Mirror in the Mirror: A Labyrinth by Michael Ende (translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn). (2/2)

[midnight_birth]

Title: Mirror in the Mirror: A Labyrinth.
Author: Michael Ende (translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn).
Genre: Literature, fiction, novel of vignettes, fantasy, surreal fiction, mythology, philosophical fiction.
Country: Germany.
Language: German.
Publication Date: 1984.
Summary: Taking his cue from a number of drawings and sketches of his father, famous surrealist painter Edgar Ende, the author have written 30 vignettes, bound together thematically like a piece of philosophical music. In a city of prostitutes, a one-legged beggar intended for a husband meets with the Whore Queen, and is forced to present her with a formidable gift. A weary traveller, not finding what he's looking for all over the world, is taken on a mysterious tour with profound consequences. An old seaman on the way down from the crow's nest finds himself at an impasse with the constellation Libra, the tightrope walker, and someone has to give way. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a little boy attends a fair show, where he imagines a companion into existence. A jinnee leads a child through a hopeless, bleak landscape to teach him harsh but valuable lessons. In a locked classroom in the pouring rain, a group of students awaiting the teacher must decide whether to take a chance on dreamwalking to their possible freedom. Among hundreds of actors waiting indefinitely for their costumes, the oldest of them all recounts the part of the fallen king he is waiting to play. In a war-torn country a deposed, immortal dictator races through the hellish corridors of his castle until he comes across a strange procession that will render him one last unexpected service. In a nightmarish landscape a clown joins the resistance against the fascist government that rules the dream he longs to wake from. Two sentries guard a door to nowhere, until an ageless maiden brings a young hero to pass through the door and attempt to find Hor, the minotaur, her brother. (Only the PART 2 in this post, refer to PART 1 for the rest of the quotes).

My rating: 8.5/10
My review:


♥ High up the mountain, the brothel-palace was bathed in chill radiance. Countless festoons of little lamps illumined it like a circus tent, projecting their light into the whore-city's murky lanes and shabby courtyards, which had no lights of their own and were usually in darkness. Every grimy nook and cranny, every gateway, doorway and window embrasure was thronged with faces. Spectral-looking in the reflected glow, large and small, bloated or emaciated, all were gazing up at the mushroom-shaped turrets, the twin domes and tumescent walls of the vast edifice.

..Everything inside the palace was made of some substance as black as graphite. It had a metallic glint, but the objects it composed might just as easily have been organic in origin as artificial. Walls and ceilings were ribbed like the roof of a human mouth, floors undulated like knotted veins. Huge pistons slid slowly back and forth in cylinders or sleeves of various kinds; little pistons did likewise at breakneck speed. Rhythmical gasps and moans could be heard, punctuated from time to time by shrill squeaks and squeals. Annular collars travelled up and down thick rods glistening with oil, propelled by multijointed arms, and pumplike contraptions thrust massive probes deep into well-shafts. The air was heavy with the stench of hot metal.

Elsewhere, bulbous nozzles periodically squirted viscous fluids into troughs or oval apertures in the walls, which closed convulsively after each emission. Being on crutches, the beggar found it exceptionally difficult to negotiate a long, tubular passage whose slimy walls and floor were in constant peristaltic motion. He came out at last in a forest of gnarled columns that continually dilated, reared up, and shrivelled in turn.

♥ "So you're still wary of me?" The Whore Queen rose and walked to the edge of the platform. She stood directly above the beggar, looking down at him over her jutting breasts. The stench of hot metal from her body was stupefying.

"Your beloved wife is rotting in jail," she said evenly. "Who put her there?"

You, my queen."

"Who corrupted your children and turned them against you?"

"You, my queen."

"How did you lose your leg?" she pursued, almost tenderly. "Who made a beggar of you? Who took all you possessed, heaped you with disgrace, rolled you in the mire?"

"You did all those things, my queen."

"Exactly." She nodded and gave a low laugh. "And you're still wary of me, even now."

He raised his head and looked her in the eye. "I carved out this realm for you," he said slowly. "I defended you against your foes, have you forgotten?"

.."Not so," she said. "I recall no such thing. Even if it were true, you did no more than the duty you owed me as your sovereign."

The beggar shook his head. "I did it because I had sworn a vow. It was a long time ago. We were both young in those days."

"How gallant of you!" she said mockingly.

"I still had faith in you then," he went on.

"And you lost that faith?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you simply break your vow?"

"No man can bargain his way out of a vow. Once made, it belongs to God."

"Anything is negotiable," she said. "Anything can be bought and sold, God included. He, too, has his price. An exorbitant price, but still."

♥ "I'm told you spent yesterday on the cathedral steps, begging. Is that true?"

"It is, my queen."

"People were generous to you, I hear - generous to a fault. All the townsfolk came running, rich and poor alike, to give you alms. Am I right?"

He nodded.

"How much did you receive?"

"A great deal," he replied. "When evening came, I had five whole sacks filled with alms."

"Gold and jewels?"

"Those, too.?"

The Whore Queen abruptly turned her back on him. Almost inaudibly, she said, "They love you, do they not?"

He made no reply.

"Why do they love you? Tell me the reason!"

"I do not know."

Her tone suddenly hardened. "But I do!" she snapped.

"Yes, my queen, but you will not tell me. For charity's sake."

"Charity?" she repeated in a wondering voice. She circled him until she was standing behind his back. "You mean," she hissed in his ear, "you want me to leave at least one of your precious illusions intact. You're afraid I'll slaughter your last ewe lamb. Well, here's the knife that will lop off its head: my tongue. The townsfolk were acting on my orders!"

She embraced him from behind, pressed her naked body against him.

"No, no," she breathed, "not true, I was lying. Fear not, I will not harm you. I'm weary, thirsty, ill. Help me! Help me this one, last time - you swore you would."

"No one can help you now, my queen, not even you yourself."

