Michal Ajvaz - The Golden Age

There are two islands, Illim and Devel. On the first there lives a king called Tana, on the second a king called Taal. There exists an enmity between the two royal houses. When Tana and Taal are still children, their fathers begin to tire of the same old naval battles joined in the cold of dawn, invasions mounted on sandy beaches (which memory makes an ongoing, dreamlike struggle), punitive expeditions to the humid jungles of the hills in search of guerillas (goaded to do so by the enemy) — and so they negotiate a tired peace. With time weariness and resignation give way to a kind of tolerance and respect, and so it comes to pass that Taal and Tana spend their youth together at the court of a Gallic king and become friends. But it seems that the ill-will has never dissolved, just lain dormant in the blood; once roused, it takes sustenance from an ages-old, bounteous source — love for a woman and the jealousy and abasement with which this is imbued. Perhaps the hatred awakes of its own accord, finds a woman to please it and stage-manages a drama in which it resumes the reins of power, makes itself joyfully manifest in words and gestures and streams into all thoughts and acts. Tana and Taal fall in love with the Gallic princess Nau, who hesitates between them for a while before expressing a preference for Tana. Tana takes her with him to Illim. When some time later his father dies, Tana becomes the island’s ruler and Nau his queen.

Taal returns to Devel, where shortly he marries the beautiful Uddo, whom he also knows from Gaul and who rumour has it was implicated in a poisoning affair when she was only fourteen. Such a spare characterization is of little use for my retelling. In this part of the Book the unknown author says nothing more about Uddo, although in the scenes in which she appears lengthy descriptions of the patterns and fabrics of her clothing and of her jewels are provided. These descriptions are made in the shadows of pockets whose contents relate the history of the lands where the fabrics are woven and give details of the lives of the artists who chiselled the jewels. (Have no fear, dear reader — I will exclude these descriptive passages from my retelling.) The faces of all the figures in the Book are veiled in a fog; around this void fabrics flutter, scents waft and jewels twinkle. I considered painting faces on the characters of the tale before deciding not to force masks on them and so conceal the emptiness they are used to.

Uddo hates Nau, and the evil influence she works on the embittered Taal grows stronger with the years. On Devel, well-paid court poets laud Uddo’s erudition. When at twenty-three the dazzlingly beautiful wife of the king is appointed president of the Devel Academy, an assembly of venerable old men who have dedicated their lives to science, jokes are cracked on all the islands of the archipelago. But the jesters are in error — Uddo has an extensive knowledge of chemistry, transformation in metals, runes, augury, archaeology, metaphysics, geometry, architecture, statics, boat-building and building of labyrinths, demonology, astronomy and haruspicy. In these sciences Uddo’s learning exceeds that of the academicians by far. (She acquired it at schools of the dark sciences of which it is better not to speak. All that is heard of these are rumours — and they may be nothing more than recollections of dreams — of night-time lectures delivered in whispers in dark rooms furnished with mountains of cushions and pillows for the students and teachers, who drift in and out of sleep.) There is no doubt that Uddo takes her duties at the Academy seriously — within very few years she turns it into a kind of secret society, something between an alchemist’s workshop and the Cosa Nostra.

At the time our story begins, Tana and Nau and have not seen Taal and Uddo for twenty-five years. In all that time there have been occasional discoveries on Illim of spies and mischief-makers from Devel, but the wary peace between the two islands has never fractured to such an extent as to excite open conflict. One day Tana receives a letter from Taal in which the latter expresses the wish that he and Uddo be reconciled with Tana and Nau. Tana answers immediately with a long letter of his own, in which he invites Taal and Uddo to Illim. Since the time of his break with Taal he has had no real friends, and in the evenings over a glass of wine he often looks back with fondness on the happy times they spent together in Gaul. Such is his joy at Taal’s letter that he pays no attention to various tales abroad in the archipelago which speak of Uddo’s murderous chemistry and Taal’s dark sonatas of power, whose darkest chords are played by his paramilitary guard. At this time Tana’s son Gato is twenty-four and he is a student in Gaul, where he is living with his mother’s parents. Fo, the son of Taal and Uddo, who was born in the same year as Gato, died four years ago; Fo’s sister Hios is seventeen. It seems that the names of both princes and the princess are mentioned in the text only incidentally — Gato and Hios are many miles from Illim and Fo is dead, so none of them will be playing any part in the action. Still we wonder if they might be important for the story — perhaps one of its strands will contrive for the wanderers to meet, or the action will return to a time when the deceased was still living.

