The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  “A marvellous statue, isn’t it?” says Taal from behind him. “I don’t show it to those philistines at court because they wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, but I was sure that you—as an artist—would grasp the depth and beauty of the work. You may study it for as long as you wish—I shall be happy to wait here with you.”

  “You do me a great kindness, Your Majesty. The statue is indeed sublime, and I am most grateful to you for showing it to me.” Gato’s words are spoken in honesty. “But I wouldn’t wish to keep you, so I shall leave you now to prepare for my journey.”

  “There’s no need to be shy. I am sure you would like to look at the statue more closely. While you do so, perhaps you would allow me one last look at the gemstone from the treasury; I am sure you have it about you. I received that stone as a gift from my wife many years ago, and I have to admit that I am sorry to see it go. I trust that you do not suspect me of wishing to take it back from you?”

  And Gato is forced to assure Taal that such a suspicion could not be further from his mind, and then to give him the stone. Taal turns it from side to side, holds it up against the light, and then—and he barely bothers to conceal the fact that the act is deliberate—the stone slips from Taal’s hand and off the balcony. Gato cries out; he can do nothing but watch as the stone sinks into the soft statue, into the head of the giant squid, before the jelly closes over it. Taal proceeds to apologize to Gato for his clumsiness, but assures him there is no need for concern—Gato can retrieve the gemstone from the statue whenever he chooses, it is a simple matter to walk through the jelly; should the statue incur slight damage as a result, Gato need not fear Taal’s wrath, his servants will restore the statue to its original state.

  In that case, says Gato, he will retrieve the gemstone straight away; and he runs down the staircase into the courtyard. When he reaches the shuddering statue, he stops short. Then he plunges his hand into one of the figures, and indeed it does enter the soft, cool jelly with ease. He is about to step into the statue when he becomes aware that dark shadows are flocking from the depths to his hand. This upsets him, and he remains standing before the statue with one hand inside it. Then there is a sharp pain in his finger, which causes him to cry out and withdraw the hand. At the tip of the finger a small body is hanging; he pulls this off and throws it down on the granite paving slabs, but its teeth have retained a piece of his flesh. The fish flaps about angrily, making a sound that reverberates around the great empty courtyard. Gato looks in disgust at its round, spiteful eyes and pumping mouth full of sharp, brilliant-white teeth. Having succeeded in thrashing its way back to the statue and slipping itself inside, the fish sticks its head back out and grins at Gato before disappearing for good.

  “Don’t worry,” calls Taal from above. “Give it a try some other time.” He is leaning over the balcony, unable to conceal in his voice the tones of derision and triumph. “Regrettably, I can wait no longer than three days.” With this, Taal’s head vanishes behind the stone balustrade.

  Gato decides not to try to enter the statue again that day: he will think things through carefully and seek the advice of Hios. When that night he tells her of the gemstone and the statue, Hios is horrified. He was enormously lucky, she said: the fish that live in the jelly are ferocious. They feed on birds that happen to fly low over the statue, which they watch from just beneath the surface and then ambush by pitching themselves out of the jelly and snatching the birds in their teeth by the wings. Hios describes how once, in a fit of anger, her mother threw a cat from the balcony; all that was left of it a few moments later was its white bones. There is only one means by which one can enter the statue. Once a year the servants do so in order to clear out the bones of birds, dead fish and any other rubbish that has fallen into it. So that the fish keep away from them, the servants smear the napes of their necks, their wrists and ankles in a grease made from a certain species of wild duck whose scent the fish cannot stand. (Next to the word duck there was a pocket containing a detailed exposition of the way this duck lived, the land in which it was found, and the history and religion practised in this land.) Hios promises Gato that the next night she will find a pretext on which to visit the servants’ wing so that she can bring him a jar of the duck grease.

