The Golden Age

At the station in Vršovice

Now, dear reader, is perhaps the time for me to present you with a story from the Book. I still don’t have much taste for this, and I have to admit that yesterday after I finished work on the last chapter I spent the entire afternoon walking the streets of Pankrác, Michle, and Vršovice. The spring mist was so fine that I could barely distinguish it from the foretaste of rain; I was bombarded with hundreds of different reeks and scents (I’m writing these chapters at the end of April). I was considering the pros and cons of embarking on the most pointless undertaking yet in the setting down of my recollections of the island. I was tempted by the thought of ending my writing here and now, thus leaving the stories of the Book to your imagination, not least because I realized I couldn’t remember that much about them and would have to piece them together from disconnected fragments, or else think up new connections. But I reached the conclusion that it would be unfair of me to wriggle out of this task; besides, as transformations of the text were part and parcel of the Book, would not a narrative transformed by forgetfulness and patched-up fantasy be truer to the Book than an exact representation of the Book as I knew it during my days on the island?

I was yet more afraid of the Book’s peculiar tendency to uncontrollable proliferation and expansion. I knew the Book well enough to realize that it was unlikely that the long period it had spent in a remote part of my brain had sufficed for its deactivation. I knew that once I began to bring extracts from the Book out into the light I would need to proceed with the caution of an experienced pyrotechnician — without careful handling any of them could explode, spraying over a wide area contents hitherto hidden. The light-minded narrator might have chosen a chapter from the Book and then found himself at the centre of a blast, with pages raining down on him by the hundreds.

But then I reached a point at which the dangers of the Book took on the aspect of a game of adventure — I told myself it would be cowardly to shirk the challenge this presented. I have some experience of the Book, after all; I know its tricks, where its dangers lie, the signals it gives, and to pay these due attention. I reached my decision as I was walking past the station at Vršovice. Since I like this place I went inside, bought myself some coffee in a plastic cup, went out on to the platform and sat down on a bench that rested against the wall of the station building. I watched the trains come and go and imagined you, dear reader, reading the tales of my travels. I wondered which part of the Book I should narrate from. As I have said, the texts that fight free of the Book’s pockets are from many different genres. Initially I thought of recounting what I could remember of the sections of the Book which seemed to me the most original. These were texts which had something in common with abstract painting, long passages in which no people, animals, plants or even objects appeared; the heroes of these passages were various kinds of smudges or stains, of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter. The islanders gave these smudges or stains special names. Admittedly, these texts are not exactly typical of the Book—the main motion present in the Book is a sweeping gyration in which formlessness gives way to form and vice versa. The stories of stains circulate only in a small wheel, in which the shapes brought forth do not trouble the material world.

These passages describe in detail how stains transform, how their positions change in an abstract two-dimensional space, and how the relations between these stains change. For example, one insertion describes over dozens of pages how the stain puo sprouts two nest protrusions (have I mentioned already that it is not only stains that have names but also parts of stains?) and how in time the ends of these stains begin to curl in towards each other. For a while all the indications are that the protrusions will join up, thus creating a rare kind of stain containing an island void, but as the protrusions appear to be about to meet, their progress is halted and they remain separate. From time to time — as if by way of contrast — a small stain approaches one of the protrusions, but it never gets close enough to bring any kind of influence to bear on the larger stain. So what is the shape to which the main stain aspires? The islanders find this kind of narrative quite thrilling; they devour it as we devour detective stories. If the island had television, the islanders’ equivalent of Dallas or Dynasty would probably be a daily episode of a never-ending series on the transformation of stains.

As the narrative progressed it seemed that the original puo stain was about to be transformed into a ziud stain. But the reader of experience smelled a red herring: the signs foretelling a transformation to ziud were too obvious, too stage-managed. Though they were hidden, this was done in such a way that the attentive reader could spot them. He began to understand that signs suggesting a transformation to ziud were scattered across the work to draw the reader’s attention away from the real — albeit hidden — focal point of the plot, and that this must be the suspiciously unobtrusive small stain near the nest protrusion. He became ever more certain that the moment was approaching when the small stain would enter the action; it might suddenly expand before swallowing the large stain so that the two of them formed a mue stain.

But in the end the reader was surprised to learn that his bluff had been called. His shrewdness and worldly wisdom had been shown up as naivety. The author had reckoned with his suspicions and exploited these with craft. The reader had overlooked the fact that there were two red herrings; his uncovering of the first deceit had prevented him from seeing the second, from deducing that two untruths made a truth. The small stain did not enter the action at all; its ostensible meaninglessness was a disguise for emptiness. There came a point in the action where the small stain unravelled and then disappeared. When the baffled reader returned to the large stain — having paid so little heed to the unobtrusive changes taking place on its left side, as he was preoccupied with tracking down a ruse on the part of the author — he realized that the original stain had gradually assumed the form of the ziud, the very outcome he had least reckoned with.

Of course, in describing these beautiful stories separately, I am not showing them to their full advantage; to give you a proper idea of their nature I would have to relate whole stain eposes and symphonies replete with heroes, crisscrossed networks and unexpected twists. But I think it likely you would not find this amusing. Indeed, I doubt you much enjoyed the tale of the puo stain. If you skipped a few lines or even the whole passage, you have nothing to be ashamed of: it took me a long time to get used to this literary genre.

If I were to retell some of the stain novels contained in the Book, I would struggle with the translation. This is another of the things I was thinking about at the station. As you know, the islanders have names for the different stains that have no equivalents in Czech, so these would have to remain in the original with the attachment of long explanatory footnotes, in which I would describe the shapes of the stains, the relationships among them, their durability and changeability, their tendency to different kinds of transformation and the effects of these transformations on other stains, both close and distant. To explain the name of a stain I would need to refer to the names of all the others; in the end we would have a network of explanatory footnotes in which each note referred to all the others, and this network would draw in the main text, which would become a commentary on its own commentary, a series of footnotes for footnotes.

So in the end I decided to retell a relatively closed episode from a part of the Book in which an unknown author describes over a great many pages (spangled with dozens of white insertion pockets like a meadow flush with mushrooms) the feud between two royal houses living in a mythical archipelago. This feud survived several generations — the crimes of fathers provoked acts of vengeance from sons which were also crimes which would have to be paid back. Interludes of peace allowed the heart to nurture memories of how it had been wronged, with the result that the unquiet hand groped for the dagger and new wrongs were wrought.