Lines from National Geographic - litteraria pragensia

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The Return of
Král Majáles
PRAGUE’S INTERNATIONAL LITERARY
RENAISSANCE 1990-2010 AN ANTHOLOGY
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Edited by
LOUIS ARMAND
Copyright © Louis Armand, 2010
Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors
Copyright © of images as captioned
Published 1 May, 2010 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze
Filozofická Fakulta
Litteraria Pragensia Books
Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC
Náměstí Jana Palacha 2
116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic
All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the
copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers.
‘Cirkus’ © 2010 by Myla Goldberg. Used by permission of Wendy Schmalz Agency.
The publication of this book has been partly supported by research grant MSM0021620824
“Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the
Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education.
All reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders.
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Cataloguing in Publication Data
The Return of Král Majáles. Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010 An Anthology, edited by Louis Armand.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-80-7308-302-1 (pb)
1. Literature. 2. Prague. 3. Central Europe.
I. Armand, Louis. II. Title
Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk
Cover, typeset & design © lazarus
Cover image: Allen Ginsberg in Prague, 1965. Photo: ČTK.
Inside pages: 1. Allen Ginsberg in Prague, 1965. Photo: ČTK. 2. Street view of the Globe
bookstore, opening party, July 1993. Photo: Mark Baker. 3. Crowd outside the Globe bookstore, opening party, July 1993. Photo: Mark Baker. 4. Beef Stew after-party at Paseka,
1995/6; centre Paul Martia and Alan Ward. Photo: Karl Skarstein.
Opposite: Tim Rogers, post card poem, “Brilliant” (1998).
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Contents
Introduction
THE RETURN OF KRÁL MAJÁLES 10 |
1
Michal Ajvaz
Two Compositions 61
Jorn Ake
Atlas Ptáků
Raphael
On Dogs & Urban Warfare
Great Pickup Lines of the 20th Century
Birdwatching at Yaxchilan
67
68
69
70
73
Gwendolyn Albert
Final Rewards
abulia
democracy
economic power
Jocasta
Letter to Eileen Myles
75
76
77
78
79
80
Hana Androniková
V. Samsara
85
Louis Armand
The Vanishing Syndrome
Psychopathologies of the Commonplace
Three Testiments to Apollonius
Correspondences
Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Circus Days
105
107
108
109
112
113
Julie Ashley
Interlopers
117
Alex Barber
The Last Bus
The Edge of the World
137
138
Kip Allan Bauersfeld
from The Superseding, A Prague Nocturne
141
Kevin Blahut
Sinbad
Alcohol’s Marionette
Young Hands
149
150
151
Petr Borkovec
Sonograph
153
Pine Ode
Snow General On Two Owls
The Work
Room
155
157
158
159
160
161
Sarah Borufka
Night Train
163
michael brennan
Apogee
The disaster of grace
No Second Chances
167
168
169
bil brown
from 3:15experiment
171
Isobelle Carmody
The Man Who Lost His Shadow
185
louIS charbonneau
The 217 Bus to Hell (or Klamovka)
203
Věra Chase
Fluidly Along the Beach
Sunday Mail
211 | 11
212
Julie Chibbaro
Skin
Fractal Swing
215
221
Joshua Cohen
Cafédämmerung
233
Lara Conway
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
The Cities of Madame Curie
The Well of Night
243
246
251
christopher cook
The Cyclops
277
Christopher Crawford
A Whistling Sound
head holiday
Men at Sea Divorcee Disco Music One Two Three
Letter to Self from Deathbed
O’Hara at the Beach
Cellar
The Tablecloth Trick
283
284
285
286
288
289
290
291
292
Lewis Crofts
And so they came
295
Pierre Daguin
Three Poems
299
Stephan Delbos
Honeymoon
Tiny Miracles
The Rusted Door
Advent
This Lighter,
Verdant; A Word
What the Poet Told Me
303
304
305
307
308
309
310
Danika Dinsmore
a girl in prague is a temporary thing (14.7.00)
26.7.00
28.7.00
Mostar, Bosnia (6.8.00)
13.8.00
Dol, Croatia (11.8.00)
War Story (10.8.00)
David Doubek
12 | Artistic exercises Then good fortune was unexpectedly worked in
Daniela DraZanová
Ezra’s Bar
Eva
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
321
322
325
337
Vít Erban
A Small, Cold Sun
The Belly of the Centipede
347
349
G.S. Evans
from Bohemia
352
Robert EverSz
from Gypsy Hearts
359
Vincent Farnsworth
dalek bird poem
not long
They Have Arrived
amerika’s top forty
Out Dying on the Vine
she disappeared during a trip Spring
twenty years of No Future
Years of Reprieve
367
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
380
Sylva Fischerová
Mothers
Inside the Description
The Language of the Fountains
This Century Blossoms Black and Green
Who Makes History
Road to Nowhere
The Blind
Draft in the Head, Draft in the World
David Freeling
Eulogy
Last Words, Café Colubris, Prague, November 4, 1996
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
395
397
Jim Freeman
Thinking Me
Muddy Water Setting Fire to my Life
Just Another Kid
Big Boats
401
402
403
404
405
Róbert Gál
from Agnomia
407
Thor Garcia
Dagger
413 | 13
Myla Goldberg
from Cirkus
431
Elizabeth Gross
Lines from National Geographic
Lines from National Geographic (2)
Liar to Gardener (I)
Liar to Gardener (II)
Liar to Gardener (IV)
Leaving Vyšehrad
Lines from National Geographic (June 1975)
Questioning room, post-Fall
Lines from National Geographic (date unknown)
Lines from National Geographic (3)
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
Stuart Horwitz
Waiter Poem
Numbers
455
456
Howard Hunt
The Ministry of Strange Affairs
459
Travis Jeppesen
from The Suiciders
479
Ivan Martin Jirous
from Magor’s Birds
489
To Amalrik
[…]
490
491
AlexandER Jorgensen
“La Paix”
The Wading Bird: Or, Gideon’s Ephod
Litter & Litter
Terminal
Tesla
493
494
495
496
497
Richard Katrovas
Love Poem for an Enemy
The Boxers Embrace
The Bridge of Intellectuals
George W. Bush was Very Nice to Me
Vít Kremlička
Tynia
Cinema Arcadia
The Attempts of a Commodities Expert
Jane Kirwin
A Shed in Bohemia
Caffeine
Power Station, Ústí Nad Labem
14 | One Made Earlier
Teaching Czech to Foreigners
Maya Květný
Promise
Poodle Ruff Muzzle
Toby Litt
Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
Auerbach
Celan
Schnittke
Great Railway Journeys of the World
Christopher Lord
Tres Mujeres de España
499
500
501
502
505
506
507
509
510
511
512
513
515
517
519
520
521
522
523
525
Paul Martia
Žižkov Pub Godspead
Before the River Flooded
545
546
548
Jason Mashak
Opiate of the Masses
WTFWJD?
On Questions
551
552
553
tom mccarthy
from Men in Space
555
John McKeown
Alcohol
Wild Poppies
The Day You Love Me
573
574
575
Maureen McManus
Collateral Poetry Totem
Turf
Joking Apart
Deconstructing Eternity, A-Z
577
578
579
580
581
Joshua Mensch
The Marvelous Marvels Forward
Quick Start, Long Night
Art Appreciation
My Third Arm
New Continent
Seance
And so the River Passes like a Long Blue Yarn
The Fine Print
Tomáš Míka
A Castle
Life Delusion A Dream of a Foreign Land
Ewald Murrer
End of the Circle
Temptation
Ken Nash
Maurice Utrillo
The Two Lives of Edward Hopper
The Great Simanoa Anima Husbandry
Scott Jonathan Nixon
Draža Mihailović
the wastebasket
Peter Orner
Belief
Tony Ozuna
El Czechano
IVA PEKÁRKOVÁ
from Elephants in the Dusk
Kateřina Piňosová
Again
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
593
594
595 | 15
597
599
603
604
607
609
613
615
619
621
647
653
Jaroslav Pížl
It’s drizzling
Insteps upwards
Night on itself choking
Magdaléna Platzová
from Salt, Sheep, and Stone
Paul Polansky
A Child’s Job
My Father Told Me I Thought I Had Survived
Z-2012
Disturbing the Peace
Justin Quinn
Prague Elegies
Musílkova
James Ragan
The Hunger Wall
Martin Reiner
Catherine Deneuve’s Fate
[…]
16 | The Same Day
655
656
657
659
665
667
669
670
671
673
682
685
687
688
689
Tim Rogers
No Thy Self (An Exercise in Diet)
691
Kateřina Rudčenková
Rubble
White Shield
Never-Ending Conversation
Tower
Of Words
699
700
701
702
703
Jaroslav Rudiš
Splinters
A Grenade in the Lap The Night that Michael Died
Šimon Šafránek
Gas Station Blues
Jeanne d’Arc au rivière du Styx
Bad Day
Revan Schendler
Night Watchman
Souvenir Cards Mother’s Teapot
Harvest
Return
An Unobstructed View
705
707
708
711
712
713
715
716
717
718
719
721
Theodore Schwinke
God’s Holsteins
God’s Heifers
God’s Cow
So He Threw it in the Air
Heaven Buys Us Drinks
There’s No Love Like the Love of a Piano Player in a Whorehouse
723
724
725
726
727
730
Patrick seguin
Kitten’s gone to London
two sheets
the purpose you hunt
733
734
735
Bethany Shaffer
Happy Household
Geometrics
The Swans of the Vltava
737
738
739
Joe Sherman
Day of the Burnt Toast
741
Phil Shoenfelt
The Train of History … Derailed
747
Jenny Smith
from Egon for Ten Voices
755 | 17
Donna Stonecipher
Album
The Reservoir
Cantilever
Silver Spoon
Holly Tavel
Ars Poetica
All About the Swiss
761
762
764
766
769
773
Jeri Theriault
Fox Heat
777
Alan Ward Thomas
Dandelion
Ignoring Traffic Signs on the Genealogical Reel to Reel
Green Life Hydrogen Fusion
781
784
787
Anthony Tognazzini
86 Things That Happened Between 2:35 and 2:38 This Afternoon
While I Was Lying On My Bed Trying To Take a Nap
Teresa’s Second Dream
Working Out with Kafka
Jane and I at Home One Sunday
Lukáš Tomin
Kye Too
791
795
797
798
805
Nicole Tomlinson
Untitled [Gielard]
Double A
Body Simulations
Again
Jáchym Topol
About 500 Diary Pages but now
and there is this spider and
Rhythm
Meanwhile it’s Nighttime
813
815
816
819
821
822
824
825
827
JAROMÍR TYPLT
from When You
829
Lawrence Wells
Godzilla vs Stalin
831
Alice Whittenburg
The Last Elephant
Under a Rock
Hedgehog
CLARE WIGFALL
18 | Norway
Laura Zam
from Collaterally Damaged
845
847
849
853
867
Lucien Zell
Wind to Wind
877
Contributors
Bibliography
878
893
Editor’s Note
The 1990s found Prague at the centre of an unprecedented cultural experiment.
This anthology attempts to record what became of that experiment.
Thank you to all those who in one way or another facilitated this project and
to its many contributors. Particular thanks are due to Alan Ward Thomas,
Ken Nash, Vincent Farnsworth, Gwendolyn Albert, Jim Freeman, Michaela
Freeman, Alice Whittenburg, Greg Evans, Travis Jeppesen, Mario Dzurila,
Mark Baker, Kevin Blahut, Jason Mashak, Eric Wargo, David Vichnar, Kevin
Bisch, Curt Matthew, Gwen Orel, Mimi Fronczak Rogers, Bernie Higgins,
Sandra Dillon, Greg Linington, Julie Ashley, Lacey (Eckl) McCormick, Jenne
Magno, Nancy Bishop, Marek Tomin, Ken Ganfield, Dan Kenney, John Bruce
Shoemaker, David Vaughan, Jeff Buehler, Bethea Zoli, Alex Zucker and Clare | 19
Wallace.
This anthology is dedicated to Zdeněk Stříbrný, whose generosity and
encouragement during the early years have here finally born fruit; and in
memory of Lukáš Tomin, whose work remains the foundation.
Girl being arrested during lead-up to the Velvet
Revolution, 1989. Photo: Herbert Slavík.
20 |
Introduction
THE RETURN OF KRÁL MAJÁLES
… the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians
conspire for their own glamour in the Future …
—Allen Ginsberg, “Král Majáles,” 7 May, 1965
There are cities in the world that exercise a particular influence over the
minds of writers, artists and historians because they seem to manifest a type
of spirit, a genius loci, through which an intellectual vitalism is channelled
or communicated. Cities galvanized, in their very substance, by a cultural
electricity—a vortex—their names imbued with powers of conjuration—Paris,
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Berlin, New York, Prague. Such is the mystique of the mind’s geography,
that thought and poetry find their location in a given place and time which
nevertheless appear transcendent. Equally, there is a question of pragmatics:
culture, wherever it is conspicuous, happens by implication and association,
like a political crime.
The end of “the Empire of Stalinist tyranny” signalled by the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, not only projected Prague into
the centre of a new Europe and a new European consciousness, it also
reignited—however briefly—the libertarianism with which the city, ever
since the “thaw” of the 1960s and the Prague Spring, had been symbolically
associated. Following the communist putsch of 1948, Prague—once the
heart of Mitteleuropa—became an annex of that historical and cultural
fiction known as Eastern Europe. As Michael March noted in his preface
to Description of a Struggle, this pseudo-territory had been “a lost continent
for over forty years.” The cultural landscape which emerged in Prague
during the Soviet Union’s collapse was thus one both newly central and
yet fundamentally decentred; both singular and radically plural. “In the
twentieth century,” as poet Tim Rogers observed, “it was possible to be born
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, enter grammar school in Czechoslovakia,
go to high school in Germany, work in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,
Ivan Klíma, Introduction, Description of a Struggle (London: Picador, 1994) xix.
Michael March, Preface, Description of a Struggle, xvii.
then retire in Czechoslovakia and die in the Czech Republic—all without
ever leaving Prague.”
Writing in a special issue of the New Orleans Review—“Ten Years After
the Velvet Revolution”—Petr Bílek noted that Czechoslovak poetry in the
early 1990s exhibited a type of historical schizophrenia. Most of the work
being published in the immediate aftermath of the revolution “had been
written in the seventies and eighties, but repressed by the old order.” A
similar view was expressed by Alexandra Büchler in her editorial to an issue
of Transcript devoted to “Iron and Velvet: A Decade of New Czech Writing.”
Büchler: “Haste and indiscriminate publication of what had been banned
and censored until 1989 made for a chaotic scene.” This was evident even at
the time. “Czech literature of the 1990s,” wrote Daniela Drazanová in a 1993
issue of Prognosis, “exists in fast-forward and reverse. Publishers are printing
the formerly banned works of “dissident” authors, previously censored
Czech classics, and the efforts of fresh and relatively unknown writers.”
Such an outpouring produced a sense of hyper-anachronism (“time
exploded”), and a cultural disconnect with a younger generation, which
often found itself alienated from the historical revision in progress and with
more affinity for contemporary literature from elsewhere. Some, like Ewald
Murrer and Jakub Rosen, established their own journals, such as Iniciály,
| devoted to publishing writers under thirty. At the same time, the picture of
“Czech” poetry after the revolution was complicated by at least three other
factors: the competing claims of newly returned émigrés; the ethnic and
political divisions which would lead to the partitioning of Czechoslovakia
in 1993; as well as by conflicting East/West representations of the Prague
literary scene inherited from the Cold War and transformed by the rapid
growth of an international literary community within the city itself. What
this meant in reality was something like Brion Gysin’s dictum: “Nothing is
true, everything is permitted.” Jaromír Slomek, a critic at Literární Noviny,
summed the situation up when he wrote that “Czech literature of the nineties
is something completely different from the books being published in the
nineties.”10
Tim Rogers, “The Metamorphosis of Prague,” Book Magazine 9 (March/April, 2000).
Petr Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” New Orleans Review 26.1/2 (2000): 16.
Alexandra Büchler, Editorial, “Iron and Velvet: A Decade of New Czech Writing, Transcript 6
(2003): www.transcipt-review.org.
Daniela Drazanová, “Transitional Literature,” Prognosis, 25 June-8 July, 1993: 2B.
Jáchym Topol, qtd in Rogers, “The Metamorphosis of Prague.”
See Tom Burkett, “After Big Brother, Unchained Writing,” Prognosis, 21 August-3 September,
1992: 3B.
The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain, quoted in John Geiger, Nothing is
True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin (New York: The Disinformation Company,
2005).
10 Qtd in Drazanová, “Transitional Literature,” 2B.
David Horák, Ewald Murrer, Ivan Brezina and David Černý.
Out of this complex genealogy, no clear sense of what inaugurated the
“Prague moment” can really be gained. Throughout the “Normalization”
period of the 1980s, the Prague intelligentsia had been systematically
suppressed. Much of the writing to appear in print during the early 90s had first
circulated in samizdat, using typed carbon copy. Prague writers experienced
their own cultural milieu as a series of arbitrary discontinuities, mediated
(according to changeable State policy) by the official publishing apparatus,
access to educational institutions, and the availability of exit visas. The 1984
awarding of the Nobel Prize to the Prague poet Jaroslav Seifert (one of the
original signatories of Charter 77)—and the consequent accessibility of his
work in translation—created a type of parallel universe outside communist
Czechoslovakia (ČSSR), shaping a literary consciousness entirely at odds
with prevailing realities within the country. One of the “greats” of modern
Czechoslovak poetry, Seifert’s writings brought with them evocations of
Prague as the city equally of Vítězlav Nezval, Karel Teige, Toyen, and of
Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Marina Tsvetaeva.
During the same period, apparently apolitical writers such as Miroslav
Holub were also becoming well-known abroad. Holub was a frequent
contributor to British journals like Encounter (founded by Stephen Spender)
and the Times Literary Supplement. Alongside Seifert, Holub was widely
regarded by many outside the ČSSR to be a major defining figure of the
Prague literary scene. British poet laureate, Ted Hughes, famously described
|
him as “one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere.”11
This was starkly at odds with the reception of Holub’s work among the
mainstream of Czech academics and critics. In her introduction to the Arc
anthology, Six Czech Poets, Alexandra Büchler writes—as late as 2007:
That Miroslav Holub is by far the most widely-known Czech poet is
symptomatic of the ready acceptance of cerebral poetry of linear thought,
“universal” ideas and easy-to-decipher allegories on the one hand, and
a reluctance to engage with poetry referring to an unfamiliar culture and
literary context on the other. Even Seifert, whose work received a brief flicker
of attention following the Nobel Prize award, did not merit as prominent a
place in English-language publishing as Holub, whose work was brought out
by Penguin and Faber, and later by Bloodaxe.12
This typecasting of Holub as somehow exemplary of a failing—on the one
hand, of a “universal” poetics and, on the other, of the English-speaking
literary establishment (as culturally myopic)—masks, behind a facile
ethnographic binary and an undeclared aesthetic ideology, a set of more
fundamental issues that have continued to inform how the various cultural
dialogues that make up the contemporary Prague scene are reported.
Holub, an accomplished immunologist, maintained—against this kind of
|
parochialism—a sense of the artist’s moral duty to enquire about the state
of the world at large.13 For Holub there was no room after the revolution
for the perpetuation of the “ghetto mentality” that had gown up within the
mainstream of Czechoslovak literature—in many respects “a typical minor
literature,” in Bílek’s words, which “preferred to dwell on specific domestic
issues rather than be part of an international exchange.”14
In the early nineties, in the face of war in former Yugoslavia, history indeed
appeared to cast a long shadow over the future of a re-unified “Europe.”
Holub, who steadfastly rejected the victim-culture that cast the Czechs as
the butt of Austro-Hungarian, Nazi and Soviet oppression, insisted that
11 Qtd in Sarah Boxer, “Miroslav Holub is Dead at 74; Czech Poet and Immunologist,” The New
York Times, 22 July, 1998, A17.
12 Six Czech Poets, ed. Alexandra Büchler (Todmorden: Arc, 2007). Cf. “A Conversation with
Arnošt Lustig and Miroslav Holub,” Trafika 1 (1993): 157. Holub: “I was told by some important
people at the American embassy: ‘You are only protected here by being published abroad.’
So I learned in the 1970s to write with the view of the English translation in my mind. And
nowadays I write almost immediately both language versions.”
13 In the inaugural issue of International Quarterly, he insisted that concerns such as global ecology
must not simply be ignored by retreating, for example, into a type of arcadia of national identity.
Responsibility for the state of the world is a shared burden, one that cannot be eschewed by
glib assertions that history, in the abstract, is to blame. This was a long-held view, dating back
to his collaboration with poets like Jiří Šotola, Miroslav Florian and Karel Šiktanc, and their
collective rejection of “abstract ideological proclamations.” See Miroslav Holub, “Náš všední
den je pevnina,” Květen 2 (September, 1956): 2.
14 Petr Bílek, “Czech Literature in the Post-Communist Era: The Socio-Historical Context,”
Transcript 6 (2003): www.transcipt-review.org.
historical “blame” could not simply be apportioned according to binaries
of political or cultural hegemony. He shared a commitment to unpleasant
truths—a commitment similar to that of other poets, like Paul Polansky and
Gwendolyn Hubka Albert, who in the late nineties devoted much energy to
exposing the hidden history of the Lety concentration camp (a camp for the
internment of Roma and other ethnic and political undesirables, exclusively
operated by the Czech collaborationist authorities throughout World War
II).15 But if Holub thought of himself as first and foremost a “European,”
he also argued against forgetting the specific responsibilities we share for
our local and internal landscapes.16 The process of lustration—the exposure
and prosecution of former communists—remained controversial in postrevolution Czechoslovakia. Holub, who was blacklisted through the 1970s
but who some critics attempted to associate with the former regime, never
turned away from the necessity to face up to one’s history in its most specific
yet also most universal aspects.17
The apparent ideological rift between a broadly “western” poetics and
the national sensitivities of some Czech translators and academics—as made
clear in the case of Holub—has arguably less to do with poetics as such
than with a certain “resentment” which applies equally within the sphere of
specifically “Czechoslovak” and later “Czech” literature of that period, in
which dividing lines are often perceptible in terms of personal politics and | political histories—between émigrés and non-émigrés; dissidents and nondissidents; anti-communists, socialists, anarchists, democrats, capitalists,
monarchists; and also inter-generationally. In a typical remark—which takes
in the work of writers like Ivan Blatný and Jiří Gruša—Bílek writes:
Most of the poetry written in exile had few original ideas to offer; it reiterated
views already held by its writers and readers. And, paradoxically, this poetry
exhibited many of the same features of the official poetry published by the
communist regime in Czechoslovakia …18
It is equally telling that, of the twelve poets Bílek chose to include in the
Summer 2000 issue of the New Orleans Review—a survey of the state of
contemporary poetry in the Czech Republic—none were born after 1963,
while only three (Sylva Fischerová, Božena Správcová and Jáchym Topol)
15 See Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak, Paul Polansky (Prague: GplusG, 1998).
16 Miroslav Holub, “Troubles on the Spaceship,” trans. David Young, International Quarterly 1.1,
“Europe in Transition: East and West” (Spring 1993): 96-99.
17 As noted by Jiří Holý and Jan Culík, after 1968, Holub was dismissed from his position at
Prague’s Microbiological Institute and his work wasn’t published in the ČSSR again until
1982, following a degrading public self-criticism, which permitted him to be employed in a
junior position at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine. Holub’s position at the
Microbiological Institute was only restored in 1995 (“Miroslav Holub: 13 September 1923-14
July 1998,” Obituary Notice, www.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Holub.htm).
18 Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 19.
were born after 1952. The attempt to frame these disparities in terms of
the legacy of the Cold War, of ‘68 and the “Moscow communiqué,” or of
‘80s normalisation, serves only to obscure—or attempt to obscure—the fact
that in Prague, as elsewhere, fundamentally self-serving agendas remain
at work in establishing claims over cultural discourse,19 with political or
aesthetic ideology often providing an otherwise arbitrary basis of critical
proscriptions.20
2. While the widespread influence of, in particular, 1960s western music
upon pre-revolution (dissident) writing has been well-documented, literary
criticism in Prague has for the most part remained aloof from popular, and
properly contemporary, culture.21 Outside the academies it is hardly surprising
that figures like Lou Reed, Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg remained,
throughout the early nineties, major cultural icons in post-communist
Czechoslovakia, adored by former president Václav Havel. As late as 1998,
students were conducting 24-hour readings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
poetry during the Beat publisher’s visit to Prague that May. While the Beat
movement is now frequently accused of being politically “naïve” and—
like surrealism (which continues to prosper in the city)—anachronistic, its
| sustained popularity indicates, if nothing else, a disaffection with the sorts
of cultural binaries (capitalism/socialism) that—although the terms have
changed since the end of the Cold War—have been preserved in the current
status quo. To appreciate the ongoing significance of the Beat legacy in the
‘90s, one need only look to Prague’s hugely successful 1998 Beat Generation
Festival—in whose catalogue Karel Srp published the StB (secret police) files
documenting Ginsberg’s 1965 visit.22
19 See Kai Hermann, “The Fall of Prague,” Encounter (November 1968): 85-92.
20 One finds, for example, that certain discursive forms of modernist poetry are tacitly earmarked
as Soviet (Yevtushenko); while a return to lyric “subjectivism” is viewed as a specifically
domestic response to the uncertainties and vicissitudes of a world from which higher temporal
authority (“the constant presence of an obvious enemy”) has been removed. See Bílek, “Czech
Poetry of the Nineties,” 21.
21 Cf. Gwen Orel, Performing Cultures: English-language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague (PhD
dissertation; University of Pittsburgh, 2005) 18-19: “The subversive power of jazz and rock-nroll were linked explicitly with the English language: early groups had names like Hell’s Devils,
Crazy Boys and Beatmen. In 1970 the communist regime forbade the use of English in rockn-roll culture: bands could no longer sing in English, take English names, or cover songs from
British or American bands. Rock-n-roll had become so important to the Czechs that it was
the 1976 trial of an underground Prague band, Plastic People of the Universe, that led to the
formation of Charter 77.”
22 In a 1996 interview, Ginsberg—who had since obtained, via a Freedom of Information Request,
access to his FBI files (he was placed on a “Dangerous Subversive” internal security list in
1965)—was quoted as saying: “I found that the FBI had translated a denunciation of me by
Prague’s Mladá fronta, saying that I was a corrupter of youth and alcoholic—which I’m not—
and not to be trusted. They sent it over to the Narcotics Bureau to send to my representative,
Congressman Jolson, wanting him not to answer my questions and request for protection and
complaints about the set-ups, the entrapment procedures of the Narcotics Bureau, because I
Allen Ginsberg, crowned “Král Majáles”
at Výstaviště, 1965. Photo ČTK.
Against the propaganda of free market capitalism (celebrated uncritically
after the revolution by supporters of Václav Klaus) and of cultural nationalism,
Ginsberg’s refusal of ideological partisanship—“the Communists have
nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen / and the
Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked”23—
represents a critical stance which, in the era of the IMF and the WTO, appears
to have once again received a certain validation.24 The question that remains
is how much of this re-validation is connected with any formal advancement
of poetics, and whether or not the impact of Ginsberg and the Beats upon the
Czech cultural consciousness has evolved beyond its historical moment.25
was irresponsible, as is proved by this communist newspaper … and that anything I said might
be turned to embarrass him. So I realised that in certain areas, the Western police and the
communist police, by 1965, were one international mucous membrane network. There was
hardly any difference between them.” Allen Ginsberg, interviewed 11 August, 1996—cited
in Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War against America’s Greatest
Authors (New York: D.J. Fine, 1988) and The National Security Archive, CNN, episode 13:
“Make Love Not War: The Sixties,” 10 January, 1999.
23 Allen Ginsberg, “Král Majáles,” Collected Poems 1947-1980 (London: Penguin, 1985).
24 “I must say that I see little difference between the armed and violent governments both
Communist and Capitalist that I have observed.” Allen Ginsberg, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg
(Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2008) 474-5.
25 Arguably, with the exception of writers involved with the international scene, the major
experiments in late-twentieth century English-language poetics, aside from the Beat movement,
have had little appreciable impact on Czech literature.
|
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pop-literary view from the outside also
remains dominated by the Beat legacy and in particular that of Ginsberg.
Ginsberg visited Prague twice during 1965 and discovered that he had
attracted a significant following in the city, even accumulating royalties on
his work. While staying at the Ambassador Hotel on Wenceslas Square,
Ginsberg was free to meet with local poets and translators while nevertheless
being kept under surveillance by the StB. Due to his popularity among
students, he was proposed by one group as their representative at the newly
reinstated Majáles or May festival, at which he was elected Král or “King” by
a large assembly of students. During the days which followed, Ginsberg was
subjected to increasing harassment by the communist authorities, who took
a dim view of his sexual promiscuity and suspected his political activities,
before he was finally arrested and expelled from the country—allegedly for
corrupting the city’s impressionable youth.
Ginsberg’s account of being crowned “King of May,” and his subsequent
deportation, was recorded by Richard Kostelanetz in a New York Times article
two months after the event. The article begins with the pronouncement:
“To university students all over the world today, Allen Ginsberg is a kind
of cultural hero and sometimes a true prophet.”26 Kostelanetz reports that
Ginsberg arrived in Prague from Poland on the 30th of April (his second
| visit to the city), after visiting Russia. Ginsberg’s account commences from
the following day:
I walked in the May Day parade that morning, and that afternoon some
students asked me to be their king. I agreed; they put me on a truck, and
I travelled in the procession of the Polytechnic School [ČVUT], with a
Dixieland band on a nearby truck. The procession went through the city to a
main square, where 10,000 to 15,000 people had gathered. I made a speech,
dedicating the glory of my crown to Franz Kafka, who once lived on that
square.
From there, we are told, the procession continued to the Park of Culture
and Rest (Park kultury a oddechu Julia Fučíka; the present-day Výstaviště
exhibition grounds) where Ginsberg found himself elected Král Majáles by
an assembled body of “100,000” students from all of Prague’s universities.27
A few days later, late at night, someone suddenly attacked me on the street,
screaming “bouzerant,” which means “fairy” or “queer”; and all of us,
including the students with me, were arrested by the police and taken down
to the station. I wasn’t released until 5 A.M.; they took affidavits from the
26 Richard Kostelanetz, “Ginsberg Makes the World Scene,” The New York Times, 11 July, 1965,
32.
27 Ginsberg, “Král Majáles.”
|
others. I suspect the attacker was a police provocateur, but I can’t prove it.28
On the 7th of May, Ginsberg was arrested and held in isolation before being
put on a plane for London Heathrow (it was during this flight that he wrote
the poem “Král Majáles”). Almost twenty-five years later, Ginsberg was
working to bring attention to the plight of Prague’s dissident community.
In January 1989, Ginsberg appeared alongside The Fugs’ Ed Sanders and
Vratislav Brabenec, of The Plastic People of the Universe, at a New York
concert in support of the Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous (known as “Magor”
or madman). Jirous had been imprisoned by the communists for reading
protest poems in public. Jirous, an art historian by training but prohibited
from working, was known for his conception of the “Parallel Polis,” or
“Second Culture”—the belief that art could expose the régime’s falsification
of social reality and bring about its collapse by “living in truth.”
The city to which Ginsberg returned a year later in 1990 was very soon to
undergo a type of transformation few cities ever experience. Over the next
few years, Jirous’s “Parallel Polis” would come to seem like a more fitting
description of the separations occurring within Prague society on both an
economic and cultural level—the outcome on the one hand of a fantastically
corrupt voucher privatisation scheme (widely heralded in the West as a new
10 | economic miracle),29 and on the other by the large scale return of former
Czech émigrés and the rapid increase in the size of the city’s international
community. A New York Times article estimated that by 1993 there were up to
30,000 Americans alone living in the city.30 Many of these had some connection
with the emerging “scene”—as writers, translators, editors, publishers,
artists, filmmakers, human rights activists, booksellers, teachers, students,
musicians or groupies. This loosely formed community—the new “Second
Culture”—gave rise to a constructed myth of the city which combined a
nostalgic Bohemianism, a Western hankering after cultural authenticity (the
“poetry of witness”), and a type of Wizard of Oz fantasy set in juxtaposition
to the 1980s “culture wars” and political bankruptcy of the Reagan/Thatcher
era in the US and Britain.31 As Bruce Sterling wrote in 1993, in an article for
Wired magazine:
this is a very ‘90s city. Even its artistic problems are ‘90s artistic problems: the
struggle of a bewildered and put-upon generation to speak authentically in
an era whose central directive is to reduce all art and all life to an infinitely
replicable commodity, to turn Kafka into a T-shirt and Havel into a carny
28 Kostelanetz, “Ginsberg Makes the World Scene,” 32.
29 See Robert McLean and Hana Lešenarová, “Bribe Case Turns ‘Economic Miracle’ Sour,”
Prognosis, 10 November-16 November, 1994: 5.
30 “Y(oung) A(mericans in) P(rague),” The New York Times, 12 December, 1993, 671.
31 The height of this phenomenon was perhaps the US cable television pilot for a resident sitcom
to be called “Prague 1,” produced by screenwriter Eric Stunzi in May 1993.
attraction, to shrink-wrap cultures as pasteurised package-tour exotica, to
make art a bogus knickknack and heritage the hottest-selling market segment
of the Museum Economy.32
Prague, mired in its own and others’ histories, has never been a stranger
to myth and mystification. “It’s uncanny atmosphere,” notes Heinz Politzer,
“had impressed observers as early and as independent of one another as
the American Longfellow and the Northern German Wilhelm Raabe.”33 But
Prague’s influence over the Anglophone imagination dates back further still.
At least—if one is inclined to excesses of cultural genealogy—as far back as the
beginnings of modern English. (Prior to that, even, we find Anne of Bohemia
serving as the patron of Anglo-Saxon poet Geoffrey Chaucer, with whose
writings—on the model of Boccaccio—the long migration of a vernacular
literary English is said to have begun, born—as it were—of translation.34
It was at this time, too, that Jan Hus, whose statue stands at the centre of
Prague’s Old Town Square, sparked a political and cultural revolution in
Central Europe by translating and teaching the work of Englishman John
Wycliffe.)
From Shakespeare’s imaginary Bohemia, and the Prague of John Dee
and Edward Kelley, to the real and romanticized post-Revolution city of the
1990s, is perhaps not such a great leap. Nor would a comparison appear | 11
entirely strange. The metamorphoses of Prague following the Velvet
Revolution of November 1989 in part revived, in part invented, a panEuropean and cosmopolitan tradition that forty years of communism never
quite succeeded in snuffing out. From the Utraquists to the Plastic People
of the Universe—from Hus, via Masaryk, to Havel—from Arcimboldo, via
Kafka and the surrealists, to Klíma—the idea of Prague persists as a type of
Xanadu of cultural resistance in which a poetry of universal ideas, contrary
to Auden’s glib pronouncements, might indeed make something happen. As
Sterling notes: “A lot of writers come here, not because Havel can teach them
how to write, but because Václav Havel is a symbol of what words-in-a-row
can do.” 35
When Ginsberg made his speech in 1965, dedicating the glory of his May
crown to Kafka, he was acknowledging a symbolic debt to a writer who, though
he was a Praguer to the very core of his being, was also a German-speaking
Jew (whose collected writings, incidentally, were not comprehensively
32 Bruce Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People,” Wired 3.01 (1993): www.wired.com/wired/
archive/3.01/.
33 Heinz Politzer, “Prague and the Origins of Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel,”
Modern Language Quarterly 16.1 (1955): 49.
34 See David J. Wallace, “Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England, and Chaucer’s Emperice,” Litteraria
Pragensia 9 (1995): 1-16.
35 Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People.”
translated into Czech until the very end of the twentieth century).36 Kafka, the
great ironist of state bureaucracy and individual alienation, defined what it
meant not to be the citizen of any singular nation or state, but to be a creature
of that “Parallel Polis” which is not merely a collocation of architectures,
municipalities and ordinances, but a type of cultural vortex whose topology
is both particular and universal. In a world beset with nationalism and
fundamentalisms of every kind, it is worth being reminded that the figures,
the places and moments of cultural modernity—at any time—have always
been in some sense foreign.37
In 1990, returning to Prague at the invitation of mayor Jaroslav Kořán, for
the first time since his expulsion in 1965 (“to reclaim my paper crown”),38
Ginsberg gave a “momentous poetry reading” at the Philosophy Faculty
of Charles University.39 In the audience were many of those who had been
students when Ginsberg was expelled from the country twenty-five years
previously—including Havel—and were active in the literary underground
before the Velvet Revolution. Karel Srp, founder of the dissident Jazz Section
(1971), has pointed out that the connection between Prague and Ginsberg
dates back even further, to the mid-1950s with the journal Světová literatura.
12 |
The editors were the first to publish Ginsberg’s Howl in Czechoslovakia,
as well as stories by Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. As these authors sometimes
illustrated the dark side of the United States, communist censorship tolerated
them.40
For Joseph Yanosik, “the influence of Ginsberg’s [1965] visit on Czech culture
should not be underestimated,” and was, according to him, a major catalyst
for the ‘68 Prague Spring.41
Ginsberg’s return thus signified for many the inauguration of a new
36 Richard Kostelanetz, “Ginsberg Makes the World Scene,” The New York Times, 11 July,
1965.
37 The so-called “Velvet Divorce” of 1993—the separation of former Czechoslovakia into two
separate states, Slovakia and the present-day Czech Republic, marked a critical point in which
national revivalism posed a serious threat to Prague’s restoration as an international city.
To a certain extent, cultural nationalism remains endemic within the major state academic
institutions, at odds with the lived reality of the city’s cultural practitioners.
38 Allen Ginsberg, “The Return of Král Majáles,” Collected Poems 1947-1997 (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007): 982. At a performance at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics, 30 June, 1992, Ginsberg noted that, during the quarter century since his expulsion
from Prague, no election of the “King of May” had taken place, the tradition only being reinstated
in 1990. His return provided the opportunity for pointing out, once again, the irony of America
having been held up, in the Cold War imagination, as a Land of the Free. In his poem, Ginsberg
writes: “And tho I am the King of May my howls and proclamations are banned on America’s
electric airwaves …”
39 Brian Kruzick Goodman, “Allen Ginsberg—King Majáles,” The New Presence 4 (Winter 2004):
41-43.
40 Qtd in Darrell Jónsson, “When Poetry was King,” The Prague Post, 7 May, 2008.
41 Joseph Yanosik, “The Plastic People of the Universe,” Perfect Sound Forever (March 1996):
www.furious.cpm/perfect/pulnoc.html
Alan Levy, with James Ragan, at the Globe bookstore, 1993.
Photo: Mark Baker.
cultural moment which, under the presidency of playwright Václav Havel,
would result in what the expatriate American newspaperman Alan Levy
later—in an often quoted editorial—called the “Left Bank of the nineties”:
We are living in the Left Bank of the Nineties. For some of us, Prague is Second
Chance City; for others, a New Frontier where anything goes, everything
goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is
nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but somewhere within each of
us here, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time.
