The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (29 page)

I saw a few heads in the audience turn in our direction and heard someone shush us indignantly. There’s only one thing worse than someone talking during a cultural event and that’s being the talker yourself, so I fell silent.

But the Murkholmer on the stage continued to unnerve me. Erect and immovable as a lamp-post, he stood there in the midst of a bewildering maze of pipes equipped with countless armatures, valves and cocks, pressure gauges and thermometers. In conformity with the
unchanging
dress sense prevalent among those weird inhabitants of Zamonia’s north-west coast, he was wearing a black suit which, like his flat hat, was in sharp contrast to his milk-white complexion. Fanning out behind him was a multiplicity of long brass pipes, all of which ran upwards and ended in butterfly valves that constantly opened and closed without a sound. Immediately in front of the Murkholmer was a stepped console from which jutted at least two hundred stops with porcelain knobs. These he operated incessantly, now and then using a foot to depress some wooden pedals in the floor. A Murkholmer! I still couldn’t take it in.

‘You’re in luck,’ whispered the Uggly, clutching my forearm. ‘That isn’t just
any
old Murkholmer, it’s Oktobir van Krakenbeyn, Bookholm’s finest performer on the scent organ.’

‘Organ?’ I whispered back. ‘Is that supposed to be a musical instrument? What’s, er … a scent organist?’

The Uggly gave me the look she reserved for provincial tourists who had strayed into her shop and stupidly asked for directions.

‘A scent organ is designed to set the scene olfactorily,’ she explained in a whisper. ‘It’s unique to Bookholm – unique to this theatre! Together with the music, it contributes an olfactory dimension to the production. Sight, hearing, smell! Even a blind member of the audience knows what’s happening onstage when the scent organ gets going. Playing the thing is an art in itself. There are seven scent organists in Bookholm, but Krakenbeyn is by far the greatest virtuoso. He designed and built that instrument himself. A grand master of nasal scene-setting! His compositions smell the best. Pay attention, the solo is beginning!’

While the street scene on the main stage continued with music but no singing, the Murkholmer did little more than pull and push the stops on his console and depress the occasional pedal. This he did with dignified stolidity, never once abandoning his grave demeanour, as if operating the furnace in a crematorium. The fluids and vapours in the organ reacted with remarkable rapidity: they came to the boil, condensed and evaporated, glowed and incandesced, hissed and bubbled. The valves on the organ pipes opened and closed too fast for the eye to follow.

Meanwhile, on the main stage, the Yarnspinner puppet continued to roam the streets of Bookholm, which was represented by the series of sets across which it trudged. Buildings, towers and walls sprouted from the floor or floated down from above, only to disappear in ever quicker succession. The drumbeats accelerated, the oboes and clarinets tooted more and more frenetically.

I raised my head and sniffed the air. It smelt just as Bookholm had smelt the first time I wandered its streets. It was redolent of the freshly roasted coffee beans which many Bookholmers liked to nibble from paper bags while reading; of steaming yeast cakes with lemon curd; of burnt toast and vanilla-flavoured tea; of freshly processed printer’s ink. Nothing remembers better than the nose! A whiff of lemon balm
or
tar or the scent of strawberries or new-mown grass are enough to catapult me back over the decades and into the past. But there was more in the air, much more! If asked whether I’d seen a tannery onstage, or a glue works or a carpenter’s shop, I would unhesitatingly have answered in the affirmative. I would also have felt convinced that the stage had held a soap factory, a waffle bakery and a barbershop, yet no such sets existed! The scent organ had only bamboozled me into thinking I could smell tanned leather, bookbinder’s glue and fresh wood shavings, also perfumed soap, baked waffles and aftershave. That was enough for my brain to imagine whole streets lined with shop windows and billboards that weren’t there at all. Olfactory scene-setting! Nasal architecture! I now grasped what the Uggly had meant.

