The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  Taal’s task

  Fo was carried into the palace with his book. After Fo’s death, Taal has his son’s work published in many thousands of copies and instructs everyone on the island to buy it. In addition to this, the king has several copies produced on the finest handmade paper as facsimile publications; these are kept in leather cases set with red, green and violet gemstones. Fo’s lettering is faithfully transcribed in all its transformations, and on the back of the sheets Fo’s text is woven around the lines of the forester’s records, just as it was in the cabin. The facsimile describes not only the story of the unfortunate Dru but also the story of Fo’s script, which is beautiful in its early guises but becomes ever more distorted as the fever takes hold. The letters were infected by the diseases of Fo’s thoughts, but perhaps the letters stirred the sickness in Fo by the piercing gaze they fixed upon him. The facsimile told of the fates of letters that became more and more akin to demons; these demons became lords of the text, shuddering, fraying and shrivelling until they were transformed into the monstrous letters of Umurian (woven somnambulistically around the clumsy letters of the woodsmen). Taal has Fo’s original manuscript placed in a gold box that he has specially made for it, and this is placed in the treasury guarded by the deadly, impassable labyrinth.

  The king’s pain suddenly transforms into hatred for the woman he believes to be the cause of Fo’s death. One day he summons Mii to the audience chamber. This vast darkened hall seems to Mii to be empty as she makes her way across it; only when she is almost at its end does she see a slight movement in the gloom. Taal speaks. Since the death of his son, Taal has avoided the light. Curtains are drawn across windows and shawls thrown over lamps. The weary voice that comes out of the nest of shadows tells Mii it wishes her to honour Fo’s memory by the creation of a statue that depicts one of the scenes in his novel. This time the sculptress lacks the courage to refuse. She senses that Taal wishes to destroy her, that Taal would welcome her refusal as justification for her imprisonment or execution. There is a long silence during which nothing moves in the gloom. The audience appears to be at an end, so Mii curtseys and begins her retreat across the long, empty hall.

  But she knows how cunning Taal can be and of his liking for the staging of dark, sinister acts, so the feeling of disquiet does not leave her. And before she reaches the door, Taal speaks again.

  “There’s something important I forgot to mention. I spent a long time considering which material you should work in.” Mii has stopped and turned back. She knows she is about to learn what evil plan Taal has thought up. “I ruled out all varieties of stone and metal. I spent a lot of time considering rare woods, but all of them seemed too crude for a statue that should be an expression of the soul of my son. In the end I decided to have the statue made of water. You have three months in which to complete it. You may start work immediately.”

  “You wish me to make a statue out of water?” Mii’s dismayed voice calls out into the dark towards where she believes Taal to be.

  “Indeed. And of course I don’t mean snow or ice. Nor will I allow the water to be in any container that gives the statue its shape. But I suppose the material needn’t be water. Any liquid will do. I would quite like a statue made of aromatic oils, but I shall leave the choice to you. There’s surely no need for me to tell you that failure to obey the royal command is punishable by death.”

  Mii knows this very well. She knows, too, that there is no point objecting that it is impossible to make a statue out of water or any other liquid, so she does not even attempt this. There she stands in the middle of the hall thinking desperately what she should do, but it seems to her she has no alternative but to wait in Taal’s palace for three months for death to arrive. But then something comes to her from deep in her memory; it contains the germ of an idea (at first foggy, but becoming ever clearer) for how Taal might be outsmarted. Mii knows that she must somehow get Taal to modify the task without ever suspecting there is a trick involved. She must induce the king to make a small change to the commission that will appear to him as nothing more than a meaningless elaboration, and she must get him to do so before she quits the hall. She begins to speak before she has a clear idea of how to proceed; her plan comes into being as she describes it in words. She walks back through the hall towards Taal; her voice is weak because she is more used to whispering to marble statues than to conversing with people. To begin with she is practically shouting, but still the king must lean forward so that he can hear her, and in so doing his face emerges from the darkness. The closer Mii gets to the king, the quieter her voice becomes. The king falls back into his armchair and the darkness.

