From then on, Josef lived at the cottage in Lhotka. When anyone asked, he told them he had decided to remodel it into a proper country house where he could spend his retirement, and he actually did start on some of the alterations. If they asked how Květa felt about it, he just didn’t answer. He moved his things out of the apartment in Prague, making sure to choose a time when he wouldn’t run into his wife, and eventually friends and people they knew stopped asking questions and got used to the fact that they lived apart. The fact that he had to spend two hours a day taking the train to work and back during the week was his problem, no one else’s. At least that’s what he told Alice when she asked him about it. After a while, even she got used to it.
11. SECOND VISION OF IMMORTALITY
Without anyone saying, uttering, or mentioning it, word spread, around the square and then around the city, that the device needed repairing. Only when this verdict reached us, wrapped in a veil of obscurity and uncertainty, did most people realize, to their painful embarrassment, that no one actually knew what purpose the device served. Even I was not entirely certain, despite that my great-grandfather made repairs to the device during the last remodeling of the city hall and its main tower. The situation reached the point where the city council, forced by no one knew exactly what — probably some vague sense of responsibility — decided to appropriate funds to repair the device. The news reached me from several sources until finally it came about that I was, shall we say, indirectly and reluctantly invited to assist in the repairs. The problem was that although we managed to dig up some of the old drawings and plans, along with a notebook containing all the mathematical calculations, deliberations on use of materials, and records of payments in a currency that no longer exists, even after a thorough study of all these documents and drawings it wasn’t entirely clear to us what purpose the device in the tower had in fact originally served. The city officials and city council came up with the idea of holding a public competition. Casting a net, they called it, in the hope that it would turn up somebody who remembered what the device had been for. Yet at the same time they remained handcuffed by an undifferentiated mixture of humility, fear, and shame at our own ignorance. The device had been the pride of our ancestors, that much we knew. Generations ago, people traveled from all across the continent to look at it. Bunches of tourists clustered in front of city hall with their oldfangled optical imaging apparatuses, capturing visual likenesses of the exterior of the device. In those days it wasn’t yet possible to capture sound and image simultaneously, and even on the few occasions when they succeeded, everything came out flat. There was no common way to produce a natural three-dimensional reproduction. Then people sat down and observed the image on a flat screen from a distance, with no way to step into it and take part in the action unfolding before them. Amazingly, they didn’t seem to find it boring. Vilém, a historian I came to know while working on the reconstruction of the device, explained that people in those days would look at the flat images in special books. Apparently, friends would get together, look through the books, and narrate them as they went along. Usually the pictures showed their family or friends and the places they had visited. A whole complicated etiquette developed around this custom, which today only a handful of specialists understand. After long and cautious deliberations it was finally decided that the device would be repaired, in spite of the fact that its purpose remained unclear. Master architect Matthias Heinz and I were selected as cochairmen of the Committee for the Restoration of the Device to oversee its reconstruction and, eventually, full restoration. We were appointed by the city council, and I can honestly say that I believe our appointment was well received by all our fellow citizens. We decided to begin by collecting all the documents related to the device in a large room at city hall provided to us by the city council. From today’s standpoint, with the device in operation again for so many years, it would be easy to laugh at our beginnings, dismissing our efforts in hindsight with the cheap observation that while we were gathering together the documents, none of us on the committee, and I daresay, not one person in the city, thought to walk up a few floors, cross the connecting bridge, and enter the tower to see what the device actually looked like. Master Matthias had the idea to reexamine the story from more than two hundred years ago, which every little child in our city knows by heart. According to the story, a prominent composer was invited here to attend the premiere of a magical opera he had written for our beautiful city, and the splendid production met with a surprisingly enthusiastic reception. As a special honor, he was given a tour of the tower, including the device. Later, in his memoirs, the composer declared it to have been the most perfect, beautiful, and cruel thing he had ever seen in his life. As we now know, his Cantata for the Device of Justice and Progress became a kind of unofficial anthem of our city. The composer is of course Leopold XVI. Even in the accounts of his visit to the device, however, there is no clear explanation of what purpose it served. Either everyone at the time knew what it was for, or they were trying to cover up their ignorance.
After a studious analysis, the financial information unexpectedly turned out to be the most helpful to us. Reading through the balance sheets, one of our historians stumbled upon the astonishing fact that partial reconstruction of the device alone, performed by my great-grandfather a hundred and fifty years ago, cost far more than the rebuilding of the municipal sewers after the memorable seventeenth earthquake and the introduction of the extraplanetary network version 28.9 combined. This fact clearly demonstrated that the device in the tower was of irreplaceable value to our ancestors, and yet its meaning and purpose still eluded us. We were fumbling in the dark. Surprisingly, we weren’t too bothered, although naturally, in the evening, when we would retire to one of our city’s cozy little pubs, we were occasionally met with questions regarding the progress of repairs on the device. The information we had assembled thus far was inconsistent. In fact, each piece of information seemed to contradict all the others. Some accounts appeared to say the device offered the ability to display the human soul. Others claimed it could determine the true nature of an individual, a family, and, ultimately, even a whole city or society. In opposition to that were theories, perhaps best described as physical, that maintained that the whole device was originally designed by astronomers to gaze into the farthest depths of space and time. Other documents indicated that it had some function in determining the principles of justice, philosophy, law, and death. Some references suggested that at one point the device had been something like a living creature, actively involved in the running of the city. None of the sources were in agreement.
We decided to keep our visit to the device a secret and perform our inspection during a weeklong sporting event that typically absorbed the attention of most of the city’s inhabitants. In the middle of the week would be a decisive friendly match between our team and the neighboring country. That afternoon was an ideal time for our visit.
We set out with our recording instruments, souls brimming with courage and hope, and ascended to the third floor of city hall. We walked down a long narrow corridor hung with hand-painted portraits of the town fathers, dating back even farther than the last reconstruction of the device. As we walked down the hallway, it suddenly occurred to me that my great-grandfather must have passed through here more than a hundred and fifty years ago. He too must have looked at this line of grim-faced men in dark suits. Just how old the paintings were was obvious from the fact that not one of them portrayed a woman. Yet the device, as we all knew, was even older still. When we reached the end of the corridor, we opened the door and walked down a short flight of stairs, which brought us to another door, leading to the tower. It goes without saying that we were uneasy. Master Matthias and his assistant opened a trunk they had brought with them and took out some heavy iron objects, with which they commenced to open the door. The rest of us were quite baffled by this complicated system, which looked to us something like a ballet or athletic performance. They kept turning and turning the iron objects, which gave out a series of loud groans. Just as we were beginning to wonder whether Master Matthias and his assistant had overestimated their strength, the door swung open. We stepped inside and found ourselves in a hall with a vaulted ceiling. Master Matthias touched my hand and pointed upward: “That,” he said, “is a barrel vault.” I stopped for a moment, uncertain how to reply. Under the stairs that led up to the tower was a statue on a stone pedestal, a figure of a man with a rooster’s head and wings. His arms were outstretched, as if about to embrace us. His eyes were covered with tape. How prescient, I thought. People centuries ago had no conception of the possibilities of present-day genetic art, yet how accurate and far-reaching their vision was.