City, Sister, Silver, page 7
It was a bit surprising when, at one of our parties, Vasil began to speak Czech … a twisted Czech traveling a roundabout route through the roughly two centuries since his family had left for the land with the dark rich soil called chernozem … entirely without warning and out of nowhere and in a blink it seized him, right under the picture of the Mother of God: kottige, kow, feeldz, gorse, plou, fyer, sojers, he spewed out what was evidently his family history in a nutshell, and collapsed in an ecstatic fit … Bohler daubed his temples with acid and Vasil came to and began to tell his story, and he has yet to finish to this day, because the Great Mother’s people got him when she decided that bad good old Prague was a good place for her and the People of the Faith … I’m getting ahead of myself. But it was chiefly his good fortune that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil and his family stumbled into our path. Because he gave Vasil a blood transfusion that cured his epilepsy, for the short remainder of his life, anyway.
It was like this: one day our little group was playing and singing in Micka’s mobile on our way back home from the Rock when we saw the Doctor’s family pack. A dappled old nag towed the caravan, and walking at its side, into our life, was a slightly battered example of our generation, a scarf with a red cross wrapped around his neck. Various children, big and little, peered out the caravan windows. It was the Miraculous Doctor Hradil with his sons, daughters, and wife. Just to be safe, we pulled over and jumped out. Seeing this, the Doctor got nervous and reached for a small silver scalpel hanging around his neck. But then he noticed Bohler’s cassock, our crosses and amulets and altogether friendly armaments and accoutrements, and gave us a slight nod. We stood leaning into the hill a little, waiting to see what power he had, and he spoke: All right, all right, okay, if anyone should ever need an examination … a minor operation or two … or even something more … all it takes is a few dumb moves at some inappropriate moment.
It was obvious right from the start that this was our man in medicine. One word led to another, and around the fire that night we learned that thanks to restitution, in those magical, adventurous Klondike yesteryears of today, the Doctor had been able to reclaim his predecessors’ good old autopsy lab, located, coincidentally, right in the capital’s center. The Miraculous Doctor Hradil worked mainly with blood, and after dinner, once the littlest children had gone to sleep, he showed us some of his cupping glasses, and he was also the proud inventor of a new medicinal trick: the laying on of people to leeches and vice versa. It works, fellas, like a charm, he wound up his lecture, rubbing out with a metal-tipped boot the graphs he’d drawn in the sand. We learned that the U.S., especially the army, had shown interest in his discovery, and that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil had lived some time in Canada, illegally, on their tab. He and some of his sons had spent a few years as hostages of the Mohawks, and in fact it was the old medicine men there that had given him the basic ingredients for Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir. He was from the old school. Taught the Mohawk shamans Latin. Understood aeronautics even. I see I can trust you fellas, but do you trust me, Priest? said the Doctor, clutching a flask in his calloused palm. Yeah sure, said Bohler politely, and the Doctor stabbed him in the face with his scalpel, slicing open his cheek. Then, quieting our crazed war whoops with a reassuring nod, he splashed Bohler’s face with a jellyfishish liquid. The priest gasped for breath, sorta tingles, right? the Doctor said proudly. Yeah. The wound was practically gone. All you’ll have left is a minor manly scar, actually I concocted it for those little rascals a mine, they’re always pretendin to be Mohawks an slashin each other up cause they think scars’re cool. A couple of his growing sons smirked. What else can it do? Micka asked. I could sense his financial timepiece ticking into action. David nodded approvingly: it was obvious. You name it, said Hradil, M.D. The Elixir can fix anything, but there’s still a few kinks in it. Sometimes it acts organically, sometimes inorganically, sometimes as an acid, sometimes as a base. Depends on the patient. Bohler blanched. We soon realized one important thing: Doctor Hradil was indisputably an excellent physician, but human life was of absolutely no interest to him. He preferred gutting corpses. The autopsy lab was his now and he was looking forward to hanging up health care. Micka took the Doctor over behind the trailer, and they sat down with a calculator on the grass. Occasionally we overheard: School in winter: 19 pairs of shoes. Or: per week: 7 kilos of flour and 6 pots of boiled beef. Or: we’re Katholiks, no big deal, the Lord’ll provide, man … Micka’s astutely persuasive voice. And then: Breakfast: 8 kilos of molasses, large melons, jelly doughnuts … it went on like that almost all night. Meanwhile we traded experiences with the Doctor’s growing sons, ever so slightly, properly, and over our shoulders sneaking peeks at his growing daughters. Doctor Hradil’s wife was the first normal human the Medicine Man had tested the Elixir on, and she was so kind and beautiful, and moved with such fawnish grace, we kept confusing her with her sixteen-year-old daughters. But we had Jesu in our hearts, and we hoped the Miraculous Doctor Hradil didn’t confuse them too. The next morning we learned that Doctor Hradil had been persuaded.
