The Golden Age

In the royal palace

From all this it is easy to conclude why it mattered so little whether the royal palace, the seat of the ruler, was occupied or left empty. Rulings and laws were always generated in conversation, regardless of whether their origins were in the words of the king or the roar of the sea. In such circumstances the institution of king seemed to me to a great extent pointless. I wondered why it was that the islanders had not got rid of it long ago. Conservatism was not the reason, to be sure: the islanders were no respecters of history and tradition. It was not that they disliked the past, but for them it was nothing more than a dreamlike area of the present, populated with interesting, blurry ghosts. To begin with I thought the institution of king might be an expression of the islanders’ subconscious desire for some kind of centrepoint and meaning, whose ever-beating pulse would underpin their love of chaos. But once I got to know the islanders better, I knew I was mistaken in this: I realized that the islanders’ resistance to a fixed order was underpinned by a yet firmer resistance to order and an old, unassuageable distaste for meaning.

The real reason for the islanders’ keeping the institution of king was most likely the sense it gave them that the absence of a centre would itself, if secure and neither disputed nor threatened, become a centre of a kind. Although for the creation of rulings and laws the conversation had no need of a king, if the only ruler was the hum of conversation, over time the illusion might spread that this state was a mere preparation for the establishment of some kind of centre and beginning, that the absence of a king was in fact a wait for a king. But because there already was a centre, because a king had his seat in a great palace in the lower town, the suggestion was made that this centre could exist as nothing other than an empty place in which every beginning was dissolved; as there was a king there already, it was evident that no one was waiting for the arrival of a king to fill the void, that the king could exist only as this veiled, dwindling figure and his laws only as the speech of dreams, phantom words quivering on the bottom of an echo, in the chatter of water; it was clear that there was nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.

When I talked of the island’s monarchy in Prague, some of my listeners understood this order of government — in which it was possible to make contact with an unknown ruler only by means of a network of illusory echoes which knew no end — as the accomplishment of a Kafkaesque Atlantic vision. I tried to explain to them that the way things operated on the island was diametrically opposed to the world of Kafka. When I described to Karael the plot of The Castle, she was completely incapable of grasping it. On the one hand she considered the secrecy of the ruler as something altogether banal, on the other as something pleasing that was part and parcel of the good functioning of a state and the well-being of its people; with amazement she asked me why the land surveyor squandered so much energy on attempting to change this common, desirable state of affairs — wasn’t the real, inaccessible Count Westwest better than the phantom in K.’s head, better than a bunch of village gossip?

I remember us talking about The Castle when we were having a picnic on the rocky headland by the lower town. We were sitting above the sea on a hot, fragrant rock; I was looking down on the town’s first houses, into the empty, shadowy rooms whose windows were only two or three metres distant from the stony incline; I was looking at the wide boulevard, how it ended nonsensically at the foot of the rock, how it led somnambulistically in a single direction across the whole town until in the distance of the far side it sunk itself into the sand dunes. In the meantime I told Karael about the wanderings of the land surveyor in the snow-covered village. And I thought about how I could answer Karael’s objections. By this time I had reached a certain understanding of the nature of the islanders, so I knew that there was no point in talking of a desire to hear the original word of law. So I said that at the very least K. was spurred on in his efforts by the ambition to perform the work of a land surveyor in the village. But Karael was surprised that he should think the work of the surveyor so much better than the work he was given, that of the school janitor.

I said to her, “Fine, I’ve been on the island long enough now to understand the point you’re making, that a king’s ruling is something created in conversation, that we need take no interest in the words the king actually pronounces. I also understand that this need not be important to the king himself, that he, too, finds his true rulings in words born out of the echoes of his words and the whisperings of the water and the wind. But this changes nothing in the fact that down there in the royal palace there lives — sometimes, at least — a real person whom you cannot identify. Perhaps the main reason for my wish to meet the ruler is curiosity, but I would say that curiosity is not the worst of all reasons on which to base a desire.”

Laughing, Karael asked, “Would you like to pay a visit to the king today?”

“What nonsense is this you’re uttering?” I was astonished. The island’s king seemed to me such a vague and distant notion that it had never crossed my mind I might get to meet him.

“Once we finish eating, let us head to the palace.”

Although I was baffled I swallowed quickly my portion of shell wrap (you will read more about this in the chapter on the island’s cuisine) and waited impatiently while Karael finished eating. Did she have some kind of special pass that would get us into the palace? I knew that at that time no one was altogether sure who the king was; indeed, I had heard conjecture from a variety of sources on the ruler’s identity. How could we possibly gain such easy access to a figure of such mystery? When Karael at last finished eating, we ran down the track which threaded its way through the rock of the bluff, like a continuation in parody of the broad, empty boulevards which passed through the town. Before long we were in the street where the royal palace was; the entirety of one side of the street was occupied by the palace’s facade, which now was bathed in shadow.

The palace looked onto the street through a uniform row of high windows, which — in common with all windows in the lower town — had no glass. We walked the length of the building’s seemingly unending front. It was as though there was a noiseless conveyor belt bringing the windows on the far side of the palace’s empty rooms to the windows at the near side, filling them with the clear seascape and the glaring blue of the sky. It took us quite a long time to reach the arched entrance. Here a cold wind was blowing. We mounted a stone staircase to the first floor, where we passed a series of identical rooms, all without furniture, all with drifts of sand in their corners, all piled high with old papers from the distant past, when reports were still submitted to the king in writing and the royal commands were also issued thus. The dust was swirling in sloping columns of sunlight.

I asked Karael if she had ever been in the palace before.

“No,” she said, “But I still hope we’ll be able to find the king.”

As we walked on and breathed the smell of old, cracked wooden floors, and the remains of faded paintings appeared on the walls like phantoms, she explained to me that anyone could enter the palace, it was just that no one chose to do so because no one was particularly interested in the king. It was true that at that time there was a lot of talk in the upper town about who was king, but the fact the question of the king’s identity was an interesting topic of conversation did not mean that it awoke in people the desire to take a look at the royal palace, particularly when the days were as hot as this.

“It may be that the king is not here today,” she told me. “But you can come here on your own whenever you feel it.”

But I was in luck. By the window of one of the rooms there was a heavy desk that had almost certainly come to the island on a ship, and sitting at this with her back to us, looking out to sea, deep in thought, was a young woman. When she heard our footsteps the woman turned round and smiled at us. I smiled back and Karael waved. I had the impression the girl was pleased to see us; ruling the island must have been agonizingly boring, and I believe she would have been happy to invite us into the room but was too shy to do so. When in the next room I asked Karael if she had known that her friend was queen, she told me she had suspected so.

The very next day I met the queen in the upper town, and I spoke to her on several occasions after that, but I never mentioned our encounter at the palace. It seemed to me it would have been tactless to do so; I thought I read a certain embarrassment in her expression. I realized that the position of king of the island was the most worthless, the least substantial, the most powerless position of all, as it was furthest removed from the final wording of the law. The king’s only privilege was the opportunity granted him to spend his days walking through a long series of rooms scented by the sun, looking at the sea and the white boats entering and departing the harbour. I believe that the queen was glad we failed to mention her position. Although the person who was king enjoyed respect on the island, this respect was mixed with pity and — I believe — a certain contempt.