by Michal Ajvaz
Theatre in the forest
This episode in the Book is connected with something that happened to me a few years after my return from the island. On a hot day in mid-July I decided to take a trip; I took the bus to Mníšek, and from there I climbed through the sparse forest, along the brooks with their magical, drowse-inducing scents that reminded me of the scent that the fierce sun drew from the island’s parched slopes. At a ridge in the path I looked down on a velvety valley with the glittering monogram of a river unfurling at its bottom edge. I walked down a path whose concentrated quiet occasionally spilled over into glades with rustling clusters of glowing leaves, as if it were unable to keep its dreams of light to itself, but the silence always returned.
I trust, dear reader, that by now you are so hardy in matters of digressions and insertions that you will have no trouble in relocating from a mythical archipelago to the Brdy hills of central Bohemia, where you will accompany me through the grass, breathe in with me the woodland scents, and pause with me awhile to take in the view of houses in the distance, dissolving downwards in the languid haze like cubes of sugar on the bottom of a cup. I am well aware that all the bold words you have heard from me about the value of insertions and digressions have failed to convince you; you are distrustful and stubborn, dear reader, and no doubt you are preparing to skip this insertion and its savage intervention between you and the tale of the origination of the statue in jelly. I expect you think I won’t notice. I won’t try to talk you out of anything, nor will I offer advice or prompting; who knows, this insertion may take you to the centre of an underground lake beneath Prague whose banks are lined with silver palaces, but then again perhaps all you will get to witness is a boring conversation in a pub in Revnice or Dobřichovice between owners of country cottages. You probably won’t miss anything important if you skip the next couple of chapters, but you could miss the encounter that holds the key to the entire text. The decision on which path in the labyrinth to take is yours and yours alone; whichever path you take, you do so at your own risk.
It was already getting dark when the woodland paths at last began to lead me to the upper edge of Revnice. I came across a gate on which there hung a poster advertising a woodland theatre—a festival of amateur theatre companies from central Bohemia was being held at this very place. On the programme that day was a play called In the Sea and on Dry Land. (I didn’t recognize the name of the author.) Through the wire fence I saw an illuminated stage beneath dark trees; the performance was in progress. For a while I watched out of curiosity. On the stage was an oblong table, at which there sat ten or so figures with their backs to the audience. There was a group of musicians standing to one side. When the musicians began to play, a construction made of wire covered with grey plush was hoisted up beyond the table; it was about two metres high, looked like a great rugby ball stood on its end, and into its front piece were sewn two large circles made of white cloth with two smaller circles of black cloth sewn onto them. Then ten stuffed plush pipes—their ends attached to thin wooden rods that were obviously controlled by actors hidden behind the stage—were lifted clumsily from the lower part of the construction. These pipes waggled about in the general direction of the figures at the table, who were crying out, assuming various attitudes of terror, and poking at the plush pipes with knives. It dawned on me that what I was watching was a dramatization of a scene from the island’s Book.
I bought myself a ticket, sat down on a bench, and watched the king and his retinue struggle with the plush tentacles. I looked about myself; there were not many spectators. The long benches contained several groups of young people drinking beer—they might have been friends and relatives of the actors. In the Revnice rendering of the scene, the giant squid kills the king and his fiancée and eats them. The naturalism in the depiction of Dru’s and Isili’s deaths was a strange contrast to the childish representation of the squid. The plush tentacles pulled Dru and Isili down into the sea. When they had gone from the stage, their terrible shrieks could still be heard as they were eaten alive; great geysers of red paint squirted high into the air. Then there was an interval. I bought myself a beer in a plastic cup and drank this slowly while I waited to see how the action would develop.
Although we had just witnessed the terrible death of the king and his fiancée, both these characters reappeared in the next act. The stage was set as a room in a modern-day apartment. Dru and Isili, who live in this room as tenants in straitened circumstances, are discussing the unspecified nightmares they have both been having. The room next to theirs is occupied by another tenant, a disagreeable bank clerk who looks like a bank clerk in a pre-war comedy film. The clerk is forever bothering Dru and Isili with his complaints (they haven’t mopped the bathroom floor, they have the radio on too loud at night, etc.) In the course of one of his visits it turns out that he, too, has recurrent nightmares on a similar theme. All three tenants dream of an evening by the sea, of a struggle in which the points of daggers glow with a red fire, there are great undulating serpents, and the foam of the sea is mixed with blood. It soon became clear to the tipsy Revnice audience that Dru and Isili were in the afterworld, living in a post-mortal city, that their past life was returning to them in these vague dreams; after a time, the characters, too, remember their pre-death existence. The author of the play mixed motifs from the island’s Book with the work of Ladislav Klíma and Swedenborg.