In return for a single monthly payment he would treat our mental problems, work up case histories, take urine samples, X-ray our livers, and photograph our blood. He kept us fit on the crazy merry-go-round of byznys, and soon he was raking in a decent percentage on the Elixir.
We’re takin the nationalist tack, men, Micka announced at our daily briefing. Alla that foreign crap — Taizé, Finnish drops, Wajza vodka — it’s all shit. Czechs can always cure Czechs best. Czechs know best what ails other Czechs. All through the Hitleriad an the bolshevik era, every Czech ate the same crap. Czechs’re all the same. Czechs’re buddies. Even that dead old Romany Gypsy poet Mácha* said so: “Who’s better than a Czech?” With ads like that running in every political weekly and cultural quarterly favorably inclined toward us, we soon broke through. The ancient Chinese selling technique also helped tremendously: Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir was far and away the cheapest health care product in the then crumbling republic. Nobody but total derelicts and lonely old crones bought the stuff, so when the wrong kind of patient took the Elixir there were never any dangerous what-have-we-heres and the coroners banged the stamp for the casket without a fuss. And that bestial Mohawk the Miraculous Doctor Hradil had himself another vagabond to strap onto his autopsy table. It was a perfect circle. Besides, by cleverly specializing in the stratum between the urban poor and the urban underclass, he usually gutted only the wrong kind of patients. And the sign on the door of his old downtown lab — MEDICINAL WORK FREE OF CHARGE — did its bit too … pulled the poor folks in like a magnet.
Medical care was one thing our hard-earning little crew truly needed. Besides, all those tablets, capsules, and draughts went great with Firewater. At 7 a.m. each morning, we were up and dressed in our fine white byznys shirts and immaculate pinstriped suits, Bohler in a fresh cassock, prepared for the daily briefing, but every now and then and all at once those dog-hard years under the bolshevik knout would show. Especially the years in the loony bins. We didn’t get goose blotches anymore, now that we drank expensive booze, but the new improved kapitalist vodkas gave us turkey blotches instead. Doctor Hradil’s treatment for that was to bathe us in a laser beam. It helped a little.
With David combining and Micka steering, we managed to nab the strangely popular Gamma Knife. That’s just like today’s folks, Bohler railed, pitchin in all that cash for some space-age knife, then stick some innocent little boy under it, see what it does. Before we put the Gamma Knife back in the warehouse, we all exchanged bone marrow. Bohler groused a bit, but we persuaded him. Afterwards we felt better. But I have to admit I felt sad … a little … from time to time … seeing the fantastic, chivalrous, gallant way Doctor Hradil’s sons treated their sisters … it wrung my heart … watching the little ones play their good wholesome Katholik games … pirates … doctor … the Clan of the Woolly Mammoth … their nerve-racking Mohawk battle cries echoing through the buildings … Doctor Hradil’s sons kicking around the neighborhood … they were good boys … and whenever only the right kind of patients had been buying the Elixir a while, and Doctor Hradil was getting bored, the boys would go dig up some stiffs from the scrap heaps, or the Dump … troll the toxic Moldau … engaging in heavy battle with the scamp gangs along the way … but they showed em a Mohawk trick or two, especially the ones for man-to-man forest combat … and soon the city brats would break into tears and flee at the sight of them … and when Hradil’s boys eventually came up against the real goons, and I’ll say something about them later on … they weren’t afraid to take a little swig of Elixir in the right place at the right time … they took after their dad … and knew how to take risks.
My heavy sorrow and my insane longing for She-Dog were giving me bad circles, worse and worse every day … so I pestered the Miraculous Doctor Hradil, visiting him for checkups: Uh-huh, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, discombobulated joints, run-down cartilage, beat-up ribs, fucked-up skull, quick shoulders, slowish knees, cracked Adam’s apple, buzzing calves, demented heels, profession? Dancer. Aha, ah-hah, well, what else’ve we got: sunken eye sockets, hungry glances, coarse fast hair, clogged pores, old hump, dark malice, yearning, eagerness, mysticism, harsh booze, avarice, gloves, fill in the blank: Actor. Uh-huh, uh-huh, hold on now, we’re almost done, how many times’ve you been committed, hoochmeister? Six, boss, Doctor sir, but that was under the communards. Just the opposite, old rat, those count double, and moving right along, this is going to hurt: Aha and oh my: yellow Slavic blotches, Celtic somnambulist, Germanic dummkopf, Jewish ganef, transitional AIDS, you stud, incipient raw graphomania, insane heavy perpetual adolescence, and good old schizophrenia. Capable of living defect-free. Good luck. Next!
