The Malacia Tapestry Read online

  'Byzantium?'

  'No, Byzantium's a dust-heap now, they say, the streets are paved with the bones of old fantoccini men — and of course the Ottoman at the gate, as ever. I'll go to Tuscady, or far Igara where they say there's gold and style and enthusiasm. Why not come with me? It could be the ideal place for out-of-work actors.'

  'All too busy, Pete. I've only just come from Kemperer's — you know how he makes you sweat — and now I must hurry to see Master Bengtsohn, who beseeches something from me.'

  Piebald Pete dropped one of his eyebrows by several centimetres, lowered his voice by about the same amount, and said, 'If I was you, Master Perian, I'd stay clear of Otto Bengtsohn, who's a troublemaker, as you may well know.'

  I could not help laughing at his expression. 'I swear I am innocent!'

  'None of us is innocent if someone thinks us guilty. Poor men should be grateful for what they get from the rich, and not go abusing them or plotting their destruction.'

  'You're saying that Bengtsohn —'

  'I'm not saying anything, am I?' Looking round, he raised his voice again as if he hoped the whole bubbling market would hear it. 'What I'm saying is that we owe a lot to the rich of the state, us poor ones. They could do without us, but we could hardly do without them, could we?'

  The subject plainly made Pete and everyone nearby uncomfortable ; I moved on. Perhaps I would visit Bengtsohn.

  As I walked down a side-alley towards Exhibition Street, I recalled that Piebald Pete had performed in my father's house on one occasion, long ago. My mother had been alive then, and my sister Katarina and I little children.

  The show had enchanted us. Afterwards, when the magic frame was folded and gone, my father had said, 'There you have observed the Traditional in operation. Your delight was because the fantoccini man did not deviate from comedic forms laid down many generations earlier. In the same way, the happiness of all who live in our little Utopian state of Malacia depends on preserving the laws which the founders laid down long, long ago.'

  I slipped through a muddy by-lane, where a few market-stalls straggled on, becoming poorer as they led away from the central magnet of St Marco, towards the sign of the Dark Eye. At the entrance to the court stood the Leather-Teeth Tavern, its doors choked with red-faced countrymen, drinking with a variety of noise, enjoyment, and facial expression. Fringing the drinkers were whores, wives, donkeys, and children, who were being serenaded by a man with a hurdy-gurdy. His mistress went round the crowd with a cap, sporting on a lead a red-scaled chick-snake which waltzed on its hind legs like a dancing dog.

  Beside the tavern, stalls of fresh herrings had been set up. I tucked my coat-tails under my armpits to get by. Beyond, a couple of bumpkins were urinating and vomiting turn and turn about against a wall. The overhanging storeys of the buildings and their sweeping eaves made the court dark but, as I got towards the back of it, I came on Otto Bengtsohn washing his hands at a pump, still clad in his mangy fur jacket.

  His arms were pale, hairless, corded with veins; ugly but useful things. He splashed his face, then wiped his hands on his jacket as he turned to examine me. Beyond him, lolling in a doorway, were two young fellows who also gave me an inspection.

  'So you altered your mind to come after all! What a cheek you gave, also! Well, you're only once young.'

  'I happened to be passing this way.'

  He nodded. 'All-People was right.' He stood contemplating me, rubbing his hands up and down his jacket until I grew uncomfortable.

  'What's this zahnoscope of yours?'

  'Business later, my young friend. First, I must have something for to eat, if you don't mind. I'm on the way to the Leather-Teeth, and perhaps you'll join me for some bite.'

  'It would be a pleasure.' There was merit in the old man after all. 'I am feeling peckish.'

  'Even the poor have to eat. Those of us what are going to change the world must keep ourselves fed up… We aren't supposed to think about change in Malacia, are we? Still, we'll see…' He grinned at me in a sly way. He pointed up at the leather-toothed ancestral depicted on the tavern sign, its segmented wings outspread. 'You have to have jaws like that creature to eat here. Do you mind visiting our slum, de Chirolo?'

  We pushed into the tavern.