  The birth of a world

  Above the sentence in which the unknown author first mentioned the group of statuary, there was a thick pocket. This I did not open immediately because I was curious to discover how the scene in the courtyard would play itself out, but once I had read the page on which the author describes the conversation between Gato and Hios about fish and duck grease, I went back to it. As I was expecting, the text on the strip of paper I pulled out gave a description of the origins of the statue. This sculpture in jelly is created four years before the death of Prince Fo, the son of Taal and Uddo. That year Fo is to turn to twenty, and Taal decides to have a magnificent new wing built on to the palace in honour of his birthday. He summons to Devel the best architects, painters and sculptors in the archipelago.

  The shell of the new wing is complete when Taal sails off to the island kingdom of Kass for a meeting about a protracted dispute over territory, which has again flared up in the form of skirmishes in ports and short exchanges of fire between ships in the straits that separate the two islands. At the castle of Kass’s ruling prince, Taal is enraptured by the magnificent statues placed along the walls of all corridors at regular intervals. The prince tells him that all the statues are the work of one person, Kass’s court sculptor. On hearing this information, Taal promises without hesitation to withdraw his military forces from all the disputed islets in the straits the very next day and to guarantee the safe passage of Kassian ships, on condition that the prince lends him the services of his court sculptor for two years. The prince is happy to consent to this, though he tells Taal that he is perhaps in for a surprise.

  Two weeks later a ship arrives at the port on Devel. Taal is surprised indeed: once the labourers have carried out all the cases of tools and piled these up on the jetty, a lightly-built young woman steps ashore. Her name is Mii, and it was she who carved the statues of the Kassian court. The commission to decorate Fo’s palace has aroused in her a great enthusiasm. Mii is not capable of making one statue only; whenever she is working on a statue she feels the need to create a whole universe of which this statue is but a part. Mii’s manner of working is as follows: first of all she walks around the palace or park in which her statues are to stand, listening to the sounds of individual spaces until she gains an understanding of their pulsation and energy, the ebbs and flows of the forces within them, and it is out of this that shapes begin to crystallize. It is as though the spaces tell her of their anxieties, dreams and myths, of their gods and demons, of the mysterious beasts that inhabit them, of the dramas they stage, of the hell that glows in their corners, of the paradise whose music sounds behind their walls, of the sea whose tide washes up to them, of the galleries of dreams that are anchored at their most distant point.

  Mii always stipulates that she herself should choose the places where the statues are to stand. For many people, her choices are beyond comprehension. A statue might stand in a hall aglow with the radiant light of chandeliers or in the darkest, dustiest corner, on an ostentatious portal or in a concealed alcove that is difficult to find, in a room in which the statue controls the space imperiously or high on a facade where its features are impossible to make out, perhaps even in an attic where no one ever has cause to go or in a cellar where the light never penetrates. It has happened that a client of Mii’s finds to his wonder, years after she completed the commission, a statue hidden in the dense brush by the park wall or beneath the murky surface of a pond.

  As the figures take shape, so too do they acquire life stories: new worlds are born with their own histories, their own gods and mythologies, their own mores and laws. Mii knows the intricate mycelia of relations and events that are expressed in the gestures of the statues, surge into the points of daggers held over th
e breasts of enemies and the tips of fingers reaching out for conciliation; she knows the thousands of images and stories of the world of statues that have never achieved expression yet pulsate in stiff gestures of the body. But she has never felt the need to tell anyone about this world, nor herself to portray it in any way; it is enough for her that it radiates from the point of a dagger or the fingers of an outstretched hand.

  Mii always works day and night, practically without a break. Whenever she finishes the creation of one of her worlds she feels immense fatigue; she sleeps for several days, and for weeks after this does not get up from her bed. In this time the universe she has created becomes dimmer and dimmer in her mind until it is gone. So clear is Mii’s mind now that when she receives a new commission and is walking around a house unknown to her, she does so with an empty consciousness, listening to the new whispers of unknown spaces, which introduce her to the rhythms of a nascent world.