I saw the Murkholmer direct a long, expressionless gaze at the audience, then turn back to his labyrinthine apparatus and very calmly pull out one stop after another. I was just wondering what sort of curious mélange of smells this would produce when an olfactory tsunami swept over me and the audience. It was simply overwhelming! We could smell chimney soot and eau de cologne, fried eggs and sweaty armpits, boiled milk and machine oil, cat’s piss and horseshit, camomile tea, burnt fat, the intoxicating scent of a florist’s roses, stale dregs of beer from the cellar of an inn, camphor and ether fumes from a pharmacy, toadstool tea and henbane soup from an Ugglian herbalist’s, pigs’ blood from a butcher’s, fresh newsprint, warm rolls. We smelt all the smells a person can detect in a city awakening to a new day. But there was also an unmistakable odour that existed in no other Zamonian city: the smell of
Dreaming Books
arising from the Bookholm Shafts. Inazia nudged me in the ribs and grinned. I was speechless.

Then there were the sounds! I mustn’t, dear friends, forget to mention the skilful contribution made to this synthesis of the arts by the theatre’s talented sound-painters. I deliberately call their activities sound-painting rather than background noises or acoustic
scenery
to indicate the level of artistry attained by its practitioners at the Puppetocircus Maximus. Hammerblows and pealing bells, cocks crowing and dogs barking, wagon wheels crunching on gravel or rumbling over cobblestones, birds twittering, children yelling, voices mingling – all these combined to form melodies and rhythms of their own that were in no way inferior in precision and harmony to the orchestra’s musical accompaniment. I was inside a huge, well-oiled, perfectly functioning theatrical machine in which everything, from the smallest prop to the last trill on the flute, was in its proper place.

‘What you’re looking at’, the Uggly informed me as quietly as she could, ‘is really only a fraction of the instrument – the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The entire theatre is, in fact, threaded with a maze of pipes connected to the organ. It’s like the circulation of the blood or the nervous system. Concealed in the floor, the walls, and even in this box are very fine jets that spray us with invisible odoriferous substances. Kibitzer believed that they probably acted in conjunction with an additional gas capable of temporarily neutralising those substances and breaking them down. Otherwise, all that this organ-playing produced would be a portmanteau of a stench and probably unbearable.’

‘Kibitzer had a point,’ I whispered back. ‘He’s …’ – I stopped short – ‘I mean, he
was
a smart fellow.’

‘There’s even a rumour’, Inazia went on in a low voice, ‘that the instrument on the stage down there isn’t a real organ but only for show – a glamorous fake – and that the real organ is somewhere else and doesn’t look in the least spectacular. Furthermore, that the organist down there is an ingenious puppet, not a Murkholmer at all.’

‘What did I tell you!’ I said triumphantly.

‘It isn’t true, though,’ she retorted. ‘That’s nonsense.’

‘How do you know?’

‘An Uggly can sense these things.’

The Ugglies’ traditional killer blow! When they ran out of rational
arguments
, they came out with their mysterious sensory perceptions, their feelings and presentiments, their esoteric knowledge! There was no point in arguing, you always came off worst. At all events, I felt slightly reassured by the thought that the organist might not be a Murkholmer after all.

Meantime, the onstage action continued. My first sojourn in Bookholm was conveyed with due dramatic brevity, whole chapters of my book being boiled down into short scenes with no dialogue. For instance, the stage version of my encounter with Ovidios in the
Graveyard of Forgotten Writers
lasted only a few seconds. So did my reading of Colophonius Regenschein’s book, which had really taken me a whole night. The Yarnspinner puppet was shown buying Regenschein’s account of the catacombs from an itinerant hawker and perusing it in the street, whereas I had actually purchased the book from a shop and read it in a café. In this scene an immense backdrop the size of a house was lowered. It was painted with something vaguely reminiscent of the treasure map Kibitzer had bequeathed me. The resemblance consisted mainly in the fact that it was a vertical representation of the catacombs. In contrast to Regenschein’s precise cartography, however, it depicted them in medieval style. We were shown cross-sections of caves and tunnels in which fearsome monsters such as dragons, trolls and giant spiders crouched over precious books and devoured Bookhunters, or similar horrific motifs portrayed in the naive manner of early book illuminators, with false perspectives and a great deal of gold leaf. Very pretty! Meanwhile, to some plaintive music, a voice (probably meant to be that of Colophonius Regenschein) sang a ballad describing the adventurous conditions prevailing below ground and recapitulated the history of the catacombs in a very truncated form:

‘In days of old the Bookemists

concealed their books from sight
.

