City, Sister, Silver, page 3
Little White She-Dog and I walked through the streets, sometimes holding hands.
The exodus continued, here and there panic seized the incoming Germans that the Czechs had put a stop to their departure … that there were machine guns on the rooftops … that the Stasi were roaming the streets of Prague along with the StB,* dragging off Germans and Czechs … that the StB was fomenting hatred among the Czech people against the traitors to communism the same way the Gestapo had fomented hatred among the German people against the vermin of the Reich … the Germans, stretching through the streets and across the square, and the Czechs, observing them from windows and balconies, surrounding them down on the sidewalks, silently watching the flight from communism with nowhere to go themselves because this was their only country … all of them well aware that the whole thing could still be stopped, aware of the force that could cut them off from one another, from that silent contact … when the Germans filled the streets they dragged, slow and sluggish, crews of long-haired boys and girls, holding hands, sometimes, like me and She-Dog, only going somewhere else … old ladies with purses, parents with little children clutching teddy bears and dolls … but when the crowd thinned out into smaller groups, alarming reports caught up to them from behind, from all over the city, maybe it was strange vibrations from the Prague train stations, from their homes back there in Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Gera, Zwickau, from border towns and villages … where they were hastily packing their last things, jewelry … food and clothing, and for the last time nervously examining their passports and taking flight, fleeing Big Brother, who seemed to have nodded off for a spell, probably after downing a large bloody nightcap as they picked off another, shot him dead, left him lying there … by the Wall … Die Unbekannten.* But the Monster could awake at any time, refreshed and ready, to dole out punishment … here and there reports spread that it was over, that they were too late, that they were going in vain, into a trap … and the clusters of Germans began to move faster, some even sprinting the last hundred, twenty, ten meters, and then it was triumph, a game … leaving behind in the streets of Mala Strana their heavy bags and suitcases, blankets they’d huddled in at night when the embassy was too full, inflatable pillows, propane-butane tanks, all the things they wouldn’t need in the West of their dreams … forgotten toys lay strewn about the street, a teddy bear with its head twisted off and rubber duckies flung out of the bolshevik pond of the gee-dee-ar onto the cobblestones of Prague, lost in the rush and confusion, no doubt since replaced by that silky-haired slut Barbie … I saw a skillet and a schoolbag, the square was full of cars, a Trabant with a comforter on the roof lay on its side …
stride after stride
pots and pans knocking at their side
children with comforters in wagons ride
flaming crosses up in the sky
days with salty anguish undone
and no one here can tell them why
where to go or what will come,
she said.
Well, I dunno if it’s all that dramatic.
Hanuš Bonn wrote that, said Little White She-Dog. Only these gee-dee-ar porkers aren’t goin into any flaming ovens.
Hey, they’re goin into the unknown, they’re fugitives, just take a look at those two old women holdin each other up.
Yeah, exactly.
What, like she’s some Ilse Koch? An I spose that granddaddy there is Mengele?
I know it’s stupid, said She-Dog. But Germans just piss me off. I was helpin em out at the train station this morning, but still they piss me off. German pisses me off. When my grandpa got back, he weighed 40 kilos. Not for long. Plus Hanuš Bonn was a family friend. We’ve got a copy of Distant Voice* with a dedication from him. Anyway it’s the Communists’ fault for fuckin us up with those movies, I’ve never even talked to a German actually.
Till today.
Yeah. Some cabs bring em here for free, others rip em off like crazy.
Some help em out like you, some break into their cars.
That’s the thing about the human tribe, like we used to say when we were little … She-Dog spread her red lips wide, flicking her tongue … when somethin’s goin on, that’s when people of a tribe find each other. As soon as there’s a threat, people divide.
Till then, though, people can be pretty awful.
Yep, anything goes, right up until there’s somethin at stake.
So what’s at stake now, She-Dog?
I donno, God I guess, or maybe everything.
The thing is, people bring on bad stuff by actin crazy.
You never know, there’s various paths an everyone’s gotta choose for themselves.
That’s our contract.
The contract’s valid.
Sinkule thinks they’re gonna lock everyone up.