Suddenly she sank to the ground, clasped his leg, smothered his foot - even his crutches - with steel-lipped kisses.

"You could!" she sobbed. "You alone can help me. Give me some of your alms - share them with me. Take pity on me. I'm so cold, so alone."

He looked down at her, half tempted to caress the ivory, hairless head, but withdrew his hand.

"How can you be so cruel? You loved me once." She was almost screaming now. "See, I beg you on my knees. I have never entreated anyone before, but I do so now. Give me the smallest, least precious of all the gifts your received. Allow me to share, just once, in something that was given for nothing!"

For a while, only her frantic sobbing could be heard. Then the beggar said, "You have taken too much, my queen, for anything more to be given you. You can take no more from me than I can give you. I have given away all that I had."

She sprang to her feet and stepped back.

"To whom?"

The beggar smiled, and his careworn face looked almost youthful. "To the poor, of course."

.."Oh, yes," she said bitterly, "when in doubt, give to the poor! What have they done to merit that divine prerogative - why should they enjoy such earthly and celestial favour, can you tell me? How easy it is for you, for the likes of you, for God! As if there were no greater afflictions than poverty! What good will your charity do them, those paupers of yours? They'll cram their bellies for a day or two, get drunk in the nearest tavern, and fritter away what's left on my whores. And then they'll be back where they started. Poverty is incurable, didn't you know?"

"Yes," he retorted, "like a missing leg." When she remained silent, he went on," What would you have done in my place?"

"I?" she exclaimed angrily. "I am a mere queen. Do you know what I would have done? I would have worn your alms next mt skin. They would have warmed me, lighted my darkness."

"Poor queen," he murmured.

♥ "It isn't within me, the cold," she cried. "I'm a star made of molten lava, but the cosmic space around me is chill and empty, and all that I embrace turns to ashes."

♥ This little globe contains a substance alien to our world and, thus, capable of annihilating it. One tiny droplet would be sufficient to extinguish all life on earth. I have only to crush the globe to destroy Creation. Both are equally fragile."

She dangled the medallion on its chain, regarding it with eyes aflame.

"It will deprive the earth of its fruitfulness. Every womb will be barren, every seed will perish. When infertility reigns supreme, the human race will become extinct. Perhaps one last human being will survive - perhaps it will be he who at last discovers the secret of earthly immortality. Unimaginably old and utterly alone, he will cry out for the death that can never be his. He it will be who inscribes the final chapter in the chronicle of mankind: 'In the end man destroyed heaven and earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the last man said, Let there be light, but the darkness remained.'"

♥ The beggar tore the paper crown from his head and crumpled it into a ball. "You blaspheme against God!" he exclaimed.

"Might it not be God that blasphemes against me?" she asked.

♥ "You alone have withstood me, as you still do. You have neither fled nor made away with yourself - you have remained a reality. How have you done this?"

At a loss for an answer, he eventually said, "With God's help."

"Yes, yes," she said a trifle impatiently, "you're devout, I know. You suffer, I know, just as I myself am incapable of suffering. Well, now I shall tell you my secret. By confiding it to you alone, I shall be rid of it and you will be burdened with it from now on. Why do you tremble so?"

"Because you're abominable, my queen!"

"No more abominable than your God," she retorted. "But I shall now dismiss you both, Him and you, who so persistently confuse yourself with Him. I shall release this city and this realm from the inferno of my bed. I shall turn to a better and more experienced lover - one who is equal to the challenge I pose. I shall embrace the Void and enfold it in my arms. Being infinite, it will not disappoint me. As for you and your God, you may forget me as I forget you."

♥ She sat quite still for a long time after he had gone. It wasn't until the little, bent-backed man in grey reappeared and discreetly cleared his throat that she finally looked up.

"Put out the lights," she commanded, "- all of them." After a moment's reflection, she added, "For ever."

"What do you intend to do?" he asked hoarsely.

"Wait," she replied.

The old retainer stood and stared at her. "For what?" he asked, but she said no more, so he withdrew.

The lights of the brothel-palace went out, one by one, until it and the whole of the whore-city were plunged in darkness.

♥ He had seen the world's whole store of marvels and mysteries. He was acquainted with the soaring moonstone columns of the Temple of Tiamat and the glass towers of Manhattan; he had drunk blood from the geyser on the Isle of Hod and debated the nature of destiny with the blind scholar in the library at Buenos Aires; he had worn the ring of Queen Mrabatan, which confers power over the memory of man, and walked the blazing streets of Eldis, to which no stranger had ever before been granted access; he had been carried in a steel litter through the factories of Detroit Cloaca Maxima without being driven insane by apparitions from the past and future, which fight their ghostly, nocturnal battles there. He had seen countless secret things, but none concerned himself. His own secret was not among them. He had failed to find it, so all the rest had remained mute.

Had he never embarked on this journey, he would at least have preserved the illusion that, somewhere in the world, there existed the sign that would address him in a language intelligible to him alone, the key to the mystery of his own being. As it was, he had to acknowledge that nothing of the kind existed. If it was true that the earth merely reflected the infinite shapes and forces of the universe like a shiny silver sphere, it must be correspondingly mistaken to believe that the universe was man's home, for man's nature was unrelated to it. But if man had always been a stranger there, from the very first, the universe was too small - too small by far.

♥ They began by traversing an elongated hall whose walls, floor and ceiling were faced with polished, veined stones of various colours. The components of this mosaic appeared to owe their selection to some common characteristic, because their delicate marbling prompted the beholder's imagination to discern similarities between these random patterns and gargoyle faces, ornamental leafwork, gods and demons, long-legged beasts, dancing girls aflame, cavalcades of figures mounted on insects, landscapes composed entirely of human forms, tempestuous seas thronged with sailing ships and monsters, frost-flower palaces and ruined cities encrusted with lichen. But the traveller was still too engrossed in his own displeasure to notice. As yet, he saw none of these things.

