by Michal Ajvaz
At the sound of the cries, the admiral and the marshal rush to the window. The cook makes use of this development to slip out of the kitchens and down the stone steps to the king’s aid. But by the time he has reached the twentieth step, the struggle with the monster is over. As the tentacles of the squid were uncoiling themselves over his head, the king realized that his interpretation of the radish statue was wrong. He is condemned to believe ever after that he is the cause of Isili’s death. The cook is rewarded richly for his loyalty and all the conspirators are imprisoned. Then the king hands over his kingdom to his younger brother and sails off to Europe. There he travels through land after land, along highways and across plains; he sits about in empty inns in the country; he walks about the biggest cities, whose streets merge in his dreams and memories into one endless city-labyrinth; he sleeps in cold hotels and inhospitable boarding houses. In the writing of his book, Fo forgets completely about his own past, but it returns to him in pictures that come to him through the dark. The description of the European wanderings of ex-king Dru are surely a result of the despair and disquiet of his own past, even if he remembers these no longer. The only despair he knows now is stirred by the multifarious images that elude his inner eye; the only disquiet that pursues him results from the frantic rush of sentences that propel themselves into the vortex of blurred images waiting for words to describe them while retreating from these very words.
Eyepiece of a telescope
It is a day in November, and Dru has been walking the paths and tracks of a forest for many hours. He is now so deep within it that he cannot find his way out. Night is falling and Dru is beginning to think he will have to sleep beneath the trees. But when he reaches the top of a low rise, he sees between the dark trunks before him a cluster of twinkling lights. He tumbles towards these through crackling drifts of leaves and soon finds himself on the edge of the villa quarter of a large town. As he goes along the streets and past dark gardens replete with the smell of decomposing grass, he meets no one. He looks into the lit windows of the villas. In one of these he sees a woman who is carefully moving a dust-cloth over the surface of a gleaming instrument. This is an astronomer’s telescope, the most complex telescope of all; Dru recognizes it from the times he was interested in astronomy. He looks up to see that the silhouette of the villa ends in a cupola, and that the barrel of the telescope is protruding from this at an angle. He recalls his erstwhile passion for the stars. After a few moments of hesitation, Dru rings the doorbell of the house. The door is opened by the woman he saw through the window. She is about fifty years old, and Dru imagines it is a long time since she spoke to anyone other than the man who keeps the shop on the corner of the street, whose illuminated window he has just passed. It seems to him that the long period of silence has forced the features of her face into a tight knot that lets nothing of her inside out. He asks the woman if she will permit him to look at the telescope. To begin with she refuses, but once he offers her money, she opens the door to him.
The telescope is in the middle of a room whose walls are lined with shelves bearing carefully arranged treatises on astronomy. The instrument’s optical centre is swathed in metal casing, but by its size it is obvious that it contains an immensely complex system of lenses and mirrors. Dru runs his hand along the instrument’s cool surface, as if he were a stroking a great motionless beast. Then he sits down in a chair and looks into the eyepiece. He sees a broad boulevard in a large city, where the palaces are built in a metal unknown to him. Walking in the streets are beings similar to humans, but with faces a gleaming gold. On the road surface there is an ultramarine dust; along it glide golden sleighs, their noses slim and curved like Viking ships. Dru is confused. Is he really looking at a city on a distant planet, or is this some kind of trick by which these moving pictures are generated somewhere in the depths of the instrument?
There is not much to be found out from the woman. She is the widow of the astronomer, who in his youth received many accolades from the world of science but whose irascible and obviously eccentric nature caused him to break with all his colleagues one after another, to conceive a hatred for other scientists, and close himself up in a private observatory he built for himself. He then dedicated all his energies to watching the stars and perfecting his instruments. He had nothing to do with other astronomers, he didn’t publish any papers or books, and he never spoke to his wife about his work. One morning she found his motionless body lying on the floor next to the telescope. After this she lived in the villa alone and cleaned her husband’s workroom every day just as she had when he was alive. Still she dusts his telescope every day. It has never crossed her mind to look into the eyepiece.
