City, Sister, Silver, page 33
This character was real skinny. Eyes swimmin, doubt he could even see me. Hair down to his waist. T-shirt on, perforated arms hangin off him like twigs. Turned and walked back into the flat, totally ignored me. I followed him in cautiously so the needles wouldn’t scuff my speedy leather. Another two sat in the kitchen. In chairs at the table. That’s all there was practically. Except for the smell. Is it Morti? Did Morti come? No, that’s not my name, I said. So whadda you want, asked one of the junkies. I told them. The kitchen table was covered with baggies of powder. Mounds of wheelies, medicine bottles. Alchemy kit on top of the stove like out of an old Ed Kelly catalog.* The one that let me in was totally wrecked. Went off to huddle up somewhere. The other two beamed. They were in a witty mood.
We donno your vahine. She’s not here, can’tcha see? Hey, he can’t see! He can’t see us, we’re not here! I think he wants ta crawl unner the table, said one. I think he wants ta shoot up, said the other. Found it so funny he pitched onto the floor. Černá, you kiddin, we got colors galore … wait, he means Bardot, no, Dietrich … no, dude, Diamanda!
I left the door open, I pointed out, and there could be more coming after me. Huh? The one in the knit cap got up. Look, guys, I said amiably … she’s the one we’re lookin for, the girl with the scar, we don’t give a damn about you … but … it all depends on you … the boys could be here any minute, and if they start takin turns on you down at the station … You lie, junkie, said the one with the cap … I underestimated him … he slugged me hard … but the other one jumped on him … take it easy, Francek, he soothed him, be reasonable … That’s right! I said in a forceful tone, like some kinda Colombian judge. You can enjoy your shit or not, it’s up to you … hey Francek, he means Evie Blue Eyes, the one with the scar …
That’s her! I shouted. But they aren’t blue though … the third one got up again: Ask me if I care. Oh yeah? Yeah! Which one a you’s Hozner? I demanded. None, said Knit Cap. So where is he? He ain’t here. He ain’t anywhere no more, hah, said Knit Cap. His witty mood was coming back.
Look, the reasonable one told me, we don’t got nothin to do with her, she’s someplace else now … Where? She’s been stoppin by old Dernet’s place … downstairs, second floor. Aright, but if you’re bullshittin me I’ll be back, I promised him. I was serious. And I said it so he could tell. Real passionate like.
I dropped back down the shaft in a crate hooked to a cable. This whole thing was gettin to be a drag.
I was so absorbed in my drug squad role I didn’t lift my finger off the buzzer till the door opened. First thing that caught my eye was the bump on his head. Second: his hushed voice. Come in, my lost child, he said. Which of the brothers sends you?
Sister.
You mean Sister Asmorgas?
I mean my sister, I said.
We are all brothers and sisters.
You’re no bro a mine, parasite, I thought to myself. Yes, I said.
How much does she send to the poor? How much did she collect?
Place didn’t look at all like the others. For one thing it was almost totally dark. Rugs on the walls. Tapestries? What’s the difference? One you don’t walk on. I figured Dernet for bout as old as that photographer guy. But he was all in black. Almost like me.
You too seek solace, young man … you are lost, fumbling your way in the dark …
You can say that again, I admitted.
Search no further!
Mr. Dernet, I’m tryin to find Černá, Evie they call her. Tell me where she is.
Sinner, yelped the oldster, kneel down!
Only place I kneel’s in church, I said, perhaps with unnecessary harshness, an they’re locked up. I patted the Madonna on my chest.
Dernet looked at me. And well you should, for Piyus, that Prick, that hydra, is leading the throngs into the flames! Kneel, dog.
Mr. Dernet, please, I’m just lookin for my sister, my girlfriend!
Sister Asmorgas is dead, boy … and you can only pray … that is why she sent you here … we are all her murderers … he had some statuettes around the room, the window was shut.
