City, Sister, Silver, page 17
And not long after, a danced-to-death Potok, trembling with emotion, was accepting congratulations from his elated pseudodroogs, and Jarmilka turned up for her percentage flushed with happiness and full of sex, which was her ABC … in addition to chuckles, the Organization gave her a bouquet and of course a couple slugs of the Fiery, and then she got acquainted with our buildings, putting in a word or two with lowered eyes about the things we could do together … I mean business-wise though, boys. And the metal flowed.
Just for thoroughness’ sake … Potok was sick to his stomach, but well, might as well, he said to himself … and the next day set out in a spotless byznys suit with Bohler’s beautiful Laotian lady, alias Madame Hoi-Tsu, a Japanese industrialist with a fragrant jasmine blossom tucked behind her dainty ear … and sporting the perfect ensemble, a subtle gray discreetly fading into dark green … my friend Cepková, the actress, had been teaching her how to walk in it. Ha, check me ou’! No bi’ deal! You look like a duck! Toes out! Cepková commanded. Don’t swing your ass, twist it. Give it a little toss. She doesn’t know what twist is! No, you nanny goa’! An’ since whe’ you know how Japane’e lady walk! You don’ know bean. We had to give her that. And from then on Bohler’s Laotian lady could move however she wanted. It was better like that anyway.
I’ve already referred to the misfortune that met one of the doctor’s sons, put to death at the hands of bandits. It was back in that old familiar ferment of the new unexplored era that the troubles with the hitlers began. And I saw Bohler the Great swing his olovrant.
The hitlers and stalingos came along right after time exploded, the blast having unplugged even the crummiest pipes of the Sewers, however worm-eaten they were and wherever the hell they went to, whatever disgusting Devil’s butt they went up … and the hitlers started slithering out … into the light straight from the eggs of the poisonous old serpent … they’d never heard of persuasion, the only thing they respected was violence … they were whores to power, the kind that makes problems for everyone else except the one who wields it … the stalingos crushed only those weaker and smaller than themselves, which there was no shortage of … they lived on the opposite side of the coin, the only power they had was dark … even Bohler miscalculated when he claimed it was under control, that their days were already numbered … because until that holy time comes, they and they alone will be counting the wounds and knocked-out teeth and shattered skulls of the others … those stalingos and gotwaalds* … and it takes the Lord an eternity to do the arithmetic … so defend yourself, Starry Bog tells you again and again … in all sorts of ways, by various means and methods … and all our pals that had any dealings with the hitlerite stalingos said it was worse than back in the Sewer … since after all you knew the spooks and they knew you and everyone knew the old time was spent … and some of our battered pals from friendly outfits sadly nodded their heads and spat tobacco … but now and then in the morning, since they were getting up early anyway … they’d polish up their bayonets … the good old warpath leads into the new time too … and there were new hitlers born every day, and they were acclimatized to the new time, to time in motion … and some weren’t even human … I myself caught one and kept him out in the yard … he’d never read a single sentence by Foglor or Landon or Kcharal ben May,* never heard of the human tribe or compassion, didn’t know how a person should treat the weak, especially widows and orphans, never heard of deference toward each and every woman … all potential sisters, or of great respect for them, stronger than any flamethrower, his dark heart was filled with nothing but complexes … which in order to survive he had to get out of his system … and he was eager to, all right … I ended up feeling so sorry for him I wanted to let him go, but David and Micka said no.
The attack came early, unexpectedly, and on several fronts at once.
Lady Laos and I were riding the subway back from an office where we’d pulled the old Japaneez bluff … we always arrived in a car with a driver, and he was Bohler’s man, a former parishioner of his, but I kept his palm greased so I could drag Lady Laos off, at least for a little while, to a hotel or my place on Gasworks … she wasn’t opposed to the idea of an occasional escape from the altar, the endless rackets with Buddhas, the blood-red wine … we’d always cuddle a little, but mainly we would talk, because I was fascinated by her tongue, now that I knew that Czech had exploded together with time, her tongue actually fascinated me more than all the rest of her beautiful golden-brown body.
