City, Sister, Silver, page 5
David meanwhile ridiculously rolled his eyes and cocked his head, paying no attention to how he moved his knees and elbows, sometimes even walking without moving his arms at all, as if he were herding cows. Whenever we went to the Galactic Bar, Černá’s, or the Dom, he would sprawl out and stare around at the carpetbaggers and local rabble, guzzle down the Water and not pay attention at all to his left, where the angel of death most often lurks. He didn’t see why he should spit whenever he saw a black cat, ain’t packin no chew, fellers, he puzzled. He didn’t see why we always kept handy a toothpick, clothespin, or length of stick when we ate at snackbar counters, not realizing how many times knocking on wood had warded off serious screw-ups. He climbed into cabs headfirst as a rule instead of with his feet. He wasn’t afraid of fog or gloom. He didn’t know to weep at the right moment, when your world is complete and like a cup that’s overflowing, to relax the motion of your sweet red heart, but that was one thing we couldn’t teach him. He didn’t know it was crucial to puke after drinking cheap wine or liquor to avoid breaking out in goose blotches. We weren’t drinking the cheap stuff for long, though. We also banned him from wearing necklaces … then you’re sweaty an unflexible, Micka lectured him. That made David sad, he was used to wearing necklaces of teeth and claws from bears he’d killed back home, up in the mountains. Rings’re all that’s allowed, an earring at the extreme, bracelets’re up to the individual, silver’s good if that’s your thing. Silver’s always good, I tried to comfort him. Micka went into the details: short hair, long hair, normal ponytail, okay, but never one a those thin little braids, you’re a man, not a rat.
David studied hard and we were amazed how much we knew. Micka taught him the fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat, I taught him how to run for it, and Bohler taught him the Our Father and gave him his first rosary. It was moving to see the way he gaped at that holy rope. Bohler’s Laotian lady was the first person to truly touch David, and it was such a beautiful experience for him that he spent weeks tagging around after her like a puppy, not realizing it wasn’t some special trait of hers but that all our female friends were more or less capable of the same.
From the moment Micka found David at the train station, spotting his hidden strategic capabilities with that old practitioner’s instinct of his … man, I saw him standin there starin … right into the chrome parts, through all the guards an everything … he was hungry … an I could feel it in the air, he was runnin through combinations, it was intense … it was obvious he was broke, an then he disappeared, an three minutes later he had it … I could tell he had no idea where he was, but without even stoppin to think he took off in the right direction, under the bridge, hand raised, keepin the edge of his left pinky between him an the river, I don’t think he even knew he was doin it … there was just somethin in him sensed what to do, I mean he walked right through the Ghoul’s shadow an didn’t even get scared … an I could see that the kid knew how to get what he wanted, sniffin it out, wanderin through the usual spots, steerin clear of the useless stuff an gettin through the essentials without a scratch … an it was obvious to me that he saw, that he knew what was goin on … so Micka brought him in, and by a tacit but irrevocable decision the young David instantly became a member of the pack, which took care of him from then on.
David constituted a solid clause in the contract, we protected him as long as necessary, and later on he protected us too.
We were a community, and while a strong shock could’ve caused it to crumble, one of the reasons we had it was in order to withstand the shocks. And besides, we actually liked each other. Despite all the jokes, the gags, the booze … the daytime paranoia, when the street turns gray and the buildings at either end suddenly start tilting toward each other … and the nights when you feel the pounding of your heart, like the sound of some distant hammer, the forge … dark love tearing you up, because it’s a serious thing when you couple with some stray bitch amid the chaos and you don’t really know … who’s who … despite all the low blows and fast moves, despite all the spirals of speech, when you hurl the fury of your hangover into your partner’s face, suddenly a bare hand is offered, palm unarmed, your droog’s bare back, exposed for the biting, it seems, but you know that in reality it’s there for you to defend … and that person with his eyes turned the other direction is going to defend you too … because you both want to survive, waiting as long as possible … at first we went everywhere with David and only took him to our establishments. He had to change the way he talked. Look, better yet, don’t even say another word to that girl … cooch … don’t call her that, aright? … just tell her the air pressure’s weird today, Micka lectured the boss, slicing into shapely morsels the animal flesh on his plate, David was still growing, and he scarfed it down like crazy. Yeah these pink earphones’re pretty cool, I told the boss, no seriously, they go with your scarf, aw shit, they just fell in the ditch, don’t worry, I’ll buy you some new ones. No, David, really, Micka lectured our boss, you can’t have Kyusu, I’m serious, the only ones you can use are Toshu, nothin I can do, that’s just the way it is.
