years, if I would just drink less and avoid wild game on the dining table. But none of those people, no matter how hard they try, will be able to return to the past, my past where I rule supremely with the aid of faithful Grossman, not out of a craving for power, but from a feeling of calling to teach those pretentious bastards the principle of subordination. And the monks all agree with me. They came by the other night. They sat with me. The Hegumen said that, in their dreams, they had discovered what happened to the Etruscans. What’s an Etruscan, I asked. And the Hegumen said that, long ago, where Rome and the so-called Vicarius Dei Filii are today, a people named the Rascians used to live, who one day disappeared from the face of the Earth. Just as we ourselves intend to do. Their priests-dreamers, going into the future down the path of dreams, saw what will one day happen on the ill-fated Apennine peninsula. One night, they all went to sleep and in their dream they saw a new country across the sea, mountainous and water-rich, so they woke up there and, in order to cover their tracks in history, they called themselves by a new name – the Serbs. A shocking tale. It was told, as I later found out, to soften my heart and quiet my anger. Because, as they departed, the Hegumen took me aside and said that there, beyond it all, Margot was meeting with Von Kurtiz. Grossman told me the same thing. They see the two of them, they say, under my windows, in the dark of night, their necks bloody. And for the first time, I was overcome with sadness instead of rage. Is it possible that not even death, I thought, is able to overcome infidelity and treason? And then two tears appeared in the corners of my eyes: Oh, Margot, Margot…
I wrote a Code. Rigorous but fair. If you cut off someone’s hand, cut off your own as well. If you do not do so, you will be executed. Why should we spread lawlessness? Why drag a third party (a judge, a guard, an executioner…) into the circulus vitiosus? The law is the law. That is what the first article says. If they did not want to submit to God’s law, let them groan under mine. Everyone is guilty and everyone should be punished. But the time of cowardly New Europe will come, when persecutions will not be anathematized. Perhaps not so soon. I’m not sure if the Renaissance has begun in Italy yet. It will never be clear to me what is so bad about injustice, torture and imprisonment; those are privileges. A certain path to the Kingdom of Heaven. Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. That is the second, last article of my Code. The rest, ten volumes, is filled with smudges. With the simulacra of letters. With the songs of troubadours. Sancta simplicitas! Whoever agrees to be robbed and murdered has the right to rob and murder. No one else. Since I have agreed to be murdered and robbed, I killed Margot and her lover but that did not help either. There, they have gone on cheating me, and they will continue to cheat me throughout the ages.
Before we vanish from the face of the Earth, I wish to leave behind a true account of my reign for my progeny, for the rabble that is patiently waiting the moment of their birth. To avenge myself ahead of time on the gloomy writers of history. I can already see them rifling through libraries, digging into dusty charters, scribbling treatises about what I did, what I thought, where I was mistaken, disturbing me in death just as my subjects disturbed me in life. Should they be allowed to control the reins of my actions from the fog of the future? I will put an end to the tyranny of the unborn, to the fruits of our common sin, to those who would deepen our transgressions; so that, from the nothingness of my present time, the profane who are wallowing in the mud of the past will not be able to find arguments to justify their own present time, which is even more oblivious.
I will not allow them to write my history, I will write theirs. By their own hand, on their own paper. As Radbertus of Odense says, can those who do not exist know anything? Even when they take on human form, what can they know of events that have vanished without a trace? I will make mistakes and lie, I admit, but I will not agree that that means I am godless. Now, they call me Charles the Clairvoyant, Charles the Edified, but as soon as I die history will remember me as the Ugly, history into which I am inserting myself by force in order to destroy it, in disgust. I want to overtake time. To describe it before a certain time is reached and then time will have no choice but to be exactly as I have determined it should be in my moment of divine inspiration. Quod dixi dixi! And that is why others should be born who will write down my thoughts. The wretches. They will think that those thoughts are theirs, and they will not even know that they do not exist yet. Isn’t this a contradiction? It makes no difference. Grossman! Write this down: I, Charles the Hideous, in the name of God, decree that the following should be born: Herbert Meier, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Çulaba Çulabi (what a silly name), Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Sava Djakonov, Rheiner Meier, his son Ernest, Afanasij Yermolayev, a dozen supplementary characters, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Kowalsky, yes, Joseph Kowalsky, Kowalskyyyy!