Doctor Hradil’s family pack was a welcome addition, a fabulous diversification. But one day, two of the M.D.’s sixteen-year-old daughters disappeared. They were last seen high on weed, carrying pails down to the cellar to fetch water from the well, laughing that distinctive pealing girlish laugh of theirs. Some of the Laotians saw their torches and heard the girls cranking the winch. Laughing the whole time. Then silence. Desperate, the Doctor’s wife rounded up the Laosters, and armed with boofalo spears, just in case, they combed the entire cellar, but the girls’ footprints were Čapekesque* … they went as far as the well and then vanished.
Even Jesu in all his greatness left no footprints on the lake. He walked across and put his imprint in the suddenly holy sand on the other side. Not the girls. One Laotian, the former shark hunter, dove into the well and scoured the cracked and muddy bottom, ten meters down, but the girls weren’t there. It was odd. It was dark. Bohler paced gloomily around the courtyard while the Doctor’s family pack prayed woefully and sadly and insistently by the fire. The tenants were tucked away in their rooms. Vasil sat under the picture of the Mother of God, where he felt safe, and sobbed.
As the evening shadows thickened, sinking into the courtyard, the Laotians went into their temple and performed a ceremony. The men lit incense, and the women separated the smoke from the fragrance and sent it out to search. Around midnight Bohler’s Laotian lady came to me and touched my forehead. She had ashes on her finger, and something else besides. I didn’t let on how flattered I was that she’d chosen me to pass the message along from tribe to tribe. The smoke had told her something, I could see it in her eyes. Where’re the girls? I asked. Wa’er too’ them. Where? Into we’. I went to tell my tribesmen.
Some of Doctor Hradil’s younger kids began to sob. Micka assured them that everything would turn out all right, plain as day. They bawled even louder. The M.D. showed up and began to pack without a word. There wasn’t much, the children gathered up their winter caps and a scalpel or two here and there, and the Doctor’s family pack abandoned the suddenly strange and inhospitable environment of our buildings for the autopsy lab. Finally a little elbow room, I tried to joke. He’s used to makin em, not losin em, Micka chimed in. David just sat glumly. Hey guys, I don’t mean to bleat, but’ve you noticed anything weird about our street lately? Not a whole lotta cats or dogs, bird or two’s about it, said Bohler. An I’d say we been losin tenants too, not that their petty gelt matters. They’re probly a little freaked out by your buddy Vasil an those screamin meemies of his, Micka retorted. No, it isn’t that … I putter around a lot, talkin with everyone … an there’s somethin strange in that well, or strange about it. I been thinkin. An my guess is it’s somethin that doesn’t work on goons like Vasil. An not on the Laosters either, they’ve seen it all before, in that yellow bolshevism of theirs. Hold on now, David said, are you tryin to tell us there’s somethin here that works on tenants’ little kids an cats an dogs an the old M.D.’s pure virgin daughters … but not on us? I finished for him, and only then did I realize what it was. Aright, okay, said Micka, but we can’t deal with it right now. He was right, but we were too caught up in the whirling merry-go-round of byznys to get around to it later on. As a result, we nearly lost all of our rackets, and all of our worries too.
4
GOLDIE AND HIS PROPOSITIONS. IN CAME SHARKY. THE CONTRACT. BOHLER SHOWS ME THE TOYS. I DO THE CARS. HE BRINGS HER IN, FINGERS THE STRING.
And one smiley day when the sun shone down on the cool city neon as sweet and heavy as grapes from the vineyard of the Lord, Micka brought in Shark Stein. He’d been hinting for some time now that we needed to expand … hey Potok, all of a sudden there’s like thirty thousand Americans here in our hometown, go an find out if they’re all just a buncha half an quarter henry millers, or if any of em also know how to make the metal flow … and I brought in Golden Joe.
Joe dressed in gold from head to toe, had to sling up his fingers because they’d gone limp from all the rings … tied his ponytail back with a golden band, instead of bookshelves, cupboards, and a fireplace at home he had showcases full of gold … and most of the gold in the little shops that spread like mold after the explosion of time belonged to him as well.
Goldie was American, a Hungarian with an excellent passport, each month he flew to Bangkok to expand his hunting ground of connections in the Hungarian colony that had sprung up there in the wake of that bloody year when the Hungarians attempted to set off the time bomb … the Monster sent in the tanks, which, as everyone knows, don’t bother persuading, they just roll on through … the Hungarian colonists in golden Thailand, where the oldest whores’re thirteen forever and some of them never die, worked for Golden Joe … some, I soon realized, out of sheer joie de vivre and love of motion, and others because Goldie’s men persuaded them it was better to cough up a few gold chips than to risk tangling with their countrymen, especially when the nearest dark and silent jungle lay right at the end of the local bus line.