  There, Bengtsohn was known and respected. In short order, a grimy girl placed soup, bread and meat balls with chillies and a pitcher of ale before us, and we set to, ignoring the jostling bodies at our elbows. I ate heartily.

  Sighing after a while, and resigning myself to his pouring me more ale, I said, 'It's good to feel the stomach full at midday for a change.' There I checked myself. 'Why should I say "for a change"? Everyone today seems to have been talking about change — it must be because the Council's meeting.'

  'Well, talk, yes, but talk's nothing — foam off from the sea. Malacia never changes, hasn't done for thousands of years, never will. Even the conversations about change don't change.'

  'Aren't you introducing change with your — zahnoscope?'

  He dropped his fork, waved his hands, shssh'd me, leant forward, shook his head all at the same time, so that I found my face peppered with half-chomped meat ball. 'Remember that whereas talking about change is proper and fit, anyone who makes bold as to implement change in this dear old stable city of ours' (said loud for effect as he groped with his fork) 'is liable to finish up in the Toi with his throat cut to shreds…'

  Silence while we ate. Then he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that the statement might be of particular interest to any eavesdroppers in the vicinity, 'I work in the field of art, that's all what interests me. Happily, art is a central interest of this dear city, like religion. Art's safe. Not a better place in the world for to pursue art, though heaven knows it don't pay all that much, even here. But of course I don't complain of that. How I'll go through next winter with a greedy wife… Come on, mop down your platter with the crust and let's get back at the workshop. Work's the thing, if it earns fair pay.'

  Back through the court we went, and into the workshop, which was a dim and dirty place, cluttered with all manner of objects. Bengtsohn waved his hand in a vaguely descriptive way which took in a number of apprentices at benches, some munching hunks of bread.

  'You have a busy place.'

  'I don't have it. It isn't of mine. I can be to booted out from here tomorrow, with boss's boots. This is an extensive works, biggest in Malacia. These workshops and glass factories back on the great exhibition gallery. You've been in that, I suppose — the gallery of the Hoytola family, Andrus Hoytola.'

  'Hoytola's hydrogenous balloon.'

  'That's another matter. I've been here during some years now, ever since I have come from Tolkhorm with my family. There are some worse masters than Hoytola, I'll grant you that. Here's Bonihatch — he's foreign to Malacia too, and a good man.' He made reference to one of the apprentices, who loitered up in shirt-sleeves.

  Bonihatch was my age, dark, small and wiry, with untidy blonde whiskers. He nodded, looking suspiciously at my clothes without addressing me.

  'A recruit?' he asked Bengtsohn.

  'We'll see,' Bengtsohn replied.

  After this enigmatic exchange, Bengtsohn, with Bonihatch in surly attendance, showed me some of his work. A small den off the main workshop was stacked with slides for magic lanterns, all categorized on shelves. He pulled slides down at random and I looked at them against a flickering oil lamp. Many of the scenes were Bengtsohn's work. He was an artist of a rough but effective order. Some of the hand-painted transparencies, especially those depicting scenery, were attractive, the colour and perspective harsh but nevertheless effective. There was an arctic view, with a man in furs driving a sledge over ice; the sledge was pulled by a reindeer, and the whole scene was lit by a sky full of northern lights which reflected off a glacier. As I held it before the lamp, he saw something in my face and said, 'You like it? As a young man, I have gone beyond the Northern Mountains to the ice lands. That's what like it was. A different world.'
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br />   'It's good.'

  'You know how we make these slide-paintings?'

  I indicated the stacks of glass round about, and the long desk I where assistants worked with brushes and a row of paint-pots. 'Apart from your genius, Master, there's no puzzle about the production.'

  He shook his head. 'You think you see the process but you do not see the system behind the process. Take our topographical line, what is popular perennially. Travellers from far parts will make sketches of the fabulous places they have visited. They return home to Byzantium or Swedish Kiev or Tolkhorm or Tuscady or some other great centre, where their sketches are etched and sold, either as books or separately. Our factory then buys the books and artists are converting the pictures to slides. Only the slides live, because light itself puts the finishing touches to the painting, if you follow me.'

