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.
In the royal palace
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?