by Michal Ajvaz
Should one take a close look at the group of monkeys cavorting in the tree-tops, for example, one would see that one of them is not part of the game; instead he is sitting comfortably on a branch some way off, reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics and writing in the margin of one of its pages the word Absurd! The observant student might notice, on the calm waters of the lake, the reflection of a house on whose veranda there is a rocking-chair in which a retired naval captain is sitting. Yet neither next to the lake nor elsewhere in the picture is there any such house. Taal fails to notice details such as this, but Hios finds them straight away and they are a source of great pleasure to her. Every morning she looks forward to finding something new in the shrubs of the garden or the gloom of a summerhouse.
Then she begins to notice other things, too. She suspects that the lines described by the spreading branches and the twisting lianas are a kind of trail left by a heavy, sad current that flows across the carpet from one form to the next. At one point the grey-blue surface of the lake resounds with a silent pain; at another, in a whirl of silver leaves stirred by the breeze, there is the sound of a music that borders on madness. And Hios asks herself who this stranger is. Who can this person be who repeats one hundred and twelve times—with the pertinacity of the melancholic at times of heaviest depression—a complicated oval motif in the ornamental relief work of the cornice of a summerhouse, before placing the goggle-eyed face of a bespectacled, pipe-smoking rabbit exactly where one expects the hundred-and-thirteenth to be? The princess has a dear friend called Ara, and it is around this time that Ara becomes painfully aware in the moments she and Ara spend together that Hios returns in her mind to the magic garden. No longer do Hios’s touches represent the crests of waves of desire that course through her body; her fingers continue to pursue old paths, but they do so abstractedly and mechanically, or—and this for Ara is more humiliating still—they follow courses suspiciously reminiscent of those taken by Gato’s carpet.
Gato soon comes to see in Hios’s joyous expression an understanding of the carpet that is very different from Taal’s. He begins to weave for her scenes with crazy animals and living objects. This early-morning dialogue between pictures and gazes, held day after day without the uttering of single word, is the only source of joy for Gato in the hostile palace where the task he is pursuing is practically hopeless and his being found out and killed is a constant threat. Hios, too, enjoys this wordless communication of conspiracy, which takes place before the unsuspecting Taal’s very eyes. And the images that Gato creates for Hios become more personal and tender with each passing day…
Dear reader, I shall not make myself ridiculous by leading you to a certain event which I would then present to you as a twist in the story. You have certainly guessed what is about to happen, just as I did when I was reading these passages of the Book. (In terms of psychology, the Book did not have much to boast about.) Naturally enough, Hios falls in love with Gato, and so she will play in the story the somewhat trite role of an Ariadne (in a proper, non-symbolic, albeit miniature labyrinth, what’s more). After several pages on which the unknown author describes how the motifs of Gato’s carpet become ever more erotic messages to Hios, the much-anticipated moment arrives and the princess and Gato embrace. After this Hios goes every night to Gato’s chamber, where she stays until morning. Several times she has to avoid being seen by Taal (who is coming to see what is new in the garden-carpet) by concealing herself behind a potted palm in an alcove of the corridor. Unhappy and insulted, Ara leaves Devel and disappears for a long time from the pages of the Book. Indeed, in my reading of the Book I came to believe she would never reappear; then she turned up unexpectedly after many more folds in the concertina so as to play a telling role in the Devel tale’s bloody finale.
The night Gato finishes work on the carpet, Hios is in his chamber. The day has been humid, but after midnight the atmosphere cools and from the palace gardens there comes the gentle murmur of rain falling on leaves. The princess throws a blanket around her shoulders and goes to sit on the windowsill. Gato sits down next to her, and together they look down at the town, up at the starless sky and across to a place where land and sea are joined. In the dense, dark mass of the town all that is visible is ragged strips of streets illuminated by street lamps and the distant fire of the lighthouse in the harbour. Gato turns to Hios and tells her who he is and why he has come to the palace. All Hios asks of him is that he should take her with him when he leaves Devel; then she tells him that the red gemstone is on the highest shelf of the treasury, in a small box which is made of the wood of the terebinth tree and has a picture of a basilisk on its lid. She tells him what to do in order to get it.
