The Golden Age (3 page)

In the slim volume from the antiquarian bookseller’s in Munich I read that the ancestors of today’s islanders built the upper town on the river where the rock drops sharply and the river frays into a maze of strands, and that they did so because water is in short supply for much of the year and to protect themselves from the pirates who once plundered the coast with great regularity. I believe that these factors may indeed have played a part in the founding of the town as it was; but the main reason for the islanders’ remaining in this inhospitable, barren place is their liking for the soft water music that forever accompanies life in the upper town, just as in the streets and apartments of the lower town they like to hear the steady ripple of the sea. The islanders did not drink alcohol or use drugs (with one exception, of which I shall speak later), but their love of rustling and other quiet sounds, sounds which we rarely perceive, had something in common with an addiction to drugs: they were able to listen all day long to the rush of the sea or the sound of the wind through a crack in a wall.

The upper town is built into a waterfall. The roaring masses of water and the rapid, wild, swirling currents are impossible to imagine. Formations of rock divide the current flowing from the lake above the town into many strands, and these zigzag down the rock-face, beating into the shelf, dividing as they go into ever more strands. In the lower part of the town they begin to come together until they become a single stream again on reaching the coastal flats. In this way the river creates in the upper town a kind of double delta. The river’s current is not particularly strong even in the rainy season. On the area of the upper town it is divided into so many weak strands that the water passing through the town only whispers in trickles, drips, rustles and ripples. At the beginning of my stay in the upper town all the sounds came to me as one, an indistinguishable murmur, but with time I learned to tell them apart—the sound of water flowing down the rock-face and the stone steps, the sounds of water columns and walls of water, fountains and individual drops falling on stone and on the surface of water. The monotonous murmur was transformed as if by magic into a musical composition played on a great variety of instruments by a full orchestra, a symphony without end whose movements traced out subtle differences in style, gave expression to the whole scale of moods and feelings of the phantom composer; it seemed to me that I could even hear in it various philosophical notions. This water composition was of varying quality: sometimes it came up with quite unexpected chords and original moves, at others it tended to repeat already familiar combinations of notes, yet never did it lapse into the banality and sentimentality saturating so many famous compositions from Europe. (When on the island I sometimes imagined an inverse world, in which concert halls would be turned over to the sounds of rain and the rustling of winds while in the treetops and on the weirs and behind the walls of factories, sonatas and symphonies would ring out; in a world such as this the damp on the plastering of walls would probably form coherent text while the pages of books would be covered with indistinct marks.)

The houses of the upper town are built on islands of rock among the branching currents. At their rear the houses are attached to the rock. The river splits into two above the roof of a house, and these two arms flow around it before dividing themselves up further; some of the new arms are drawn away before joining a stream grown out of other currents, while others come together again beneath the house, creating a circle of water around it. Sometimes the occupiers admit an arm of the river into their house, where it continues to fray. To begin with I thought they did this so the current could be put to work in rooms hidden somewhere in the house, but the islanders would likely grow indignant at such single-minded exploitation of this element whose quiet power they esteem so highly; they take simple delight in the coolness of the water and the sounds it makes, and sometimes they put drops of dye in it and watch the figures change and melt. (The islanders sometimes put me in mind of the Japanese, though the former differ from the latter in that they feel absolutely no need to create objects of beauty.)

The occupiers of many of the houses directed the water across the roof so that as it tumbled over the edge it became a lustrous curtain of water made up of several columns, in which threads of sunlight created the perfect illusion of sparkling beads of coral or a solid wall of water. (It may be that this feature of the island’s architecture inspired Frank Lloyd Wright to design his unrealized house in the Arizona desert with its wall of water.) Naturally it was a simple matter to pass through such a wall of water, meaning that any intruder who chose to enter the house would be obstructed by nothing more than a brief dousing. But there was no thievery and murder on the island. Although morality and humaneness meant nothing to the islanders, they were strangers, too, to egoism, and they were too dreamy and lazy to do evil.

On the island I had a girlfriend. I shall refer to her as Karael, as this was her name at the time we first met. In her house, too, the bedroom was separated from the outside world by a murmuring wall of water. When at night I was unable to sleep, I would watch the wall shining magically in the moonlight and listen to the trickling of the water until sleep reclaimed me. Or I would watch the wall from the room as the sun was setting, when it seemed that the wall was composed of a liquid crimson glow. These moments of the day and night were for me the pinnacle of happiness: I would forget about Europe and all I still wanted to do there, about the stories and articles I was working on, about my friends and the countries I wanted to visit. I would forget, too, my constant objections to the islanders’ way of life, which consisted of nothing more than bathing lazily in their perfect, unvarnished sense of the absolute, in the sea of bliss composed of lights and murmurs before these degenerated into shapes and words. And I would ask how I could wish for something other than this clear light, than this splendid, idle glow of the present.

