The Golden Age

Waiting for the prince

The head of the second puppet, which until now had been looking fixedly ahead, turned abruptly to the man-puppet; the body stayed where it was. “Fool,” said the woman angrily. “Why don’t you bring the rabbit skins home? We could collect them and after a while I’d have enough to make a fur coat with. And it’s so damned cold, we’ve been having blizzards for months.”

“I can’t bring the skins home because I keep losing them. They won’t let me into the coffee-houses with them, I have to give them up at the cloakroom. And when I leave they always give me something else in their place. I’ve had some strange tools, thick books on economics in German from the nineteenth century, plaster-cast busts of Roman statesmen, stuffed birds. They always claim they’re mine, and they always find about ten witnesses who saw me leave in the cloakroom a treatise on the railways in Styria or a stuffed owl. What I am supposed to do? I pick up the owl and make my way home through the blizzard. Sometimes I can’t help but weep, and so I walk along sobbing, my tears turning to ice.”

“I keep telling you not to go to coffee-houses. All you do there is spend money, and I’ve got nothing to wear. Coffee-houses are terrible places for spreading illness. They’re always saying on the radio that someone has gone mad in a coffee-house and started singing that long-drawn-out song about the end of conventional mathematics in some new, evil empire. The waiters are heretics and most of them are former or future killers of women. You can cry over a stuffed owl, but you don’t give any thought to me as you spend day after day in your coffee-houses, sitting on your ass with your friends while I’m sitting here all alone staring at the wall.”

“I go to coffee-houses because I have to. There’s nothing much there that makes me want to go in. In fact, I hate coffee-houses, and you’re quite right, they are incubators for the worst epidemics. The waiters beat the customers and strip them naked; this is particularly upsetting for the women, some of whom are even considering avoiding coffee-houses altogether. I’d far sooner be at home with you, especially with the weather as it is now, when it’s dark all the time and it never stops snowing, and the meteors whizz by on the blizzard. But what can I do about it? I simply have to go to the coffee-houses, I have to sit it out there in case the prince’s messenger arrives. I have to be ever prepared to receive his dispatches and instructions.”

“And how many of these dispatches have ever reached you, you fool?”

“None so far. Because enemies have got to the messenger and doped him, very discreetly. They rewrite the messages letter by letter, transforming them into something else altogether, like the service manual for a microwave oven or an advertisement for a second-hand-car dealer’s. But still I am able to identify in them distant traces of the voice of my master, and I can hear it calling for help. I know that the expedition to the City of Pure Light came to grief, that for a long time the prince wandered the swamplands, that he was taken captive by evil women who did him harm. Why, they even turned him into a woman and made him dance ballet in a little white skirt, in some sordid Not-Petersburg, a city born on the plains out of the murk of despair, a city which is cursed, a city within whose walls no saviour will ever be spawned. How my prince must be suffering! If I could I’d drop everything and set out in search of him. I’m sure he’s waiting for me, asking what’s taking me so long. But all his dispatches reach me in such violated form that I have no way of telling where they were issued. All the signs are so ambiguous; at one moment I’m sure that he’s in the Gobi Desert and I begin to plan my journey and learn Mongolian, then it appears he is being held captive in a certain apartment in Prague 8. I asked a prophet for advice, and he thought long and hard before telling me, ‘Gobi Desert or Prague 8, it is all the same.’ I feel that this holy man speaks the truth, but unfortunately my education is so poor that I am unable to grasp the profound import of his words.”

“I don’t believe there is any such person as this prince of yours. I think you made him up to explain your hanging around in coffee-houses all day, or else you dreamed him. At best he’s some kind of demon made of small strips of paper.”

The male puppet jumped up before stomping about the stage, waving his arms like Mr Punch. “How can you say such a thing! That there’s no such person as the prince! The prince is more real than any of us. Without him our lives would lose all sense and order; our letters would disintegrate so that once again they would be no more than fragments of the little letters from which they are glued together, and these would slowly gather in the Gospel of the Metal Tiger, whose renewal we have dreaded for five thousand years. We would be speechless because we would be unable to connect any subject with any predicate, and white larvae and ice monsters would get into the space between them. Without the prince all that would be left of us would be shavings composed — as is well known — of our bodies, and these shavings are gathered and held together due only to his goodness, due only to the fact that he speaks up for us to the gods, his parents. Even now, at a time for him so fraught with difficulties, he continues to think of us; he never forgets us, not even when he is performing solo at the ballet in Not-Petersburg. The clearest proof of this is the fact that still we haven’t disintegrated. Although I believe that recently there was a brief time when we slipped his mind, as I saw bodies beginning to come apart like the spines of well-thumbed books, this was surely nothing more than a moment of weakness for which we can hardly blame him because in his place we would have given up long ago and thought only of our ballet career, with its intoxicating footlights and its merry backstage soirées with caviar and champagne. O my noble prince! It is thanks to him that there is Order in the world; he might have ordained that the stains on old walls should writhe, that the animals should berate us all day long, as used to be the case in the dark days of old, before the prince was born to his divine mother. But surely you remember this? Is that what you want, that our sufferings of those years should return? Do you not recall how unpleasant it was to be woken in the morning by the pigeons walking along the windowsills, speaking of us in disgusting obscenities which, resisting our efforts to shoo them away, they would repeat at lunch in front of our children? And our children lost all respect for us; they conspired against us with the animals and bullied us. And although the animals gave us an apology before they flew away from the planet, our children refused to do the same, writing to us that they had procured a pen with green ink like pus which stank most dreadfully, and it was with this pen that they would write the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ for ever more.”