Dru offers the woman all the money that remains to him and they agree he will rent one of the rooms in the villa, with access to the telescope whenever he wishes. The woman is at first reluctant to go along with this, but her money is running out and she knows her only other choice is to sell the villa along with the telescope. So Dru moves into the villa and spends whole nights looking into the eyepiece of the telescope, set by its creator so as to watch the journeys of the planets across the sky. He cannot rid himself of the suspicion that he may not in fact be observing life on a planet that orbits a great purple sun in a distant galaxy but rather a projection produced somewhere inside the instrument; perhaps he is the victim of a practical joke the misanthropic stargazer prepared for one of his colleagues. One day he unscrews part of the instrument’s casing, but once confronted with the magnificent glass labyrinth composed of so many visions and lights, he lacks the courage to take the work of the grumpy astronomer to pieces. But the more he immerses himself in life seen through the eyepiece, the less he thinks about whether or not it is real. (Although on days when the sky is shrouded in cloud and he lies morose on the ottoman in his room, the thought does flash through his mind that the world that is slowly becoming his home is just an illusion, the joke of a dead scientist.)
But that year is notable for its clear nights; only rarely is the sky overcast. Dru begins to live with the inhabitants of the distant planet. To begin with all he does is watch the activity in the streets and thoroughfares and buildings, the latter of which fortunately have large glass windows that make it easy to look into the dwellings of the extra-terrestrials. The telescope is so sophisticated that it can be focused on any place on the planet’s visible side, its lenses set so that Dru can read without difficulty unknown gold characters on the red pages of the books the extra-terrestrials hold in their hands. Dru learns to lip-read the spoken word and to understand what it means from the context. After a time he has the impression he can hear conversations, along with the melody and timbre of voices. He looks through windows into classrooms and learns to read and write with small children; he looks over the shoulders of readers and reads along with them novels, epic poetry, and works of philosophy and history. He discovers that the planet’s name is Umur and learns about the most dramatic moments in the histories of its states, about its religions and thought systems.
Three times a day his landlady puts a plate of food in front of him without saying a word; if he happens to be asleep, she puts the plate on his bedside table. They barely speak. Dru never tells her what he has seen in the telescope, just as her husband never told her, and it seems she has no interest in it. Dru watches the opening and closing of the great, fantastical flowers of creeping plants that grow around the houses; he watches tournaments in vast arenas, naval battles, azure geysers spurting from the floors of apartments and their transformation each night into clear ice that reflects the light of the moon and the stars.
He knows that it takes a ray of light thousands of years to reach Earth, that all the beings he watches are long dead, yet still it seems to him that he lives among the Umurians. Sometimes he replies to questions he reads from their lips—questions that were asked of someone else and spoken many thousands of years ago. He calls out in Umurian to the solitary night-time walker to take care, having seen slinking up be
hind him one of the panthers that live in the wild gardens of the rooftops and at night climb down the tangled creepers into the streets, although he knows full well that thousands of years have passed since the moment the panther bit into the foolhardy pedestrian’s neck. The stargazer’s widow is a frequent witness to Dru’s shouted utterances in a language that bears no relation to Earth speech as he stares into the eyepiece. But never does she comment, never does she ask any questions. She remains silent when he turns his attention to her, perhaps with the intention of thanking her for a meal, when a strange language issues from his mouth and he struggles to recall the words of his own planet. Perhaps she lived through this with her husband; perhaps he, too, spoke in the same unknown language; perhaps she thinks that the instrument to which the two men have sacrificed so many nights is an invention of the devil, a bringer of madness and death; perhaps she thinks this is man’s business, and that she has no right to interfere in it.
Dru sleeps during the day, and when he wakes in the afternoon he waits with impatience for night to fall. He sits in his room in a low chair, watching through the window the outlines of the bald branches of the garden; he contemplates the white walls of the room and their pictures of a glorious distant planet, which appears to be living through the later years of a golden age (there are obvious indications of imminent decline). Sometimes the face of Isili comes to him as in an obscure dream, or scenes from his life at the court of Vauz, or from the hotels and wayside inns of his days as a wanderer. By this time Dru’s thoughts are in the language of the Umurians. The face of his landlady—the only human face he ever gets to see—appears to him monstrous, stirring his compassion. One day he catches sight of his own reflection in the hallway mirror and is horrified to see that he, too, has a ghostlike white mask instead of a face of gleaming gold. He covers the mirror with a piece of cloth, and his landlady is willing to leave it like this.