I started to sweat a little. Excuse me, Mr. Dernet, I don’t think you can help. Kneel, he screamed, and opened the closet door, actually it mighta been a ward robe … Asmorgas seeks young men such as you, drink her light and you shall find peace … an altar came shootin outta the closet, some kinda mechanical setup, artificial light flooded the room, Dernet kneeled down on the floor … it was a regular Mary statue, musta cost a good couple grand for that motor though … I had a buddy over at the Tatra factory, I knew this stuff … gave Mary a pat on the forehead, just a light flick, they produce it for export to Latin America … the thing rolled back in again, stopped glowin … Dernet picked himself up, eyes poppin outta his skull … You know the sign? I drop and bow down to you. Command me and I shall be your servant.
Jesus, I gotta get outta here, I thought. The madman grabbed my pantleg, on his knees.
Tell me, Dernet, I gave it a try, where can I find the girl with the scar on her chin who sought out your presence?
Walk straight down the street and you will find her, he yelled. That wasn’t good enough. He kept pawin at me.
People are diseased and unhappy, said Dernet … perhaps you will find her, but living in terrible sin.
He was startin to piss me off, I shoved him away, pretty gently though … those tapestries were covered with crucifixions, but not of Christ, they were women. Women’s bodies. Just lookin at em made me sick.
I took the elevator up by mistake, but at least it gave me a chance to calm down. There’s gotta be some normal people, I thought, look at Černá, she’s not … depraved. Or maybe I’m just chasin a phantom, but c’mon, I can’t be that dumb.
I checked out the buildings one by one. I knew I couldn’t keep it up long, but I didn’t wanna throw in the towel just yet. Guess I’ll hafta go back to Balkon. With a bonus check.
Here I was trampin around South City like Little Boy Know-No thing,* it was no good. I’d lost the trail. I hate when that happens. My only option now was Rudolf. They want me, I’ll make em a deal. Though I didn’t much like the idea a them knowin what … who … mattered to me. That’s no good. That’s nobody’s business but mine. Once they know that, they got you in the palm a their hand.
Yep, eatin in stand-up snackbars, and yep, ridin the tram … same scenery, same faces, life as usual.
I lay on a bed in the former flat of the ex-pack, tryin not to think … about nobodyhood … where’s Micka now, I wonder, who’s he forgin plans with these days … Bohler and his beauty must be settlin in by now … so Sharky really went and signed up, yep, said he’d been in the army before … said everybody over there has. And David. Poor guy.
I got up and grabbed a rag. That bloody thumbprint of his was still on the light switch downstairs.
When I got back, I noticed the place was different. I stood in the doorway … and sniffed. Something had changed. I listened. Someone was in the bathroom. Only so was my jacket with the knives. And the photos … I yanked the door open and hopped outta the way. It was just a soapy Vasil, he gave a shriek of horror. I stood there snickerin till finally it hit him … but he kept screechin and fumblin around … blinded by the soap … snagged hold a somethin, my jacket. Asshole! I said, yankin it away, you’re gonna get it all wet, tossed him a towel and then I froze.
First I thought they were just ornaments, but then I realized he had fingernails growin outta his chest … like armor … like some creatures inside him were pokin their thumbs out, like pieces a mica or somethin. The nails were in his skin.
Sorry, Vasil, I stuttered, I’ll be next door … I shut the door and went to lie down again. It’ll never be over. It’ll never be over for me, I told my pillow.
I think he woulda split if I hadn’t been lyin there. Woulda walked out the door and gone somewhere else. Most likely back to the train station. That’s how ashamed Vasil was. He tried to rush past me, red all over.
Don’t be stupid, hell, I said, your business what genes you got. There’s people missin legs, ears, so what?
I mutant.
Baloney! So’m I!
You know nothink.
Well, you’re right about that, I thought. I know.
Eto z Chernobyla.
Oh yeah, here come the horror stories. He’d told them before. About how when it blew they ail went outside to look at the beautiful glow. About how the murderers fed them all kinds of crap about everything bein all right. About how various bandits and wretches snuck into the evacuated villages and lived there. And mutated. And died.