David was very quick to grasp what is, what isn’t, and what could be, and which truly mattered at any given moment. He started to think around the corner. Suddenly he was popping up in underpasses and vanishing down hallways, waving to us from the ramparts while we were still dashing toward the moat. He got into the slang so quickly and used the right words so perfectly, it hit me that Czech had exploded along with time.
Then he began to pull away from us, sending out signals on his own and keeping in motion the octopus whose tentacles wound their way into government offices and out among byznysmen and goon squads, whom we also had need of now and then … he began to steer us, which suited us just fine … since all us savvy Praguers with the heroic past of the Sewer were actually a little squeamish of the warts on the tentacles … and then Sharky came in as foreign minister and we expanded.
I saw She-Dog again and David violated our little entente, tripped up on the water mill, lost all fear of anything, it all merged, and he lost his mind.
At the outset, though, good spirits prevailed. We were the Knights of the Secret and we were waiting. We and our assistants worked like robots. It even struck me once that if there was anything human about this transformation, it was something out of Frankenstein.
Sometime at the dawning, in freedom, we decided to make money, to engage somehow in the changed world around us. What I liked most were the coins, the eyes of a wide-ranging organism, their gaze as cool as the distant stars, the cold wind blows over them too … we soon realized money wasn’t the metal we used to buy our beer or red wine and the Northerners their rum, but that money was debts, stamped and unstamped papers, money grows from money, multiplying by division like cells … money is words, friendships, low blows, promises, money reacts magically when the right doorknobs are polished, stacking up with each smile in the right place at the right time … currency is attracted through courtesy to this bank and hostility to that one, and the one with the most money on his hump isn’t the mad dog, or the exotic tattooed dragon from the murderer’s dream, but the clever eel.
Micka wanted cash, I was killing off the rest of my power and feeling the motion and searching for my sister, and David was taking shape, starting to live, he’d been born into freedom. We were cranking up the machine, and though we suspected it might destroy us, death during those tense moments of conveying the treasure out of the cave was just another sparkling secret you could set your own rhythm to. In that single everlasting instant of frenzied time, death is there as your invisible girlfriend; and we also relied on instinct.
If the Monster, with all its tanks and troops and police, hadn’t cut us down back in prehistoric times, what did we have to fear now? Prison … if anything leaked out, if all those cleverly scattered connections were unable to cover it up … would be like a leper colony for kids, once you’d seen the spooks’ ugly mugs from below … prison now: yeah right. Either the laws didn’t exist, or they did but no one was paying enough attention to catch us in a loophole, those paragraphs didn’t apply … I’m still talking about years 1, 2, 3, etc. after the explosion of time … didn’t apply to us because we were fast.
So instead we concluded a little entente among ourselves, because we feared for our souls.
We said no, David told Bohler, no rackets, no Ukrainians, no Yugos, no Russians. Eyetals maybe, Greeks maybe, no Albanians, no Poles, nobody from Prague, no tough gangs, fuck em. You’re racists, Bohler mumbled upward, imploringly, in the direction of his Bog, he’s been bought off, I thought to myself. You’re racists, Bohler the helper pleaded one more time. No we aren’t, but you’re a moron, said David. From time to time Bohler tried to cut his shady business friends in on our ride, but David, now the boss, kept a firm grip on him. Whenever we began to give Bohler a hard time about his great compassion for dubious types, he countered by dropping a few words to the effect that our buildings, a dependable source of revenue, had in fact been obtained through his prayers. After some consideration, I had to admit there was something to this.
The member of parliament who along with his little clique forced through the legislative exemption on the termination of leases owned five buildings himself. Never even got a chance to throw the poor tenants out. His tough luck Micka used to work in a boiler room with his archenemy, now a police officer. And I knew the MP’s stepdaughter, she used to sleep with one of my droogs from the active era. That did the trick. We drank a toast the day she brought us the photocopies of the MP’s real estate contracts with the dates retouched, but we had no clue David would work so fast that three of the buildings fell right in our laps. I stood up for Bohler, so he got the rentals. I still felt like I owed him a lot. As helper, he could only dream of sharing. But he didn’t give a damn, he was interested in more important things.
