City, Sister, Silver, page 9
wait, Bohler, was Raskolnikov sleepin with Sonia or was he sleepin with that other sis?!
… like atoms in some fucked-up model, wandering aimlessly through space, I bet some of em don’t even know they’re alive, Bohler concluded his discourse.
I wanted to ask him whether Raskolnikov had a sister and slyly ferret out somehow what kind of power she had, but our work was cut out for us. We broke into Toy Central and combed through the storerooms. We didn’t find any more Cheyennes, but we took the ones from the window at least, and it goes without saying we also roughed up a toyfil or two along the way. Then Bohler rigged up something around the edges of the rooms, and by the time he lit the fuse we were moving pretty fast. We hopped into the car and put a good couple hundred meters behind us before we heard the soul-soothing blast, a splendid red glow laced with green and yellow flashes lit our way as the sources of the toyfils’ evil power crackled in the blaze, or so, dear Lord, I firmly hope. As soon as we got home, we took the Cheyennes out to the lawn in back and set them free.
But to return to our commercial enterprises: Sharky, like us, was expecting the Messiach, so it was no big deal, he just signed a few papers for Micka, and the razor-faced Shark Stein became a full-fledged member of the pack. Micka glowed and glowed, because with all the years he’d spent in Tokyo our new pseudodroog was an exceptionally valuable acquisition.
Your attention, gentlemen, Micka announced at one of our briefings. Diisseldorf, that means Bank of Japan, they got their hounds at the border right this second, waitin to see how the breakup goes. As long as we’re not swimmin in blood, the hounds’ll come runnin. An a little bird tells me Suzuki’s makin a deal with Volkswagen to buy Škoda, I.G. Farben, an bloody old Krupp! Cash on the barrel! They’ll have computer samurais here on every corner before we know it.
And David combined and Micka negotiated, and they plugged in the well-traveled Sharky, who we made our foreign minister … we’re still in years 1, 2, 3, etc. … and Micka pulled the levers calibrated for cross-border transfers … mainly at the ministry, but also in various companies and outfits, and David did his combining, and they sent me out to play my part … this time it was pretty enjoyable, since I was riding with Bohler’s Laotian lady, alias Madame Hoi-Tsu … the gadgets, complete with cheap spare parts from Thailand, compliments of Golden Joe, were taking several of the slower countries by storm all at once, and the Laosters peeled us off a percentage, and every so often we would quietly and without needless ado unload a few less important buildings on the outskirts of town … that actually didn’t exist … since the treacherous MP we’d shot down was working for us now … we’d persuaded him of the benefits of some fast work in the silent company of a few certain land registers stored in a particular office … and the Miraculous Doctor Hradil’s Elixir was taking by storm one East European market after another, because the farther east it went, the more poor souls there were who either wasted away into lifeless vagabonds or adjusted into entirely healthy individuals … here and there we also received reports that in certain mutated regions the Elixir worked as an aphrodisiac … out toward the Urals, Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir was winning more and more enthusiastic devotees every day … both right and wrong patients, in exact accordance with Darwin’s theory … and with the good old Russian roulette principle … and the label designed by our art director, picturing the deviously smiling M.D. Hradil with a rented white lab coat and a borrowed stethoscope, fending off the Grim Reaper, was the hit of the new, post-bolshevik world, and the days when Vasil sat in the cellar licking labels and pasting them on were long gone … now the Elixir was produced out of a few old factories in the new Bohemia’s capital … and we were still the Mongolian Indian fabric magnates, and the construction of the government palace on our government plot of land was going at such a snailish pace that it actually didn’t exist, which meant it didn’t block our view … and another scheme or scam … would pop up every now and then … and there was no shortage of them … because this was and still is the Klondike … of the Wild East.
And we went like whipped dogs hitched to a sled that we just had to get there, because the second you stop, your time is gone and you end up freezing to death in hostile territory.