Some inhabitants of the upper town distributed the water around their houses by a system of narrow gutters that trailed across the ceilings; the water would flow over the sides of the gutters, thus creating walls of water inside the house, too. The rooms in such houses would be separated from one another by nothing but these cool, translucent walls. The water would be drained from the house by channels in the floor. These half-transparent walls breathed out an exhilarating coolness even on the hottest nights, but they long made me feel uncomfortable as naturally they granted those who lived within them no privacy; behind the wall to a neighbouring room, objects and bodies appeared as deformed and imprecise shapes. I was taken aback that the islanders had no difficulty in performing the most intimate acts behind transparent walls, even when the room beyond the wall of water was full of people.

When I complained about this to Karael she did not understand why I was bothered by it. She said that nobody really saw us, that the people beyond the wall of water watched only the quivering shapes on the wall’s surface, and although these resembled us a little, there were all kinds of things which resembled us, certain other people, for example, or our own shadows and pictures and photographs of us, and we did not identify ourselves with these things. I understood later that the islanders’ perception of images on walls of water and reflections in the mirror is different from ours: they look at them as at independent objects that bear a certain relation to what is behind the wall of water or in front of the mirror, but this relation is no more remarkable than relations that exist among all things.

For the islanders the real presence of a thing was enough. For them shape and colour had an intrinsic longing to create a glowing carpet, and our gaze did them a great injustice by forcing them to become components of things, by attaching to them all kinds of doubtful phantom interiors and unverifiable backs; it seemed to the islanders an inexcusable impropriety to dispose of colours and shapes so that they represented other, remote things. When after my departure Karael telephoned me from the booth on the jetty, I had the impression she did not identify fully the voice in the sun-heated receiver with the foreigner she had known on the island.

The islanders did not bind images and reflections to things; they set them free, granted them lives of independence. I think they understood the relations between things and images as two-sided, believing that the shapes and motions of figures originated too in what took place on the surfaces of mirrors and bodies of water. On the island things and their images and images and their things conducted similar dialogues to those which existed between things and names. I observed that some of Karael’s gestures and the agitated play of her fingers probably had their beginnings in the quivering images on the wall of water, that from the time she obtained an octagonal mirror of green glass, an olive tinge appeared in her dusky complexion. (I wouldn’t like to speculate on whether this phenomenon was caused by the mirror’s drawing my attention to something that had been there all along, whether the colour of Karael’s skin changed as a consequence of a psychosomatic process, or whether there exists in obscurity some kind of mirror sorcery.)

When I was on the island I, too, gradually learned not to make too great a distinction between things and images, while the imitation of images by things seemed to me a truly banal phenomenon. Regrettably this inability to defend myself against the power of images has stayed with me: for example, I come home late at night and see in the hallway mirror that my face resembles the dim reflection in the window of the empty night tram; I see etched in my features a hint of the dark facades of the houses that passed by my face when I was on the tram. You would never get me into the labyrinth of crooked mirrors on Pet
ín Hill.

The walls of water had one more purpose: they served as clocks. On flowing into a house, water would enter a receptacle in which there was a cylinder composed of twenty-four layers. Each layer was made up of a dense aromatic essence, and the water which flowed through the receptacle dissolved one layer every hour. In this way the walls of water always expelled the fragrance of the hour so that in their every waking moment the inhabitants of the upper town knew what time it was. I found this particularly pleasant at night. Whenever I awoke in the middle of the night, the damp air would be replete with, let us say, the scent of vanilla and I would say to myself, “It is only two o’clock, I may sleep for a long time yet.” Or else I would smell oranges and know that daybreak was at hand. Even today in my Prague flat sometimes I stir in the night and, neither asleep nor fully awake, sniff the air to determine the time, at which point the smells of the city break into my reverie through the half-open window. And I ask myself what strange hour is this before my disquiet wakes me properly and it dawns on me where I am.