Future historians will chronicle our course—and I have reason to believe that
they’re already here—but even they will need to know the nuts and bolts of
what it was like and how it felt to live and be in liberated Prague in the last
decade of the 20th century.42
Writing two years after Levy, Sterling concurred:
Prague is very much like Paris in the ‘20s, but it’s also very much unlike Paris
in the ‘20s. One main reason is that there is no André Breton here. People do sit
and write—stop by The Globe, the crowded émigré bookstore on Janovského
14 in north Prague, and you’ll see a full third of the cappuccino-sipping
black-clad Praguelodyte customers scribbling busily in their notebooks.
There are many American wannabe writers here—even better, they actually
42 Alan Levy, Editorial, The Prague Post, 1 October, 1991.
| 13
manage to publish sometimes—but there is not a Prague literary movement,
no Prague literary-isms. No magisterial literary theorists hold forth here as
Breton or Louis Aragon or Gertrude Stein did in Paris. There isn’t a Prague
technique, or a Prague approach, or a Prague literary philosophy that will set
a doubting world afire. There are people here sincerely trying to find a voice,
but as yet there is no voice. There may well be a new Hemingway here (as
The Prague Post once declared there must be). But if Prague writers want to do
a kind of writing that is really as new and powerful as Hemingway’s was in
Hemingway’s time, then they will have to teach themselves.43
14 |
Like Ginsberg, Levy had been expelled from Czechoslovakia by the
communist authorities. Originally from New York, Levy moved to Prague in
1967, where he chronicled the Soviet invasion the following year—recounted
in his book Rowboat to Prague (1972; reprinted in 1980 as So Many Heroes). In
1971 his press accreditation was revoked and, along with his family, he was
expelled from the country on allegations of spying. For many years he lived
in Vienna, where he served as foreign correspondent for the International
Herald Tribune and as dramaturge of Vienna’s English Theatre. Levy returned
to Prague in 1990 and subsequently became editor-in-chief of The Prague Post,
from its founding in 1991 until his death in 2004. Of his contribution to the
city’s cultural life, Havel wrote:
Alan Levy chose to become active in our country during what was for us
a very sensitive and important period—the time of creating a free, open
environment for the media. Because of his human qualities and professional
experience, he quickly became recognised as a not inconsiderable figure for
whom I had great respect.44
Levy, the author of 18 books, published interviews with W.H. Auden, the
Beatles, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Nabokov and Ezra Pound—a body of work
that, for some, helped to establish the requisite genealogy for viewing the
post-1989 Prague scene within the broader historical context of previous
international milieux in Paris and Berlin. He also represented a sense of
continuity with a Prague of the past.
As the only accredited American journalist in the city during the years
immediately following the ‘68 soviet invasion, Levy was able to lay claim to a
particular authority in seeking to foster the young, post-revolution scene. He
was, nevertheless, merely one of a number of longer-term expatriates whose
activities, in some respects, constitute this scene’s pre-history—among them
the Academy Award-winning animator, Gene Deitch; the “Rhodes Scholar
Spy,” Ian Milner; PEN translation prize winner Gerald Turner; and Mary
43 Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People.”
44 Václav Havel, quoted in Mark Nessmith, “Top Post editor Levy dies at age 72,” The Prague
Post, 8 April, 2004.
Ian Milner, Jean Bertram, Margot Milner and James Bertram,
outside Milner’s house in Podolí,1951. Photo: Jarmila Milner.
Hawker, daughter of the defector George Wheeler, a former major in the US
military government in West Germany. Both Hawker and Milner worked in
what is today the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, in the
Philosophy Faculty of Charles University—the same university department
in which Prague Structuralism was first theorised in the 1920s by the likes
of Vilém Mathesius, Jan Mukařovský, René Wellek and Roman Jakobson.
Before his death in 1991, Milner served as the translator of poets such as
Holub, Sylva Fischerová and Vladimír Holan.
During the years leading up to the Velvet Revolution, philosophers,
musicians, artists and writers from the “West” continued to visit Prague,
despite the restrictions put in place by the communist authorities. The
seminars of the underground university—hosted during the 70s and 80s by
dissident philosophers including Ladislav Hejdánek and Julius Tomin (father
of the writer Lukáš Tomin)—brought to the city the likes of Jacques Derrida
(detained in Ruzyně prison in December 1981) and Roger Scruton, and has
been examined in detail by Barbara Day in her book The Velvet Philosophers.45
Meanwhile Philip Roth’s The Prague Orgy (1985) helped to maintain the myth
of Prague literary Bohemianism, echoing the émigré writer Milan Kundera’s
45 Barbara Day, The Velvet Philosophers (London: The Claridge Press, 1999).
| 15
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).46
In May 1989, Joan Baez—one of many 1960s artists to influence Czechslovak
dissident groups—performed a concert in Brno, openly criticising the
regime (she performed a reprise concert in Prague on 17 November, 2009).
At the same time, writers like Gwendolyn Albert (studying linguistics in
Prague on a Fulbright scholarship) were becoming involved in the dayto-day operations of the Občanské Fórum (Civic Forum, soon to constitute
the first post-communist government, headed by Václav Havel). When the
revolution began in earnest, more than a week after the fall of the Berlin wall,
Albert was working in Civic Forum headquarters in the Laterna Magika
Theatre, assisting Rita Klimová (later to become Havel’s first ambassador to
the United States).
In an account later published in the Prague Post, Albert records the
moment, on 23 November 1989, when Alexander Dubček—the former ČSSR
president deposed by the Soviet invasion in 1968—addressed the crowds
from the balcony of the Svobodné Slovo newspaper offices on Wenceslas
Square, standing beside a Václav Havel who had only recently been released
from ten months’ imprisonment.47 This symbolic conflation of the Velvet
Revolution and the Prague Spring served to feed a broader, international
romanticism about the city and its political and cultural circumstances.
16 | With glasnost still working its inexorable way towards the collapse of the
Communist Party in Russia, the post-revolution euphoria in Prague served
as the backdrop for a self-willed literary renaissance. As Bílek notes:
After the revolution, almost two thousand private publishers emerged. Instead
of two periodicals covering all of contemporary literature, suddenly there
were dozens of monthlies and quarterlies appearing and disappearing.48
This renaissance was in part fostered by the rapidly growing international
community in the city and by a reading public hungry for news from the
outside.49 Regular publications soon began appearing in English, German
and French. In November 1990, five Americans from Santa Barbara founded
Prague’s first English-language newspaper, Prognosis, which published bi46 It is notable that, throughout the nineties there was in fact no Czech edition of Kundera’s novel.
From 1985, Kundera himself wrote exclusively in French.
47 Qtd in Kimberly Ashton, “Speaking Out: American Activist Passionate about Human Rights,”
The Prague Post, 25 July, 2007. Cf. Alan Levy, “Gwendolyn Albert, Militant Pacifist,” The
Prague Post, 12 June, 2003.
48 Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 20.
49 A trend which has continued. According to figures compiled in 2005, 28.8% of all books
published in the Czech Republic were translations—2,211 of those from English alone (Dana
Soupková, Czech Literature in English Translation, unpublished MA thesis, Masaryk University,
Brno, 2006: chapter 1.1). As Miroslav Holub notes: “translations have been an integral part
of Czech culture since the nineteenth century.” See “A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig and
Miroslav Holub,” Trafika 1 (1993): 157.
weekly (and for a brief period weekly) until its closure in March 1995. Many
of the writers to emerge on the Prague scene worked for the paper in one
capacity or another—including John Allison, Anthony Tognazzini, David
Freeling, Randall Lyman, Thor Garcia and Louis Armand. Less than a year
later, The Prague Post—a weekly newspaper with ambitions more orientated
towards the status quo—was founded by Lisa Frankenberg and Kent
Hawryluk (two former Prognosis employees), with Alan Levy as editor-inchief. By 1993 two further papers where briefly in print—Prague News (half
in German) and the Bohemia Daily Standard—representing the apogee of the
early “left bank of the nineties” phenomenon.
3. The middle of 1991 saw the first of Prague’s international writers’ festivals,
initiated by the former New York book seller and director of the Prague Book
Fair at Palác Kultury (until 1993), Michael March. The same year saw the
publication of March’s Child of Europe: The Penguin Anthology of East European
Poetry. This anthology, like the Prague festival, grew out of a project beginning
in the 80s. As March recounts:
I established poetry festivals and readings at Keats House [in London]—
publishing and introducing with George Theiner, editor of Index on Censorship,
the work of such great poets as Vladimír Holan—before moving the readings
to the Arts Theatre and Donmar Warehouse Theatre. From 1983, they became
the “Covent Garden Readings.” In February 1989, I brought “Child of Europe”
to the National Theatre, presenting poets from eight communist countries,
at a decisive moment. The Festival was broadcast on television and radio,
and praised in the press. In May 1991, I moved the readings to Prague—to
Valdštejn Palace, which was opened for the first time in living memory to the
public.50
The inaugural festival featured, among others, Miroslav Holub, Eva
Kantůrková, Irving Layton, Karel Pecka, Paul-Eerik Rummo, Zdena
Salivarová, Josef Škvorecký, and Petr Odillo Stradický. 1992 saw Robert
Bly in Prague as a guest of the festival, and in succeeding years a roster of
internationally renowned authors (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Susan Sontag,
Harold Pinter, Jorge Sempún, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Creeley) appeared
alongside Czech writers such as Ivan Klíma, Hana Androniková, Jáchym
Topol, Sylva Fischerová, Jaroslav Rudiš, Sylvie Rychterová, Michal Ajvaz,
Petr Borkovec and Ewald Murrer.
In February of 1992, Howard Sidenberg—a former doctoral student in
Russian politics at the University of California-Santa Barbara—founded
Twisted Spoon Press out of a communal apartment in Smíchov. Sidenberg,
50 Michael March, Prague Writers’ Festival website: www.pwf.cz.
| 17
who had arrived in Prague the previous year, joined with translator Kevin
Blahut, artist Kip Bauersfeld, and writer Lukáš Tomin, to establish the sole
continuously operating English-language literary press in the country.51
The first title to appear was Tomin’s debut novel, The Doll, described by Fay
Weldon as
A visionary work, by an extraordinary and important young writer. As
cultures and languages mix and merge, Tomin meets the consequent literary
challenge head on, and actually makes this reader hopeful about the future
of the novel.52
Tomin, the first of two sons of prominent dissident intellectuals (his mother,
Zdena Tominová, was spokesperson for Charter 77), had lived in the
UK, France and Canada since 1980 and wrote three novels in English (all
published by Twisted Spoon). A series of poems had earlier been published
in the London Literary Review along with an article on the souring of the
Velvet Revolution in The New Statesman. After his return to Prague in 1991,
Tomin became a regular contributor to Literární Noviny, Iniciály, Host and
The Prague Post. His second novel, Ashtrays (1993), illustrated by Alf van der
Plank, is regarded by many as the masterpiece of the Prague renaissance
53
18 | of the 1990s—described by the Post as “a linguistic tour de force.” Without
ever having received the wider recognition his work warranted, and which
his early reviewers suggested was immanent, Tomin committed suicide in
1995 at the age of 32—his body was discovered at the foot of a cliff in the
Šárka valley.54 His third novel, Kye, was published posthumously in 1997.
Reviewing it, Anthony Tognazzini wrote of Tomin as “a fine formalist whose
narrative experiments are bold and intriguing.”55
During its almost twenty years of operation, Twisted Spoon has produced
books in translation by Bohumil Hrabal (Total Fears, written between 1989
and 1991 as a series of letters to an American student in Prague, April
Gifford), Ladislav Klíma (Glorious Nemesis, translated by Marek Tomin), Eva
Švankmajerová (Baradla Cave, translated by Gwendolyn Albert), Pavel Brycz (I,
City, translated by Joshua Cohen and Markéta Hofmeisterová), Vít Kremlička
(Selected Writings), Róbert Gál (Signs and Symptoms) and Tomaž Šalamun—
alongside work by Louis Armand, Joshua Cohen, Søren S. Gauger, Travis
Jeppesen, Christopher Lord and Phil Shoenfelt—garnering strong reviews in
the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles
Times. Throughout, the emphasis of the press has been, in Sidenberg’s words,
51
52
53
54
55
Julie Ashley, “Of Words and Twisted Spoons,” The Prague Post, 16 October, 1996.
Lukáš Tomin, The Doll (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1992)—publisher’s blurb.
Michael Halstead, “Book Review: Ashtrays,” The Prague Post, 23 March, 1994.
Day, The Velvet Philosophers, 69.
Anthony Tognazzini, “Tomin’s Final Novel,” The Prague Post, 26 November, 1997.
“on introducing both new works from contemporary writers and work from
an earlier period that has been neglected in translation.”56
Soon after Twisted Spoon published its inaugural titles, Prague’s first
English-language literary journal appeared in print, in June 1992—founded by
Doug Hajek and fellow Canadian Laura Busheikin, with former Los Angeles
resident Tony Ozuna (who had arrived in Prague two years earlier), and
designed by soon-to-be-prominent Czech artist Veronika Bromová. Deriving
its name from a play upon the pan-Slavonic for “tongue” or “language,”
Yazzyk was avowedly cross-cultural, publishing work both written in English
and translated from Czech and Slovak. Seeking in part to emulate former
underground magazine Revolver Revue57 and Joachim Dvořák’s more recent
Labyrint Revue (a journal devoted to articles on culture, writing and the arts
largely in translation), it included such writers as Jáchym Topol, Michal Ajvaz,
Egon Bondy, Iva Pekárková, Eva Hauserová, Ivan Jirous, and Jana Krejcarová,
alongside David Freeling, Randall Lyman, Věra Chase, Toby Litt and Daniela
Drazanová. A consistent feature of Yazzyk’s cover was the incorporation of the
tri-part design of the new Czech flag. The first two issues (with a print run
of 2,000 copies) sold out within twelve months of publication—number 2, on
“Erotica, Sexuality and Gender,” having since become a rare collector’s item.
There was rumour of a fifth number, to be edited by Cyril Simsa (translator,
critic, essayist and science fiction writer). “Fantasy and the Fantastic” was to | 19
be the theme, but the journal folded before it could appear.
Although running to only four issues, Yazzyk was a major accomplishment
and paved the way for many of the journals that were to follow. In his article
on the Prague scene in Wired, Bruce Sterling wrote of Yazzyk: “it may not be
the best literary magazine on the planet, but it’s the best one to deal with this
corner of it.”58 Ozuna describes how the first issues came about:
Our contacts for writers and translators were all from the mailing lists of
the Czech underground, who were operating out of an office for VOKNO
magazine across the street from Hlavni Nadraži. We were able to easily
solicit texts from many translators: James Naughton (Oxford University),
the translator for Bohumil Hrabal, Miroslav Holub, and Alexandra Berková;
Peter Kusy (Columbia University), the translator for Milan Kundera; and Paul
Wilson, Václav Havel’s translator. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg
urged us to use poetry translations of Ginsberg’s Czech counterpart, Egon
Bondy (whom we did publish in two issues). The Bondy was only published
due to the collaboration of Martin Machovec, who is the current (as he was at
that time as well) expert on literature of the underground.59
56 Howard Sidenberg, Twisted Spoon website: www.twistedspoon.com.
57 Revolver Revue was founded in 1985 and published in samizdat until 1989, after which it
achieved regular publication.
58 Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People.”
59 Tony Ozuna, letter to the author, 22 January, 2010.
Anthony Tognazzini at Beef Stew,
1993. Photo: Michaela Freeman.
20 |
Also in June of 1992, Aleš Najbrt and photographer Tono Stano started up the
bilingual RAUT magazine, funded by Reflex, and produced on large format
(100cm x 70cm) glossy paper, featuring photography, interviews and new
writing—including Toby Litt and Tomáš Míka’s translations of Jaroslav Pížl
in issue 2.
Three months later saw the beginnings of the Beef Stew poetry readings.
The first reading took place on the 13th of September at Rubín Theatre, in
Malá Strana and continued, two weeks later, at the original Ubiquity Club’s
“Reggae Room” (located adjacent to the upstairs ballroom at Slovanský Dům,
later the site of Tam Tam club). Two weeks after that the readings moved to
the Prague Cultural Centre/Ženský Domov in Prague 5, near Anděl metro
station, where they continued until the end of the year. From February 1993,
Beef Stew moved to its permanent venue in the downstairs club at Radost/
FX, on Bělohradská street. Initiated by New York poet David Freeling, Beef
Stew ran every Sunday evening for ten years, during which time the readings
were coordinated by a string of writers including Anthony Tognazzini, Jim
Freeman and Willie Watson.
A favourite venue for British and American journalists reporting on the
New Bohemia, Beef Stew became the epitome of Levy’s rive gauche hype.60
60 One memorable episode involved organizer David Freeling shouting “This is not a democracy,
this is a poetry reading!” in response to complaints by sections of the audience about free
speech when a fist fight broke out after Beef Stew regular Jeremy Saxon punched a heckler in
Freeling: “Everyone wants to find a great writer. We’re all waiting for
something to escape the pot.”61 Beef Stew was variously loved and loathed
by members of the international community and the media alike. Many
sought to find in Beef Stew symptoms of a cultural disconnect. Gwen Orel,
in Performing Cultures: English-language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague,
described the open-mic readings as “a cultural ghetto where [American]
expatriates performed their ambivalence.”62 For many involved in the
Prague scene, Beef Stew was nevertheless—particularly in its early years—at
the heart of a substantial English-speaking subculture.63 While the epicentre
of that subculture shifted many times as the decade progressed and literary
circles eccentrically formed and reformed across the city, a list of those who
performed in the Radost basement reads like a Who’s Who of the Prague ‘90s.
Among them, Lukáš Tomin, Julie Chibbaro, Myla Goldberg, Peter Orner,
Stuart Horwitz, Alan Ward Thomas, Anthony Tognazzini, Robert Eversz,
Karin Cintron, Neil Danziger, Theo Schwinke, Paul Martia, Jay Godwin,
Shannon McCormick, Joe Sherman, Louis Armand, Donna Stonecipher, Ken
Nash, Julie Ashley, Vincent Farnsworth, Jenny Smith and Jeri Theriault—
many of whom went on to build important careers both in Prague and
abroad.
Perhaps due to limited book publishing opportunities in Prague at that
time, many worthwhile manuscripts never saw the light of day—a signal | 21
for detractors to declare, like Gary Shteyngart (author of The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook and one-time reader at Beef Stew) that the scene
lacked talent.64 Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season (Random House, 2000)
and Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague (Crown, 2004), was a regular reader
at Beef Stew between 1993 and 1994, where she presented chapters of an
unpublished novel Cirkus, an intricately structured story about the last days
of the Kludský family circus (1902-1934), which circulated in typescript and
became one of several underground Prague classics without ever making it
into print. Julie Chibbaro, author of Redemption (Simon & Schuster, 2004),
was another regular, arriving in 1996. She described the Beef Stew readings
as “life-changing”:
to have a weekly audience response helped me to understand what worked
61
62
63
64
front of a Czech TV crew (ČTK1) who recorded it all on tape. (Alan Thomas, letter to the author,
10 February, 2010.)
Qtd in Randall Lyman, “Open Mike,” Prognosis, 5-18 March, 1993: 3B.
Orel, Performing Cultures: English-language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague, 73.
Typically the readings were followed by late-night drinking sessions at a nearby bar. In the early
days it was Stará Beseda in Žižkov (next to where the Clown & Bard later was at Bořivojova
102). Later, the after-reading venue was Paseka, at Ibsenova 3 near Náměstí Míru (a former
haunt of Václav Havel), for several years. After Paseka, U Havrana near I.P. Pavlova became
the post-Stew watering hole of choice.
Gary Shteyngart in conversation with Coilín O’Connor for Radio Praha / Český Rozhlas, 26
March 2004.
and what didn’t in my pieces (at least to an extent). It was hosted by an
excellent writer named Anthony Tognazzini and held at Radost. Around that
same time, about five of us got together and started a writers’ workshop,
helping each other learn and improve. One of the writers recommended
I submit my work to a little mag called Optimism Monthly, edited by Alan
Ward Thomas. He ended up publishing a number of my stories and novel
excerpts (about ten) in the next several years. An editor, David Speranza, at
another journal, The Prague Revue, also asked for a story, “Chrome,” which
was published in the Autumn/Winter 1996/97 edition of the Revue. … My
time in Prague transformed me from a person who thought she was a writer
into a professional.65
Along with David Freeling, Anthony Tognazzini was a central figure in the
Prague expatriate scene. Over a period of six years, Tognazzini published in
almost every English-language periodical in the city, writing regularly for
Prognosis and the Prague Post. According to long-time patron and sometimes
publisher, Jim Freeman, Tognazzini was one of the major voices to emerge
from the early 90s and is perhaps the most closely associated with Beef Stew.
His collection of short stories, I Carry a Hammer in my Pocket for Occasions
Such as These—published in 2007, by BOA in New York—originated as a
chapbook produced by Alan Thomas’s Presidential Press, ten years earlier.
22 | Peter Orner—a lecturer in Anglo-American law and Human Rights at the
Law Faculty of Charles University—began publishing in the Atlantic Monthly
while living in Prague. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown,
2006) was described by Dave Eggers in the Guardian as a “georgeously
written book … bursting with soul.” Orner’s first book, a collection of short
stories entitled Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), was ostensibly written
chapter-by-chapter for the weekly Beef Stew readings. As Orner recalls:
I was working on my first book, Esther Stories. Each Sunday night I read with
a group of writers at the Beef Stew reading series in the basement of Radost.
Beef Stew was led by Jim Freeman. I loved Beef Stew because it was such a
supportive environment and also because it gave me a deadline. Each week,
I had to finish something. It didn’t matter what the hell it was, it simply
had to be something. It was odd down there in the dark. Some nights the
light wouldn’t work and I remember being barely able to see what I was
reading.66
Writing in the Lonely Planet guide to Prague (2008), former Globe bookstore
partner, Mark Baker, notes that “with 20 years’ hindsight … it’s possible to say
the critics were too quick to pounce.” The Prague scene, he adds, “spawned
more than its fair share of decent writers,” among others:
65 Julie Chibbaro, letter to the author, 3 January, 2010.
66 Peter Orner, letter to the author, 3 January, 2010.
• Jonathan Ledgard, a long-time Prague correspondent for The Economist …
the author of the acclaimed novel Giraffe (2006), based on the story of the
slaughter of central Europe’s largest giraffe herd by the Czechoslovak secret
police in 1975.
• Maarten Troost … a reporter in the early days of The Prague Post and the
subsequent author of two hilarious titles: The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) and
Getting Stoned with the Savages (2006)—books that could have been written
about Prague but are actually about his later adventures in the South Pacific.
• Olen Steinhauer [who] spent time here in the mid-’90s before decamping
to Budapest to write five acclaimed Cold War spy thrillers. The fourth book,
Liberation Movements (2006), opens in the Czech Republic and shades of
Prague can be seen throughout the series.
• Robert Eversz [who] has lived off and on in Prague since 1992 … his 1998
novel Gypsy Hearts is set here. He’s written several popular noir thrillers,
including Shooting Elvis (1997), which explore America’s obsession with
celebrity culture.67
The story doesn’t end there. Defying the notion that Prague’s international
scene was principally a North American enclave, Toby Litt—author of ten
books, including Corpsing (Hamish Hamilton, 2000), Ghost Story (Penguin,
2004) and Journey into Space (Penguin, 2009)—completed three novels
between 1990 and 1993, while teaching English at the Economics Faculty of | 23
Charles University. As Litt notes, however:
All three Prague novels are still unpublished, as is the Prague-based novel,
dissidents, I wrote back in England. Eventually, The Prague Metro helped me
get an agent, Mic Cheetham, who still represents me.68
Tom McCarthy—author of the widely acclaimed Remainder (Alma/Vintage,
2006)—had a similar experience. Living in Prague until 1993, where he
worked at the Fine Arts Academy (AVU) as a life model, McCarthy only
succeeded in publishing his own Prague novel—a roman-à-clef in part about
the city’s contemporary art scene, entitled Men in Space—in 2007. Reviewing
Men in Space for The Observer newspaper, Lee Rourke wrote: “McCarthy is
fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary
novel towards exciting territories.”69 Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of
Books, described McCarthy’s Remainder as “one of the great English novels of
67 Neil Wilson and Mark Baker, Lonely Planet: Prague, 8th ed. (London: Lonely Planet, 2009)
33. “This list was compiled early last year and would now also include Matt Welch’s Myth of
a Maverick (nonfiction), Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls (also nonfiction) and Brendan McNally’s
Germania. I also didn’t include John Allison’s very funny The Adventures of Joe Marlboro (in
Prague) … The late Alan Levy wrote several books (not mentioned above), including Rowboat
to Prague (on the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion) and The Wiesenthal File” (Mark Baker, letter to
the author, 2 February, 2010).
68 Toby Litt, letter to the author, 26 January, 2010.
69 Lee Rourke, “Men in Space,” The Observer, 9 September, 2007: 27.
24 |
Misery Loves Company, 1995: Chip Persons, David Nykl, Peter Dubois, Chris Clarke, Leah
Gaffen, Laura Zam, Sean Fuller, Ewan McLaren, Celise Kalke, Victoria Toth, Richard Toth, William
Hollister, Gregory Linington, Robert Russell.
the last ten years.”70
Louis Armand read at Beef Stew intermittently from mid-1994. In 1997
his first poetry collection, Séances, was published by Howard Sidenberg’s
Twisted Spoon Press, being described by Miroslav Holub as “luminous and
original” and by John Millett, editor of Poetry Australia, as “among the best
work written anywhere.”71 A second volume appeared from Arc four years
later, while his first volume of fiction, The Garden, came out in 2001 from Salt.
Meanwhile Phil Shoenfelt, formerly of the New York band Khmer Rouge,
published a bilingual volume of song lyrics and poetry—The Green Hotel/
Zelený Hotel—with the Prague-based publisher Maťa in 1998. His first novel
appeared in 2001, with Twisted Spoon, entitled Junkie Love—described by
Nick Cave as “a nice nasty read.”72 Having received numerous independent
book awards, Junkie Love was taken up in 2006 by Random House. Another
long-time Prague habitué, Christopher Cook, published a novel, Robbers
(Carroll & Graf, 2000), and a collection of short stories, Screen Door Jesus
(Host, 2001), to critical acclaim. Like Goldberg’s Bee Season and McCarthy’s
Remainder, Cook’s Screen Door Jesus was also made into a film.
4. By the time the Beef Stew readings came to an end in 2002, more than
twenty of those writers active in Prague during the first decade after the | 25
revolution had embarked on noteworthy publishing careers. Such accounts
give the lie to opinions, like Shteyngart’s, periodically aired in the media to
the effect that Prague in the nineties was little more than a haven of “bored
liberal arts trained cubicle drones … recession refugees and debt artists fed
on the myth of ‘20s Paris and ‘50s New York.”73 Writing in the August 2007
issue of the Washington D.C. periodical, The Smithsonian, Jonathan Kandell—
casting an appraising look back over almost two decades of literary revival—
rightly concluded that expatriate writers had indeed “made remarkable
contributions to Prague’s post-Communist renaissance.”74
As this renaissance gathered steam in the mid-nineties, an increasing
number of initiatives broadened the scope and complexion of the international
scene. The English-language press continued to expand (at least 25 periodicals
appeared during the ‘90s alone—from underground zines like Riding Black
70 Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” The New York Review of Books 55.18 (20 November,
2008).
71 Publisher’s blurb.
72 Publisher’s blurb.
73 Alexander Zaitchik, “Let the Kazoos Sound: A Decade of English Press in Prague,” Think
(November/December, 2001): http://www.thinkexpats.com/component/content/article/85publications/190-let-the-kazoos-sound-a-decade-of-english-press-in-prague.html
74 Jonathan Kandell, “Americans in Prague: A second wave of expatriates is now playing a vital
role in the renaissance of the Czech capital,” Smithsonian magazine, August 2007: http://
www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/prague.html##ixzz0e6bJDanM
26 |
to financial reviews like the Prague Business Journal), while at the same time
opportunities in theatre and film began to open up. The years 1991 and 1992
saw the creation of at least three English-language theatre companies, each at
least partly orientated towards producing new work: Peter Krough’s North
American Theatre (which opened its first, and only, season with Larry Shue’s
Wenceslaus Square); Victoria Jones and Clare Goddard’s Small & Dangerous
(managed by Camille Hunt—who a decade later would be a partner in the
successful Hunt & Kastner Gallery); and Black Box International Theatre
(initially Studio Theatre, headed by Elizabeth Russell)—opening with the
premier of Jim Bunch’s “Lay Down by Me” under the artistic direction of
Nancy Bishop.75 As Gwen Orel notes:
The presence of English-language theatres in Prague in the nineties coincided
with the ongoing transition to a market economy in the Czech Republic, as
the English language itself became increasingly the international language of
business and culture.76
75 Orel, Performing Cultures: English-language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague, 46 and
passim.
76 Orel, Performing Cultures, 1.
While Small & Dangerous lasted only a year under that name (during which
time it produced a long list of short plays by local writers: Sean Fuller’s
Death in Smichov, Tim Stanley’s Belongings, Robert Russell’s Icebreaker,
Victoria Jones’s Sailor, Vijai Maheshwari’s Boy, Girl and Probability, Robert
Eversz’s Cowboys and Indians, Mark Rayner’s Duet for Killers, Clare Goddard’s
hanging, Bryn Howarth’s Who Will Untie Us? and William Lee’s Refugees), it
nevertheless survived through the mid-nineties as Big Knees—a partner of
the Misery Loves Company ensemble—continuing to stage new work by
two of Prague’s most successful English-language playwrights, Fuller and
Laura Zam.77
In the wake of these early theatre ensembles followed a long line of others:
Exposure, Beautiful Confusion, Prahaha Productions, Channel Surfing,
Prague Ensemble Theatre, English Workshop Productions, Bear Theatre,
Prague Playgroup, the Old Town Theatre Project, Black Snow, the Prague
Playhouse, and Blood, Love and Rhetoric. In 1996, Four Days—a non-profit
theatre association headed by Denisa Václavová—initiated the ongoing
International Theatre Festival 4+4 Days in Motion (4+4 dny v pohybu),
featuring dance and movement theatre. From 1998, the seminal Misery Loves
Company, founded by Richard Toth, shifted its focus from text-based to
more physical, post-dramatic theatre, under the name Miloco (led by Daniel
Fleischer-Brown), establishing the Fulcrum Festival of Physical Theatre in | 27
2000 and devising original work throughout the often dry years of Prague’s
turn-of-the-millennium theatre scene. But in the early nineties, emerging
companies like Small & Dangerous and Misery Loves Company remained
closely integrated with the local literary community. Plays were regularly
commissioned from writers who read their scripts at Beef Stew and whose
work began to be published in magazines both abroad and in Prague. At
the same time, opportunities in film became increasingly frequent with the
foundation in 1993 of the highly successful Stillking production company.
Some of those involved in the early theatre experiments—like Nancy Bishop
and the poet Maya Květný—subsequently went on to important careers
(both Bishop and Květný are now major casting agents in Prague’s studio
film industry).
1993 also saw the establishment of several new English-language
publishing houses, whose activities—while mostly short-lived—fed a general
wave of optimism about the future viability of a commercial literary market.
These included: Praha Publishing (one-time publisher of Prognosis, now the
name of a producer of medical text books); Two Tongues Press—conceived,
yet never realised, by Canadian, Marilyn McCune (its first title was intended
to be short story collection by James Ragan); and Modrá Músa—formed by
another Canadian, Laura Scanga, and two Americans, Michael Vena and
77 Orel, Performing Cultures, 71-75.
28 |
The Globe before and after. Bottom: Martin Machovec, Allen Ginsberg,
Mark Baker (with Prognosis editor John Allison in the background), 1993.
Scott Rogers (a classics student from the University of Virginia).
In July of the same year, Rogers—along with three Prague Post writers,
Jasper Bear, Mark Baker and Maura Griffin, joined by Rogers’s future
wife Markéta Janků—opened what was to become Prague’s major literary
landmark of the ‘90s: the Globe Bookstore and Coffeehouse. Established on
the former site of a small laundry service in Holešovice, at Janovského 14, the
Globe catered to a mixed clientele of translators, bibliophiles, anglophiles,
students and the local literati. With its distinctive motto—in libris veritas; in
kava vita—it quickly became a magnet for visiting writers as well as a base of
operations for many in the now established international community. Along
with Café Kandinsky, at Kamenická 9, and basement bar/clubs like Pokrok
and Fraktal, the new bookstore contributed to the growing perception of the
Letná-Holešovice district as Prague’s “Greenwich Village.”
During its first year, the Globe hosted readings by Allen Ginsberg,78
Martin Amis, Ivan Klíma, Arnošt Lustig, Ludvík Vaculík and Jáchym Topol.79
Those who worked at the Globe over the years, until its relocation across the
river in 2000, included Dan Kenney and the late Edmund Watts (who both
published newletters from there), the poet Tim Rogers, artist Kip Bauersfeld,
and singer Tonya Graves. Writing in the Prague Post fifteen years later, Frank
Kuznik observed:
In the heady days of the ‘90s, when Americans arrived almost daily in
Prague with backpacks and visions of joining a new Left Bank brimming
with artists and writers, literary readings were a staple and center of the
expat community. Many were held at the Globe, which in its heyday as the
only English-language bookstore in town attracted visiting authors such as
Richard Ford and Amy Tan, and a steady stream of amateur poets.80
Soon after the Globe opened its doors, its resident press—Modrá Músa—
produced the first anthology of contemporary English-language writing
from Prague, entitled Bohemian Verses, edited by Scott Rogers. A deluxe
hardbound edition, using handmade paper from the sixteenth century Velké
Losiny mills, the anthology included work by Jeffrey Young, James Ragan,
David Freeling, Daniela Drazanová and Kevin Blahut. In his introduction,
Rogers—with Anita Lynn Forgach of the Prague Fine Arts Academy—wrote:
“it is a fact that in Bohemia under communism it was a custom for ‘books to
perish like birds.’ … The book you now hold, which respects and makes use
of the fine Czech tradition of bookmaking, stands in sharp contrast to the
books of those Czech writers of the not-so-distant past who persevered with
78 Ginsberg also read that year (1993) at Viola, a long-established literary venue on Národní, and
at the American Centre on Hybernská.
79 Mark Baker, “Reviving a Lost Literary Scene,” The Prague Post, 1 November, 2006.
80 Frank Kuznik, “Literary Revival,” The Prague Post, 7-13 May, 2008: A7.
| 29
only handwritten, typewritten, or mimeographed texts (samizdat).” Rogers
and Forgach go on to add:
Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the arts in the Czech Republic have
flourished in a renewed atmosphere of freedom of expression. Prague has
once again regained its former magnetic appeal as an international focal point
for young artists, musicians, and writers, all of whom have come to this city
to participate in the new Czech renaissance. Though the writers represented
in Bohemian Verses differ in age, gender, motherland, and purpose, all for
various lengths of time have called Prague home.81
As the years pass, this question of calling Prague “home” has become
more complicated and vexed. With the 1990s receding from view and the
communities it engendered disappearing or being merged within less easily
identifiable social networks and structures, so too has the very conception of
a contemporary Prague “scene” become more difficult to reconcile with its
fin-de-millénaire antecedents. It is understandable in this light why no further
anthologies appear after Bohemian Verses for the next seventeen years—a
perhaps unforeseeable timeframe within the uncertainties and flux of the
new Republic. The experience of Prague as a habitation of foreigners “at
home” has had to be experienced and thought-through differently from the
30 |
post-Revolutionary romanticism that often confused the lived city with its
mythological doppelgangers in Paris and elsewhere: imagined communities
ranged in opposition, mutually evoked, invented and reinvented.82
With the concept of history still ideologically overburdened by the legacies
of Marxism, on the one hand, and confronted by a rampant (amnesiac)
consumerism, on the other, many writers turned to an anthropological view
of their situation, recognising that history, as Miroslav Holub once said, “is
always a failure by definition…”83 Navigating the contingencies of daily postrevolution experience became for some the foundation of a poetic—evoking
Nathanial Tarn’s idea of poet-as-anthropologist. For others, contingency
pointed the way to alternative realities, to psychogeographical overlays and
counter-rational mappings of urban territories—rending the city as a type of
amalgam of mythology and poetic construct.
Whatever anthropological dimension there might have been to the early
literary renaissance, it nevertheless remained a creature of circumstance
in which a whole “generation” found itself, irrespective of ethnicity, in
radically foreign times. “It is on this basis,” as Gwendolyn Albert observed
already ten years ago, “that people from all over the world have met and
81 Bohemian Verses: An Anthology of Contemporary English Language Writing from Prague, ed.
Scott Rogers (Prague: Modrá Musá, 1993) xvi-xvii.
82 Indeed, as I write this I am reminded of František Palacký’s famous remark: “If there were no
Austria, we would have to create it.”
83 “A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig and Miroslav Holub,” Trafika 1 (1993): 163.
attempted to communicate with one another in post-1989 Prague.”84 And yet
it remains true that whenever writers have committed to make this city a
“home,” as Rogers says, they, in turn, become creators of new “histories”
and custodians of a Prague which is today as foreign to the pre-revolution
city as it in turn was to the Prague of Brod, Kisch, Ungar, Werfel, Meyrink,
Rilke and Leppin.
At the same time as the Globe was opening, bars and nightclubs across the
city were catering to the semi-exotic “new Bohemian scene” and a barrage
of rapidly shifting cultural paradigms. Edmund White, writing for Vogue,
observed:
The Czechs can’t seem to explore fast enough all they missed out on
during 40 years of communism. They’re digging down into their pre-war
modernist heritage. They’re keeping their bars open 24 hours a day, they’re
translating books from every language, and they’re travelling as much as
the disadvantageous exchange rate permits. The frantic desire to catch up
accounts for much of the exuberance of this thrilling youthful city.85
Echoing a sixties euphoria, post-revolution Prague was a mix of low rent
communalism, drugs and open possibility. Dozens of squats existed in the
city’s suburbs and downtown, adjacent to such well-known landmarks | 31
as Charles Bridge (including Asylum, a semi-legal performance space on
Betlémská street established by the poet Jay Godwin and home to the Electric
Circus and a diverse theatre performance community). Many of the buildings
that housed them had been left in legal limbo following the ‘89 revolution and
the ensuing restitution laws which sought to return formerly nationalised
properties to their pre-1948 owners. Among these was the Art Deco Café
Slavia, located opposite the National Theatre, a centre-piece of Prague’s precommunist literary culture. Slavia closed for lengthy periods throughout the
early ‘90s under administration by the Academy of Performing Arts (AMU)
and a Boston company, HN Gorin. On 8 November 1993, the “Society of the
Friends of Café Slavia” (Glen Emery, John Bruce Shoemaker, Marek Gregor,
Ladislav Provan) gained access to the building and reopened the café for two
weeks—attempting to restore the café’s former ethos—until the authorities
had it closed down again on the 20th.86
As the nineties progressed, an increasing number of subculture bars and
clubs opened in neglected buildings across Prague. Many of these became
well-known, like Mamma Klub (Elišky Krásnohorské in Josefov), “Klub
Stalin” (located beneath the demolished Stalin Monument in Letná), Bunkr
84 Gwendolyn Albert, “Allegiance to the Strange: Prague Expatriate Writing of the Nineties,” New
Orleans Review 26.1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2000): 161.