Having forgotten Isili, Dru falls in love with a girl from Umur. Nus has a face of dark gold set with diamonds. There he sits at the telescope, unkempt, unshaven and unwashed, whispering Umurian words of love to Nus, watching her travel about the city. When she falls in love with a young panther-hunter, he feels a dark despair; such is his torment as he looks into her bedroom and follows their night-time games of love, that he wishes he would die. Sometimes he has the impression that the lovers know about him and are laughing at him. Sometimes he thinks Nus might be looking—in provocation and derision—in the direction of the distant telescope and Earth, straight into the eyepiece of Dru the cosmic voyeur; when this happens he flies into a rage, cries out and kicks the telescope, curses Nus of Umur and threatens her with a dreadful revenge. But Nus, of course, has been dead for several thousand years.
Fo’s return
The plot of the novel written by Fo in the cabin in the woods is gradually shifted to the other planet. Dru, erstwhile king of Vauz, comes into the story less and less, until he features only in connection with the description of scenes from the telescope. Now events are described to which Dru’s telescope does not have access, events which he is surely imagining. Also described are the feelings and thoughts of the extra-terrestrials, whom Dru learns to read better and better from their facial expressions, gestures and words. And so the extra-terrestrial passages, which to begin with were somewhat reminiscent of the nouveau roman, gradually assume the nature of a traditional, omniscient author. (But the right to get right into a particular space or the thoughts of a character, which the authors of the nineteenth century considered theirs for the taking, is in this case paid for by Dru’s agonized solving of clues as his gaze wanders about the dumb surface of objects and faces, a surface that remains resolutely closed to him.)
And as visible worlds grow out of invisible worlds and carry their hidden spaces and secrets within, as what is close to the surface illumines depths, backs and interiors, the world in which Dru lives has from the very beginning its own depth, in which there are very few gaps. Because of this Dru is all the more exasperated when he comes up against a genuine blind spot. For example, the main square of the capital city is entered by a mighty river, screened from view at a certain point by the city hall; the river does not re-emerge on the far side of this building. Dru’s gaze is well-trained in looking for clues of the hidden, and he studies carefully the reflections flickering across the smooth sides of sleighs that emerge from behind the city hall. But the sleighs move too quickly and the reflections on their warped surfaces are too misshapen to read. Once mirrored in a metal tray carried by a waiter in a restaurant at the back of the square, he sees something pulsating, which may be natural or may be mechanical; after this his gaze follows the waiters of this establishment for several nights, but never again do they hold their trays at the correct angle.
By this time only one sentence in every hundred pages reminds the reader of the eye resting against the eyepiece to observe a planet in a distant galaxy; now the people of Earth are figures from a strange planet. Then at last the eye disappears from the text entirely—in his cabin, Fo forgets all about it, and the novel becomes a saga of Umur. The gaze is free of the constraints imposed by the eyepiece and able to travel about Umur at will; all coverings are demolished, objects are no longer made up of fronts and backs, surfaces and insides. The gaze that sweeps the planet, sniffs into hollows and joyfully orbits objects like a dog, belongs to no one in particular; its drunken course leaves in its wake a continuous trail of words. A life form appears on the square behind the city hall that is half-plant, half-mountain, that drinks in the water of the river and transforms this water into translucent, coloured crystals that travel through steep caves into glowing underwater lakes. The pressure of gases in the lakes occasionally throws these crystals high above the Umurian city like magnificent fireworks. The gaze follows Nus into rooms in the most secret depths of her house, pushes through walls and curtains, walks about with her in a vast gold cellar Dru never knew existed.