Lady Laos sensed the dark wave first. I sat absorbed in daydreams. The train was just passing under the Vltava where an iron gate straddles its path, so if anything went wrong, the tunnels between the stations closed, and the metal plate chopped the car in two, hopefully we’d both be on the same side of the guillotine, together till the water washed over us … I thought to myself, it’s always good to be prepared for every possibility … meanwhile Lady Laos crept off to a seat in back, in the corner, and huddled up, even managing to shrink a little, cats have a knack for that … I look up and see a pair of skinhead stooges garbed in black, obvious hitlers … know why those jerks’re bald? I flashed back to a recent conversation with Micka, cause they’re not men … he’d said … remember the advice Chief Joseph gave General Champollion: Tell your young men to let their hair grow long so it’ll be an honor to kill them … so said the chief of the Nez Percé tribe, that old murderer … till they killed him of course … they’re pussies, they’re scared a losin their scalps … Micka concluded, but unfortunately he wasn’t here right now … he’d’ve seen that these two weren’t scared, they were champin at the bit … from the next car over two more shuffled in … one stalingo was in the car with us already, I’d been too busy daydreaming to notice … he stood up … so five supremacists total, an that’s plenty … they stood there leering at me … one made a grab for Lady Laos’s hair, she knocked his hand away … an here it comes, the whole folklore. I narrowed my eyes, preparing to take all my power and dance my way into the real world, summon up my darkest demon, the one with eyes set in dark slits, gashes of wrath, and howl and twirl in the air like a beast, and bite, and always land on all fours … the hitlers were so much in love with their dark power that only pure insanity could stop them … sometimes … but I can wait, I thought, I’ve got my rosary … and Lady Laos’s moist palm slipped in between my cold clenched fingers. Meanwhile two of the boys in leather jackets casually passed a bottle of Myslivec* back and forth, spluttering with laughter, the third flashed his skull-and-swastika T-shirt, the fourth the chains around his hand and a spare around his waist. The fifth calmly surveyed the alarmed faces on the rest of the passengers, I’d forgotten all about them. How long till the next stop, three, five minutes? Can we make the door? An then what? I ran through tactics like a field marshal. But the graves in the distance looked dark and damp, as victims’ graves tend to be. Fine, I put on my tough-guy face, I got a blade in my pocket too, dickheads. Yeeellooow whooore, the chain guy warbled, the chief, I figured, rocking up and down in his boots. He was still just playing around though, the frenzy hadn’t caught him yet. The people around us stared into their newspapers, at the ceiling, at each other’s shoes. A little girl next to me dropped a tasteless pink-and-yellow webbed toyfil on the floor, looked at it, opened her mouth. “By underground rail, through all Prague we sail, on steps another elderly mother,” a tune buzzed in my head … slaaant-eyed scuuumbaaag, warbled the guy with the chains … “the cat’s aboard too, purring loudly for you,” I lay Lady Laos’s arm around my shoulders so it’d be obvious to everyone, “riding the metro, the underground track, Vanya with his bass and kitty in back,” I hummed the tune to her. Hey, the chain guy leaned toward me, Potok, you old brook,* I could make you bubble so bad you’d pee your pants, dumbshit. Zat so? I replied bravely. Fok yu, the Martian said to my face, even thumb contracts don’t get broken, an if you wanna know more be at Černá’s tonight … Černá’s, I realized he’d said. And I was pretty relieved, for a second I thought they’d found out that I’d stopped tossing scraps to their bro in the yard. The train pulled into the station. Die, human pieces a shit, the Martian bid the other passengers farewell and got off. So did his boys.
Trash, said the man with the little girl next to me, are you from Japan, he asked Lady Laos, r yu jappaneez, ma’am? Yes, I said, she’s looking into buying the City Brewery. I was pretty prompt in my role as interpreter. Good for her, another passenger joined in, we can’t afford it anyway. Can’t afford it, you wanna sell it all to the furriners? someone else chimed in loudly. A wave of satisfaction rippled through the debaters. So we end up slaves, yeah, mister, you can stick it up your you-know-what! Look everyone … if the Castle sells out to the Jews, we’re screwed! What are you, some kina intellectual? … Stupi’ hiyenaz, bluddy fucksy itty-its, said Lady Laos, full of fury, her beautiful Czech tongue so brutal it tugged at my heartstrings. I comfortably stretched out my legs. Lady Laos too. It was behind us.
