City, Sister, Silver, page 4
I missed her during the performance because it was my piece, a piece I’d written for her, or for someone else from the community. I played the part of a human rose, budding, blossoming, flowering, withering, and wilting, all in an hour. The best part of the show was a string of short scenes, witty skits, got the audience rolling in the aisles usually, I went on acting off to the side … slowly croaking … here and there we mixed in some porno as our part in the struggle against the regime, having the gardener tickle the elves, for instance … a child walking across the stage now and then to make it obvious the emperor was naked … I played the rose and tried to get into its time, into its life … seeing as I had to kill it in the end … Little White She-Dog played a swarm of flies, voracious aphids, we had some pretty good scuffles up on stage, her biting me full of holes, I was the rose, not too manly a role, I admit, and by the time I shed my petals, there wasn’t much light left on me. And since She-Dog wasn’t there that night, Cepková, a blonde, had to fill in for her, and as she was sawing off my thorns I saw She-Dog’s face beneath her makeup, sending me a message, I heard her brain from inside the rose’s red darkness and I knew she wanted to free me of fear, but I didn’t want to be free of it because without fear I couldn’t act … without fear I could do anything except create … because the only way I can make up human characters and play around with them is if I know the wicked old horror of life and the horror of its ending … I chose fear … so She-Dog cast me out of the community, cut me off from herself … she promised to send me a sister, though … to fulfill my future … and two green spots like magnets flared in Cepková’s face, like a blaze of heat … but then the fire died out and the female features beneath the makeup settled back into clown face as called for in the script, and She-Dog was gone … my tears flowed onto the rose … the people in the front row saw it and thought, Potok the dancer, stoned again … but I didn’t give a shit … after all, even that old sadist Nero needed a sizable cast of extras for his poem about the fire … and my colleague pranced around me, acting out scissors and a greedy hand and a cloudburst with falling branches, all things with a negative sign in the life of a rose, and then she brought my drooping time to a stop, playing water and a sunbeam … the audience went wild … and She-Dog wasn’t there … so after consulting with the stage manager, I acted out the watering of the rose, inserting a tube in my mouth and coiling it around my body and into a demijohn of red wine, I drank liters of it that night as I thought about my girlfriend, because it was obvious to me if she hadn’t come it had to be serious, and then it was dark, Firewater-dark, with shards in my head. And in the morning I looked at my colleague Cepková, a blonde in my bed, that’s pretty sick, I said to myself, and tried to wake her so she’d take off. I thought maybe She-Dog had kept her promise and sent me my sister, so soon? But when I touched those blonde tresses, it turned my stomach.
Lemme sleep!
Cepková, get up, listen …
Leave me alone … what time is it?
Hey, there’s other worlds!
Aw baloney, there’s just this one.
Really? Yeah, for real?
Same difference.
Yeah, I guess so.
2
WHAT MADE MY HEART. CHARGED OBJECTS. BACK IN THE SEWER. THE CONSPIRACY.
And then one murky post-bolshevik day I stood in the street and I was alone and nothing can sear that day out of my memory. At the Tchibo coffee shop I had a memorable appointment with Micka where we laid the cornerstone of the Organization.
Nor can anything sear out the era of the Sewer, because that was what made my heart. You could zigzag through the streets and test the weight of the buildings on your back, and you can ask your mirror on the wall: Tell me, who’s the fairest of them all? and the mirror takes a while to answer and it’s scary, and you draw on that while for the tension in your motion, and then the mirror is just an object again and:
the shattered mirror is cut-up snapshots, I look around and it would be nice to write myself into third person, but no, says Potok: I lived in various flats and packs, and when one smiley streetwalking day they let me out of the wicked old city insane asylum, they gave me a social service key and a hole to crawl into. There wasn’t any family around I could stay with. I didn’t want to put up with any anger or affection for a while. So I lay my head down on Gasworks Street and filled my wardrobe with disguises. She-Dog was still in my dreams.
There were boyfriends and girlfriends and conspiracies, you could grin and say yep and nope, hah, and give a wink … there was Bohler and Micka and Čáp and Cepková and Elsa the Lion and others, each traveling in his or her own circles, which sometimes intersected under the pressure we all felt … and there were objects surviving with spirit stored inside them, objects generated in the war against death, shit, and fear, and these are often the material in which images, sounds, and speech originate, including written speech, so ferocious, so meek. And just by the way and like it was no big deal, there were people walking the streets who knew how to make these charged objects. Some of them were survival artists, even if self-destruction was the price they paid to survive. Some of them lived in the Pearl. I wanted to learn. I was hungry. Most of the other inhabitants were too slow for me, dangerous even, sour time’s grayness had gotten them, but I full-throatedly wished good luck to all, contempt is best left for oneself.
No charged object of mine ever stopped water cannons or tanks, brought my dearest girlfriend back, or staved off a single wicked wrinkle. All they did was lap up time; sometimes that’s enough. I ate em up like bread, putting them into my tongue.