85 Edmund White, “Prague’s New Face,” Vogue, September, 1994: 352.
86 “Destiny of Café Slavia Still Unknown,” Carolina 96 (26 November, 1993): carolina.cuni.cz/
archive-en/Carolina-E-No-096.txt.
Glen Emery and John Bruce Shoemaker
at Obecní Dům, 1993.
32 |
(in a former Civil Guard nuclear shelter, along with Radio 1, at Lodecká 2 in
Nové Město), Jo’s Bar & Garáž (opened in 1992 by Canadian Glen Emery—a
former resident of the ČSSR in the ‘70s and ‘80s—on Malostranské náměstí),
Repre (briefly located downstairs in the pre-restoration Obecní Dům—coowned by John Bruce Shoemaker, frequent sponsor of Twisted Spoon
Press, Trafika, Optimism and Think), Tam Tam (located on the second floor
in Slovanský Dům, now a boutique mall at Na Příkopě 22—operated by
Christoph Brandl), and Klub X (first in Palác Metro on Národní, then in the
basement of Dětský Dům, across the street from Tam Tam at Na Příkopě
15). The Thirsty Dog/Formanka (not to be confused with the present Žíznivý
Pes), a bar which opened on the river-side of Obecní Dům for only 18 months
during 1993 and 1994, achieved particular notoriety before being shut down
on the 7th of June by city health inspectors. Allen Ginsberg read there, Joe
Strummer (of The Clash) performed there, and Nick Cave wrote a song about
it for his album Let Love In.87 These venues catered to a broad demographic,
often mirrored in the crowded private salon-style gatherings presided over
by patrons and poets such as Bruce Damer and Věra Chase.
87 Glen Emery in conversation with Coilín O’Connor for Radio Praha / Český Rozhlas, 25 June
2007.
5. For the following three years, the Prague scene ran on overdrive. In 1993
alone, three new literary journals appeared.88 Grasp, edited by Revan Schendler
and Robert Haas at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, had to wait
sixteen years for its second issue to see the light of day in 2009 (when it was
revived by its current editors Andreas Patenidis and Iliya Bolotyansky). The
other two journals fared significantly better. One Eye Open / Jedním Okem, a
journal of women’s issues in Central and Eastern Europe, was founded by
twenty-five year old American, Deborah Dubois, who—along with Laura
Busheiken of Yazzyk—joined prominent Czech feminist Jiřina Šiklová in
establishing the Gender Studies Centre in Prague.89
One Eye Open was targeted to an audience across the former Soviet
bloc, with a view to addressing the shared situation of women in the postcommunist region, where public awareness of problems routinely addressed
by feminists in the West remained minimal. While One Eye Open was, up
until its last three issues, primarily a literary journal, it was nevertheless
consistently addressed at creating gender dialogue. Speaking about the
significance of the journal’s title, Dubois explained in an interview that
“people’s eyes aren’t open here … Getting one eye open is a start.”90 One Eye
Open would eventually run to eight issues, the last appearing in Winter 2006.
Its editors included Věra Chase, Eva Věšínová (Kalivodová), Clare Wallace,
Marci Shore and Jacqui True. Among the journal’s contributors were Eva | 33
Hauserová, Maya Květný, Magdaléna Lubiejewska, Randall Lyman, Jakub
Zahradník, Pavla (Slabá) Jonssonová, Sylva Fischerová, Louis Armand,
Rebecca Floyd and Kirsten Lodge. The ambitions of One Eye Open were also
shared by a number of women’s writing groups that grew up in the city, led by
poets like Laura Conway and Lenka Králová (whose “Art of Disappearing”
group held regular readings at Žižkov’s Klub A and published a bilingual
anthology under the group’s name in 1999).
Undoubtedly the most widely respected journal to appear in the 1990s
was Trafika, named after the traditional Czech tobacconist/newspaper shop,
founded by three Americans—Michael Lee, Alfredo Sánchez, Jeffrey Young
(with Scott Rogers serving as managing editor). Published by Modrá Músa
and the World Literature Society, Trafika began life as a quarterly, slipping
into an irregular rhythm with number 5 (from which point it is registered as
being published by “Trafika Inc.” in New York), then appearing again only
twice in the succeeding four years—its last issue under the sole editorship
of Young, in Autumn 1999. Rogers once made the prediction: “In five years’
88 As Bílek notes, during this same period Czech-language literary publishing contracted. “Since
1993, except for books by a dozen big names, almost all Czech poetry has been self-published
or produced by presses whose names appear on only one book” (“Czech Poetry of the Nineties,”
20). Additioally: “Data from 2001 suggests that out of 3,136 registered publishers, one third
published one book a year” (Bílek, “Czech Literature in the Post-Communist Era”).
89 See Randall Lyman, “Word Soup,” Prognosis, 5-18 March, 1993: 3B.
90 Qtd in Lyman, “Word Soup,” 3B.
34 |
time, Trafika will be established as one of the premier magazines of the world,
enhancing Prague’s reputation … There is a great Czech literary tradition to
which we are contributing.”91 On its debut, the journal was described by one
reviewer as “slickly vacuous,” with only a nominal connection to the city’s
literary community, despite its widely advertised Prague connection.92
Yet the success of Trafika largely stemmed from its strictly internationalist
orientation and its emulation of iconic journals like Granta and the Paris
Review. “We believe,” Rogers said of the journal, “that literature is international
in scope.”93 In six years of operation, it published a number of important
Prague writers, including Lukáš Tomin, Michal Ajvaz, Jáchym Topol, Sylva
Fischerová, Ludvík Vaculík and Petr Borkovec (his first appearance in English,
in Trafika 3), alongside such recognisable names as Gilbert Sorrentino, Joyce
Carol Oates and John Barth. A few Prague writers also found temporary
editorial work at Trafika, most notably the poet Donna Stonecipher, whose
book The Reservoir was published in 2002 by Georgia University Press.
Still in 1993, Divus—the art publishing house founded by Ivan Mečl,
released its first English-language title, the Australian Miles Lewis’s Batman’s
Hill. At the same time, the first chapbooks began to appear from among
the writers associated with Beef Stew, including Anthony Tognazzini’s
Introductions from the Execution Stand, Ken Nash’s Palaver & Other forms of
Intercourse, and Darren Waters’s Notes on the Second Coming. In the following | 35
year Jim Freeman’s micro-press published Stuart Horwitz’s 123 Thoughts on
Writing and Aesthetics and Jay Godwin’s Priceless Poems from Worthless Words
(Freeman would go on to publish three more of Godwin’s books over the next
two years). Other chapbook titles appearing contemporaneously included
Maya Květný’s Nestled Indecorous, Anthony Tognazzini’s Everybody’s Book
and Karin Cintron’s Waiting out the Night. Meanwhile, Julie Ashley founded
the first of several Beef Stew-related writing workshops which ran more or
less continuously from 1993-1998. Among its members were Myla Goldberg,
Jeff Herzbach, Alan Ward Thomas, Paul Martia, Jim Freeman, Anthony
Tognazzini, Chris Beneke, Julie Chibbaro, Neil Danziger, Karin Cintron,
Jenny Smith, Shannon McCormick, Theo Schwinke.
May 1994 saw the inauguration of the revitalised Prague book fair, Svět
91 Qtd in Michael Halstead, “Literary Symbiosis Drives Ambitious Magazine,” The Prague Post, 9
March, 1994.
92 Christopher Sheer, “Review of Trafika 1,” Prognosis, 29 October-11 November, 1993: 7B.
Like Trafika, the Prague Summer Writers’ Workshop—initiated in August 1993 by Trevor
Top (publications officer at the ill-fated Central European University) and Robert Eversz—was
sometimes criticised for it seemingly nominal connection with the local literary community.
Linked initially to the University of New Orleans, and later coming under the directorship of
Richard Katrovas, the Workshop has for many years brought visiting American students and
faculty to the city. During its first year, sponsored by Czech PEN, the Globe, Prognosis, X-Ink
and Trafika, the 1994 workshop hosted seminars by Miroslav Holub, Arnošt Lustig, Alan Levy,
Ivan Klíma, Eda Kriseová, Jiří Stránský, Martin Šimečka, Josef Škvorecký, Zdeněk Urbánek and
Ludvík Vaculík.
93 Qtd Halstead, “Literary Symbiosis.”
Knihy, with regular panel discussions with local and international authors
co-ordinated by translator and director of “Literature Across Frontiers,”
Alexandra Büchler. In November, Jiří Stránský hosted the 61st World
Congress of PEN International, whose theme for that year was “Literature
and Tolerance.” Writers attending included Václav Havel, Arthur Miller,
Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Ivan Klíma, Arnošt Lustig, Sylvie Richterová
and Salman Rushdie (but not Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who declined).
Meanwhile two other English-language periodicals appeared. The first,
Transitions, a news publication, ran for five years (1994-1999) before moving
online. The second was X-Ink (running to six issues), describing itself as
“Prague’s monthly cultural arts forum,” edited by Matthew Salt. Adopting the
same large format as Yazzyk, the new bi-lingual magazine included writing
on art, theatre, film, design, music, architecture, as well as poetry and fiction.
Its staff included playwright Sean Fuller and Twisted Spoon copy editor
Amy Nestor. During the same year Bruce Damer—with Jitka Kafková and
Geraldine Mucha—opened D-Salon, hosted by the artist Kateřina Štenclová,
with a view to generating patronage for contemporary art and new writing
in Prague.94 The salons took place at the Novotného Lávka club, near Charles
Bridge, and featured exhibitions and performances, including film actor
James Mitchell Lear’s “Hemingway Reminisces.” Meanwhile, international
36 | media attention turned to a one-off experiment organized by Ken Nash and
Karin Citron at the English School of Prague, involving twenty fiction writers
(Myla Goldberg, Ken Nash, Karin Cintron, Julie Ashley, Thomas Alan Ward,
Jeff Herzbach, Karel Skarstein, Jason Penazzi-Russell, Lawrence Wells, and
others), on the 9th of April—the 24-hour “Novel-a-thon.”95
1995—the year Radio Free Europe moved its headquarters from Munich
to Prague’s former Federal Parliament building—was greeted with the arrival
and rapid departure of Velvet magazine, Prague’s first “city magazine,”
precursor to Pozor: News from Around the Bloc (edited by Kevin Bisch and
Elizabeth Cornell) which lasted all of 1996, and Think (edited by Jeffree Benét
and published bilingually), which continued until 2002 and established itself
as something of a bête noir of the Prague expatriate community—anticipating
the fortunes of the Prague Pill in 2002-2003. The remainder of the nineties
witnessed a succession of publications with widely different reputations
aimed increasingly towards politics and business, including The New
Presence (from 1996), Threshold Praha (1997), The Prague Tribune (1997-2007),
Freezerbox Magazine (edited by Alexander Zaitchik and Cedric Howe from
1998 to 2008), Central European Review, (1999-2002), and Transitions Online (the
continuation of the earlier print magazine, commencing from 1999). In 1997,
94 Deborah Michaels, “New Salon Aims to Increase Arts Patronage,” The Prague Post, April 6-12,
1994: 3a.
95 Michele Kayal, “In Prague, Overnight Novels a Test for U.S. Expats,” USA Today/International
Edition, 11 April, 1994: 9A.
the art magazine Umělec was founded (published by Divus)—appearing in a
separate English-language edition from 2000 onwards, under the editorship
first of fiction writer Jeff Buehler and then of playwright William Hollister.
While Jejune: America Eats its Young was initially published in Oakland,
California—appearing biannually from 1993—editor Gwendolyn Albert’s
return to Prague in 1995 helped to further diversify the city’s publishing
scene. In the intervening years since her participation in the events of
November 1989, Albert—along with partner Vincent Farnsworth—had
begun to establish herself as an important new writer in the San Francisco
Bay Area, having produced a volume of poems written earlier in Prague,
entitled Dogs, with Ed Mycue’s Norton Coker Press in 1991. Farnsworth, the
journal’s managing editor, divided his time with being a sound-installation
artist (founding the Pazvuky Noise Project with bassist Dan Kenney) and,
beginning in the late ‘90s under the stage-name Reverend Feedback, front
man for the now legendary Blaq Mummy. Throughout the latter half of the
‘90s he organised readings at the Globe and elsewhere. In 2001 he published
his second collection of poetry, Immortal Whistle Blower, with Bill Lavender’s
Lavender Ink press in New Orleans.
Unlike earlier English-language literary journals in Prague, Jejune was
avowedly grungy in its aesthetic and outwardly anti-establishment in its
political orientation. Tim Rogers, reviewing Jejune 8 for the Prague Post, | 37
compared it to the mimeographed zines produced out of New York’s Lower
East Side in the ‘70s—Ted Berrigan’s C, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You, and Anne
Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair.96 As often focused on issues of civil
rights as it was on new writing, Jejune published articles and interviews
dealing with the rise of neo-fascism and the plight of the Czech Republic’s
Roma community. Number 8 carried an interview with poet Paul Polansky
and Nazi-hunter Lubomír Zubák, about the cover-up over Lety concentration
camp, along with an interview with Petr Uhl, former dissident and (at that
time) Czech Commissioner for Human Rights. Jejune continued for six years,
running to nine issues in total (all, except the last, wearing a cover designed
by artist Mark Neville), publishing work by a range of local and American
writers, including Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Theo Schwinke, Jeremy Hurewitz,
Paul Polansky, Sapphire, Spencer Selby, Alexander Zaitchik, Jenny Smith,
Robert Bly, Jules Mann, Robert Bové, John McKeown, Eileen Myles, Lydia
Lunch and Ed Mycue.
Contemporaneous with Jejune, but appearing regularly every month over
five years, was a magazine that was probably the most fully identified with
Beef Stew and the Prague expatriate community—Optimism Monthly. In an
interview in February 1996, long-time editor Alan Ward Thomas commented
on the idea behind the magazine:
96 Tim Rogers, “Jejune: Angel Heir or Devil’s Advocate?” The Prague Post, 16 December, 1998.
The purpose of Optimism Monthly was to help overcome the tremendous
cynicism that arose after the initial buzz about the Paris of the ‘90s wore off
… We try to stay loyal to regular contributors and always have new writers
in each issue. We’ve already published over a hundred writers, quite a few
of them for the first time … What interests me most are new voices. For
example Jenny Smith’s “Egon” or Theo Schwinke’s poems about God and
animals; Julie Chibarros’ voice is delightful and unlike anything I’ve ever
read; Anthony Tognazzini has written cubist fairytales … there are headways
being made into new ground.97
Published by Tim Otis, with production support from Tim and Mimi Rogers,
and edited for much of its run by Alan Thomas (the last twelve numbers
being edited by Laura Conway), Optimism contained artwork and writing
by a long and impressive list of local and visiting writers, including Maya
Květný, Anthony Tognazzini, David Vávra, Dan Kenney, Jim Freeman, Laura
Conway, Paul Martia, Donna Stoneceipher, David Freeling, Neil Danziger,
Julie Ashley, Alan Baird, Jeremy Saxon, Stevieanna DeSaille, Ken Nash,
Ira Cohen, Joie Cook, Tim Rogers, Jenny Smith, Stuart Horwitz, Theodore
Schwinke, Karl Skarstein, Věra Chase, Peter Svobodny, Isobelle Carmody,
Christopher Lord, John McKeown, Alice Whittenburg, Kirsten Lodge, Julie
Chibbaro, Patrick Seguin (editor of the fugitive zine RASH), Phil Shoenfelt,
38 |
Róbert Gál, photographer Lucia Nimcová, Anne Waldman, Vít Kremlička,
Kateřina Piňosová, Šimon Šafránek, Julia Vinograd and Jeri Theriault.
1995 also saw the beginning of another international review in the mould
of Trafika, begun by a group of editors linked to Jáma Restaurant and Klub
X—Jason Penazzi-Russell, David Conhaim, Max Munson, Will Pritts and
Todd Morimoto. Changing its name for the second issue—from Jáma Revue
to The Prague Revue—the new journal set out with ambitions, like Trafika’s, to
be a quarterly before settling into an annual rhythm with its last three issues.
Unique among Prague’s literary journals for its devotion to publishing
original full-length plays (including Joe Sutton’s “An Eternity,” William
Borden’s “Hangman,” Richard Toth and William Hollister’s “Dumb,” and
Přemysl Rut’s “No Tragedy: A Little Czech Macbeth”), The Prague Revue also
holds the honour of having printed the only English translations of Bohumil
Hrabal’s poetry (issue 5, 1998). Among those to serve on the Revue’s editorial
board were Jan Flemr, Michael March (director of the Prague Writers Festival),
Howard Sidenberg (of Twisted Spoon), David Speranza, Louis Armand and
Clare Wallace (formerly of One Eye Open).
Rebekah Bloyd—co-translator of Miroslav Holub’s The Rampage (1997)—
described the Revue as “daring and original.”98 Reviewing number 7 for the
97 Alan Ward Thomas interviewed by Dan Kenney, [unpronounceable symbol] (February 1996).
98 Qtd in Stephan Delbos, “Description of a Struggle: The History of the Prague Revue,” Luna Park
Review (2008): www.lunapark.com/PragueRevue.htm
Prague Post, Tim Rogers observed that “the strength of the Revue lies in writing
from times and places that have not received much attention in English.”99
Its 1999 issue (number 6)—dedicated to the memory of Holub—included a
feature on the Spanish “Generation of ‘98”; number 5 (Winter 1998) included
a selection of Portuguese poets translated by Richard Zenith; while number
7 (2000) presented the work of eleven contemporary Slovenian writers, guest
edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki. Among the Revue’s many
notable contributors were Daniela Drazanová, Anthony Tognazzini, Ewald
Murrer, Laura Zam, Arnošt Lustig, Igor Pomerantsev, Jakub Deml, Julie
Chibbaro, Ivan Klíma, John Kinsella, Miroslav Holub, Karel Srp, Michael
Brennan, Justin Quinn, Vít Kremlička, Susan M. Schultz and Aleš Šteger.
In December 1995, in an old Blues club on Národní street called Klub X, The
Prague Revue sponsored its first X-Poezie readings, which would continue at
its new location on Na Příkopě, in the centre of Prague’s downtown, almost
weekly until the club’s closure in 1997. X-Poezie was a mix of open-mic and
featured readers—among them Ivan Klíma, Miroslav Holub, Peter Bakowski,
Justin Quinn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The readings spawned a series of
chapbooks, produced in collaboration with Twisted Spoon Press, including
poetry by Louis Armand and Lukáš Tomin’s Kye Too—posthumously
published in a limited edition in 1999. Under the imprint of the Prague
Revue Cultural Foundation, the Revue—in 1996—published Yevtushenko’s | 39
Neumírej před smrtí as a hardcover book in Czech translation and—in
1999—David Conhaim’s novel Autumn Serenade. After a seven year hiatus,
the Revue reappeared under the managing editorship of Stephan Delbos, in
2008, making a foray into the Prague Fringe Festival with a production of Joe
Sutton’s play “Assorted Other Duties.”100 Contributors to the revived Revue
included Lewis Crofts, Ken Nash, Louis Armand, Christopher Crawford,
Douglas Shields Dix, Lucien Zell, Elizabeth Gross and Catherine Hales.
In 1996, the Revue’s Jason Penazzi-Russell initiated the first Prague Culture
Festival, bringing together Prague’s music and English-language literary
communities, with readings by Donna Stonecipher, Anthony Tognazzini,
David Freeling and Louis Armand at the Malá Strana blues venue, U Malého
Glena. The festival anticipated by three years the Poetry Day festival (Den
poezie), founded by Renata Bulvová and Bernie Higgins (directors of Klub 8)
in 1999 and taking place, every year since, during the two weeks around the
birthday of the Czech Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha (16 November).
In 2003, the management of the festival changed to Higgins and Martin
Sborník (comprising the Společnost poezie/Poetry Society). For the first few
years after it began, the festival also sponsored the Poezie pro cestující (poetryon-the-metro) project. Participants during Den Poezie’s ten year history
99 Tim Rogers, “A Delectable Selection of Literary Diversions,” The Prague Post, 27 June, 2001.
100The Prague Fringe Festival was established in 2002 under the directorship of Steve Gove.
include Věra Jirousová, Kateřina Rudčenková, Alexandra Berková, Graeme
Hetherington, Věra Chase, Vincent Farnsworth, Gwendolyn Albert, Laura
Conway, Šimon Šafránek, Kateřina Piňosová, Phil Shoenfelt, Louis Armand,
Patrick Seguin and Róbert Gál.
Returning to 1996 we encounter two more English-language periodicals.
One, a small-circulation zine published out of the Globe Bookstore by Dan
Kenney and Eric Wargo—entitled [unpronounceable symbol]—containing a
mix of reviews, commentary and interviews with local personalities (running
to five issues); the other, a biannual with international ambitions, originally
co-produced in Prague, London and Dublin—entitled Metre—edited by
David Wheatley and Justin Quinn. Quinn, resident in the city since 1992,
has become over time a respected translator of Czech poetry, in particular
the work of Petr Borkovec and Ivan Blatný. His first volume of poetry, The
O’o’a’a’ Bird, was published by Michael Schmidt’s Carcanet Press in 1995 and
was nominated for the UK’s Forward Prize for best first collection.
While Metre made little direct connection with the Prague scene during
the nine years that it operated an editorial address in the city, it nevertheless
created a different, largely Anglo-Celtic, context for the reception of some
Czech writing in translation. One issue—number 12 (Autumn 2002)—was
devoted to “Reports from Central Europe,” and contained work by Cyprian
40 | Norwid, Marcin Sendecki, Ewa Lipska, Tadeusz Różewicz, Mila Haugová,
Afanasy Fet, Ivan Blatný, Petr Borkovec and Anthony Caleshu. In their
introduction, Justin Quinn and Fran Brearton evoked a contemporary
neglect of writing from the former Iron Curtain countries, noting that the
West lost its interest in poetry from the Soviet bloc with the eastward spread
of capitalism:
Once a certain western sentimentality about suffering had been exposed, it
seemed that critical debates about Central European writing had nowhere
left to go. The attempt to market “the poetry of perestroika” marked the
last gasp of an existing debate rather than the beginning of a new critical
dispensation.101
Arguably, this situation was indicative of a more general loss of prestige of
poetry in English-speaking countries during the 1990s—exemplified in the
UK by the abolition by major presses like Oxford of their poetry lists—as well
as by a revaluation of the “role” of poetry in Central Europe itself. As Ivan
(“Magor”) Jirous has remarked, it was possible under the former regime for
anyone to write poetry and go to prison for it, but this didn’t mean the poetry
itself was of any worth, other than as a political provocation.102
101Fran Brearton and Justin Quinn, “Introduction: Reports from Central Europe,” Metre 12 (2002):
85.
102Ivan Jirous in conversation with Alex Zucker and the author, Club Jilská, 24 November, 1994.
What Brearton and Quinn argued for, in place of this widely typecast
“poetic mode of political allegory,” was “a much more complex and interesting
panorama of [the] various literary cultures, constrained in the past by …
forms of politicisation, beginning to explore and rediscover other modes.”
In short, they called for “a re-assessment that understands a genuinely
international map of poetry through its working in national tradition as
well as within a broader European poetic language.”103 Given the context,
it is hardly surprising that the selection of poets which followed was made
primarily on grounds of “nationality,” with scant effort to address either the
essentially multicultural character of contemporary Central Europe, nor even
the complex profiles of individual poets. The fact that Blatný, for example,
had been in exile in Britain from 1948 until his death in 1990 (time spent
largely in psychiatric institutions), and wrote in English as well as Czech,
wasn’t allowed to impinge upon an ostensibly ethnocentric argument—the
type of ethno-“internationalism” so savagely caricatured by David Černý’s
recent Entropa installation at the Council of Europe headquarters in Brussels
(January 2009).
6. Robert Creeley’s visit to Prague in May 1998 provided an opportunity for a
consideration of the dominant tendencies in English-language poetics in the | 41
city, between the legacy of Ginsberg and the Beats, on the one hand, and that
of Black Mountain and its many outgrowths on the other. The previous year,
Alan Ward Thomas, editor of Optimism, published his first book—Dandelion:
Scattered Reflections on Allen Ginsberg—while in 1998 Vincent Farnsworth, in
Exquisite Corpse, and Louis Armand in Sulfur both published responses to
Creeley, who reciprocated, refering to Armand’s writing as “generous and
engaging.”104 (Always supportive of younger poets, Creeley also entered
into a long correspondence with local poet Alexander Jorgensen, initiated
connections and gave moral support.)105 By the end of the nineties, a core
of poets had emerged in Prague whose work stood out from this tradition
and was gaining increased recognition—among them Gwendolyn Albert,
Laura Conway, Farnsworth, Armand, Michael Brennan, Jenny Smith and Bil
Brown.
Conway’s first book, To Knock Something Hard in the Dark, had appeared
from Bench Press in San Francisco in 1981. Concordia, in Prague, published
her collaboration with Kateřina Piňosová—The Alphabet of Trees—in 2002. In
2005, her work was anthologised in the New American Underground, being
described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “joining the ranks of Ginsberg,
103Brearton and Quinn, “Introduction: Reports from Central Europe,” 86; 87.
104Robert Creeley, letter to the author, 31 May, 1998.
105Alexander Jorgensen, “Emails to a Younger Poet,” Jacket 31 (2006).
42 |
Ferlinghetti, Corso.”106 Farnsworth’s first collection of poetry, Little Twirly
Things, was published by Norton Coker in 1992. Evolving the concept
of “deep poetics”—attempting to “fuse the contemporarily relevant and
political with perennial truths”107—Farnsworth’s writing attracted the
attention of Tom Clark and Andrei Codrescu, who later referred to him as
“the sage of Prague”108 (Codrescu read with Farnsworth at the Globe in July
1999). In 1998 Farnsworth was a member of the Allen Ginsberg Memorial
Committee chaired by Amiri Baraka and in 2000 starred, with Thor Garcia,
in Tally Mulligan’s film High Low.
In 1999, Farnsworth—with the late Igor Tschai—had co-ordinated
Armand’s first solo exhibition in Prague, “Paintings,” at the ArtNatura
gallery downtown. The following year, Armand’s poetry was included by
Michael Brennan and Peter Minter in their breakthrough anthology Calyx: 30
Contemporary Australian Poets, heralded by critic Marjorie Perloff as “poetry
no one can afford to ignore.”109 Brennan, whose Vagabond Press published
work by Pierre Joris, Charles Simic and James Tate, guest-edited issue 7 of the
Prague Revue. In August 1999 he hosted Jacket editor John Tranter in Prague
(Tranter read at the Globe after presenting a lecture at Charles University).
Brennan’s first collection, The Imageless World, was published by Salt in 2003
and received the Dame Mary Gilmore Award.
In September 1998, Bil Brown, a former student of Ginsberg and Stan | 43
Brakhage, founded the non-profit Pražská škola poetiky (Prague School of
Poetics), with Jenny Smith and Jenne Magno. The school organised a series
of festivals and bilingual workshops focused on writing, performance and
improvisation, involving writers such as Anne Waldman, Jerome Rothenberg,
Bernadette Mayer and Lydia Lunch. As Magno relates: “There was a feeling
at that time that Prague was the vortex.”110 Collaborating closely with the
Schule für Dichtung in Wien, the Pražská škola also played host to some
of the writers and performers loosely associated with the Vienna School,
including Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld.
According to its mission statement, the Pražská škola’s major objective
was “the cultivation of a responsible poetics” linked to outreach and
humanitarian programmes:
Poetics is a hidden science that investigates and expands the parameters of
106David Lerner, Julia Vinograd and Alan Allen (eds.), The New American Underground: Vol. 1. San
Fransisco—Poets from Hell (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2005)—cover blurb.
107Qtd in Bill Lavender and Dave Brinks (eds.), “Death Interrupted: A Colloquy of Words from New
Orleans,” Big Bridge 14 (2006): www.bigbridge.org/BB14/.
108Exquisite Corpse: Cyber Corpse 4 (April/May, 2000): www.corpse.org/archives/issue_4/index.
html.
109Michael Brennan and Peter Minter (eds.), Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Sydney:
Paper Bark Press, 2000).
110Jenne Magno in conversation with the author, 15 February, 2010.
creative expression, and is described by American poet Charles Bernstein
as “the continuation of poetry by other means.” The Pražská škola poetiky,
a new international school of poetics based in Prague, upholds this dictum
by hosting an intensive annual programme of exchange, invention and
performance, as well as year-round activities designed to ignite a dialogue
within the international writing community and the Prague community at
large.111
The Pražská škola was described by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as “important for
the development and recognition of Czech poetry,” while Anne Waldman—
co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado—called it “a unique visionary project,
promoting literature and writing and the artistic imagination across cultural
borders … creating new dialogues and possibilities in the next millennium.”
As Ide Hintz, co-founder of the Schule für Dictung, wrote:
44 |
Central Europe has always been and always will be a genuine transmitter and
translator between cultures and languages (traditional and utopian). Prague
hosts and neighbours many languages (spoken and written). The Velvet
Revolution—together with other post-Stalinist revolutions—was prepared
mostly by poets, artists and intellectuals.112
The same year (1998), Bil Brown collaborated with Jameson Welsh to form
Involute Press, publishing Jenny Smith’s Egon (previously serialised in
Optimism). Brown, Smith and Magno also participated in the Allen Ginsberg
commemorative readings in Vienna that year, along with members of the
“Labyrinth” group (Peter Waugh and Karin Kaminker).
The end of 1997 saw the opening of another literary café, GplusG, this
time in Prague’s inner eastern suburb of Vinohrady—a partnership between
former Slovak dissident Fedor Gál and son Róbert. Four of Paul Polansky’s
books appeared under the GplusG imprint between 1998 and 1999—a volume
of poetry, two edited volumes drawing upon the poetry and oral histories of
survivors of the Roma holocaust, and a novel (The Storm) which focused on
the “crimes of the Czech authorities” against its Romani population. The
novel caused a scandal in the Czech Republic and largely disappeared from
bookstores due to the provocative nature of comments made in the book’s
preface (concerning Václav Havel and Karel Schwarzenberg).113 From 1999,
Polansky became increasingly involved with the plight of Kosovo’s Roma. In
December 2004, the City Council of Weimar (Germany) awarded Polansky
its prestigious Human Rights Award in recognition of his work (Polansky
111“Living Word Outreach Poetics Program” (1998).
112“What is Pražská škola poetiky?” press release (January, 2000).
113Valentina Confido, “I Give you my Word: The Actions of Paul Polansky,” Undefeated: Poems
1991-2008 (Rome: Multimedia Edzioni, 2009)..
| 45
was nominated for the award by the Nobel laureate Günter Grass).
Among the other authors included in the GplusG series were Leslie
Feinberg, Jorge Semprun and Jan Urban, though Polansky—ex-boxer, big
game hunter and draft-dodger in the mould of a latter-day Hemingway—
remains the author perhaps most closely identified with the press, while
his Roma advocacy work is most proximate to that of Gwendolyn Albert,
a pioneer in the field, who founded the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation
in 2002 and in 2004 was elected as the first director of the Czech League of
Human Rights.
A series of international readings at Café GplusG during 1999
(“Mezinárodní Literární Večírek”) was hosted by Theodore Schwinke, with
a community of writers including Farnsworth, Polansky, Albert, publisher
Howard Sidenberg, Jeri Theriault, John McKeown and Jenny Smith (whose
play Tall Cotton was performed that year at Jazz Club Železná in midSeptember, with Greg and Andrew Linington).
Seven months earlier, in February 1999, a new bilingual quarterly
appeared online, edited by Alice Whittenburg and Greg Evans. Called The
Café Irreal, this new journal announced itself by way of a manifesto on “irreal”
literature—defined by Evans as engaged with underlying impossibilities in
the depiction of the physical world, which is rendered both unpredictable
46 | and fundamentally inexplicable. Unlike its predecessors, The Café Irreal
was devoted to a clearly defined aesthetic philosophy, evolved from that of
the Prague surrealist movement of the 1930s. In its eleven years of online
publication, The Café Irreal has published translations of Ewald Murrer, Věra
Chase, Jiří Kratochvil, Ladislav Novák, Michal Ajvaz, Pavel Řezníček and
Alexandra Berková, alongside work by Michael Stein and Lucien Zell.
Rounding out the year, Jeri Theriault published her first collection
of poetry, East of Monhegan / Na východ od Monheganu, translated by Lída
Sasková, while Bil Brown and Danika Dinsmore coordinated the Prague
chapter of the month-long “3:15 Experiment” (August 1999).114 But as the
year came to an end, so did a major local institution. Unable to renegotiate
its lease, the Globe Bookstore and Coffee House was forced to move from
its original location across the river to its present address on Pštrossova in
Nové Město. Retaining only two of its original owners—Scott Rogers and
Markéta Janků—the Globe was reconceived as an internet café and service
provider (Globopolis). The new dot.com, recipient of the largest venturecapital package in Czech history, lasted only a year before folding. Rogers
moved on to be chief operating officer of the new In Your Pocket guidebook
publishing group. The bookstore was sold to a German investor, Michael
Homan, and in 2006, after years of financial struggle and dwindling clientele,
was resold to its current owner, Moscow-based Michael Sito.
114See www.315experiment.com.
| 47
Portrait of Paul Martia, by Ken Nash (from Prague on 13 Beers a Day, 1993).
6. The second decade after the Velvet Revolution began with signals of
impending doom. While millenarians across the world were locked down
in their bunkers out of fear of nuclear Armageddon sparked by mass
computer malfunction, cultural sceptics were announcing the failure, end,
or non-existence of Prague’s “left bank of the nineties.” Moreover, as Francis
Fukuyama was busy insisting, history itself had come to an end, the internet
had abolished the culture of the book, and culture was henceforth to exist
only in a type of retrospective virtuality in an new post-literate age. Few
involved in the local scene were bothered by this new Munich accord aimed
at whipping the Prague renaissance off the map. As poet Jenny Smith noted
in an interview: “Time magazine declared Prague dead. That’s good.”115
With the election of Tony Blair as British prime minister, and the electoral
coup d’état of George W. Bush in the United States, the beginning of the
twenty-first century appeared in temper far removed from the elation and
optimism which greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade earlier. A series
of new wars, economic crises, the erosion of the social contract across Europe
and the English-speaking world, climate politics and impending ecological
disaster, combined to create a sense of regression and lost opportunity. At
115Qtd in Angela Primlani, “Composition in Prague,” The Prague Post, 22 September, 1999.
Gwendolyn Albert and Mirek
Vondraška addressing an anti-war
rally on Jan Palach Square, 2002.
Photo: ČTK.
48 |
the same time, a new wave of social militancy appeared to spread across
the developed world in response to the excesses of globalisation and the reemergence in many countries of a quasi-police state. In September 2000, the
International Monetary Fund/World Bank summit took place in Prague’s
communist-era Palác Kultury, attracting some 12,000 international protestors.
For weeks the city was subject to a heavy police presence reminiscent of the
lead-up to November 1989. Two years later—on the 4th of March, 2002—
the US State Department released its annual report on human rights in the
Czech Republic, heavily criticising police brutality during the IMF/World
Bank protests. It was a pattern that would be repeated at the Prague NATO
summit in November 2002, only three months after the city’s devastating
floods. With the election by parliament of the economic rationalist Václav
Klaus to the presidency on the 28th of February, 2003 (the deciding votes
having been cast by delegates of the largely unreformed Communist Party or
KSČM), many people began to wonder about the progress of Czech political
culture after the Velvet Revolution. As Gwendolyn Albert noted: “there
was a promise of a kind of society in 1989, and there is a big gap in that
promise.”116
Following the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New
York, armoured vehicles appeared in the centre of Prague, alongside
concrete barricades manned by heavily armed militia—largely around the
116Qtd in Ashton, “Speaking Out.”
American Embassy and Radio Free Europe headquarters (declared to be
prime terrorist targets). A never-substantiated claim had it that one of the
9/11 hijackers, Mohammad Atta, met with Iraqi officials in Prague on the
8th of April, five months prior to the attacks.117 (Many of the barricades and
police checkpoints remained in place throughout the decade.) With growing
American belligerence in the Middle East, a number of Prague’s literary
community took an active lead in the anti-war movement—including
Gwendolyn Albert, philosopher Erazim Kohák, feminist Mirek Vondraška
and journalist Arie Farnam, protesting against the US invasion of Iraq and
the so-called doctrine of pre-emptive war.118
On the 6th of March, 2003, student Zdeněk Adamec doused himself in
gasoline and set himself ablaze on Wenceslas Square only a short distance
from the spot where philosophy student Jan Palach had immolated himself in
January 1969 (six other students followed Adamec’s example in the ensuing
months). In a note entitled “Action Torch,” posted on the internet just prior
to his suicide and condemning the Iraq war, Adamec wrote:
We didn’t get any better even after the Velvet Revolution … The so-called
democracy we gained is not a Democracy. It’s about the rule of officials,
money and treading on people.119
While it is generally recognised that the turn of the millennium represented
a difficult time for the international scene in Prague, news of its demise
had been greatly exaggerated. Continuing its project of outreach and
social advocacy, the Pražská škola poetiky evolved in late 1999 into two
complementary programmes: Projekt 2000 and Prameni, both under the
general directorship of Jenne Magno. Projekt 2000: “The Subversive in Voice
and Verse,” was a workshop series and festival of experimental poetics and
performance. Among the poets who presented workshops were Jerome
Rothenberg, translator of Vítěslav Nezval and founder of ethnopoetics, and
the increasingly present Anne Waldman. The Projekt 2000 festival took
place at Galerie NoD, 10-28 November (2000)—dedicated to “stretching the
boundaries of word, text, voice and vision.” Participants included Waldman,
Kateřina Piňosová, Anna Vaníčková and Antonie Svobodová (working with
“bodytext”), Pavla (Slabá) Jonssonová, Iva Vodražková, Kateřina Kotková
and Lydia Lunch.
Projekt 2000 supports an underrepresented portion of the artistic community
in that [the] festival is a tribute to experimental women writers, artists and
117Patrick E. Tyler with John Tagliabue, “A Nation Challeneged: The Investigation; Czechs Confirm
Iraqi Agent Met With Terror Ringleader,” The New York Times, 27 October, 2001.
118Jennifer Joan Lee, “A Movement Mushrooms,” The New York Times, 6 March, 2004.
