The Golden Age

Encounter above the Neckar

For the next act, which followed after another interval, there was again a change of scene. We found ourselves on the glassed-in terrace of a villa obviously built on an elevated spot on a hillside: through the glass wall one could see to the bottom of the hill, where a peaceful river ran through a quaint old town with narrow streets watched over by domed churches. The river was spanned by a magnificent towered bridge, and immediately beyond the last houses of the town there were hills covered in deep forest. Partway up one of the hills — like a weightless, two-dimensional picture — were the ruins of a great castle. (The town in the valley was in fact produced by a colour slide projected onto a screen.) This town, hemmed in by hills on all sides, was familiar; I realized the slide was a view of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. So this had to be one of the villas on the hillside that rises sharply on the right-hand (north) bank of the Neckar.

There’s the piercing sound of the house’s doorbell. Emerging from inside the house, a white-haired old man comes on to the terrace and opens the door. Standing behind him is a young girl. She has just arrived in Heidelberg to study at the university; she has read about the availability of lodgings at the villa in the classified ads of a newspaper. So that’s how the girl came to live in the villa above the Neckar. She and the kindly old man become friends. Every day they sit together on the terrace and the old man talks about his life, which in no way has been exciting — he spent his career as a clerk at Heidelberg City Hall. His children have not lived with him for many years, and when a few years ago his wife died, he decided to rent out rooms to students.

The girl is a student of German literature. One day she confides to the man that she is trying to write a fantasy story. Over breakfast she begins to describe its plot to him. (I doubt anyone in Revnice was surprised to learn that the story was about a conspiracy among courtiers in an island kingdom — they had all suspected from the beginning that the student was a reincarnation of Isili. But the identity of the owner was not clear; I heard my fellow spectators betting on whether it was Dru or the squid.) The student believes that her imagination is creating images when they in fact arise from her memory. The old man is not surprised by the story’s plot; when his tenant — wishing to show off her storytelling skills — asks him to guess the manner of the attempted assassination of the king, which the conspirators decide upon after lengthy deliberations, he answers while breaking into his boiled egg with his spoon. “I suppose they decided to kill the king by confronting him with a giant squid,” he says. The astonished girl tries to find out how it is that he knows the plot of her story when she hasn’t even committed it to paper yet or spoken to anyone else about it. All the old man says in reply is that he doesn’t wish to speak of it at the moment, but that he will explain everything to her some time soon. When the Isili-student asks when this will be, he looks out of the window with a smile on his lips and says, “Perhaps…perhaps after the first fall of snow.”

One morning the girl descends to the terrace from her room to find that the roofs of the houses in the town below and the trees of the hills have been coated with snow. (The picture has been changed in the slide projector.) The old man is standing on the terrace already, looking pensively at the white scene with its gentle touches of grey. The girl stands next to him and they study together the snowy landscape and the cable car rising slowly through the white pass in the forest on the hillside opposite. They have been standing in silence for quite a while when the old man begins to speak of the royal court on Vauz, of that last supper by the sea, of the shameful murder in the post-mortal city, of the burning deserts of the second underworld in which he ended up after Isili and the squid killed him. He is Dru. And as he is speaking, everything comes back to the Isili-student; she rests her head against the cold glass of the window lit by the snow of Heidelberg on the Neckar, as images from her memory rise up from the dark chasm within her.

Then she weeps quietly and asks Dru for his forgiveness.

“I forgave you when I was still in the desert of the second underworld. I knew you’d show up here. I’ve been waiting for you for years, since before you were even born. And trust me, it’s not so I can take my revenge on you.”

“How did you know I would come?”

“When I was living in the second underworld, I reached its outermost frontier. There I came across a great abandoned palace — perhaps it had been the palace of some god who had left for another cosmos. I walked its corridors and studied the frescoes depicting the past and the future of the universe that adorned them. It was in one of these that I saw the two of us sitting at breakfast on this terrace; it was clear from the picture that we were not meeting for the first time. Perhaps you have heard of Heidelberg Man?”

“Protanthropus heidelbergensis. An anthropoid. Its jaw was found in Mauer — not far from here — in 1907.” The girl was quoting from a coursebook in anthropology.

“That jaw belonged to you. Way back when you and I lived together in the forests here. It wasn’t a bad life — indeed, it was every bit as beautiful as your life in the ocean deep, which I also saw in the frescoes. I always expected to meet the squid in Heidelberg, too. I asked myself for ages who it might be; there was a time when I believed it to be Professor Gadamer from the university, but one evening when I was sitting in the Florian wineroom, its owner came in and I knew straight away that he was the one. And he recognized me as well; he joined me at my table and had a good bottle brought up from the cellar. We sat there drinking together until morning. He told me about your life together in the ocean; we made good our differences and became friends. These days we take walks together in the woods above the city. We’ve both been waiting for you here. You must go and see him — he’ll be delighted to see you. Don’t worry, in future lives we’ll love each other again; we’ll also persecute and hate each other, fight and kill each other on both sides of the frontier of death. But for the time being, we can spend a few years here in tranquillity. Hölderlin wrote — a long time ago, admittedly — that Heidelberg was the most beautiful of Germany’s smaller cities. And just look at the peace that rests in its streets and the squares of the old town. The walls breathe with a silent joy, and it is a joy to walk its hills and sit in its university library studying from volumes whose pages are bathed in a calm light. Let us pass here our short golden age, an age we’ll often look back on during the trials and in the despair of our lives to come.”

The play at Revnice had not finished yet, but by this time I was tired; at the end of the Heidelberg scenes I slipped out of the audience and went down to the station. As I sat under a glaring bulb in an empty carriage of the late train, I thought how strange it was that the Revnice play had grafted motifs from the island’s Book onto philosophies of reincarnation and pessimism, ideas very distant from the islanders’ view of the world. I had written down the name of the company that produced the play, thinking I would get in touch with the actors at their Prague base and ask who the author was and where they discovered him, but then I dropped the idea. I was pretty sure what they would tell me: either the play was written by someone who had spent some time on the island, come across the Book there, and used some of its motifs in his work, or else some visitor to the island had told the natives about the play and then part of its story had been incorporated into the Book. The Book was open — it drew in stories from other books, plays or films and transformed them, and naturally it was willing to release its own story-lines and images for use in the literatures of other nations. Perhaps many motifs in works of literature of international renown have their origins in the Book; there is no way of knowing this for sure — the Book changes so quickly that whatever escapes from it to find lasting form on the pages of other books or theatre stages, transforms and then perishes in the Book.