It was not until they passed through the succeeding rooms that his self-absorption waned. Hesitantly and incredulously at first, he began to decipher the alphabet of symbols which he himself was creating, yet not creating. Flat and unrelieved until now, the patterns became steadily more plastic and three-dimensional. Bizarre rock formations, stalactites and stalagmites, roots, tree stumps, nuggets of congealed lava and ingots of fused metals stood or lay strewn around, fashioned by random natural forces into strange but realistic shapes of increasing perfection. It was hard to believe that all these things had been produced by arbitrary quirks of coincidence, yet the transformation of these random shapes into remarkable works of art was being affected by no force other than that which operated within the traveller himself. The boundary between him and his surroundings - between that which his imagination supplied and that which actually confronted him - became more and more blurred until, in the end, he could no longer distinguish one from the other: his mind appeared external to himself, the objects of his perception internal. All at once he seemed to see himself, a figure seated on a little cart, from within and without at the same time, as if he too were no more than a random shape in which his mind's eye perceived something of substance. But it was this very act of imagination that transformed substantiality into reality. Though startled by the thought, the traveller found it pleasurable.

From this moment on, having at last begun to see, he could no longer have said whether what he saw depended on what confronted him. It seemed to him that external objects became progressively simpler and more universal as he passed from room to room. Now that the mysterious power within him had unfolded its wings, it soared ever higher and transformed the appearance of all things. Whole worlds were conjured up in his mind by a withered leaf, a white egg, a bird's feather, and he was intimately related to them all: he was at once their creator and their creature. Only now, after his total abandonment of what he had hitherto called real, was he drawing closer to reality.

♥ The traveller eventually became aware that he could even hear the silvery splash and murmur of the waterfalls, though muffled by distance, and the more intently he listened the more clearly his ears detected a kind of sweet, crystalline music.

"What is that?" he asked, and gave another little start, this time at the sound of his own voice, which struck him as harsh and obtrusive.

The girl smiled. "What the noble lord can hear," she replied softly, "are the tender buds of his own future existence."

♥ The fourth plaque gung still farther to the right but a full diameter above the other three. Instead of being perfectly round, its circumference was as eccentric as that of a careworn pebble. Nothing could be seen on the surface, which was entirely blank.

Undaunted, the traveller studied it as attentively as the rest, but all he perceived after a while was something definable only as static motion, rather as if smoke were rising and falling within the confines of itself. A certain uneasiness gripped him at the same time, for he felt that the very strength that had just awakened in him was draining away into the disk's blank void - spinning ineffectually down into a bottomless pit. He stood his ground none the less, and waited patiently for this plaque, too, to address him, but in vain. At length, grasping the girl's hand as though clutching at a straw, he whispered, "Why doesn't it speak?"

"It has already spoken," she replied.

"Then why didn't I hear it?"

"You hear it, my lord, I'm sure, but to know what it said you must first search your memory."

"I wish to know now!"

"My lord," the girl said very softly, "how can you, while you wish to? Wishing means drawing distinctions. Only those who draw no distinctions can see the invisible and hear the inaudible."

♥ The little cart came to a halt. The girl took her far taller companion gently by the hand, though only with her fingertips, and together they walked in silence towards the inner chambers, bound for virgin continents and oceans tinged with the light of dawn.

♥

Orphic Prolifeation, 1960.

♥ "One of us will have to let the other pass," the old seaman said grimly, "and it certainly won't be me."

"Nor me," the tightrope walker rejoined with a faint smile. "What's the answer?"

"We'll have to fight," said the old seaman.

So they grabbed each other and started wrestling. However, they were soon locked in such an iron embrace that neither could budge an inch. They stood motionless for a while, straining limbs entwined, looking for an opening. The the tightrope walker, whose lips were close to the seaman's ear, began to whisper. The seaman replied in kind, and their whispered exchange continued for quite some time.

"So," said the tightrope walker," trying to break my neck, eh?"

"Trying, yes, but you've a good sense of balance."

"No wonder. I'm Libra, the Scales."

"You don't say! I looked for you in the sky every night. One hundred and forty-four voyages around the world I've made, but I never saw you till now."

"Perhaps your eyes aren't sharp enough."

"I knew all the constellations, large and small, but not Libra."

"Now you've found me, why give us both such a hard time? The truth is, you were top-heavy up there, alone in the crow's-nest. You were looking for something in the sky to offset your weight."

"What about you? If you know so much, what are you looking for?"

"My balance."

"Have you lost it, then? Did you ever have it?"

"It's my job to lose and regain it in turn. If I ever found it for good, I'd be finished."

"So what are we fighting for?"

They both let go at the same moment and stood looking at each other. In the course of their tussle the seaman had wrenched the balancing pole away from his opponent, while the tightrope walker had ended up with the heavy brass telescope in his hands.

"Goodbye, my friend," the tightrope walker said with a laugh, and set off down the mast.

"Hey!" called the seaman, but the tightrope walker was already out of sight. Balancing the heavy pole in both hands, unskillfully as yet, the seaman teetered along the main-yard and was soon hidden by the huge, white sails.

♥

Leaf Face, 1953.

♥ The black sky looked don on an uninhabitable land, an interminable waste of bomb craters, petrified forests, dried-up riverbeds, junkyards.

In the midst of this wilderness stood a deserted city filled with shadows and sightless black windows - a skeleton of a city - and in the midst of the city was a fairground. The silence was at its deepest there. The Ferris wheel's rusty gondolas swayed in the chill wind, the carousel horses were grey with dust.

Nothing could be heard by a rhythmical sound like water dripping - huge drops of it falling, again and again, with overwhelming persistence.

Or were they heartbeats? If a heart was beating, whose could it be? A human being's, an animal's - perhaps an angel's?

