Tainaron: Mail From Another City (18 page)

427  

I remembered a particularly pleasant little cake shop on the side of a canal where Longhorn took me soon after I arrived in Tainaron for the first time. I also wanted to try those particularly crisp herb pastries, as light as wafers, which smell of smoke and which I believe are not made anywhere else but in that bakery. My desire was so strong that my mouth watered and I had to swallow when the memory of the little pastries spread on to my tongue.

428  

To my disappointment, I could no longer find the cross-street of the ring boulevard on which the caf? was located. I thought I was following the correct route; I turned at the same street corner as before, and carried on along the side of the canal, but soon I found myself in quite unknown quarters. There were unfinished buildings and enormous industrial shells from which the sound of turbines and the fumes of combustion engines rose into the air. The people there also looked completely different, poorer and smaller than the Tainaronians who had sat on the terrace of my favourite caf?. At last I found a glum coffee bar where badly foamed dayma was served in thick handleless cups and where the bread was dense and heavy.

429  

'I should like to have a map of Tainaron,' I said yesterday to Longhorn. 'It would be much easier to wander here alone, and you would not always have the bother of being my guide. I could not find a single map in the department store. Could you perhaps find a map somewhere? Would it be possible?'

430  

'Unfortunately it is impossible,' he answered.

431  

'Why impossible? Have all the maps sold out?'

432  

'That is not why,' he said. 'No comprehensive map of Tainaron has ever been made.'

433  

'What? No proper map has been made? But that is very strange,' I said, dissatisfied and astonished.

434  

'It is not at all strange,' Longhorn said abruptly. 'It would be sheer impossibility to draw up such a map, a completely senseless project.'

435  

'Why so?' I asked, increasingly irritated. 'To me a kingdom which has no map is not a real kingdom but barbary, chaos, mere confusion.'

436  

'You still know very little about Tainaron,' he said quietly. 'We too have our laws, but they are different from yours.'

437  

I felt a little abashed, but that did not wipe away all my irritability.

438  

'A map cannot be made,' he continued, 'because Tainaron is constantly changing.'

439  

'All cities change,' I said.

440  

'None as fast as Tainaron,' Longhorn replied. 'For what Tainaron was yesterday it is no longer today. No one can have a grasp of Tainaron as a whole. Every map would lead its user astray.'

441  

'All cities must have maps, at least of some kind,' I continued to argue.

442  

Longhorn sighed and looked at me kindly, but a little wearily.

443  

'Come!' he said, and took me gently by the arm. 'Let's go!'

444  

'Where to?' I asked.

445  

'We are going to the observation tower,' Longhorn said. 'To make you understand.'

446  

The observation tower was built on the same hill as the funfair. I had not noticed it until now, for the movement of the Ferris wheel had taken up all my attention. We had to climb for an agonisingly long time up the narrow wooden stairs which circled the outer wall of the tower like a creeper. I do not like such high places, and I felt as if the wind were rocking the frail construction. We climbed and climbed. As we circled the steps, the Ferris wheel, too, kept returning before my eyes; its carriages, now empty, shook and swayed, and its movement made my dizzy. We climbed, and I regretted that I had taken up Longhorn's offer.

447  

Midway, I said to Longhorn: 'Now I cannot climb any farther. Let us stay here. We can see enough from here.'

448  

But Longhorn's ears were deaf, and he continued his astonishingly agile clambering. At times he seemed to glide upward - but of course he did have more pairs of legs than I. He did not even glance behind him, and I had to follow him. I went on climbing.

449  

At last! We were standing on the upper platform, but I had grown dizzy and did not immediately go right up to the rail. My eyes were sore from the wind and sunshine which, up here, seemed blindingly bright. I tried to breathe slowly; I swallowed and fastened my eyes on the fibres of the platform's planks. I had decided that I would not complain any more; for I suspected that Longhorn now considered me spoilt and bad company and by no means did I wish him to tire of acting as my guide.

450  

But I could not help hoping that Longhorn would put one of his narrow, long upper limbs around my shoulders. He appeared not to have noticed my uncertain state, but was gazing absorbedly and - so it seemed to me - with eyes moist with pride the panorama that opened up before us. He began to hum a wordless song which I had never heard before, and its monotonous melody and the peaceful wave-forms of the timber fibres restored my balance.

451  

I gathered my courage and looked downwards. We had been climbing for a long time, but I was still astonished that we were so excessively high up. I shaded my eyes and saw, in the dizzying depths, the plain of Tainaron, patterned with the shadows of frantically scurrying clouds. I also realised that the tower must be a little skew, for the horizon was clearly slanted. Directly below us was the little funfair, today deserted, with its gaudily coloured tents. Even the highest carriages of the Ferris wheel were far below us. Far away glass and steel glittered, bronze and gold glimmered, when a shimmering ray lit up the windows of a skyscraper or the cupolas of churches. This was Tainaron, his city, theirs - never mine.

452  

But it was an astonishing city! Longhorn's pride was understandable. I had never understood how enormous Tainaron was. I saw the cone-like areas which I had once visited, only to be dampened by the queen's tears, I saw the prince's palace park with its paths and pagodas, and in the east the endless, muddled skeins of the slums.

453  

We were so high up that from below all that could be heard was the occasional shriek, isolated, a shriller cry than the rest, and mysterious clinking sounds which I had also heard at night and whose origin I had never been able to trace. It sounded as if someone were tapping a glass with a silver spoon in order to make a speech. A little farther up, and everything would have been completely silent.

454  

'Here is everything I have,' Longhorn said. 'You, too.'

455  

The shining belt of Oceanos with its stripes of foam encircled us on all sides. A haze hid the horizon to the south, but to the north a high, silver-glowing cloud formation was visible, so motionless, in contrast to the clouds that slipped over Tainaron, that it looked like a metal sculpture. Its shape was like that of a human torso.