Just as it seemed he had negotiated the first word successfully, he made a serious error. He was reaching for the snow-covered dot of the “i” as he could not see this, he could not know that it was attached only by a thin, aluminium bar to the lower part of the letter, not to the wall like the other letters. The bar buckled under his weight and was now leaning like a wilting flower; Baumgarten’s feet slipped from the narrow ledge, and there he was, dangling over the boulevard, both hands clinging for dear life to the dot, which itself was sinking towards the abyss, where snowflakes were swirling around in the light of the street lamps. With the last of his strength he succeeded in grasping the lower arc of the neighbouring “e” and so clambered back onto the ledge. The thief now had both hands on the line of intersection of the “f” and was casting about with her right foot in the hollow of the “a” which followed. Baumgarten recovered himself; he made a risky leap from the first word to the second, then clung to the severe initial capital, which to his great good fortune held firm.
As the thief was attempting to place her foot in the snow-filled lap of the “y,” which was in the dead centre of the second word, with its lower part protruding from the ledge and into space, she slipped. Baumgarten watched with horror as the woman slid down the “y” and towards the abyss. Though she was clinging to the letter with both hands, its slippery surface eluded her grip; not until the hands reached the ball at the lower tip of the “y”—the very lowest point in the whole legend — was the downwards glide arrested. What luck that they had used a serif typeface, thought Baumgarten. He remembered an article on typography published pre-war in an avant-garde magazine, in which Karel Teige advocated that letters be stripped of elements of the calligrapher’s art and other bourgeois flourishes, claiming that the modern age demanded sans-serif lettering. Fortunately this had not come to pass, and Baumgarten was able to hurry along the avenue of violet-glow lettering to the aid of the thief who was dangling wretchedly over the boulevard. On reaching the middle of the word he took the “a” in his left hand and leaned over the abyss, where the snow was swirling about in the lamplight, and held out his free hand to the woman. Happily she was nimble enough to climb, with his help, back up the “y.” As she made it to the letter’s fork, he pulled the snow-drenched mask from her face.
He was confronted with the face of a girl of about twenty, whose blonde curls were fighting themselves free. She sat down on the back stroke of the “y,” leaning her elbows on the front stroke; her breathing was heavy. She made no attempt to conceal her face. She undid the Velcro fastener of her pocket and handed Baumgarten the necklace; this may have been a means of thanking him for saving her life, or perhaps it was his trophy for emerging victorious from this race over the roofs of Paris. The aesthetician put the necklace in the pocket of his dressing gown, next to the revolver. He, too, was exhausted; he sat down on the rounded roof of the “a” and got his breath back. From down below in the street, he thought, a late-night walker would see us as two rather puzzling splodges in the glowing lettering.
Dear reader, you may be interested to learn what Baumgarten and the Parisian she-thief talked about on that snowy roof. It was a long conversation, which my Parisian friend reported to me in full in the pleasant warmth of the café on Rue des Beaux-Arts. But we have occupied our minds with tales of the Czech aesthetician abroad for quite long enough. I have now described the two scenes in which letters and objects are joined, which was the reason for my telling the story of this Czech émigré. You are sure to have noticed that these scenes are those in the yard at the farm (where objects are transformed into letters) and on the roof of the department store (where letters are transformed into objects). Let us now return to the island.
Spilled sauce
On the island I often encountered a peculiar shape — asymmetric stains out of which there grew several long, broad lobes; this shape reminded me of a bison on the attack with its head bowed, or perhaps even more so of a lady’s glove hanging limp. I saw flat stones which had been carved into this shape and set on a plinth so that the end of the narrowest of the projections on its bottom side was resting on this. These mini-monuments — examples of a kind of “stain” sculpture — channelled streams of water at the centre of fountains in the upper town, and they stood high on promontories of rock. In the lower town the shape appeared as a bas-relief on the escutcheons of palaces or in faded frescoes; some inhabitants of the upper town would set small coloured stones in their walls and mirrors in this shape reminiscent of a bison or glove. I asked several islanders about the shape: once I learned that it represented a monster that many years ago had devastated the island, another time that it described the outlines of magical, luminous flowers that had grown one night on the floor of the bed chamber of a queen who had lived long ago and whose name was forgotten.
I had little doubt that they thought up such explanations on the spot. It was highly unlikely the islanders knew the origin of the shape. To say that they were lying to me would be imprecise; it was rather that for them the past was of the same realm as dream and imagination, and thus they treated fabulation and vague traces of dreams in the present as legitimate means of penetrating the world of the past, from which objects would emerge still breathing, like pleasant fragrances. This approach was born out of their requirement for a certain exactness, albeit of a kind different to the one on which our own sciences pride themselves. The islanders were offended by the notion of historical research, considering it on the one hand practically indecent (obscene behaviour towards the past), and on the other a strange, even comical bypassing of the task at hand. Karael — who, like most islanders, knew English — once spent a long time browsing a history book in English I had brought with me before laying it aside and announcing, “It puts me in mind of an expedition that goes off to hunt animals that don’t exist, taking a few cooking pots for use as hunters’ tools.” In order to hold on to my good name, I felt it necessary to conceal from the islanders that I was researching the history of the island, although the dearth of available sources coupled with the infectiousness of the islanders’ worldview meant that my research was more about dreaming than comparing, categorizing, judgment and proof.
Evidently objects in which the mysterious shape was repeated had once had a sacral significance. That religion should have existed on the island seemed to me curious. The islanders were of a nation that felt no need for the spiritual and the transcendental; it was extremely difficult for me to imagine a religious islander. Missionaries of various religions were constantly arriving on the island. Naturally the islanders would hear them out willingly enough and were prepared to repeat after them all manner of things (meaning the islanders would draw the visitors into their games). When the missionaries realized what was happening in these games to the articles of their faith and the identity of their god, they thought it better to leave the island. Many considered this the Devil’s island.