  “Very well, Your Majesty, I’ll try to make a statue out of some kind of liquid,” she says as she walks. “But there is one thing I need to get straight before I start working. There are thicker liquids and runnier pastes, aren’t there? What I mean to say is that it is not always clear where to draw the line between what is a liquid and what is a solid, and I wouldn’t like to think we might argue this point once the statue is finished. I suggest we agree beforehand what we consider a liquid on the basis of a simple and clear criterion, such as…” (as she walks, Mii pretends to be pondering on this) “…such as whether fish are able to live in the material the statue is made of.”

  By now Mii is again standing before Taal’s chair, hidden though it is by the dark. Her plan for how to escape death was completed when she spoke her last word and took her last step. Taal is mistrustful and he takes a while to consider her proposal, but he finds nothing in it that could make the statue any easier to produce and thus jeopardize his intentions; on the contrary, it seems to Taal that in her panic Mii has made the task still harder for herself. So he replies, “Very well, it is your task to create a statue from a material in which fish are able to live.” He promises Mii that no one apart from her assistants will see the statue until it has been completed. Then he dismisses her.

  As she stood before the king, Mii was remembering a marvellous lake that was hidden high in the hills of the small island on which she spent her childhood. After thousands of years of a gradual drying out, the water of this lake thickened into a kind of jelly. In the lake there lived predatory fish that darted out of the water to feed on birds that came too close to the surface. The fish would bite into the birds and pull them into the jelly, before stripping off all the flesh so that only the skeleton remained. Because it had taken such a long time for the water to thicken, the fish had had plenty of time to adapt to the changing conditions. Unlike the African lungfish (protopterus annectens)—which has created some kind of ersatz lungs for itself and will soon drown in water if it cannot get to the air above the surface—they did not convert to the breathing of atmospheric oxygen; the fish of the lake still breathed with their gills, which had adapted themselves entirely to the jelly and were very well able to exploit the small quantities of oxygen the jelly contained. It was difficult to decide whether the nimble movement of the fish in the jelly was swimming or burrowing. (The burrows disappeared immediately, of course, because the jelly closed as soon as the fish had passed through it—if you find this difficult to picture, try moving a spoon about in a blancmange.) Mii knows that the jelly is solid enough to make a statue out of, as the villagers living around the lake make quaking jelly statues for sale at the market in the capital.

  A tent in the courtyard

  Mii immediately sends her assistants to the island for barrels of jelly and fish from the lake. Then she begins to read Fo’s book. She is perhaps the only person in the kingdom who has not yet read it. Mii never reads books: the worlds in which she lives are so full of characters and stories that no more faces, bodies and stories could fit into them. But now she is in the company of dead Prince Fo, walking the corridors of the uncompleted palace, which is now slowly closing in on itself; the outlines of unfinished statues have befriended and merged with the spaces around them. Mii immerses herself in the vision born out of Fo’s solitude, sickness and despair.
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  And Mii is enchanted by the book. As in a dull metallic mirror, she recognizes her own face in the joyous child’s face of Isili and the noble gold, diamond-spangled face of Nus. In his many characters she gets to know Fo’s features and gestures, which were nothing to her while he was alive but a blurry backdrop to her nascent statues. They are made manifest not only in Dru’s wanderings and the process of his disengagement from the Earth, but also in the vigilant glances, whispers and light steps of the Vauz conspirators, and even in the elegant unfurling and recoiling of the squid’s tentacles. She identifies the rhythms of Fo’s blood in the undulation of the ocean’s surface and the dumb rotation of the stars around the centre of a distant galaxy. And this polymorphous but homogeneous pulsation, which goes deep into the bodies of the sentences and itself exploits the movements of these dark bodies, makes Mii think of something she knows from her own experience—that behind every work of art there are two things intermingling, each referring to the other: the face of the author, the features of which are drawn from the universe at large, and the universe, which appears in the mirror of the face.