119“Torch 2003,” iDNES.cz, 6 March, 2003.
| 49
performers. Not only are women artists underrepresented in the Czech
Republic, but very few are translated into English … and very few American
women artists have been translated into Czech. This is an important time
socially and politically for women in the Czech Republic. The festival will
take place less than 6 months after an all-female shadow cabinet formed in
response to the [Czech government’s] all male cabinet and one particular
member’s comment that women do not belong in politics. It is a time for
strong, creative, independent women’s voices to be expressed.120
The arts group Prameni pursued “poetry by other means” in a continuation
of Pražská škola’s outreach programme. “Parallel Poetics: Dissent, Discourse
and Democracy” (2000) was an attempt at opening discussion into “the
importance of uncompromised individual expression and parallel artistic
culture to the creation and preservation of civil society”:
We believe that discussion of the role of poet and artist in society, the
importance of self-expression to the development of the individual and
society as a whole, and the impact of parallel cultures on local and global
change, is essential in the Czech Republic.121
From September 1999 to June 2000, Prameni developed the “Living Word
50 | Poetics Project” with Kateřina Piňosová, designed as a series of workshops
with students at the Romská střední škola sociální v Kolíně. The project was
sponsored by the Just Buffalo Literary Centre in New York, and was designed
as a poetry exchange between the Roma students and students of the Native
American Magnet School #19 in Buffalo.122 A remarkable volume of writings
by the students, produced during the workshop sessions, was published in
2003 as Život Fungoval a Nakonec Skončil/Life Went on and Finally Ended.
In 2003, the Pražská škola was formally subsumed by Naropa University/
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, under the directorship of Anne
Waldman, launching the short-lived Šanalan Poetry Festival, with Jenne
Magno remaining as co-ordinator. The festival, running from the 11th to
the 18th of May, featured Irina Andreeva (of physical theatre group Novogo
Fronto), singer Ida Kelarová, Jáchym Topol, Alexandra Berková, Rikki
Ducornet, Anselm Hollo, Pavla (Slabá) Jonssonová, Ivan Klíma and Kateřina
Piňosová. Concurrent with Šanalan was the first Vienna-Prague “Poet-ArtistPerformers for Peace,” sponsored by Urbannomadmxs and Prameni, at the St
Martin-in-the-Wall church on Martinska (16 May), with Gwendolyn Albert,
Kristin Weight, Ken Nash, Franz-Karl Prüller, Victoria Oscarsson and Peter
Waugh.
120Projekt 2000, press release (May, 2000).
121Parallel Poetics: Dissent, Discourse and Democracy, proposal (2001).
122Matt Gailitis, “Exploring Possibilities,” The Prague Post, 31 October, 2001.
Edmund Watts at Uni Jazz, 2002.
During the first three years of the decade, seven new regular reading
series grew up in different parts of the city. The Fra reading series at Café
Fra in Vinohrady (hosted by Petr Borkovec, an editor of the Czech literary
journal Souvislosti and considered by critics to be the pre-eminent poet of his
generation); “Poetry Jam” and “Poetry in the Twilight” at Železná Jazz club
downtown (hosted by Lucien Zell and Ryan Mergen); “In One Voice” at Uni
Jazz (hosted by Edmund Watts); the Jejune readings at the Clown & Bard | 51
on Bořivojova street, Žižkov (hosted by Vincent Farnsworth); “Mr Hyde
Park” at Literárná Kavárna Obratnik in Smíchov (hosted by Kristen Weight,
running from 2002-2003); and the Alchemy Reading and Performance Series,
commencing at the newly opened Shakespeare & Sons bookstore and café in
Vršovice (modelled on its Parisian counterpart), before moving to Tulip Café
and eventually the Globe.
Begun in 2003 after the closure of Beef Stew, the monthly Alchemy
open-mic (hosted first by Laura Conway and then Ken Nash) has featured
book-launches by Lewis Crofts (The Pornographer of Vienna, 2007) and Clare
Wigfall (The Loudest Sound and Nothing, 2007), and readings by Justin Quinn,
David E. Oprava, Carrie Etter, Holly Tavel, Alistair Noon, Jeremy Saxon,
Kateřina Rudčenková, Věra Chase, Richard Katrovas, Howard Hunt, Donna
Stonecipher, Louis Armand, Greg Evans, Alice Whittenburg, Jorn Ake (Boys
Whistling Like Canaries, 2009), Jeremiah Paleček, Jane Kirwan, Jim Freeman,
Joe Sherman, Thor Garcia, Vincent Farnsworth, Alan Levy, Róbert Gál, Myla
Goldberg, Gwendolyn Albert, Lucien Zell, Gene Deitch, Šimon Šafránek
(Fiery Wheels, 2000), Jeri Theriault, Christopher Cook and Phil Shoenfelt.
2000 saw the brief appearance (for six issues) of the literary broadsheet
Plastic (Semtext), edited by Louis Armand. Semtext published essays and
poetry by Justin Quinn, Marjorie Perloff, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, Juliana
Spahr, Lukáš Tomin, Brian Henry, John Tranter, Susan M. Schultz, Michael
Brennan, D.J. Huppatz, Sandra Miller, Rod Mengham, Andrei Codrescu,
Bruno Solařík, Emmanuelle Pireyre, Ethan Paquin, Nicole Tomlinson, Pam
Brown, Brendan Lorber and Aleš Šteger.123 It became the model for the
Prague Literary Review, a monthly tabloid-format review founded in 2003 by
publisher Roman Kratochvila (of Shakespeare & Sons) and editor Michael
Levitin. From its second issue the PLR, as it became known, was edited by
Armand, with a focus on a core of writers including Aleš Debeljak, Joshua
Cohen, Travis Jeppesen, Drew Milne, McKenzie Wark and others.
Cohen and Jeppesen had both previously been editors of the Prague Pill,
a free newspaper published by John Caulkins from 2002, with a focus on
culture and political critique. The Pill in certain respects resembled the earlier
Prognosis, and its antagonistic relationship with the Prague Post mirrored the
former’s. With the collapse of the Pill in 2003, Cohen and Jeppesen worked
freelance for magazines like Think Again and Umělec—Jeppesen producing
some of the most committed English-language art criticism so far to appear
outside academic publications. Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the
“Contemporary,” a volume of Jeppesen’s writings on Central and Eastern
European art, was published by Social Disease in the UK in 2009.
Prior to arriving in Prague, Jeppesen’s novel Victims was selected by Dennis
Cooper to debut his Little House on the Bowery series for Akashic Books in
2003. In his review of Victims for the PLR, Tom McCarthy wrote: “the book
52 | holds a remarkably confident and able line through complicated waters,
diving into interiority, surfacing in direct speech, aquaplaning into prose that’s
brilliant at times …”124 Jeppesen’s second novel, Wolf at the Door, appeared
from Howard Sidenberg’s Twisted Spoon Press in 2007. Also published by
Twisted Spoon was Cohen’s first book, a collection of short stories, entitled
The Quorum. A draft of Cohen’s book-length monologue, Cadenza for the
Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007), appeared in PLR
2.2 (March 2004). His monumental novel, Witz, was published by Dalkey
Archive in 2010, described by Steve Erickson as “inspired as it is audacious
... the wracked dream of a new Genesis. At the dawn of twenty-first century
fiction, the only question is whether Joshua Cohen’s novel is the Ark or the
Flood.”
7. In May 2004—coinciding with the Czech Republic’s accession to the
European Union—Armand, with Kratochvila, founded the Prague
International Poetry Festival (První Pražský mezinárodní festival poezie),
123Some of the work from Semtext was later gathered in a special issue of Litteraria Pragensia—
“Contemporary Poetics,” vol.11, no.22 (2002)—edited by Louis Armand and including
contributions from Susan Schultz, Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Muecke, Steve McCaffery,
Véronique Vassiliou, Rod Mengham, Drew Milne, Kevin Nolan, Augusto de Campos, D.J.
Huppatz. This in turn became the basis of a collection of writings published as Contemporary
Poetics by Northwestern University Press, in 2007.
124Tom McCarthy, “When God Drops the Remote Control,” PLR 1.3 (2004): 17.
| 53
a week-long series of readings sponsored by the PLR and Twisted Spoon
Press.125 The readings, in Czech and English, took place in five venues across
the city, incorporating Ken Nash’s Alchemy readings at Tulip Café, and
ending at the historic music club Malostranská Beseda. The festival brought
together over forty poets from Prague and around the world, including
Anselm Hollo, Charles Bernstein, Trevor Joyce, Drew Milne, Andrzej
Soznovski, Tomaž Šalamun, “Kollaps” (Jaroslav Rudiš, Alex Švamberg,
Pavlína Medunová), Laura Conway, Phil Shoenfelt, Travis Jeppesen, Šimon
Šafránek, Vincent Farnsworth, Rod Mengham, Věra Chase, Gwendolyn
Albert, Róbert Gál, Stephen Rodefer, Fritz Widhalm, Nichita Danilov, Sándor
Kányádi, Munayem Mayenin, Cristina Cirstea, Martin Solotruk, Peter Šulej,
Vít Kremlička, Martin Zet, Jeff Buehler, Jaroslav Pížl and Martin Reiner.
Writing in the Poetry Society Newsletter, Vincent Farnsworth observed:
54 |
A recent death and a recent birth have made for a new reality in the creative
scene of English-language poetry in Prague. The death was literal, that of
Alan Levy [2 April, 2004], the local newspaperman who first called Prague
the “Paris of the nineties.” The birth, metaphorical, was of the Prague
International Poetry Festival, which has laid the groundwork of a new
phase in expatriate poetry in the Czech Republic. Borrowing the term “deep
poetics” from political scientist and poet Peter Dale Scott’s writings on the
deepest machinations and impulses within world political crises, the death
of Levy and the birth of the Poetry Festival coming closely together in time
signal a shift in the strata of “deep poetics” in Prague.126
Of those participating in the festival, eight had been or were soon to be
published by Twisted Spoon. Beginning in 1997, the press had begun
to develop a series of new writing in English from Prague, alongside
translations of contemporary writing from across Central Europe. Books by
Milan Simecka, Natasza Goerke, Emil Hakl, Pavel Z., Andrzej Stasiuk, Søren
A. Gauger, Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta and Cristian Popescu, all appeared
after 2000, as Twisted Spoon continued to gain international recognition as
the sole major English-language literary press in the region.
At the end of 2004, Armand ceased being editor of the PLR. The
remaining four issues were co-edited by Cohen, Jeppesen, Sidenberg and
Róbert Gál. During its relatively short life, spanning fourteen issues, the
PLR had published work by a long list of notable writers, including Karen
Mac Cormack, Allen Fisher, Petr Borkovec, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman,
Keston Sutherland, Bruce Andrews, Jáchym Topol, Vladimír Hulec, Søren A.
Gauger, Jorn Ake, Bob Perelman, Kate Fagan, John Kinsella, Anselm Hollo,
125Mindy Kay Bricker, “On the Wings of Poesy, a Gathering of Literary Lights,” The Prague Post,
13 May, 2004.
126Vincent Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?” Poetry News (Summer, 2004): www.poetrysociety.org.
uk/content/publications/poetrynews/pn2004/pinprague/.
Nancy Bishop and Joel Sugerman. Production still
from Rex-patriates, 2004. Photo: Minna Pyyhkala.
William Allegrezza, Kevin Nolan, Peter Minter, Michael Rothenberg, Charles
| 55
Bernstein, Peter Šulej, Philip Hammial, Véronique Vassiliou, Tomaž Šalamun,
Dennis Cooper, Alan Halsey, Kateřina Piňosová, Lukáš Tomin, Stephen
Rodefer, Donald F. Theall, Lou Rowan, Václav Kahuda, Laura Conway, Ivan
Blatný, Raymond Federman, Susan M. Schultz, Eva Švankmajerová, D.J.
Huppatz, Larry Sawyer, Sandra Miller, Tony Ozuna, Justin Quinn, David
Seiter, Alan Sondheim, Gregory L. Ulmer, Clare Wallace, Dane Zajc, Clark
Coolidge, Nicole Tomlinson, Ken Nash, Phil Shoenfelt, Gwendolyn Albert,
Jeri Theriault, Lucien Zell, Joe Sherman, Simon Critchley, Pierre Daguin,
Vincent Farnsworth and Jeremiah Paleček.
After the collapse of the PLR, Jeppesen and Cohen founded BLATT with
Anagram bookstore owner Miro Peraica as publisher. BLATT continued in
the same format as the PLR, releasing three issues in 2006 and producing
Jeppesen’s Poems I Wrote While Watching TV. A reading series and minifestival were hosted by the magazine at Café Metropole in Vinohrady, until
Jeppesen’s departure for Berlin in 2007. Cohen had already returned to New
York the year earlier and he was not listed as an editor for the final issue of
BLATT.
With Prague’s second post-revolution literary renaissance well-underway
by mid-decade, the overly hyped ‘90s began to recede into distant memory,
but not before Nancy Bishop issued a retrospective reappraisal in her satirical
2004 film Rex-patriates (in which Alan Levy had a cameo role shortly before
his death). Reflecting on the experience of making the film, Bishop notes:
56 |
People often ask “why did you come to Prague?” After time passed, I realized
that the question should be “why are you still here?” … I realized I wasn’t
alone when Alan Levy, editor of The Prague Post, coined the phrase “rexpatriate; a returning expatriate, someone who has lived here, goes home, but
can’t get Prague out of his or her blood and returns.”
Tony Laue, the screen writer of ... Rex-pariates, had similar experiences and
we decided that we had a story to tell. We recognized that our lives in Prague
could be divided into three phases. “The honeymoon” is the beginning, when
you fall in love with Prague, when all things Czech are magical and fascinating.
The second phase—“escape from Prague”—is when the fascination shatters
and gives way to an existential loneliness and infuriating frustration with the
cultural divide. If you manage to make it past this point without bolting or
defenestrating yourself, you realize the third phase—“normalization.” This
is when things are neither good nor bad but Prague becomes home, and your
native country doesn’t seem like home anymore. We later learned that these
are actual phases of emigration that have been classified by psychologists.
The film took the form of a mock documentary. We told the story
through the eyes of archetypal characters; the writer, the artist, the actor, the
entrepreneur and the academic. Alan Levy played himself bringing a sense of
reality to the film. We wanted it to be unclear if the film was real or not.
In Rex-patriates, Levy explained how even after he was forced to flee
following the invasion of ‘68, he always wanted to die in Prague, even if
it meant having his dead body dropped in from a helicopter. Alan died in
Prague three days before the opening night of Rex-patriates. His ashes are in
the Vltava.127
For Farnsworth:
If Levy’s passing marks the end of the (failed) Left Bank era, Rex-patriates is its
cinematic epitaph. A farcical send-up of the expatriate in Prague stereotypes
… the film takes its name from Levy’s phrase for Americans who spend time
in Prague, experience reverse culture shock when they go back to the US,
and then return to live in Prague as “re-expatriates.” By playing himself in a
film that pokes fun at the expat art scene, Levy signalled that his prediction
would no longer hold sway. In the Deep Poetics view, when he passed away
this last April, Levy resolved the “Paris of the ‘90s” conundrum: he took it
with him.128
From 2005 to 2007, Bethany Shaffer and Chris Crawford co-hosted the “Poezie
a Provokace” reading series at Villa Incognito, in Prague’s Smíchov district.
Among the writers who presented their work there were French-American
poet Chris Tysh, Greek poet Dimitris Lyacos, Larry Jaffe (American poet
and social activist), the Irish performance poets Neil McCarthy and Stephan
127Nancy Bishop, letter to the author, 4 March 2010..
128Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?”
Murray, alongside Clare Wigfall and the “Ancient Geeks,” Jane Kirwan,
Lucien Zell, Karl Körner and Willie Watson.
Although established in 2002, Litteraria Pragensia Books began regular
production only in 2005, publishing mainly academic titles, including
work by Slavoj Žižek, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ivan Havel, Tom McCarthy,
Michal Ajvaz, Lisa Jarnot, Greg Ulmer, Johanna Drucker, Vadim Erent and
Bonita Rhoads, Christian Bök, Keston Sutherland, and J.H. Prynne. In 2008,
two volumes of writings by playwright Stewart Parker appeared under
Clare Wallace’s editorship, including Parker’s previously unpublished TV
plays. The press had formerly been linked to Litteraria Pragensia journal,
established in 1990 by Martin Procházka at the Czech Academy of Sciences,
which published work by Stephen Greenblatt, Jerome McGann, Mark Poster
and Natalie Zemon Davis in its early issues. Both the journal and the press
maintain connections to the legacy of Prague Structuralism and are identified
with the resurgence of a “Prague School” of critical theory and poetics.
From 2008 to 2009, Michael Koshkin and Jennifer Rogers’s Hot Whiskey
Press was briefly active in Prague. In May 2008 Stephan Delbos and Marika
Ley hosted Evropský Sen/The European Dream, a three-day festival of poetry,
music and visual art from Prague and Berlin, at Chapeau Rouge, Popo Café
Petl and the Globe. Participants included Catherine Hales, Mathias Traxler,
Josef Hrubý, Alistair Noon, Lucien Zell, Elizabeth Gross and Christopher | 57
Crawford. During the same year, Natalya Dotsenko and Zuzana Hronková
began an irregular poetry performance series at the Anglo-American
University library—initially at a location on Maltézské náměstí (opposite
Prague’s “beat hotel” at number 8), later at Letenská 1—with readings by
Joshua Mensch, Justin Quinn, Alexander Jorgensen, Lucian Zell, Delbos,
Crawford and Armand.
April 2009 saw the week-long Micro-Festival Poetry Series, hosted by
Armand, spread across four venues in Prague (Shakespeare & Sons, the
Globe, Café Fra) and Brno (Skleněná Louka), featuring a mix of local and
visiting writers including Petr Borkovec, Pam Brown, Stephan Delbos,
Vincent Farnsworth, Michael Farrell, Philip Hammial, Jill Jones, Trevor
Joyce, Kevin Nolan, Justin Quinn, Martin Reiner, Maurice Scully and Tomáš
Míka. Rakish Angel, the first in a series of poetry pamphlets devoted to new
Prague writing, appeared in November, containing work by Gil Fleischman,
Jason Mashak, Sarah Borufka and Kateřina Rudčenková, edited by Stephan
Delbos. By the end of the year a loose grouping of poets had begun to emerge,
appearing regularly at the Alchemy reading series and, from February 2010,
at Poezie Suterén—a nomadic weekly forum for poetic research and new
writing in English and Czech, beginning in the basement of Café Ideal in
Vinohrady—with readings by Scott Nixon, Joshua Mensch, Chris Crawford,
Louis Armand, Stephan Delbos, Sylva Fischerová, Jaromír Typlt and Anne
Brechin.
With the decade coming to a close, there has been a tendency to speak
of yet a third “renaissance” in Prague’s international literary scene. From a
perspective of twenty years, the lure of periodisation, of identifying different
groupings and tendencies, presents itself in ways that it did not in the past.
The textual record, however, remains uneven and incomplete, rendering an
historical view opaque at best, even when from time to time broad outlines
appear to present themselves or defining traits seem to recur. It is of course
no more possible to define such a thing as a Prague “poetics,” as it would
be for any other geographical location. And yet, like communities of writers
intimately identified with other cities around the world and at different
times, it may be that a “Prague School” (or schools) exists. Yet whatever
collective aesthetic may be attributed to writers living and working together
in this particular space, it is always worth keeping in mind the nature of any
habitation which goes beyond the mere contingencies of urban geography.
“Our” space, as Henri Lefebvre once wrote,
remains qualified (and qualifying) beneath the sediments left behind by
history, by accumulation, by quantification. The qualities in question are
qualities of space, not qualities in space. To say that such qualities constitute a
“culture,” or “cultural models,” adds very little to the matter.129
58 |
How such a space is imaginatively constituted in and by language is the
question which is perhaps most pressing for any writer, and above all for
the writer whose habitation is first and foremost that of a foreign space, over
which no sovereign claim is possible—“the foolish crown of no ignorance,
no wisdom anymore”130—which is, of course, the space of language itself.
Language, to paraphrase an often-evoked idea, establishes the realities for
which history must seek explanation. Prague, the name of this city, echoes the
word práh, meaning “threshold.” And it is the sense of living on a threshold—
of performing in the gap between what history is able to measure and what
its legislators seek to proscribe—that lends to this habitation its character of
ostranenie—of strangeness and estrangement—just as in those old black and
white Prague films that show us a protagonist trapped behind a mirror, face
to face with a doppelganger about whose inner nature we struggle to grasp
anything.
Whatever else after twenty years may be said to characterise the Prague
“scene” and its literary subcultures, in the end we have only the words with
which to build anthologies and make sense of. As poet Barrett Watten says:
“Finally the operators disappear and one language looks at another.”
129Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991) 230.
130Ginsberg, “The Return of Kál Majáles.”
| 59
60 |
Photo: Jan Rasch
Michal Ajvaz
Two Compositions
(from Empty Streets)
As I left the station the heat of the afternoon entered my lungs like a hot
paste in which I distinguished the smells of asphalt, crumbling plaster and
rotting fruit from the market nearby. Here the bus had its terminus; it stood
on the other side of the street, on a break with its engine switched off. Then
the bus drove up and I took a seat right at the back. As the walls beyond the
windows changed I thought over my visit to the station concourse. I still had
no idea whether my chat with the shop owner would be of any use to me in
my search for Viola, but whatever it meant it had left me feeling pleased.
I’d met people like the owner of Tam-Tam before. The life of one was very | 61
much like that of another. There wasn’t any real need for them to tell me
their stories; I could tell by the way they moved their hands as if directed by
a light, invisible current that the rest of their body was too heavy for them.
Thirty years ago, when the realities of life in this country were transformed
into a kind of weird dream and hope retreated from the world, in silence
they went away into the void, a void which took various forms. There was
nowhere in the world now emerging they were able to live, so they found
themselves a no-place and settled there, for years. When ten years ago the
dream dissolved, they were used to this void in which they had lived for so
long; they loved their no-place, its magic was well known to them, they were
at home with the miracle of its fauna and flora. What the world was now
offering them, so it seemed, was precious little. All those years partaking of
the wonderful nectar of nothingness had made them hard to please; they had
no appetite for food of another kind, nor could the splendours of any other
building compare to those of the palace of emptiness. So they stayed there.
This does not mean that they all lived on abandoned station concourses; often
they walked among us. But wherever they were, still they were nowhere,
carrying with them their emptiness as if it were a lightweight tent. Other
people would feel rather sorry for them, were sometimes contemptuous of
them: “He’s not capable of coming back to the real world,” they would say.
Even so, perhaps those who said these things had some kind of awareness
of how much our world needed the point of view of those who never came
back. It was a point of view which protected the sick things in our world
by spreading around them a healing emptiness, a balmy nothingness which
took long years to mature and as such was a fruit of the past, bringing sense,
conciliation, hope and joy.
At home I put the CD into the player and lay down on the couch. The
first composition I would hear had a strange title: The Revelation and End of
the Orange Book: a sonata whose pianist plays behind walls at three in the morning.
Though the man at Tam-Tam had prepared me for it, at first I was more than
confused by the music I heard. For a long time there was no sound at all,
then after five minutes or so there was a sound which might have been that
of a train in the distance. I had to quiet my breathing and strain my ears.
There was another long silence before I made out the faint hum of a distant
conversation. This was submerged by another wave of silence, from which
I unpicked various rustlings, creakings, something somewhere knocking
into something, something rolling around something and then stopping,
something pointed which was scratching, something crumbling ... These
might have been tiny sounds on the outer wall of a house, or a din softened
by a great distance.
Try as I might to hold my breath, I was half an hour into the piece and still
I hadn’t been able to make out a single note from a piano. Perhaps the walls
62 | behind which the pianist was sitting were so many that I was not going to
hear anything of his composition. Then again, why should I be disappointed
by a sonata which is swallowed up by walls? I was beginning to understand
the man at Tam-Tam: these sounds which bordered on silence were changing
my apprehension of both sound and silence. It no longer seemed that there
was any great difference between them. While silence was full of nascent
sounds, sounds were drenched in the silence out of which they were born.
And so it was enough for me to listen calmly to the silence of a night in the
early 1980s, the subject of Cj’s narrative, and to know that it contained a
piano sonata.
But then the sonata really did make itself heard. The notes of a piano
softened by distance and many walls insinuated themselves among the other
sounds, by which they were received in friendship. The piano music did not
rise above the other sounds. At that moment its notes were the children of
silence just as were theirs. And likewise its main purpose was to protect and
preserve the fabric of the silence, the breathing of which continued to give
life to all sounds without making differences between them. The pianist was
surely playing far away, behind many walls; several times the sonata was
lost for a while in the silence or else it was stifled by the rustlings of a town at
night, sounds which were barely louder than the sound of the keys.
I tried to make out which moods and sensations this distant composition
was conveying. The problem with this was that all these seemed to have their
base in the mother, silence; their separation from her was incomplete and
each took a share in ensuring her peace. Yet the small step they took from the
mother was enough to reveal a dark desperation, which was then lost in the
reconciling silence. At those moments when the piece was heard somewhat
more clearly, it was possible to make out a recurring melody which was
playing variations on a basic motif of four notes—D, A flat, B, C—as they
rode the mournful arc from initial rise to the resignation of decline, and back
again. A short time later the sonata was lost again in the silence. The silence
lasted some ten minutes, after which came a scraping and scratching before
the piece ended.
I might compare the piece to a blank, white screen, upon which all there
is are a few greyish lines, which are at first sight practically indiscernible.
It lasted almost an hour, and for most of that time all there was to hear was
silence. My thoughts returned to the man at Tam-Tam; I could understand
why he liked music like this. His whole life he must have cultivated an
appreciation of nothingness, learned to savour the nuances of emptiness. I
thought, too, of Viola listening to the sounds of the night, and wondered if
there was some kind of connection between the night-time silences Julie had
spoken of and those of twenty years ago. Indeed, was not his composition
witness to Cj’s having at that time sat at night in an unlit room, listening for
something? Among the sounds of the night, had he been searching for the
same voice as Viola? And, of course, still I did not know what the Orange | 63
Book of the piece’s title was. Perhaps it was precisely this which held the key
to the Viola mystery and that of the double trident. From the composition all
I had been able to make out was that the book was connected closely with an
immense sadness.
What followed was the piece which had the double trident as its title. If
you were not listening to it with any great concentration you might have
noticed in it very little to set it apart from traditional forms of music. But it
was not my impression that Cj was returning humbly to tradition after his
experimental period: rather, that here silence was engaged in a campaign
of aggression on tradition’s territory. It seemed that since the composer had
spent some time in sound’s borderlands and had there learned the life of
silence, he heard the rhythms of silence in every sound and every note; now
he wished to deploy its power in the realm which in relation to the mutterings
of silence was the most distant, and which put up the greatest resistance to
them. This was the realm of notes, rhythms and keys, musical motifs and
melodies which were pure.
The piece began with a babble of different motifs, dozens of them perhaps,
invading each other’s territory and then blending one into another, as if caught
up in a dreamlike whirl. The world this music was opening up was one of
chaos, but also one replete with hope and expectation. At the same time it
seemed to me that it was shot through with the melancholia of reminiscence:
perhaps the composer was recalling a joyful beginning of long ago. Out of
this whirl three different motifs came to the fore and then fought themselves
free; each of these took on echoes of the others, more and more they came to
resemble one another, without, however, surrendering their uniqueness. In
the piece’s next part they became entwined to form a single melody, though
not even then was the fusion complete as each motif retained a semblance
of independence. I had an image of a rope woven from three sources. And
who was to say that these sources were only three? Out of the three-in-one
melody I was able to distinguish with ever greater certainty a fourth strand,
one which was light in both colour and weight and which differed from the
original three. It was as if the composer had wished to suppress it, as if he
had not wished or was not supposed to refer to it but at the same time had
been unable to prevent himself from thinking of it. I had the feeling that a
darker and heavier strand would succeed the one which was denied, as if
this was a thin, light, practically imperceptible thread from a coil of rope
really immensely strong and able alone to bear the entire load.
While I was listening I fiddled with the case of the CD. At one point my
eye was caught by the double trident symbol which gave the piece its title;
it suddenly came to me that it could be some kind of diagram of musical
composition, where the lower oval represented the undifferentiated whirl of
the beginning, the three arms of the lower trident the three strands of melody
64 | which would work themselves free. That the arms drew closer to each other
meant a growing similarity between the individual motifs, while the vertical
line which the arms of the lower trident led into denoted the weaving of the
motifs into a single melody. Then I had another idea: did not the content of
this piece provide a history in music of the White Triangle? Was Cj’s music
perhaps describing how Cj, U and Nm drew closer together, to the point
where a fellowship was formed, which at that time may or may not have
been the White Triangle. Let us see, I told myself, whether the shape of things
will continue to correspond to the development of a piece of music.
But what was I to make of this fourth, more luminous strand? There was
something in it which reminded me of the melody in the last piece played by
the night-time, wall-muffled piano. And this it did indeed become: the notes
D, A flat, B, C sounded again. After this the Orange Book motif melted back
into the luminous strand out of which it had broken. What was the meaning
of this? I had the feeling that the Orange Book had somehow closed, had
retreated from the world. Might someone have stolen or destroyed it? If
this composition really was referring to a time twenty years before, it was
of course highly likely that the Orange Book—whatever it was—had existed
in a single typescript, and that this had been lost. I remembered similar
instances from my own experience.
Shortly after this the luminous strand, too, died away. The notes I was
hearing now displayed the starkness of despair. With the expiry of the
luminous strand some kind of break occurred in the composition: I was
convinced that this moment signified the horizontal line in the diagram
which was the intersection with the vertical, so dividing the symbol into two
halves. As the piece went on a dissonance built among the three remaining
strands, and three melodies again extricated themselves from the whole;
the vertical line opened itself up into the three arms of the upper double
trident—the ways of Cj, U and Nm had parted. The whole thing drew to a
close in notes which expressed conciliation and sadness, as in the first piece.
Each of the strands held echoes of the magically transformed notes of the
luminous strand and the motif of the Orange Book.
I had the impression that Cj was letting me in on the secret I’d been
struggling to untangle, that he was keeping nothing from me—but he
was telling me all this in the language of music, which I was incapable of
transferring into words and pictures. The least penetrable of the events the
music described came in the middle of the piece and represented the cross
line at the centre of the symbol. This was the blind spot the man at Tam-Tam
had spoken of; it referred to the time when the mysterious Orange Book had
appeared or been discovered, soon after which—it seemed—somehow it
had vanished. It was my bet that during this time the double trident symbol
had first appeared, meaning that the double trident was a diagram which
represented its own creation.
For a little while yet I mused on the events Cj’s music was telling of, until | 65
the effort of doing so gave me a headache. I couldn’t stop myself feeling
agitated. Unable to stay in the flat, I determined to seek out the building with
the double trident which the Tam-Tam man had mentioned. I hurried out to
make sure that I got to the station while it was still light. Translated by Andrew Oakland.
First published in Café Irreal 26 (2007).
66 |
Photo: Jorn Ake
Jorn Ake
Atlas Ptáků
This morning the bird arrived with the wrong colors
more beautiful in the Prague outside the window
than in the book full of pictures with wrong names.
I tried to watch my language at the kitchen table
without losing sight of my tongue.
My wife said I needed lessons and some money
to be happy at a bookstore with some coffee.
I thought only about my tongue’s depression.
The birdseed washed away with the rain
but the bird came back again and again,
returning to the continental tree
from the island window ledge,
another’s bell voice counting the trips out loud.
The magpie arrived on the chimney
and called down his ř-ř-ř-ř-ř-k
that I could not make with my tongue.
My wife was being right in Bratislava,
then Budapest and finally at a dam on the river Danube
where wetlands were more unfortunate.
I could not say what I saw.
I was looking through binoculars
at a country with a history of oppressive lenses.
The language was my fault.
Still, when the falcon flew over
the birds fled no matter what name I used,
and the lady in the window of the other building
waved to me or at me or just away from herself.
| 67
Raphael
The air raid sirens are like truth
spilled from a bucket at the top of a pole—
soon someone will be dead
or heavily wounded
and their house will be in flames.
You hear the doors of the neighborhood
open and close, slamming each way,
while underneath, your heart’s pounding
as you grab the kids and shove
them down into the shelter
68 | where you wait.
After, you go back upstairs
to finish with breakfast
or reading the paper—
nothing changes,
except for the dead.
I used to call my sister in New Jersey
to tell her we were okay,
but she’d just say,
Do you know what time it is here?
It’s the middle of the night.
We were all asleep.
On Dogs & Urban Warfare
If a bird then a dog then another bird.
If food then the dog again and again.
If the sky then a gun and a hand
and a helicopter.
Oh helicopter, like a bird, then
another bird,
the dog’s run off,
where’s the food,
where’s my gun,
when’s that hand
pointing at the sky
going to go off
empty again
again.
| 69
Great Pickup Lines of the 20th Century
The red barn blue sky green trees amber water spuming white over granite
as a minor league pitcher leans over a fence towards a girl with big teeth,
Your eyes are like Coca-Cola, he says.
This is an honest poem.
In 1909 Albert Kahn spent his fortune
on 72,000 autochromes lumières, a color process
made of starch rolled onto a glass photographic plate,
convinced people would not destroy
what they could see was made of flesh.
This was followed by World War I.
70 | World War II.
And Kodachrome.
So much depends upon…
In 1966, Larry Burrows saw a colored man stagger
into the arms of another colored man
on a hilltop in a forest of slaughtered trees near Dong Ha,
only they were colored differently and no one was laughing
at the name of the place, the mud and blood thicker
than laughter
and dismemberment better than memory
at recalling what was torn from the body
and what was given back in carefully labeled bags.
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day…
On February 1, 1968 General Nguyen Ngoc Loan put a bullet
in the ear of Nguyen Van Lem and Eddie Adams made it black and white.
Still, color came out of Nguyen Van Lem’s brain
and entered the mind of several million Americans,
who said in survey after survey
that blood sure looks like blood
when seen on an RCA.
His master’s voice.
Then today in Jerusalem, a woman leaned into the window of a car
and a katyusha rocket from the West Bank cut her in half,
the photographer angling to get not just the blood
but the body and the car flaming like a cauldron
dropped out of the sky into the forge of Hephaestus.
If you hear nothing, you had better get the fuck down.
My first camera was a Nikon, purchased
after seeing one slung around the neck of Tim Page
reclined in Vietnam like it was his sofa.
Even now, when I walk out into my backyard
I think of Vietnam, not because my backyard is a jungle—
I don’t even have a backyard.
I live in New York City on East 96th Street.
One grandfather was a minister,
the other, a surgeon—
a Presbyterian and a Lutheran.
So before me there was a belief in God,
and then a string of images I remember
flowing out of Vietnam like entrails
carefully unraveled from an opened body.
The Lutheran put men back together
on a hospital ship in the Pacific during World War II.
| 71
The Presbyterian spent the war in a prison camp
in Manila, Philippines with his family.
I became a poet.
…a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens.
Take a plane across the country a week after a major disaster
and look for Srebrenica, Mogadishu, Banda Aceh
lodged in a Motel 6 of the national consciousness
and you’ll find free coffee, a clean mattress
and all the donuts you can eat before the salesmen get up.
This is my backyard.
Take a photograph. It’ll last longer.
Meanwhile, a boy leans through a low hole in a wall
to look at a group of American soldiers
72 | carefully working their way up an alley in Sadr City
no wider than he is tall—
the hole placed perfectly for an IED.
Hey baby, come here often?
Longer and longer.
Birdwatching at Yaxchilan
The afternoon after the curassow, a helicopter
with a government minister
from Guatemala
looking for his son,
a kayaker on the Usumacinta
three weeks late for dinner—
Nobody, we haven’t seen
any bodies in the river
today—
That night, the URNG serenaded
teenage Mexican soldiers
from across the river
with the screams of jaguars
they’d learned by sleeping light,
tracer bullets arcing
overhead
like hummingbirds
fighting in the heat of midday.
Later in Lagos de Montebello
the children of refugees
showered us with flowers
then threw rocks at our car
as we left.
From Boys Whistling Like Canaries (Spokane and Cheney:
Eastern Washington University Press, 2009).
| 73
74 |
Vincent Farnsworth & Gwendolyn Albert, Tábor, 1994.
Gwendolyn Albert
Final Rewards
(a collection of facts)
Charles VIII,
a monarch
accidentally smashed his head
against the lintel of a doorway
in the Château d’Amboise
and died in agony (1498).
His dying words were: I hope never again
to commit a mortal sin,
nor even a venial one, if I can help it.
{a venial sin being one which is pardonable,
such as clumsiness}
Machiavelli,
a politician
said at the last:
I love my country more than my soul.
and Žižka,
a religious fanatic:
Make my skin into drumheads
for the Bohemian cause!
and Goethe,
a poet:
light, more
light
| 75
abulia
1.
dissidents hung in the boiler room
translating Plato
2.
divide the waste among the worlds
publish a classification
3.
the inventor of dynamite shows his remorse
not so Robert J.
4.
5.
cradle the skull of your nursery school teacher
primary colors
snack
6.
there is a nation of common assumptions
day night hunger cold rest
7.
to distract myself from personal distress
I think of the unjustly murdered
8.
to distract myself from the unjustly murdered
I go to the movies
9.
enemy you are the treadmill
you are the thread running breakfast to dinner
76 | a muffled crusade meets a microphone
the horses balk
10. friends, where is the boiler room
where are the subtitles for our film?
democracy
you can’t
hear yourself
think so
you give
your voice
to someone
else
the choice of
choices avoiding
its self
evident
truths
but GOOD LUCK!
surviving the banks
of wasted effort
on which
this flag
can be seen
to wave
it stands for you so
you stand for it as
through the night sky
through the sea and
under the earth
people murder
in your name
just a little something you can
call your own yes
you stand for this and
you stand that
then it’s time
to vote
| 77
economic power
producer distributer good and service
loan shark war profiteer all toil
to survive in a world of blooming lilacs
pigeons icebergs Sauvignon grapes
silverfish earwigs seismic rifts
silkworms, little white daisies turning
pink, the sweep of cirrus clouds
the Doppler effect, the fennel seed
basil, mustard, olives, capers
tenderness toward the very young
the sick the old or for
no reason algae, tobacco,
78 | plums and viruses poppy seeds
cornstarch honey space
between the candle
and the flame,
vitreous waves
of the sea and
sunshine adrenaline tears
from laughing hair that
curls and lips and breasts
a castle moat
overgrown with green
on a world patrolled
by satellite
Jocasta
is a survivor
the next day
she cut off all her hair
and sat at the window
her morning gown the
color of bruises
her beautiful feet
bare
she was the context
of their first moments
they pushed and pulled her like
hot wax like
wet cement
in Vienna she
rode the streetcar
a hundred women
drank coffee spoke German
wore eyes
the color of bruises
this is what it
means to be
Queen
| 79
80 |
| 81
82 |
| 83
84 |
Photo: Thomas Langdon
Hana Androniková
V. Samsara
I have always been intrigued by the fact that cows in India are sacred.
Unmolested, they roam the streets of towns and villages. In some parts they
have a bell round their neck and a jasmine topknot on their head, sometimes
they are painted. But mostly they are wretched. Gaunt, filthy and sick, they
munch away on pounds of rotting waste, eating up slops, paper, or bits of
cloth they find along the wayside. Drivers, rickshaw-men and pedestrians
break their necks avoiding the cows sprawled in the middle of the road.