We cracked the whip on each other just as hard as we did on ourselves, that’s the way it is in the human byznys tribe. And whenever we felt our bodies pining, like an unexpectedly cold morning breeze, the M.D. would find us a remedy … his sons were wholly absorbed in the search for their sisters, and no one understood that better than me … but time was flying like a demon from its lair … out of that crack in the concrete … as if time were hungry, as if time were feeding on the flesh of the people who lived in it … its enemies, it struck me … I told Doctor Hradil about it one day, but he said: only paranoids have enemies … and the metal flowed … and Prague was changing … and the ones that couldn’t find their way had to crawl … slower and slower, till they perished in time … and the ones that had harnessed time broke the others’ backs, shot them down, as long as there was something in it for them, but if it didn’t seem worth their trouble they knocked around the cheap eateries in the town below the Castle, keeping to themselves, till they perished too … and that’s the way it’s been from the very beginning … there’s something baroque about it … and the way the people who live in the Castle perish isn’t a whole lot more elegant … and the M.D. just cracked a little smile over his autopsy table and, eyes glittering, plunged into his research … the avid anthropologist … and then one of his sons got killed for carelessly erasing an evil swastika down in that accursed subway … the hitlers were starting to swarm.
At first our little group wasn’t too concerned, just the wrong rumble in the wrong place at the wrong time, but soon we were to hear more about them.
The Laotians, who’d taken a liking to the Doctor’s pack, even teaching the littlest ones some of their words, gathered under the lab windows the night of the young boy’s final journey. It may’ve seemed a little strange to them to see the deceased rolling off the old conveyor belt onto the bier in sacks. The M.D. had dissected him in order to be certain … of the strength of the blows … the direction of the wrath … so he’d be better able to protect his other children.
The Laotians also got their butts kicked every now and then, and every now and then they kicked ass right back, but until they saw those sacks filled with the little white boy who’d spoken their language, it didn’t really hit them … they’d stared down death’s bony sneer for a pretty long time in that cutthroat land of theirs.
But now, for the very first time, they got a nice sharp look at their new free land, and except for the ones Bohler had persuaded to be baptized and rewarded with rosaries they all began to howl … and the ones that had been baptized knelt down with clasped hands and began twisting their necks and tossing their heads … damn, what’s with them? I hissed to Bohler … well, he said tentatively, I donno for sure, but if y’ask me I’d say they’re turnin the other cheek, guess I went overboard, they musta misconstrued it.
Just then Bohler’s Laotian lady came up to us with a terrified look on her face: Horry, horry! What’s up? I inquired. Lao’ians ou’ to ki’. So what do you want me to do? I said. Call the cops? No, no, she said, they ki’ cop too! Bohler and I traded looks, then took in the scene with panicked eyes. The Laotian pack was calmly howling away below the lab windows, but the ones who’d been baptized started popping up out of the crowd here and there … samurai swords glittering in their hands, boofalo spears hoisted high … one guy right in front of us, the one that used to hunt sharks, tore off his clothes, snatched a boofalo spear away from one of his softly howling neighbors, and dumped his clothes on his head … uh-oh, said Bohler, I was tellin em just today, “If you have two coats, trade one for a blade an go fight, if your strength tells you to,” I mighta been a little off on that one … another Laotian, armed with a sword, dragged an old woman out of the howling, wailing crowd, slammed her into the wall, then slapped an elderly man in the face … the rest of the armed anabaptists clustered around the shark hunter … what else did you say in your sermon today? I asked the blanching Bohler, maliciously, I admit. “Cast off your father an mother an rid yourself of your family when you take to the warpath against obvious iniquity,” shit, they didn’t get that those’re just quick metaphors, Bohler added. But then we heard the wail of sirens and Micka’s raspy voice. A dark line was forming in the street, again I saw the plexiglas. The shark hunter let out a savage roar, quickly joined by his blood relatives. Luckily Micka and David got in on the act, recognizing the footsoldiers’ leader. It was Micka’s pseudodroog from the Sewer days, owed the Organization for all sorts of things, I’d performed the corruption on him myself. Arms raised to the heavens, Bohler reined in the Laosters with a frightening string of international swear words as David handed flowers to the cops in the first few rows and the Doctor shouted down at them from the window of his lab: He was my son, not yours, you sickening pigs! His teenage daughters draped themselves over the boofalo spears while the little ones ran back and forth translating. I noticed the Doctor’s sons had knocked out a few windows with their slingshots; that probably explained why the tenants had called the cops. The scene quickly settled down. Bohler led his Christians away. We held a procession for the son.