Coincidentally the tongue I use is one of Czechs, of Slavs, of slaves, of onetime slaves to Germans and Russians, and it’s a dog’s tongue. A clever dog knows how to survive and what price to pay for survival. He knows when to crouch and when to dodge and when to bite, it’s in his tongue. It’s a tongue that was to have been destroyed, and its time has yet to come; now it never will. Invented by versifiers, spoken by coachmen and maids, and that’s in it too, it evolved its own loops and holes and the wildness of a serpent’s young. It’s a tongue that often had to be spoken only in whispers. It’s tender and cruel, and has some good old words of love, I think, it’s a swift and agile tongue, and it’s always happening. Not even the Avars* could get this tongue of mine, not tanks or burning borders or the most repulsive human species of all: cowardly teachers. What will eventually get it is cash in a shrinking world. But I still have time, as Totilla the barbarian said back in that wicked time of his, before his battle began. Before they got him.
As soon as we’d served out our childhood, the theologian Bohler and I started wheeling and dealing with the Poles. There were times in my youth when I wanted to be Polish. Watching from under a rock. There wasn’t much time, I watched primitively. On account of the avalanches. What I liked best were the simple things; the trick was to make my mind up fast. The Indians were dead already. Poles clobbered cops. Prayed. Drank vodka. Romantics always and in everything, but standing up. Our hatred of the Monster was so great and our feeling of humiliation so strong, we sometimes dreamed about our own murder.
Another of the overlapping shards of glass, a snapshot: Čáp, white with rage, reads a statement from our fathers and grandfathers calling on us to abandon our protest because it might lead to shooting.
Look, this is crazy, says Čáp, they all left town for their cottages! Yeah, so, if they stayed they’d just get locked up, I said knowingly. Yeah but that’s the point! It’s all right for people to be dancin around the truncheons if they know those guys’re in the slammer. But out at their cottages!
So Čáp took up the responsibility that was lying out in the street and put together his own band of juveniles. I was first in line to sign his declaration, because his vision was the wackiest one around. Hey … nothin works, but a guy’s gotta try … our Polish brothers’ve got the Church, all ours’re destroyed … hey! Oh yeah, sure, I nodded, yeah right … it’s like Blake said, either create your own system or be enslaved to someone else’s. Bohler reappears in the shards of mirror: Take that watch from Tokštajn, we’ll hawk it to the Poles, toss in some ideological diversionism. The bazaar of course was illegal … stupid Czechs, they really piss me off, Bohler would say, smiling at the Polish bandits, the Bohos just don’t get it, I mean at least these guys’re men, if they didn’t trade their families could starve to death, what else’re they sposta do, they don’t go for the disgusting sin of whimpering … they steal … the Poles’re always bleedin an fightin, Bohler said dreamily, the Polish nation is the Christ of crazy Eastern Europe, he blasphemed … as the Polish bandits unloaded their cars full of smuggled Kazaks, one strode into the setting sun with a rug thrown over his shoulders, hence the vision … and who could that gentleman hanging there be … the one with his arms spread wide like an airplane?
The older and wiser ones who said, don’t go, they might shoot, were forfeiting us, and if things hadn’t gone so fast they would’ve also lost Čáp’s juveniles … he was getting skinnier every day, curly hair flapping, eyes shining … we’ll hand it out, but not till after the prayer! I told him inside the church … out of the question! Čáp protested, so what if we interrupt, dammit! … half of em can’t make out the words anyway … he had a point, we passed out our flyers with the picture of the Czech lion tugging at his chains, the Christians snatched them up and gaped in terror, stuffing them under their coats, into their bags and purses … one fellow told me “thank you” and in his eyes he had a smile, a smile of joy, he knew there was a time for war and a time for prayer and that the two of them merge together … a single sister shook my hand … she smiled too … let’s hit Ignatius, said Čáp, and off we flew, through passageways and carriageways, swift and agile, glancing left and right, with eyes in the back of our heads, fast and silent, with that good old Katholik joie de vivre … Čáp’s teachings were more and more appealing every day, because he knew the war against communism must lead also to the liberation of ants and every other living creature, that no one must harm the helpless and the young, and that whosoever does must accept the punishment … only his kingdom was a kingdom not of this world. And Čáp’s juveniles amazed me too … the most jaded bunch I ever had the honor to meet … hardcore cynics, extraordinarily reckless at times … at the age when we’d been struggling through school, they skipped out, didn’t give a damn … at the age when we’d torn down a flag here and there and on the sly, they learned to dance under the truncheons … some of them were really young … practically kids … we took our experience from insane asylums and prison cells, first from the ones ten years older than us and then our own … and passed it on to them, only they were tougher … at the age when we’d collected stamps, they collected tear gas cartridges off the cobblestones and had a blast doing it … the Poles were their model too … and their tongue accelerated with their motion along the cobblestones … our eyes sometimes glowed with fire … the machines of the enemy rumbled through the air and underground, but we had a vision.
I mean everyone knows … back in today’s central woman, Europe, there’s nothing but dogs, they wiped out the wolves, on this reservation the only thing left to do was devote yourself to illegal shamanship and just here and there and occasionally, for a fleeting moment, dance and possess the strength of a warrior, a mortal prepared to die.