♥ "What we propose to show you, ladies and gentlemen, will make you no more knowledgeable or virtuous than you are at present, for our theatre is neither a school nor a church. Our performance will do nothing to lessen the world's misfortunes, but neither will it add to them, which is saying a great deal. We cherish no intentions of any kind, not even that of deceiving you. We shall present no arguments. We have no wish to prove anything, refute anything, draw your attention to anything - no wish even to convince you that our show is real, should you choose to dismiss it as a fiction. It may seem that we have no need of you at all, ladies and gentlemen, but that is not the case."

♥ "The cause of our present difficulties is incarnation. Our resident magician has been striving for hours, employing the most potent formulas devised by alchemists and scholars from Agrippa to Einstein, to condense the figure behind this curtain sufficiently to render it visible. To date, however, it remains two-dimensional and in imminent danger of disintegrating into a heap of letters."

♥ "Who are you?" asked the boy.

"The Pagad," the man replied. He perched on the edge of the stage and swung his legs.

"And what are you?"

"A magician - and an illusionist. Both."

"What's your name?"

"I have many names. 'Ende', for one."

The boy laughed. "That's a funny name."

"Quite," the Pagad agreed. "What's yours?"

"Just 'Boy'," the boy replied awkwardly.

"Anyway," said the Pagad, "thank you for imagining me. That means I can now imagine you. And that," he added with a twinkle in his eyes, "brings our show to an 'Ende'. ..By the way, I think you ought to have a proper name. I'm going to call you Michael."

"Thanks, Ende." The boy smiled at him. "Now we're even."

They left the booth, the fairground, the city. Their figures steadily dwindled as they walked into the distance, deep in conversation, with the black sky overhead. They were holding hands, and it was hard to tell who was leading whom.

♥

Sinner, 1953.

♥ "We're going," he said in a metallic voice. More gently, he added, "It won't take long, not the first time."

The boy stared at his huge companion in astonishment, eyebrows arched like the wings of a bird in flight. "You mean you refuse to obey me?" he demanded incredulously. "You know who I am. Aren't you afraid of me?"

"If I felt fear, I should also feel hope," the jinnee muttered, with an audible crack in his brazen voice. "No, boy, I'm not afraid of you - neither of what you are now, nor of the man you will become, for he will pronounce me right."

"When will that be?" the boy asked. "When I'm big?"

Something akin to a smile appeared on the lugubrious, simian face. "That's still a while away, boy - many lives and deaths away. Yes, when you're big."

♥

Sick Times, 1960.

♥ "Angry?" he repeated dully. "What is anger? Perhaps you'll teach me sometime, but first, before you can completely transform it, you must completely absorb it. You've a long and difficult course of instruction ahead of you, boy. It's no child's play."

"Not for you, perhaps," the boy said briskly. "For me it's easy. It's nothing - just a mistake to be corrected. All would be well without anger."

The jinnee slowly squared his cloudy shoulders as though bracing them against an immense weight. "Many things are necessary." The words hummed furiously like a swarm of bees. "Who knows how many?

The boy gave up.

♥ The jinnee sighed like a pool of molten lava blowing bubbles.

♥ "Who is to help me," the boy demanded, "and why?"

"Everyone," replied the jinnee, " - all the people whom you yourself will help later on, because you'll owe them your ability to do so.

♥ "Patience, little master, patience! You say I'm here, but I'm not. If I were, how do you think I could lead you by the hand without turning your warm little heart to ice? Keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. For the present, that's all that's expected of you."

♥ "Good morning," he wheezed. The boy didn't answer, just gave him a searching stare, so he went on, "It is a good morning, isn't it, now that you're here? ..Mind you," the little grey man pursued in a reedy voice, "mornings here have been like this for as long as I can remember. Today's no different. There's only one hour here, and that's the hour before dawn. It's never noon, never evening, never night. Those times of day have yet to be invented here. This house is the longer hour of all: it's a fragment of eternity, that's why."

♥ "This youngster here," he said to the jinnee, very brusque all of a sudden, "why bring him to our whore-ridden street?"

But the jinnee just stood there like a stone tower, glum and silent.

"What business is it of yours?" the boy demanded angrily. "Do you think I don't know what whores are? I've known for ages!"

"Really?" The roadsweeper bowed his head and learned heavily on his broom. "Then tell me what you know of them."

"They're women who sell love for money, and that's a very bad thing."

The roadsweeper gave a little nod. "Well, well!" he said. Then, with a faint, sad smile, he went on, "It mightn't be as bad as all that, my son, except that there's no money here - no love, either. The whores in our street sell something else in exchange for something else, that's the trouble." And again he laughed or coughed, whichever.

Intrigued, the boy took two or three steps towards the roadsweeper. "Tell me what," he said.

The old man debated how best to explain. At length, having thought of a way, he said, "I'm sure you know a lot of fairy-tales, don't you?"

"I know them all," the boy replied proudly, " - all the ones there are. The person who tells me them knows every fairy-tale in the world."

"Good, and I'm sure you also know that every one is true.'

"Of course!"

The roadsweeper nodded again. "Quite right. I'm not saying they aren't true. They always are, provided a person knows how to tell them properly, but haven't you noticed something? They're always about winners - they turn out for the best, come what may. Stories about losers are just as true, except that they're soon forgotten, perhaps because the losers themselves forget them. That's the reason."

"Losers?" said the boy, edging closer. "I've never heard of any. Do they really exist?"

The roadsweeper put out his hand to stroke the boy's cheek, but the boy promptly drew back. The old man gave an apologetic smile.

"In spite of all you've told me, " he wheezed, "I suspect you really only know one story - that of the hundredth prince who solved the riddle, but not those of the ninety-nine that failed to do so before him and came to grief. Nearly all their stories end right here in this street."

The old man turned his head and gazed into the distance, where the rows of houses seemed to converge on a single point. "To the best of my knowledge, none of the losers who come here has ever succeeded in reaching the other end. The street grows beneath their feet - it becomes longer the farther they go. That's why they all end by stopping wherever they happen to be, in this house or that. They simply move in with the whores for as long as they live."

