The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (37 page)

I found one poster particularly amusing:

Another slip of paper bore nothing but two mysterious handwritten sentences:

Yet another was less cryptic:

And so on and so forth … Hundreds of these notices, either pasted one on top of the other or nailed to the trunk, formed the dead tree’s new bark. One day it would be completely encased in them. I was particularly struck by two things. First, that the titles of the plays advertised were rather unusual for a puppet theatre:
The Dead Art of Folding Cylinders
,
Malevolent Bananas
,
The Iron Eyebrow
, or
When Chairs Weep
, to name but a few. They weren’t fairy-tale or mythical material and few of the productions were expressly directed at children. They were adapted from works of contemporary literature: novels, dramas and stories by modern authors like Arngrim Berserker, Juhanna Pignozzi, Petro Polognese, Count Pallaprat di Bigotto, Yury Yurk, Gwatkin de Latouche, Lapoleon Lonocle, Audrian van Eckenschreck and Hyppolitus Knotz – in other words, modern authors who had originally aimed their work at an adult readership in book form. Why was I so disturbed by the thought that so much contemporary literature was being adapted for the puppet theatre? The second thing that struck me about these notices was that nearly all the performances took place at timber-time.
¹

‘Good heavens,’ I exclaimed, ‘what happened to good old timber-time? Are books ever read aloud in the old-fashioned way, or are they all automatically adapted into puppet plays?’

‘Oh, timber-time!’ the Uggly said in a dismissive tone. She looked at me pityingly. ‘Timber-time? That’s only for hay-wagon tourists these days!’ She was alluding to one aspect of Bookholm tourism in which provincial visitors were hauled into the city on big hay wagons normally used for bringing in the hay harvest.

‘There still are some good professional readers, of course,’ she went on, ‘but their performances are so overcrowded, you can hardly hear a word for the chattering of the audience. Besides, master readers play for safety. They almost always read from the popular stuff everyone knows. Your books, for instance.’ She glared at me reproachfully.

‘In that case,’ I said quickly, to change the subject, ‘do highbrow audiences go mainly to puppet theatres for their evening’s entertainment?’

Inazia nodded. ‘You can say that again. And to some extent, you’re not entirely blameless for that.’

‘I’m not?’

‘Well, no. You may not have lit the fire that destroyed this city, but you did, so to speak, bring the torch that lit it out of the catacombs in company with the Shadow King. Puppetism arose from the ashes of old Bookholm. To that extent—’

‘To that extent
I’m
to blame for everything yet again?’ I laughed. ‘Utter nonsense! You can pin a lot of things on me, but not the fact that timber-time is dying out and there’s a puppet theatre on every street corner.
I’m
not responsible for that!’

The Uggly smiled. ‘But that art form could never have attained its present greatness if the city hadn’t been destroyed. It’s a beautiful bloom that sprang from disaster. You can stick that feather in your cap with a clear conscience, my friend.’

To be honest, I was far from displeased by this idea. Optimus Yarnspinner, the spark that ignited a new art form, the father of
Puppetism
! Why not? Speaking with all due modesty, I had already made a certain contribution to Zamonian culture, but I’d never created a new artistic discipline before. Inazia’s bold assertion might possibly contain a grain of truth … An exciting idea began to germinate within me.

‘I want to learn everything there is to know about Puppetism,’ I demanded. ‘Everything! I’ve missed out on so much since the old days.’

‘Everything?’ Inazia sighed. ‘Pah! Do you know what that means? Have you any idea how much accumulated knowledge there is? How long it would take?’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’ve plenty of time.’

She gave me a long look. ‘You never know,’ she said eventually, taking my arm again. ‘Very well, though, I’ll tell you all I can. You asked for it, and you’ll regret it.’ Then she laughed in the dismaying way in which only Ugglies can laugh.

1
Late evening, when it was an old Bookholmian custom to light a log fire and read aloud from books. Local bookshops sometimes used such readings for promotional purposes. See
The City of Dreaming Books
, p. 109 ff. (Tr.)

Maestro Corodiak

DURING THE NEXT
few weeks, my friends, I discovered how accurate Inazia’s prediction had been. I learned far more about Puppetism than I really wanted. But isn’t that the only sensible way of learning? Stuffing yourself with more than you can digest? Sucking up information like a thirsty sponge? Filling up with data like a camel of the desert hydrating itself for a long journey? It’s the only way of finding out what you really need – what will lodge in the convolutions of your brain like intellectual, ideological fat and form the inexhaustible reservoir that will sustain you for a lifetime. Any serious course of study is an orgy, an information-gathering bacchanal. Most of it you subsequently forget like anyone who has indulged to excess. What matters is what sticks in the mind – except that you never know in advance what it will be. So in with it! I’ve never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can’t arrange a library in alphabetical order until you’ve collected one.