There was beating in the streets, ready and waiting, but the people with vision went back for it again and again because it was the realest thing they had left.
Čáp hurling cobblestones at a personnel carrier on Železná Street, giving his juveniles a thrill … because the kingdom won’t happen all by itself, that’s just common sense. It was motion, it was new. It didn’t matter how many people accepted the motion, all it takes is one rotten tooth in a loyal healthy smile to give the Monster a headache …
And none of our citizens, whose stupid heads contained a shrewdly manipulated image of Poles as the hungry, wretched enemy, had a clue … and no one over in Poland had a clue about those rowdy Czechs … no one had a clue how crazy we were … no one eavesdropping from a satellite or dangling in an airshaft listening in on the scarred speech of our cooperatives, that accelerated city-speak … sitting in their cottages or squatting in the slammer, no one had a clue what the conspiracy was really about … all those scattered gangs of the city underground preparing for the important assignment, hastening toward a final solution for the soul’s design … auguring from their own dread-filled intestines, tensely watching the quivering skies … secretly going for the future’s throat in a conspiracy to nothing less than murder … namely, the brutal and conclusive assassination of Josef Vissarionovich Švejk.*
3
DAVID LEARNS. THE BYZNYS PATH. THE LAOTIANS. WHAT WAS WORN. THE WELL.
And then I stood in the street, it was freedom, half past six, weather roughly March. Clouds above, asphalt below, people with shopping bags walking the street, children and dogs in tow, it was freedom and time out of joint was going mad. I let it drag me in, it was a different dance than with She-Dog, different than the dance of the rose, different than with the truncheons, there was no end to it, it seemed endless. Human time had accelerated, I was disguised as a young man with a tiger-stripe tie, files under my arm, walking to an appointment with my associates. Walking at just the right pace to be there on time, fifteen minutes early, that was part of the social contract, our own little entente. I could’ve afforded a car if I’d wanted one, I was just afraid to drive. Micka had changed too. Tiger stripes suited him. He wanted to make cash spin the way my She-Dog spun on electricity, but he didn’t know how to send out the signals. Micka handled the paperwork, forgetting all his past hospital treatments he’d finished school and become a lawyer, it was freedom and he began smoking cigars. For the signals there was David, strategist and head of our little entente, the only one of us from the countryside, he’d climbed trees till the age of eighteen, which also made him the only one of us in sound health. All he needed to learn was the basics.
Hey, last time we went to see Mošna, he looked at his watch three times, Micka tutored him. What about it, David said studiously. Next time Mošna peeks at his watch, we get up an go, said Micka, it’s an unmistakable sign. How’s that? our boss wanted to know. Every textbook for future psychiatrists strictly forbids lookin at your watch, it gives sensitive patients the feelin they’re takin up too much time, an rightfully so, said Micka. End of doctor’s story, I added.
Micka was the first to enlighten David about the Secret. But it wasn’t totally necessary, because David was born a man of the contract, all he lacked was the terminology. Together then we taught him how to eat with silverware, have eyes in the back of his head, talk with women, hand out bribes, be in three places at once, ride the subway without holding on, smear invoices and puff on them, creep through the fax, and use the phone. Which is better to eat with in a Vietnamese restaurant, David, chopsticks or silverware? Chopsticks I guess, right? With chopsticks you’ve got one hand free, with silverware you’re at least holdin a blade, think about it now, think hard. David nodded and Micka gave me a look of pride. I tried too: Okay, David, what’s heavier, a kilo of feathers or a kilo of garnets? Dummy. C’mon now, what’s lighter, a liter from the head or a wheel? He hesitated, but he knew.
We knew that Slovaks were fast Moravians, Moravians were a few bricks shy of a load, Czechs thought around the corner, Praguers were stuck-up pigs, and all of us were on the same map. Micka and I had been born with asphalt between our fingers, Bohler didn’t know who he was but had a degree in theology, and David was a hick but caught on at the speed of light and didn’t have any hang-ups since we were there to hold his hand. Even in his innocent phase, when he was still getting up to speed, not one Prague pig ever said a thing about the ludicrous way he moved or his overall appearance, not to mention the threads and the accent. Many a hanger-on was tempted no doubt, but we never gave them the chance.
If I didn’t know him, though, or didn’t get that vibe right away, I might like to slug him one myself, Micka admitted one night during a dance party at the Dom. We watched the horrified look on the face of one of our girlfriends as David attempted to move with her. Bohler just gave a perverted laugh. I felt a passionate longing for She-Dog run through me, something between a toothache and the thought of a sharp knife, careful, what’s the connection with David? Is it a sign? I asked myself, or maybe my power. It didn’t reply.
Micka organized the papers, tampering with rubber stamps, tuning in the contacts, pressing the lever to the ground, it was just about to begin, we were letting the genie out of the bottle, and I for one was hoping it would go in a straight line, I stretched and twisted my body, rehearsing my speech for the play.
Bohler stood by, the helper, also waiting for motion, eyes fixed upward. We were ready.