It was also his idea to gobble up the space in front of the buildings. By now David knew how to stand politely if Mošna the civil servant glanced at his watch, but he didn’t. It didn’t even occur to him. He just looked at the piece of paper David held up to his face. It was a copy of a collective death sentence dated 1952, and the name of the judge was legible. For Mošna it served as sort of an orthographic mirror. The Devil knows whether those unavenged old convicts still dangled in his dreams … in his other hand David held another sheet of paper, and he could’ve said something like: Now sign this, cunt … but he was a polite boy and all he felt for cunts was a mix of grateful respect and tenderness … but I couldn’t think of any other word, he said. So he only said the first part. And Mošna the civil servant signed.
Ludvig the civil servant was sent down to us from heaven itself. Boys, you’ve got it made, you don’t know what it’s like passin the buck all day long, you boys’re livin! Got a little drum kit back home myself, haven’t picked up the sticks in years, though. In his mind we lived wild, exciting lives, for him the adolescent demi-vierges slouching around the basement clubs, the jaded huntresses lining the bars in the places we took him, were all bohemian sexpots. He was our man in the government. When Bohler handed him the aspirin that Micka passed off as LSD, I wanted to rub off the name at least, but David wouldn’t allow it. Sometimes I’d get furious about how easy it was, I’d go totally berserk, but I knew we were just trying to see how far we could push it, testing the spring, we wanted to fly.
Ludvig held the ceiling up with his eyes, panting loudly. Trying not to lose contact with real life. As the conversation rewound from art back to byznys, he miraculously revived. I’ll get you eighty of our best architects to build that palace, terrific boys, every one, Artists that aren’t in it just for the cash! Those architects of yours’ll rob you blind, man! Micka had him spellbound. But we were all “terrific boys.” He never actually did take home any of our female friends, so maybe he was gay. Either it was enough for us to see how desirable he was, groping one of them off in the corner, or he genuinely wasn’t interested.
Pisses me off, said Micka, I’d like to hear what kina setup he’s got at home. Maybe he’s scared to go to a hotel an at home he’s got a wife, I said. More likely he can’t get it up, the theologian said. Micka gave the nod and another terrific boy joined us at our table. Give this architect a break, Ludvig, or I’ll rip your ass to shreds faster than you can say Frank Gehry! Micka yammered. Ludvig pulled out a break and tossed it across the table, for once in his life he had plenty of them for everyone, and amid the general drunkenness it even seemed normal for the artist to be dragging around his diploma, it had gold lettering, we all saw it. Micka was getting better every day, and our man in the government melted, the contract was in the bag, all that was left was to seal it shut.
Then it was up to me to sneak through the window of opportunity with my rich assortment of disguises. David sent out the signals designating where to drop off the envelopes, where to speak plainly and where to be slightly shy, when to stand awkwardly in the doorway with a radiant boyish smile, which decision makers would appreciate a bottle of Water … which officials enjoyed reminiscing about the Sewer days and were eager to pop some wheelies … the sparkling party favors of real life, with girls or without … who said art with a capital A and longed to hobnob with the Names … and since a lot of atelier types were our friends and most of them were poor … they’d get a blazer and a signal on when to be where, now and then someone would speak intriguingly of suicide … and I knew where to stick out my chin, and my shiny teeth and shoes, and where to be just a regular Czech, a little sharp, a little naive … when two hands join, the cause prospers, but if you’re not interested, fuck off an don’t hassle me … who clung to the good old dissident ways, now battling corruption, so I could assure them as a former brother-in-arms that this dynamic group of young men … and the new government building began to be mapped out right on our land … and we weren’t surprised when the price climbed dizzyingly high … we cashed in on the cobblestones … and the funny thing was, we could see the construction site out Bohler’s windows … and coincidentally the firm that won the contract was favorably disposed toward us … they knew why, they weren’t stupid … and when the deliveries got held up, the envelopes would start to rustle, and they were always fatter coming in than they were going out … it tied my guts in knots, how could we get away with it? … the fools, but I wanted it, all the way down to the bottom of the filth and the fun that I got out of it … Micka came up with the gadgets and the threads were my idea, the fabric came from India by way of various tracks through Mongolia, it was unbelievably cheap … we bought up tons of the stuff, and then, with the help of a little baksheesh for various fifth- and sixth-division Ludvigs, coincidentally the rest was slapped with outrageous duties and we became the Indian fabric magnates of our crumbling republic … and while I expended