“Do not try to seize the stone unnoticed,” she says. “You may believe the corridor to be empty before the door to the treasury, but in fact there are many peepholes manned by many unseen eyes. Observe the handles of the closed doors of the corridor and you will see that none of them is still: they are held from the inside by the hands of watchers. Listen well at the thin walls and the folds of the curtains and you will hear the whisper of secret commands passed from mouth to mouth. The palace corridors are long, and you would not be the first to disappear in them without a trace. Death awaits in the gloom of nooks and empty corridors; you must do your dealings in the glare of the chandeliers of the great halls. Tomorrow my father will hold a celebration in the main hall. You will announce to him before all those present that you wish to solve the problem set by the door to the treasury. Thus shall everyone know of it. It is highly likely that the eyes of curious courtiers will follow you about. That you shall be under surveillance is good: those curious eyes might spare you from the knife or the bullet.
“In moving the game stone about the labyrinth, naturally it is impossible that one should be guided by written instructions. You will need to know each of the thirty-six moves by heart. Thirty-six times you must decide whether to move the stone to the right or to the left. I shall now teach you the story of the caliph of Baghdad. This you shall have no difficulty in remembering, as each of its events is linked to the next. Disguised as a merchant, the caliph walks the streets of Baghdad, where he has thirty-six encounters that correspond to the thirty-six moves. As you move the stone you will tell the story to yourself. Whenever the caliph meets a man, you move to the right; when he meets a woman, this means you must move to the left.”
And there at the window above the sleeping town the princess proceeds to tell the story of the caliph, who one warm night mounts the side gate of his palace and sets about walking the narrow moon-and-starlit streets. There he has encounters with a wise man, a robber, a magician, a ferryman who works the Euphrates, a fig-seller, a woman whose face is concealed by a veil. The woman then disappears and reappears in a great variety of guises. The caliph last comes across her in his chamber after he has returned to the palace. The mysterious woman is the daughter of his vizier. The caliph embraces her, delighted to have captured the apparition that escaped him time and again in the Baghdad night. The last move of the stone is to the left, after which it meanders about the passages for a while before it suddenly reaches the centre of the labyrinth, whereupon a hidden mechanism opens the door. Hios teaches Gato the story of the caliph all night long. Only when the dawn-time scents of the carpet reach their nostrils does she steal from Gato’s room.
The royal treasury
I am telling you the story just as I learned it on the island, in the full knowledge that little of this Book island, if anything of it, remains today. First to change was its environment. I remember receiving a telephone call from Karael several months after I had left the island; in those days we were still phoning and writing to each other quite often. When my cellphone rang I was walking under a leaden sky along a mud-spattered sidewalk among the tower blocks of Prague’s Jížní msto housing estate, looking for an electrical repair shop. Among other things, I asked Karael about the Book, and she told me something of its most recent changes. I learned that the town on Devel
had in the course of several rewrites become gradually flatter, until it became a town of humble dwellings scattered about a marshy delta, the old camp of nomads who had stopped there on their way to the sea. The town was strung together around the mouth of a shallow brown river, where the tents reluctantly gave way to imperfect houses. In this version the conversation in which Hios advises Gato how to negotiate the labyrinth does not take place above the town but on its fringes; the princess and her lover are sitting at a ground-floor window from which they look upon the steppe, lit by the moon to the distant horizon. But I am not able to think of the town’s face as ever-changing, as the islanders can. My memory needs to select one face, one town from the many metamorphoses. So that time on the Jížní msto estate, as a wind that reminded me of the island gusted between the tower blocks, I decided to take no notice of the town on the delta and to preserve in my memory the image of the town I had taken from my own reading of the Book.