The boy looked appalled. "You, too?"

The roadsweeper didn't reply.

♥ At length he said, "The truth is, this street is shorter than it seems - only a lifetime long at most. I ought to know."

♥ "Are you dumb?" the man groaned. "What are you doing? Leave me alone!"

"You're right," she whispered, still clawing his scalp. "I'm dumb."

The man just lay there, incapable of resistance. His forehead was beaded with swear. "And I," he mumbled, "am blind."

"One wouldn't know it to look at you."

"No, not in that way - not in the eyes."

"With me it's the same. It isn't my mouth that's dumb."

♥ "I went in search of paradise."

In the long silence that followed, all the boy could hear was the thudding of his own heart. At last the whore whispered, "You didn't find it, naturally, because it doesn't exist. Now you've abandoned hope, am I right?"

The man held the boy's gaze. His voice sounded almost resigned. "If I hadn't found it," he said, "I should never have lost hope."

The tarnished silver fingernails continued to comb his hair again and again. "Go on," said the whore, "tell me everything!" And the boy, still imprisoned by the man's gaze, heard his voice again. "I should have gone on searching to the end of my days," it said, "and I should have died happy, never doubting the existence of a place where all is beautiful, all is perfect. I should gladly have accepted the fact that no one can find it."

The whore's voice was as gentle as the bite of a leech. "Then why did you go in search of it at all?"

As if the boy had asked the question, the man directed his reply at him. "I was homesick, so homesick that I had no choice. Entering paradise didn't matter to me - I wanted a glimpse of perfect beauty, nothing more. The certainty that it exists would have satisfied me for all eternity."

"So You found it after all, this paradise of yours," whispered the whore, still running her fingers through his hair. "You let yourself in, didn't you?"

He sat up so abruptly that she started back in alarm, but his voice remained cool and indifferent. "In the centre of the universe," he said, addressing the wide-eyed boy, "stands a wall of impenetrable density, and carved above the gate are the words THE GARDEN OF EDEN. I touched the bars of the gate, which was locked, and they fell to dust and rust beneath my hand. Walking through the gateway, I saw before me an endless waste of ashes and cinders, and in its midst an enormous, petrified tree whose branches clawed the sober sky. And while I stood looking, something stirred beside me, and out of a dark hole in the ground crawled a thing like a giant spider. I could only see that it was dreadfully desiccated, dreadfully ancient, and that it was trailing a pair of huge wings behind it. And the creature bore down on me, crying, 'Come back, all of you! Come back, Sons of Man!' And it plucked handfuls of feathers from its body and hurled them at me. 'There's no one here but me!' it cried again and again. 'I'm alone, alone!' And then I fled, I don't know where to or how, or whether it was an hour ago or a thousand years."

♥ The roadsweeper, who had caught sight of something in the gutter, picked it up. It was a gold bangle the size of a crown. Turning it over in his hands, he said, "There, my boy, that was your first lesson. The abandonment of a dream is the roof of all evil."

..When they were a good way up the street again, the boy paused and looked back. "Is it true what the roadsweeper said - that all evil begins with the abandonment of a dream?"

"It begins earlier still," the jinnee replied. "It begins with the abandonment of hope." He said no more until much later, when the boy's thoughts had already turned to the games he would soon be playing and the jinnee himself was alone again, imprisoned in his tower of ice. "No one," he muttered, "can fathom the depths to which they sink who lose hope..."

♥ "Hey, roadsweeper!" called another of the whores, "what have you got there?"

"It looks like a crown," the old man muttered. "Some poor wretch must have mislaid it or thrown it away."

The woman put out her hand but came no closer. "Give it to me," she pleaded. "Give it to me!"

The little old man shoo his head. "I can't, you know that full well."

"What will you do with it?"

"Take it home to my wife, I expect."

"You mean you've actually got a wife? Fancy that! Is she beautiful?"

The other whores tittered like a cellarful of squeaking rats. The old man was unmoved. "This crown will make her so, I reckon," he wheezed.

"Aren't you afraid?" asked another of the whores. "Our queen had given orders tat all treasure-trove is to be brought to her. She's not to be trifled with, old man."

The roadsweeper narrowed is eyes and coughed or laughed in some embarrassment. "If you promise not to give me away, my lovely, I'll let you intro a secret."

"All right, I promise."

"Your queen," she roadsweeper said deliberately, "is my wife."

In a matter of seconds, the street was as empty of whores as it had been to begin with. All the doors and windows were shut. The old man hung the crown on his broomstick and shouldered it. He nodded to the boy, tipped his peaked cap, and the grey of his figure dissolved into the grey of the walls.

♥

Expectant Lazarus, 1960.

♥ It was raining in the classroom - it always did. The place had a marshy smell because incessant moisture had rotted the floorboards away to an almost peatlike consistency and big, snowy excrescences of saltpetre blossomed at numerous points on the mouldering walls. The panes of the three tall, narrow windows were of frosted glass to prevent pupils from being distracted by whatever lay beyond them.

♥ "Now I'm being made to start again from scratch. It's outrageous, in my opinion."

"Everything always starts from scratch," the civil servant retorted with a frown. "Life is repetition. What makes you so special?"

♥ Then she whispered, "To tell the truth, I don't know what paradise is either."

"So what are you talking about?" said the boy.

"But I do know that it's always next door," she went on. "Everyone knows that. All that separates us from it is a wall, sometimes of stone, sometimes of glass, sometimes of tissue paper, but it's always next door."

"Couldn't we simply smash a pane?" the boy suggested, blushing at his own audacity. "I mean, if it would be worth it."

The girl stared at home sadly and whispered, "That wouldn't help. It's always next door, which means it's never where we happen to be. If we were outside, it wouldn't be there any more. But it's out there now, that's for sure."

♥ "What about getting out of here - or do you like this place?"