The contract’s valid, even if we’re not scared anymore.
Of what, machine guns on the rooftops? Good luck puttin a halt to that.
Halt. It’s wild how many German words we use. I could go for a lager right now, how bout it?
Let’s duck into a building first.
Yeah yeah, said She-Dog, nudging open the door of a place with a lion on a shield, how bout here?
Here it smelled of wood, another place it was a septic tank, we searched out cellars because we longed for that hole in the ground where she had taught me, where for the first time the world had been real, where our bodies had grown up together, where we had come to know every centimeter of each other’s body and our own as they grew larger and coarser … there was also time preserved in those cellars, intact and compacted, in corners and under vaults, in every nook and cranny, even in the spiderwebs that served as the delicate dress for our wedding, our intercourse. Often it was damp with groundwater, sometimes old as time itself, time had a heavy fragrance, it slaked our thirst. I would hold Little White She-Dog on top of me, or she would sit down in an alcove, spreading apart her legs, and in that clench of male and female, in the motion, the screwing, slowly the rhythm would come and in it the red darkness, and in the darkness images. We set the time around us in motion, it swirled and spoke to me. Sometimes She-Dog would whisper into my ear, today she spoke of fear, and as she ran her nails down my sides, shredding my skin, it was like lightning flashing down through the red darkness under my eyelids. I couldn’t hear her voice, it was like the sounds were forming letters, but it was only the idea of them, just her speech echoing in my brain, now it was the speech of fear, fear of losing power, losing it as the city set against it the power of all the others’ fear, the fear of the crowd, it’s sour, I heard She-Dog’s mind echo. We knew that time also flowed up above, but we didn’t have the strength to reach up there anymore … up above the rooftops, where there might be machine guns … and might not … it wasn’t so much them, though, as the nests full of mutant pigeons born with the plague, chemical freaks, plunging to the pavement on their first try at flying, without any soft palm between them and the world, nests full of little birds peeping in terror, and it wasn’t a bird’s cry but the wheeze of a new sort of creature, nobody heard them except maybe Starry Bog, they were born into nothing but terror and hopelessness, and they didn’t know it, but I did, and that was why I couldn’t go that high.
We were also losing power because the reign of cruelty glowed in colors as bright as the sky when the twilight is aflame and filled with the demons that descend on the city at the first stroke of nightfall.
We aged in those twilights, by now every cell in our shared body was a combat veteran … and She-Dog’s power was turning against her because she wasn’t living just for herself anymore, she wanted to go farther … and take me with her. But I was afraid … to be in the world the way she wanted me to, to give it to her, to be inside someone else … I was losing my power by acting, feeling out the world in assorted costumes and characters because I was fearful of direct contact.
We screwed in cellars whenever we could, whenever we got the urge, we became absolute virtuosos at finding places where it was warm and dark and the old time murmured like a living thing. It would’ve meant death if either of us had pushed the other away, or let go. When lions mate, the male grips the nape of the female’s neck so tight with his teeth her neck would snap if she moved, that was the way we held on to each other, with every single pore. I opened my eyes and the red darkness was still there, She-Dog watched me, smiling, she knew that the red darkness came from inside us but also existed out in the world, a part of it, like an animal, say, or a desert, or the shit of the tenants in the flats above our heads. Firmly fastened down to the darkness around the edges, that cloud protected us, sometimes an electric light swang past when they came down for coal … but no one gifted with power had ever seen us, I thought … no one else came here for time.
We were moving in bliss, and then She-Dog’s brain sent me to an old woman shoveling coal into pails, suddenly I heard the clink of shovel on pail, clear as a bell, and then she sent me on a journey through the old woman. As my eyes sank into She-Dog’s, I saw myself as a little bead, then as a microscopic Gulliver, traveling through every fold of skin on the old woman’s shriveled face, feeling every wrinkle, feeling the chill of time in the tunnel of death, where it lay in wait.
