Windows to Europe

Chapter 1

The Book with the Purple Binding

I was walking up and down the rows of books at the antiquarian booksellers in Karlova Street. Now and then I would take a look out the shop window. It started to snow heavily; holding a book in my hand I watched the snowflakes swirling in front of the wall of St Savior’s Church. I returned to my book, savoring its aroma and allowing my gaze to flit over its pages, reading here and there the fragment of a sentence that suddenly sparkled mysteriously as it was taken out of context. I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep. I was glad I did not have to go out into the darkness and the snowstorm.

I ran my finger slowly along the undulating spines of the books on the shelf; suddenly my finger disappeared into a dark hollow between a thick French tome on national economy and book whose torn spine bore the inscription Geburtshilfe bei Rind und Pferd. At the rear of the hollow my finger touched an unusually soft and smooth spine. With effort I pulled out from the back of the shelf a book bound in dark-purple velvet that bore neither title nor author’s name, and I opened it: the pages were printed in some strange script; I leafed idly through the book. I briefly examined the convoluted arabesques on the fly-leaves and closed the book again. I jammed it back in between the two learned treatises, which had meanwhile drawn breath and filled the gap that remained after the book was removed. I moved further along the shelf but then hesitated and came back, reaching for the book with the purple binding. For a moment I held it aslant, half in, half out of the row of books. Nothing was easier than to put it back level with the rest and continue to browse through other books as I had done on previous occasions, then to go out into the blizzard and continue my walk through the streets before returning home. After all nothing had happened, nothing to remember, nothing to forget. But I realized that the alphabet in which the book was printed was not of this world. It was still a simple matter to ignore the crevice from which there wafted a disconcerting and alluring breath and allow it to become overgrown with a tissue of renewing circumstances. It was not the first such encounter in my life. Like everyone, I had, on many previous occasions, ignored a half-open door leading elsewhere – in the chilly passages of strange houses, in backyards, on the outskirts of towns. The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest. Our gestures would seem to rise out of an entity that also encompasses these concealed spaces, and in an odd way they reveal their shadowy existence, although we are unaware of the roar of waves and shrieks of animals – the disquieting accompaniment to our words (and possibly their secret birthplace); we are unaware of the glitter of jewels in the unknown world of nooks and crannies; usually we do not stray off the path even once in the course of our lives. What golden temples in the jungle might we find our way to? With what beasts and monsters might we contend and on what islands might we forget our plans and ambitions? Maybe it was the fascinating flurry of snowy chimeras outside the window or maybe an ironic love of fate, engendered by my failures of recent years, that caused my old fear of crossing frontiers to protest only feebly – as if simply out of habit – and then quickly fall silent; I pulled the book out and opened it once more. I looked at the indifferent letters – rounded but with sharp points at the edges; they were closed or enclosing shapes, convulsed and bristling at one and the same time, but often appearing violently pierced by pointed wedges that penetrated their inner space from outside; elsewhere the bloated letters seemed to be bursting under the pressure of some expanding internal force. I paid for the book at the till, put it in my pocket and left the shop. Darkness had fallen outside in the meantime and the snow floundered in the light of the street lamps.

Back home I switched on the lamp on the desk by the window, then sat down and started to examine the book carefully. I slowly turned the pages, so that one after another they emerged in the ring of lamplight, as if surfacing from the depths of a dark pool; rows of rounded and spiny letters lay on the pages like magic necklaces. In the exhalation of the letters that hovered over the pages there pulsated some kind of somber stories set in jungles and spacious cities; occasionally a scene from one of these stories seemed suddenly to flash before my eyes: the evil face of an intractable disciple of a fantastic heresy, the soft footfall of a wild beast from deep inside a nocturnal palace, an anxious gesture within loose silk, a piece of crumbling stone balustrade among bushes in a garden. I discovered that the book contained several copperplate engravings. The first illustration depicted a broad, deserted square, governed by a sort of dreamlike symmetry with a melancholy sharp perspective of chessboard paving; out of the middle of the square rose an obelisk whose plinth was a regular polygon of smooth stone; on either side of the obelisk stood a three-tiered fountain: on the picture the water falling from one basin to the next gave the impression of a solid, rigid mass. The square was surrounded on its three visible sides by the facades of palaces with monotonous tall colonnades above regular flights of steps. The shadows were short and sharp-cut, suggesting that it was noon on a hot summer day somewhere in the south. At first I thought the square was utterly deserted and only a little while later did I notice a few tiny figures that were out of proportion with the gigantic buildings and whose outlines were lost in the thick crosshatching that represented the shadow in the colonnades of the two palaces standing opposite each other. On the marble paving by the wall of the left-hand palace, a young man was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, while a tiger leaned over him holding him down with a mighty paw and tearing at his throat with its teeth. The crudely depicted dark blood spurting from the wound looked like an open fan. By the foot of one of the columns of the palace on the opposite side of the square, several men sprawled at their ease, smoking pipes and playing cards, and were either unaware of what was happening on the other side of the square or unconcerned by it. Between some columns, a short distance away , stood a man and a woman: with a sweep of his arm the man was pointing across the empty space of the sun-drenched square at the murderous tiger, while the women was wringing her hands, stretching them up towards the lofty caisson vaulting of the colonnade. The second engraving depicted an anatomical section of a pearl-oyster lying on a muddy river bed. The third illustration showed some machine with complex system of conveyor belts and lots of meshed cogwheels with meticulously hatched teeth.

I left the book open on the desk by the window and went to bed. When I closed my eyes, rows of rounded and spiny letters flashed in front of my eyes, squirming and writhing as they were transformed into snowflakes swirling in the light of the street lamp. I felt troubled by this alien and unpredictable thing, which I’d introduced into my apartment like a black hen’s egg. But I told myself that my anxiety was possibly needless and that the book, like so many disturbing things that have invaded our world, was silently and unobtrusively taking root in an intimately familiar space and soaking up its juices.

I woke up in the middle of the night. When I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness I made out a faint greenish glow shimmering above the open book. I got up and went over to the desk: the letters of the book glimmered; in their faint light, the snowflakes falling on the cornice outside the window glowed green.