"That's not the point," said the civil servant. "There's such a thing as a sense of duty. No one has a right to evade reality, least of all when it isn't pleasant."

The youth dangled his legs over the edge of the desk. "All you have to do is shut your eyes for a minute or two," he said quietly. "When you open them again, you're in a different reality. Things keep changing all the time, haven't you noticed?"

"When you shut your eyes," said the boy with bedraggled wings, "you die."

"Fair enough," said the youth, "it amounts to the same thing. We change, too, that's all there is to it. I was someone else a minute ago, and now I'm suddenly this person here."

♥ "Suit yourself," said the youth, jumping down from the desk. "Me, I'm only passing through."

"But we can't get out," the bride exclaimed. "The door's locked."

"You can get out of anywhere," the youth told her, "as long as you can dreamwalk."

"How do you do that?" asked the almond-eyed girl, and the boy with wings chimed in, "Yes, what's dreamwalking?"

"This is ridiculous!" protested the civil servant.

"Dreamwalking," said the youth, "means inventing new stories and climbing aboard them yourself. I can't think what they teach you in this school if you don't even know that."

"Where did you learn it?" the fat woman demanded.

"From a dreamwalker," the youth replied. "I invented him myself."

♥ "How do we invent a new story?" the bride inquired.

"The simplest way," said the youth, "would be for us all to act a play together."

"Oh dear," the fat woman groaned, "I'll never remember my lines."

"Who do we act it for?" asked the doctor.

"Ourselves. We're the audience and the cast combined, and what we perform is reality."

"But what are we to perform?" asked the boy with wings.

"You can never tell beforehand. You start, that's all."

"But it may turn out badly," said the bride. "What'll become of us then?"

The youth shrugged. "Anyone who insists on knowing that in advance can't dreamwalk."

♥ In one swift movement, he leaped into the picture he had just drawn. The others watched, fascinated, as he sauntered back and forth across the stage.

"Come on," he called, "hurry up! The rain!"

The boy with wings was the first to climb through, closely followed by the almond-eyed girl. The bride went next. The fat woman had to be pushed from behind by the doctor and pulled from in front by those who were already onstage. Then the doctor himself vaulted the footlights. That left the civil servant, who stood there irresolutely under his black umbrella.

The youth in tightrope walker's costume leaned out of the picture and proffered his hand. "Don't you want to come too?"

"The civil servant shook his head. "I don't believe in it."

"You don't have to. Just take the plunge."

♥

The Beggar King, 1936.

♥ That was when he noticed the all-enveloping silence: the firing had stopped at last.

Everything was steeped in golden twilight.

♥ The old man stared thoughtfully down the muzzle, then calmly surveyed the torn and pockmarked leather uniform, the blood-encrusted beard, the bullet hole in the forehead. Then and only then did he look the dictator in the eye. Hatred welled up in the dictator's burning throat, cold and sweet. It came as a relief, made him feel positively grateful. He was weary of killing in cold blood.

♥ "Why did you cause all this havoc?"

"I was compelled to," said the dictator. "I've no regrets. I feel no sympathy for any of them." After a pause he added more softly, "I envy them their ability to die. ..In order to seize power," replied the dictator, "I had to take it from those that had it, and in order to keep it I had to employ it against those that sought to deprive me of it.

The chef's hat gave a nod. "An old, old story. It has been repeated a thousand times, but no one believes it. That's why it will be repeated a thousand times more."

.."What about you?" [the dictator] blurted out, when he had caught the old man up. "What do you know of power? Do you seriously believe that anything great can be achieved on earth without it?"

"I?" said the old man. "I cannot tell great from small."

"I wanted power so that I could give the world justice," bellowed the dictator, and blood began to trickle afresh from the wound in his forehead, "but to get it I had to commit injustice, like anyone who seeks power. I wanted to end oppression, but to do so I had to imprison and execute those who opposed me - I became an oppressor despite myself. To abolish violence we must use it, to eliminate human misery we must inflict it, to render war impossible we must wage it, to save the world we must destroy it. Such is the true nature of power."

Chest heaving, he had once more barred the old man's path with his pistol ready.

"Yet you love it still," the old man said softly.

"Power is the supreme virtue!" The dictator's voice quavered and broke. "But its sole shortcoming is sufficient to spoil the whole: it can never be absolute - that's what makes it so insatiable. The only true form of power is omnipotence, which can never be attained, hence my disenchantment with it. Power has cheated me."

"And so," said the old man, "you have become the very person you set out to fight. It happens again and again. That is why you cannot die."

♥ "When the Happy Monarch came to build the huge, mysterious palace whose planning alone had occupied ten whole years of his life, and to which marvelling crowds made pilgrimage long before its completion, he did something strange. No one will ever know for sure what made him do it, whether wisdom or self-hatred, but the night after the foundation stone had been laid, when the site was dark and deserted, he went there in secret and buried a termites' nest in a pit beneath the foundations stone itself. Many decades later - almost a lifetime had elapsed, and the many vicissitudes of his turbulent reign had long since banished all thought of the termites from his mind - when the unique building was finished at last and he, its architect and author, first set foot on the battlements of the topmost tower, the termites, too, completed their unseen work. We have no record of any last words that might shed light on his motives, because he and all his courtiers were buried in the dust and rubble of the fallen palace, but the long-enduring legend has it that, when his almost unmarked body was finally unearthed, his face worse a happy smile."

♥ "You cannot die, but you can be unborn."

..While the children proceeded to sing softly in the corner of the room, which now looked farther away than ever, she slowly raised the chalice to his lips.

He drank greedily, gulping the contents down. When the empty chalice had been removed he found himself a naked, wrinkled infant lying in the midst of the torn leather uniform, which reposed on the seat of the chair like a black, shiny, empty cocoon. He tried to cry out, but all that escaped his lips was a feeble croak.

..She wrapped him in her apron and beckoned to the children in lace cassocks, who came over, still singing, and escorted him out through the wall, which dissolved into misty grey light.