The next day Gato hands the garden-carpet over to Taal. In the afternoon the celebration in the great hall is declared open, and Gato wastes no time in approaching the king and declaring his wish to negotiate the labyrinth on the door of the treasury. News of the wish expressed by the stranger travels in whispers in all directions and to every corner of the hall, killing all conversation so all that is heard is a murmur of curiosity, astonishment and dismay. Taal’s face has darkened; he says that anyone has the right to attempt to conquer the labyrinth, that Gato should remember the trap-door and the subterranean river, but he says nothing more. Gato leaves the hall immediately and makes his way along the corridor, which seems to him endless. A procession of silent courtiers tiptoes cautiously behind him, stretching back beyond the bend in the corridor. Whenever Gato turns, they stop mid-step, some of them leaning forward with a foot raised, the outstretched toes just touching the gleaming parquet. Gato remembers reading that the moment after death the soul recalls the last image it saw in life, and he says to himself, “What strange theatrics I shall look upon in the underworld if I confuse one of the moves!” But once he reaches the door to the treasury, he does not turn again. He takes the magnetic stone in his hand, and begins to recite the story of the caliph.
His anxiety does not leave him. At one moment he suspects the stone is moving away from the labyrinth’s centre and into a blind alley, and he asks himself if Hios has not betrayed him, if she has taken the side of her family against the stranger. Perhaps her coming to him in the night was part of a plan devised in collaboration with Uddo and Taal. He thinks back to some of things she told him, which seem to him now ambiguous and disquieting; he imagines Hios leaving his chamber and going straight to her father, how they share in laughter at his expense just as cruel as the laughter of Taal and Uddo over Nau’s sickness and Tana’s desperation. When in Hios’s telling the caliph climbed through a hole in the wall into the garden of a stranger’s house, where he was addressed from the dark of the summerhouse by an old Persian merchant, it almost seemed to him that she had changed the story on purpose: would it not have been more logical for the caliph to encounter a woman, not a man in a garden at night? He suffers anguish akin to torment as he considers whether to move the stone to the left rather than to the right, before at last he obeys Hios and goes right, and the floor beneath him remains firm.
But the caliph had many more encounters that night, with men and with women, and Gato has many more decisions to make and junctions to negotiate. After every move he waits for the floor to open up beneath him, plunging him down into the subterranean river; he feels something akin to disappointment when this does not happen, as he will have to persist in this unbearable anxiety. The thirtieth move has been made and still Gato stands on the polished parquet, but this is no comfort to him. He knows very well how cunning Taal can be, and becomes ever more certain that Hios and Taal are in league, that he has been told thirty-five right moves but that the thirty-sixth will open the trap-door to the chasm when he feels victory to be in his grasp.
When the moment arrives for him to make that last move, when the caliph has returned to his chamber and the clear Baghdad sky is bright with stars, Gato pauses with the stone in his hand. What if the figure in the semi-transparent veil waiting in the caliph’s bed is not the lovely daughter of the vizier? What if the story Hios has kept from him has the caliph pull back the bed-drapes to find a thief, who has broken into the palace that night and is waiting for the caliph with a sharp dagger in his hand? Gato stands there for a long time with the stone in his hand, deliberating whether to go left or right. But in the end he goes left, as Hios told him to, and closes his eyes. There is a creaking sound. Gato attempts to hold on to the relief work of the door, although he knows full well that this will do nothing to save him from the long fall. His hands slip on the smooth, rounded surfaces. His eyes closed, he falls. He feels the chill of the cave and he hears the chattering of the subterranean river.
