Authors: Michal Ajvaz
None of the plotters is a member of the king’s inner circle, hence none of them has access to his dining table. But the king’s fussiness about the company he keeps works to the advantage of the admiral’s plan, as it excludes all the plotters from the circle of suspects—although the sudden appearance of a squid may not raise suspicions of treason in any case. The musician who is given the horn has no idea what his playing will bring about. On that fateful evening the admiral is standing in the passage next to the kitchens with the marshal, another of the plotters. They are looking down on the party on the terrace, discussing in whispers the various scenarios that might play themselves out after the squid breaks out of the water. Suddenly they hear a noise behind them; it turns out that in a dark alcove there is a door to the pantry. The cook is in the pantry, and he has surely heard everything they have been saying to each other.
By killing the cook the conspirators would disrupt the smooth progression of the evening, and this would jeopardize their plan. They have to make do with escorting him back to the kitchens, where they keep him under surveillance to make sure he does not try to escape or put something into one of the dishes for the king’s party that would alert them to the possibility of an assassination attempt. The cook racks his brains for a way of warning the king. To write a message on a piece of paper is out of the question: not only would the plotters notice this right away, but anyway there is no paper or pencil in the kitchens. The cook is famed for the figures he models out of marzipan; he puts these into scenes that depict various events in the life of the king and his fiancée. The king likes to guess what each scene is showing; many times he has rewarded the cook for these culinary works of art. It dawns on the cook that he might send the king a message about the danger by depicting in marzipan the awful event planned for him. But on that day there is not a scrap of marzipan in the kitchens or in the pantry. The cook is trying frantically to think of a substitute for the marzipan when his eyes light on a large radish that is lying on the table right in front of him. This is not the ideal material in which to make a miniature statue, but by its inconspicuous nature a radish might have the advantage of escaping the attention of the conspirators. Besides, radishes are a favourite with the king, so the ruler will know that the plate bearing the cook’s creation is intended for him.
So the cook picks up the radish and begins to carve into it the scene so alive in his own soul. He carves a musician blowing a horn, the head of a squid emerging from the deep with its ten awful limbs; he carves figures—which include those of the king and his fiancée—jumping up from the table in horror, turning over their chairs. His work is quite a success, and fortunately the admiral and the marshal have paid no attention to his treatment of the radish. So the radish is conveyed down to the terrace along with several other dishes, and after it has been tried by the court taster it is placed before the king. For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish. He looks at each of the tiny figures in turn and tries to work out what the whole scene is supposed to mean. Unfortunately this deciphering is made more difficult by the fact that the taster has bitten off two of the tentacles that made it possible to identify the monster as a squid. These tentacles are longer and thinner than the other eight and at their tips become oval-shaped bowls covered with suckers. “What scene has the cook thought up for us today?” says Dru, turning the radish—which is redder still in the light of the sun approaching the horizon—over and over in his hands. In the end he sends a servant to the kitchens to ask what the radish statue is supposed to mean, but as the man reaches the first bend in the staircase, Dru calls him back: he thinks he has grasped the sense of the cook’s work.
Dru recalls that one of the poems he wrote for his fiancée, in which he delighted in the use of various astronomical metaphors, contained the line, “Your song brings from the heavens dreamlike stars and restless comets.” Surely the cook wishes to please the king and his fiancée by giving shape to this image in a radish. “Just look at this!” the king says to his delighted fellow diners. “The cook has made a horn-player to accompany Isili’s song. And here are the charmed listeners. And here—” (he indicates the head of the squid) “—is the comet, lured from the heavens by the song and now plunging itself into the waves.” In mistaking the ten tentacles for the tail of a comet, the king is making a fatal mistake. Although the cook has given the squid enormous round eyes, the king considers this an instance of anthropomorphism, a finishing touch that develops the metaphor; if the comet can hear the song, it must have ears, so there is no reason why it shouldn’t have eyes, too. And everyone at the table sees the radish as a comet that has flown down to listen to the song of Princess Isili; they are surprised they didn’t see this straight away because it really is quite obvious. They applaud the cook’s craftsmanship and his devotion to the king. Isili nestles her body against the king’s, and as the red sun is about to reach the shimmering red line of the horizon, the king signals to the musicians to commence their playing. The musicians reach for their instruments; the horn-player puts his horn to his lips.
The deep, sad tone of the horn sounds. Then, terrifying in its quietness, ghostlike in its slowness, the head of a giant monster with great round eyes emerges from the water right in front of the diners, blocking the red sun from view. With the pink sky as a backdrop, the tentacles ripple. Though it seems there are hundreds of these tentacles, in fact there are only ten. After a moment of silent stupefaction, cries ring out as the men begin to chop at the serpent arms with their swords. The dogs jump on to the table and tear into the ends of tentacles flapping among the bowls of food. One of the two thin feelers shoots out like a lasso and, lightning fast, wraps itself around Isili’s slender body. Dru grabs a bread knife and drives it several times into the deadly liana that is closing around his fiancée, but the tentacle coils itself up and bears Isili away. Then the other tentacles are withdrawn sharply from the table; they give a last slow ripple before dropping beneath the sea’s darkening surface. The last part of the squid to remain above water is the enormous eyes, which for a moment or two observe the dinner guests, who have lapsed back into a state of silent petrifaction. Then the red sun touches its reflection and merges with it.
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.
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 behind 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.