ANALYSIS
To start I will comment how the hypertext is structured and how I read it,
and afterwards I will explain the aspects which were important for me.
The author shows us firstly the title page
and the names of the translator and the illustrator who helped him. Below, he
puts “Start with Builders” and once we click we are in the story. In this chapter,
“Builders”,
they tell us the story of builders, al called John, who travelled in a boat
from Osat to Serbia in the XVIII century, due to the demand of construction
after the Austro-Turkish War. They restored monasteries, churches, chapels, etc.
In the beginning of XIX century, the most famous builder was Dimitriye
Shuvakovich, whose motto was and remained:
“If you want to
live long and happily on this earth, do not spare your efforts!”
This builder with some others built for Lord Nikolich of Rudna a small palace, and beside
it a fashionable park with imitation classic marble urns along its paths.
Lord Nikolich didn’t understand the meaning of this urns and the builder told
him that it was to collect tears. Lord Nikolich didn’t like this, and the
builder was fired. At the end of this chapter, the author transports us
directly to the next link “Lunch”.
This chapter starts explaining that Lord Nikolich had a daughter called
Attilia, from fifteen years old, whom he sent to school as though she were a boy. She was angry with her
father because he had fired the builder without having built a church for her wedding nor a palace to live in with her fiancé Lieutenant
Alexander, so she told the coachman, Yagoda, to find the best builder to do
both things. Yagoda found two ones who were the best at that moment and invited
them to lunch: John the Damascene, who built the palace and John
the Ladder, who built the church. Lord Nikolich laid down only two conditions.
The first one was that he would pay one year in advance but the two buildings
had to be finished at the same time. The other one was that they had to build
them near to the house where they were living. Both builders opposed this
second condition as they wanted to raise the building where only one wind blows. After lunch,
Damascene went with Attilia to the music-room and she told him, that the palace
had to be like a love letter. She also told him the dreams she had had in the
ones she gave birth to a boy with a scar like an eye on his arm and that this
boy would build her the palace. When she pulled up Damascene’s sleeve she saw
the scar. This is the end of the second chapter.
Next we find “the First Fork”.
He asks us if we want to read first the chapter “The Third Church” or “The
Palace”. It’s not important which one you choose because you’ll read the other one
after. To click you’ll find below links called “CHURCH” and ”PALACE”. I
personally chose “CHURCH” for the simple fact that it came first. One you click
on the link it takes you to this chapter.
Exactly on the Feast of St.
Andrew the First-Called, John the Ladder presented Lord Nikolich his drawings
of the church and further he showed him two plans of two other ones he was
planning to build. Nikolich was surprised since he only had asked him one and
didn’t plan to pay him more. John explained him that one was for the garden,
where he would plan a box hedge and he would perform little by little a church
such as he had asked him. Nikolich could observe the evolution from the church
from his window that would grow at the same time as the one of stone. When
Nikolich asked John about the other church from the plan he answered:
- Ah, that's a
secret which you will only uncover when the building work is finished. For
there can be no successful construction without a secret and no real church
without a miracle.
Attilia and her father went very often to look how the construction of the
church and the palace went, but one day Yagoda told them that the church of the
garden had stopped growing. Nikolich didn’t matter because he hadn’t asked for
that church but he went to ask John when he would finish the important one.
When he did arrive, he saw that the church had a door and a window less and
no-one was working in it. Instead of calling John, he asked Damascene to know
why John had stopped building and he answered that it was because the church of
the garden had stopped growing. This made Nikolich very angry but Damascene
told him that if the church of the garden didn’t grow, the third one wouldn’t
grow either and they should be finished at the same time. Damascene explained
him why this happened:
- You must have
sinned, my Lord. You must have owed something to somebody, or short-changed
someone. When you remember what you did wrong and who you were unjust to, show
repentance and put matters right. Return the debt, then John can complete your
church.
Nikolich asked him where they were building the third church and Damascene
answered him:
- In Heaven.
John always builds the third church in Heaven.
At the end the author tells us that if we haven’t read the chapter “The
Palace”, we have to read it and if we already did, we have to continue to “the
Second Fork”.