Anyone who happens to bump into one must face the outrage of the crowd.
Cows have power. They can bring traffic to a standstill. And people show
| 85
them respect. Yet many of them die of starvation.
Mother was brisk and impatient, and Zam was as slow as a cow’s digestive
system. By the time anything finally worked its way through Zam’s wiring
her nerves would be in shreds. I had no problem with his tempo.
Zam would mix a dough of water and dark, coarsely ground wheat flour
with a little bran. He pinched off a bit of the dough, rolled it into a ball, then
flattened it into a pancake, flipping it from one hand to the other. That regular
slapping sound is music. Chapatti. As soon as the thin pancake landed on the
circular opening over the fire it puffed up. His skilled hand swiftly turned it
over and it was done. The Indians eat chapattis with everything; they stuff
them with vegetables, scoop up sauce with them, wipe their plates clean.
The chapatti is their bread as well as knife, fork and spoon. A complete place
setting all in one.
My father worked until he dropped. He would stay on at the site until he
felt he had things more or less under control. Sometimes he didn’t come
home for days on end. The Indians were stubborn, but that didn’t bother
him. No one was more mulish than Raquel. The coolies were willing, they
just refused to work with anything technical, with new tools, with anything
not tested and proved over centuries.
He tried to pacify Ruda Martinec, who he had been levelling the site for
three days, yet the result was hard to see. Just deep furrows and gaping holes
sixty yards across, twelve feet deep.
—Sorry, boss, I really don’t know what to do. I’ve brought in some carts
so they won’t wear themselves out filling the holes, but they just beg me
to let them carry the stuff on their heads. I tell them hell will freeze over
before they’re done, but they complain that shovels make their hands ache.
We don’t know how to shovel soil, they moan, let us carry it in baskets on
our heads. Yesterday they demonstrated how useless they were at it—and
today they’re on strike.
—Hell freezing over probably doesn’t mean much to them.
—How on earth am I to run a sight with these primitives? How can I
make them get something done and at the same time make sure they don’t
ruin what’s been done already?
Thomas looked grave.
—You realise where the snag is, don’t you?
Ruda shrugged and made a long face.
—If you treat someone like an idiot, they’ll start acting like one.
He set aside the roll of drawings, locked the office and followed Martinec
back to the workmen. He picked up a shovel. Let’s show them how it’s done.
If a sahib can use a shovel, they will follow suit.
Martinec grabbed a shovel and joined him.
86 |
—You’re taking a bit of a chance, boss. Suppose they don’t join in? I bet
they can spend hours just watching.
—Let’s see who gives up first.
—Well, I think we’ll be fit to drop and they’ll still have the strength to
stand there gaping.
The workmen stuck it out long enough for both sahibs to be sinking,
but not long enough for Thomas to give up. After two or three hours, the
crowd around them grew, some of the men started to fidget and touch the
wooden handles of the shovels. Then gradually, cautiously, they yielded to
the monotonous rhythm. Ruda straightened his back and slapped Tom’s
shoulder in approval. Tom staggered like an old drunk.
He was to look in on the boss. Bártoš was pacing the office, waving his arms
in agitation. From the window he could see the open space on the river bank.
Piles of bricks, bamboo scaffolding, the ground looking as if a bomb had
landed, people everywhere. An ant-hill on fast forward.
—We need that three-storey building and we need it now. The old
warehouse is bursting at the seams. When can you start?
—As soon as we complete the loading bays at the station and get the
drains linked up. Fortnight, I assume.
—What? You want to start concreting during the rainy season?
—Yes.
—Seriously?
—Yes.
—Okay, you know what you’re doing. When are you going to start shifting
the jetty? Can you speed things up?
Thomas paused for a moment. He didn’t like false promises.
—Well, I could, but I’d need more people. From home.
—Don’t you have enough?
He could feel the exhaustion. His neck stiff with a string of sleepless
nights, his lungs loaded with forty cigarettes a day. But here was a chance,
an opportunity not to be missed. He fought hard to concentrate and make
his point so there could be no room for doubt.
—Martinec is busting his hump, but he can’t keep up with ordering all
the materials. I deal with the suppliers myself, or he’d never get any sleep.
Kielkowský spends the day and night on the plans, doesn’t have time to deal
with budgets, so I do that myself too. Švarc handles deliveries and Zítek does
the accounts, fulltime. So there’s no one to oversee the actual site.
—How many?
—Two or three should be enough, but no greenhorns. I need men who
know what they’re about, aces who understand construction and can keep
the workmen on their toes—this needs redoing, mix the mortar properly, get
this rendering fixed.
| 87
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
—I need men who can get the coolies to stop carrying everything on
their heads. Bricks, cement, mortar, at a snail’s pace. Otherwise we’re going
nowhere fast. They have to be people steeled against these folk’s perpetual
tomorrow.
—I’ll ask for two foremen. You’ll have them here within five weeks.
—Thanks. We’ll move the jetty after the monsoons are over.
He was standing knee-deep in the muddy water. The formwork strained
to the limit, soil dissolving into a brown mash and the persistent patter of
raindrops landing in hungry puddles.
—Where the hell are they?
Ruda Martinec, his wild mop of hair plastered on his head like a helmet,
was yelling into the shafts of rain.
—Don’t know. But if they don’t get here this minute, we’ll be up shit
creek!
Thomas took two flamingo steps closer and surveyed the layout.
—Get out of here! I mean it.
—What about you?
—Let’s go!
A landslide. The earth shifted and holes opened up in bomb crates. Not
one company, for miles around, was doing any construction work, except
for the geniuses at Baťa. Sinking foundations and setting concrete in the
monsoon, you’d have to be insane. Or suicidal. Thomas knew he was neither.
He only needed more pumps.
By the end of the week they had evolved an efficient method: the flood of
pumps set against the rain, the mixer pouring concrete into the foundations
before the holes disappeared under water. Inch by inch, they poured the
concrete into the crisscross of shuttering. They linked finished skewbacks
with strips of rebar to deaden the shocks from earthquakes. The foundations
were ready in six weeks.
Ruda Martinec shouted to him over his shoulder.
—Your wife rang, boss.
He straightened up and for a moment wondered what that meant.
—Has something happened?
—She asked the same. Said she hadn’t heard from you for a week. Wanted
to know if you’re still alive.
He nodded. Thanks, Ruda.
—You ought to go and see her. I can take care of things here.
Arm bent, fingers gripping a white handle, pale brown liquid filling a china
cup. She was pouring herself a cup of tea. Leaning against the doorframe, he
observed the curve of her back.
88 |
—Did you send for me, madam?
Her startled cry bounced off the wall. She swung round, the teapot lid
clinked.
—You frightened the life out of me!
His footsteps were leaving visible traces of mud.
—Frightened?
—I didn’t recognise you.
Her smile still heavy with the fright.
Layers of dust had turned his hair a strange grey colour, half-an-inch
stubble betrayed a weeklong absence of the razor, and the darkness of his
complexion could be as much from the sun as from dirt. Millwheels of sweat
in the armpits of his shirt.
—You look like a savage.
He stepped towards her.
—Where is he?
—Who? Daniel? In bed.
She breathed in a medley of odours. Sweat, cement, tobacco, lime, mortar,
rain. He took the teacup from her hand and set it back down on the tray. The
tablecloth behind her was a field of flowers and tropical fruits. He lifted her
onto the table. Breathless, she tried to resist.
—He’s not asleep yet. He’s waiting for his story.
—Let him wait.
—Mu-mmeeee!
—I don’t think he’s going to.
His eyes shot up, he let go of her dress.
—Can you tell him something short?
—Can you go and have a wash?
She ran her hands down her dress to smooth away his hand prints. He
switched off the dining-room lights, headed for the bathroom and reached
for the soap. He left the door ajar to catch the bedtime story.
I’m going to tell you about the brave warrior of the Mixtecs who became
the first ruler. One day, he climbed a hill and cried out: Whosoever wishes
to be lord of this land must defeat me in battle! Everyone heard, but no one
wanted to pit their strength against his. As he came back down the hill, the
rising Sun tickled his face. The warrior thought that the Sun was challenging
him to a duel. So he took his bow and shot an arrow at the Sun.
But the Sun didn’t even notice and continued on his way across the sky.
The warrior remained on the alert right until the moment the Sun set below
the horizon. I’ve conquered the Sun! he shouted into the silent landscape.
I’ve conquered the Sun! And so he became the first ruler of the Mixtecs. And
ever since that time the Mixtecs have called their rulers “he who conquered
the Sun.”
| 89
—But that was only a short story.
—I’ll tell you a longer one tomorrow.
—But the Sun didn’t even fight with him.
—No, it didn’t.
—So how could he win, without a fight?
—You sometimes can win if the other one doesn’t put up a fight. And
sometimes you can win by not fighting yourself. You let the other one think
he’s won. As the saying goes, discretion is the better part of valour. And the
Sun had the discretion not to put up a fight. You can only do that when you
are so strong that you don’t have to prove you’re better. Now, go to sleep.
When she entered the bedroom, he was grinning.
—So how could he win, without a fight?
—Stop it.
—I’m not sure if he understood your definition of a victory that isn’t one
and a fight without fighting. I certainly didn’t.
—Well, he did.
—And there’s me, always puzzled who he gets his brains from.
He laughed and grabbed at her.
—You’re roaring like a tiger. If Dan hears you he’ll have nightmares.
—Just as long as he doesn’t come in here.
A monsoon storm swept across Batanagar. It was too much for the warehouse
roof. The iron sheeting rolled up like wrapping paper, roof fittings and
mountings gave under the weight of water. The wall of the engineering
works collapsed; the bamboo scaffolding of the petrol station lay scattered
like matchsticks. Any prospect of a decent sleep vanished in the rainy haze.
Once the monsoons passed, my father came to Darjeeling to bring us back.
We had taken refuge there for a few weeks to escape the stifling heat and
floods. Mother, Kavita and me. I looked forward to getting back to Calcutta.
I was sitting in the kitchen, watching Zam’s hands. He crushed the cooked
lentils, heated some oil in a frying pan, browned a spoonful of cumin seeds,
added a finely chopped onion and waited until it turned golden-brown.
Then he tipped the mashed lentils into the pan and sprinkled in a spoonful
of turmeric, a pinch of salt and some green chillies. In fifteen minutes it was
done.
The construction division had to remodel some of the larger stores. They
divided the work, splitting India into parts, and set out. Tom headed south,
to Hyderabad and Madras.
90 | After three weeks he returned to Calcutta. He came home late at night, tired
and hungry. He crept into the bedroom, sat on the bed and watched her
sleeping, her breath feeding his lungs, her dreams shifting stars and planets
on his navy sky. Dressed, he fell asleep next to her. In the morning, he woke
to an empty bed, spaced out and slow. He found her in the bathroom; she
was sitting on the edge of the bath, breathing deeply.
—Raquel, what’s the matter?
He bent over her and inspected her closely. She was unusually pale.
—I’ll send for Doctor Seagal.
—He was here yesterday. I’m all right.
—All right? Did he say that?
She smiled.
—I’ve got another builder for you.
He raised an eyebrow and let out a whistle.
—I bet I’m the last to know.
—Well, you’re hardly ever home.
—You could have written me, like last time.
They told me I would be getting a little brother or sister for my sixth birthday.
I wanted a brother. Girls in India count for nothing. Kavita once told my
mother that when her cousin had a baby girl her husband was so angry that
he cut his wife’s ear off. It was clear to me that girls were a punishment.
Then there were days when my mother was out of sorts.
I came to the dining table straight from bed. She looked at me sternly.
—Go and brush your teeth and get dressed, now. You’re not having
breakfast in your pyjamas.
—Why do I have to brush my teeth in the morning when I haven’t eaten
anything all night?
She glanced at Thomas, quite upset. He went on stirring his coffee and
that made her even more annoyed.
—Daddy will explain.
—Do what mummy says, Dan. I’ll explain afterwards.
I flounced off towards the bathroom and listened to snatches of what they
were saying.
—Darling, how am I to explain that he must brush his teeth in the morning
when he hasn’t eaten all night? Anyway, I’m in a rush to get to work.
—I just haven’t got the energy to argue with either of you, Tom.
—I know. But you look good.
She rolled her eyes.
—He so takes after you, Raquel. Analysing everything, and woe betide if
something doesn’t make sense. He can’t stand rules for rules’ sake.
—Come on, Tom. Cleaning one’s teeth in the morning is not just some
| 91
rule; it’s basic hygiene.
—There you are. I can go and explain it to him now you’ve given me a
decent case to make.
She looked for something to throw at him. There was a bowl of oranges
behind her, she reached for one, but he was already at the door.
—I’ll get you some knives, the kind they throw in the circus. That’ll be
more fun.
Martinec came hurtling into the office, frantic.
—There’re some cobras in the warehouse, boss. Dozens of them.
—So? Chase them out.
—But—but how? The men are scared of them.
—Damn, heat at home and cobras at work.
A few minutes later Tom showed up at the warehouse with a bunch of
grinning natives at his heels, each armed with a stick and a sack over the
shoulder.
—Right then, Ruda. These men will show you how to get rid of a few
snakes.
He marched straight inside, a stick in his hand. Martinec was racked with
doubt.
—Are the bastards poisonous?
Tom paused at the door and treated Martinec to a lukewarm smile. Fatal,
he said dryly.
—But the good news is that people who die of a cobra bite are cleansed of
their sins. They get buried whole, you see. They don’t have to be cremated.
It’s redemption, actually.
—Oh. I feel much better now.
*
The child was born still.
Kavita said it was a curse, that the Shivor’s crone had cast a spell on
mistress. I didn’t really understand, but I felt something dreadful had
happened. I remember my parents, their bodies wrapped up in pain, my
mother’s eyes blank pages, no stories to tell. I walked through the house,
silent, invisible to everyone. I overheard Kavita telling Zam that mistress
had been seized by demons. I was frightened, but I knew my father would
do everything to drive the demons away.
He tried to reach her.
—Raquel?
Something in her flipped, sinking down into a place he couldn’t see. He
held her tight, but his arms felt empty, his voice fractured in his mouth. He
kept saying her name. Stay with me; his fingers gripping her loose flesh.
92 | Please, don’t. You can’t leave me like this.
Slowly her eyes came back, her face unfolded as she recognized him,
filling out in the grip of his arms. He was shaking, his lips against her face.
—Promise me you won’t go mad.
Through the crack in the door I watched the people in the house, doctor
Seagal and others I’d never seen before. Then they took something away in
a small wooden box. I stayed with Kavita, who kept chanting her mantras,
calling on her gods and good spirits, leaving me behind in a wake of broken
shapes and sounds. After that, everything changed. Mother stopped telling
me bedtime stories, which lasted the whole summer. Father would come
home early and take me for walks or to the cinema. There were dozens of
cinemas on Chauringi. I remember them all, and the cartoons, too. Mickey
Mouse, Felix the Cat, Popeye the Sailorman, and my father next to me,
laughing like a kid. Before I went to sleep he would tell me about the work at
the site, and about the most beautiful buildings in the world.
Agra. Mogul architecture. The Taj Mahal. A white marble mausoleum on
the edge of the desert. Rabindranath Tagore wrote that the Taj Mahal was a
teardrop on the cheek of time.
In 1631, when his wife, the Persian princess Mumtaz Mahal, died in
childbed, Shah Jahan summoned the best of Asia’s artists, craftsmen and
builders. It took them twenty-two years to complete the spectacular shrine.
Legend has it that Shah Jahan was so distressed by his wife’s death that in
just a few months his black beard and hair went completely white.
The palace changes colour with the seasons and with the time of day,
blushing at dawn, gold with the moon on it. The colours are said to reflect
the changes of a woman’s mood.
—Mummy also feels pink sometimes.
—Yes, she does.
—Can we go and see it?
—Would you like to?
A year later we did. On the way to Agra we stopped at Benares.
Pilgrims at the ghat, in the river of rituals, the sacred rite of washing. A
Hindu with the golden beads of a Brahmin round his neck, the highest caste.
The goddess washing away all human sins. The Ganges. Long ago she had
flowed in Heaven.
Father told me that Benares was older than Jerusalem, a city already
ancient when Rome was formed. The holiest place on the Ganges, centre of
the world. If you die in Benares, you become one with the universe.
Mother turned round. Two steps from her sat a young man, dark-skinned, | 93
almost naked, his chest covered in black hairs, in the lotus position. Deep
meditation in the midst of the chaos at the ghats.
I strayed away from my parents, delirious, wandering among crowds,
taking in images, smells and noises. A knot of people squatting round a fire,
a charred body on a pile of wood, only dried feet poking out from the flames.
I stood transfixed. I tried to turn away, but rooted to the spot, I kept looking
at the remains of the burning corpse. And there I saw him. A legless man,
crooked, with a humped back, who had no trouble walking. The pilgrim’s
arms were his legs. The way he walked on his hands made me wonder why
we needed legs at all. My body is a prison in which I suffer for my past lives,
he said. The Ganges is a goddess, the Ganges is pure. Forever.
Rain streaming down the ghats, dead bodies burning on pyres for the ashes
to be carried away by the river, cries framing the air. Rama’s name is truth.
Rama’s name is truth. Rama’s name is truth. Do you see, Danny? They’re
burying a holy man.
—His body won’t be burned?
—No. They’ll wrap it in cloth, weight it with stones and throw it in the
river. The bodies of holy men and children are without sin, they don’t have
to be purified by fire.
—So if I died now, would you throw me in the river too?
Benares. A groove in the memory. The nighttime river swallowing a purple
sky, hundreds of fires and stinging smoke. The dark orange glow on the walls
of the temples, the dead in embroidered covers, the living in colourful plaids.
Human bodies are torches in the chain of temples and recurring births and
deaths, in the cycle of day and night, of months and years, in the boundless
river of a human longing for purification and eternal deliverance. Salvation
on the stone steps beside the sacred waters.
At Benares, our journey leaves the Ganges and turns towards Agra, others
continue upstream. The legless Jaman Lal carries his mother’s ashes in a
canvas bag, so as to throw it into the river at Hardvar and add his name to the
book of Hindu pilgrims. There in the Himalayas the goddess Ganges flows
down the hair of the dancing Siva, garlands of flowers burning, floating on
the river to unite the soul of the deceased with the souls of the grieving.
There, the legless pilgrim will have his head shaved and set off once more,
into the desert.
Raquel wrote to Regina.
If I hadn’t fallen in love with India long before this, I would have been swept off my
94 | feet on the way to Agra. Like when I started dancing lessons. I don’t have much to
compare it with, because I’ve never been anywhere else abroad, but the Orient has
enchanted me. No one’s in a hurry, no one makes plans, cows meander through the
streets in a flood of sounds and colours. It’s an endless carnival, one costume more
inventive than the next. Everything here has colour, even the air; sunlight shimmers
gold and the night is blue.
I no longer suffer at the sight of poverty. I even got used to the crippled beggars
crawling in the dust of the streets, little children who grab at your sleeve until you
give them something. The longer you stay in this country, the more ordinary all
these contrasts seem. Cashmere scarves and pearls and coral beads from the Indian
Ocean; a myriad human faces, languages and gods.
The Rowlatt Act of 1919 allowed imprisonment without trial, for opposition
to British rule. Oppression and revolt, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and
passive resistance. A tiny man moving hundreds of millions of people. The
temples opened under the weight of Gandhi’s words. There is no god, he
said. If god were here, everyone could enter, for he dwells in each one of us.
Gates, for centuries closed to lower-castes, sprung open, ancient prejudices
crumbled.
In 1935, the British parliament approved a new Constitution for India,
which the Indians failed to appreciate. Officials of the Indian National
Congress condemned the new Act, though a year later they did contest the
elections held under the new constitution. They won and took office in seven
of the eleven provinces. The gentlemen of the Muslim League conceded and
Muhammad Ali Jinnah offered his cooperation. The representatives of the
Congress, intoxicated by their triumph and blinded by their own arrogance,
rejected his offer, thumbing their noses at the League. The gulf between the
two sides grew too wide even for Ghandi to cross.
In 1939, when the Viceroy announced that India was at war with Germany,
the ministers of the Indian Congress were shocked, then tendered their
resignation. No one had asked their opinion.
My parents admired Ghandi, his non-violent struggle for the liberation of
India.
Raquel read the Bhagavadgita. She knew whole passages by heart; she
studied Buddhism, carried away by its simplicity and conciliatory nature.
Unlike Hinduism, it did not justify the caste system. She told Tom about the
basic ideas and principles of non-violent resistance. Ahinsa. In Sanskrit, sin
means “willing to kill,” ahinsa is the opposite, “unwilling to kill.” Ahinsa
means non-violence.
Tom looked interested.
—So you like non-violence? Unbelievable. If I weren’t physically stronger
than you, I’d be dead ten times over.
As she glanced at him, he remembered the shattered dishes from their | 95
last scene. Ahinsa. He kept his mouth shut. I’ve spent a fortune on cups and
plates. China’s useless; paper plates would be more practical.
The Taj Mahal.
I was looking at the black marble inscriptions, the grand gateway, while
my father got carried away.
—The gate is a symbol of the divide between the world of the senses and
the world of the spirit. For Muslims it is the gateway to Paradise.
—What does it say here?
—They’re quotations from the Koran. See how the writing is the same
size wherever you stand? It’s a trick by the masters of calligraphy, a perfect
optical illusion.
Finally we went inside. Arrays of cypresses and fountains, the symmetry of
the Persian garden, a strip of water reflecting the Taj Mahal. At first sight it
seemed small and distant, but that was another illusion, which faded away
to be replaced by just another. The Taj Mahal grew. With every step it gained
magnitude, us at its feet, I felt as if I were looking at the greatest building in
the world.
For Muslims four is a mystical number, my father said. Every element of
the structure is made up of four parts, or a multiple of four, only the mosque
is one, facing towards Mecca. Amazed, my head back, I turned slowly
and the design of the dome kept changing, quotations from the holy book
pouring down the inside walls. The image above me became a maelstrom, the
ornamentation whirling round, and before I realised what was happening I
hit the ground. Father hauled me to my feet. Boy! You can’t spin when you’re
looking up.
The mosque had a twin, a guest house; white marble flowers on red
sandstone instead of quotations from the Koran. And then the centrepiece,
the queen’s tomb in an octagonal space, echoes of ages, a glimpse of her
shape in the tangle of light shattered against the milky glass. I shivered.
Outside, everything was different. The mosque, the tomb, it would never
fly without the minarets. Four slender fingers reaching up to the sky, lifting
the giant above the ground.
We waited until dusk. Darkness set to show us another of the woman’s
moods. In the evening it is white, lily white. Ancient love in cold marble.
—What will you say if someone asks you what the Taj Mahal is?
Father sometimes asked very strange questions.
—A dream that comes true.
*
96 |
The construction of Batanagar proceeded at a dizzying speed. They had sent
him two pros, Pešat and Semotám. Pešat tossed himself on the drawings and
paperwork that had been shuffled here and there for the past several weeks.
Tom leaned against one heap and nodded.
—Do something about this, Jiří, as fast as you can. The bureaucrats would
have a field day.
Then he took Semotám on a tour of the site. They stopped by a group that
was digging trenches and putting in the shuttering. Tom leaned forward and
blinked.
—What do you think you’re doing?
Ruda Martinec straightened and smiled at Tom and the tall, greying man
behind him. Tom pointed to the shuttering.
—Is this some sort of joke? Where are the plans?
—No joke, this is the formwork for the foundations.
—Fine, but what are you using as a guide?
—The fence, boss. The blueprints are shit, excuse my French
Tom smiled. Let me introduce you. Vladimír Semotám, site foreman, our
fresh reinforcement from Zlín. Ruda Martinec, site foreman in India, takes
fences as guidelines. So next time you’ve got problems with the plans, Ruda,
get Vladimír to keep an eye on the men and you go and talk it out with
Kielkowský. From now on I don’t want to hear there isn’t time.
—Sorry, boss, but you can’t talk to Kielkowský.
—It’s perfectly possible to talk to anyone, including Kielkowský.
Even my wife from time to time, crossed his mind.
—Before you start pouring in the concrete, give me a shout. I’ll come
and check the dimensions. And take Vladimír out for a drink tonight and
while you’re still sober put together a basic vocab of building terms and
instructions. Vladimír doesn’t know a word of Hindi, so give him a hand.
Otherwise he’s of no use here.
That evening Martinec and Semotám stitched together a model CzechHindi dictionary: mix that mortar better, add more cement, more water, it’s
all crooked, take it apart, and the like. Theoretically, it was perfect; practically,
the twenty closely typed pages were a bit too much. The next day Semotám
could be seen roaming the site with his nose in his notepad, flicking through
it back and forth.
A few days after the reinforcements arrived, Tom set off on his own
rounds. He walked quickly, but quietly, trying to be invisible, as always,
when he needed to check how things were really going. He sneaked towards
a group of workmen who weren’t exactly overdoing it. They speeded up.
He was sure he hadn’t been spotted yet, so he didn’t understand the abrupt
change. One of the men gave a warning nod.
—Watch it, Dammit-Sahib coming!
And they were at it, hammer and tongs. Then round the corner came | 97
Semotám with his handmade dictionary, his loose canvas trousers flapping
around his thin legs. Now and again he tripped, not looking where he was
going, he kept scratching his head, as if thinking hard. Dammit-Sahib.
Where had they got it from? Semotám tottered across to the workmen and
pointed to a course of badly laid bricks. He wanted to say something, but got
stuck in the pages of his dictionary, ruffling them back and forth, trying to
find the right word. Dammit, where is it, he mumbled. Dammit, I’ve seen it
somewhere. The men were nudging each other.
—How do you say it, dammit. Ah, here it is.
Beaming, Dammit-Sahib delivered the relevant sentence from his notes.
The workmen, with smiles on their lips, began dismantling the bricks.
So that’s Dammit-Sahib, Tom shook his head as he made his way back to
the office. I wonder what the varlets call me.
When mum was well again, she said it was time for me to learn to read. She
gave me a book full of pictures and letters and taught me how the letters went
together to make up words. I could write DAN and wanted to know how to
write Raquel and Tom. I had a lot of fun tracing round the letters with crayons
and decorating them with faces and bodies of people and animals, outlines
of the temples we had seen, or the flowers and trees that grew everywhere
around. Dad would try to find the original letters or numbers hidden in the
drawings. Come on then, let me see those spelled doodles, he would say as
he sat down to dinner.
Time and again my mother told me I had to study. Knowledge is important,
she used to say. Sluggish footsteps reached us from the hallway.
—Knowledge doesn’t guarantee anything.
A suntanned forearm in a rolled-up sleeve leaned on the door frame. Tom
was standing in the door with a sceptical smile and a cigarette hanging from
his lips. He was mumbling, words borne on fumes of whisky and I couldn’t
make out what it was.
—Far from it. People who overstress education protect themselves with a
false sense of security.
—What?
She looked uneasy as she gazed at the corner of his shirt poking out of his
trousers and his unbuttoned collar. Unconsciously she ran a hand down her
blouse buttons, to check that she was tidy, and waited.
—Yes, a false sense of security. The feeling of being superior to the
uneducated. So they are proud of something that doesn’t exist.
He removed the cigarette from his lips and carried on.
—To have knowledge, my son, does not mean to understand. The depth
of human understanding can’t be measured by erudition, can it, Mummy?
98 |
She turned to me.
—Go and get washed, Dan. Daddy’s tired.
From the stairs I could hear them.
—Don’t go confusing him, Tom. He could at least learn to read and write,
don’t you think?
I agreed with her on that. Then her tone altered.
—What’s happened? Are you all right?
—Absolutely. The plantation is complete, now we got a roof over our
heads, the local snakes, too, of course. One big happy family. It’s glorious; I’ll
take you by in the morning.
Batanagar. Baťa’s town on the banks of the Hooghly. The river carrying
barges, boats with rice, construction materials, jute. Corpses wrapped in
cloths. Years ago, he had discussed the project with the architect. Here would
be the railway; here the port, the works, the administration block, housing.
The houses smelled of fresh paint and drying concrete, the pavements
were covered in gravel, a cobra here and there. Tom was showing Raquel
the houses for employees, plastered brick boxes, lined up, looking like sugar
cubes. Living-dining room, kitchen and cook’s quarters on the ground floor,
three en-suite bedrooms and a balcony upstairs. Bamboo fences.
—We can move in. Take your pick.
Her eyes bulged and she started to stutter.
—Me, but, it… no. I don’t want to move.
—But everyone else is here, even Bartoš. We’re among the last not to have
moved in. Don’t you like it? It’s just like the house in Zlín.
—Just like? It’s not like it at all. It’s completely different. There’s nothing
to do here. Look around you.
He said nothing, just thrust his hands in his pockets. He knew how this
would end.
—What do the women do here when their men are at work? Embroidery?
Knitting? I’m no good at knitting, I don’t want to knit.
He crossed from the window to the door and back. He fished his silver
cigarette case out of his pocket, then cautiously patting his other pockets
he located his lighter. For a moment he rolled it between his fingers as if
warming it.
—I couldn’t stand it. They have a cook to do the cooking, a nanny for the
kids, and it’s an hour to town by car, so what the hell do they do all day?
What can they do?
He clicked the cigarette case open, took out a cigarette and snapped the
case shut. He tapped the cigarette against the case, then rolled it between his
fingers.
—Well, tell me!
He turned his back on her. He ran his finger across the little knurled
wheel and the lighter flared. He brought it up towards his face, jammed the | 99
cigarette between his lips and pushed the other end into the flame. He took
a deep pull. The tobacco crackled, blazing orange.
—I don’t want to move. Our house in town has character and—
He removed his cigarette and exhaled the smoke.
—Crumbling plaster, mould in the corners—
She dismissed him with a wave of the hand.
—It’s not that bad, and it isn’t even very expensive. We can afford it. If
you don’t want to pay for it, I’ve still got Aunt Esther’s money. I can use that.
Tom, here—it’s so—
He kept pulling on his cigarette, the lighter and cigarette case now back in
his pockets, gazing at her through the smoke. His silence stirred her up.
—I don’t want to. I like your job, I respect it, but we don’t have to live at
the plant. Here you can see it from the window, it’s just round the corner. I’d
go mad. We’re not going to swap our banyan trees for this bush country with
a factory. I don’t want to!
He looked at her as if watching theatre.
—And Daniel. When he goes away to school, I’d die here!
She was about to collapse. Then she saw him laughing; he threw up his
arms in defeat.
—Enough. Stop, please. Spare me. My heart’s bleeding.
She put her fingers to her lips, trying to calm down. Her hand was itching;
she was dying to slap him. She couldn’t stand that amused, indulgent
expression.
—All right, then. We’ll stay in town.
—You don’t mind?
How could he mind? She was shifting her feet like a child. How could he
refuse? It wasn’t worth the heat.
—They’ll point at us and call us anti-social, but what wouldn’t I do for
your peace of mind.
And for his own.
When he came in from the site, he opened the post and leafed through the
month-old, September 1937 issue of Svět. He laughed with delight and began
reading aloud a piece on the construction of the Zlín skyscraper.
The seventy-seven-metre tall administrative building will house a staff
of two hundred. It rises to sixteen storeys, all linked by four automatic lifts,
a lift for visitors, a paternoster and a goods hoist. The skeleton went up in
five months, one floor every ten days. But the showpiece is the office of
the company head. An office in a lift, air-conditioned, with a wash-basin,
pneumatic mail, electricity outlets and a telephone. So the boss can pop up
on any floor, behind anyone’s back.
He grinned. How did they manage the wash-basin?
100 |
They put me down for an English school. I didn’t fancy boarding, but the fact
that I was going to be in the same class as Sam McCormick put me at ease.
His real name was Samuel, but everyone called him Sam. His father was an
officer in the British Army, and he and his wife Betsy would come to visit.
I preferred going to their house, because Sam’s older brother Rupert had
a rifle and during the holidays he taught us how to fire it. Mr McCormick
was a typical English gentleman. He would sit in the living-room or on the
terrace behind his newspaper, which offered some notional protection from
the verbal onslaughts of his energetic wife. In his hand he would have a cigar
the size of a stick of salami. He rarely spoke, just a word or two now and
again, as if they were precious gems. On a couple of occasions he invited my
father to his club.
So, did you have a good chat with Mr McCormick, mum would ask
when he got back. I’d be intrigued to know whether he actually speaks at his
gentlemen’s club.
—Yes, when he orders whisky.
For her part, his wife Betsy had plenty to say for both of them. Mostly
she went on about problems with the servants and the unbearable climate of
Calcutta. Here and there she would skate onto the thin ice of how the boys
should be brought up. Such a responsibility, such a burden for her, and yes,
she bears it alone, with no help. Or do you imagine that that husband of hers,
that waxwork with a cigar, ever gets involved? He never lifts a finger, unless
to light another cigar; he leaves everything to her. One day she would stuff
some dynamite down his cigar, she giggled and went prattling on.
I knew what my new school was like; we had been there once with the
McCormicks to visit Rupert. Each boy had the full paraphernalia, uniform,
textbooks, PE kit. We went for a walk in the grounds, looked into the
classrooms and the boys’ studies, strolled round the tennis courts and
playing fields. It all smacked of discipline, a rod of iron. I felt pangs in the pit
of my stomach. The ritual of mealtimes made the greatest impression on me.
The whole school gathered for lunch, pushing and squabbling, then they sat
down and instantly stopped talking. They sat in silence, plates steaming, but
no one touched their food. All you could hear was the sound of breathing.
Then a man in a black gown and a funny hat appeared, with a little flag in
his hand. Like before a race, he solemnly raised the flag above his head, the
eyes of all turned towards him. He flagged them off. Now! At that moment
a symphony of knives and forks clinking on plates broke out as they started
to eat as one.
Before I went away to school, my mother insisted that I kept my things neat
and tidy. She said it was a matter of principle and she was uncompromising.
Your room’s a dump, she would say. When, in my own defence, I pointed | 101
out that daddy didn’t tidy up after himself either, she erupted. Over dinner
she announced that it would do neither of us any harm to watch where we
dropped things. Father froze in mid-bite, perplexed. He looked like he’d
never heard such heresy.
—I can’t speak for you, Daniel, but my things are always tidy.
I assumed his countenance.
—Mine too.
Mother hissed, laid aside her knife and fork, stabbing us with her eyes
and briskly left the dining room. We looked at each other, but then quickly
rose to check where she had gone.
My mother was unpredictable.
She ran upstairs and stormed into my room. Just inside the door there was
a pile of clothes, two drawers of the antique chest hung half-open exposing
a jumble of socks and underwear, bits of plasticine and a brand-new pencil
case on the floor under the table, some braces and my satchel a little way
off. The desk top looked as if a bomb had hit it. She swept the clothes up
from the floor, moved the length and breadth of the room, tripping, puffing
like a badger, her arms full of dirty socks and underpants. She paused and
crammed them into one of the open drawers. Then she lugged it all the way
out and at one go swept everything off the desk into it and hurtled out of the
room. Red in the face, she propped the drawer on the window ledge, holding
it level with one hand, and with her other hand flung wide the shutter.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. In a daze I stared as my underpants, socks,
shirts, pencils and exercise books went out of the window, floating down into
the busy street below. Wait… don’t… not that… I stuttered. Mess overboard,
she snapped. I watched passers-by as they were looking up, startled by what
strange rain the gods had sent down on them, dodging each falling object,
then nudging one another as they saw it was pieces of a boy’s wardrobe. My
father stood beside me, stunned. I sprinted down the stairs to sweep up my
room from the pavement. Before I had gathered everything up another load
landed.
As I stood in the hall with an armful of my clothes and broken pencils, I
realized that now it was my father’s turn. I dropped my load on the chequer
tile floor and ran back up the stairs.
My parents were discussing the issue through the closed door of
the bedroom. Mother was pounding her fist on the oak while father had
barricaded himself inside.
—Promise me you won’t throw my underwear in the street and I’ll let you
in.
—Open up!
102 |
—Promise, or I’m afraid we’ll be spending the night apart. And you
wouldn’t want that, would you?
—Coward! Open that door!
Eventually she gave up and promised. Afterwards, father came to help me
get my things together. He called it solidarity. I appreciated it, but I would
have rather seen him running in the crowds, picking up his socks, facing the
gazes of bystanders. I’ve never been so embarrassed.
Between December and March, a cold wind blows down from the peaks
of the Himalayas, briefly driving the heat from the streets of Calcutta and
its clammy houses. In April, the wind changes direction and the hot air of
the south once more holds all India in thrall. Extremely high temperatures,
extreme drought. Then in the summer come the long-awaited monsoon
rains, which last until September. If they don’t arrive, the place is stricken by
deadly heat and starvation. In late September and October, the wind turns
back again, bringing the threat of tropical cyclones.
End of September, 1938.
News kept arriving from Europe. Munich. The frontiers of Czechoslovakia
were annexed and two weeks later the Wehrmacht occupied the
Sudetenland.
—Unbelievable. They sold us out the backdoor. Daladier, that sod. And
Chamberlain. The perfect aristocratic fool.
That was one of the rare occasions when Tom got really angry. Raquel
placed a hand on her forehead.
—I can’t believe it. The land of Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller. Heine.
He scoffed.
—What about Nietzsche? Maybe there were always more lunatics than
ordinary people and we just never noticed. As if the World War wasn’t
enough, here they come again, dusting off their epaulettes, they cheer on
that maniac with the moustache, swallowing every bit of his nonsense as if it
were holy writ. Once a Prussian, always a Prussian.
He never spoke like that.
—How can you say such things? You’ve got German blood yourself,
Tom.
—Which is why it frightens me. Treitschke, Nietzsche, Hitler, hear how
they rhyme? The myth of the Übermensch who can do anything in the name
of his innate superiority. Isn’t that insane?
—But Nietzsche’s indifference to the sufferings of others is a long way
from wanting to harm anyone.
—Is that less depraved? The result, my dear, the result is the same.
Everyone considered my father an optimist because of his even temper,
but it wasn’t true. Rather, it was my mother who held out for the good in
everyone. He harboured no such illusions. After the events of 1938 my father | 103
had no doubt that the Germans were serious about racial purity and that any
Jew who got in their way was a potential corpse.
Translated by David Short.
First published in Words Without Borders (November 2007).
104 |
Photo: Cait Regan
Louis Armand
The Vanishing Syndrome
(i.m. Miroslav Holub, 1923-1998)
I’m never sure of reaching you …
All of these letters—I should be able to say
that as I speak I limit the world
but it’s useless to try to integrate life and
death and to act rationally. Which is what
might be meant by “becoming human”
as opposed to Pseudo-Dionysius
who considered that god transcends
contraries and this dictum was taken up
by Nicholas of Cusa as the clearest definition
of divinity: “you must regard the centre
and poles as coincident—using the help
of your imagination as much as possible …”
(As they say, apprehension takes place
as a movement between seeing
and uncertainty …) For example today
I’m trying not to draw analogies
between the sky and a statistical curve
or flight paths or mechanised
and anonymous histories. (Do you think
I’m being ironic?) But no, there are other
people, single strangers or crowds
appearing continuously—when they are not
seen they are heard—which leads me to believe
momentarily in a collective witnessing of
events. (Monsieur Armand, vous délirez!)