Fo’s palace
Dear reader, this division between chapters is not taken from the island’s Book. The book was not divided into chapters, nor even into paragraphs; the only means of division in the Book was given by the pockets, which sorted passages of text into different levels. But even these borders were constantly violated, so that which was separate was forever being drawn back into the fantastically tangled knot. I paused at the point of Gato’s long fall into the unknown so as to increase the tension. Let us set him free, and see that he is not falling into the abyss but into the space beyond the door. The creaking is not being made by the mechanism of the trap-door: it is the sound of the door opening. The chill Gato feels has been released by the treasury and the chattering comes from the astounded courtiers. In his anxiety Gato has done Hios an injustice. Taal and Uddo have no idea that their daughter and the stranger have become lovers. Hios did not betray him; for the whole time Gato was negotiating the labyrinth, she was standing there among the courtiers with bated breath, praying that Gato would not make a mistake.
By the light of a dim lamp, the gemstones, pearls and gold jewels of the treasury glitter. Gato quickly discovers on the top shelf the little box with the basilisk on its lid. He turns back from the treasury and his gaze seeks and finds the smiling face of Hios in the astonished crowd. Taal and Uddo are standing at a distance from the rest; Gato can see that Uddo’s mouth, its lips moving rapidly, is close to Taal’s ear. Having recognized the gemstone in the stranger’s hand, Uddo knows now who he is and also who told him how to get into the treasury. And on the spot she thinks up one of her dark plans, details of which she is whispering now to Taal. By the time Gato reaches the royal couple, Uddo’s lips have stopped fidgeting, moved away from Taal’s ear, and are set in an expression of satisfaction. A smiling Taal offers Gato his congratulations and commends his skill. Giving Gato a friendly pat on the shoulder, Taal tells him to be less modest and to help himself to more of the precious objects. Gato announces that next day he will be leaving the palace and the island, news which Taal greets with a nod of the head before moving closer to Gato and whispering to him: “Before you leave there’s something I must show you. My chamberlain will visit you in your chamber this afternoon and bring you to me.”
After luncheon the chamberlain does indeed come to Gato, and Gato follows him in silence. Rather than turning as usual at the end of the corridor, the chamberlain takes out a bunch of great keys and unlocks one of the doors that hitherto has always been locked. For the first time, Gato steps into the palace of the dead prince Fo. They pass down a long, straight, well-lit corridor, the silence broken only by the jingling of the keys at the chamberlain’s waist. The wind enters by the broken high windows to lift the white curtains, whose fabric squirms before Gato’s eyes like a dreamlike script and brushes dust and a scent of decay across his face. In alcoves on the other side of the corridor there are statues of white marble; these depict heroes wrestling with Gorgons, the dances of demons, women being transformed into bushes and wild beasts. Most of these statues are unfinished, and some of the plinths bear
nothing more than a chunk of marble out of which there emerges a human face or hands, the wings of a great bird, a sharp beak, the talons of a beast of prey, the scaly tail of a monster. At the end of the corridor there is a glass door; when the curtains before this are parted by the wind, Gato sees that it leads to a small balcony. Here Taal is resting his weight on the stone wall, looking down at a closed courtyard.
The welcome he offers Gato is exaggerated in its heartiness; the prince dreads what will come next.
“I haven’t yet shown you the most beautiful work of art in the palace,” says Taal. “It would be a shame for you to leave without having seen it.”
Gato steps up to the wall and looks down into the courtyard on the strangest group of statuary he has seen in his life. Its setting is the seashore, over which there looms the head of a giant squid whose eight terrible arms and two terrible tentacles are attacking a group of people sitting on the shore around a long table. Those unfortunates who are already in the squid’s terrible grip are struggling in vain to free themselves; the other figures are thrusting swords and knives into the body of this monster of the deep. There are plates on the table bearing the remains of a meal; Gato notices that the food on one of these has been shaped into some kind of figurine which is a modified, small-scale depiction of the scene of the struggle with the squid. But more than by the statue itself, Gato is astonished by the material of which it is made. To begin with he takes this for dark-green coloured glass, but then there is a gust of wind and the whole edifice quakes gently. When the wind is stronger the figures themselves stir. Gato is astonished to realize the work is made of some kind of jelly or aspic. The greenish jelly is transparent enough for Gato to see small, long, black shadows moving about within it.