At the same Feast of
St. Andrew the First-Called, John the Damascene showed the plans of the palace
to Nikolich, the one who would be formed by a great hall with a fireplace and
two rooms: the dining-room and the bedchamber. Attilia remembered him that she
wanted the palace as a love letter and he started to build it. One day,
Damascene called Nikolich because he digging he had found a marble statue of a
woman who was pointing at something with her forefinger and he told him this
would be fine at the entrance hall of the palace. Nikolich didn’t like it and
Damascene took
a hammer and knocked off the statue's arm. Suddenly a red liquid
spurted out as if it was blood, and you could see that it had muscles and bones
but made of marble. When Attilia knew this, she went to see the statue but
Damascene had taken it away. This meant that something bad was going to happen
because Damascene never went back. One day, Yagoda arrived
with news from Damascene. The thing is that because of all his affairs with
married women he was persued by their husbands, so
some nights, he decided to sleep in the palace. One of these nights he was attacket but could defend himself, cut off the forefinger
of his opponent and escape. When Attila and her father heard this story they
went to Tisa, to look for Damascene, but his workers told them he had already
gone, and that they had to pay them because they had done the work of three
years in only one and they only had been payed for
the first. Nikolich told them he wouldn’t pay anything until it would be
finished and called John the Ladder to ask him who was reallu
Damascene. He said that he was a normal and common person and that he had said
that he wouldn’t work for them anymore. Besides he had given him a box which he
had to deliver him that contained a bloodstained forefinger.
Now we find the same comment as at the end of the chapter before, but this
time with “The Third Church”, as we have already read it we go to “the Second Fork”.
Here he asks another time
which chapter we want to read first knowing that we’ll have to read both. One
is “BEDCHAMBER” and the other is “DINING-ROOM”. One more time I chose “BEDCHAMBER” because
it was the first.
The chapter begins with Attilia writing a letter to John the Ladder telling him that
as her father didn´t want to pay them, she sends him money for both, for him
and Damascene in order to pay the work done. One morning Yagoda
arrived shouting that the hedge in the garden was growing, so they went running
to see if the other things were also growing, but they saw that everything was
the same as before and came back home. The same day Attila came back to palace
to go for a walk, in one of the rooms she found a compass and a message from Damascene,
so she decided to stay there that night because it was already getting dark.
She came into the bedchamber and threw herself on the big round bed which was
in the center of the room. When she heard noises, she wanted to shut herself up
in the room but she couldn´t until she tried
30 times, just the same as when she wanted to go out, then she realized
that this number was related to Damascene´s message. Next morning she noticed
that if she placed the two compasses in the bed´s center, they pointed at the
marble statue which was found and taken by Damascene, and started to make
calculations which took her to the city of Temishvar.
In arriving, she recognized the church which John the Ladder was going to
built for her and went in order to talk with the priest. He told her they were
waiting for her and gave her a document in which was written “Attilia as owner
of the church” and a box containing two marriage rings with "A"
letter engraved on them. The priest told her that they were from John and to
the question of who of both johns he was talking about:
-
Well, there are two
rings - rejoined the priest and burst into
laughter.
At the end of
the chapter it tells us that if we didn´t read the chapter called “The dining-room”
we should go to it, and if we have read it before then this is the end of the
story. As we didn´t see it, we click on the link.
This chapter tells us that Attila liked to go and prowl around the
unfinished palace and one afternoon when she was drowsed in a sofa heard one of
his father´s servants doing a stock list of the objects in the hall in a loud
voice. She noticed that all of them started with the same letter and knew that
it was another message from Damascene. She ran to the dining-room and she was
very surprised when she saw the whole roof painted. There was Drawn a clock shaped
sun showing ten to ten, the moon and four stars. Combining the first letters
from the objects in the stock list, she found the following sentence:
"An arshin
equals a hundred miles"
All this
finishes in turn in a window, so Attilia decided to call Yagoda
in order to ask him to measure the distance between the stars painted. She also
thought that the clock shaped sun was a compass and that the time represented
the northwest, so she asked which city was
Attilia was
really surprised, and then Lieutenant asked her if she knew someone in Kremünster. She told about her boyfriend, Alexander, and
told him about their relationship. He came to see her, they had sex, and then
he left without saying anything. At that moment Lieutenant hold her and they
had sex. After all this, she hugged her fiancé and said:
-
I'll find no better
Alexander than this one!
From where she
was having sex she couldn´t appreciate that Lieutenant was wearing a glove on
his right hand in order to hide that he didn´t have the index finger and in its
place he had a silver thimble.
And now it’s really
the end of the hypertext since we have read all the chapters and we only have to
click the link “the end” of the story.