And next morning at our briefing we were back in our byznys suits. Riding the tentacles and cranking up the mill and whispering and roaring with laughter and phoning and faxing and shooting up and forging plots and raking it in and winning and losing. Drinking Firewater. Sleeping with pseudodrooginas. Chasing cars. And paying off cops and gangsters, who every now and then we needed, and who we didn’t have anything to give but cash.
Sometimes it took a house, a hotel, a rubber stamp or two, a smile. One signature cost twenty, another the right sentence at the right time. Some places on the eternal wheel of the world there were death, solitude, and insanity together with love and compassion and the solidarity of the human tribe. Here it was dark and there it was light, and we lived mostly in between. I trained my eyes to see the dividing line. I stabbed myself in the heart and it healed itself up, ripped off my fingers and next morning they were back. Cut the nerve and they wiggled. Wanted to die, but just made money. And that night, as we sat under the light, laughing and stroking each other, death gave me a light prick of his sickle, grazing my eyelid with the tip, just a touch to say: Hey, you fuck, I know you’re out there. Sometimes it seemed like nothing really existed, other times it was full. I couldn’t get to sleep that night.
The Galactic Bar was for ungluing our heads, the Dóm for eroticism, and Černá’s for both and more. We dealt in trade. And we flew into fits and shook with spasms, because it was unbelievable what we could do. Then Sharky came up with towing BMWs, my job was to sell the things, and even when I had the addresses in my pocket and knew just how to get there, it took some wild dancing … joints cracking and heart charging up as I obtained information … dealing with guys who’d spent their whole lives polishing their one Oktavia or Zhigula, and who, via commercial enterprise or inheritance or magic or sleazy rackets or divine grace or murder in the Congo or hard honest family work or sheer chance, had struck it a little rich, what do I know about all the ways there were in the years when time broke into a run … and I listened to their astonished speech, old and new … interweaving … because, astonished at all the gold to be had in that suddenly sprinting time, these guys walked straight from their grubby factory workbenches and concrete engineer’s feed troughs into the newly reestablished millionaires’ clubs … instead of the old standby, soccer, now they broke up their lives with golf … took things at a slower pace … and adopted the new terminology of social mobility … instead of bats and biddies it was madam or mrs. or my dear lady … instead of hobbyhorses, maracas, fuck bunnies, wham-bam, or poontang they vied for cuties, cupcakes, receptionists, assistants, and secretaries … and their wives began to exercise a little here and there, because suddenly it occurred to them they actually had something to live for still … sunbathing in the Canaries, say … lovers, for instance … and as their husbands got rich, there was plastic surgery all over the place … and brand-new handsome vitamin people … and the men settled into their new old legally acquired smuggled BMWs, happy, as if suddenly … I’m afraid to write it … never blaspheme unnecessarily, Bohler had admonished us … they’d spotted their sister in the rearview mirror outlined in the flames from their eyes … they dressed in suits and hired photographers and cruised around in tax-free duty-free cars … and being used to their smelly old bolshevik jalopies, occasionally they’d lose control and knock off some old or young beggar’s head … because there’s always somebody standing in the rain by a milepost and somebody driving by … and it’s fairly rare to run into a saint who’ll whip a gleaming sword from his briefcase and hew his jalopy in two as a gift … and that’s the way it was, is, and always will be … and I cruelly fleeced my parvenu clients and donated the leftovers to Bohler for the scamps and goons and refugees so I wouldn’t please the Devil too much … so I could get through the eye of the needle before that camel.