  When Taal shows Mii the sketches that express his ideas about how the statues of the palace should look, the sculptress does not so much as look at them. She asks him to take her to Fo’s wing, and for one whole month she does nothing but walk the empty corridors, halls and staircases. Out of the veins of the marble panelling and the rippling of the curtains, the gloom of the corridors and the brilliant light of the halls, there gradually arise the shapes of new gods, demons and heroes, the figures of humans, animals and monsters; the staircase transforms into cascades of water, giving life to nymphs and river deities; in the corridor an army of phantoms appears that mounts an expedition against the world of the humans. To begin with, Mii has blocks of marble set down in places she determines; then she gets to work on many statues simultaneously. Taal looks on with awe as she runs from the mouth of a statue by the wall of the balcony to the scales of a Triton in the fountain.

  The pocket attached to this passage in the Book contained a detailed catalogue of all the statuary Mii created in Fo’s palace. I would quite like to have read this, but it was so badly smudged as to be practically illegible. I imagined someone folding out his part of the text and then walking with it through a wall of water; or perhaps these pages had been caught by a higher wave down by the sea. It was with a sense of sorrow that I looked at the white pages and the smudges of ink that had run. It came to me that here was a place where the forms of the statues returned to the realms of the shapeless currents out of which once they had crystallized.

  Fo goes to take a look at the birth of a new world, just as Hios will do four years later. To begin with, Mii is unconcerned by his presence: in any case she hardly ever notices creatures that do not belong in the world she is creating. So Fo watches the origination of unknown creatures that will share his palace with him. His admiration for Mii soon develops into love. But at this time Mii lives in the world inhabited by her statues; for her figures she knows an incestuous love, in which she is the mother. For Mii, Fo is an incomprehensible and ever less welcome apparition, coming from another world.

  We do not know if Mii could have fallen in love with Fo had the prince waited to declare his feelings for her until she finished her work at the palace, until she began to forget the faces and fates of her lovers in a disappearing world and to return to the world of men. But like all others of his family, Fo is of an impatient, excitable nature. When he realizes that Mii is taking absolutely no notice of him, when he sees that the only answer she has to give to his declaration is silence and that the only feeling she shows in his presence is resentment that someone is disturbing her work, he quits the palace and wanders about the island, sleeping in caves, under trees in the woods or on the sandy shore.

  A cabin in the woods

  The part of the Book that described the wanderings of the unhappy Prince Fo was extremely long, although it included hardly anything that had a particular bearing on the main story-line. The author gave a long-winded description of Fo’s encounters with country-dwellers who fail to recognize the wayfaring stranger who speaks with them. I read details of the country Fo passes through. The Book acknowledged Fo’s entering new districts with pockets in which the author wrote at length about the flora and fauna of the new territories or told a variety of boring or interesting tales from the locality. But the islanders made no distinction between the main story-line and its adjuncts; once when I was speaking with Karael about the unexpected digressions the islanders were always willing to give in to, she came out with something like an aphorism. “The main thing,” she said, “is that which is incidental.” (Another of her aphorisms was: “If you wish to encounter something that is exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.”) For a long time I found these labyrinthine insertions and diversions quite intolerable, but as you now know, dear reader, in the course of time I learned to appreciate the charms of nonsensical encounters on minor routes and confused returns to a world my absence had made strange to me. In these encounters our most intimate and important life goals suddenly become diversions that lead us away from a path that is unknown, monstrous and endlessly alluring, a path that is spun from materials we have always known to be diversional but at whose end there shines the highest, most blissful Goal, the correction of everything that has ever bothered or distracted us.