the fleeting remains of my power on hypnotism, sailing through bedrooms and offices and, in one or two delicate cases, fifth-division Ludvigs’ cottages … to get them to bang the stamp … Micka bought some warehouses on the outskirts of Prague for a song … they were full of unsalable dry goods, cheap T-shirts and undies: two million for family, six m. for suckers … and with the help of Bohler’s Laotian lady, they flew to her homeland, where they dropped out of sight for a while, together with the plane, before resurfacing in the form of lotions, ointments, incense, hats suitable for the stony fields of reeducation camps, multicolored ribbons, bamboo boofalo spears, everlasting candles, miniature Buddhas, noisemakers for scaring off birds … we nearly gave Bohler the boot, a pink slip for four m. would’ve meant at least a fall down the stairs, I was there to protect him, but David was tough and Micka always did have a cruel streak … just in the nick of time, though, six cousins of the Laotian kitty flew into town, and they paid in dollars, because those T-shirts and undies had earned them millions in that zany currency of theirs, which they put toward the purchase of crude rubber and got a racket of their own going with Hong Kong. When the communist soil of their homeland got too hot for comfort, they took a quick trip around the world to see their cousin … and no wonder, she was a gem, from her smile right down to the roots of her short hairs, I could sense them whenever I activated the remains of my power … I didn’t even want to think about her belly or her behind, and if my power hadn’t been dying I would’ve taken her away from Bohler … also they wanted to meet the amazing wheeler-dealers we were by then, and get a little or big something going in Eastern Europe, B-o-g willing.
Put em in the buildings, David told Bohler.
C’mon, that’s crazy, everything’s taken, they’d hafta live with me!
One policy we adopted immediately so as not to please the Devil too much was no throwing out tenants. There was one thing, however … our sole infringement upon the domain of tenant rights … that we persuaded them to do … which was to take all their disgusting wall-size screens and various heathen TVs and lug them out to the lawn in back … where Bohler took an ax and chopped them up, one by one, because there’s no reasoning with Evil. Then we knocked their satellites off the roof, and of course we paid them back for it all, down to the last haler … it’s just that all sortsa Tides an Mr. Hydes come crawlin outta that satanic tube, the old ideological stupidifier, an they’re hungry for human heads …. especially children’s … an hell if we’re gonna share our home with a bunch a ghouls, Bohler argued, the rest of us nodded approvingly.
Only now he had a bunch of agnostics crashing right in his own flat. Aw c’mon, that bag on the third floor’s gonna kick the bucket any day now, Micka consoled the theologian, just stick it out, c’mon, you got the biggest place.
Bohler and his Laotian blossom had five rooms to themselves; true, in one he’d built a small altar, but it was our assessment he surely still had room to fit in a few Buddhas.
Hey, try to get along with em, Micka continued, they’re great, really, I’m tellin ya, an once we get asylum for em, he gave me a meaningful look, they’re gonna come in damn handy, David nodded. The yellow race is gonna dominate for the next century, minimum, plain as day, even says so in the Bible, doesn’t it, David? Yep, David said. Hah, hah, said Bohler.
David studied hard and we were amazed how much we knew. Micka taught him the fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat, I taught him how to run for it, and Bohler taught him the Our Father and gave him his first rosary. It was moving to see the way he gaped at that holy rope. Bohler’s Laotian lady was the first person to truly touch David, and it was such a beautiful experience for him that he spent weeks tagging around after her like a puppy, not realizing it wasn’t some special trait of hers but that all our female friends were more or less capable of the same.
From the moment Micka found David at the train station, spotting his hidden strategic capabilities with that old practitioner’s instinct of his … man, I saw him standin there starin … right into the chrome parts, through all the guards an everything … he was hungry … an I could feel it in the air, he was runnin through combinations, it was intense … it was obvious he was broke, an then he disappeared, an three minutes later he had it … I could tell he had no idea where he was, but without even stoppin to think he took off in the right direction, under the bridge, hand raised, keepin the edge of his left pinky between him an the river, I don’t think he even knew he was doin it … there was just somethin in him sensed what to do, I mean he walked right through the Ghoul’s shadow an didn’t even get scared … an I could see that the kid knew how to get what he wanted, sniffin it out, wanderin through the usual spots, steerin clear of the useless stuff an gettin through the essentials without a scratch … an it was obvious to me that he saw, that he knew what was goin on … so Micka brought him in, and by a tacit but irrevocable decision the young David instantly became a member of the pack, which took care of him from then on.
