The Golden Age (5 page)

I have already mentioned that the king had his seat in the lower town. It is a problem to identify the islanders’ political systems. The ruler of the island was appointed for an indefinite period by means of institutions which were something between elections, dreams, referenda, small talk and a proliferation of knocks. In the conversations the islanders carried on within the family and among close friends, they spoke of who might be king; some of those present at these conversations were then present at other conversations with other people, at which suitable candidates for the post of king were discussed. The opinions expressed here were formed in other conversations still, were influenced by others still, and flowed into others still. In this spillover names broached the surface of the conversation and then disappeared again; a name would sound in almost every utterance but shortly thereafter it was no longer spoken at all, except perhaps in a rapid whisper. Names were spoken loudly and then more quietly, unambiguously and in vague observations and woolly allusions; names would gather in clusters, then disperse. All this would happen without more than three or four people ever having met at any one time.

As I said, the names of the islanders were often subject to change. These changes of name made the electoral process still more complicated as it was often less than clear who was being spoken about. One could say that many of the names were introduced in error, though of course it was possible to find in the tangle of echoes an element of truth which would serve to distort the error, and in any case the islanders considered error a sound reason for the existence of the things it begot. As a consequence of such errors, after some time people began to speak of a candidate for the post of king as of a person who did not really exist. Not even this did the islanders find alarming.

Naturally people nominated as candidates took part in the conversations; to greater and lesser extents they expressed resistance to the idea. I do not believe that any islander was too keen on the prospect of entering kingly office. All this was spread by means of knocks, tale-telling and indirect reports, which distorted both purposely and unwittingly what really happened and what was really said. But the islanders understood this distortion not as a malfunction of the electoral mechanism, but as something which was part and parcel of the royal election process. If the changing flow of names in conversation played its part in the appointment of a king, so too did chance and fate. And an argument founded in a slip of the tongue had a power equal to that invested in a discussion of character and achievement.

It cannot be said that this series of conversations had any kind of end. But there were moments when the process reached a phase where the powers effective on it were temporarily in balance. Many of the various strands outlined within it came together in a single person, and for a short time the pressure applied by the persuaders and the resistance put up by the subjects of persuasion, fuelled by fatigue, argument, error and slips of the tongue, cancelled each other out.

If a king were to be enthroned, the phase at which a fragile balance obtained needed to be exploited; if the opportunity were missed—not an uncommon occurrence—the knots would begin to work themselves loose, before tangling themselves up in confusion, forming once again many centres. And it would be necessary to wait for a new balance to emerge, for the tips of the star-shaped scales, with their many arms and pans, to meet once more, however briefly, and indicate a name. The islander who gained the impression that it was he who stood at the centre of this temporary balance of forces, took himself off to the royal palace in the lower town, where he performed the king’s office until new conversations formed in him the impression that his government had ended.

Reports of or conjecture on the ascension of a new ruler were also broadcast as a network of echoes, knocks and confusing mirror images, and thus it could happen that conversations on the election remained ongoing several weeks after a new ruler had been installed in the royal palace; conversely, the impression could establish itself that the election had reached its conclusion—while the conversation petered out, the royal palace remained unoccupied. It is no wonder that in these circumstances the islanders were never quite sure at any given time who their king was, or, indeed, whether the island had a king. And as the kings themselves never made much show of being kings (I believe they were always slightly embarrassed by it), and as generally speaking their stays in the royal palace were interspersed with stays elsewhere (some kings visited but once a week), it might happen that an islander had no idea that the king was someone close to him, perhaps even a family member. Indeed, it might be the case that a wife did not know that her husband had been ruler of the island for several years.