  One afternoon in the woods, Fo gets caught in the rain. He takes shelter under the branches of a tree and watches the bushes as they shiver in the torrents of water. Then he catches sight through the leaves of some kind of building. It is a small cabin, built perhaps by woodsmen for their own use; since the woodsmen abandoned it, it has no doubt been used as a night shelter by various vagabonds. The cabin has no proper windows or door, just openings cut into the walls. On its floor there is a palliasse, its rotting straw poking out at several places, and cinders in a grate. (The smoke leaves the cabin through a black-edged hole in the roof.) Having laid himself down on the palliasse, Fo watches the woods grow dark through the door and listens to the lovely song played by the rain on the leaves. Before long he falls asleep. At dawn he is woken by the cold. He goes off in search of brushwood so that he can get a fire going. As he is laying rain-drenched twigs in the grate, he notices in there between the sooty logs a piece of blackened paper—the fire-ravaged page of some book. He reads the only sentence that is still legible. (It is this: “For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish.”) He looks about the room for something to light the fire with. In the corner of the room there is a pile of paper, bearing on one side of each sheet records on the felling of trees. Fo crumples up several sheets, pushes them in among the twigs and lights the fire.

  Then he pulls the palliasse closer to the fire, lies back down on it, looks through the door at the play of the mist above the roots of the trees, and listens to the crackling of the flames. He is expecting to see Mii in his mind’s eye, and it is indeed so that her face and hands (working the stone) appear to him at once. But this time the images do not develop in accordance with the established ritual: they have got stuck; some kind of obstacle has forced itself between him and them. To his surprise and displeasure Fo realizes this obstacle is the sentence he read a while earlier on that piece of singed paper. For the time being this aggressive sentence has blocked the transmission of the film of painful bliss he was so looking forward to; images of Mii have paled and buckled. Fo is furious that something as inconsequential as a couple of banal words about a vegetable can come between him and his grand passion, but still he is helpless to resist thoughts of the king and the radish. His mind churns out one question after another, and of these questions he cannot rid himself. What could possibly be the reason for a king’s long contemplation of a radish? Of course, if it were a particularly fine example of its kind his eyes might be drawn to it, but why would he need to look at it for a long time? Did he not have enough on his plate with all the affairs of state? If it were a fine example of its kind, perhaps he was shown it at an agricultural fair he had cause to visit. But Fo finds this answer unsatisfactory: not even the most marvellous vegetable can be studied and contemp
lated for long, and it is inconceivable that a ruler would do so. He had a vague notion that the meaning of the radish was somehow bound up with the position of the king in society: there must be some connection between the radish and the fate of the state or the life and death of the king or someone close to him.

  Fo takes a walk in the woods, where he picks some red berries. Thinking of turning back, he finds himself hoping he will be unable to find his way to the cabin where he was troubled by the radish in such an absurd manner. Just as he is beginning to think himself lost, and to feel relief at the prospect, the back wall of the cabin emerges from the bushes right in front of him. He returns to his new dwelling with a sigh and lies back down on the palliasse. He tells himself the words on the singed sheet of paper are so intrusive because they make no sense. If he thinks hard for an hour about the king-radish sentence, he is sure to hit upon some meaningful connection, and thus will he succeed in breaking its power and rid himself of it. Then once again he will dedicate himself to the blissful suffering of his lovesickness.

  Sitting on the palliasse, he sets about a deconstruction of the situation described by the sentence. The king cannot afford to fritter away his time in the study of radishes: he must rule, and if at any given moment he happens not to be ruling, there are surely means of diversion available to him other than the contemplation of vegetables. No, implicit in the radish there must be something important, a message of the utmost significance. But if this were hidden inside the radish, the king would not find out what it was just by studying and contemplating it, regardless of how long he spent in doing so. Unless, of course, the message was on the very surface of the radish, in someone’s handwriting or perhaps carved into it. But even this made little sense: if the message were in a script or a language the king understood, it would be unnecessary for him to study and contemplate it for a long time, and if it were in a script or language unknown to him, even the longest imaginable study of the text would be no help to him in deciphering it unless other things were done besides. On top of all this, why would anyone carve an important message (concerning, perhaps, the security of the kingdom or the life of the king) into the surface of a radish? It was practically impossible to imagine a situation where someone was required to write to the king on a radish rather than a piece of paper.