  'I follow you. I too am proud to call myself an artist, though I work in movement rather than light.'

  'Light is everything.'

  He led me through a choked passage where great sheets of tin stood on either side, to another shop. There, amid stink and smoke, men in aprons were making the magic lanterns which formed part of the Hoytola enterprise. Some lanterns were cheap and flimsy, others masterpieces of manufacture, with high fluted chimneys and mahogany panels bound in brass.

  Eventually, Bengtsohn led me back to the paint shop, where we watched a girl of no more than fifteen copy a view from an etching on to a glass.

  'The view is being transferred to the slide,' announced Bengtsohn. 'Pretty, perhaps, but not accurate. How could we transfer the view to the glass with accuracy? Well, now, I have developed a perfectly effective way so to do.' He dropped his voice so that the girl — who never looked up from her work — should not catch his words. 'The new method employs the zahnoscope.'

  Bonihatch spoke for the first time. 'It's revolutionary,' was all he said.

  Gripping me by the muscle of my upper arm, Bengtsohn took me through into another room, poky and enclosed, where the window was framed by heavy curtains. A support rather like a music-stand stood at one end of the room with a lamp burning above it and a water globe next to it. In the centre of the room was something which resembled a cumbrous Turkish cannon. Constructed almost entirely of mahogany and bound in richly chased brass, its barrel comprised five square sections, each smaller than the next and tapering towards the muzzle. It was mounted on a solid base which terminated in four brass wheels.

  'It's a cannon?' I asked.

  'It could cause a breach in the walls of everyone's complacency — but no, it is my zahnoscope merely, so-called after a German monk what invented the design.'

  He tapped the muzzle. 'There's a lens here, to trap rays from the light. That's the secret! A special large lens such as Malacia's glass workers do not produce. I received it from ship only this morning — it has just been fitted. You saw me with it when All-People summoned you.'

  He tapped the breech. 'There's a mirror in here. That's the secret too! Now I shall show how it works.'

  Taking a coloured topographical view from a shelf, he propped it on the music-stand, turned up the wick of the lamp, and adjusted the water globe between stand and lamp so that the beams of the lamp focused brightly on the view. Then he drew the curtains across the window. The room was lit only by the oil lamp. Bengtsohn motioned me to a chair by the breech.

  It was as if I sat at a desk. The flat top of the desk was glass. And there, perfectly reproduced on the glass, was the topographical view, bright in all its original colour!

  'It's beautiful, Master! Here you can have a perfect magic-lantern show.'

  'This is a tool, not a toy. We place the glass of our slides over the viewer and can adjust the barrel — what adjusts the focal length of the lenses — until we have the exact size of picture necessary for the slide, no matter what the dimensions from the original etching. We can then simply paint over the image with accuracy.'

  I clapped my hands. 'You are more than an artist! — You are an actor! Like me, you take the poor shadowy thing of real life and magnify it and add brighter colours to delight your audience… But what do you want me here for? I can't handle a paint-brush.'

  He stood pulling his lower lip and squinting at me.

  'People come in two kinds. Either they're too clever or too foolish to be trusted. I can't reason out which group you're in.'

  'I'm to be trusted. Everyone trusts Perian de Chirolo — ask Kemperer, for whom you once worked, who knows me minutely. His wife will also say a good word for me.'

  He brushed my speech aside, stood gazing into the distance in very much a pose I have used for Blind Kedgoree.

  'Well, I need a young man not too ill set-up, there's no denying that… The older you get, the more difficult things become…'

  At last he turned back to me. 'Very well, I shall take you in my confidence, young man; but I warn that what I tell you must not be repeated with nobody, not with your dearest friend, no, not even with your sweetest sweetheart. Come, we'll walk in the exhibition gallery while I will explain my invention and my intention—'

  He drew back the curtains, turned down the lamp, and led me back to the workshops. We climbed some steps, went through a door, and were in another world where disorder was forgotten. We had entered the elegantly appointed gallery itself, the walls of which were lined with thousands of glass slides, aligned on racks for easy viewing. The slides could be hired for varying amounts, depending upon quality and subject. There were long sets of twenty or thirty slides which told in pictures heroic stories of old, as well as vivid portrayals of brigandage or disaster, which were most popular. Well-dressed people were walking about and gazing at the pictures; Bengtsohn kept his voice down.

