Michal Ajvaz - The Golden Age

“For the story about the wrecking of the boat, the important thing was the statue standing directly next to Leibniz. This was carved in ebony and was a depiction of a hermaphrodite emerging from the waves of the sea, holding a large, open book in its hands. For sure the words in the letter on the desk of the sculptor’s flat were about this statue. (Baumgarten had no recollection of what these words were, but he was too tired to ask.) In the book one could read a poem written in letters formed from pearls and set into the black ebony of the pages. This was a poem the sculptor had written for the woman he loved, who at this moment was lying in bed with another man. I imagine that the sculptor and traveller wanted to make the woman a gift of pearls he had found in the speos on the island. He wrote a poem for her and worked on the statue of the hermaphrodite, which were also intended as presents for her (the hermaphrodite was meant to symbolize their ideal communion); then it came to him that his gifts to his beloved would be more original if he made the three into one.

“But surprisingly the poem written in pearls had little in common with love poetry. In painstaking rhyme and regular stanzas it told that the dead do not reveal themselves at night in churchyards or old houses, as people foolishly believe, but that they like the sun, light and warm. So they walk upon sandy beaches, and many people meet their dear-departed on the beach at Waikiki, on the beaches of California, on the Epi-plage or Tahiti beaches of Saint-Tropez, even on the municipal pebble beach in Nice. The epic poem in pearls told how a middle-aged businessman goes on holiday for the first time without his wife, who has been kept at home by her career commitments. Through a travel agent he books a stay on the Aegean island of Mykonos. On his very first day on Paradise beach a suntanned girl in a swimsuit calls to him, and to his great astonishment the businessman recognizes her as a woman he once loved, who died in a car accident twenty years earlier.

“After that they meet on the beach every day, and on a sun bed under a parasol or under the reed awning of the beach bar she tells him of life in the underworld; she shows him which of the visitors to the beach are deceased; she greets other dead folk as if they are all members of some club. She says that life in the underworld is not especially entertaining, nor is it particularly depressing. Admittedly the vast underworld spaces are a little unwelcoming and hardly abounding with comforts, but they are clean and always kept tidy. She claims that such a life is quite tolerable, that it might even be slightly better than life before death: the regime of the underworld is not very strict and the deceased are able to leave Erebus every day. If they return in the evening at a time later than allowed for by their exeat, generally all they receive is a reprimand. They can go anywhere on Earth they choose, and as many of them love warm, sandy beaches they spend whole days on the hot sand.

“She isn’t sure whether she is in Hell or in Paradise. She says that this is a common topic of discussion among the deceased, that everyone’s opinion on it is different. But there is no higher authority in the underworld to arbitrate their disputes. The guards who watch the gate are themselves deceased who have been in the underworld for a long time, as is the captain of the ship of the dead which takes them ashore every morning. Every evening the businessman waits with her on the cooling beach, on which most of those remaining are deceased, until he hears the distant drone of the engine of the ship of the dead and a white speedboat sweeps into the bay. Then they kiss and the girl climbs aboard with the others and gives him a last wave before the boat disappears behind the rock. When after two weeks they say their final goodbyes, the girl asks if she will ever see him on Mykonos again. The businessman replies that it is unlikely he will ever again manage to go on holiday without his wife. ‘No matter,’ says the girl. ‘You can visit me once you die. I’ll give you my address. The underworld is pretty vast and complex and you might not find me otherwise. Then we can make up for lost time. I’m already really looking forward to the time we can walk together on Paradise beach every day; in fact, we can visit all the beaches of the Aegean…’ Hey, don’t go to sleep or you’ll fall.”

These last words were not those of the deceased woman on Mykonos; they were meant for Baumgarten. A pleasant torpor had indeed taken hold of his body; his eyes were closing, their lashes were wet with melted snow, and he was seeing the snowflakes as foam of the waves on the Aegean beach the thief had been telling him about. When the girl saw that the dozing aesthetician was swaying precariously on the tip of the a , she shook him. Baumgarten insisted he had not been asleep at all, that he had been listening to her attentively, but immediately afterwards his head began to sink towards her lap. The girl was not pleased to stop talking about her favourite topic but she concluded that Baumgarten was too sleepy to pay her any heed and it was time to go.

She took him by the hand and led him along what remained of the word Lafayette . When they reached the final “e,” she saw that he was a little more alert; on their way down she would attempt to tell him something more about the picture. Baumgarten, half-asleep and serene, was happy to be led; he skipped over the letters with the lightness of a somnambulist. The girl’s talk had the quality of snow-music and as such was no bother to him.

“I thought that the story of the wrecking of the Zephyrus was one of island treasure and heartache,” the thief said, giving Baumgarten a radiant smile. “But in the fine weave of the story these were only secondary motifs. The Berlin picture was full of such confusing signs and unexpected twists. Then it occurred to me to use the magnifying glass to look into the car which stood in front of the house of the sculptor’s unfaithful mistress. And I saw in the car four agents of the Chinese secret service.”

Baumgarten wished for a moment to sit on the short, horizontal line which intersected the second “t,” as this put him in mind of a seat. But the thief pulled him away.

“Just keep going, you’ll be home in a few minutes. One of the Chinese agents was aiming a rifle with a silencer and telescopic sights at the head of the man who was lying in the bed with the sculptor’s mistress. The muscles of the Chinese’s trigger finger were tensed. Then it came to me that the red spot I’d taken for the glowing end of a cigarette was in fact the light made by the gun’s sights, and it was wandering over the man’s face. The next moment he was likely to catch the full force of the Chinese’s rifle; had the painter shown the town a second later, one would probably have seen in the room a bloodied face and a pillow stained with red. And what’s the connection between all this and the Chinese characters on the strip of paper sticking out of the book on the bedside table? Is this merely a coincidence, or does the sculptor’s mistress know more than we think about the game the secret service is playing? And what of the revolver in her handbag? What does she intend to shoot at with that? Perhaps you’d be interested to know what happened.” The girl turned to face Baumgarten, who had not spoken, because at that very moment he was giving himself up to a dream in which the violet neon letters were changing into water nymphs with glowing bodies, dancing in a woodland glade.

“The picture didn’t show whether the mystery man in the bed escaped with his life. After all, the picture wove together thousands of story-lines, many of which went deep into the past, although all ended at the moment at which the town was captured. So it was unclear what would happen in the next fraction of a second in any of the stories. As you can see, we’ve reached the end of the word. Just a few steps along the roof of the building next door and we can climb down the fire escape and through the skylight to the staircase; I’ve tried it before. Oddly enough it was a torn poster I saw on a wall in the quarter around the harbour, a poster announcing a performance by a ballet company, that led me to answers to the questions I’d been asking myself. Among the things the sculptor had found in the cave-temple were two suits of clothing to wear during the performing of rituals. On religious festivals the priests would wear these to dance their sacred dances in the lake of red-hot lava which bubbled in the mouth of the volcano at the island’s centre. The suits were woven of special fibres which, so it seemed, were resistant to any degree of heat and insulated the body quite perfectly. Naturally certain international concerns became interested in the suits, as did the general staffs of the armies of many countries. The impractical sculptor had never imagined that the suits would become the subject of great interest, that he would be able to earn a vast sum of money by them. He gifted the suits to his friends, members of an avant-garde ballet troupe, and they wore them in the compelling final act of a ballet on the theme of Plotinus’s Enneads , the whole of which was set in the fire of the One, represented on stage by a real earthly fire.