“I don’t remember anything of the sort. You’re just making things up again,” the woman said grumpily. But it seemed that the man hadn’t heard her, that he was completely distracted by his master the prince. The puppet walked stiffly around the table, raising and then dropping its arms before calling: ‘The prince! The prince! How marvellous the times before the Reconquista, when he set out for the City of Pure Light, when we — filled with infinite gratitude and immeasurable hope that the golden age would return — bade him farewell at the kiosk whose light blazed in the dark, there at the tram terminus, the last time we drank coffee together from the plastic cup which is a timeless symbol of our brotherhood!’”

“If the prince really does exist and isn’t just some paper demon or a figment of your imagination, then he’s certainly the same kind of worthless thing as you are, the same kind of loud-mouthed coffee-house loser. You’re always using him as an excuse, you’re always rambling on about a City of Pure Light and messages from the prince, but for all I can see you spend your days just hanging around with your friends in coffee-houses sipping sweet liqueurs; all of you would be better off with a proper glass of apricot schnapps. And when you get home you don’t lend a hand with anything, you just go straight to your room and shut yourself in, saying you’ve got work to do, that you’ve got to cut animals out of plywood with a fret-saw. But I know full well what you do in there: you amuse yourself with your lovers. I’m not as big a fool as you think; I see right through you. You’ve given them dresses in the same pattern as the wallpaper in your room, and you’ve stuck wallpaper masks on their faces as if you think that’ll keep me from recognizing what they are. But I’ve known about your lovers for years; I’ve heard them laughing and I’ve seen the flash of the diamond teeth you bought them. I see them very well, and I talk to them, too. As soon as you leave for the coffee-house I go in to them and we talk about you; they ridicule and impersonate you; we all laugh at you, and their diamond teeth glow in the lamp-light and glint across the room.”

“You don’t understand anything: the wallpaper, suits and masks are of the splendid fabric used for the curtains of the chateau in the City of Pure Light in the era of its glory, before the treacherous tanks of Byzantium drove into its streets. As the city was being evacuated I managed to salvage a little of this fabric to remind me of the happy days which it was my good fortune to spend in the galaxy’s secret capital. I used it to make wallpaper and clothing for the women among my old friends and comrades-in-arms who escaped from the Byzantine despots along with me.”

The man paused and the woman said nothing. Then two curtains darted across the stage, one from each side, while two strings came down from above from which was suspended a sign bearing the words “Entr’acte: 10 minutes.” There was the sound of shuffling legs and coughing.

“Boring, isn’t it?” said an unusually deep female voice; it belonged to the woman sitting next to me, who had turned to face me. “Today’s show is pretty rotten,” she sighed. “In fact, every show is worse than the one the day before. I’m thinking of giving up on the boat theatre.” Then she asked me out of the blue whether I knew anything about old clocks. I answered in surprise that the repairing of old clocks had long been a hobby of mine, that I indulged in this esoteric delight almost every free evening I had.

“Your beautiful fingers told me that might be the case,” said the woman. “I’ve been watching them and imagining them moving about in a labyrinth of cogwheels. They look incredibly dexterous and quick.” The woman stroked my fingers shyly, giving the impression she would never tire of their touch; then she leaned towards me and whispered, “I am in great anguish and I think you might be able to help me. It’s my antique clock: a month ago it just stopped. I appreciate that your time is precious to you, but I was wondering if you’d do me the kindness of coming home with me to take a look at it. When all’s said and done, today’s play is a real disappointment with so few elevated thoughts in it, and so little nobility. Since my clock stopped ticking, my apartment has been so quiet, particularly at night, when I doze to the groaning of the building and a rustling which takes my memories captive and turns them into recollections of some ancient evil. Every night the building resounds with age-old insults and vicious mockery. The boat’s almost reached its next stop; I live close to the jetty, we’ll be there before you have a chance to stretch your legs. I’d be delighted if you’d take a look at the clock. Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to tell me what’s wrong with it. For you it’ll probably be child’s play. And it’ll be enough for me to hear your opinion on it. While we’re at it, I’ve got some rather special wine for us to drink. Friends of mine brought it back from the vineyards of Bordeaux.”

I was a little intimidated by the woman’s deep voice, and I shuddered at the thought of the rooms in which it had probably been formed, the reverberations of which could be heard within it (gleaming antique furniture, modernist lamps, Japanese electronics with fidgety little green lights). I was inclined to make my excuses but was too lazy to come up with a reason; I was also tempted by the prospect of the insides of a valuable old clock and a glass of good French wine. So I told the woman I would go with her, just for a short while. Almost as soon as I accepted the offer, the boat shook as it touched the jetty. Several other members of the audience left their seats along with us. Up on deck I saw that the fog had cleared somewhat, that the boat was at anchor between the Steel Bridge and the Palacký Bridge. There were a number of new audience members waiting to board.