  It seems to her that the characters, stories and landscapes create together a picture of Fo’s mind, and that, had he never begun to write, Fo would never have encountered himself or the real world. Mii, who hears talk of separation from real life in connection with her own work all the time, knows very well that only at the bottom of our most personal myths, which we ourselves do not understand, only where these myths feed on juices flowing in the weave of real things and there recognize their cosmic names, do we encounter the true voice of the world. She wants to laugh when she reads of the wait for “a great societal statuary” after the installation of a new regime in Kass; she knows that the voice of the world speaks only through these nonsensical myths, that only its pictures, which take nothing from the world, are the hieroglyphs in which the world writes its secrets, just as it is only possible to write the word table using strange characters that bear little resemblance to the table itself.

  Genuine reality is the birth of reality, and the birth of reality is an act that is spun out of myth and alive with spirits. We see the world in the convex mirror of a weird obsession that belongs not to us but to the monster that stalks the halls of our consciousness; all plane mirrors are blind. Fo was Dru and the squid, the admiral and the cook, Nus and Isili; he was the ocean the squid swam through, in which Isili’s body was lost; he was the multiform landscape of Umur. Fo’s character was composed by the gathering into itself of all these images, as they appeared to him over manifold, wonderful encounters. And Mii knows what sickness had consumed Fo: it was the horror and the delight evoked by his self-encounter and encounter with the world and all the figures, animals, deities, spectres, landscapes and stars that make of us what we are, and also delight and horror at the blurring of their shapes in the mute, monotonous pulsation of the great medusa of the cosmos.

  Mii knows too that in his hatred Taal had made the right decision; Prince Fo was worthy of celebration in a marvellous, terrible statue made of a quivering, transparent material and full of predatory beasts. Had the king asked for a statue of marble, she would be asking him now if she could make it in jelly. Although she had tricked Taal into changing the task, she is convinced that a statue of jelly is more marvellous than a statue of water (assuming that it were possible to create such a statue), that the only material suitable for Fo’s apotheosis is one that is not of the four elements, so that it almost might not exist while being present within all the elements as an anguished, delightful possibility—the possibility of death and a return to the beginning that elicits transformation. Within solid matter there lives a shapeless porridge that is a dream of cosmic decay; within liquids it is a slow melody of turbidity; within fire it is the aspect of the flame that does not tend to the purification of the shape but to its warping, by preparing it to receive moisture; within air it is the gradual transformation of gases and vapours into a dark sediment that coats the surfaces of objects, thus healing over the wound inflicted by the blade that cut these objects free of the world.

  A pity, she thinks, that I could not transform the whole book of Fo into a forest of statues that would stand somewhere out on the plain; or I could have colonized a town with statues, set statues of jelly in its streets and lanes, in its thoroughfares and in its courtyards, on the staircases of its buildings, in its bedrooms and hallways, in its cathedrals and in its mysterious, stinking public conveniences. But Mii must choose one scene only, and it takes her a long time to decide. She pictures Dru wandering about Europe, an out-of-humour Dru lying in his bed in the stargazer’s villa on a night when the sky is overcast; she considers depicting a scene of life on that other planet—one of the city’s curve-nosed sleighs, perhaps, in which Dru’s extraterrestrial lover would be sitting—or creating a group scene that would address the pages covered in the unreadable script of that other planet. She is for a long time given to thoughts of a statue that would illustrate some of the book’s later pages, where Fo’s writings coursed around the lines of the forester’s records—this statue would show both of these worlds.

  But in the end Mii opts to create a statuary group depicting the scene with the giant squid, and in which she will give Dru the face of Fo. She is more and more certain that the moment the king looks into the great eyes of the monster is the secret heart of Fo’s work. She wants her statue to show a hero confronted with the greatest of all dangers, a terrible enemy that resides at the farthest point of his fear, in the last chamber of the labyrinth of his nightmares. She wants it to be apparent that the moment Dru first beheld the face of the awful beast, he saw himself in it: now he understood that what he most feared was also what he most desired—this vision of awfulness was also himself, and it was in this that he should perish. Mii wants the statue to express Dru’s hatred and also his love of the monster and himself, just as he loves and hates Isili—for indeed it seems to Mii that Dru must hate his beloved fiancée for being an obstacle on his journey to the sea bottom, to his joining the monsters that reside there, his brothers and sisters, his sweet underwater lovers with their deep eyes and beautiful undulating tentacles. Mii understands that this ironical heart is not the sort one usually finds in books: it is not a concentration of the sense of Fo’s work, nor does it reveal this sense. Rather, this encounter of the hero and the monster that smashed his world seems to subvert any possible orientation in one’s reading and instil an uncertainty in the work that anticipates its meaning and thus is always able to escape it.

