Tainaron: Mail From Another City (10 page)

And he suddenly shook his head, so that the fluffy blue collar that surrounded his neck hissed and rustled.

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'And then there are the nights, they are definitely too big. They have grown larger and larger since the princess left, and the princess left thirty years ago, in her prime. You will not believe how small they were when she was still here. This small!'

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He stretched out two of the downy pincers of his forelimb for me to see: they were almost touching. I looked at them with polite interest and nodded.

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The prince leaned backward in his chair and spoke now more audibly, as if with greater warmth: 'When the princess had died, I often went into the city incognito, in strange armour. I stood by the bridge and did not let anyone by without inspecting him or her thoroughly from head to feet. But I never saw the princess again, for I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess's eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the uninterrupted flow of oncomers there flowed only the loam of strange memories....'

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And the prince's voice fell. I suspected that the audience should have ended long ago, and it tired me to stand before me as the only hearer of his ancient yearning. No one came to fetch me away, and in the palace there was a soundlessness as if there were no one else there.

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'Do you know why we have been forgotten?' the prince whispered unexpectedly, and his choice of words surprised me: why that 'we', it was not really right in this situation, and why did he lower his voice in such a familiar way?

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'Because it is all the same to them,' the prince whispered, 'what I do now, where I go or what I say, everything is permitted now. Do you understand?'

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'No, I do not believe it, your highness,' I said hesitantly, but his forelimb crooked and beckoned me closer.

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I bent obediently toward him and came so close that I thought I heard the little silver bell he had mentioned, as well as the scent of some bitter herb. Then he whispered into my ear: 'In reality, I am no longer the prince.'

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He drew away to see the effect of his words on me. I can say that they did not really have any effect. I was convinced he was speaking the truth. Only thus did the emptiness and indifference which I had encountered in the palace - and earlier - make sense.

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'I see you believe that I....,' the prince said heavily. 'But do not worry, that is not the case, not in the least. Know this: times change, but each is only one time of many. So what; it can be changed, like a change of clothes. Today I still sit in my palace. But often I ring my bell for a long while and no one comes. My shirt still bears the arms of Tainaron, but the wine which is brought to me is no longer of the same quality as before. So what. For tomorrow I shall be in exile, or my body will lie in that landscape garden on the little wooden bridge and the national guard will have pierced it with newly sharpened bayonets.'

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Now he finally rose to his feet - I had been expecting it for a long time - and I realised, with relief, that the audience was over. I bowed respectfully, and when I turned, I saw only my own footprints in the heavy dust that completely covered the stone floor of the donjon.

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Their solitude proved to me with complete clarity that no one had visited the room for ages, and that the prince himself had not left it.

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He was a lost cause.

  
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The day of the great mogul - the twelfth letter

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I do not know why I pick up my pen again. No longer because I might expect return mail. But I would like to tell someone that something strange has happened, some curious, unpleasant changes, and I have no idea what has caused them. Perhaps it is temporary, and my life will return to how it was before. Perhaps, too, the days that were like prizes, long ago, will return.

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I have not travelled anywhere, but this city is now different. The change does not please me. When I look out, I see that it is as if it has been unclothed. The most important thing is absent; the thing that once, just a moment ago, made me strong and happy. I look at the ground, I look at the sky, and everywhere is the same absence, in the eyes that crowd the streets and the department stores as if they were seeking their lost pupils in the windows and sales counters. If I were to send you photographs of Tainaron before and Tainaron now, you would say no difference is visible, and perhaps it is so; but nevertheless I know that everything is decisively different.

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If the sounds of the city were to be muted for a moment, I could hear a secretly crumbling sound as if a trickle of sand were falling from the side of a sandpit. And the vital force, which I believed to be inexhaustible, runs and runs somewhere where no one can use it.

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Is this is what is known as growing old? Do I see it everywhere, although it exists only inside myself? And what once was happiness around me, was it too a mere reflection? But in that case how can I know anything of what Tainaron is, what it is like?

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Today the book I open describes the great mogul Aurangzeb, who was a cruel tyrant. Fifteen of his elephants fell into a cleft on a mountain road, and on the back of one of them was his favourite wife.

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'Remarkable,' writes the great mogul, 'empty-handed I came into this world, and now, as I leave it, I drag with me an enormous caravan of sins.... My sorrow mortifies me. Farewell, farewell, farewell.'

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I force myself to get up and open the door and step out into the street. I have decided to eat, but from the window table of the caf? the passers-by look as if they are dragging burdens which are invisible but nevertheless heavy. The liquid glimmers in my cup, and soon I shall have to swallow it. I look at it as if it were the goblet of today.

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Under the marble table my legs wait, motionless, symmetrical, side by side. I do not know whether I have ever sensed their existence as such. They are alive, and all at once I am scorched by hot pity. My legs, my poor legs! Modest, sturdy and resilient, my own pillars, you too will wither!

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Small days, small days. The woman who, in the tramcar, takes a comb from her handbag and, pulling it through her stiff hair, complains: 'The comb doesn't work, no. The concrete eats the hair so.'

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A friend who sways toward me, his coat open, shaking his fingers. There was a time when he ran from table to table, his face flushed, to proclaim that his dogma was the youth of the world. What he says now is something quite different, quite different, but I do not listen; I mourn. The youth of the world!

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How we secrete words around us, so that the eye of reality may not see us! In vain! So hopelessly thin and tattered a veil does not hide anything, and we writhe in the brightness of destiny. No shield, no armour, and neither will flesh ever return to the word.

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And when I pass by the statue of the Great Sleeper, around it billows a tired song:

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