Wheeler-dealers took a fancy to the thatching on the roofs of the former Czech villages and cheerily sold them off. And not only thatching. Zones’re big byznys. Radiation, who knew what that was? It won’t kill you now, Vanya, so what’s all the fuss about? Can’t see it. Doesn’t exist. There were other things you could see. Later on.
Vasil told stories about children who thought a two-headed calf was normal. Wondered why their dads buried the sweet little thing on the spot. Three-eyed birdies. A zoo’s about the only thing that would’ve amazed the children of Chernobyl. A botanical garden probably would’ve bored them to tears.
Vasil was a champion of monstrosity, a connoisseur of curios. He told us how when he was fleeing the area, people on trains got up and changed seats when he told them where he was from. One time he hung his coat on the rack in some pub and they tossed it into the fire. Cause it’d touched the other coats.
The people they evacuated from the Zone, and we’re talking entire villages, were cursed wherever they went. No one was allowed to write about Wormwood,* and people believed that radiation was contagious like the flu. Some evacuees couldn’t stand it and went back. Ran the army barricades and returned to their land. Illegally. Vasil was afraid they might spot him from the helicopters. So he dug a pit in the cellar and spent the winter there. Come summer he couldn’t believe his eyes. The grass wasn’t green. The trees weren’t trees. He didn’t see a single living thing. Then a pigeon. He couldn’t eat it though, it had something wrong with its eyes. It had something instead of eyes. Vasil thought it was the end of the world. That God had gone mad and he, Vasil, was the last human left. It never occurred to him for one second that he might be the one who’d gone insane. That intrigued me. I made him tell me that part more than once. He reached the barricades, but the soldiers saw him and chased him away. Said he needed a pass. He got through somewhere else. But he couldn’t stand to be around people. Nobody believed him when he said what was going on in the Zone. The radio didn’t report anything out of the ordinary.
He went back. And there were others. He met a girl that was also alone. All her relatives had died. Couldn’t get a foothold anywhere else so she went back on her own. They ate the animals. When it got really bad they lived on eggs. He said, you don’t know … what’s in those eggs. They traded with people on the other side of the barricades, farm tools for food. Hid from soldiers. Vasil always enjoyed describing that period … it seemed like he was happy then.
No chairmen, no meetings, no statues of leaders jutting up absurdly, nakedly, from the empty village squares … he didn’t have to bow down to anyone, he wasn’t a dog anymore … he had a woman.
But then he started growing the nails. I don’t know if there was anything wrong with the girl, Vasil never said. Once he told us about the thing the girl gave birth to. She snapped. He buried her and fled. Felt like a monster. And he had no idea what would happen next. To his body. He expected to die soon. That explained why he was so shy and preferred to sleep down in the cellar. He saw himself as stigmatized.
Seriously, Vasil, I don’t give a damn. If you got a trunk growin outta you. Your business, hell. Everyone’s different. It’s all the same.
Da?
You Chernobyl Czech you …
Bot I no haf legitimatsya.
You want some ID? What for?
Legalizovatsya.
We’ll fix that! I still know people! Got any proof though?
He brought me some tattered papers. We did a little lookin into em. Yep, issued in a city that didn’t exist, in a region that’d changed names, in a country that’d split up … signed by dead people … somebody else’s picture … classic.
It’ll work somehow, don’t worry.
But it didn’t. Vasil got taken in by the People of the Faith, servants of the Great Mother. Or whatever.
The People of the Faith were the only ones that took him under their wing during his destitute trek across the Union. Probably would’ve ended up in the clink otherwise. Didn’t have any proof for the two years of his life he’d spent in the Zone. Made up some story about workin on an oil rig. But he was scared. Even back then he knew it was dangerous, he knew too much about the Zone.
