by Michal Ajvaz
“…in the morning the virgin queen will breakfast on her balcony while you and her sister do the same on the balcony opposite. The queen will raise her right hand to you in greeting and you will return the greeting with your left. The birds will sing. It will be beautiful. I can hardly wait for your arrival; flags will fly throughout the town in your honour.”
Fortunately this was the moment at which the first red geyser spurted from the swollen shell. Karael jumped up nimbly and was the first to catch the juice on the ink sponge. The shell ruptured in other places, too, and the juice burst forth in torrents which the guests caught in their bowls. So I ceased to think of clocks adorned with cherubs, of a poisonous flower and a queen; I, too, took up my bowl and caught the delicious juice; I, too, sipped the liquid and nibbled on the bowl. The sun had almost reached the level of the sea and the wall of water blazed an incredible crimson. Thus ended one of my days on the island.
First encounter with the Book
The story I told at the feast was no doubt influenced at least a little by the island’s Book, although for a long time I found this maze of adventure stories, fairy tales and myths about rabbits, princes and princesses, whose descriptions, insertions, digressions, improbabilities and anachronisms knew no end, quite insufferable. It took me far longer to find in it something that appealed to me than it did to get used to the island’s cuisine and its board games without rules. Now is perhaps the time for me to say something more about the Book, which I have mentioned a number of times already. I confess that I have kept putting off talking about the Book because I don’t have much of an appetite for it, but having discussed board games and food I can’t think of anything else of particular interest: I will just have to tackle the Book here and now.
The main reason for my avoiding writing about the Book was the fear that I would lack the strength to negotiate its labyrinth, which has become yet more intricate since the time it left the island and settled in my brain. I found the Book puzzling enough when I read it on the island, and then I had no idea of its extent; indeed, it is unlikely that I even discovered what was its main part. Since then it has become even more difficult to survey, having become something of a hybrid, in which pages woven from the fine fibres of memory and pages born in the realm of dreams sit side by side. When I think of the Book I see its long insertions emerging from the blurred landscapes of memory, stretching to infinity as they grow around tremulous pictures produced by the imagination. Dear reader, I believe I told you in the first chapter of this book that I was looking forward to wandering in ghostly realms ruled by the triumvirate Memory, Dream, and Desire, and to having adventures there; but now, having reached the twenty-ninth chapter, I am feeling very tired. I hadn’t realized how exhausting it is to wade about in the swamp of memory.
As I said, the islanders took no great interest in art. After the apotheosis of the Stain, when the building efforts of the Europeans in the lower town ceased, no architecture existed on the island. The islanders needed no temples or offices. Sometimes they would build a simple house on the islet of rock on which the upper town was accommodated, but, as the island population was in decline and no new houses were needed, they tended to repair old dwellings instead. The islanders had no painting and sculpture (which is perhaps surprising considering the great roles these play in the story-lines of the Book); they were satisfied by the shapes of stains, the movements made by the shadows of leaves on walls, the ever-changing white figures described by the foam of the waves of the sea. They had no music because it was enough for them to listen to the rustlings of the island; indeed, in the tapestry of island sounds there was no tear by which music could enter.
For a long time I believed that the islanders cultivated no art at all. But one morning, having awoken in Karael’s house, lying there with my eyes closed, listening to the chatter and trickle of water, I realized I was hearing occasional sounds which escaped the classifications I had established for familiar island sounds. A sound kept returning that reminded me of the opening of a Velcro, or a cookie being bitten into, and this was usually followed by the kind of sound made by a cloth fluttering in the wind or the rapid flapping of a bird’s wings; the third sound was a light swish or perhaps a quiet sigh. I tried to guess what was making these sounds, but the only idea that came to me was the improbable one of a sorrowful bird groaning in pain, pecking intermittently at a cookie and flapping its wings. I got up and walked through the wall of water to the stone terrace. There I saw something that surprised me more than the sight of a sorrowful bird nibbling cookies would have done: Karael was sitting on the terrace reading from a large book which was lying on the stone table in front of her.
I sat down next to her and watched. I saw that the pages of the book were neither stitched nor glued to a spine, that they were gathered like those of a children’s foldout picture book, and that they were written on one side only. At a number of places on a page there was some kind of paper patch-pocket attached; these pockets looked a little like ears or mushrooms. At certain places in the text there was another kind of attachment: a thin strip of paper which became wider and thicker two or three centimetres along to form a kind of oval (the cap of a mushroom) whose axis (the stalk of the mushroom) was perpendicular to the paper strip. The upper side of the oval was sealed along its whole length and contained a number of slits. Although Karael paid no attention at all to some of the pockets, others she opened (this was the sound that had reminded me of Velcro or the crunching of cookies) and pulled from them a small pleated strip of thin paper. This strip, too, had attachments like those I’ve just described, and some of these (somewhat smaller) ears, too, Karael opened, pulling out more paper concertinas with ears. I looked on in amazement, trying to work out how many levels the book had. I counted six, but even at the sixth level there was a little ear jutting out; there was no way of telling how many more concertina strips with ears were hidden within it.