David constituted a solid clause in the contract, we protected him as long as necessary, and later on he protected us too.
We were a community, and while a strong shock could’ve caused it to crumble, one of the reasons we had it was in order to withstand the shocks. And besides, we actually liked each other. Despite all the jokes, the gags, the booze … the daytime paranoia, when the street turns gray and the buildings at either end suddenly start tilting toward each other … and the nights when you feel the pounding of your heart, like the sound of some distant hammer, the forge … dark love tearing you up, because it’s a serious thing when you couple with some stray bitch amid the chaos and you don’t really know … who’s who … despite all the low blows and fast moves, despite all the spirals of speech, when you hurl the fury of your hangover into your partner’s face, suddenly a bare hand is offered, palm unarmed, your droog’s bare back, exposed for the biting, it seems, but you know that in reality it’s there for you to defend … and that person with his eyes turned the other direction is going to defend you too … because you both want to survive, waiting as long as possible … at first we went everywhere with David and only took him to our establishments. He had to change the way he talked. Look, better yet, don’t even say another word to that girl … cooch … don’t call her that, aright? … just tell her the air pressure’s weird today, Micka lectured the boss, slicing into shapely morsels the animal flesh on his plate, David was still growing, and he scarfed it down like crazy. Yeah these pink earphones’re pretty cool, I told the boss, no seriously, they go with your scarf, aw shit, they just fell in the ditch, don’t worry, I’ll buy you some new ones. No, David, really, Micka lectured our boss, you can’t have Kyusu, I’m serious, the only ones you can use are Toshu, nothin I can do, that’s just the way it is.
David was very quick to grasp what is, what isn’t, and what could be, and which truly mattered at any given moment. He started to think around the corner. Suddenly he was popping up in underpasses and vanishing down hallways, waving to us from the ramparts while we were still dashing toward the moat. He got into the slang so quickly and used the right words so perfectly, it hit me that Czech had exploded along with time.
Then he began to pull away from us, sending out signals on his own and keeping in motion the octopus whose tentacles wound their way into government offices and out among byznysmen and goon squads, whom we also had need of now and then … he began to steer us, which suited us just fine … since all us savvy Praguers with the heroic past of the Sewer were actually a little squeamish of the warts on the tentacles … and then Sharky came in as foreign minister and we expanded.
I saw She-Dog again and David violated our little entente, tripped up on the water mill, lost all fear of anything, it all merged, and he lost his mind.
At the outset, though, good spirits prevailed. We were the Knights of the Secret and we were waiting. We and our assistants worked like robots. It even struck me once that if there was anything human about this transformation, it was something out of Frankenstein.
Sometime at the dawning, in freedom, we decided to make money, to engage somehow in the changed world around us. What I liked most were the coins, the eyes of a wide-ranging organism, their gaze as cool as the distant stars, the cold wind blows over them too … we soon realized money wasn’t the metal we used to buy our beer or red wine and the Northerners their rum, but that money was debts, stamped and unstamped papers, money grows from money, multiplying by division like cells … money is words, friendships, low blows, promises, money reacts magically when the right doorknobs are polished, stacking up with each smile in the right place at the right time … currency is attracted through courtesy to this bank and hostility to that one, and the one with the most money on his hump isn’t the mad dog, or the exotic tattooed dragon from the murderer’s dream, but the clever eel.
Micka wanted cash, I was killing off the rest of my power and feeling the motion and searching for my sister, and David was taking shape, starting to live, he’d been born into freedom. We were cranking up the machine, and though we suspected it might destroy us, death during those tense moments of conveying the treasure out of the cave was just another sparkling secret you could set your own rhythm to. In that single everlasting instant of frenzied time, death is there as your invisible girlfriend; and we also relied on instinct.
If the Monster, with all its tanks and troops and police, hadn’t cut us down back in prehistoric times, what did we have to fear now? Prison … if anything leaked out, if all those cleverly scattered connections were unable to cover it up … would be like a leper colony for kids, once you’d seen the spooks’ ugly mugs from below … prison now: yeah right. Either the laws didn’t exist, or they did but no one was paying enough attention to catch us in a loophole, those paragraphs didn’t apply … I’m still talking about years 1, 2, 3, etc. after the explosion of time … didn’t apply to us because we were fast.
So instead we concluded a little entente among ourselves, because we feared for our souls.
