The Golden Age

Theatre in the forest

This episode in the Book is connected with something that happened to me a few years after my return from the island. On a hot day in mid-July I decided to take a trip; I took the bus to Mníšek, and from there I climbed through the sparse forest, along the brooks with their magical, drowse-inducing scents that reminded me of the scent that the fierce sun drew from the island’s parched slopes. At a ridge in the path I looked down on a velvety valley with the glittering monogram of a river unfurling at its bottom edge. I walked down a path whose concentrated quiet occasionally spilled over into glades with rustling clusters of glowing leaves, as if it were unable to keep its dreams of light to itself, but the silence always returned.

I trust, dear reader, that by now you are so hardy in matters of digressions and insertions that you will have no trouble in relocating from a mythical archipelago to the Brdy hills of central Bohemia, where you will accompany me through the grass, breathe in with me the woodland scents, and pause with me awhile to take in the view of houses in the distance, dissolving downwards in the languid haze like cubes of sugar on the bottom of a cup. I am well aware that all the bold words you have heard from me about the value of insertions and digressions have failed to convince you; you are distrustful and stubborn, dear reader, and no doubt you are preparing to skip this insertion and its savage intervention between you and the tale of the origination of the statue in jelly. I expect you think I won’t notice. I won’t try to talk you out of anything, nor will I offer advice or prompting; who knows, this insertion may take you to the centre of an underground lake beneath Prague whose banks are lined with silver palaces, but then again perhaps all you will get to witness is a boring conversation in a pub in Revnice or Dobřichovice between owners of country cottages. You probably won’t miss anything important if you skip the next couple of chapters, but you could miss the encounter that holds the key to the entire text. The decision on which path in the labyrinth to take is yours and yours alone; whichever path you take, you do so at your own risk.

It was already getting dark when the woodland paths at last began to lead me to the upper edge of Revnice. I came across a gate on which there hung a poster advertising a woodland theatre — a festival of amateur theatre companies from central Bohemia was being held at this very place. On the programme that day was a play called In the Sea and on Dry Land. (I didn’t recognize the name of the author.) Through the wire fence I saw an illuminated stage beneath dark trees; the performance was in progress. For a while I watched out of curiosity. On the stage was an oblong table, at which there sat ten or so figures with their backs to the audience. There was a group of musicians standing to one side. When the musicians began to play, a construction made of wire covered with grey plush was hoisted up beyond the table; it was about two metres high, looked like a great rugby ball stood on its end, and into its front piece were sewn two large circles made of white cloth with two smaller circles of black cloth sewn onto them. Then ten stuffed plush pipes — their ends attached to thin wooden rods that were obviously controlled by actors hidden behind the stage — were lifted clumsily from the lower part of the construction. These pipes waggled about in the general direction of the figures at the table, who were crying out, assuming various attitudes of terror, and poking at the plush pipes with knives. It dawned on me that what I was watching was a dramatization of a scene from the island’s Book.

I bought myself a ticket, sat down on a bench, and watched the king and his retinue struggle with the plush tentacles. I looked about myself; there were not many spectators. The long benches contained several groups of young people drinking beer — they might have been friends and relatives of the actors. In the Revnice rendering of the scene, the giant squid kills the king and his fiancée and eats them. The naturalism in the depiction of Dru’s and Isili’s deaths was a strange contrast to the childish representation of the squid. The plush tentacles pulled Dru and Isili down into the sea. When they had gone from the stage, their terrible shrieks could still be heard as they were eaten alive; great geysers of red paint squirted high into the air. Then there was an interval. I bought myself a beer in a plastic cup and drank this slowly while I waited to see how the action would develop.

Although we had just witnessed the terrible death of the king and his fiancée, both these characters reappeared in the next act. The stage was set as a room in a modern-day apartment. Dru and Isili, who live in this room as tenants in straitened circumstances, are discussing the unspecified nightmares they have both been having. The room next to theirs is occupied by another tenant, a disagreeable bank clerk who looks like a bank clerk in a pre-war comedy film. The clerk is forever bothering Dru and Isili with his complaints (they haven’t mopped the bathroom floor, they have the radio on too loud at night, etc.) In the course of one of his visits it turns out that he, too, has recurrent nightmares on a similar theme. All three tenants dream of an evening by the sea, of a struggle in which the points of daggers glow with a red fire, there are great undulating serpents, and the foam of the sea is mixed with blood. It soon became clear to the tipsy Revnice audience that Dru and Isili were in the afterworld, living in a post-mortal city, that their past life was returning to them in these vague dreams; after a time, the characters, too, remember their pre-death existence. The author of the play mixed motifs from the island’s Book with the work of Ladislav Klíma and Swedenborg.

But the role of the clerk in the events on Vauz remained unclear. The three characters try for some time to figure this out together; then their memories suddenly come into sharp focus: in life, the post-mortal bank clerk was the squid. The clerk goes into shock and bursts into tears. Dru and Isili throw themselves at him; they scold him and beat him while he whimpers and pleads for mercy. Dru and Isili take a cruel revenge on the erstwhile squid: they make him their servant and humiliate and bully him. The clerk who was once a squid takes the abuse and the slaps from both his tormentors with cowardly submissiveness, but all the time, unobtrusively but cleverly, he is plotting against them. He succeeds in turning Dru and Isili against each other to such a degree that they begin to hate each other. To humiliate Dru, Isili becomes the lover of the bank clerk who was once a squid, and together they decide to kill Dru. At night when Dru is sleeping, Isili unlocks the door of the room for the clerk to enter. The erstwhile squid holds Dru down while Isili drives a knife into his chest several times. In the course of this grim scene streams of red paint once again spurted onto the floor of the stage and the grass in front of it. A very strange play, I said myself, although I was well used to various guises of the bizarre from the island’s Book and imagined myself unshockable by any kind of literary eccentricity.

Then Isili and the squid live together. Memories of his life in the ocean deep gradually come back to the bank clerk; he tells Isili about it every evening at dinner. They promise each other they will both try to return as squids in their next incarnation — massive, beautiful and strong they will swim through the depths together. They tell each other they will have to be on their guard against Dru — who is bound to want to avenge himself — but they hope that his violent death in the post-mortal world will have sent him to a distant underworld, from where it will take him a long time to make his way back to our universe.

The next act — a balletic interlude — was set in the sea. Green filters pushed in front of spotlights and long gauze drapes rippling in the Revnice breeze were intended to create the illusion of an undersea world. Romantic music I didn’t recognize was played over the speakers. Two figures in grey leotards ran onto the stage, one from each side; it was Isili and the bank clerk, who had become squids. Now the director was ignoring the literality of earlier scenes in favour of a more modernist approach. There were no plush probosces sewn onto the dancers’ leotards; the twenty tentacles were represented by the movements of four arms waving about continually like those of Indian dancers, pulling the body onto the tips of the toes in their rise before falling in languid sinusoids to the boards of the Revnice stage; stretching for alluring underwater depths and returning to their starting point, as if in the knowledge that the most beautiful place of this magnificent underwater life was precisely where one happened to be. The imaginary tentacles created in the arm movements of the dancers combined over and over in new figures of tenderness and passion. Apparently the ballet was meant to represent a life of freedom and joy in the depths of the ocean. The act ended with the peaceful death of the elderly squid Isili and the grief of her consort, who now wrung his tentacles and whirled around the corpse on the seabed in an expressive dance of despair (the weary undulating of the ballerina’s arms represented the currents of the sea toying with the squid’s remains), and moved his arms to indicate that he was embracing his dead mate with all his tentacles and that he would never overcome his sadness.