Presently Tana and Nau are down at the harbour to welcome the galleon from Devel. They embrace Taal and Uddo, who for many days will be their guests at the palace. Every evening the four of them sit on a balcony above the trees of the garden, looking back on the days they spent together on Gaul and talking of their islands. It seems that these evenings serve to dissolve all remnants of resentment and ill-will between them. At this time Nau begins to be troubled by a strange illness. One morning she realizes that the skin of her right hand has stiffened, lost feeling and acquired a bluish hue; over the next few days she observes with alarm how these changes progress. Within two weeks the skin has become a smooth, grey-blue shell in which the queen is held captive: Nau is walled in in her own body. She has become a statue of herself, unable to move, unable to speak or even eat. Fortunately the hardening has not attacked her inner organs, so she can swallow pulped food when it is poured carefully into her mouth. The only feature of her outer body which is not grey and immobile is her eyes — two terrified, twitching larvae set in the heavy metal her skin has become. Whenever Tana carries his queen in his arms he watches in the smooth surface of the new metal distorted reflections of the palace — sagging columns, bloated window frames, soft networks of chequered corridors; when he leans in close to her round, gleaming, pitted face he sees in it a grotesque caricature of his own.

Tana takes meticulous care of Nau. He dresses her as if she were an enormous marionette; he carries her into the garden; every evening he bathes her and lays her next to him in their bed. He summons the most celebrated physicians, each of whom recommends a different treatment — one has Nau’s shell of a body coated in rose oil, another daubs it with ass’s milk, another fills the room with smoke produced from the wood of trees that grow on distant Formos. The physicians come and go, but the queen’s shell becomes not the tiniest bit softer. Taal and Uddo declare themselves extremely concerned. Taal summons his court physician, who applies to Nau’s body over several weeks a decoction of Develian herbs. But it seems to Tana that all these cures only serve to make Nau’s skin harder still.

The royal palace has a square ground plan. Its rooms are on seven floors and entered from seven arcaded galleries joined by a staircase. The galleries enclose an inner courtyard, where a fountain surrounded by palm trees spurts water continuously. The tops of the palms reach to the third gallery. One warm night of a full moon Tana is unable to sleep, and he sees from the movements of Nau’s eyes that she, too, is awake. So he carries his hardened queen from the room with the same care as if she were a priceless statue. Their bed-chamber is on the seventh, highest floor of the palace. In the dark gallery Tana leans his queen against the wall and lets her breathe in the fragrance of the summer night. He sits down on a stone bench beside her, takes up his telescope and studies the moon, which is illuminating the slim columns of the arcades and is reflected in the metal statues of the galleries. The room of Taal and Uddo is on the opposite side of the gallery, and next to this, in an alcove, there is a circular aquarium in which the water is rippling and lit blue by a medusa. This was a gift to Nau from an envoy of the Emperor of China and she keeps it as a kind of living jewel. Apart from the glow of the moon and weak blue light of the medusa — which is like the flame of a gas burner in the wind — the sleeping palace is in complete darkness. (That one story of the Book should tell of Gaul, galleries and telescopes, alchemy and chemistry is an anachronism characteristic of all its parts. The authors of the Book do not use anachronism with any particularly sophisticated intent; they do not use it in conjuring tricks like Jünger or Gracq. Anachronism in the Book tends to be employed carelessly, even naively, and at times it is not even clear whether it appears through negligence, playfulness or a simple ignorance of history.)