And this in a country still suffering
after forty years of schizophrenia.
It’s true, Prague is like a giant Potemkin village,
which accounts for the sense of
ostranenie even while crossing the street
| 105
(any street) or entering a tabák (to buy
a packet of Gauloises)—Stalin, or
Frida Kahlo’s monkey stares from the cover
of a fashionably retro magazine.
(One reads about Trotsky’s assassination,
it must have been the anniversary—
ambivalence?) Holding a cigarette that way,
the eye of it looking up through the
window, the orange halo of a streetlight.
It’s raining again and grown dark—
I sit down at a corner table to write this
thinking about the seductions of amnesia—
the first time we met (in a room
overlooking “Red Army Square”) it had been
another anniversary—Jan Palach’s funeral.
“So the counting out began,” you said,
“to separate the sane, who / Veil themselves in
words, from the insane, who rip off /
Feathers from their bodies …” And I can’t help
recalling that story of Hrabal’s about a swan
106 | doused in petrol and set alight by drunken
soldiers—the hopeless flapping of its wings
and the Vltava’s blithe indifference.
But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you.
(Bored with the absurd and the too poignant
“image”?) No, I wanted to tell you the joke
about the great Czech poet whose death,
like his poetry, was acclaimed mostly
in translation. (I enclose for your amusement
copies of the obituaries published
in the Prague newspapers.) As someone
said once: “That is no land for old men …”
Or perhaps I should quote Mayakovsky instead,
who died young and wrote: Dans mon âme pas
un cheveau blanc / Aucune douleur sénile …
But there’s nothing unexpected in that,
besides it’s getting late and the writing—
you know the saying—is on the wall:
vÝchod—sortie—ausgang—exit …
ET ILS, ONT TOUS FOUTU LE CAMP!
First published in The Prague Revue 6 (1999).
Psychopathologies of the Commonplace
(for Bob creeley)
inchoate and always coming back to a point of starting out
before the age mimicked us.
the zero of endless re-birth in conjugations of to be
and other non-places? times square,
for example, or caught mid-flight above the date line
an embryonic consciousness …
but what does it matter
to have been, here or there? the same
narrative of disappointment in the eyes of everyone
or alone crossing an intersection, somewhere—
was it strange that the scene never appeared to be questioned
by our passing it? that the intimacy of streetlights
was nothing more than a wished-for recognition
of ourselves in the embrace of the inanimate (at dusk
in a half-familiar suburb, or menaced by the distant
barking of a dog, cerberus-like, guarding each avenue
of escape) … and being lost
always in the unspecific as though and as though
with our motives no longer returning
in the guise of ordinary things, even when it seemed
they were all written down (the testimonials, the witnessed
accounts of mundane fact) … but when in time
we are left to the dumb-show of our shadows’ diminishing
how will we know which of those meanings
ever concerned us? today or tomorrow or today.
as if there were a difference
in the way it would end (that stupid blinking of an eye
exhausted of perception) and afterwards
to remember, to name it at last, even as the words break off
and no longer resemble us. did they ever?
First published in Sulfur 44 (1999).
| 107
Three Testiments to Apollonius
(for Czesław Miłosz)
—Non, je ne regrette rien. What was required of me
is what I attempted: simplicity, always simplicity.
When we were children, who was to say
the Argonauts never stood beside the Vistula
preparing a sacrifice to their shrewd gods or scheming
to steal our national myth? We grew up jealously
behind city walls, imagining the erotic
pleasure of creation. The Greeks had raided
everything they could find: the mannerist prosody,
the epic fatalism. Their school-masters
bullied us into becoming poets. We knew what
ethics was and did our duty.
—I always suspected your words which you call
silence. If the future exists, why should it listen
to our private misgivings? our furtive dialogues
108 |
with all those we could not love or save? our bad faith
at having been condemned in absentia by what
we could not write? War and occupation were our
normalcy. They bred their own language
refusing to be stuffed in books and goaded
from time to time with sentiment. Our childish gods were
officially dead, sold-off for the sake of a footnote to History.
—Soon our sweet movie comes to an end. We rise
from the dead again and everything begins,
exactly as it was meant to. It was enough to know
that someone must also have thrown the last stone,
that images do not belong to words, that we
alone know what an horizon is. Life takes its toll.
A mechanical dog laughs and perhaps it is us
it is laughing at. An old grammarian with his
mental puppet show, rehearsing the great show-trials
of the Slavic poets. One by one, they are snuffing out
the conjectures. On our heads they are reconstructing
the old borders and checkpoints; soon they will not need
to prohibit us.
First published in Big Bridge: War Papers 2 (2008).
Correspondences
I walk out in the bleak village and look for you
– Ted Berrigan
1. To begin with, a letter, a copied
address. Dear X,
New York is dying. Berrigan died
twenty-five years ago
waiting for the obituary. All
the great artisans have
forgotten you, once again
embarked upon that second
life, a product of the god who failed.
I lie awake in the park at night
listening for children’s playground noises.
A dreamless charity
settling the old accounts: Louise’s
rum-mouth, Clare’s vagina,
Petya’s yellowgreen eyes.
Pieces of time and circumstance
in a one-night show, dressed in newspaper
and hazard lights. Broke everything
because you loved
to make things out of pieces.
Jane in the Midwest with her bandaged
ego, Natascha in Germany.
A breakdown-signal flashing a hundred-thousand
Marilyn Monroes, steeled against
some dim freeze of pain and happenstance.
How long can we outlive John Keats?
The act itself is not extensive. It is
a moment’s alcoholic urgency
pressing against you, feminine and tough,
emptying your pockets.
This is what sleep becomes, staring up
into a still, small place, all the outcomes methodised.
2. I was glad to receive your letter.
I was thinking about you just that moment and why I
hadn’t heard from you. You’re my mainstay
from the beginning. My lifeline, my umbilicus. A piece
| 109
of autobiography cut-off mid-wrench.
We were the late ones who made it too soon
into this world. There were
bugs in your brain, white ants and black ants
stealing softly across fields of permafrost.
Red leaves covered them in autumn …
You were the one with eyes like a zoo. Womanhater, man-hater, snarling down 14th street.
I never knew you, I only wanted to be real,
pretending to follow-on into the disconnect.
A chair beside a window, a face or a piece
of furniture. Minimal driftage of an ear’s
desolate murmuring, of rain stirring ashes into tarmac.
We grew up naked in the afternoon, into the same
non-story. A maternal ear and dead perfume:
staring at the cellophane, the mascara windows, the
neon meat hanging there by the thinnest of threads.
3. A naked man in a window behind fifth avenue.
110 | Six a.m. breakfast special: Fear eats the soul.
Time to arrange a new day, take it up and lock it.
Walking and forever walking beneath a sun that burns
a white hole in the sky. Anachronisms loom up
everywhere in this city, like The Brain that
Wouldn’t Die, Terror creatures from beyond the grave.
Shocking but true! And now we’re all here,
wandering through the eye’s atomic fallout shelter.
Sex pictures of a captive mind: The Infamous
House of Madame X or The Diabolical Doctor Z
and his Fiendish Creation. Will it ever be possible
to find our way back through games and repetition?
The headlines have nothing new to say.
All in place, nothing in order; whole in spite
of being pieces. The crowd goes on with its life of
nonsense, embarrassing us into joining-in. A ceremony
of replacing the foot that precedes with the one that
follows, face to face with the traffic signal’s menace.
4. Sweating it out under night-cover humidity:
how many genetic modifications preceded us?
Daybreak, copping it sweet in Chelsea, Midtown, then
on to 92nd street. Big Charles makes coffee,
fried eggs, toast on the side. Nourishment
if not for the soul (it is important to eat,
come what may). Listening meanwhile at the
talk-machine, hooked into the ear of things.
True stories told in rhyme. We are
all perhaps the adopted points-of-view
of somebody. Should we be blamed for this?
Your letter arrived and I’m sorry too
not knowing where the future lies.
John today is sick, D’s leaving town. (We live
according to details unrequited by History.)
Back again on the Lower East Side, why not
live perpetually in transit? Reading a ping-pong ball’s
return flight—the moment lengthens, days pass
this way. Or the world is nothing more
than an unstable intelligence that cannot decide
what to do with us. Still, there are reasons to inquire.
5. It was mid-June, a type of hysteria overtook us.
We were playing the part of latecomers
to a scene that had passed on. The Yankees
at home to Pittsburgh, jazzmen in the park.
A national hero nobody seemed to recognise
lay passed-out at the foot of the temperance
monument. Who can judge, if the visible world
is just so much furniture beneath a sky painted with
static and feedback? N called from a payphone
in Europe, searching for the secret lives
of other people in faraway places. But these were
only re-enactments. Their promises, hinging upon
facts, could not be held. Dreaming of a man’s
or a woman’s full, bloodied mouth and darkening eyes.
Who engineers the mirror image? We expected
some type of movie, exposing the reason why. But
somebody had left the door open, slipping out
into rain and blackened celluloid. Thoughts, also, escape
at every opportunity: after hundreds of hours
of staring, there is nothing to look at, nothing left to see.
First published in the Warwick Review (2009).
| 111
Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Imagine not suffering. Moonlight over the zócalo
like a silent movie’s comforting simplicity.
That was before the words came, the lost cause
and ennui. High and alone lives the sad oleander.
Ours was the politics of an ant crawling around
inside a box. Strangers single you out for
comment, going on and on about the weather.
Or seeking redress for a journey we could never
have undertaken. A demon in a box, chanting in the dark:
Podrán masacres nuestros cuerpos,
pero nuestra dignidad e ideales, jamás!
But there’s nothing sure you can say about anything.
The irrational crowd asleep in the shade
of oleanders. They have nowhere else to go.
Carnival lights strung across the zócalo. And you
who seek the one immobile point in time,
112 | gazing from an arcade at the barefooted women.
Believing that all things are reversible—
that the longest way around is the shortest way home.
First published in The Prague Revue 8 (2008).
Circus Days
(for Hugh Clarence Ultan)
1. It’s morning & we’re on our way—the park
& leaves hanging in autumn sunlight like analgesic.
Hands travel in all directions at once—
astride the giant green shoulders, juggled up into
another day’s sinewy disjuncts. Hello, are you happy?
Funnelled through the mysterious ordination of events:
Kleomenes at Thermopylae, mantis-eyed, staring into
darkest comedy. Sat in the cold under the Big Top—
the elephant at the door, the monkey running around
in circles doing tricks. Scenes of hope & despair.
But we are becoming the future, not knowing
when to stop. Backwardly, navigating insipient
weather—butterflies, stamps, old shoes, those
delicate painted lips that send us, kneeling, into sleep.
2. At the bottom of the box my mother is there
who is not in her right mind. The moon with its
puppet strings showing, frictionless knots
slipping & unslipping. Nor is this the light at the end.
Dear, it is always late, you will lose count thinking
of it. Also, one of its themes is Time. Collecting the
left-overs in soup tureens—remits of La Place Blanche,
staring Pépé le Moko-like at the departing logos.
What will we do tomorrow if it doesn’t return?
A constant activity would be a surface without grips,
unsizing us. Night grows ugly, all nerves & sex,
looking & not looking. A violet-blue window seems
to be inside the room & at the same time outside it.
Or a stranger is mounting the stairs, pointing at us.
3. Why not describe everything backwards? Scenes of
scotch-taped celluloid, navigating the gross weather.
Headlines stand out in bas relief, thrusts of form
between interludes of grisaille. Improvise something
on this theme. Sifting the left-overs, Pasternak’s
territory of conscience. Humanity finds the myth of
personal freedom intolerable, unlike a work of fiction.
Waiting for that girl with the eyes of a trapeze artist
| 113
on the corner of West 57th street. Thoughts travel in
many directions at once, electronics, science fiction,
footprints on the moon. What I’ve been painting is
a life’s work index of first lines, whoever reads them?
Standing outside the Art Students League like a
character in a novel hopelessly excluded from its plot.
4. Grew up in a time of last ideas & normalisation,
thick-necked, under hellish weather. Street preacher
shouting if God’s self-sufficient what are we doing
here? Sitting opposite a table for company, one litre
of red wine after another. Signals writ large all through
the air—a last minute blunt cutting out of sky, its
variations, before the venom sets in. Parts of a face,
a man’s or a woman’s, perfume. But already it’s late.
Anatomised an hour, moving straight ahead sideways
out the door. Outside the window a green sky cuts out
giant writing in hard autumn schist. Oh, my nerves
are bad tonight. Why blame the sins of a permissive
mother? History is what happened at other times
114 | among strange people, unashamed of letting us watch.
5. All through the air signals flash out of margins,
saturating it. It even gains a type of solidity. It sits there
in the world like a brain, naked & useless.
Spreading out from North American winters—dead
leaves mulching into excrement. Dollars stir the rain
into an autism, a giant lozenge pressing through
windows & ventilation ducts. We stood there
watching it, designed to self-destruct into dreariness
& forbearance. A whole year of mouths ending only
in paraphrase, rumours, plagiarisms of nature.
The scapegoat artist hangs in sunlight, complicating
our greybrown scenery. In it for the dollars? You must be
crazy. Kleomenes at Thermopylae. A private joke in a
parallel room. The windows unaccountably fogging up.
6. Something about the weather. Figures against a black
ground moving in all directions at once. Pigeons
flocking under the circus tent of Manhattan skyline.
Momentary, headlong, physical insurrections that end
underground riding the subway to afternoon teas,
sex & privacy. Evenings of paraphrase turn emaciated
or womanly—out-waiting the rain, it is perhaps
a symptom after all. A barbershop quartet stands out
in bas relief on the opposite side, hurrying you
to self-doubt & secrecy—coupled to a surmise that
it, the day, ought to be seized & usually wasn’t.
But did we promise ourselves happiness? Looking &
not looking for the key under the door, to get to wherever
time comes from, or to relent, or to be taken “all in all.”
7. Am I talking to myself again? Waiting for catharsis
to unfold, the way things happen in restored old
subtitled films. Hello, are you happy? Those little
painted lips behind store windows among the windowdressing. The story begins with intimacy & evolves
into a threat. A zone of silence where we stand &
scrutinise the naked body, in vague penance. It is
difficult not to run out of the room, stupidly looking
for the departed years. & still the light in the trees.
The lowering sky & waning light—a sky you want to
get out from under. The danger is in conclusions.
Again words point an abstract finger to exert will, put
things in order—names, images, objects cancelled out.
The kid says “You die!” But already it’s too late.
8. Things seek attachment: behind the door, a room
on the second floor, light through the trees.
In sleep you stretch forward to touch the scenery.
Soon enough time to perform the last act—
counting down these dry years, looking under the table
for the joke that got away. Our cruelty makes us
stupid—pratfalls & false hilarity. We’re still
getting there, the long road out to the deserted lot
& ruined chimney stacks teetering. When it comes,
I’ll go on bargaining to the last breath, Kleomenes
at Thermopylae, under the Big Top, arraigned
before the horses & sequined women, the strong
man, the dancing bears. What was our reason for
coming here? What false assurance did we accept?
First published in When Pressed (2008).
| 115
116 |
Photo: James Prohaska
Julie Ashley
Interlopers
If I had learned anything in the past year—from almost dying in a car wreck,
from selling everything I owned and moving to a post-communist country,
from making more friends in six months in Prague than in the rest of my
twenty-three years put together and watching them leave just as fast as I’d
made them—I’d learned expectations could be treacherous.
So when Chloe and I finally had sex, I wasn’t foolish enough to expect
that just because of one great night she was magically going to become mine
or anything un-Chloe like. I didn’t want her to think for a minute that like so
many guys before I’d ever try to change her, or trap her. So I didn’t tell her
how happy I was the morning after she crawled into my bed. I just offered | 117
her coffee, fresh cherries, smoked cheese, and the caraway-sprinkled Czech
bread that came in loaves shaped like flattened footballs.
She sat at my narrow kitchen table still wearing the t-shirt I’d loaned her
last night. She stretched out her legs, arched her shoulders and back, and
flung her graceful arms overhead in a sort of casual full-body yawn. “I was
dreaming of Paris this morning,” she sighed. “I almost thought I’d wake up
there.”
“I had a really weird dream, too,” I said. “That you and I….” I waggled
my eyebrows. “Ludicrous, huh?”
She laughed. “About fucking time, I’d say.” She extended her long legs
under the table and past my legs, bracing them against my kitchen wall as
she flexed and arched her feet. No woman I had ever known seemed quite as
at home in her own flesh as Chloe.
I peeled her right foot from the wall, moved it gently into my lap, and
began kneading its grubby sole with my thumbs. This, I figured, must be
my reward for having been patient and friendly so long—that at last I could
reach out and simply touch her as naturally as if we belonged to each other.
“Mmm,” Chloe said, leaning back in her chair. She let her head droop to
one side, like a heavy bloom bending the stem of her neck, and reached for a
slice of mustard-smeared bread, chewing and swallowing as she closed her
eyes. “Mmm, Nick,” she said. “I’m so glad you were fun. Otherwise it would
have been awful.”
I stroked her thick-skinned sole, fingers listening to the small shifts of her
toes and the tensing of tendons beneath her foot’s surface. “What would have
been awful?”
Opening her clear blue eyes, she nudged her right foot from my palm
with the insistent big toe of her left. “If you had sucked in bed,” she said.
I raised my eyebrow sardonically at her. Giving her right foot a last parting
pat, I turned my focus and hands to her left.
“Well, obviously I didn’t think that you would,” she said. “Or I wouldn’t
have bothered. But you could have been a slobbery kisser…”
“Or I could have insisted that you do my laundry. Or I could have had a
ring hidden under the pillow—” These were among the many complaints
that Chloe had lodged against guys she had met, and slept with, and finally
discarded during the four months we’d been good friends.
“It was just such a tacky ring,” Chloe sighed. Looking thoughtful, she
sucked the meat from a cherry, then plucked the pit from her tongue with
two fingers and tossed it into her drained coffee mug. “What I meant, though,
Nick, is that you and I are already real friends and that’s why I didn’t jump
your bones sooner. It just would have been too depressing if it hadn’t worked
out.”
I nodded and kept on rubbing her foot. Back in April when Chloe and I
118 | first met, she had been infatuated with a Czech theater actor; that stopped
when he asked her to do his laundry. I chalked his request up to cultural
difference—all the Czech guys I knew had their laundry done by their
moms, wives, or girlfriends—but Chloe called it symptomatic of the actor’s
narcissism, which made him a boring lover as well. Her next, a Scottish
journalist, had kept referring reverently to Chloe’s “artistic temperament.”
(“Like I was some kind of flighty wood-nymph,” she griped. “Irritating as
hell.”) She had spurned the Hungarian tennis pro because he tried to give
her a ring after only three weeks. This meant, Chloe said, either he was too
serious about her, or that he believed he could buy her affection.
Men tended to romanticize Chloe—her blond curls and the fine bones of
her face, her slapdash and eccentric wardrobe, the way she always said what
she meant without ever caring what anyone thought. But I thought I knew
her well enough not to make any stupid mistakes. I finished massaging her
left foot and placed it carefully next to her right, back against the kitchen
wall.
“Now you aren’t going to get weird on me, right?” she asked, as I released
her foot. “You promised? We’re going to keep on being friends?”
“As if I would ever stop being your friend.”
When we had eaten the last of the cherries, Chloe pulled my t-shirt off
over her head. Her flesh glowed peach-beige against the shabby backdrop of
my kitchen—but only momentarily. Then she stepped into last night’s dress,
buttoning it up the front, and ruffled my hair. “Alas,” she said. “I can’t dally
longer. Time to go sell hats, my man.”
We always ran into each other in town, so I didn’t make plans to meet up
with her later, only touched her chin lightly after we kissed. “See you soon,
huh?”
She turned away, smiling. “You know all my haunts.”
After she’d gone I got back into bed and tunneled down into the sheets. I
could smell her, all over me, all through my bed. Later, contorting my limbs
at the corners of my cramped bathtub in order to squeeze my head under the
faucet, I could smell Chloe steaming out of my hair.
I rode the tram east past the neighborhood brewery, past the cemetery,
past the new McDonald’s, and over the Vltava River, which sparkled like
crumpled tinfoil in the sun. At Café Velryba, I found my pal Simon hunched
musing over a plate of bland lentils, sipping gritty coffee from a glass.
“Ahoj, Nick,” he said, gesturing at a chair. “Is Tricky Ben back yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Should be any day now.”
“Didn’t he fly to Amsterdam, though? Could take him weeks to get out
of there, no?” Simon waited while I ordered lunch, and then leaned slightly
toward me. “Pretty good reading, last night, huh?” Simon hosted a weekly
open-mike reading. “How about that love poem of Evan the Poet’s?” The
poem had been delirious, graphic.
Evan didn’t interest me, though. He was the kind of guy who bragged
about never revising his poems for fear of dampening their “divine spark.” | 119
Fiona said she had heard him proclaim, one typically sodden night at the
pub, that his book of poems would be done any day and that it could possibly
make him immortal.
“I guess that Evan’s got a new girl?” Simon’s deep voice rose in pitch at the
end of almost every sentence, as if each statement were truly a question.
The words new girl made me smile inside, but I knew I should not
mention Chloe to Simon. One cardinal don’t in Chloe’s book was blabbering
triumphantly all over town. (“Trying to mark his property,” she’d said,
when her Scottish beau had done just that. “Like a dog pissing on a hydrant.
Grotesque.”) So I changed the subject. “Been writing much lately?”
Simon adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’ve been working on a few
things?” He squeezed out only a few poems each year—hence his Prague
moniker, Two-Poem Simon. “I don’t want to force anything,” he said. He
held his hands near his chest, palms flattened out against one another: a
gesture reminiscent of prayer. “So I’m trying not to push too hard? Art is
chance, right?”
I nodded. I knew it was an excuse for Simon not to write, but also I believed
in chance. It had brought me to Prague. Back in Cleveland the previous
fall, I’d been speeding home from work, half-heartedly looking forward to
an evening of re-runs and take-out Chinese after staring at ad copy on a
computer screen since nine that morning. Everyone said how lucky I was to
have found “creative” work right out of college—never mind if the job made
my brain curl with boredom. That night as I was driving home, the ice-coated
highway beneath my bald tires scarcely seemed more real to me than the cutand-paste images and empty words I’d manipulated on screen all day. I was
accelerating to make a green when a guy in a Buick burned through his red
light. I swerved on ice, skidding, and plunged through the guardrail. My car
flipped once, twice, and slid to a rest, upright, in a ditch.
I woke up the next afternoon with a headache that wanted to jump through
my skull. My face had slammed the wheel on first impact, leaving a gash
that was now a stitched, puckered line. (Healed, it adds vague interest to
my bland face—a white streak slanting rakishly through one eyebrow.) My
parents, and the doctors, called my luck a miracle: I’d escaped with just that
gash, and minor abrasions. The miracle, for me, was quite different: waking
up that day with the hospital’s fluorescent glare in my eyes, I suddenly knew
I’d been wasting my life. I knew that I despised my job, the monthly payments
on my car, my furniture, my credit cards—so many things I couldn’t define
that made life seem hopeless and stunted and small.
My parents took me back to Akron for a few days’ bed rest. That Sunday,
Mom brought me the newspaper. There, in the centerfold of the travel section,
was Prague—a breathtaking jumble of towers and churches, of spires glinting
bright against ancient hewn stone. The article claimed that the Czech capital
was swarming with American expatriates; just speaking English could
120 | get you a legal job, though the people interviewed didn’t sound like they
worked very much. Living was cheap, Czech beer was delicious, and young
adventurers from all over the world were meeting there, just like Paris in the
20s.
I was no Picasso, no Stein—just an amateur cartoonist and scribbler. In
any case, I was far too nineties and self-conscious to believe that I could
participate in something as vital as Paris in those days had been. I’d seen
enough MTV to suspect that anything I chose to do was probably already
becoming passé. But still, there was Prague, in soft-colored ink, beckoning
like a pastel Disneyland. The following week I gave notice at work, calculated
the costs of my move, and researched the resale value of my car. I arrived in
February and met Tricky Ben my first night at the hostel.
“Thirsty Dog tonight?” Simon asked, as I rose to leave.
“Probably.” I bade him goodbye and strolled through Stáré Město, to
work. Prague’s weekly English-language newspaper was run like a frathouse garage sale: whenever a little money came in, the Progress staff threw
an open-bar bash and worried later about the print budget. The job wouldn’t
last, and it didn’t pay well, but nobody cared what time I showed up as long
I turned in one cartoon each week and had proofread every page once by
print time.
Around four o’clock, Tricky Ben showed up at the office. A mammoth
pack was tethered to his back like an awkward portable home. He thumped
the pack down next to my desk, bear-hugged me, stepped backward, and
pumped on my hand. “Man, I am totally thrilled to be back!”
Four months in the States hadn’t changed Ben at all. His cheeks were
ruddy with too much sun. His Levi’s were frayed at the seat, knees and cuffs.
Gray-blond strands poked out from beneath the bandanna he always wore
tied round his head. He told me he’d spent the night on the train and asked
if he could crash at my flat.
“Drop your stuff there, at least,” I said, thinking of Chloe. “If it looks like
I’ll need the place to myself, we can find you another couch for the night.”
“Your landlord hasn’t by any chance hooked up the hot water yet?” Ben
asked, hopeful.
“Don’t be absurd. In the middle of summer? He swears he’ll have it fixed
in the fall.” Ben took my keys and we arranged to meet in the evening.
By a quarter to six I couldn’t stand any more squinting at black spikes of
type. I hurried out into the late afternoon, hoping to catch Chloe during the
hourly rush at the astronomical clock in Old Town Square. The golden early
evening light refracted off the cobblestones, glinted off trams, newsstands,
into my eyes.
As the first bell struck, the tourists bunched in front of the Old Town
Hall’s clock tower raised their cameras to their eyes. Sky blue windows
beneath the clock’s face slid open to show bowing mini-apostles. A merchant
figurine jangled a bag; vanity swooned at herself in a mirror; a skeleton
tolled a tiny gold bell. The crowd snapped shutters at the show, zooming and | 121
panning with camcorders. Sometimes I wondered if this type of tourist ever
saw “sights” with their physical eyes, or if they lived their entire vacations
squinting through lenses that miniaturized, through dull glass viewfinders
crosshatched like targets.
After all six bells had rung, the clump of spectators slowly dispersed. Two
yards away, a gray-haired man was pointing at one of the hats attached to
Chloe’s voluminous skirt. She smiled, unfastening it, and held a mirror up
to his face. Chloe’s aunt had a hat factory near Brno, so all afternoon during
tourist season she strolled around the center of town, wearing a blue faux
renaissance dress with hats pinned everywhere on its hoop skirt.
As the last of her customers turned away, Chloe glanced up from her
change pouch and saw me. Then she came toward me and hugged me with
the top part of her body, careful not to crush the hats. A white ruffled bonnet,
part of her costume, looked incongruously sweet on her head.
Chloe had never met Tricky Ben, but she’d heard about him. I told her he
had shown up at the office and asked if she wanted to meet him tonight. She
sighed something about prior plans, but said she would love a coffee right
now. We ducked down a side alley crooked like an elbow, into a deserted
café. Fiddling with a hook on her dress, Chloe stepped out of her blue
overskirt and draped it across an empty table. She wore a hooped petticoat
underneath.
“God, that dress gets heavy” she said, dropping into a chair and sipping
her espresso. “You know, I’m starting to feel claustrophobic as hell. I can’t
believe what a village Prague is.”
Most people, including Chloe and I, lived in the prefabricated high-rises
fringing the city, but everyone came to Prague’s center for fun. Once you
knew anybody at all, you ran into them all the time on the streets, in the
pubs, on the subways and trams. In Cleveland and Akron, where I’d lived my
whole life, I’d hardly ever run into a soul. Back in the States people zoomed
by, sealed up in their separate cars.
“The thing is,” she said, staring into her coffee, “I’ve got to get some
distance from Evan. He hunted me down twice today while I was working,
gave me a new poem each time. I mean, it’s flattering and all, but, Jesus, you
heard what he read Sunday night….”
My belly felt hollow. “You’re talking about Evan the Poet?” We all met so
many people in Prague that we preferred monikers to last names.
She nodded. “The same.”
“Why’s he hunting you down?”
“All I did was sleep with him a few times. I never said he could be public
about it.”
I stared at the golden face I had kissed for the first time the previous night,
realizing Evan the Poet had kissed it. I forced my eyes downward and gulped
my espresso. “So that’s who you’re seeing tonight?”
She rolled her eyes, nodding. “I wish I weren’t. He’s taking it so
122 |
seriously.”
Something in my stomach twisted. Of all the posers and pricks about
town, she’d had to fuck Evan the pretentious poet. Had fucked him recently,
no doubt. I couldn’t believe how she’d told me, offhanded, as if I would have
no reason to care. I stood, blood slamming between my ears. “You know, I’ve
got to run meet Ben.”
She stood, in her petticoat, coffee half-full, and said we should meet for
lunch the next day. I lied about some prior plans.
On the streets the tourist swarm buzzed thick. I hunted Old Town’s
winding streets until I found the right kind of place—yellow bottle-glass
windows, smog-smeared, and a tiny sign above the door that said just
Pívníce, nothing in German, Italian or English. Inside, men in baggy blue
laborers’ clothes were swigging pilsner from heavy glass steins. As soon as I
slid into a chair the waiter smacked down a foam-headed beer. I couldn’t stop
picturing Chloe’s face, so rosy and pretty and framed by white frills as she
mentioned, casually, sleeping with Evan. I had tried so hard that morning to
seem unsurprised and cool, undemanding. Maybe I had convinced her too
well.
The first time Chloe had slept at my place was early in May, shortly after
we met. We’d been out dancing with mutual friends and had gotten on the
same tram, heading home. Chloe explained that after midnight she had to
ride to the end of the line, then wait forty minutes for a night-bus outside the
sleazy Smíchov train station. I said I lived just two tram stops up, and had
twin beds that did not even touch. She would be safe sleeping there, if she
wanted.
Of course I didn’t touch Chloe that night, nor the many nights after that
when her sleeping over seemed logical and, gradually, cozy. Early mornings,
when we trudged into my one-room flat, I would hand her a clean t-shirt and
duck helpfully into the bathroom. When I came out she’d be curled under the
covers of the narrow bed separated from mine by a nightstand and a lamp.
We’d lazily chat until we drifted off. Over that long chain of nights I learned
about Chloe’s disposable lovers, about her parents’ hideous marriage, and
that despite her artist’s pose she wasn’t sure she could paint worth a shit but
she had to keep trying because what else was there?
The man sitting next to me nudged my shoulder, pointing at my untouched
foaming mug. “Na zdraví!” he said.
I raised my stein toward him, muttering it back. On the first sip, the mug’s
rim sliced into my lip. I flinched, set it down.
My neighbor shook his head, sympathetic, as I wiped the blood from my
lip. Helpfully, he rotated the stein so that the unchipped rim faced me, then
said, “Na zdraví!’ again.
I thanked him, drank, and then pulled out my sketchpad. It opened to
a drawing of Chloe, and I flipped through four more, looking for a blank
page. Chloe had inherited her Czech-born father’s high, Slavic cheekbones, | 123
as well as deeply domed eyelids that made her blue eyes seem wistful and
wise. Morning after morning, while she slept, I had sketched the lines of
Chloe’s cheeks and chin, her full lips—as if by recording the minutiae of her,
by drafting a blueprint of her architecture, I could somehow participate in
her. When she woke up I’d always clap the book closed and claim I’d been
working on a cartoon for Progress.
I thought about tearing these sketches out. I could crumple them into
the pub’s thick glass ashtray, ignite them, and watch them flicker, smoke,
burn. But the delicate lashes I’d drawn on her cheek tangled me up and I left
them all in. Early that morning, before we had gone to sleep, I had tried to
memorize how Chloe looked, moving above me with her eyes closed, lips
parted. The gray-blue dawn light made her skin translucent, ghostly and
cool. Had Evan seen her like that too? He had shed his foul poet’s hair on her
body. His sweat had slicked her arching back, her curved belly. I knew that
my jealousy was out of line, beyond my rights. Chloe, after all, had promised
me nothing.
I turned the page to blot her out, and tried to focus on where I was. I
sketched the dusty plastic plants lined up on a ledge by the opaque window.
The man next to me offered a shot of férnet. I accepted. We spoke in broken
English and Czech until our few mutual words had worn out.
At eight o’clock, I was waiting as planned at Narodní třída. As soon as
Ben stepped off the tram he said, “I’m ravenous. Let’s eat. The Konvikt Klub’s
still open, right?”
I was glad to have Tricky Ben back to distract me. We cut through an
alley to Konviktská Street, ducked into the building and rang the pub’s bell,
but nobody let us in the barred gate, so we sat on the floor in the hallway
and waited. After five minutes a cluster of American Eurorail-types burst
through the little arched door of the pub and into the hall on the gate’s other
side. We caught the gate as they left and went in. Some killjoy guidebook
had written up the Konvikt Klub as an underground pub not yet flooded by
tourists, so lately getting a table was tough.
We plowed through deep-fried battered cheese, boiled potatoes and
pickled cabbage, watching a middle-aged tourist couple push their barelytouched food plates away and begin to call loudly, crossly, for their bill. The
hostile waiter bustled by, pretending not to understand English.
Ben scowled, shook his head. “Look at those interlopers,” he said. “They’ll
give us all a bad name in this town.”
“Yeah,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Any fool could tell that we
belong here.”
We asked for the bill in our best restaurant Czech, hoping to prove that we
weren’t like the others. The waiter rewarded us with a sneer.
“Mind walking around?” Ben asked, on the street. “I’d like to bask in the
city a bit.”
The sun had sunk, the sky was deep violet, and the hexagonal-headed
124 |
wrought-iron streetlamps glowed behind dust-fogged glass panes. We
climbed a narrow set of steps onto the street that flanked the Vltava, walked
through dark piss-scented arcades. Emerging on a riverfront square, we
looked over the bridge toward Mala Strana. Upriver, the castle rose, lit, on its
hill, while the mingled songs of several musicians trickled down the bridge
toward us, as if down a cobbled chute into the Old Town. We waded out into
the throng, past drunken tour-groups, kissing couples, and a wild-haired
guy playing music for cash. The man could hardly sing or keep time, but
he had friends playing congas and shakers and he had the audience singing
along—three dozen people from as many countries earnestly belting out
“Hey, Jude.”
Once on the left bank, we started uphill. Cobblestones slipped by under
our feet. On the facades, above broad arched doors, the painted plaques of
old house-signs hinted at long-inscrutable stories: the red eagle, the three
little gold violins, the golden goblet, the golden key.
Among the tourist-trap restaurants and shops in the row of steep-tilted
houses stood an old pub, U Hrochů. In March, when I was new in town,
Simon, Ben and I went there. The place was brimming with Czech men who
all seemed to know one another already. We had taken the only free table,
pulled soggy cardboard coasters from the holder and placed them on the
ash-riddled table. “A real neighborhood pub in Malá Strana,” Simon had
said, appreciatively, always on the prowl for new hangouts. “Right here
on the route to the castle. Who knew?” But after we’d waited a full fifteen
minutes a black-vested waiter finally came over and said, “Jsme zavřeno.”
We’re closed. When Simon used his most polite Czech to protest, the waiter
flipped a coaster onto its blank side, scrawled “Reservé” on it with a pen,
and slapped it on the table. “Jenom jedno pívo?” Ben begged. Just one beer?
The waiter vigorously shook his head. All the Czech guys were nudging
each other and smiling. “Guess they don’t like our kind?” Simon had said,
back on the street. “What do they think we are, tourists?”
At the base of the old castle steps Ben said he’d walked around enough
and asked what we ought to do with our evening. I told him that the hip
place this summer was a pub in Staré Město called the Thirsty Dog.
“Let’s hit it,” Ben said. “Carpe diem. You know, seize the carp.”
We rode the metro under the river, crossed Old Town Square near Kafka’s
old high school, took the dark alley behind the Týn Church, and only got a
little bit lost in the twisted spaghetti of medieval streets before emerging at
the Thirsty Dog.
Inside, murals jumped along the white walls—warped cartoons of cats
and dogs, balloons and bones. Evan the Poet spotted us through the crowd
and hurried over, dark-eyed and tanned and wearing black slacks that looked
as if they had actually been pressed. Chloe came with him, resplendent in
green, carrying her black knit cape.
“Hey,” Evan crowed, slapping my shoulder. “Near-Death Nick!”
| 125
I introduced Evan and Chloe to Ben.
“I’ve heard about you,” Chloe said. “You’re the one who sells magic tricks
on the street.”
“Just one trick,” said Ben. “Mainly I work the bridge. I sidle up to tourists,
show them this little coin trick I invented—it’s actually easy but it looks
good—then I sell them the secret for a small fee.”
“Did I tell you I’m almost done with my book?” Evan asked me. He
gestured at Chloe, who had turned to watch Ben demonstrate his coin trick.
“She’s the best inspiration,” he said. “I just walk around town, writing
sonnets to her in my head.”
Ben tapped my arm. “Hey, man, there’s old Two-Poem Simon!”
Simon had just strolled into the Dog, wearing a too-large tweedy suitjacket that must have been hot as hell in that pub. He had told me recently
that he was trying to cultivate a shabby “disaffected poet” look; he thought
it suited his metal-framed glasses and his role as host of the open-mike
readings. Ben went toward Simon, and I would have followed if Evan’s hand
hadn’t been clamped on my shoulder.
Chloe leaned against the bar, smiling at me. One bare foot was pulled out
of its sandal and pressed against the inner knee of her opposite leg. Evan
swiveled to follow my gaze. “Isn’t she a vision?” he said, looping his hairy
arm around her waist. “Some kind of enchanted dryad. You’re gorgeous,” he
told her. “Where’d you get that dress?”
“This woman who wanted to sleep with me once picked it up in a second-
hand store.”
“And did you sleep with her?” Evan asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
Ben and Simon had joined us, all grins. Simon poked Ben in the ribs with
his elbow. “Suppose you didn’t smuggle in any of that Amsterdam weed?”
“Nah, but I’ve got a huge chunk of hash.”
“You carried it yourself on the train?”
“I started out with a few ounces each of this sweet hairy bud and good
black hash. Bought two big jars of peanut butter. Who could blame a redblooded American boy for smuggling Skippy into a dry country? I scooped
a big hunk off the top of each jar, stuck the drugs, in the hollow there, right?
Then scooped the peanut butter back in—I ate a spoonful or two so it’d fit—
and smoothed it over all pretty and slick. Rolled the jars up in two separate
bags and put them on the overhead rack so they couldn’t be definitely traced
to me, in case of drug-sniffing hounds or whatever. But I slept a few hours on
the train naturally, and some asshole stole one of the jars. Fucking train was
full of Eurorail kids. One of ‘em thought, ‘Aww-right! Score! Peanut butter!’
Probably thought it was real kind to leave me one jar.”