The old nursemaid carried him in her arms through the gloomy grounds of the citadel. She looked for a particular stop among the trees and shrubs until she found it: a grassy mound that had been rent asunder, either by an exploding shell or an earthquake, in such a way that it resembled an immense vagina. She carried him inside. He made no sound as she unwrapped him and carefully laid him, quite naked, in the depths of the cleft. BY now he was a tiny, contorted foetus with a bulbous forehead.

"There, there, my little one, go to sleep now."

He saw her rejoin the children, who were waiting beneath the trees. Then, slowly and almost imperceptibly, the vagina's earthen lips began to close. Beyond the dim figures of the old woman and the children, the whole vast citadel suddenly went up in flames. The conflagration looked like one enormous parrot tulip.

♥ It's all a dream, I know it is. I've always known, ever since I began to dream, that I exist. It's the world that isn't real.

..When a dreamer knows he's dreaming, he's about to wake up. I shal wake up soon. This fire may simply be another reality's first sunbeam filtering through my closed eyelids.

..Waking is prohibited. The very desire to wake is officially construed as an attempt to escape, an act of high treason. It must be suppressed.

..Waking is what matters.

..It's surprising enough that I exist, but even more surprising that I've lived as long as I have. I've really tried, ladies and gentlemen - I've done my level best. If everyone else can endure the world, I told myself, so can I, because I'm sure they find it no easier than I do. I've waited all my life and grown old in the expectation of waking up, and look where I am today! I envy you your unconcern. Personally, I'm concerned as hell.

..Waking up, that's what it's about.

..A thing for snotyher dream.

..Waking is prohibited,.

..I can't be the only one to have noticed, I'm not that smart. They've merely agreed not to talk about it - or are things the way they want them? Do they like this dream, all of them?

..The desire to wake is a crime.

..I've really tried, ladies and gentlemen. I've done my level best.

..How can you be afraid when you're on the point of waking up? I'm only a dream myself. My existence is absurd and incomprehensible.

..On and on he went, one step at a time, as blindly as he had done all his life.

As blindly as we all do throughout our lives, never knowing what the next moment will bring, or whether our next step will land us on terra firma or send us tumbling into the void. The world is so flimsy, so fragile, that every step is a crucial decision.

..My existence is absurd and incomprehensible, but I was never free to choose another. A person remains what he is. Freedom exists only in the future; it cannot be found in the past. No one can ever choose himself a different past. All that happens has to come to pass as it did. Everything is inevitable after the event, nothing before. All that matters is to awaken from the dream. We run after freedom notwithstanding - we cannot help ourselves, but freedom always lies ahead of us like a mirage, always an instant away, always in the future. And the future is dark, a dark and impenetrable wall before our eyes. Or rather, it passes right through our eyes, right through our heads. We are blind - dazzled by the future. We never perceive what lies before us, never foresee the next moment until it hits us in the fact. We see only what we have already seen, in other words, nothing.

..Hell is a never-ending nightmare, but how did I get into it? What must I do to wake at last?

..I appeal to you whose dream I inhabit, whoever you are. I know that I'm powerless to resist your superior strength, so steer me in any direction you choose, but remember: you cannot delude me any more.

..There's no point in running, no escape. What is happening here is happening everywhere and always. The more you run, the surer you are to be caught.

..They're dreaming that they're dreaming. They're in another dream. It would be wrong to wake them. I wish I could sleep the way they do.

..It would be wrong to wake them. They're in another dream. They may even be the ones who are dreaming this world I'm in.

..Waking up is what matters. Nothing else counts.

..I don't want to speak. I never want to have to speak again. I've nothing more to say.

..There's no point in running, no escape.

..Ladies and gentlemen, fellow dreamers! The next item on the programme is a unique act requiring the utmost concentration. May we please have absolute silence and a roll on the drums? Thank you.

Now comes the moment of truth, though honesty compels me to admit that I don't know what a moment is, nor have I any knowledge of the truth, still less of whom I mean by the word "I".

This dream, which you call the world, was bad enough when I came into it. It's just as bad now, if not worse. I have no memory - I always forget things - so I can't be specific. It seemed to me that I'd landed up in the wrong dream or the wrong world, or that I myself was wrong for this world - or dream, as the case may be. I was beaten and imprisoned on some occasions and applauded and rewarded on others, even though I'd always been the same person and acted the same way. That was why I resorted to making you laugh and cry. That was my forte.

..I wait endlessly for the moment of awakening to come, but it never does. Like a swimmer trapped beneath a layer of ice, I keep searching for an air-hole, but I never find one. I've swum for a lifetime holding my breath. I can't think how the rest of you manage it.

..Or is it our dreamer unaware that he is merely dreaming us into existence? Can I, his dream, convey that to him and persuade him to wake up? Tell me something, ladies and gentlemen: what becomes of a dream when its dreamer awakes? Nothing? Does it cease to exist? Well, I want out - I mean that most sincerely. I don't want to go on dreaming that I exist, nor do I want to be someone else's dream, no natter whose. Unless, of course, we're dreaming each other. Are we a tissue of dreams, a boundless, groundless, tangled web of dreams? Are we all a single dream dreamed by no one at all?

..If it's true that I'm just a collective dream - that you dreamed me from the first, that I've never existed outside the minds of my audience - then I beg you, from the bottom of my heart, to release me. Dream of something else from now on, not of me - I can't endure it any longer. I don't expect you to wake up. Sleep on for as long as you please, and sleep sound, but dream of me no more. You've had your fun with me; now let me go.

♥ Seen in the reflected glow their faces resembled the faces of people asleep. It had started to rain, but too belatedly and far too half-heartedly to do more than slick their hair to their foreheads.

♥ Shouts could be heard in the distance, then some single shots, then the raucous bark of a sub-machine-gun. Such were the sounds that customarily heralded the night: a time for murder, for torture and interrogation - a time when each distrusted all.

