Once she began work on her film she no longer had so much time to listen to the novel beyond the wall. But every day she found a few moments to lay her ear against the wall and find out something of the latest scandalous adventures of the novel’s heroine.
“Last month I listened to a new episode about white snakes born in the rippling movements of curtains. As ever the story-line was fantastical and nasty, and as ever I couldn’t tear my ear away from the wall. But in the end I had to leave for a meeting about the shooting of the film. When I left the apartment I saw two men in overalls in the corridor. They were pulling some kind of cable into the neighbour’s apartment: perhaps he was having cable TV installed. The door to the apartment was open, and I heard — this time with perfect clarity — the voice with the well-known intonation, accompanied by the gentle clacking of the computer keyboard. The realization that my neighbour was not speaking Czech but a Scandinavian language I didn’t understand, came to me as if in a dream. He had never spoken Czech — the words I’d thought I was hearing were in fact fragments of Swedish or Norwegian; it was I who had made of them something they weren’t and composed them into a story-line that was at once scandalous and fascinating to me. A few days later I got to talking with the typist by the mailboxes, and she told me that my neighbour, her employer, was the Prague representative of a Swedish software firm. He didn’t know a word of Czech and spent most of the day dictating to her messages in Swedish for the firm’s headquarters in Uppsala.”
I was reminded of the “language of water,” of utterances born of rustlings and murmurs, but I didn’t want to tell the girl about the island. “I thought the similarity between the novel behind the wall and your Iliad quite striking,” I told her instead. “The motif of the prodigal daughter was, I thought, also present in the dreams you had about your film. Your Iliad was about more than just the fighting between the Achaeans and the Trojans: it was also about a girl who had turned her back on her father and fallen in with some gods with low morals. Why don’t you write the novel you invented with your ear to the wall?”
“I don’t know, perhaps one day I will. The moment I realized I was the author of the novel of the prodigal daughter, that terribly obscene dream, I realized, too, that I could be the source of an endless number of stories. It seems to me that everyone has such a source of stories inside him; mostly, though, this remains hidden. Mine was stirred by fragments of Swedish and the murmur of the language and the fractured images these were immersed in. To begin with I was horrified because I thought it would be my responsibility to write down all the stories that spurted from this source and that my whole life would be too short to manage this in. Then it came to me that each of the stories contained something of all the others. You said yourself that my Iliad is the same story as my novel about Amélie. I realized there was no hurry to do anything — it’s always enough to tell one story, shoot one film, or paint one picture at a time for all pictures and stories to be present.”
The quest for the gemstone
Three weeks after the flight of Taal and Uddo, Gato returns to Illim. When she was still able to move her hardening lips a little, Nau asked Tana not to write to Gato about her illness; she did not want her son to see her transforming into a piteous, gleaming tortoise. But after a time, and in spite of Tana’s best efforts to censor this, news of the queen’s condition reaches Gaul, and Gato sets sail for his island home as soon as he hears it. Then the moment he learns of the hidden inscription and the gemstone at Taal’s palace, he announces his intention to leave for Devel; he will find and bring back the gemstone. Gato paces the sand-strewn paths of the park deep into the night. When Tano wakes from a restless sleep, he hears beneath his window the repeated crunch of the sand. In the course of this sleepless night, Gato devises a plan for how to gain entry to the palace of Taal and Uddo.
Gato’s plan is based around the fact that no one at Taal’s court knows what he looks like; also, it draws on a strange art that Gato learned in a land where his ship was once washed ashore while on its way to Gaul. Next to the name of this land there was one of those thick pockets I came to think of as “geographical-historical.” It contained details of the territory and its history, interwoven — as was common in the Book—with the psychopathology of its ruling family, again expressed by images from mythology — conspiracy, erotically-motivated revenge, incest, battles at sea, intrigue and uprising, sharp daggers under pillows, faithless women consorting with enemies of the family, dragons in palace gardens at night, high politics discussed in bed chambers, catalogues of poisons seeping through the closed world of the family, inscriptions on walls in scripts unknown, the rising sun shining bright on warriors’ blades. But as this is of no great importance to our story, let us leave this pocket closed.
The land on whose coast Gato disembarked was celebrated for its carpets, which were more magnificent than the most beautiful works of Persia and Bukhara. Its people wove carpets from fine but strong fibres spun by a special species of spider which lived off great butterflies in mountain forests. The spiders had two means of attracting the butterflies: by giving off an intoxicating scent, and by a chemical reaction that was actuated in their fibres by early morning sun (when the butterflies flew out), causing the webs to take on the most glorious colours. Each spider would spin fibres of a different colour, as the colour of a web also had the function of marking its territory. The fineness and strength of the fibres made it possible to portray on the carpets the subtlest of details. The people of this land wove into their carpets vedute of towns in which it was possible to count the number of stones on the bracelets of women walking in the streets; there were carpets with battle panoramas in which were clearly visible teeth in the grimacing mouths of warriors, and carpets showing jungles where each stalk of grass and each colour in a parrot’s crest were carefully distinguished.
A popular genre was the so-called “lost portrait.” Having commissioned a master weaver to produce his likeness, the client would some time later receive a carpet that showed, for example, a large town in which there were thousands of figures in the streets and at the windows. One of these figures was a portrait of the client, but in order to find it, it was necessary to look very hard. The longer this search took — and it might take months or even years — the more highly the work was prized. The carpet weavers employed a number of tricks: after several years of intensive searching, one client found his own face reflected dimly on the lid of somebody’s snuff-box, while another found himself painted on a crumpled chocolate-bar wrapper lying on a rubbish heap. A carpet which made use of Poe’s principle of the “Lost Letter” was particularly celebrated. This depicted a painter showing his girlfriend a picture mounted on his easel, that of a town. The town was extraordinarily elaborate and there was a fantastic number of figures in the streets and parks and on the squares and bridges. The client studied the picture for many years, taking in every figure and every nook and cranny, until one morning he found his portrait in the large face of the painter in the foreground.