tiger, whose renewal we have dreaded for five thousand years. We would be speechless because we would be unable to connect any subject with any predicate, and white larvae and ice monsters would get into the space between them. Without the prince all that would be left of us would be shavings composed—as is well known—of our bodies, and these shavings are gathered and held together due only to his goodness, due only to the fact that he speaks up for us to the gods, his parents. Even now, at a time for him so fraught with difficulties, he continues to think of us; he never forgets us, not even when he is performing solo at the ballet in Not-Petersburg. The clearest proof of this is the fact that still we haven’t disintegrated. Although I believe that recently there was a brief time when we slipped his mind, as I saw bodies beginning to come apart like the spines of well-thumbed books, this was surely nothing more than a moment of weakness for which we can hardly blame him because in his place we would have given up long ago and thought only of our ballet career, with its intoxicating footlights and its merry backstage soirées with caviar and champagne. O my noble prince! It is thanks to him that there is Order in the world; he might have ordained that the stains on old walls should writhe, that the animals should berate us all day long, as used to be the case in the dark days of old, before the prince was born to his divine mother. But surely you remember this? Is that what you want, that our sufferings of those years should return? Do you not recall how unpleasant it was to be woken in the morning by the pigeons walking along the windowsills, speaking of us in disgusting obscenities which, resisting our efforts to shoo them away, they would repeat at lunch in front of our children? And our children lost all respect for us; they conspired against us with the animals and bullied us. And although the animals gave us an apology before they flew away from the planet, our children refused to do the same, writing to us that they had procured a pen with green ink like pus which stank most dreadfully, and it was with this pen that they would write the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ for ever more.”