The tale of Dru’s wanderings and the description of how—once in his new world—he forgets about Isili entirely, is no doubt an echo of Fo’s own fate. Mii’s face has disappeared entirely from Fo’s thoughts, but it returns unrecognized in the masks of his characters. The similarity between Fo’s story and the story of his heroes is so great that the unknown author of this part of the Book—perhaps Fo himself in the cabin—several times confuses Mii with Isili and inserts the wrong name. (“If you wish to find something exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.”) It might be expected that Fo’s projecting his own trauma in his work would be a kind of therapy for him, allowing him to exorcize the demons of despair and restlessness. I was imagining that once his imagination had given his demons new bodies, he would find the courage to drive them from his thoughts; but in fact all that happens is that the demons gain new nourishment, which makes them stronger and more aggressive. They control the world of Fo’s novel just as earlier they controlled the world of Fo’s real life; they unify both these regions under their rule, and in this new empire they begin to flaunt the rituals of their power.
Fo is lying on his front on the palliasse, writing in ever smaller letters on sheets he lays on the floor. He is worried that the store of paper in the cabin will not suffice, and thus he will not be able to describe everything that is happening and has happened on Umur—its celebrated history, the grandeur of its court, the glory of its celebrations, the beauty and magnificence of its nature. When he has filled the last sheet in the cabin and placed it atop the pile next to the palliasse, he turns this pile over and begins to write on the other side of the pages, in the gaps between lines recording numbers of felled trees. The letters become so small that Fo himself is not able to read most of them, but it is enough for him to know that the pages are being filled. He has long been recording dialogue in the Umurian original, not bothering to translate it, and on top of this—in the manner of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who in War and Peace switched from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Roman for the writing of dialogue in French—Fo
does this in the hieratic script of Umur (composed of monstrous letters he has thought up in the cabin). In the end he is writing the rest of the text, too, in the hieratic script; whether or not it is in the Umurian language, no one will be able to determine. Thus on the floor of a small building in the woods are scattered many sheets of paper filled with small, illegible characters written between the lines of a forester’s record-keeping.
It was not just Fo’s book that was written in the script of Umur: the part of the Book that described Fo’s work, which I read on the island, quoted from it in the original. I really believe the islanders read these pages, and that they even derived pleasure from doing so in spite of not knowing the meaning of Fo’s characters and thus not being able to understand what they were reading. But unlike the islanders I was not so good a student that I could take pleasure from symbols without meaning. When I noticed that the last two thirds of Fo’s work were written in Umurian characters only, I carefully folded the strip of paper back into itself, returned it to the pocket it belonged in, and went back to Fo’s cabin. I still hadn’t finished with the pocket whose contents described the origination of the statue in jelly, which itself—as no doubt you remember, dear reader—was to be found in the pocket that contained the seafarer’s tale of a feud between two families in an archipelago, itself inserted into a description of twenty years’ worth of this seafarer’s travels.
Fo’s fall into another world is perhaps the result and also the cause of a sickness that has taken hold of his mind and body owing to the hardships suffered on his solitary journeys and the harshness of his life in the cabin; these come immediately after the burn-out of his unrequited love, and are exacerbated by the draining tension and compulsive ecstasy created in him by his writing. When at last Fo is discovered by one of the units searching the island for him at Taal’s command, the crown prince, who has by now covered both sides of every sheet of paper he can find, is lying in the cabin trembling with fever; he has used the last of his strength to carve some strange letters into the floorboards. News of Fo’s discovery reaches the palace before he does: the king, Uddo, Hios and the whole court are standing in the courtyard when the unit delivers him home. What they see is a delirious, emaciated figure being borne through the palace gates on a stretcher; the figure does not see them. Fo’s parents and sister are a constant presence at his bedside, but Fo does not recognize them. They have Mii brought to him in the hope that the sight of the woman he loved will clear his mind, but Fo babbles to her something about how happy he is that she managed to escape the squid’s tentacles, and he seems to be telling her how sorry he is about the dreadful illness that so changed her golden, diamond-spangled face. Then he whispers something in an unknown language and retreats into himself. By dawn of the third day his separation from the world is complete.