  'Despite this place stinks of privilege, it preserves a part of the cultural thought of Malacia as well as Count Renardo's state museum. Andrus Hoytola exploits cheap labour, no use to deny that — a class enemy if there was one — yet he is not a merchant just but also an artist and a man of foresight. However, to my invention…'

  There was a secretiveness about him which did not suit my open nature. He manoeuvred me into a corner, saying he would lecture me upon matters not generally understood.

  'It has long been known through the learned alchemists that there are certain salts what have an empathy with or aversion against the light, so that some say they are fallen from the sun or the moon. I have developed here a process whereby a judicious mixture of silver iodine will secure on a slide of glass an image of whatever is placed before the zahnoscope. A second process involving oils of lavender and heated mercury fixes the image permanently on the glass. This is painting without hands, my dear de Chirolo…'

  When he beamed at me, he looked years younger.

  'Why tell me your secret?'

  He shook his head. 'It's not mine, but Nature's. All what wish can share it. You do not realize the oppressiveness of the state what we live in —'

  'I love my native city.'

  'I what am a foreigner should not criticize? Nevertheless, any such scientific processes what I describe are suppressed… Justice is denied — and beauty.'

  He snatched from one of the exhibition racks a slide which he urged me to hold up to the light. It was a volcanic eruption. I stared through a volcano in full spate, with streams of lava furrowing its snow-clad slopes — to see one of the most beautiful faces I had ever come across, a face with a high-bridged nose, two dark-golden eyes, a mouth that was flashing a brilliant smile — though not in my direction — and a delicate head of cultivated unruly hair, jet-black and tied with a length of blue ribbon at the back.

  Even as this face materialized through the volcanic eruption, it turned into profile and then went into eclipse, with only the tresses and ribbons at the back of the head available to my view. Even that was thrilling enough; but never had I seen a profile so adorable, or so originally designed, with the entire physiognomy depending from that patrician nose, without the nose being too large even by one delicious millime
tre.

  Lowering Mount Vesuvius slightly, I regarded the body to which this fabulous head was such an exquisite adjunct. Though I beheld it only from behind, I saw that the waist was slender, the hips generous, and the buttocks altogether matchless enough to put the snowy slopes of any volcano to shame. The whole enchanting figure was sheathed in a long, crisp dress of apricot-coloured silk which swept to the floor. My aesthetic senses, roused by the proportions of the face, were overtaken by my carnal ones and I resolved to approach this beauty at whatever cost.

  All the while, Bengtsohn was talking in his cranky way, mistaking the subject of my absorption, '…this beautiful view was never touched by human hands…'

  'Glad I am to hear you say it.'

  'The exciting effect of fire and snow in conjunction…'

  'Oh, yes, and that conjunction…'

  'Yet this is but an imitation of an imitation…'

  'No, that I can't believe! This is the real thing at last.'

  'You flatter me, but the zahnoscope can be made to capture the real thing, to go straight to life rather than art…'

  I put the slide down. The vision was preparing to leave the gallery; I might never see her again and my happiness would never be complete.

  'You must excuse me, Maestro — I do have more preference for life than for art, just as you do. You must manage your affairs and mine —'

  Seeing I was making to go, he grasped my arm.

  'Listen, please, young man. I'm offering you work and money. All-People can't be mistaken. You have not work or money. I want to do a new thing with the zahnoscope. I want to mercurize — that's how I call it — I want to mercurize a whole story on slides, using real actors, not just paintings. It will be a dazzling new success, it will be revolutionary — and you can take prominently part in it. Now, come into the workshop and let me explain properly all.'

  'I've just seen a friend — who's the fair creature at the far end of the gallery?'

  He answered sharply. 'That's Armida Hoytola, daughter of the gallery-owner, a difficult, flighty girl. She's a parasite, a class enemy. Don't waste your time —'