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The Pavilion and the Lime Tree
by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
pon his return from a war in the course of which he had, as was his custom, defeated many an enemy and reduced many a walled city to gravel and ash, King Guita wished to take the air beneath a certain aged pavilion. No legend clung to its grounds. In the remotest courtyard of the palace it stood, a simple stone pavilion whose floor was adorned by a mosaic of no great originality. The edifice, all told, was furnished with a wooden bench and flanked by a lime tree. In his already distant childhood days, King Guita had spent long and restful evenings there, playing at his governess's feet in the wan scent of lime.
When he found, on his return, the pavilion demolished and the lime tree felled, a royal fury overtook him. He summoned the palace architect and demanded that he explain himself. In a quavering voice, the man pleaded for his life. Wasn't it his duty, foreseeing as he did his majesty's victory and the treasures he would certainly bring back, to enlarge the storehouses of the palace? And since that courtyard, forgotten by one and all, with its obsolete pavilion and its ailing lime, adjoined one of the storerooms already overflowing with the spoils of earlier wars...
King Guita saw that the architect believed himself to have acted rightly, and for a while spared his life. But a feeling of irreparable loss overcame him each time his thoughts returned to the coolness of the tiles beneath his knees as he sniffed the oval leaves brought his way on the breeze. Then it seemed that he had lost more than a city, more even than a province: something like his kingdom's secret heart. One day, when this feeling assailed him with greater force than usual, his gaze settled on the architect. He frowned, and had him put to death.
He ordered the successor to rebuild the pavilion in a recreated courtyard, and to transplant there a nearly identical tree. Finally, he went one night and sat alone on the wooden bench. He lingered there, sniffing the air in vain. The tree's emanations seemed denatured and unfamiliar to him. When the light had so dimmed that the mosaic might no longer be made out, he let himself slip from the bench onto the floor, onto the very spot where, as a child, he had spent so many peaceful hours. He ran his fingers over the surface of the mosaic without finding the same infinitesimal reliefs, the same minute fissures, the same traces of wear his fingertips remembered. The pitiless ruler wept. He who had never before trembled was terrified. Recently but a memory, the pavilion and the lime tree were real once more. Suddenly the king doubted his memories, his own name, his rank. And if he were not Guita the king, by God who was he, and what was he doing in this unfamiliar palace, in this hostile night?
To be certain he might never again suffer this nightmarish feeling, he forbade forevermore any change, be it in even the smallest detail, to the city. It could of course grow, and its upkeep would always be a sacred duty, but what already was would be forever, and would enjoy imprescriptible rights of utter precedence over what was yet to come, over all the unformed and indeterminate future.
It would seem the king's project and character fascinated his subjects and their descendants, as for many years, almost unto the present day, all was done according to his will. It is true that today few venture into the city's distant heart where, on days of high wind, the last buildings from the Founder's era finish breaking like waves in a gravel sea. Abandoned, too, are the plans to preserve the inextricable and dangerous maze of medieval alleys. It is thanks to the long fidelity of a people to the folly of a single man that we inhabit the sole existing urban order devised toward totality, a concentric and cumulative keep, time and the city turning, ideally, around a memory like a wheel around an axle.
(translated by Edward Gauvin )
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's novel La Faculté des songes (Grasset, 1982) won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and his most recent collection of stories, Singe savant tabassé par deux clowns (Grasset, 2005), was awarded the Bourse Goncourt for achievement in the form. His thirty-year career spans eight novels and more than 95 stories that have been translated in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, China, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, Slovenia, Hungary, and Croatia.
Edward Gauvin graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and, last November, received a Young Translators Fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. His work on Châteaureynaud, the author's first appearances in English, may be seen at AGNI Online and, among other pieces he translated, at Words Without Borders.
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