In my eyes, fixed on the smiling eyes of She-Dog, I saw my horror as I traveled along the skin of the old woman’s belly, and then she sent me farther, now through time as well, I felt the moist cells of an embryo, and it wasn’t my body anymore, I had become one of the embryo’s tissues, I was inside it, time suddenly turned the other direction, and I was with them as they matured in the woman’s belly and went out into the world in blood and tears, I felt time come to a stop as the pain came, shaping reality, and then She-Dog sent me off again, into the old woman’s innards, and as they opened up I made my way out, and then I was in She-Dog, feeling the pressure build inside my cock. I spurted, hoping to get to the bottom and out, but She-Dog held me firmly … now I could feel the time of life, the old time we searched out in the cellars, beginning to carry us off, sweeping us out of the alcove, we went soaring through the air, She-Dog’s body growing heavy in my embrace, I saw her face sag, her hair turning gray. She had rough skin, I touched her belly, scarred from giving birth, but I won’t show you you! was the sentence she gave me.
Think it started already? said She-Dog. We stepped out of the building, back onto the set. There was a rumbling from the square, as if those permanently parked Trabants were all starting up at once. Could be personnel carriers, I thought. Maybe they sent in a few tanks after all. She-Dog adjusted her skirt.
Look, I’m not gonna wear em, I mean c’mon, they always get wet.
You shoulda left em back there.
Are you nuts, some pervert sorcerer finds em an we’re goners.
She was referring to the fact that I made her wear panties. There was a time when she hadn’t worn them out on our strolls, but then I discovered I preferred to fuck around them, running up the inside of her thigh and wedging my cock beneath the elastic, the feel of the fabric, the resistance, turned me on. Besides, She-Dog really was little, so the distance it added between me and her sex was negligible. Maybe also my member needed to feel something besides her, anything, in those days when I was losing it. Maybe her grip was getting weaker. Or, then again, maybe it was just that I wasn’t so young anymore and my cock demanded rougher treatment.
It was buses. Dozens of buses lined up in rows, full of Germans. The people inside them were different from the herd in front of the embassy. I could make out individual faces, each with its own expression, not just faces in a crowd anymore. They were somewhere else now, they were in their own time, and it wasn’t sour, I lost interest in them.
Hey, said She-Dog, I spotted Šulc, so he made it!
You knew?
Yeah, he came over to my place all freaked out askin me to teach him how to say “They took my papers” in Deutsch. Then he had a faint planned.
So how do you say it?
I donno. I thought he was kiddin, musta had him repeat Ich bin der ausländer* like a hundred times.
As the buses drove off, one after the next, bystanders moved into the square. From adjacent streets, out of shops and pubs, filling the empty space left behind. Emerging from their homes to join the silent demonstration, abandoning the archways where they had stood, as if hidden, for hours now. Watching the Germans’ departure. The ones in the last buses no longer looked like fugitives, foreigners trapped in a foreign city, they were smiling, some even seemed to enjoy it, waving to the crowd. A hand reached out one of the bus windows holding a can of Coke, a German no longer squatting on the cold cobblestones, handing down from on high the shiny greeting of capitalism. All of a sudden three boys were hopping up and down on the spot, jostling for position, the biggest one snagged the can, stuck it under his jacket, and bolted. The two who came away empty-handed wandered along the buses until someone tossed them a pack of gum, then stood there divvying it up until the driver of one of the buses honked, wrenching them out of their trance. In the quiet of that historical moment it sounded out of place, like a fart during Mass. The Germans in the last bus smiled happily and wearily, some flashing the V-sign, now they looked like sightseers. And the Czechs in the streets, the ones blocking the route, the ones who took a few steps after the last departing bus, furtively filling in the space from which you could clear the iron hurdle with a turn of the key in the ignition, not that you’d want to, maybe not … but the possibility was there … to disappear, suddenly the border was just a few steps over the cobblestones, nothing out of the ordinary from an everyday pedestrian point of view … maybe they felt the wings of time, maybe now time was like an angel, or a dragon, here and there its feathers grazing a person or two in the crowd, knocking someone’s hat off maybe, shattering a window somewhere.
Down through the streets from the Castle, the cops closed in again.