We said no, David told Bohler, no rackets, no Ukrainians, no Yugos, no Russians. Eyetals maybe, Greeks maybe, no Albanians, no Poles, nobody from Prague, no tough gangs, fuck em. You’re racists, Bohler mumbled upward, imploringly, in the direction of his Bog, he’s been bought off, I thought to myself. You’re racists, Bohler the helper pleaded one more time. No we aren’t, but you’re a moron, said David. From time to time Bohler tried to cut his shady business friends in on our ride, but David, now the boss, kept a firm grip on him. Whenever we began to give Bohler a hard time about his great compassion for dubious types, he countered by dropping a few words to the effect that our buildings, a dependable source of revenue, had in fact been obtained through his prayers. After some consideration, I had to admit there was something to this.
The member of parliament who along with his little clique forced through the legislative exemption on the termination of leases owned five buildings himself. Never even got a chance to throw the poor tenants out. His tough luck Micka used to work in a boiler room with his archenemy, now a police officer. And I knew the MP’s stepdaughter, she used to sleep with one of my droogs from the active era. That did the trick. We drank a toast the day she brought us the photocopies of the MP’s real estate contracts with the dates retouched, but we had no clue David would work so fast that three of the buildings fell right in our laps. I stood up for Bohler, so he got the rentals. I still felt like I owed him a lot. As helper, he could only dream of sharing. But he didn’t give a damn, he was interested in more important things.
It was also his idea to gobble up the space in front of the buildings. By now David knew how to stand politely if Mošna the civil servant glanced at his watch, but he didn’t. It didn’t even occur to him. He just looked at the piece of paper David held up to his face. It was a copy of a collective death sentence dated 1952, and the name of the judge was legible. For Mošna it served as sort of an orthographic mirror. The Devil knows whether those unavenged old convicts still dangled in his dreams … in his other hand David held another sheet of paper, and he could’ve said something like: Now sign this, cunt … but he was a polite boy and all he felt for cunts was a mix of grateful respect and tenderness … but I couldn’t think of any other word, he said. So he only said the first part. And Mošna the civil servant signed.
Ludvig the civil servant was sent down to us from heaven itself. Boys, you’ve got it made, you don’t know what it’s like passin the buck all day long, you boys’re livin! Got a little drum kit back home myself, haven’t picked up the sticks in years, though. In his mind we lived wild, exciting lives, for him the adolescent demi-vierges slouching around the basement clubs, the jaded huntresses lining the bars in the places we took him, were all bohemian sexpots. He was our man in the government. When Bohler handed him the aspirin that Micka passed off as LSD, I wanted to rub off the name at least, but David wouldn’t allow it. Sometimes I’d get furious about how easy it was, I’d go totally berserk, but I knew we were just trying to see how far we could push it, testing the spring, we wanted to fly.
Ludvig held the ceiling up with his eyes, panting loudly. Trying not to lose contact with real life. As the conversation rewound from art back to byznys, he miraculously revived. I’ll get you eighty of our best architects to build that palace, terrific boys, every one, Artists that aren’t in it just for the cash! Those architects of yours’ll rob you blind, man! Micka had him spellbound. But we were all “terrific boys.” He never actually did take home any of our female friends, so maybe he was gay. Either it was enough for us to see how desirable he was, groping one of them off in the corner, or he genuinely wasn’t interested.
Pisses me off, said Micka, I’d like to hear what kina setup he’s got at home. Maybe he’s scared to go to a hotel an at home he’s got a wife, I said. More likely he can’t get it up, the theologian said. Micka gave the nod and another terrific boy joined us at our table. Give this architect a break, Ludvig, or I’ll rip your ass to shreds faster than you can say Frank Gehry! Micka yammered. Ludvig pulled out a break and tossed it across the table, for once in his life he had plenty of them for everyone, and amid the general drunkenness it even seemed normal for the artist to be dragging around his diploma, it had gold lettering, we all saw it. Micka was getting better every day, and our man in the government melted, the contract was in the bag, all that was left was to seal it shut.