But the role of the clerk in the events on Vauz remained unclear. The three characters try for some time to figure this out together; then their memories suddenly come into sharp focus: in life, the post-mortal bank clerk was the squid. The clerk goes into shock and bursts into tears. Dru and Isili throw themselves at him; they scold him and beat him while he whimpers and pleads for mercy. Dru and Isili take a cruel revenge on the erstwhile squid: they make him their servant and humiliate and bully him. The clerk who was once a squid takes the abuse and the slaps from both his tormentors with cowardly submissiveness, but all the time, unobtrusively but cleverly, he is plotting against them. He succeeds in turning Dru and Isili against each other to such a degree that they begin to hate each other. To humiliate Dru, Isili becomes the lover of the bank clerk who was once a squid, and together they decide to kill Dru. At night when Dru is sleeping, Isili unlocks the door of the room for the clerk to enter. The erstwhile squid holds Dru down while Isili drives a knife into his chest several times. In the course of this grim scene streams of red paint once again spurted onto the floor of the stage and the grass in front of it. A very strange play, I said myself, although I was well used to various guises of the bizarre from the island’s Book and imagined myself unshockable by any kind of literary eccentricity.
Then Isili and the squid live together. Memories of his life in the ocean deep gradually come back to the bank clerk; he tells Isili about it every evening at dinner. They promise each other they will both try to return as squids in their next incarnation—massive, beautiful and strong they will swim through the depths together. They tell each other they will have to be on their guard against Dru—who is bound to want to avenge himself—but they hope that his violent death in the post-mortal world will have sent him to a distant underworld, from where it will take him a long time to make his way back to our universe.
The next act—a balletic interlude—was set in the sea. Green filters pushed in front of spotlights and long gauze drapes rippling in the Revnice breeze were intended to create the illusion of an undersea world. Romantic music I didn’t recognize was played over the speakers. Two figures in grey leotards ran onto the stage, one from each side; it was Isili and the bank clerk, who had become squids. Now the director was ignoring the literality of earlier scenes in favour of a more modernist approach. There were no plush probosces sewn onto the dancers’ leotards; the twenty tentacles were represented by the movements of four arms waving about continually like those of Indian dancers, pulling the body onto the tips of the toes in their rise before falling in languid sinusoids to the boards of the Revni
ce stage; stretching for alluring underwater depths and returning to their starting point, as if in the knowledge that the most beautiful place of this magnificent underwater life was precisely where one happened to be. The imaginary tentacles created in the arm movements of the dancers combined over and over in new figures of tenderness and passion. Apparently the ballet was meant to represent a life of freedom and joy in the depths of the ocean. The act ended with the peaceful death of the elderly squid Isili and the grief of her consort, who now wrung his tentacles and whirled around the corpse on the seabed in an expressive dance of despair (the weary undulating of the ballerina’s arms represented the currents of the sea toying with the squid’s remains), and moved his arms to indicate that he was embracing his dead mate with all his tentacles and that he would never overcome his sadness.
Encounter above the Neckar
For the next act, which followed after another interval, there was again a change of scene. We found ourselves on the glassed-in terrace of a villa obviously built on an elevated spot on a hillside: through the glass wall one could see to the bottom of the hill, where a peaceful river ran through a quaint old town with narrow streets watched over by domed churches. The river was spanned by a magnificent towered bridge, and immediately beyond the last houses of the town there were hills covered in deep forest. Partway up one of the hills—like a weightless, two-dimensional picture—were the ruins of a great castle. (The town in the valley was in fact produced by a colour slide projected onto a screen.) This town, hemmed in by hills on all sides, was familiar; I realized the slide was a view of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. So this had to be one of the villas on the hillside that rises sharply on the right-hand (north) bank of the Neckar.
There’s the piercing sound of the house’s doorbell. Emerging from inside the house, a white-haired old man comes on to the terrace and opens the door. Standing behind him is a young girl. She has just arrived in Heidelberg to study at the university; she has read about the availability of lodgings at the villa in the classified ads of a newspaper. So that’s how the girl came to live in the villa above the Neckar. She and the kindly old man become friends. Every day they sit together on the terrace and the old man talks about his life, which in no way has been exciting—he spent his career as a clerk at Heidelberg City Hall. His children have not lived with him for many years, and when a few years ago his wife died, he decided to rent out rooms to students.