Joe’d been drawn to Prague right from year 1, having sensed the motion, and as one word led to another suddenly there were whole sentences of Inglish with the unfamiliar accent of the Sewer of Buda and Pest, I listened with great interest, leaving the content to Micka and David … and in came the Firewater, and since Goldie was interested in our gadgets, we agreed to make a deal … it got a little hairy when David had to advise him of our little entente … Goldie didn’t live by the contract and didn’t know about the Secret, he had intercourse with those thirteen-year-olds whenever he went to Bangkok, but seeing as he could tell that our interest in metal was real, he tossed out an idea he said he’d been toying with for some time now in the hope of giving gold a rest and enjoying life a little in his golden years, of which so far there were nearly thirty … maybe get a few massage parlors goin, staff em with sweet young things, I’m talkin real young, an white! Praga could be a minor branch of Bangkok, no problem, fly in a few tea roses to brighten things up a little, but mainly to give some classes, cause your girls here … well … they’re a little on the comfy side … maybe I’ll fly Amber an Coral over … but we’ll recruit the rest from the finest old Prague Katholik families … inasmuch as possible … an bam, we’re swimmin in metal, with the legislation the way it is here we’ll be pullin in the sickest pigs from every desirable state, suckin the metal outta their pockets before they can get a grunt in, an afterwards too … but first David had to advise him of our little entente, which we had mutually bound ourselves to so as not to please the Devil too much … porno okay, but never with fleas … an fleas means kids … said David … that’s cool, said Golden Boy, but when he made his next proposition David had to raise his voice again … we don’t transport, distribute, or offer drugs to anyone that isn’t already hooked … that we don’t think is already hooked … then Goldie, by now openly amused at what odd tradesters we were, whipped out another proposition, this one slightly soggy with Water and wheelies of truth, which I’d slipped into his Jack Daniels with my usual agility … I’d used them in negotiations with guys like him before, whenever Micka screwed up his nose in that special way and said the password: Aunt Madia may be dumb as a pumpkin, chief, but your proposition is quite attractive … I’d insidiously trot out the wheelies of truth … got em from a KGB major I knew … usually the chiefs would get tangled up in their words, and now and then they’d own up to their innermost, generally dark intentions, which was important, since maybe we wanted to be their contacts and maybe we didn’t, but we definitely didn’t intend to wind up as somebody’s sacrifice, like the son of humble Abraham that almost got his throat slit up there on the mountain … that’s what I call a close shave, and back in the days of today’s fast times that I’m talking about here, the eardrums we’d gotten from Starry Bog were pretty ground down to start with, so there was no guarantee we’d hear the command from the heavens that stopped old Abraham’s blade … and this time Goldie started off with a detour through liberated Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy, before coming back to Thailand and then up to the border … with Burma, and then he crossed over and stopped his speech there, casually tossing in a word or two about this tribe called the Karens, a pretty powerful nation, and a minor conflict with the Burmese government, inserting a mention or two about a few tens of thousands dead … and slightly and heavily wounded … villages burned, men executed, women raped, children kidnapped … in other words, the usual … adding how fascinating it was to track the constant improvement in armaments and accoutrements on both sides of the conflict … see, the Karen rebels began to suffer heavy losses when the government boosted its arsenal with wicked old lethal long-range AK-3s, which as every little kid knows come from Czech factories … now that was a racket, boys … Goldie smacked his lips … and that wasn’t all, because the clever Karen chiefs took all the gold they had stashed away in those bamboo stems of theirs and bought the very same perverted Czech weapons, and they had so much gold saved up in those thieving households of theirs that the Bohos also outfitted their rifles with infrared telescopic sights, and at night the government ranks wore seriously thin in spots … so the government had no choice but to pick up the phone and call the death factories about installing chemical warheads, and when the orders were filled … Goldie smacked his lips and took a slug of Firewater spiked with wheelies … the Karen shamans, in those old caves full of moonlight and eerie drawings in human blood, opted for the final solution and telepathically roused the death factory managers, and each invoice for special rocket hookups to fit the AK-3s … meant a huge profit for the intelligent byznysman … said Goldie … an it’s still goin on … just a stone’s throw from Bangkok … Igen! said Goldie, reverting to his native tongue just before he fainted, which tended to happened to other crews’ chiefs after sampling my cocktails … allowing us to confer in peace … without any foreign hick’s bat ears around … and David didn’t have to cite him any more clauses from our little entente, which was a good thing, since he probably wouldn’t’ve been able to take knowing what a pack of angels we really were … the main point of our contract was the Secret, because the one thing we prayed for more than anything else back in those days of today, after the explosion of time, was for the Messiach … to come … even though we enjoyed ourselves most of the dwindling time, death lurked around every corner, as always … and sometimes life was so insane … as always … and a knight isn’t allowed to do himself in … not even if he’s taken hostage … not even if they torture him … he’s gotta suffer through it all … every one of Starry Bog’s traps … and we all contained so much cancer and human misery and fear and hunger that sometimes it leaked out our eye sockets and Bohler had to step in with his cross.