“No religion can change the world, and no single fact can ever refute a religion.” Thus will Oswald Spengler write on the eve of one of the slaughters of the future. Hundreds of years will pass in vain; even then this will be clear to no one. Years pass in vain; that’s the first premise of this chapter of HISTORY. Thousands of futile years. I watch Grossman: hunchbacked, wrapped in a bearskin, he is writing down my words. The second S in his name has gotten somehow smaller, grown pale. Were I to ask him: Do you get the meaning of Spengler’s words, he would say: Yes, Sire; were I to ask him: Are you dead? He would answer: Yes, Sire. Complete obedience! The most certain path to the Kingdom of Heaven. Years spent at the Theological Seminary in Uppsala have left their indelible mark. But he did not learn anything about religion and facts there. He cannot be blamed for that, such knowledge is not gained by study. It is inborn, as in my case. And yet, I am not proud of it; genius brings a heap of unpleasantness with it. With it you attract the rage of the average folk. There, just now – although that now will have to wait its turn in the chronological order – one of the countless scribblers, a certain Herbert Meier, is writing and proving that I never even existed, that history makes no mention of me, that I am the fabrication of a mystical fraternity that I myself concocted. He is partially right, the good-for-nothing Meier; insofar as I am not a fact. I extracted myself from my shell-of-fact, thank God, and I watch what is going on at the grandiose fairground that stretches across the centuries in both directions. I suppose now it is understandable how it is that I know what happens in the distant past and far into the future: I am not a fact, I simply believe that I exist; that gives me the ability to recognize facts that are all happening at the same time, but for the sake of difficulty, they enter the present one by one. Time is just the normal ordering of facts, fact after fact: bones, skulls, written records; that fabulous heap of things needs to have a certain order. Isn’t that so, Grossman? Yes, Sire. Then write this down: Construction of the Tower of Babylon happened just a moment ago, Judgment Day will happen in the next. All that occurs in between is not time. Only facts occur.
But I did not come into the world to adapt myself to its rules. From early childhood I was unable to see any deeper difference between the blueprints of cities and the cities that are built. The third dimension, which the scholars of my court pushed under my nose, made me laugh. This so-called third dimension is the same as a carrot strung to a stick and hung in front of a donkey’s eyes. No one has any use of it, and it has done damage to many. Because, if you set off to catch it, if you head off into that ostensible distance, it moves away, it does not allow you near, but it draws you forward, like the carrot does the donkey, straight into trouble and death. Yeah, yeah, the scholars, professors and metaphysicists will cry out in protest, “But we live in this world, we have a soul and a spirit.” One load of nonsense after another. No one has ever proven that. Life, let the professors get it into their heads, is not a fact. Don’t be disgusted, Grossman, I am not denying the existence of the soul and spirit, far from it, I am denying the existence of the scholars and professors, I am denying that you exist. You are the parasites of your souls. You are a nasty disease that your souls must survive. You, as Grossman, or as Grosman, you are nothing. It is in my power to order you to go back to the beginning of HISTORY, to scratch out “Grossman” wherever it is written, and to replace it with, let’s say, “Gruber.” I can order you to embellish an even darker autobiography than the one you wrote, the one you rebelled against when I died, scribbling your pitiful denunciations in the margins. Assine! No biography can be as horrible as its owner can. But I have still not died in the world of facts. I just want you to know that I can see through your actions. Half-wit! To whom do you think you are justifying yourself? Haven’t I told you hundreds