The girl is a student of German literature. One day she confides to the man that she is trying to write a fantasy story. Over breakfast she begins to describe its plot to him. (I doubt anyone in Revnice was surprised to learn that the story was about a conspiracy among courtiers in an island kingdom—they had all suspected from the beginning that the student was a reincarnation of Isili. But the identity of the owner was not clear; I heard my fellow spectators betting on whether it was Dru or the squid.) The student believes that her imagination is creating images when they in fact arise from her memory. The old man is not surprised by the story’s plot; when his tenant—wishing to show off her storytelling skills—asks him to guess the manner of the attempted assassination of the king, which the conspirators decide upon after lengthy deliberations, he answers while breaking into his boiled egg with his spoon. “I suppose they decided to kill the king by confronting him with a giant squid,” he says. The astonished girl tries to find out how it is that he knows the plot of her story when she hasn’t even committed it to paper yet or spoken to anyone else about it. All the old man says in reply is that he doesn’t wish to speak of it at the moment, but that he will explain everything to her some time soon. When the Isili-student asks when this will be, he looks out of the window with a smile on his lips and says, “Perhaps…perhaps after the first fall of snow.”
One morning the girl descends to the terrace from her room to find that the roofs of the houses in the town below and the trees of the hills have been coated with snow. (The picture has been changed in the slide projector.) The old man is standing on the terrace already, looking pensively at the white scene with its gentle touches of grey. The girl stands next to him and they study together the snowy landscape and the cable car rising slowly through the white pass in the forest on the hillside opposite. They have been standing in silence for quite a while when the old man begins to speak of the royal court on Vauz, of that last supper by the sea, of the shameful murder in the post-mortal city, of the burning deserts of the second underworld in which he ended up after Isili and the squid killed him. He is Dru. And as he is speaking, everything comes back to the Isili-student; she rests her head against the cold glass of the window lit by the snow of Heidelberg on the Neckar, as images from her memory rise up from the dark chasm within her.
Then she weeps quietly and asks Dru for his forgiveness.
“I forgave you when I was still in the desert of the second underworld. I knew you’d show up here. I’ve been waiting for you for years, since before you were even born. And trust me, it’s not so I can take my revenge on you.”
“How did you know I would come?”
“When I was living in the second underworld, I reached its outermost frontier. There I came across a great abandoned palace—perhaps it had been the palace of some god who had left for another cosmos. I walked its corridors and studied the frescoes depicting the past and the future of the universe that adorned them. It was in one of these that I saw the two of us sitting at breakfast on this terrace; it was clear from the picture that we were not meeting for the first time. Perhaps you have heard of Heidelberg Man?”
“Protanthropus heidelbergensis. An anthropoid. Its jaw was found in Mauer—not far from here—in 1907.” The girl was quoting from a coursebook in anthropology.
“That jaw belonged to you. Way back when you and I lived together in the forests here. It wasn’t a bad life—indeed, it was every bit as beautiful as your life in the ocean deep, which I also saw in the frescoes. I always expected to meet the squid in Heidelberg, too. I asked myself for ages who it might be; there was a time when I believed it to be Professor Gadamer from the university, but one evening when I was sitting in the Florian wineroom, its owner came in and I knew straight away that he was the one. And he recognized me as well; he joined me at my table and had a good bottle brought up from the cellar. We sat there drinking together until morning. He told me about your life together in the ocean; we made good our differences and became friends. These days we take walks together in the woods above the city. We’ve both been waiting for you here. You must go and see him—he’ll be delighted to see you. Don’t worry, in future lives we’ll love each other again; we’ll also persecute and hate each other, fight and kill each other on both sides of the frontier of death. But for the time being, we can spend a few years here in tranquillity. Hölderlin wrote—a long time ago, admittedly—that Heidelberg was the most beautiful of Germany’s smaller cities. And just look at the peace that rests in its streets and the squares of the old town. The walls breathe with a silent joy, and it is a joy to walk its hills and sit in its university library studying from volumes whose pages are bathed in a calm light. Let us pass here our short golden age, an age we’ll often look back on during the trials and in the despair of our lives to come.”
The play at Revnice had not finished yet, but by this time I was tired; at the end of the Heidelberg scenes I slipped out of the audience and went down to the station. As I sat under a glaring bulb in an empty carriage of the late train, I thought how strange it was that the Revnice play had grafted motifs from the island’s Book onto philosophies of reincarnation and pessimism, ideas very distant from the islanders’ view of the world. I had written down the name of the company that produced the play, thinking I would get in touch with the actors at their Prague base and ask who the author was and where they discovered him, but then I dropped the idea. I was pretty sure what they would tell me: either the play was written by someone who had spent some time on the island, come across the Book there, and used some of its motifs in his
work, or else some visitor to the island had told the natives about the play and then part of its story had been incorporated into the Book. The Book was open—it drew in stories from other books, plays or films and transformed them, and naturally it was willing to release its own story-lines and images for use in the literatures of other nations. Perhaps many motifs in works of literature of international renown have their origins in the Book; there is no way of knowing this for sure—the Book changes so quickly that whatever escapes from it to find lasting form on the pages of other books or theatre stages, transforms and then perishes in the Book.