♥ The space behind the big plate glass pane was teeming with enormous bugs: armour-plated millipedes as long as a man's arm, weaving and rearing on countless flickering legs, wood lice as big as dinner plates, roaches as black and bulky as rubber boots. Poised above this seething mass was a large sphere of burnished metal. Not only did it seem to hover in mid-air without wire or other means of support, but it revolved this way and that, sometimes slowly, sometimes at a dizzy speed. On top of the sphere stood a rat, a gigantic rat almost the size of a dog. To keep its footing it had to offset the motion of the sphere by scampering nimbly in the opposite direction. However long the animal had been in this terrible predicament, it looked at the end of its tether. Its fur was bedraggled and sodden with sweat, its mouth half open in a rictus that exposed its long, yellow incisors, its breathing painfully rapid. The end could not be far away. Soon it would slip off and fall headlong into the gruesome conglomeration of creatures whose innumerable pincers and tentacles were already groping avidly for it.

♥ "This is a dumb assignment," the first sentry resumed. "Where's the sense in it?"

The second sentry readjusted the contents of his dripping nose with a hearty sniff. "Dumb question. We're guarding the door."

"Why? To stop someone getting out?"

"Sure. The Minotaur, as if you didn't know. He's dangerous."

"You mean he's inside there? Where, right behind the door?"

A pause. They marched on, turned about, converged again.

"Has anyone ever come out of that door?"

"No, never. He eats them all." The second sentry gave a wry grin. "He's a monster."

While they were swapping guns, the first sentry muttered, "No one who goes in ever comes out again, so the that. The door always leads somewhere else, never back to where you came from."

"There you are, then," the second said smugly as they marched on. "It's like I told you: nobody ever comes out."

They turned about and passed each other again.

"In that case," the first sentry said stubbornly, "why are we guarding the door?"

His companion gave an impatient snort. "How should I know? Maybe so no one can get in."

"Would anyone want to go in?"

"Not unless he was feeling suicidal."

They marched on, turned about, swapped guns.

The first sentry was undeterred. "So no one wants to go in?"

"I wouldn't do it, not fore a pension."

"And no one ever has gone in?"

"Search me. Maybe someone did once, before my time. I don't remember."

"Then why are we guarding the door?"

The second sentry raised his voice. "I told you, so nobody can get out. What's the difference, anyway? Do your job and shut up."

♥ "Ravens," he muttered to himself, "are angels in disguise."

His companion had a fit of coughing. "Bullshit!" he said gruffly. "They're crows, common or garden crows. Ravens are almost extinct these days."

"So are angels," said the second sentry, avoiding his eye.

♥ "Are you a hero by trade?" she asked.

The matador recovered his composure - he even managed another chuckle. "Well, it depends on your point of view. I merely try to control my fear."

"Fear?" From the girl's tone of voice, she might never have heard the word before.

"Yes, of death," said the matador. "I'm a born coward, like most people. I'm scared of dying, that's why I practise it all the time."

♥ "So you think me foolish. You may well be right, but it seems to me a man Myst be some kind of a fool to want to achieve anything at all. Speaking for myself, I'm more interested in achieving something than in justifying my desire to do so."

♥ "Look, I've something to ask you. If I do go through the door... I mean, there's just a chance I may not -"

"Quite so," the girl said coldly, "every chance. No one has ever come back before."

The matador looked positively awkward and embarrassed all of a sudden. "Don't misunderstand me, Princess, that's to say... The fact is, I don't have any ties with the outside world, no family or -" he hesitated - "sweetheart. The way I see it, I could find myself in a situation where the knowledge that there's someone waiting for me outside would give me strength and courage."

The girl shook her head. "My poor boy, do you seriously think the outside world isn't part of the labyrinth? There's no such thing as outside and in, the existence of that door proves it. This world here is only one of the many dreams you've dreamed and will dream in time to come."

♥ "Did you imagine it was easy to be a hero?" the girl pursued. "Not thinking - did you imagine that would be enough to guarantee success and ward off failure? If killing were all that counted, the world would be full of heroes."

♥ The matador looked more bewildered than ever. "But what about the men who went through that door before me? He devoured them, didn't he?"

"If we remember no one, how can we tell what happened to them?"

The matador rose. His swarthy face had turned pale, but there was a feverish glint in his eyes. "I shall find out what happened to them!"

Again the girl shook her head. "You're no more destined to be a hero than any of your predecessors, my poor boy. A hero is someone of whom tales can be told, so he has to remain in the same dream, the same story, as those who recount his deeds. But our memory extends no farther than this threshold here. Anyone who crosses it leaves our dream behind."

♥ "Will you really give me nothing to take with me?" he asked softly.

The girl smiled for the first time, and it was that very smile which first tinged her face with sadness.

"You mean a ball of thread," she said, "- one you can use to guide you back here when the deed is done? It would be pointless, my friend. Once that door closes behind you, you and I will know nothing of each other. You would throw the useless ball of thread away - even its purpose would escape your comprehension. You will undergo many transformations as you pass from one scene to another, and each time you will think you have awoken from a dream of which you remember nothing. You will hurry on, ever farther, ever deeper, ever oblivious. You will live lives and die deaths, and you will always be different and always the same in the labyrinth where no differences exist. But him you seek to kill you will never find, for in finding him you will have become him. You will be he, the first letter of the alphabet. The silence that precedes all else. Then you will know the meaning of solitude."

She paused as if she had already said too much.

"No," she added quietly after a little while, "I can give you nothing for your journey, not even this kiss."

She climbed the steps and kissed him. He accepted the kiss with his arms limp at his sides, feeling as if he were already no more than a long-forgotten name.

"What of you? he asked. "Will you at least remember the kiss you bestowed on no one?"

"No," she told him.

.."I was thinking of my poor brother behind that door there."

There was a pause. "Poor creature," she murmured as she turned and walked off. "Poor, poor Hor."