They stowed them all in oaken chests

deprived of air and light
,

then hid the books down in the depths

where still they dream today
.

Their resting place is hard to find

oft seek it though you may.’

The recurring refrain was the same each time:

‘Hail, ye suicidal creatures

eager precious books to see!

Leather, ink and age-old paper
,

long-forgotten library!’

That, of course, was plagiarised from Evubeth van Goldwine’s immortal last symphony, from which the melody for the ballad had also been borrowed. Although cheeky, it was well-stolen. If you’re going to steal, steal only from the best, that’s my motto too.

Then, on the main stage, the puppet finally reached Kibitzer’s bookshop. The music died away, the big curtain closed and that of a smaller stage rose almost simultaneously. And there I – or rather, my puppet double – was again! All alone now and only dimly illuminated in a sea of darkness. At once, piles of books sprouted from the floor and bookcases fraught with ancient tomes trundled forward out of the background. It grew lighter, but only a little. Clouds of fine yellow dust swirled into the air and then I smelt it: the unmistakable Nocturnomathian book dust that only the works of Professor Abdul Nightingale could produce.

‘This is incredible!’ I gasped. ‘It smells just like Kibitzer’s shop!’

Mutely, Inazia laid a hand on my arm. A candle ignited itself as though lit by a ghostly hand, then a curious figure with huge, luminous eyes emerged from the darkness: Ahmed ben Kibitzer, almost as lifelike as in real life! I would have been little less startled had his ghost appeared in our box. I almost uttered a shrill cry, once more aware of whose chair I was occupying. Tears sprang to my eyes. I
made
to jump up, but the Uggly soothingly gripped my arm and prevented me from doing so.

The Kibitzer puppet was really spooky, especially when one knew it personified the dead. It was operated by black-clad puppeteers equipped with rods, but they were scarcely visible in the gloom and one forgot them as soon as the puppet moved. It was a mystery to me how they illuminated its eyes from within and imitated Kibitzer’s quavering voice so perfectly, likewise how that voice could be heard in every last corner of the theatre as clearly as if it were whispering in one’s ear. It was as if he had returned from the hereafter to enact his role on the stage. One could hear woodworms munching away at the shelves and the humming of Kibitzer’s brains, smell mouldy paper and ancient leather. The theatregoers were quiet as mice.

What ensued, however, wasn’t a dramatic scene but some snappy, humorous dialogue between me and the Nocturnomath that had never taken place in real life or in my book. But that didn’t matter at all, because it not only epitomised the disputatious relationship between us but made the audience laugh. Its culmination was that Kibitzer threw me out of his shop. Even I couldn’t help grinning.

‘That was Kibitzer’s favourite scene,’ Inazia whispered beside me and tears welled up in my eyes once more. Before I could completely surrender to emotion, however, there was an abrupt change of lighting and scenery. Curtains rose and fell, and the Yarnspinner puppet roamed the darkened streets to music whose pounding chords on the piano reminded me of Igöri Iglegty’s disturbing compositions, with their notes like dagger thrusts. In a ballet-like scene, I encountered Bookhunters and other shady characters from the Bookholmian underworld and was marooned in the most obscure corners of the city, the latter being conveyed by grandiose sets that seemed to have been borrowed from nightmare paintings by Chicorigi de Gorio. Eventually, my puppet left the menacing shades of night behind and came to a brightly lit inn. The sinister music died away.