Then he found his way to some journalists … from the desirable countries. Met with em in somebody’s flat. That was the first and last time he let anyone look at his nails. They rolled the cameras and he told his whole story. Gave a fake name though, he didn’t want to take any chances. A week later the story came out in one of the desirable world’s leading weeklies, duly dressed up with quotes from the poor fugitive railing against the Soviet government. Splashed across the cover was a photo of the man with the nails. With his real name of course. All the other prominent glossies ran the story too. He had to make himself scarce, in a hurry. Go to meet Anyushka. That was what his new colleagues from the cheap seats called death, he explained. That intrigued me too. Anyushka. Really? Such a tender name? Da. Vasil didn’t expand on what kind of enterprise he and his new colleagues were involved in. But in Moscow he’d also met People of the Faith.
At that point you could say all kinds of things out loud. The Great Mother, who got money from her followers, said them over the radio. From what I gathered from Vasil, she promised to change people … the same old song … give me all that’s yours and I will strike you like a bolt of lightning, tear you up by the roots, change you … I think Vasil … and he never said this … I think he wanted to get rid of his nails, sure, he could trim em, but I think he wanted to be free of all the horrible things he’d been through … and the Great Mother found a lot of people like him.
Skolko, Vasil? How many?
Miliony. In Ukraine. Many in Bulgaria. Bait!
When he saw how interested I was, he brought me a picture. A photo actually. Of the Great Mother.
Is icun.
Icon?
No, is new. So: Icun.
On the back was a strange picture, a drawing. In color. A face, a woman’s, with a cross in one eye, a star in the other. The eyes followed you wherever you moved, like those photos of the deceased they put on tombstones. Same technology. What was even worse, the face had a … nail through its forehead. Or a screw. I didn’t like the look of it.
Behind the face was a railroad car. But the Great Mother’s face was kind. She looked to be about forty. Dark-skinned. Like some woman from India, I guess. Where’s she from … this lady?
Is born in Chernobyl.
Right there, yeah?
I no know. Nobotty know. Ana … change? … She change people to her rebyonky, her children … ana yeh zashchichayeh.
She protects them?
Da. Protekts.
When Vasil finally got the chance to make his plea to the Great Mother … she told him no. She told him he was on the right path … nails or no nails, and that he had to stay with her. That he, more than anyone else, was her child. And then Vasil told me, and this was one thing he didn’t share with the others … maybe Bohler, I donno … that the Great Mother had chosen him, along with several others, to send to Prague, just as she sent people to Sofia, Bucharest, Bratislava … Poland, all over … to herald her coming and gain new adherents who wanted to change themselves … and give her all their money and land, because the final great change was approaching, and only those who changed in time would survive …
I think I yawned a little.
Guess it hurt Vasil’s feelings … he said the prophet’s rebyonky weren’t all just dumb and destitute like him, there were also scientists. Atomic scientists.
Yeah yeah, I said.
Patok! Vasil shouted. I’d never been able to teach him not to do that. Plus when it came to the Great Mother, he tended to get emotional.
Eto seriozno. Ana tozhe rabotala v etoy industrii … The way he told it, she was one of the engineers that survived Chernobyl, and she was there the whole time. She knew what people could take so the radiation wouldn’t harm them. But they had to change. He said she spoke every tongue on earth and she was there for the whole world.
Every tongue? Ochen intyeresno, Vasil. So why’d you run away?
He gave me a look.
Aha, I said to myself. And casual-like, randomly … moved off the bed. So maybe he didn’t. What’s he pullin on me. Probly been workin for the sect this whole time. Nailhead. All this stuff that’s been goin on … Vasil!
Ty hochesh s nye gavarit? She in Prague. She … want see you.
Me? Why me?
And Vasil told the story … claimed he really had run away from them, that he’d wanted to make his way in the new world, the West, on his own, but they’d found him … by his saliva, from the labels he’d stuck on the bottles of Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir.
Said he was back in contact with the People of the Faith and the Great Mother wanted him. And he … thought he had no choice. He said the Great Mother wanted me because of the Elixir. I patted my Madonna. Vasil watched. Smiled. He knew something.
The Elixir’s gone!
Vasil gave a shrug.
She know vhat is Elixir … superadidas!