This time they weren’t marching with the routine stride of extras in some movie about the Crusades; they were sprinting. I couldn’t make out their faces behind the plexiglas, but from the way they were moving it was obvious they were eager. Wild pigs get a whiff of the watering hole, a jungle scene came to me and I danced it out with my feet, grabbing hold of Little White She-Dog, but she was already crouching down, her sense of smell too was better than her sight. The first row of cops had their truncheons out. No more foreigners now, no more cameras to sully the dictatorship’s reputation. We don’t go throwin our dirty laundry around for everyone to see, an that includes your soiled shorts, you son of a bitch, an your stinky socks, it’s time to clean house, whenever the Monster’s in the mood.
Let’s go, I said, more forcefully than usual.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the crowd began to disperse, nobody bothered waiting for a head-on collision, where a threatening mass had stood before suddenly there were clusters, and then just individuals, and all at once everything was the same as before, here and there a pensioner passing by, a college student, a worker in his blue jumpsuit, a lady with a baby carriage, people in their old roles, pub doors creaking familiarly like at the beginning of the world. Once again trams rattled to a stop on the square. Suddenly Jícha materialized.
Ciao, Bára, ciao, Potok! You guys saw it! Pinch me if I’m dreamin!
It was a perfect time loop, said She-Dog. My love’s an expert when it comes to that stuff.
What a protest! That was great! Those cops were scared stiff, Jícha said gleefully.
Oh definitely, beside themselves with fear, said She-Dog.
Did you guys know Sinkule booked? An Glaser too, course he did time. I’m surprised bout the rest of em, though.
What’re you up to tonight? I asked out of curiosity.
Nothin, he said.
Come see the show, we can get you in, I said condescendingly.
What? You guys’re performing?
Uh-huh.
You know Jirmut’s back in jail, an so’s Pečorka. An they locked up those Slovaks. When they cracked down on Solidarity, every theater in Poland went on strike! An here?
Huh, never thought a that, said Bára.
I mean somebody’s gotta start here too, said Jícha.
That got my attention … start … that was a time thing. Half-assed activists like this guy, though …
But … I said.
Maybe you guys could be the ones, said Jícha.
But … I said.
We’re just a little troupe, said Bára.
We just wanna bring joy to the people, I said.
Jícha stood tight-lipped. He’s gonna remember this, I thought.
We’re just a little troupe of perverts, She-Dog came to the rescue.
No thanks, I got somethin tonight, aright ciao, said Jícha.
Aright ciao, we said.
Let’s go for a coffee, Bára, I’m feelin kina battered an beat.
Not me. You’re gettin old.
We’re gettin old as monkeys. Maybe when the Communists bite the dust, we’ll get capitalism.
Could be, maybe, said Bára, they’re both just words.
Everything’ll be private, belong to somebody, I mused, even the trams, even that cup of coffee that I’m gonna have by myself.
An the owners’ll lock up their buildings.
Oh yeah, I said, hate to have that happen.
Forget it, when things get normal here, we’re gonna make so much cash we won’t even care.
You think?
I donno. I’m goin.
How bout that drink?
I’d better be goin.
You’re goin? Yeah? Aright then, later.
Aright, later.
But I set out after her, watching the street, and when we passed the place with the sign, it seemed suited, I spoke again. We were there. And you, She-Dog, on your way, made a move, arched your back, turned the corner, that’s how I’ll put it: she turned the corner and I guess kept going, I guess, or maybe she did soar off into time, maybe she used that trick with power she taught me once at some boring party: you stick your fingers in a socket, reversing the current with your power, an go with it, seeing the streaks in your brain, the colorful streaks of electricity as they travel through the building, an you go, through every outlet, every wall, and when you stop the current with your fingers the streaks come circling back, weaving together, an you go, racing in the closed circuit as long as your breath does not give out. As long as you don’t want it to. It’s a colorful game. I’m going to say it, let it be so: you grabbed me in the cellar and held on tight … and maybe you were playing now too, with a socket, say, with air, a stone, some male, somebody’s you met, because we put on the show without you that night and I didn’t see you for years, if I’m to refer to time in conventional terms.