Then it was up to me to sneak through the window of opportunity with my rich assortment of disguises. David sent out the signals designating where to drop off the envelopes, where to speak plainly and where to be slightly shy, when to stand awkwardly in the doorway with a radiant boyish smile, which decision makers would appreciate a bottle of Water … which officials enjoyed reminiscing about the Sewer days and were eager to pop some wheelies … the sparkling party favors of real life, with girls or without … who said art with a capital A and longed to hobnob with the Names … and since a lot of atelier types were our friends and most of them were poor … they’d get a blazer and a signal on when to be where, now and then someone would speak intriguingly of suicide … and I knew where to stick out my chin, and my shiny teeth and shoes, and where to be just a regular Czech, a little sharp, a little naive … when two hands join, the cause prospers, but if you’re not interested, fuck off an don’t hassle me … who clung to the good old dissident ways, now battling corruption, so I could assure them as a former brother-in-arms that this dynamic group of young men … and the new government building began to be mapped out right on our land … and we weren’t surprised when the price climbed dizzyingly high … we cashed in on the cobblestones … and the funny thing was, we could see the construction site out Bohler’s windows … and coincidentally the firm that won the contract was favorably disposed toward us … they knew why, they weren’t stupid … and when the deliveries got held up, the envelopes would start to rustle, and they were always fatter coming in than they were going out … it tied my guts in knots, how could we get away with it? … the fools, but I wanted it, all the way down to the bottom of the filth and the fun that I got out of it … Micka came up with the gadgets and the threads were my idea, the fabric came from India by way of various tracks through Mongolia, it was unbelievably cheap … we bought up tons of the stuff, and then, with the help of a little baksheesh for various fifth- and sixth-division Ludvigs, coincidentally the rest was slapped with outrageous duties and we became the Indian fabric magnates of our crumbling republic … and while I expended the fleeting remains of my power on hypnotism, sailing through bedrooms and offices and, in one or two delicate cases, fifth-division Ludvigs’ cottages … to get them to bang the stamp … Micka bought some warehouses on the outskirts of Prague for a song … they were full of unsalable dry goods, cheap T-shirts and undies: two million for family, six m. for suckers … and with the help of Bohler’s Laotian lady, they flew to her homeland, where they dropped out of sight for a while, together with the plane, before resurfacing in the form of lotions, ointments, incense, hats suitable for the stony fields of reeducation camps, multicolored ribbons, bamboo boofalo spears, everlasting candles, miniature Buddhas, noisemakers for scaring off birds … we nearly gave Bohler the boot, a pink slip for four m. would’ve meant at least a fall down the stairs, I was there to protect him, but David was tough and Micka always did have a cruel streak … just in the nick of time, though, six cousins of the Laotian kitty flew into town, and they paid in dollars, because those T-shirts and undies had earned them millions in that zany currency of theirs, which they put toward the purchase of crude rubber and got a racket of their own going with Hong Kong. When the communist soil of their homeland got too hot for comfort, they took a quick trip around the world to see their cousin … and no wonder, she was a gem, from her smile right down to the roots of her short hairs, I could sense them whenever I activated the remains of my power … I didn’t even want to think about her belly or her behind, and if my power hadn’t been dying I would’ve taken her away from Bohler … also they wanted to meet the amazing wheeler-dealers we were by then, and get a little or big something going in Eastern Europe, B-o-g willing.
Put em in the buildings, David told Bohler.
C’mon, that’s crazy, everything’s taken, they’d hafta live with me!
One policy we adopted immediately so as not to please the Devil too much was no throwing out tenants. There was one thing, however … our sole infringement upon the domain of tenant rights … that we persuaded them to do … which was to take all their disgusting wall-size screens and various heathen TVs and lug them out to the lawn in back … where Bohler took an ax and chopped them up, one by one, because there’s no reasoning with Evil. Then we knocked their satellites off the roof, and of course we paid them back for it all, down to the last haler … it’s just that all sortsa Tides an Mr. Hydes come crawlin outta that satanic tube, the old ideological stupidifier, an they’re hungry for human heads …. especially children’s … an hell if we’re gonna share our home with a bunch a ghouls, Bohler argued, the rest of us nodded approvingly.
Only now he had a bunch of agnostics crashing right in his own flat. Aw c’mon, that bag on the third floor’s gonna kick the bucket any day now, Micka consoled the theologian, just stick it out, c’mon, you got the biggest place.
Bohler and his Laotian blossom had five rooms to themselves; true, in one he’d built a small altar, but it was our assessment he surely still had room to fit in a few Buddhas.
Hey, try to get along with em, Micka continued, they’re great, really, I’m tellin ya, an once we get asylum for em, he gave me a meaningful look, they’re gonna come in damn handy, David nodded. The yellow race is gonna dominate for the next century, minimum, plain as day, even says so in the Bible, doesn’t it, David? Yep, David said. Hah, hah, said Bohler.