  Within ten days a ship appears in the harbour at Devel; out of this Mii’s assistants carry a great many heavy barrels, which they then convey up to the palace. At the place in the courtyard where the statue should stand, Mii has a great tent erected. The barrels from the ship disappear beneath its canvas. From this time on, Mii spends every day and every night in the tent. Apart from her assistants, who never speak a word, no one knows what is going on inside. Taal walks about the courtyard and around the tent, or he stands on the balcony looking down on the tent’s roof. In the evening, lamps are lit inside, and they burn all night, casting strange shadows on the tent walls. In these Taal sometimes recognizes Mii’s face, and, as the lamps travel from one point to another, the greenish shadow of an enormous Fo in profile creeps across the canvas before it dwindles away. By the light of the moving lamps it is impossible for Taal to tell which face in the mime of shadows belongs to a living person and which to a statue; he has the impression he can see his son’s lips moving and his arms reaching out toward him. The activity in the tent hardly makes any sound—just a kind of quiet squelching and slapping. But occasionally a scream of pain penetrates to every corner of the silent palace and shakes awake all its occupants. That this is the cry of a careless, sleep-starved assistant who had been bitten by a fish, no one knows. At the time Gato was preparing to enter the statue, Hios would remember these night-time wails with great anxiety.

  Taal is puzzled. At first he thinks tha
t Mii is hiding in the tent in order to conceal from him for as long as possible the fact that she is incapable of accomplishing the task; but the moving, greenish shadows, the spooky squelching sounds and the night-time screams soon make him nervous. The king begins to entertain the belief that Mii is a sorcerer able to create statues out of water, that perhaps she has summoned demons to help her in her work; but then, at other times, he tells himself that the coloured shadows are part of a trick that by way of lights and green-tinted glass, Mii is hoping to create the impression that she is carrying out Taal’s orders, while all the time she is simply waiting for the right moment to attempt an escape. Taal sends reinforcements to his guards at all the palace’s gates, though there is nothing to suggest that Mii is really planning to leave the palace in secret.

  On the penultimate day of the third month Mii announces that the statue will be unveiled the next evening. Shortly before sunset, Taal arrives in the courtyard alone, although he had earlier imagined inviting the whole court to witness Mii’s defeat and humiliation, her tears and pleas for mercy, all of which he had been anticipating with relish. (Such a cruel theatre would be played out on the same spot four years later.) He is far from sure what will meet his eyes when the tent is removed. He keeps imagining himself seeing the granite paving of the courtyard and nothing more, Mii kneeling down before him and beseeching him to spare her life; but then, neither did he rule out the possibility that he would indeed see a statue made of water, which by some miracle had been fashioned into human form. Taal crosses the smooth granite of the empty courtyard, half of which is bathed in warm, reddish light. Then he steps into the shadow cast by the tent.

  The sculptress and her assistants are already standing in front of the tent. When Taal stops a few paces from them, Mii gives the command for her assistants to pull away the canvas with a single tug on a rope. To his amazement, Taal finds himself looking at a statuary group atremble in the evening breeze—the terrible face of the squid with its enormous eyes, the tentacles slithering about the fragile body of Isili, and—reaching for his knife—Dru, who bears the face of Taal’s dead son. The scene depicted by the statue was played out at this very hour; the sun sinks a little lower, and its red rays serve to illuminate the green matter of which the statue is made. In the glowing bodies of its figures, magical sparks and the black shadows of moving fish can be seen.