Perhaps I’ve neglected to convey sufficiently and exhaustively in both common parlance and my golden mother tongue Czech what a truly big-hearted fellow Bohler was. Now that he had cash and a flat, even if it did belong to the pack, he was constantly sucking up to his Katholik, church-and-pew Bog by caring for stray sheep, usually shaggy with wool the color of coke from the filthiest bolshevik boiler room around. He sprinkled his little altar with tears while we cranked out the cash, a portion of which he squandered not only on the scamps but on all the other characters he dragged in from South Station whenever the urge seized him. Delousing stray Romanians, returned to the way station of Bohemia from every corner of fucking white man’s Europe, rubbing Dalmatian ointments into Albanian hookers’ legs, swollen from pounding the pavement, and running baths filled with Fiora perfumes for underage Gypsy girls from the worst urban holes of the Wild East … he sobbed his eyes out to David about how whenever there was some odd job, arranging fabrics in the warehouse, say, or packing gadgets into crates, or the painless removal of spiderwebs from the hallways of our buildings, the kinda dumbfuck peasant work we usually paid some lush from the nearest dive to do … he could go down to the station and pick through the rejects from all the countries … where the delicate flesh of baked pigeons gently and readily … passes through the razor-thin lips of emaciated faces … and continues down in the shape of mouthfuls … those desirable states whose officials were absolutely right to decide that no way’re they givin asylum to that shady-lookin greaseball … because either they’ve got demogracy at home or they goddamn well avec deus ex machina better fight for it, by nonviolent means of course.
Bohler had an infallible nose for the biggest badasses … we had to throw the craziest fucks out on a regular basis … a destitute Romanian concentration camp escapee turned out to be a Portuguese pickpocket … a Bulgarian divinity student that Bohler nabbed in the station dive turned out to be an Indian witch and violated his altar … torture-scarred Armenians, after eating, taking a bath, changing clothes, and buying tickets to the nearest town in Germany (all on the pack’s tab), turned without warning from members of the first Christian nation on earth into savage Azeris tired of murdering in the woods … but then again not too tired … Croatians fleeing the most awful horrors imaginable, after a fit of Bohler’s generosity, underwent a bizarre transformation into Serbs … Serb dissidents turned into Bosnian Muslims … asking the way to the Black Stone of Mecca and salaaming endlessly … apage Satanas, Bohler shrieked in his sleep, and Lady Laos kept a sawed-off shotgun under the bed … I do’ know if i’s fo’ him, me, o’ them, she said with an apologetic smile … all of Bohler’s good deeds were followed by swift and just punishment … and one day he brought in a gorgeous Slovak … as it happened Sharky was out in eastern Slovakia looking into an intriguing plan Kosice had to become a Hanseatic city of free byznys … we’d just sat down with the Water after some difficult negotiations in which we’d managed to extend the patent on Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir to include its sale as a guaranteed anti-hair-loss product … also caused weaker links to lose their skin, unfortunately … with a little fast work, we nailed down a monopoly in Bohemia … and that in turn meant more moola and chuckles and loot, Micka was the only one even keeping track anymore … as the theologist nudged the beautiful girl into the room, Lady Laos turned visibly pale, which for a tea rose is pretty unusual … this is Helenka from the University of Trnava, Bohler blushed, she’s applied for Czech citizenship … says she wants to study anthropology, human evolution … Bohler said into the silence. Hey, hi, I majored in anthro too, course they gave me the boot, cause I was the best, I said amiably. Yeah, cool, when they shut down the border she’ll be crossin the Iron Curtain, back an forth, back an forth … Micka daydreamed, already drunk. She was beautiful. She was mysterious … she was brought in. I fell for her right away. She was quick to grasp what it was all about and wanted in on the action, tearing right into Praguese. I listened to her tongue, and when she and Lady Laos went at it I got it in full stereo. Even Micka had to smile.
But I couldn’t stop longing … for She-Dog … my childhood sister, Little White She-Dog. I wondered about her promise … of a sister, what sign would she give me and when … and if so, then it all has meaning … while our women argued in the kitchen, we sat and dreamed … bottles of Firewater on the desks, weapons close at hand … outside our windows the battle raged … we were brutes and terrific boys, thieves and entrepreneurs, drunks and junkies, artistes and wheeler-dealers … low-down and dependable … and above all we were a community, don’t forget, there was a war raging outside our windows … and this was before we knew what would happen … and we were ferocious and meek and ferocious and meek and ferocious and meek … and we were fetishists and sexists and superstitious, the power of water and fire were in the air … and there was a time for prayer and a time for song … a time to get your ass kicked and a time to kick butt … and from time to time we’d just sit back and dream, in the community but by ourselves … Bohler told us we were miles Christi … but we were actually more like Dog Soldiers* … it was the time after the explosion and we lived in the ruins … robots thundered through the air … and time went by … because time is always running.