At some moments all the concertinas were folded inside the pockets; at others Karael would have left open several pockets simultaneously, having opened out not only the strips which they had contained but also some of the strips which these gave issue to. Whenever there was a gust of wind, all the concertinas were lifted up and began to flutter (explaining the sounds of bird’s wings), reminding me of those little flags we used to wave on May 1st. When the wind dropped, the concertinas lay limp across the table, their ends hanging over its edges and shivering (the murmuring, whispering, sighing sound).
A short time later Karael carefully folded all the concertinas back into the pockets and closed the book. But her agitation remained inside the book; indeed it was even more obviously present when Karael’s hand was not on it. Inside the closed book, the ears formed a bump which reached its highest point in the book’s centre. The front cover—which was not joined to the back cover by means of a spine, only by the round shape of the largest paper concertina (the only one which did not belong in a pocket)—rocked from side to side ceaselessly. I was concerned that the book would topple, and this indeed happened, the front cover tipping over slowly to the ground, the paper concertina unfurling in an arc, leaving the ears so shamelessly exposed that I turned my eyes away.
Karael told me this was the island’s Book. I’ll write it with a capital letter because the islanders have only one book. I was surprised to discover that any form of art existed on the island, and that this should be literature was astonishing to me. Why should the islanders, who have such a love of formlessness, choose an art form that works with words? Words are surely more hostile than colours, lines or tones to a formless life. But once I familiarized myself with the Book and its history I realized it could not have been any different. I have already mentioned—in the chapter on the phonetics of the island’s sounds and rustlings—that the shapeless whirling the islanders love to watch is really the life of many waning and emerging images and shapes, that the whirring they listen to is the voice of a thousand fused stories. In this whirring the islanders recognize
the appeal to protect the formless from a humiliating lapse into form; and they hear in it another appeal, too: to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there, and to show these off to the world. It seemed to me that the islanders thought the formless resounded with the quiet plea to expose at least some of the pictures that glimmer through the whirring, thus releasing at least some of the plots and stories whose telling weaves the murmur of stillness. The appeal to keep silent and the appeal to tell become entwined, revealing a single, formless longing—a longing to unfurl the monstrous, stupefying whirling of which it has long been part and product. A whirling in the life of the formless dreams of shape that allows itself to give birth to a complicated architecture, but this soon caves in, disintegrates and crumbles to formlessness so that the process can start again at the beginning.
But a new beginning is only possible at the very end of the shaping process, not until it seems—no doubt deceptively—that the last trace of the formless has been eradicated. Tones and colours would not be able to maintain the progress of this ages-old cycle: their borders do not stretch to the most distant headland on the continent of shapes. Tones and colours would not be able to bring about the glorious re-emergence of the formless because they would be unable to eradicate these traces completely. For this you need words, sentences and stories. The murmurs, rustlings and blurred shapes of the island did not dream of pictures, sculptures and tones; the murmurs and rustlings of the island could bring forth nothing but a book. I have mentioned already that the islanders loved border territories; life on the island was played out on two borderland strips—the world of shapeless murmurs and whirls and the world described in the Babylonian architecture of the Book. Each of these territories worked on the other; the one was born out of the other and they were astonishingly similar—the monotonous murmurs and whirls were really a complicated mesh of many shapes, pictures and actions, and in the intricacy of the Book’s architecture it was not difficult to trace the monotonous principle that determined the inserting ad infinitum of one into the other.
The history of the Book
Though indifferent to art, the islanders had their literature, and this literature was contained in the Book. The Book existed in a single copy only, and this was passed from hand to hand. There was no rule which determined how long a reader might hold on to the Book and no one ever recalled it or asked for it to be moved along to the next reader, nor was it anywhere stated who the reader should pass it on to. Usually the Book arrived unexpectedly, and whoever received it might choose to pass it on immediately or to keep it. It was typical for the Book to remain in the possession of one reader for several days or weeks. I can’t imagine that anyone ever tried to read the Book from beginning to end; readers tended to choose one of the Book’s sections and wander around in it. Nor did I read the Book in its entirety, even though it came into my possession several times. I looked into the Book on the day of my departure from the island, and even then I found in it quarters completely unknown to me, places which I would never have the chance to get to know.
When the Book came into the possession of an islander who chose to hold on to it, he or she would read several passages. Sometimes it was passed on in the form in which it had been received; more commonly, the text was modified somehow. The islanders considered the act of writing in the Book a natural part of the process of reading it. Cases when the reader made no alteration to the text were regarded as exceptions, phases in the endless metamorphosis the Book was subject to, in which the powers of transformation were concentrated while new forms matured beneath the surface. Like the other islanders, Karael knew that books in Europe were generally read without the reader’s writing into them, but she was amazed by this European custom and struggled to imagine what such reading was like. It seemed to her as absurd and eccentric as watching a film with the same shot in every frame; the islanders studied our books with an expression of confusion we might compare to that of the novice cinema-goer confronted with a film by Andy Warhol where all that appears on screen for several hours is a view of a New York skyscraper.