But not entirely. As we pulled up to our buildings, back in the car with the chauffeur again, I saw Bohler the Great swing the olovrant.
It was almost high noon. We’d spent some time in a certain hotel … and now it looked like we were too late, me and Madame Hoi-Tsu, now slightly raspy from speaking … it didn’t look pretty, the sun, the roar … in shock, our driver slammed on the brakes, then immediately shot right off again … the car jumped, I swear, like a living thing … straight at one of the runts, and we saw the Laotians’ shop gasping its last in the flames … their fans, made with love and fear and inspired by the butterfly’s ineffable charm, fluttered amid the random occlusion of glassy fangs, the remnants of shattered windows, crackling in wreaths of sparks … not to mention the joss sticks and incense, whose fragrances had long since lapsed into the old walls, their perpetual moistness now being licked by an at first glance clearly obscene tongue … and as their red and yellow scorching breath reached up to the second story, there wasn’t a soul around … not one of our dear tenants … the street was empty … and two Laotians held firmly in check by a clamoring pack of hitlers were parrying with boofalo spears, what else, and one of the chrome-domes dropped to the ground with blood coming out his neck … skinhead scum, I almost wet my pants right then, and my legs began to dance on me, but this wasn’t the time for flight … now was a good time to die … this was the fast time of Chief Joseph … and the chauffeur lurched forward, screaming the car to a halt just two centimeters away from one scared-to-death skinhead’s mug … close enough to accommodate those gorilla mitts of his, I was glad the driver had em … and Lady Laos dropped into a crouch, ready to pounce, claws artfully trimmed and subtly adorned with henna … always prepared for loving scratches, I’d naively thought till then … and she let out a shriek, a shriek of power with hatred in it … because one Laotian lay on the ground, samurai sword snapped in two, and Bohler, now Bohler the Great, stood by the wall of the building as it blistered in the heat, and spotting us grinned through the blood on his face, flashing his teeth in that perverted old smile … and as a hitler with a crowbar came at him, he swung that olovrant of his and swatted him across the eyes so hard I hope the last thing that fuck ever saw was the bared teeth of the Lord’s dog … Bohler the Great … I approached the Laosters, and before they recognized me I sustained a minor stab wound over my left collarbone … to this day I wear the scar as a tattoo of that moment … but then I laughed and they knew who I was … I laughed because I knew it all, this was the old time back again, the time of the corpse, the time of the Monster, and I knew that I could handle it … my power was coming back, and good settled in where it always had been, face-to-face with evil again … and there were just two colors, black and white … like back in the body of the Monster, the intoxicating red darkness glowed inside my head, but not like before, when it had come while making love, because the time for that word too had come, only now in a brawl … I danced the attackers a first-rank dance, they were in the first rank and Potok was in top form … and had good shoes on … and in and through my dance, as the first bone snapped, I begged She-Dog to come back to me like my old power had so suddenly now … and because I still loved her, I danced as well as I had back then and only then and once upon a time in the dance of the rose … but instead of dancing the death of a rose, I whipped out my knife and cut a tiny étude of a rose’s life into the pavement, softly … carving out a few dance figures … till the boys were fairly dripping … and then She-Dog swore that she’d come back … that I’d see her … again she put words in my brain … not in some dark cellar this time … but on the blood-soaked pavement, in sunlight … in the fire’s warmth … in freedom, and then I saw the Martian … and his eyes showed neither anger nor fear … like the eyes of the ones the Laosters and I forced back step by step to the sound of their pained screams … he was eager … no bat … no crowbar … no chain, none of those fashionable items, just a long Solingen in his hand, gleaming, solid and grooved, wonder what for? I managed to ask one of the louts before finishing off his face … plainly the Martian didn’t give a damn about any showy bouncer stunts … and then the Laotians started howling, a furious throaty howl, and I felt the rhythmic frenzy of war drums pounding in my brain … I guess their forest spirits answering back … howling, with an instinct inherited from the slave