How happy I would be if these lines of mine inspired someone to start producing aromatic clocks! I am convinced that it would not be too difficult. There is many a sleeper who awakes to the darkness, to be smothered in the formless matter of the night so that he cannot breathe; there is a soggy, amorphous mass on top of him, and the sight of the glowing face of his watch cannot save him as the black, liquid mud that stuffs itself into his lungs, ears and brain, refuses to have anything to do with phosphorescent numerals. But the night would be powerless to resist a scent effusing in the darkness, washing into all its bays; it would have to capitulate to this amicable foe, this kindly victor, to accept the segmentation the scent was offering, to submit to the bleary but precise arithmetic. Thus would the night lose its power over the wakeful, allowing them to return to the realm of sleep, of their desires.

The water flowing out of the lake above the town was divided into several arms that divided and frayed further until in several places—on tables of rock, in the moss, in the depths of a house—the current transformed itself into a fine capillary net before the strands were gathered together again. I would often study the places where the river dissolved almost to nothing; here were labyrinths of tiny, barely visible, dissipating threads of water, zigzagging, dripping, oozing underbeds, which rose and receded and evaporated. It seemed incredible to me that a flow of water which above the town and down on the plain moved in orderly fashion in a single direction and despite the shallowness of its basin earned the designation of
river
in every season of the year, should now and then transform itself into this tangled web that verged on nothingness. It seemed to me that by these muddled and fading movements it revealed its true nature, the well-concealed secret of its unity and calm. The capillary labyrinth was at the heart of the double delta that spread through the town, the secret heart of the river as a whole.

The rooms of the apartments of both towns had practically no furniture, although the inhabitants of the upper town had a liking for mirrors, which made up a large proportion of the cargoes which came to the island by ship. On the walls of stone and water of the upper town there were mirrors small and large, oval, round and rectangular, in which was reflected the maze of arms of the double delta, which itself was like a mirror image. In these mirrors the labyrinth was multiplied, it gathered to its arms new braids; it seemed as though some of the currents flowed into a dark sea concealed in the depths of the mirrors, while others rose from dreamlike sources in the mirrors and gradually acquired substantiality as they went on their way. Waters that dissipated in the mirrors were constantly replaced by currents that flowed into reality from the world of reflected images.

In the rooms of the upper town it was difficult not to look at the world from the islanders’ perspective, with no significant distinction made between things and images. The heart of the double delta, the fading capillary labyrinth, which itself was on the border where being and non-being collide, was not much more substantial than its mirror image. The muddled motions of the sources were no different in kind from the motions originating in the quiverings of mirrors suspended in draughts; the water threading its way down the curtains seemed to be heading for the fantastic, hovering lake that was also the destination of imaginary, reverse waterfalls ascending out of the depths. The lake was visible on horizontal surfaces beneath real walls of falling water, while the glass of the mirrors reflected walls of water that looked like half-materialized images. It was no simple matter to distinguish real water from its mirror image. After a while anyone living among the mirrors, in a world where the things reflected were so weak and insubstantial and reflections so disengaged from things, ceased to make too great a distinction between the two.

The upper town was also the centre for the mining of precious stones. I had heard something of the island’s celebrated precious stones before I disembarked there. Down in the harbour I witnessed trading between seamen and islanders, and in upper-town apartments I saw decorations of small coloured stones set in stone walls as well as wavering figures composed of precious stones that were suspended on long threads in walls of water. I was puzzled not to see on the island anything that looked like a mine; indeed, I encountered nothing to suggest that the earth was dug. Once I got to know Karael, I asked her to show me a place where precious stones were mined. We were sitting on the terrace of her house in the upper town; she took me by the hand and led me through the wall of water into one of the rooms at the back of the house, which was up against the rock. She opened a door in the wall I had seen many times before and assumed led to some kind of closet or pantry. When she switched on the lamp I saw a narrow, damp cave.

Karael explained to me that every house in the upper town had such a door in the wall or trapdoor in the floor. The islanders mine precious stones at home. They have no regular working hours, but from time to time—typically several times a day—they go to the seams and tap away at the stones with a small hammer. There are not as many precious stones today as there once were (the rock’s productivity has gradually fallen off), but the meagre yield is sufficient for the islanders, who also make use of many of the coloured stones to decorate their dwellings. It cannot be said that they work particularly hard, nor has their work yet made it easier for them to learn the lessons the rock has to teach them; they do not read in the rock’s features which stones it is concealing and where these stones are to be found. I would maintain that the ease with which they earn their living has much to tell us about the islanders’ characters, good traits and bad, about their generosity and nobility and their lack of interest in creation and in deeper and more systematic thought.