So it is true to say that in most cases the reader passed on a book which differed from the one he had received. As the Book circulated, the written-over was written over—and so the reader never encountered the same work twice. He discovered that since his last reading the characters he had introduced into the plot had acquired virtues and vices of which he had had no inkling, that dark events from the lives they had led before had come to light. And so it was that the Book was always a fragment: at any given moment no one knew it in its entirety.
There were three ways of making a change in the Book: insertion, overwriting of the text and deletion. The most significant and most common changes were made by insertion; indeed, the Book itself was a kind of insert, a pocket containing a corrugated reality. Probably the Book was born at the moment its first author noticed a crack emerge in the roar of the sea or the rustling of leaves; out of this crack the pictures and the words gushed forth, just as the strips of paper forced their way out of the Book’s pockets. The ongoing proliferation of insertions was the main event in the endless metamorphosis which was the life of the Book: the most remarkable aspect of its transformation was the expansion brought about by the insertions made on its many levels.
I know something about the history of the Book from the Book itself: in one of its pockets I found a contribution which told of the life and origins of the Book—the rest I have imagined and invented. It seems that the Book has transformed itself from the very beginning, although in the distant past it was more similar to our books in that insertions were written in gaps between lines and the margins of the page. But as the insertions became longer and longer and other insertions were inserted in them, it became more and more difficult to find unoccupied space for new text. Lettering became smaller and smaller; new sentences were woven around pre-existing text and other insertions, continuing bottom up as they wrapped around the line and proceeded back the way they had come before making another swift turn so as to proceed in the original direction; if, for example, in the corner of a page they found unoccupied space, they would contort themselves into a spiral. Text written thus gradually became illegible and assumed the character of a picture—a fantastical word-drawing. Then there was no longer any space at all for new words; it was necessary to tear out the pages, to write out on new sheets everything that was still legible. The new sheets were stuck into the Book to make a text which—initially, at least—was easy to read. But over time this, too, changed into an impenetrable jungle of letters.
Later some reader who was searching in vain for a blank space in which to make his insertion, and who did not wish to transcribe a whole page, came up with the idea of writing his contribution on a new sheet, which he would then stick—by means of a thin strip of paper—to the word or sentence in the pre-existing text to which his insertion was related. In this way it became the practise to paste insertions in the Book; on to the pasted-in sheets other pasted-in sheets were added, others on to these, and so on. When I imagine what the Book must have looked like in those days, I see its covers as the cracked shell of a wounded crab; spilling out of confinement there are strips of paper, upon which at various points have been stuck other strips of paper, which themselves sprout yet more such strips. All this paper either lies limply on a table or flutters in the wind and rustles. Periodically someone tries to stuff it within the covers as one would try to stuff heaps of underwear into an under-sized suitcase.
It is out of these beginnings that today’s relatively simple and convenient use of the Book has developed. In terms of its form the Book is like a foldout picture-book; this form recurs on all its levels. Whenever someone wishes to make an addition to the Book, he does not violate the pre-existing text, nor does he transcribe the page in question; he writes his contribution on any long strip of paper and folds it into a concertina. Should he choose to make a longer insertio
n, all he needs to do is paste a second folded strip on to the end of the first. Once the reader-author has finished his contribution, he tucks it into an ear-shaped pocket, which he pastes in using the juice of the berries of one of the island’s trees; the pocket is stuck by the same agent above the word or term in the pre-existing text to which it refers and whose content it develops. (But the hidden content of every object is the rest of a universe, tied up in that object; and so the Book has erased the difference between the explanatory note and the digression, or rather it has revealed that the distinction was always an illusory one. The hidden content of every part of such an insertion/explanation/digression constitutes a whole universe, making it something very large, which is not at all what it seems.) We might describe the ear of an insertion as a three-dimensional bracket. The pocket is easy to unstick: should another reader-author wish to write an insertion to an insertion, all he needs to do is repeat the whole process and to paste another, smaller ear at the appropriate place on the first insertion.
This bulking of the Book from the inside is possible because the paper used is extraordinarily light and thin but also very tough. This paper is produced from reeds which grow on the banks of the lower reaches of the river. It is made by the islanders during the periods they spend in the lower town. And here their journey to work rarely takes much longer than it does when they are living in their homes in the upper town, where it is their custom to stop off in the family mine on the way from bedroom to pantry. There is no shortage of reed in the lower town. Reed has swallowed up the statues and obelisks which stand along the river. Like a mighty but patient army it has advanced along the streets that lead from the river to the edges of town, has penetrated the courtyards of the palaces and the entrance halls of mansions and apartments alike. I saw town-centre apartments which brought together reed from the riverside and sand from the outskirts. Nor is there any shortage of demand for the paper-makers’ wares: the interest of the bibliophiles of Europe in light but tough paper never wanes. Paper is the island’s third article for export, after gemstones and fruit jellies. (I once discovered in an Amsterdam bookshop an annotated edition of the collected works of Nietzsche printed on the island’s paper. It had been possible to contain these in a single volume, which included all the letters, drafts and notes of Nietzsche’s estate—those on the forgotten umbrella, too—and an extensive commentary by the publisher.)