Fo is lying on his front on the palliasse, writing in ever smaller letters on sheets he lays on the floor. He is worried that the store of paper in the cabin will not suffice, and thus he will not be able to describe everything that is happening and has happened on Umur — its celebrated history, the grandeur of its court, the glory of its celebrations, the beauty and magnificence of its nature. When he has filled the last sheet in the cabin and placed it atop the pile next to the palliasse, he turns this pile over and begins to write on the other side of the pages, in the gaps between lines recording numbers of felled trees. The letters become so small that Fo himself is not able to read most of them, but it is enough for him to know that the pages are being filled. He has long been recording dialogue in the Umurian original, not bothering to translate it, and on top of this — in the manner of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who in War and Peace switched from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Roman for the writing of dialogue in French — Fo does this in the hieratic script of Umur (composed of monstrous letters he has thought up in the cabin). In the end he is writing the rest of the text, too, in the hieratic script; whether or not it is in the Umurian language, no one will be able to determine. Thus on the floor of a small building in the woods are scattered many sheets of paper filled with small, illegible characters written between the lines of a forester’s record-keeping.
It was not just Fo’s book that was written in the script of Umur: the part of the Book that described Fo’s work, which I read on the island, quoted from it in the original. I really believe the islanders read these pages, and that they even derived pleasure from doing so in spite of not knowing the meaning of Fo’s characters and thus not being able to understand what they were reading. But unlike the islanders I was not so good a student that I could take pleasure from symbols without meaning. When I noticed that the last two thirds of Fo’s work were written in Umurian characters only, I carefully folded the strip of paper back into itself, returned it to the pocket it belonged in, and went back to Fo’s cabin. I still hadn’t finished with the pocket whose contents described the origination of the statue in jelly, which itself — as no doubt you remember, dear reader — was to be found in the pocket that contained the seafarer’s tale of a feud between two families in an archipelago, itself inserted into a description of twenty years’ worth of this seafarer’s travels.
Fo’s fall into another world is perhaps the result and also the cause of a sickness that has taken hold of his mind and body owing to the hardships suffered on his solitary journeys and the harshness of his life in the cabin; these come immediately after the burn-out of his unrequited love, and are exacerbated by the draining tension and compulsive ecstasy created in him by his writing. When at last Fo is discovered by one of the units searching the island for him at Taal’s command, the crown prince, who has by now covered both sides of every sheet of paper he can find, is lying in the cabin trembling with fever; he has used the last of his strength to carve some strange letters into the floorboards. News of Fo’s discovery reaches the palace before he does: the king, Uddo, Hios and the whole court are standing in the courtyard when the unit delivers him home. What they see is a delirious, emaciated figure being borne through the palace gates on a stretcher; the figure does not see them. Fo’s parents and sister are a constant presence at his bedside, but Fo does not recognize them. They have Mii brought to him in the hope that the sight of the woman he loved will clear his mind, but Fo babbles to her something about how happy he is that she managed to escape the squid’s tentacles, and he seems to be telling her how sorry he is about the dreadful illness that so changed her golden, diamond-spangled face. Then he whispers something in an unknown language and retreats into himself. By dawn of the third day his separation from the world is complete.
Theatre in the forest
This episode in the Book is connected with something that happened to me a few years after my return from the island. On a hot day in mid-July I decided to take a trip; I took the bus to Mníšek, and from there I climbed through the sparse forest, along the brooks with their magical, drowse-inducing scents that reminded me of the scent that the fierce sun drew from the island’s parched slopes. At a ridge in the path I looked down on a velvety valley with the glittering monogram of a river unfurling at its bottom edge. I walked down a path whose concentrated quiet occasionally spilled over into glades with rustling clusters of glowing leaves, as if it were unable to keep its dreams of light to itself, but the silence always returned.
I trust, dear reader, that by now you are so hardy in matters of digressions and insertions that you will have no trouble in relocating from a mythical archipelago to the Brdy hills of central Bohemia, where you will accompany me through the grass, breathe in with me the woodland scents, and pause with me awhile to take in the view of houses in the distance, dissolving downwards in the languid haze like cubes of sugar on the bottom of a cup. I am well aware that all the bold words you have heard from me about the value of insertions and digressions have failed to convince you; you are distrustful and stubborn, dear reader, and no doubt you are preparing to skip this insertion and its savage intervention between you and the tale of the origination of the statue in jelly. I expect you think I won’t notice. I won’t try to talk you out of anything, nor will I offer advice or prompting; who knows, this insertion may take you to the centre of an underground lake beneath Prague whose banks are lined with silver palaces, but then again perhaps all you will get to witness is a boring conversation in a pub in Revnice or Dobřichovice between owners of country cottages. You probably won’t miss anything important if you skip the next couple of chapters, but you could miss the encounter that holds the key to the entire text. The decision on which path in the labyrinth to take is yours and yours alone; whichever path you take, you do so at your own risk.
It was already getting dark when the woodland paths at last began to lead me to the upper edge of Revnice. I came across a gate on which there hung a poster advertising a woodland theatre — a festival of amateur theatre companies from central Bohemia was being held at this very place. On the programme that day was a play called In the Sea and on Dry Land. (I didn’t recognize the name of the author.) Through the wire fence I saw an illuminated stage beneath dark trees; the performance was in progress. For a while I watched out of curiosity. On the stage was an oblong table, at which there sat ten or so figures with their backs to the audience. There was a group of musicians standing to one side. When the musicians began to play, a construction made of wire covered with grey plush was hoisted up beyond the table; it was about two metres high, looked like a great rugby ball stood on its end, and into its front piece were sewn two large circles made of white cloth with two smaller circles of black cloth sewn onto them. Then ten stuffed plush pipes — their ends attached to thin wooden rods that were obviously controlled by actors hidden behind the stage — were lifted clumsily from the lower part of the construction. These pipes waggled about in the general direction of the figures at the table, who were crying out, assuming various attitudes of terror, and poking at the plush pipes with knives. It dawned on me that what I was watching was a dramatization of a scene from the island’s Book.