Yes, I wanted to learn! At a relatively advanced age for a Lindworm I became an avid student of Puppetism, and to that end the Uggly mercilessly dragged me along every street and through every district in the city. She showed me every gaming room, every cellar theatre, every bookshop specialising in Puppetism, every little museum of curiosities, every factory and every shop that had any connection with that novel art. We roamed the backyards of Slengvort, where there were workshops producing almost every part of a puppet’s anatomy: wig-makers, eye mechanics, wood carvers for kinetic lips, beard and plait braiders, workshops for mechanical hands and mobile ceramic faces, carpenters’ shops that produced wooden limbs on a lathe. There
were
studios redolent of turpentine that specialised in the elaborate painting of puppets. Other artists concentrated on scenery and posters. There was a cloud-painting studio, prettily named
Cumulus
, which would paint you any theatrical sky you chose. There were also smithies that turned out perfect little metal joints, sewing rooms for tiny costumes, factories producing miniature tableware and articles in daily use, a rope works producing puppet strings only, and several dwarfs’ joineries specialising in miniature furniture. In one of Slengvort’s side streets there was even a tattooist whose ink-laden needles decorated puppets in an unrivalled manner.

We visited a shop that traded in the Doodleton Musical Puppets I’d seen at the Puppetocircus Maximus: walking basses, dancing violins, flying trumpets, eyelash-batting clarinets, and drums and xylophones that played themselves with spindly metal arms and tiny fingers. The proprietor, a talkative Frogling with a gurgling voice, proudly told us about an opera of his own composition that dealt with the historically attested musical war between the
Grailsundian Frogling Polka
and the
Florinthian St Vitus’s Dance
. We fled from his premises before he could start to yodel us some of it.

In antiquarian bookshops we rummaged around in handwritten scripts for hitherto unperformed puppet plays. There were thousands of these, for nearly every other waiter and bookseller’s apprentice strove to render his lot more lucrative by writing them. In cellars and attics I discovered a multitude of unused or forgotten puppets such as I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams. They ranged from the tiniest of flea circus marionettes, which were adequately visible only through a magnifying glass, to whole armies of tattered puppet supernumeraries and huge, colourful book-dragons the length of a whole street but made of featherweight balsa wood. These were stored in interconnecting vaulted cellars, where they collected dust while waiting to be borne through the streets during the annual puppet carnival.

I stood marvelling in a crowded shop that specialised in butterfly marionettes. Thousands of wonderful
Lepidoptera zamoniae
, which I
initially
mistook for hand-painted paper puppets, were suspended from strings or mounted on thin sticks, adorning the shelves and walls in such profusion that the sheer wealth of colours made one’s eyes ache. When the proprietress, who reeked of wild garlic and was an Uggly like Inazia, informed us that they were all
real
butterflies, individually mummified and mounted, it gave me the creeps. Even her assurances that the creatures died a peaceful, natural death and had been reverently embalmed by the Uggly herself failed to appease me altogether. This Uggly-owned business made an almost more sinister impression on me than a shop named
The Witching Hour
, which we visited shortly afterwards, although that one positively aimed to give its customers the creeps! As its name betrayed, it specialised in puppet actors that played demons, ghosts and similar imaginary, otherworldly creatures. Dangling from its ceiling were greenish victims of drowning with bulging eyes; ghostly, skeletal figures swathed in cobwebs that glowed by day as well as in the dark; headless bodies and bodyless heads; transparent, nebulous figures made of glass and crystal; dancing will-o’-the-wisps; and every imaginable kind of shadowy creature whose appearance on the stage of a puppet theatre was calculated to provoke gooseflesh and childish screams. Inazia, who was clearly a regular customer, acquired a shrunken head reputed to weep when the clock struck midnight. I never asked if it worked, nor did I want to know!

Housed in one backyard basement was a workshop specialising in the manufacture of puppets related in various ways to books – a very special type of Bookholmian Puppetism. Here we found marionettes similar to some of the protagonists I’d seen at the Puppetocircus Maximus, for instance, talking puppets composed of piles of books or dangerous Animatomes complete with eyes, legs, mandibles and venomous stings, though in this case they were hanging motionless on strings. There were also the talkative classical volumes that had spoken in rhyme onstage in the scene involving Goldenbeard’s book trap, but here they were mutely arrayed on a shelf.