Evan propped his elbow up on the bar next to Chloe. “How about if we
go home now?” he said.
“I’m going to head downstairs,” I said. “Anybody want to come?”
126 |
Simon checked his watch. “It’s near one. It should be a pretty good
scene?”
“Maybe some other night,” Evan said. He was running his fingers down
Chloe’s neck while he fumbled with his other hand for the beer mug he had
left on the bar.
Chloe rolled her eyes at him. “You guys go on downstairs,” she said. “I’d
better get this man to the tram stop and prop him up there before he falls. “
Evan took a deep swig of his beer, and then set it behind him on the bar
without removing his eyes from Chloe. “You are a Greek goddess in that
green dress.” He was using the same singsong intonation he used when he
read his poems to a crowd. Simon, Ben and I turned away.
“So Chloe and Evan?” Simon said, just outside the Dog, in the wheedling
voice he used for good gossip. “How long’s that been going on?” His glasses
glimmered in the streetlight.
“A while,” I said.
“I kind of thought the two of you…?” He let his voice trail off,
suggestive.
Ben raised his eyebrows. “You and her?”
“We’re just friends.” I pictured Evan with her at the tram stop, tangling
his claws in her hair.
“Naturally people suspected?” said Simon. “You don’t have a thing for
her?”
“Do you?” Ben asked Simon.
Thin shoulders shrugged beneath Simon’s loose suit-coat. He said,
“Doesn’t everyone?”
We walked around the corner to the main entrance of Obecní Dům. It was
an undulant cream-colored building, sinuous S-curves all flowing together.
We trooped downstairs, past the art nouveau tile-work, and into Klub Repré.
In the outer lounge room of the club, smoke and people hung thickly around
velvet couches. We wandered off separately to cruise the joint. I found Fiona
on a purple sofa that clashed with her screamingly red hennaed hair. She
asked if I’d like to dance.
In the club’s cavernous inner room a d.j. was spinning the usual mix—
Nirvana back-to-back with the Doors, Smashing Pumpkins followed by
Steppenwolf, Abba, the Beastie Boys, the Cure, the Clash, Public Enemy and
the Rolling Stones. A Czech friend of mine had explained to me once that the
mix didn’t seem incongruous to him: “We got all this music at the same time.
All in ‘90 and after. It is all excellent for dancing, yes?”
Fiona and I shrugged at each other as “Magic Carpet Ride” revved up.
Then she commenced shimmying, rolling her hips, and I commenced to flail
my limbs. Simon boogied over to us, wearing the tweed suit-coat tied round
his waist. He shouted over the music, “Want to check out the Bunkr, maybe?
Or Ubiquity? The Rock Café?”
I glanced pointedly at the packed floor. “This isn’t enough of a crowd for | 127
you?”
He worked a shrug into his dance moves. “Not really anybody we
know.”
I said I was thinking of heading home soon. “It’s early,” said Simon. “Only
around two, I think. Things will be just picking up at the Borat?”
We tracked down Tricky Ben at the bar, then all straggled upstairs and
onto the street, down Celetná, spilling tipsy across Old Town Square and on
toward the river. A full moon was blazing over Prague’s labyrinth. A Czech
woman whom I’d dated in the spring had taught me the Czech word for
moon—měsíc—and since then whenever I looked at the moon I mouthed
měsíc, such a melting, lilting word. Sometimes a new word could make
everything different, could make it shift right in front of my eyes, even if
that thing had always been present, as constant as breathing or dreaming or
sleep.
Clusters of people were sprawled on the bridge, singing raggedly along
to the strum of guitars. I’d sat there several nights myself, sharing bottles of
too-sweet Czech wine with people I had just met and didn’t share a language
with, speaking in gestures when we had to speak but mostly just singing
along with the others. We all seemed to know a few of the same songs.
Tonight these singers seemed desperate to me, nobody singing in the
same key. I wondered if any of them heard each other. I wished that I hadn’t
had to see Evan, drunk and dumb and crazy for Chloe. I wished she had
never climbed into my bed. I hadn’t been expecting it. Sure, we had hit it off
from the start, but until last night I had assumed that was partly because we
had never had sex. Back in May, when I had first gotten to know her, I had
decided that I was too proud to offer myself as one more of her eager dogs.
But last night, after the open-mike reading and the requisite post-reading
beers, all but one seat on our night tram was full. We’d both dived for it,
giggling, and somehow she’d ended up on my lap. When she turned to
make a joke our mouths came so close, but, thinking of how Chloe saw men
who chased her, I had merely smoothed the hair back from her face and,
feeling strong in my fake nonchalance, had turned away and peered out the
window.
Back at my place, I handed her the usual shirt but when I came out of
the bathroom this time she lay stretched out on top of the sheet. The white
t-shirt stopped at the top of her thighs, her nipples were dark just beneath
the thin fabric. I didn’t dare to let myself see. I crawled into my separate bed,
burrowed in.
She snapped off the lamp between our two beds. I heard her shift a little
and sigh. “I’m not all that sleepy,” she said, and then briefly paused, as if
poising to leap. “I guess I’m feeling a little excited.”
My head was all aglow with beer; the dim room smelled like the spice of
her armpits.
“Didn’t you want to kiss me?” she said. “On the tram? I almost kissed
128 |
you.”
“Of course I wanted to,” I said.
“If we fuck tonight,” she said, “that’s not going to ruin our friendship, is
it?”
I turned my gasp into a choked laugh. Streams of gold from the streetlight
outside washed in through the slits in the Venetian blinds. Chloe lay on her
side, on the edge of her twin bed. “You’re the best friend I have left in this
town. So just tell me honestly, Nick. Please don’t lie.” She was sliding off her
bed.
I shifted to make room for her. “There’s no way that I would stop being
your friend.”
She flipped back the bedsheet and climbed in beside me. The fuzz of her
unshaven legs brushed my shins. “I thought so,” she said, “but you can’t
be too careful with guys.” The blond curls that framed her cheeks, eyes,
her mouth, were glimmering in the rising light. Our toes touched first, then
our knees, then our hips. “Sometimes a guy will act like my friend, then
I’m stupid enough to sleep with him, and it turns out he’s not my friend
anymore. You wouldn’t be like that, would you?”
I traced her brow with the tip of my finger, as if gently smudging a line on
a sketch; I touched, as tenderly as I knew how, the thin skin at the corner of
her eye, swept that finger along her cheekbone, into the silky curls over her
ear. She was all golden and pressed up against me.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
I was leaning against the bridge’s railing, a stone notch digging into my
chest, when Ben came up and clasped my shoulder.
“What’s with you, man?” he said. “You feeling okay?”
I told him I’d see him back at the flat.
“Don’t be an idiot. Fun’s hardly started.” His blue bandanna looked black
in the moonlight, its spots against the darkness like stars. “You do have a
thing for that Chloe girl, don’t you?”
“So what if I do?”
“I guess that sucks. Did Evan steal her from you, or what?”
“Nothing like that. Sometimes she comes home with me because she lives
way southwest, on one of those bus lines. She sleeps in my extra bed.”
Ben toyed with the loose ends of his bandanna, peering at me dubiously.
“That’s all?”
“Chloe falls for no one,” I said, not willing to confess to Ben that I ranked
with Evan as one of her fools. “She uses ‘em and sheds ‘em like skins. I doubt
that Evan realizes yet.”
“Brutal,” Ben said. He leaned way over the rail of the bridge, let his feet
push off the ground so his belly balanced on top of the wall, then jumped back
down with a loud clump of boots. “If her taste is that awful, good riddance.
You’ll find someone better soon. Meanwhile, man, carpe diem. Why don’t we
seize the proverbial fish?”
| 129
Further down the bridge, Fiona and Simon were just drifting away from
the statue of St. John of Nepomuk. Ben went toward them. I stepped up to
wish. The legend says that a Bohemian king had John, a priest, tortured,
thrust in a sack, and tossed over the side of the bridge. The bronze relief
plaque beneath the saint’s feet depicts the moment of his martyrdom: all the
king’s minions gathered around, their raised bronze bodies dark with years,
and the bright crumpled man-shape of John in his sack soaring over the wall
of the bridge. That’s what you wish on: St. John-in-a-sack. By now he’s so
worn and shiny from fingers that if you didn’t know the tale you would
probably think he was jumping, escaping.
I fixed my finger on tiny St. John, looked up the dark river that split the
lit city. I never wished for something specific because that meant I could
be disappointed; besides, I never knew what I needed until it slapped me,
hard, in the face. The secret of life, as far as I knew, was that nobody really
knew what he sought. We were all groping our way through life’s mazes.
I watched the dark changing face of the river, millions of lapping watery
tongues folding back into one glassy mass. Ben had it right: seize the fish
while you can. Seize the fish, kiss the fish, let the fish go.
I swirled my finger one last time over St. John’s bright falling body. Amen,
amen, amen, I thought, then walked over to my friends. They had reached
the point on the bridge’s western end where stone steps led down to Kampa
Island.
“Party on Kampa!” Simon was crowing. Fiona was twirling her long wild
hair to the music coming from the pub under the bridge, on the island.
“He-e-e-e-ey!” a loud call fluted over the bridge. Chloe was sprinting
toward our small group, her dark cape flapping around her green dress.
When she reached us she latched her hands on her knees and leaned over
slightly, catching her breath. “I saw you from across the bridge. I was just
walking to my night tram.”
“Evan isn’t with you?” said Simon.
“Ditched him at his tram stop,” she said. “I’m so glad I caught up with
you.”
“We’re heading down to the island,” said Ben, “to smoke some hash and
howl at the moon.”
Kampa was nearly deserted that night—just a few couples tangled on
blankets and a clump of hippies strumming guitars. We found a spot on the
grass, settled in. Ben loaded hashish into his little pipe and we all passed it
around. The moon had turned yellow, the night was deep blue. The hippies’
music trickled toward us. My friends were all voluble, happy and high.
Next to me, Chloe leaned back on her elbows. I wondered how she had
got rid of Evan. I wondered if she would sleep with him again or if she had
knocked him once and for all from the dizzy perch he’d enjoyed at the Dog,
when he had still believed she wanted him personally, had thought himself
130 | special and chosen and blessed. She wouldn’t deliberately hurt him, of
course, any more than she’d longed to hurt me. And in the end I would have
to forgive her, because she would see nothing for me to forgive; she’d made
me promise, after all, that having sex would change nothing between us. In
the end, I was the one who had lied.
She was laughing in the moonlight, playing with Fiona’s red hair as she
hummed along with the strains of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” wavering, in
several hopeful keys, toward us through the summer night. Fiona leaned
closer, into Chloe’s shoulder. “Perfect night for an orgy,” she said.
Chloe laughed, twisting Fiona’s hair in her hands. “Pity about the company,
though.” She swept a mass of the snaky red hair across her own face.
At first I thought either the hash was too strong, or the moonlight must
be tricking me with the blue way it bounced off that wild, hennaed hair but,
blinking, I realized that it was no trick. Chloe was actually kissing Fiona,
whose hair was foaming around their joined faces. I’m not sure who dove
in next, but soon we were all in it, rolling around, and everything was
moonlight and tongues, and it was more curious than erotic: peculiar the
scratch of Ben’s sunburned cheek, how bony men’s shoulders were under
my hands, how soft both women were in contrast. Imagine comparing how
four people kissed when each of them was so fresh in your mind: Simon
earnest and mushy-tongued, warm; Ben precise and passionate; Fiona was
like kissing a plum, her plump mouth small, open, pulpy inside. Chloe was
sweet-breathed despite the hashish, her tongue like a question, her curls
in my fingers. Above us, in the old trees, things were singing. Somehow
I unbuttoned her dress and took her white breast into my mouth, moonwarmed and slippery as a fish.
Then Ben moved in on her other breast, Fiona’s mouth caught Chloe’s
mouth, Simon’s lips were on my neck, and I had begun to feel very strange.
The moon ceased seeming like an excuse. I didn’t want the rest of them
there. But it was Chloe who pushed us all away, and soon the excitement
thinned into exhaustion. The hash buzz ebbed and the grass in our clothes
was starting to itch and everyone began to say that this interlude shouldn’t
become public knowledge.
We climbed the stone steps to the bridge. I nudged Ben and whispered,
“Would you mind crashing at Simon’s tonight?”
He lowered his eyebrows, squinting at me. “You’re not feeling weird
about this thing, are you, man? Because you know it’s women I like.”
“Of course. I just want some space to myself.”
“Understood,” he said, with a little salute. On the bridge he went east
with Fiona and Simon.
Chloe, as usual, went west with me, though we didn’t talk about where she
would sleep. The tram schedule at Malostranské Square said we had thirty
minutes to wait. Chloe suggested that we walk a bit, so we started uphill,
toward the castle. “Why didn’t you go to Evan’s?” I asked, carefully pacing
my words to stay calm; each word fell a cobblestone’s distance apart.
| 131
“Because he was acting so gross at the Dog, like he thought that he owned
me or something. I just left him at the tram stop to stew in it.”
“I’m not a huge fan of Evan’s,” I said, “but you shouldn’t play with people
like that.”
She glanced at me, then away, and then back, her blue eyes narrowing.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have slept with the guy, but it seemed harmless enough
at the time. You weren’t hurt that I did, were you?”
“Past tense?”
She stopped walking. “Shit. Are you hurt?”
I nodded and shrugged.
“Christ. Don’t be, Nick. It’s not personal. I think I’m through with him,
anyhow.” She grabbed my arm. “Hey, do you know about Drahomira?”
I didn’t.
She led me up a crooked alley, across narrow Janský Vršek, where
alchemists used to live in a tower, up a crumbling flight of steps, and partway
around the base of the castle. “Okay, we’re almost there,” she said. “This is
your reward. Ta-dum!”
Set into a peeling wall was the sort of pedestal-cubbyhole usually filled
by some saint or other, but this curved niche contained just one red candle,
burning low, and what looked like a very shriveled bouquet.
“It’s a chapel for Drahomíra,” said Chloe, “the mother of Good King
Wenceslas.”
“So she was another saint?”
“No.” Chloe laughed. “That’s the fabulous part. She wasn’t a martyr, or
murdered or mutilated or married off against her will like every other woman
in Czech history. She was pagan and she had power of her own. Of course
she was a murderer, too, but you can’t ask for everything in a role model.”
“Why the chapel for her, then?”
Chloe laughed harder. “This is the spot, the very spot, mind you, where
Drahomira was dragged into hell. I guess there were witnesses.”
Winding our way back downhill we felt the strain of the slope in our
knees. Below and ahead of us lay the dark city, glittering here and there
with small lights. We strolled through the gap in a crumbling wall and into
the orchards next to Petřín. Straying from the jagged path that meandered
among the apple and pear trees, we sidestepped our careful way down the
steep lawns until we found a good hollow for sitting. The grass was cool,
moist. It tickled my ears.
“It’s freezing this time of morning,” she said. She gathered her cape more
closely around her. “Nick, I think that I’m moving to Paris.”
I begged her pardon.
“You know I love French—the language, the wine, the lifestyle, the men.”
She shifted her head in the grass beside mine. “But probably I can’t move
there till fall. I’ll have to sell a whole lot of hats.”
“Why Paris?”
132 |
“I’ve been thinking about why I’m still in Prague,” Chloe said—originally
she’d planned to stay just six weeks, to make some quick cash selling hats,
then move on—“and I couldn’t find any reason at all.” Her voice in the dark
sounded dreamy and tired. She said that Paris was a real city, with a real art
scene, and real museums, with real challenges. “Prague’s too easy to be true,”
she said. She said that her whole life in Prague seemed like some ridiculous
dream; it couldn’t go on forever like this, and when the expatriate bubble
burst she wanted to be far away.
“Why not just enjoy it?” I said. “Why ask questions, go looking for
problems? Haven’t you got all that you really need?”
She sighed. “Maybe you need less than I do.” Anyway, she said, she
was sick of the transience, of how all the friends she made kept on leaving.
“Prague isn’t a real place at all, for Americans. It’s some kind of surrealist
way station. Everyone’s always coming or going.”
“That’s another lesson,” I said.
“Christ, everything is a lesson for you.” I heard her plucking at the grass,
ripping strand after strand from the earth. “A lesson in what?”
“Impermanence. Trust. You meet these people; you learn to love them;
they leave and of course you miss them a while, but you trust those spaces to
fill in. And they do: you keep meeting more people, finding adventures. This
is real life, same as everywhere else, only it happens here at light speed.”
“A college friend of mine is in Paris,” she said. “She says I could work as
an artist’s model. Everyone says I’ve got the bones for it. My Prague phase
was great and all, but it’s over. All of my best friends are gone or they’re
leaving.”
I touched her cheekbone. “I don’t count?”
“You’re too complicated,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “You know,
we missed the goddamn tram.” She said she was starting to feel awfully
tired.
“Take a nap right here,” I said.
“My head’s on a rock.”
I patted my shirt pocket. “Put your head here.”
She smiled and moved her head to my chest. I felt my heart throbbing
just under her ear. “This really is much nicer,” she murmured. She shifted an
arm to encircle my waist, flung one knee over my knees. I adjusted the loose
folds of her cape to keep her bare legs covered and warm and smoothed
the thick fabric over her torso. She sighed. Her forehead nuzzled my chest.
The moon had dipped toward the horizon; its whitish light turned her curls
strangely silver. Her head jerked suddenly, then relaxed: a last protest before
consciousness fell.
When I awoke the sky was more purple than blue; the blazing moon had
paled and moved. Chloe was leaving, I knew it for certain, and I would fill
her place with new friends. I would start again. Again. I hadn’t expected
anything different, but now I was swallowing it, knowing deeply—which | 133
was something else altogether. Dew may have fallen, because I was cold. The
sleeves of my thick flannel shirt weren’t enough. Mist seeped down the long
wooded hill, down among Malá Strana’s red roofs, into its locked courtyards
and gardens. Mist was drifting across the dark river, and curling like intrigue
throughout the Old Town, a ghost ivy clinging to the brass spires. A deep
peach light spread across the horizon. I realized these ancient hill orchards
faced east, perfect balcony seats for the dawn.
Craning my neck and propping myself gently up on my elbows, I could
just see Chloe’s face. I traced the shape of her lips with my eyes and thought
how unfair genetics could be, how random and unjust beauty’s lure. If Chloe
hadn’t looked like a painting, would I have cared that she’d been fucking
Evan? It was talking with her that I loved most of all—at least that’s what I
told myself—but how to separate our talks from watching her face when she
grimaced or smiled, from the way her lips curved and stretched when she
laughed? If Cleveland had been half as lovely as Prague, would I have ever
needed to leave?
Chloe shifted, yawned, and opened her eyes. “You make a pretty good
pillow,” she said.
I told her the sun was about to come up. We stretched, unkinked our
limbs, sat upright. The city below us was gathering shape, hazy outlines of
buildings, curved streets, sharpening in the new light. The three-dimensional
map of the city was rising from the night like a prayer. Curved bands of light
advanced on the dark, pushing back the violet-blue sky as if it were a domed
lid on the city, being lifted gradually, sliver by sliver. Day touched the river
and set it to shimmering; it spilled down the length of the medieval bridge.
Chloe had thrown the black cape from her shoulders; her dress was the
same bright green as the lawns. “Is it like this every day?” she asked. “It can’t
possibly be this beautiful, can it? Every single goddamn day?”
“It must be,” I said. “We’re just never watching.”
Chloe was holding her chin in her hands; her blue eyes were open wide.
“We’re idiots,” she said. “Such fools.” She snuggled her shoulder into my
chest. The round edge of the sun wobbled up behind the Old Town like the
rim of a blazingly new golden coin. Its face expanded, lengthened, bulged,
until the sphere detached from the land and the clouds. Rising smoothly, it
dangled over the city.
I thought of how long that sun had been rising, every day while the city
slowly took shape—a millennium of myths and wars, hopes and nightmares
mapped in stone, until Prague had become this strange pearl, in this valley,
a dream I could cradle right there, in my eyes. Long before even that, it was
rising, over a river, a lush wooded valley riddled with groves more sacred
perhaps than the squabbling churches that later usurped them. The sun
would still rise when this city was rubble. I would not be here to see.
But this moment, I thought, this I could keep. I had to remember a glimmer
134 | of this, how full and blind and lost I was in this wonder that went on with
or without me. Day pushed the night back, the mist slid downhill, and light
burgeoned into the bowl of the valley. The miracle was daily, eternal, and we
were just passing across its gold face.
Something was always rising and falling and here we were in the palm of
its hand, born on a cool morning into its garden. The monastery bells tolled
some hour.
Chloe pulled away and yawned. “I’ve seen what we came for,” she said.
“Let’s go home.”
| 135
Brunch at Julie Ashley’s flat in Holešovice, 1996. In this photo: Lacey (Eckl)
McCormick, Julie Ashley, Shannon McCormick , Kate Fitzpatrick, Tim Simmons,
Abbey Achs, Deb Achs, Neil Danziger, David Freeling, Anthony Tognazzini, Alan
Ward, Scott Bellefeuille, Theo Schwinke, Nicole Achs Freeling, Sandra Crouch.
136 |
Paul Martia, Alan Ward Thomas and Alex Barber, Vaclávské náměstí, New Year’s Eve, 1999.
Photo: Karl Skarstein.
Alex Barber
The Last Bus
I’m scared
I’m sacred
I’m overflowing with potential.
Fossil children, hold your breath the light is coming, words fade into the
dunes.
The captain of bones lives to trade a single flower for sand he can pour
through his glass to get more time.
The last bus comes at midnight.
Our chivalry has gone unnoticed.
| 137
I am who I am without you.
You only needed me to get this far.
I spent a past life ruling and raping and this one paying back my trespasses.
I’m just figuring out the rhymes of my own shadows.
Thank you for having me.
Once the plate of kharma.
The Edge of the World
I drove
to the edge of the world
and forgot my name.
No
I drove
to the edge of the world
and forgot.
138 |
Opposite: Alex Barber, “Lester & Zippy,” Think magazine, 2001.
| 139
140 |
Kip Bauersfield, “Boy with Glasses,” oil on canvas, Prague 2004.
Kip Alan Bauersfeld
from The Superseding, A Prague Nocturne
Emil in the moonlight
He’d been walking for a long time. Walking. He didn’t know how long.
Walking over the face of the earth. At times he thought he could feel the sea
at his side. At other times he felt himself wandering in endless valleys, across
forested steppes, beside the roaring flow of enormous rivers. At a certain
point he knew he was moving inland. Deeper and deeper toward the heart
of the continent. Ahead the moon shone full through a silver lined rift in the
clouds, illuminating the red tiled roofs and golden spires of the village at
the Church above the Black Woods in a watery luminescence that made the
| 141
whole of the village seem to float upon the dark body of the land. The road
sloped down and to the left and he was walking, still walking, walking in the
direction of the moon.
How long had it been? How long? He couldn’t say. The Egyptian Dynasties,
the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, and Romans had all
fallen, felled by the merciless, almost human, hands of time. Europe had
seen wars and more wars, periods of darkness and relative light.
An indifferent Earth swallowed corpses by the billions, belched smoke
and flames, trembled and wet itself after the heavens cried. How long had it
been?
The tubercular hands of a denuded apple tree reached from the empty
expanse of a near-by field, the moon light painting silver shards of a mirrored
glass into its rain soaked fingers. How long had it been? Too long, that was
all. And perhaps not long enough.
There were times when he thought he could smell the salt air of the sea.
Times when the after-thought of far away factories burned his eyes. Times
when the whole of the world was lost in a listless hazy coal smoke, times
when the piercing freshness of the pines made him forget his body high in
the clear unseen alpine air. Times when he bruised his feet upon the jagged
rocks.
He’d been walking for a long time.
An ambulance sped passed as he neared the edge of the town trailing a
cape of thin mist that pressed into his face. For a moment he closed his eyes,
to hear all the better the never ending sound of his footsteps upon the earth,
to hear the beating of his heart. The moon drew him out like the tide.
He liked it best when he could see its body in reflection upon wet asphalt,
in pools of still water.
A couple passed, arm in arm, laughing, on the other side of the road. Then
he was in the village, the raised golden cross of the church spire guiding him
on through the narrow winding streets.
There were only a few lights, dim and veiled, here and there, at street
level. The village seemed to close in upon itself, hidden behind stone walls,
doors, curtained windows like secret memories in the mind. Theirs was a
different world than his.
He could hear the folks in the pub as he neared the square, laughing and
shouting and singing.
Making merry on this night.
On this night as so many nights before.
Someone was playing a violin. He heard a door close and a dog barking.
He heard muffled shouts and pounding.
Again he strained to hear the sound of his own footsteps.
The expanse of the deserted square opening before him, the Gothic church
of the Saint of the Guardian Angel rising up from the far end, moonlight
142 | sleeping on its green copper garrets, moonlight licking the edges of the
golden spired ball and cross, moonlight caressing the darkness inside the
bell tower.
Still he heard pounding and muffled shouts, the sound of a nail from
his worn down heel scuffing the cobblestones. He slowed down as he
approached the faintly rocking ambulance parked on the empty square. The
muffled shouts and pounding evidently coming from inside. He winked to
the moon as he paused and undid the latch, then turned, walking out across
the street and the top of the square to the left.
The bewildered Harvey Kreis froze as the ambulance doors unexpectedly
swung open. He knew never to expect what he expected. His nerves were
fractalized, generating ever new yet eternally similar patterns of pain.
And the sight that greeted him, the sight he’d unwillingly come so far to
see?
No more than the darkened facade and drawn metal shutters of a bookstore.
The rain slicked sidewalk was empty save for a few soiled leaflets advertising
a circus. He pushed further open the doors to improve his view, prepared
to see the executioner, testing the trap door of the gallows, sharpening the
blade of the axe in a bloodied white smock.
With uncertain relief Kreis stepped cautiously down from the ambulance.
His mind had been spun so perfectly in the centrifuge of this unfathomable
evening as to resemble, at this hour, calm itself. Carefully he closed the
doors behind him. He jiggled the latch to ensure it was properly locked.
Then staggered and almost fell back, the ridge of his lower spine slamming
into the cold, rusty metal lock on the shutters of the bookstore, arching then
inward in equal and opposite reaction, his head careening back on his neck
to take in the cloud covered vault of the silvery darkened heavens, his eyes
rolling to meet the now cloud fractured body of the moon as it waned behind
the roof of the church, his chin then giving way to the summons of gravity,
as it fell with a nod, his eyes working to fix upon a lonely figure moving
without haste toward the far side of the square.
With everything in him he wanted to call out, to shout, but by virtue of
his own fear this proved impossible. For a few moments he wavered in front
of the bookstore his eyes riveted to the figure rapidly disappearing among
the nocturnal shadows of the buildings on the far side of the square. Fearing
both solitude and company, as a thin but rain ready cloud veiled the body
of the moon, the howl of a far away dog set him to fright and Kreis found
himself walking briskly out into the shadows.
Walking, walking still, through narrow walled streets, a faint incline
growing stronger as the street turned to a cobblestone path and then into a
muddy trail draped in wet leaves, rimmed by rain weighted blades of green
grass, fenced off to the left, the night air rife with the pungent smell of brown
coal smoke, invisible dogs whimpering timidly, the moon calling out to him
with a smile one moment and then turning away, leaning back, hiding her | 143
face the very next.
He could hear the old communist era PA system switched on and off and
then on and off again.
A cock crowed in the distance.
The sound of static from a speaker on a nearby telephone pole immediately
raised the hairs on the back of Kreis’ neck. He stopped, stung by the silence, the
burning at once assuaged by the sound of water running in the subterranean
sewers.
Kreis sized up the darkened streets nervously, a pale amber-orange street
light flickering on to cast his elongated shadow across the windowless wall
of the two story house beside him. The sight of this frightened him again,
forcing him to up the pace, in an ever more irrational attempt to catch the
figure disappearing now into the woods below.
And he was walking down through thick matted grass to the stream,
branches poking his exposed flesh, snagging on his clothes, mud ever more
slippery, the face of the moon now wearing endlessly interchangeable masks,
falling toward the dark undulant body of the earth visible through the twisted
trees. The sound of snapping branches behind him turned his head.
Kreis froze mid-step.
The man meet his eyes as the body of the moon chaffed the upper ridge
behind him, watching for an instant as Kreis’s pupils reflected the moon in
miniature before falling back into the darkness of an intervening cloud.
He turned away and as he crossed the stream a legion of invisible frogs
leapt into the water as if fleeing a snake. He headed up the hillside into the
woods without so much as a word, the moon now setting behind the ridge.
They walked on, occasionally stumbling, in a blind silence, through the
Black Woods, for an indeterminate measure of time, before finally, in a small
recess formed by a cleft in the hill side, in the middle of a ring of dark sturdy
pines, the man stopped.
He turned slowly, extending the full length of his arm. He was reaching
out, his palm up-turned…
Like happiness, only falling
“Well go on, walk, time is of the essence you know,” said the man in coat tails
glancing down again at his gold pocket watch, adding with a bow, “Your
Majesty.”
Favasha stood upon the carpet of clouds bathed in a golden moon light.
Far beneath her the Vltava wound like a white gold snake through the heart
of Bohemia, ever refilling inspiration’s ancient chalice with the new wine of
unrequited dream…
“Go on, it’s just down there, he’s waiting, go on…” said the man in white
144 | gloves knitting his fingers nervously, “it won’t take long at all.”
“What won’t take long?” asked Favasha turning around to see only the
distant face of the moon gazing at her unremittingly through a rift in the
wind blown clouds. Our two friends had vanished.
“The ceremony of course, it is what you agreed to,” said the man in
coat tails suddenly beside her, swinging his watch back and forth like a
pendulum.
“What ceremony?” insisted Favasha.
“Never to fear, you’re the guest of honor, he’s selected you to read it!”
said the man in white gloves on the other side of her as he took her by the
elbow.
“To read what?”
“To read it, what else!” said the man in coat tails taking the other elbow
rather forcefully.
“What it?”
“The gospel of course! You know…” said Mr President beginning to tug
at her as she leaned back in resistance.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what your talking about.”
“The book, he wants you to read the gospel, after all you helped write it,
we all helped write it, but you especially, and to give it to him as a gift, on his
birthday no less, he’s invited only the best for the occasion I assure you, now
hurry up…” explained the man in coat tails with a beaming smile and a wink
of his left eye, his hand firmly on her elbow but applying no force.
“But what gospel, and who’s he?” asked Favasha relaxing for a moment.
“The gospel you helped write, the one you burned Your Majesty, flames
have always been dear to his heart. Don’t ask how he treated Theophilus
after he torched the Library at Alexandria. His joy was immeasurable! You
couldn’t have given it to him in a nicer way. Your generosity will be duly
rewarded we assure you. He as you well know is the Lord,” said both our
friends in unison as they at one and the same time heaved on her arms like
a fisherman his full nets and Favasha like the projectile in a catapult went
flying.
There was a strange electric blue phosphorescence to the air as she flew
over ravines and gullies, dipping and swaying held close to the body of
the earth in the white gloved talons of some prehistoric bird with leathery
wings, a gold pocket watch rocking round its neck as they flew, over springs
of stallion blood leaping into the air boiled and ebullient, past the poisonous
emerald eyes of insects in bogs of peat moss, and on among the fragmentary
dreams of grave stones translucent and radiant, past trees with leaves of
noosed rope, to a forest of giant frost-covered pinwheels that twinkled in her
wake like falling meteors…
Further on she began to rise carried through a frozen maze of men and
women she’d thought but stars adorned in an armor of white hot crabs that,
as they moved sideways to withdraw, exposed tired faces which appeared | 145
as death masks peeling and cringing and laughing. As she looked away,
Favisha suddenly saw the mirrors through which she was flying, mirrors and
cobwebs woven of tattered flags, bits of fabric and splintered glass sticking
to her hair and pouring from her watery eyes like cathederaled candle light.
It was then that the creature in whose claws she hung began to descend
in a deep arching spiral and she was overcome with waves of an emotion
tinged in shades of utter amazement, dizzying and euphoric, yet terrifying,
a strange, twisted feeling that slowly overwhelmed her, consumed her,
devoured her, a feeling much like happiness, only… falling.
White, white, white upon white
Favasha’s field of vision grew narrower, narrower and narrower, at last fading,
fading to a field of white, white, white upon white that soon enveloped her.
The reading
Slowly Favasha returned, slowly, falling into herself as from a great height,
a height through which the whole of her life had stretched, contracting now,
condensing into bits of sound. Whispers, endless whispers, whispers of an
unforgivable sin. Whispers crowding out her mind, writhing beneath her
skin.
Opening her eyes she saw only darkness, before slowly something began
to expand and her eyes adjusted to the deep, faintly flickering amber that
solidified the air, molding and shaping it like dancing shadows from an
unseen fire—forms banished as soon as created. It was as if her eyes had
opened on a piece of fabric rippling in the wind, draped across her face, a
living fabric, crawling, as if woven of worms, the worms themselves then
woven of ever smaller worms, coarse and hairy were the quivering fibers
of the air, inching upward, dancing bits of shadow defining the shifting
spaces in-between, infinite, alluding to something impossibly beyond, as if
the space behind her she could not see, but feel, feel behind her, was out there
somewhere, defining that fabric, giving the air form, on the other side. Her
eyes scraped against it, their movement pressing in like a finger to soft wax,
the intaglio space of their passing shifting her focus in an impossible search
for a point to define.
Favasha could feel her chest swelling, breasts pressing into the space
before her, inside becoming outside like a breath held without walls, defined
only by its own expansive continuity, by the impossibility of escape, of the
need to merge, to be one with itself.
“Go on,” said the voices in unison. “On go now, reeead!” they
whispered.
146 |
She couldn’t tell if she was looking up or down, straight ahead or to the
side. There was no way to tell, but her chin was high, her throat strained,
the back of her neck crushed down upon itself as if someone was pushing
her forehead into the center of the earth, trying to force it to collapse upon
itself, yet at the same time pushing with unimaginable pressure up along
her spine, and out into the cosmos through the back of her skull. The only
way to escape the pressure was through her eyes and they rose as if climbing
a ladder, following the fabric up, up and up, detailed and slow in motion,
until, exhausted from the climb, the line of her sight met with an edge, as
if a wall, upon which she could focus, an edge defined by a shift in color,
the darkness beyond alluding to a space less solid, deeper, demarcating the
ledge upon which her gaze for a moment could rest.
It was then that far, far above her, at the top of the infinite arch of her
vision, she could see a pin point of electric blue light with a white circle at
the center, an infintesimally small circle as clear as an eye held to her face
yet further away than the farthest star that began to fall, rocking on the air,
pulling away from the electric blue light beyond, growing slowly larger,
slowly larger, falling toward her.
“Go on,” whispered the voices, swirling around her, inside her, pausing
to inhale through her open pours and orifices, “Reeead!” they hisssed.
All grew immeasurably cold, a cold that sliced and scraped, peeled and
burned. Favasha’s eyes followed the falling white body for an indiscernible
amount of time. It could have been seconds, days, years, eons. Its edges began
to fissure and splinter, to fray, to curl into a crescent, the darkness separating
it from itself. And as it did so, it began to glow brighter and brighter and
brighter.
When, at last, the white body appeared to be just above, as if it was about
to fall into her eyes, she realized, suddenly, with immaculate clarity, what it
was.
A feather.
A simple, single, feather. Solitary and distraught. Glowing as it rocked
through the air above her eyes, glowing as it passed through her, drawing
her gaze down, down, down to the sheet of white paper into which it, and
everything in her, then merged.
Favasha was that sheet of paper, that feather, surrounded by a field of
white upon white upon which, around her on all sides, dark lines began to
slither and wind, building themselves up like self generating walls, gaining
volume, flexing to cast the shadows of the labyrinth, pulling together, closing,
opening, gathering in a stormy, stressed, guttural sound that tore through
the space around her, the space that was her, as dark and light collided, with
inexplicable force, exploding and imploding yet inviolable, to form a vortex
that swirled around her, alive, fragments of the whirling walls reaching out
toward her, pulling her apart, caressing her lips, her tongue, reaching down
| 147
her throat.
“Reeead!” screeched the voices from the impossible center of it all.
And Favasha’s lips began to move, her tongue crawled up her throat—it
dragged along her teeth, curled out over her lips before beginning to roll
across the swirling walls around her, as pieces broke off in joints and arches
and lines, pieces that grew in size and stature into letters and then words,
towering, resounding words, lined up in rows, sounding off in tones ominous,
catastrophic and unyielding, tones instantly subdued like the fading call of an
echo off the canyon walls of desolation lake, into the whispering insistence of
her own voice as it fell, as the feather did, slowly, down, down, down inside
her. Until at last she could hear, hushed as if in a lullaby, from impossibly far
away, the sound of her own voice, reading: “Late in the afternoon...”
148 |
Kip Bauersfeld & Kevin Blahut, 1996.
Kevin Blahut
Sinbad
One lately wonders at the identities
of those who, when Sinbad’s head burned
—as it sometimes must have—
and he was able to perform
—as he sometimes must have been—
replaced him for a while with filthy terror.
Certainly they were insidious in charm,
and if they walked valleys unmolested,
it was menace, not faith, that got them through.
This everyone knows. However, recovering,
even Sinbad could regard only fragmentarily
the gathered winsome faces of those whose
rejoicing made him crave collapse.
| 149
Young Hands
Young hands browned by tobacco,
think they’ll grasp forever,
last until the sun shines for you.
Large sections of your inadequacies
I’ve memorized,
all pale and square as cretins.
That time you took him and
hammered him like a xylophone.
Another glass? Another bottle.
Something to sear it blank.
150 |
Alcohol’s Marionette
The talk and touch is knee-jerk,
from faces smooth as television screens.
Impossible to remember.
Pacifists wave skeletal arms to incite to violence,
cough a death rattle.
They carry knives.
Some drool, copulate and expire.
There is a smell of apples rotted brown and soft
buried in slimy autumn leaves,
chemicals tirelessly knocking against each other
to make empty venomous gesture and speech.
My brother was exoskeleton eaten hollow by mites.
kept running by a mite brain.
Soaring breaks against it.
Birdbeak cracked by thick glass
that vanished in this light.
A Petrified Head (New York: William Aloysius Books, 1993).
| 151
152 |
Photo: Petr Králík
Petr Borkovec
Sonograph
(for Franz Hammerbacher)
A thrush up on the gutter
—still spreading and already drying out—
like a blot of ink in bold. I flexed
a forking wand of walnut, an antler
still hooked onto a ringing head,
and it came springing back at me
as though still on the tree.
I looked for skulls in all the leaves
and bones of stalks. The thrush sang.
Teams combed the alders near the river.
The stains left after branches tilt
in the wind. They fleck and gather
in the dry wind. A golden worm,
it seems, works through the facing shore.
Small bits of driftwood flock and cloud
along in front of a dead carp,
which in its turn, eye clouded over,
snags in the shoulder of the river
where branches burn: they blossom
as in a documentary, the flames
of fire in daylight with no smoke or sound;
ash swarming up; the glow burgeoning.
Odd shells and old ceramics
turn brightly green amidst the mud
that’s full of seeds. Streams of magpies
along the silt and swirls and streaks.