The islanders were supported in such ignorance by the fact that they had little sense of family. The bonds they took on were loose, they never held for very long, and it was not required that they join two members only. This is not to say that the islanders did not know love, although they did not always distinguish the body from the landscape, so that their love contained much of the space and the moment. This sense of being rooted in the landscape saturated moments of love with precious essences, but one of its consequences was that the flame of love never burned long or strong. Connected with this was the fact that islanders—male and female alike—never declared fidelity; they made no attempt to conceal from their partners relationships with other men and women. At a sepia banquet, for example—of which I shall speak more later—Karael was surprised by my look of distress at her withdrawing to the bedroom (which was separated by nothing more than the wall of water) with one of the guests. The thought of being faithful to me seemed to her eccentric, but so as not to cause me pain she never embraced anyone else in my presence as other women of the island tended to do in front of their partners.

In a certain sense the power of the king was absolute, but in another he was practically powerless. In reaching his decisions he sought no counsel, but as his decrees were broadcast by the same network of whispers and allusions that had brought about his election, it was quite natural for the directive generated by the network to have little in common with the king’s original command. The decrees of the ruler were put into circulation by the friends and relatives who visited him in the royal palace or in whom he confided when he was living in his own house. It was quite common that a decree took on a meaning which was the opposite of the one intended, as the islanders expressed negation by placing the particle
ul
before a word, something which was easily missed amid the background noise of the island; or it was heard in places where it had not been spoken. Hence the meaning could change many times in the course of one conversation, and if there was an even number of changes, the declaration or directive comprised the same words as those spoken by the king.

I had the impression that this strange sameness—which was dependent on an even or odd number of mistakes and mediated by many mishearings caused by the murmur of walls of water and the roar of the sea—actually set the utterances that finally reached me still further from the originals than would have been the case with a deliberate lie or a purposeful misrepresentation, as these might be pervaded with the (perhaps false) hope that the king’s original meaning could be hunted down, while this network of haphazard, apathetic changes and shifts from affirmation to negation showed that the identity of the king’s words and how they were differed from, was not important.

The network of falsehood also drew in the original utterance, which itself had arisen through mishearing and error. There was nothing one could do but listen in silence to words born out of mishearings and expiring in the murmur of the water and the wind, and, after the words had died away, listen to the murmur itself while dreaming a dream about a king in whose court one could find asylum, a dream which was so intoxicating because it could never become reality.

In the murmurs it was of course possible to hear all kinds of things, not least because the islanders spoke so quietly. Just as at dusk in the lower town crouching, elongated, emaciated, melting, delicate, fracturing figures would flit about in the cracks and stains of the walls, it was not unusual for the manifold murmurs to beget phrases which no one had uttered—known to the islanders as “the speech of the water” in this way every conversation was a weave of real utterances whose wording was transformed by the rustlings and murmuring of the island and hallucination-like utterances made by the water or the wind, out of which often bad words and dark images would emerge. This was how words never uttered by the king could enter a conversation as a king’s ruling. Whether or not this ruling had its origins in the words actually spoken by the king was of no great importance, as generally these were changed so radically that the outpourings of the speech of the water may have been closer to the king’s intentions (at least to those of which he himself was not yet apprised).

These changes to the rulings of the king did not, of course, come to an end by the forming in conversation of some kind of final version. Rulings continued to change for as long as they were circulated in the conversation network, until they dissolved and died. Nor was it possible to divide this long series of changes into a phase of formation and a phase of disintegration; laws came into being, reached maturity and began to decompose in a single act. I could not reconcile myself to the fact of the islanders’ unconcern that a ruling would enter a neighbour’s house in a form different from—or, indeed, opposite to—the one in which it entered their own; it enraged me that they felt no need to investigate which of the versions was the true one, or at least which corresponded most closely to the words of the king; I found it astonishing that they did not attempt to get the two versions somehow to agree. All this might give the impression that the islanders’ attitude to laws was a relaxed one and that they were not much concerned with upholding them. But this was not so: the islanders needed laws and had a highly developed sense for them. For the islanders there was nothing arbitrary about the wording of a law, its interpretation and the manner in which it was discharged. They were conscientious and meticulous in their attempts to interpret a law correctly, although this correctness was the correctness of a particular phase of the law’s transformation; not only was there nothing in it to rule out the emergence in a later phase of a law of completely different character, it actually demanded this.

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.