hunters, they could sense the end was near, one way or another, and in fraternal harmony the two of them wanted a chance to kill their own Frenchman, before it was all over, whichever way it turned out … and the parishioner lay on the pavement with two lying underneath him but one standing over him … and Bohler swang his olovrant … but one of the boys snagged the string with his crowbar, and while they were playing tug-of-war a few more came at Bohler from behind, with a certain cautiousness, but still pretty fast … and the Martian left behind the dopes in the front row … and waited … and then I danced a hoof chop and one of the animals dropped and I felt like I’d knocked down a riser, clearing the stage for the Great Director’s latest dramatical tour de force … the Martian stepped through a gap in the bodies, parting in waves to make way for his fury, and She-Dog cried out: Darling! … for a little tenderness I gotta go to the threshold of death? you bitch! … I sent my words back into the darkness to her, and the knife blade sparkled at my chest … and out of the thus far incomprehensibly silent sky came a RRRRAAWWWR, a hole opened up in the ground at the Martian’s feet, chunks of cobblestone flying, and again: ROAAWEE!, this time different as Lady Laos sprinted out of the building holding the shotgun at her hip … I felt pretty proud that she’d saved my life first, I’m a little conceited, I admit … just between us actors … RRROWEEE, this time blasting into the air … and the wounded went quickly limping off after the ones that were still whole … and due to the intoxicating feeling of victory, our wounds didn’t even hurt that much, luckily that’s how it tends to be, they say, in those kindsa battles. Only then we went into the building.
Sister
Shards, they have the time of those days in them too, it was she, my dark star, who took me by the hand and stood me in this room. In outer space. There’s a mirror. She turns me toward it, I’m in it alone, just my face. That woman left me in it. At the bottom of solitude. At the bottom of a solitude more deep and awful than I ever imagined. Until I felt the chill that blows from the stars, I knew nothing about life. Perhaps the noose of my path had at last drawn tight and this was the despair of the trap. No, her hand turned over the mirror, and written on the back was: “Only dogs have a destiny.” I read on:
8
THE NORTH. ČERNÁ’S. I FIND OUT WHAT THE WELL IS. THE SHADOWS. I FIND OUT WHY THEY DON’T RING. HADRABA’S OFFER.
I went in, slightly dazed an proudly blood-spattered, first. I still harbored some hope that as the first one in I’d grab the morning mail an then, brushing aside Micka’s invoice reports an sundry promotions an ads for poisons, bury myself, at least a short while, in The Fool World, Clokwork Pomegranate, The Anchor and the Cross an find out the details, a new classic work came in the mail almost every day.
But then through the open door, where the fire was meekly breathing its last, I saw the two Laosters’ dead bodies, an David, streaming blood, came downstairs, having chewed through his ropes. That was hard-core, Bohler said, standing nearby. He looked awful, lips gushing, but that was from Lady Laos’s biting kiss, the first one after the victory, back on life’s track, which any old iron bar can easily knock you off of.
I’ll call Hradil, said David, an I noticed he had blood on his hands. The tips of his thumbs had been sliced away, or chopped off. He went back an forth between nervously twirling the little bones an holding them stiffly up in the air, I guess waiting for them to dry. As Bohler stood over the Laosters’ dead bodies, into the room walked the shark hunter. One of those I’d fought alongside. He clutched my shoulder, spun me around, an touched my wound. Then went to the dead ones lying on the floor, I noticed they weren’t even that bloody, except for the gaping wounds of ruptured flesh around their stomachs. They weren’t beaten to death. Bohler stood at their dead feet praying, the shark hunter kneeled down an spread his arms. Knelt there like some hesitant bird. Helena! cried David, an rushed back upstairs. I dragged along after him. I was astounded to fall twice along the way. Get up! I told myself, an probably thanks to my whipped-up emotions assumed the feet-down position each time, in stride, precisely as prescribed by Stanislavsky. Lady Slovak lay by the smashed altar. They were gonna give her a ride, David turned to me, but then they dragged me off … there were too many of em … They found out I wasn’t … Czech, so they didn’t … Helena’s face was cruelly aged with two bloody slashes an sprinkled all over with some kind of powder. I hope it’s powder, I thought.