A barge pulled up on to the beach
has rusted into silence;
| 153
a thresher’s belt—carefully caught
among the lower wheels and cracked,
toys with the thought of starting up again.
The thrush sang all the while.
Against the twilight, now up on the gable.
That metamorphosing stain, I thought,
is almost like a bird—it looks like one.
But everything flowed into it.
And the song was still unchanging.
I watched. Called everything the same.
I listened. The thrush sang.
I believed it all. What it seemed. How it looked.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
154 |
Pine
1
Its supple top keeps on exploding
as if behind a film, as if
a fire down at its foot inflamed the air;
flakes of flame.
The higher shelves give up. They waver
backwards. The wind doesn’t charge them—
flows over and aligns them.
Medusa, green star-fish.
If you look at it,
even the trunk is opening up
and the air above the crown
is frayed and shadowy.
Jays flash and work
inside it, washing to and fro.
A gust threw dry leaves over it.
2
This morning, a drop cuts down the window.
Beyond—somewhere in the land—
there’s a retreat in all directions.
But the ear is in on every plan.
Thaw. Snow leaps off the needles.
The branch comes to a standstill, slowly,
shifting movement somewhere
to lower or to higher shelves. Inflow
of black lines. Then for a long time
it’s slowed again by darkening skies.
A great tit leaves its print but doesn’t sink
into the ledge of snow upon the ledge,
which dries, but doesn’t crumble,
as though it has some promises to keep.
| 155
3
Dry and tame above the thaw.
branch furnishings in room-lighting,
warm.
4
A palisade of pines across the way, but clamour
coming as if from only one of them.
Another with a crooked basal branch,
stout as a trunk, maybe stouter.
A kestrel gathers strength to still itself,
pressing on a spike, much like
a sharpened shred of twisted skin.
In the background, at the gate, a movement—
they’re carrying out some heavy object, a bed or chest,
but now it seems to be an injured person.
Perhaps someone was hurt or maybe fainted.
In the end, it seems they’re leading someone out
in handcuffs, on each side two or three
156 | holding him by the collar and the arms.
It’s hard to see the shouts and hear the clamour
which maintains itself on the same and single tone.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
Ode
A great tit swoops down to a book in hand
in February, at a window screened by heat,
and standing side on seems to have just set,
the body’s flash and tremor all for its eye.
The winter holds on tooth and nail through it,
stock still, glazed over—as you’d say—in feathers,
beautiful and distinct, a moment measurable only by other shining things,
made out by gleam alone, which takes the measure
of rhythms and dark ratios, the spillages
of interval and edge—their likenesses
knock you back almost to the icy sill.
That eye’s a mask. Of what? The warring frost
and forest which open far out to the margins
like sleeves, almost in darkness, and no emergence
of wrist or fist, just cold light breaking branches
| 157
on the horizon, where gazes go without saying,
chapped lip, someone’s dry hand (almost), water
like eyelets from snow melted on a sweater,
and ribboned pine and quince above the door.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
Snow General On
outlying fields—gone now.
But still no revelation, nothing new:
an aftertaste of change, if even that,
when you observe the planes—empty, flat—
and hold the very distance in your hand.
The rooks delight and fly above the land,
a black panel, the shadow of an airship,
a string of tugboats uniform in shape
which pulls along the same and single track
the surface, which then coils and closes back,
the river’s bridge and bed, the river isle,
158 | the shore, the works and days of river life.
Like black hills crowned with the constant thunder
of a highway, like weather’s distant trundle
inland, the shifting brilliancies and planes
at lay-bys and at dirty filling stations,
there where the shadows grade back into murk,
and headlights carve quick frescos from the dark.
Like a gaze blacked out by closing forest walls.
Like the forest broken open by wood trails,
like wood trails which the forest dark then seals,
like the forest razed to leave outlying fields,
as matt as these hinds poised before the sedge,
a beast of prey that stands at something’s edge,
and an eye behind glass that turns behind them.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
Two Owls
The street sleeved to their body,
but outspread to their flight,
to the buzzard, to the bat,
the rounded edges of their vanishing
caught by the streetlight’s glare:
space briefly folded up
in the hush of that back-draught.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
| 159
The Work
the river’s watermark, the swell
of sunset on the west side of the sky.
Soft folds of air caught in the current’s turn
as long as the last bird has yet to fly.
A foot-bridge propped up on the surface, footsteps,
a wrinkled beach, a pair of shoes, and sand,
although withdrawn, which watches you discreetly,
ice, which razors you, the strokes. Point
of no return. Man on a punt, depicted,
perhaps observing his float’s glint and play.
Who now encounters only things themselves.
The roar and thunder. The foot-bridge rubbed away.
160 |
Translated by Justin Quinn.
Room
The window opens back against the curtains.
The narrow pendulum is at a standstill,
dark brown with gold behind undusted glass.
On the left, a stove. Upholstery on the chairs
is red, as is the quilt, as is the table
in the Last Supper, which hangs above the bed.
Old lipstick fills the dishes in the case,
in one a rosary is coiled in its own heat.
A picture shows the Blaníks in the spring:
a shaded angler can’t see the girl and dog
nearing the foot-bridge. A cupboard, a head on it,
hair-pieces, dust and clips. The television
with lacework almost breathing underneath
reflects a country road, the glint and flash
of sunlight and a spire. On the smeared black screen
all this takes on the colouring of ash.
Translated by Justin Quinn.
| 161
162 |
Sarah Borufka
Night Train
I watched a woman
With sandy hair
And thick metal braces
Ride through daylight
Over her head
A metal contraption towered
Like a halo
Or a crown of thorns
She was in a wheelchair
Always going down
One way streets
The wrong way
Cursing
My friend called
Her
St. Bridget
The saint of Ireland and Fallen Women
She smoked herself into a stupor
And gulped down
Bottles of night train
I am sure
She
Watched
Bubbles
Burst
| 163
Like dreams
That once mattered
When the bubbles had burst
And the dreams didn’t
Matter
Anymore
She adjusted
Sip by sip
She told me about
The giant, cow-sized dog
She once saw in a dream
She said he confessed to her
He had never told the other dogs
That he belonged to the same species
164 | It would be too confusing
And maybe they’d hate him,
He had said
The merciless New Orleans sun
Was dripping on us
As she offered me a sip
Of night train
I declined
She said
She watched
Her friends
Become
Moist and musty soil
The kind that
Mushrooms mosses
Berries
Sprout out of
She said
She once
Watched
Someone
Important
Become
The earth
That we all grow up to
Be buried in
She swallowed and smiled a
Vague smile
She was one of
New Orleans’ fallen ladies
I never got her name
I never told her mine
My friend
Still sees her
Riding that night train
The wrong way
Down Magazine street
Into a dark night
That asks no questions.
| 165
166 |
Photo: Jen Emery
MICHAEL BRENNAN
Apogee
(for Tioui)
Pressed between two atmospheres, fatigue swelling in your eyes you rise up
and face day, the intrigue of chance cast in the air, a face you assume, a name
of so many syllables, so much history. Erstatz-coffee drawn from chicory,
azure-leaves as bitter as morning’s current affairs: the interminable process
of adaptation. You sort the ephemera of the real, loose leaf files, around some
system, think of distant friends, sense the mutual gravitation of associated
bodies, the logic of words forming syssarcosis, ill-defined ligaments that bind
and underwrite the plausible. You breathe in as contingency allows. Close a
door, a series of syllables expiring in the mind, fractals of thought rhythmic, | 167
language operating below itself, opening in ganglia, flowering toward an
impulse to annihilate le travail de destruction. On the wall of the station the
metro is a giant’s print, the concentric lines break through at points on the
peripherique into the violence of unknown spaces. You press the green
cardboard ticket between thumb and forefinger, and would decouple
light from matter so that the universe grew transparent. You think of Kant
unwriting God while a busker strums out a few lines of Brel je ne sais pas
pourquoi le vent s’amuse dans les matins clairs. The woman opposite strokes a
dog in a gym bag, stares, and you remember a girl in Maastricht now more
distant than time and space allow, a name that returns in dreams of beautiful
drownings. You cross the wooden tiers, the library stacks tower over you, the
premeditations of their architecture grimly wry now the librarians no longer
recall the catalogue’s shibboleth and so, of course, you have a drink or sit by
the river.
First published in Jacket 11 (2000).
The disaster of grace
It’s true the mirror was in love, finding itself in every face.
It was not a function of syntax. His life was slurred.
Yes, it’s true, the heart hid in the dark with the dream of light.
How did you disguise yourself with only a pause?
How hungry I grew after the lean years.
The mirror stole the face I would have traded for such emptiness.
All those wars of attrition. Silly lovers.
If I could reach you with anything but myself, what then might begin?
Rest maybe. When the sleepless awake. When the dreamers sleep.
What gentleness, the bricks barely brush these first flowers.
Ahk, sly dog, teaching me touch.
My hands fell apart in yours.
Poor soul, dance upon my feet awhile.
Hunger, never leave me alone.
All that I left was a beginning.
168 | I could have cried for him, but for his friendship.
No, not her, the drinking was alone.
Oh, that the half-hearted might find each other!
It was mid-winter when his eyelids said their farewells to each other.
First published in Jacket 27 (2005).
No second chances
“I burnt every bridge I ever walked across,” he mumbled through thick
whiskers into his coffee. It was the morning the hostages walked back into the
station, unharmed after a year in the headlines. “I never asked for a second
chance, and never gave any. I’m a man of this world. I don’t harbour grudges
or regrets. I don’t know a thing about unrequited love, bad investments,
long-lost friends or tax audits.” He was on a roll, you could smell the cinders
of those bridges in his gravelly voice. “I’m a self-made man. I left home at
fifteen, and never looked back. I never knew a family except these two boots.
I’ve been welcomed into every house as a stranger and left so. I know the
names of every street in every capital you care to mention. I don’t have a
mother tongue, each tongue holds me equally to its tit. I’ve broken bread
with the poor and lame, as with the rich and mighty, and never changed, or
looked back, or wondered why, or how, or when I got there. I sleep easily,
deeply, without dreams, without memory. I’ve never been depressed, or
anxious, or fearful of any person, place or thing, but known them all. I’ve
never felt fatigue, felt cold, or been wasted by heat. I’ve never given a second
thought to success, fame, money, nor heaven and hell, or a life hereafter. They | 169
are empty as words to me, empty as love, hope, trust, fate, or regret. I know
the shape of my hands, the weight of my feet treading the earth. I know of
no home to return to, I have no brother to call my own, no lover’s warm arms
wait for me, or hearth beckons. I know what it is to kill and be killed, to travel
endlessly without heritage or inheritance. I have held a bloodied stone in
my fist and learnt what it is to exist.” His confession left me a little haggard
and confused, as though I’d been dangled over the edge of a pitch black
canyon, simply because I was there. Gaunt smiling faces flickered across the
TV screen over the bar, as he paid me two dollars for the coffee and started to
exit by the side door. He turned as if on the edge of some further uncalled-for
confession or prophecy. I expected apocalypse, or rapture, the ageless war,
or to hear of the brother he has killed time and again over millennia, of the
wandering and erring coming to its inevitable end, of the Mercy seat and
redemption, the rising of the dead, of judgement, damnation and salvation.
But no, not a word from that good-for-nothing, that cheapskate ape, not even
a lousy tip.
170 |
Photo: Bil Brown
bil brown
from 3:15experiment
Noon: 03 august 1999
emblematical apoet
Baraka I think
said ”poets must enter
philosofie”
whoever sd it
was right
as the left hand
distinguishes
right brain action
as philosofie
/kultura pro panní/
a language alive
Czech still adding words –
still learning them, unlike others
french
this langue age
of philosofie brought down
an empire and (who?)
what proletariat
| 171
Midnight: 03 august 1999
losing count after the fifth
Internationale: an ethiopian
theocracz binds hands and feet
this media feet purged small one too
big flat w/ no nail
dried blood around the wound
after the fifth—pleading
172 |
Noon: 04 august 1999
balance this
two short shirt suits
after eating salami
my bowels ache...
see a movie in a small room
take a ticket
How much time is spent
spending it underground
a series of views
tunnels
escalators
when it’s dusk—see the light
wind blows hair
at the top
step off
this morning
laughing woke me up
still funny in this dark
| 173
Midnight: 04 august 1999
everytime I buy these Strikes
a new girl
but she looks the same on every package
I smoke a lot
walk past this pale nude cpl
walking into a cunt
174 |
Noon: 05 august 1999
this word reality
this world—
so, many times knew
couldn’t be true
or viable
a resource—seeing things the way they
(like an overcurious swarm)
are The Way Things Are this dissertation
it is academic after
all the way things are
buys and sells this worn
stolen hocked sense
another reality as the Czechs
steal this word and make it “pet reality”
like a lovely joke...
maybe it’s closer to the source
land houses accommodation hospice
accommodating the feeding
| 175
an overpopulation—a resource
is nothing but a batterie given
blood as it tastes like acid
the tongue cannot even SPEAK
fluent enough to draw names around it
like these names matter from the top of a screen looking down
hard concrete listing
Midnight: 05 august 1999
. gotta headache thinking .
numbers are green and gold
eyes behind squinting numbers
lights dim
fire burns wax
smokes you can smell of it
176 |
Noon: 14 august 1999
. The Secret .
Whereas there is a distant dissertation
The Speaking of Trees a desperate attempt
a new delving into
a release and a breath
out of the cosmos a sign far as Moravia
like a girl waves to a passing truck
a simple misgiving
a balloon at the top of the mountain they called it
a slick cloth to catch celestial debris this new religion
a woman menstruating fields would wither another age circumspect
a woman menstruating twice in two weeks hospitalers would tear rags,
& call it “god’s will”
the death of a sign yet to be born the age awaits but is
personal and distinct
unlike it in this time
Whereas
| 177
the dissertation is given
a new preface to this
there is another such
a life or a end and the heat of a brow given
in 1999 either or
create a sigil out of a name read it backwards
pray no one hears
Noon: 16 august 1999
She was the first to go
the journalist that’s
mouth is a proxy
why wd you want to write about that?
you wd know
class from classy... come on
…just a number of numbers or a name
and what is more esoteric
than finance
look for something to throw out
ignore something
the guy was cute accept the call
his mother said keep the head
up nose up chin
watch the skirts
cause that will keep
you poor
but to worship
178 |
a woman
in this country
object of glory and desire
her feet walk
paved gold
aura gold
trellises throw petals
stemmed thorns
said it: sometimes she just wouldn’t shut-up
this was a problem
her problem (as is like to say in czech)
desire is forgotten
it was a date
not a discovery per se
when guns pointed temple
she was the first to go out
spoken thinking between the faxes
“the streets were a scene out of the movie Independence Day!”
it could have been a funny story
if it weren’t fucked up
sometimes it takes up to a week
before the family is notified
two bodies on the side of a busy intersection
Midnight: 16 august 1999
wherever it is
ignore it
/noir noc červené básník/
ignore it
the loss isn’t laughing
| 179
Noon: 17 august 1999
walk past this in a suit
and a glance toward the eyes
walk past jeans a dirty nose
not a glance at all
eyes are dead
all of this depends
where the immobile
rather, immovable
recognition
falls
no more esoteric than finance
dark night under-the-table básník
no one will watch if you look
the other way
180 |
Noon: 18 august 1999
-IX°at the kraldum- (fragment)
“As above…
Archangels three: Metatron, the Prince of countenance
(reflected from Kether), and Sandalphon, the Princess of Prayer, and
Nephesch ha Messiah, the Soul of the Reconciler for Earth.
“unto whosoever
shall make war upon her
when established”
thus
“Fixed, culminated
completed Force,
whether good or evil” although I do not take evil for good for evil
anymore than
.theta-epsilon-lambda-eta-mu-alpha.
A scarlet bow for his horns!
there are no voices anymore
…so below”
| 181
Midnight: 18 august 1999
address the plight
as survivors are few above
are there no more voices anymore?
resident with claws for hands
after fire can you see the light hands outstretched arms?
after shock can you feel your legs?
anymore there would be another
hands grip loss symbol of a dress
homes crushed bones broken skin pulled back
attachment to an eagle and a red field
another cross—these hospitalers aid
in Istanbul unscathed …so below
182 |
Noon: 25 august 1999
I find this
circle trap
by what
I accept
only what I expect
if another
bothersome tirade
happens
should the
bones be pulled apart
or should kisses
all over that
foot to this foot
making little sense
it is a trap
like breathing
closed
behind this door
is it a trap
it is a draft
is it a way-out
scratching against a too far gone dementia
find this
| 183
184 |
Photo: George Stawicki
Isobelle Carmody
The Man Who Lost His Shadow
Light floods from all directions, banishing every trace of night. Only a frozen
transparency holds back the darkness.
There is a young couple in the booth opposite sitting so that although they
appear to be languidly independent of one another, their bodies touch all
along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels,
their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together
explicitly. They are not foreign as I am, and even in a no man’s land like this
establishment, whose success depends upon its rejecting utterly any trace
of the culture within which it finds itself, they belong in a way that I do not.
| 185
Part of it may be because they are casually dressed while I am wearing my
formal but now somewhat crushed travelling clothes. Or maybe it is that
they are young and I am not.
The girl is very tall and slender as women here seem to be—young women,
anyway. The older women are as bulky as bears in their winter coats, their
expressions forbidding and surly. The stewardesses on Thai airlines, which I
flew for the first part of the trip here, were as small and fragile as tiny blownglass blossoms, while the German stewardesses on my second flight, were
older. Young matrons with thick competant arms and faces. Here the young
women have still, remote faces. One can see it is a general type and the girl
opposite fits it. The waiter brings them two drinks—orangina, perhaps, and
a plate with two chocolate coated cakes. A waiter is an an anomaly in this sort
of place, and yet his presence is a sign of the hybridisation of two cultures,
each trying to consume and subdue the other.
The girl takes up the plate and cuts into the cake, her expression unchanged.
Inside the coating of chocolate is a pale soft sponge or maybe some sort of
creamy filling. She offers the laden fork to the boy, and my stomach spasms
dully in what might be hunger. He is sitting bolt upright, although she is
now resting her back against the seat, her spine bent into a delicate bow
and curled around the long flat belly. She eats the two cakes slowly, licking
her lips and talking, but never smiling, never showing any emotion. Her
companion nods, and watches her with ravenous attention.
The waiter brings them a tall glass of fruit salad topped with a fat loose
whorl of impossibly white cream. The boy’s turn, I think, but he gestures at
the glass and the girl sets aside the plate she had been holding and takes it
up. Again she scoops up cream and fruit and offers it to him, and again he
refuses. She eats the whole parfait with the same dreamy absorption. When
she sets the glass down, the boy runs his hand over her belly possessively,
then slides it around to pull her to him to be kissed. When he releases her,
I see that her hands have not moved throughout the embrace and her body
retracts automatically to its former languid bow.
The boy has become aware of my regard, and gives me a curious look. I
do not glance away, embarrassed. I realise that I feel almost no sense of self
consciousness. It is as if the affliction which has brought me to this strange
outpost, has left me free of any need to pretend to be normal. The boy calls the
waiter and pays the bill and as they leave, the young woman settles her limp,
expressionless glance on me. There is no way of knowing what is going on in
her mind. Perhaps nothing. Now that they have gone, my exhaustion returns
and I begin to think of leaving. I wonder if I am afraid, but my emotions are
slightly unfocused so that I am not sure from one moment to the next what
I am feeling.
Beyond the sheet of window glass are a utilitarian rank of petrol bowsers
flooded with light, and beyond the asphelt surrounding them, lost in
186 | shadow, is a road leading back to the highway bounded on either side by a
dense pine forest. That road connects to the city and I see it in the glass as I
saw it through the frosted window of the taxi upon my arrival: a city street
winding away and steeply up, street cobbles shining wetly. On either side
of it, unbroken, ornate facades of buildings, art nouveau and gothic details
picked out delicately by the buttery gold of the street lamps.
The thousands of tourists who come to see this city, must feel they are
stepping into the past, yet when the street was new, night would have been
an all-consuming darkness so that nothing would have been visible; the
brash light which symbolises the modern world thinks naively that it has
banished darkness—from the streets, from corners, from the hearts of men
and women. But it is eternal and it will find its way, its crack, its vein.
The castle appears beyond the glass now, seeming to be lifted above the
snarl of old town streets surrounding it on beams of light, to float in greenish
illumination, and I find I am back in the taxi that is not a taxi. Such is the
power of the castle, this city.
The driver glances at me in the rear view mirror and tells me in brutish
English that the lights are switched off the castle just before midnight. I think
how I would like to sit somewhere—in a café perhaps, and wait to see it
swallowed up by the night.
“You have business?” he asks, a touch of curiousity. Perhaps he senses
my affliction, though it is virtually unnoticable at night. He wonders why I
am here. I could tell him that the turbulent history of this country, the stony
eroded beauty of this city that is its heart, fascinates me.
“Business,” I agree. A strange business.
I do not know how I lost my shadow. After the first shock wore off, I told
myself it was freak chance. My shadow might not even have known what
it was doing when it severed itself from me. I could easily envisage myself
walking and hesitating at some slight fork in the streets, my shadow going on
sunk in its own thoughts, failing to notice that it did so without me. Seconds
later, I would choose the other way. Maybe after a time it realised what had
happened and retraced its path, but by then, it had long gone.
That was one of my earliest theories. Hopes you might as well say. One
does not like to admit the possibility that ones shadow has left on purpose. I
consoled myself with a vision of my shadow, slipping frantically along walls
and paths searching for me, wailing as forlornly as a lost child, occasionally
plunging into pools of shadow and emerging with difficulty because it lacked
a form to pull it from the larger shadow.
But now, I can more imagine its relief at being cut loose. It may have
been a fortuitous accident that freed it, or maybe it saw its chance to be free,
and took it. Either way, I blame my passivity for our estrangement. Caught
within the roaring machinery of the relationship between my parents, I
had learned to defend myself with stillness. But having gained the habit of
passivity, I could not lose it and so as an adult, I found it almost impossible | 187
to engage with life. I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk and
if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have
admitted it mildly.
But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping
void its absence left, that it is we who need our shadows, not they us. Without
it to anchor me to the earth, I became dangerously detached. I dreamed of
the reassurance of its company, its small tug at my heels, its soft movement
before me, feeling out my path like a blind man’s cane. Without it to bind me
to the earth, I am like one of those astronauts whose each step on the moon
is so buoyant as to suggest that they might any second step into infinity. I
am afraid that without my shadow, I will soon make just such a step into
oblivion. It has gone far enough for me to understand that I am diminishing
without its darkness to balance me.
The taxi swerved violently to avoid another taxi that had tried to pull out
from a side street and the driver muttered what sounded like a curse. I noted
indifferently that I had not felt the slightest fear at our near collision. That
numbness is an unexpected side effect of my affliction.
Of course, I did not know what it meant to have lost my shadow. After
an initial response of blank disbelief upon discovering it, followed by a
mercifully brief period of doubting my sanity, I sought help. Ironically I went
to a doctor first, a general practitioner more accustomed to removing warts
and administering antibiotics and tranquillisers than to treating a man with
an ailment as sophisticated and mysterious as mine. She offered me the latter
and seeing the shape of her thoughts, I said somewhat haughtily that she
need not suppose that anything was wrong with my mind. Could she not
accept the evidence of her eyes as I had done? I lacked a shadow. What could
be more empirically concrete? Yet she simply pretended to be confused by
my symptoms.
“What exactly do you want?” she demanded finally.
I asked her coldly to refer me to a specialist in shadows, since her own
training seemed to have left her ill equipped for more exotic illnesses.
Somewhat maliciously, she sent me to a radiologist, whose view of shadows
was shaped entirely by his seeking cancers and tumours in X-rays day
after day. I can only say that his judgement was seriously warped by his
position.
When I told him of my problem his eyes blazed and he clutched my arm
hard enough to leave a bruise, proclaiming that I was the first human to
have escaped the curse of shadows. He confided his belief that they were
not bestowed by god as was generally supposed, but had been served upon
us by some force which he refused to name. His mania was apparent when
I questioned him about the purpose of shadows. He gave me an affronted
look and asked what sort of man I thought he was, to ask him such a
188 | question; exactly as if I had asked the shade of his pubic hair. He examined
the X ray plate he had insisted on taking and developing, suspiciously, then
pronounced resentfully that he saw no shadow.
After that, I gave up on the medical profession. I was not really ill, I
reasoned. Having lost a shadow I was more like a man whose wife leaves
him, clearing out their apartment with mysterious speed and efficiency.
With this in mind, I consulted a private investigating firm. The man who
ran the agency gave his name as Andrews. Since I could not not feel at ease
addressing him in this manner, I contrived not to call him anything.
“I’ve never been asked to shadow a shadow before,” he said when I had
laid the matter before him. I can only suppose he meant it as a joke but I did
not laugh. I am not good at humour, and I told him this. He squinted his eyes
at me and seemed suddenly sobered as if my words had made him take me
seriously.
“Perhaps that’s it. Think of it from their point of view. Having to endure
being dragged about, never having a chance to exert their own mind or will
or taste. They’re worse than slaves because they can only emulate. Nothing
they do is original. There must be millions of them constantly plotting a
coup, fed by dreams of freedom. And on top of that, to be faced with living
with someone who has no sense of humour. It must be unendurable.” He
seemed very sincere, but a certain reticence in my own character prevented
me breaking down and confessing my fear of precisely this thing—that some
profound lack in me had driven away my shadow. That was a matter to be
resolved beween my shadow and I.
“Can you find it?” I asked him, finally, flatly.
He looked through a leather ledger before consulting with his secretary,
and after some negotiating, agreed that he should have a modest retainer
for a week. If after that time, his enquiries had divulged no promising clues,
our contract would end. If he did find a lead, I would pay him $100 a day
thereafter, including expenses, until he found my shadow or my money was
gone.
I gulped a little at the size of his daily fee, but a modest, hard working
life has enabled me to put aside a very good sum, and to comfort myself, I
reckoned that ten thousand dollars spent on finding my shadow would still
leave ample for my old age, and perhaps would even run to a convalescing
trip to the Greek Islands off season after it was all over, so that my shadow
and I could re-evaluate our relationship.
Unfortunately after a week, the investigator could report nothing.
He confessed that my inability to remember when I had lost my shadow was
a stumbling block. I blushed when he spoke of this for his words seemed to me
to suggest that I had been criminally careless. Though I continued to argue
that the loss could only have happened a little before I noticed it, he seemed
to doubt me, and made me doubt myself. Mulling it over, I discovered to my
horror that I could not remember the last instance I had consiously noticed | 189
my shadow. I ran my mind over the day before my retirement, and then
the week and months leading up to it. Finally, frantically, I began to run my
mind over the years preceeding, but still I could not recall seeing my shadow
on any specific occasion. I envisaged all of the bright sunny days I had lived
though, from forest walks in the Autumn to a dip in the blazing summer
heat, to no avail.
I could recall seeing my reflection many times, but not my shadow. I told
myself at one point that, after all it was only a shadow, and then was chilled,
for perhaps it was just such carelessness that had driven it off. If that was so,
I avowed remorsefully, I would show how I valued it by the very fervency
of my search.
Fortunately my retirement meant I had no appointments or ties to hold me
back. In fact the investigator had the gall to suggest my retirement on the
very day I had noticed my shadow missing, pointed to a link between the
two events. Absurd especially since he could not substantiate his notion with
anything aside from the most spurious and simplistic choronological causal
link. Was he suggesting my retirement had provoked the departure of my
shadow, I demanded? He bridled at my tone and though we parted politely,
I did not go back to him.
“Behind there, gardens,” the taxi driver said nodding at a high graffitied
wall. I wondered why the garden was walled. Perhaps it was a zoological
garden and some sort of wild life dwelt in it, but perhaps not. Already I
could see this was a secretive city and in such a place, a garden might be
considered to be dangrously wild, and needing to be retrained. I saw the
driver watching me.
“Gardens,” I said.
But I was thinking of how I had returned at length to my building
after recovering from my first horror at the loss of my shadow, having come
to the conclusion than I must go away from my own country if I wanted
to find it. My compatriots were not interested in shadows, after all. They were
creatures of sunlight and brightness for the most part and even their violence
was radiant and garish, devoid of true darkness. I needed to find an older
world with crannies and corners. I needed a place where I would be irrelevant
even if I was to behave in ways that would mark me eccentic or even mad.
That meant a city. An old city.
And then, that evening as if in an answer to my soul searching, the person
using the control in the communal television room changed channels, and
I found myself watching the end of a documentary in which the camera
showed a series of views of an ancient city. The last shot showed a cracked
wall, where a child’s shadow walked along the shadow of another wall,
beneath a rolling scroll of names. The documentary ended abruptly and I
gave a cry of disappointment.
190 |
What is that place? Do you know where it is? I asked the other residents
seated about in the mismatched chairs. A flat-flaced, somber eyed man
grunted that he ought to know since it was his own city. He had been a child
there. Before the occupation. His parents had escaped and had emigrated.
I asked if they understood shadows there. It was a risky question but there
was a surreal quality to the light in the room that allowed it.
“There was a time when people had to be shadows there,” the man said.
My landlady reproached me for my selfishness when I told her of
my intended journey. “What would your grandmother think of such
behavior.”
I regretted immediately that I had once spoken to her of my grandmother,
but I said that if anyone, she would understand most profoundly what I was
doing.
My landlady said sharply that it was probably so, since my grandmother had
been as mad as a cut snake. I could see that she was offended in the way
only a woman whose mind is so convoluted in its masochism as to regard
everything that occurs in the world as being somehow aimed at her. Nothing
that happened, not a car crash in another city in which a stranger dies, nor the
razing of a park to build a racecourse, nor the swearing of a drunk weaving
from a pub, is exempt from being gathered into her aggrieved personal
worldview. Of course it is a stunningly self centred, even sociopathic means
of regarding the world.
My grandmother was a woman of incredible wisdom, but it is true that she
was insane. Perhaps it was the weight of all that wisdom that cracked her
mind open like an egg. When she was very old, not long before the end, she
became disorientated physically. She was always imagining she was in the
house of her father, no matter where she was; that my home, or the hotel or
mental institutuion or public toilet, were somehow connected to it, if she
could just find the right door. She was frequently exclaiming at a picture or
vase, saying hadn’t that been moved from the mantlepiece in her father’s
study, or from the hall table, and worrying that it would trouble him.
“It is very vexing when things are moved around,” she would sigh
and scrub at her forehead fretfully with a tiny clenched fist.
It took some time for me to realise her apparent confusion was in fact an
awareness of links which are buried under life, and hidden from reason.
Children see these links between things very clearly, I believe. It is why they
weep at one stranger and smile at another. So do the elderly who slough
off reason without regret, see these links. Indeed perhaps with the same
gusto as many of them throw off their clothes in public, they welcome back
to themselves the Edenlike simplicity and clarity of childhood. Even before
my grandmother died, I had begun to realise that her confusion was simply
a deeper seeing of the world and the documentary had suggested to me that
finding my shadow might take such vision. That frightened me because that
manner of seeing cannot be learned or treated as a trick. That which allows | 191
one to see such links, of necessity blinds one to other things. Nevertheless, I
vowed that at least I would follow this one strange clue without question.
I told myself that bereft of its caster, a shadow must be forced to all sorts
of ruses and opportunistic leaps to shift itself about. Chance must rule its
progress and I was ready to let go of all the comforting order and planning
that had so far hedged my existence, and give myself to the roads of chance.
If one would enter the kingdom of heaven, one must come naked like a child.
So my grandmother used to say.
The airport had been very crowded, or so it seemed to me. But perhaps it
is always like that in the international terminal. I presented my ticket and
little bag to the departure desk. Boarding the plane, I felt exhilerated and
thought of a quote I had read on my desk calender the day I left work. What
does not kill you will make you stronger. It can only have been a warning, for
little more than an hour later, walking to the tram stop in bright afternoon
sunlight, I noticed that I cast no shadow. I and stared down at the ground
in front of me, feeling the sun pouring on my shoulders and on the back of
my head. I turned and looked up, intrigued and puzzled, to find out what
second light source had erased my shadow. The shadow of the light pole
alongside me, fell on a wall. With a feeling of unreality, I held up a hand to
the wall, but was it cast no shadow.
I have no memory at all of the remainder of the trip home. How had
I managed it staggering with terror, yet neither losing my hat nor briefcase
heavy with the paraphenalia from my desk?
Another taxi swerved across in front of us, forcing the driver to run over the
tram lines. The cobbles made the wheels drum under the seat, and I closed my
eyes, remembering intimately the way I had been pressed into my seat as the
plane left the earth and launched itself into a long drawn out vibrating dusk
in which the sun seemed to hang for hours half submerged by the horizon.
I had declined food, despite my hunger. I dislike the prefabricated nature of
airplane food and resolved to treat the long flight as a period of fasting and
mental preparation for my search. I did not drink any tea or coffee, but took
only water as if I were on a religious pilgrimage. Night fell and twelve hours
later, it was still night. I felt on that plane as I feel now; as if I have entered an
endless night that will not be broken until I am reunited with my shadow.
When the plane landed, it was so dark a day outside that it
was indistinguishable from night. It seemed an omen to me. People
exclaimed over the fog and there was talk of long delays for connecting
flights. The woman at the transit station explained reproachfully to
a complaining man from my flight that we were lucky to have been
permitted to land at all. She looked interested to hear my destination.
“That’s becoming very popular. Some say it is the Paris of the 1920’s all
over again,” she approved in round vowels so plump they were like fruit
192 | waiting to be picked.
Day passed imperceptibly into night and still there was no call to board. I
resisted suggestions to stay overnight. The smell of food made me feel faint
and I decided to break my fast and while the hours away with a leisurely
meal; perhaps even a light beer. The last meal I had eaten was a dinner of
lamb chops and boiled potatoes prepared by my landlady the night before I
left. I was so hungry that the thought of even that grudging meal made my
stomach rumble. Nevertheless, I was grimy and sweaty after the long hours
of travel and I decided I would bathe before eating. I exchanged my last bank
notes for English pounds, and managed to locate an attendant to unlock the
shower and give me soap and a towel.
In the booth, I undressed slowly and took a very hot shower, enjoying the
water on my tired skin. Another effect of the loss of my shadow has been to
render my skin dreadfully dry and itchy. After what seemed a very short
interlude, the shower attendant hammered on the door and in an indescribable
argot, gave what can only have been a command to make haste. I obeyed,
surrendering the soiled towel and giving her a pound tip to demonstrate
both my disapproval and my high mindedness.
This transaction reminded me that I would now need to change a
small travellers cheque if I wanted to eat. Coming out of the restrooms,
I patted my pockets searching for my wallet. Unable to find it, I decided I
must have left it in the shower cubical. Although I was convinced that I had
not taken it out there, I checked. Then it came to me. I had removed my jacket
to be hung in the plane, taking out both the wallet and the thick plastic sleeve
containing my travel documents, and sliding both into the seat pocket. On
arrival, I had taken out the travel agency pouch, but I had no recollection of
retrieving the wallet.
I went to the information desk, puzzled by my lack of apprehension. I put
the curious deadening of my feelings down to jet-lag.
“If you had realised immediately,” the man said regretfully, a touch
of Jamaica in his tone. Nevertheless he will make some calls. Can I come back
in an hour. Not a question. I sat down for a while near his desk, then it
occured to me to see if I could simply report the cheques stolen and have
them replaced. Money, after all, was my most pressing need. My cards and
other papers could be replaced at another time.
I spoke to the young woman at the Thomas Cook counter, who assured
me the cheques could be replaced quickly, so long as I could provide
their numbers which were supposed to be kept separately. I explained that
the sheet of numbers was packed into my bag, which had been checked in
some hours earlier, and might already have gone on ahead and even now
be waiting for me at my destination.
“That is against regulations,” she told me with certainty. “The bags must
travel with the clients. Always.”
I said nothing, knowing as she did that bags sometimes went without their | 193
people, just as shadows sometimes travelled alone. It wasn’t meant to happen
but it could. The announcement for my flight to board came over the air.
“I will have to get the cheques once I arrive.” I said.
“You can’t mean to go there without money,” she exclaimed. The
genuine concern in her tone simultaneously touched me, and reminded me
of the mysterious nature of my trip. It came to me that this mishap was a
sign that I was failing to understand.
The young woman mistook the question in my eyes and leaned over
her smooth counter to explain her words. “In a country like that, you
must have money. Everything is for sale. Everything costs and you are safe as
long as you can afford the price. Safety has a price, just like comfort or food
or coffee.”
I sensed that under these words, she was telling me something
important but I could not seem to understand. My mind felt numb. I told
her that I had made up my mind to simply go on. Surely this would be
the most unreasoned response to what had happened, and therefore the
most apposite. Maybe it was even a kind of test. At my request, she wrote
the address of their office, saying there was surely a cheap bus to the centre
and I could walk from there. Alternatively, I could take a courtesy bus to one
of the bigger hotels. The Hilton, for instance, where they would not want
money immediately, and would quite likely sort the lost cheques out for
me.
She was kind, but I had no desire to spend any of my money on a hotel like
the Hilton, which raised in me the same objections as pre-packaged airline
food or MacDonalds. I would not find my shadow staying in such a hotel
and to go there would signal surrender. I would get a bus to the centre of
the city after changing the little remaining cash I had, and walk about until
day broke. Then I would get the cheques replaced. I did not try to make any
plans beyond that, for even that might be too much.
I checked back with the airline attendant who said no one had handed
in the wallet. I gave him my landladies number in case it should appear. I
disliked doing that, but I had no one else’s name to give other than my
employer, who was not the sort to maintain warm connections with former
employees. The severence payment was generous enough to make it clear
that I was to expect nothing more of him.
Boarding the small plane that would carry me on the last leg of my journey,
I wondered what my boss would think if he knew I was on my way to a city
full of shadows and danger, where everything had a price although I had no
money, or so little as to be meaningless. Perhaps he would even regret my
retirement, and wish he had persuaded me to stay on. The thought should
have given me pleasure, but it was tasteless, and I began to feel uneasy about
myself.
194 |
On the plane I ate the small club sandwich offered, and drank as many cups
of coffee as I could fit into the short flight. The food seemed only to make me
hungrier and the sense of disorientation increased. It was no longer possible
to pretend that I was not sickening.
The face of the customs official at the airport was flat and severe, but his
eyes were the same soulful brown as the man in the television room of my
apartment house, and absurdly as he took my passport, I wondered if they
could be related.
“Reason for visit?” he asked. His thick finger tapped a blank space in the
form I had filled out. He slid a pen through the small window in the glass
separating his official niche from me. I took it up and noticed my fingers
were trembling. I tried to focus my thoughts. It was incredibly difficult for
even when I had understood the question I could not seem to think how to
answer it. I looked at the official and found him staring and cataloguing my
features for a report to be added to a file of suspicious foreigners.
I could feel sweat crawling down my armpits. I forced myself to write.
“Research,” he read. “What kind of research?”
I felt I might be about to faint or have some sort of convulsion. All of
my glassy calmness seemed to rupture. My heart beat in jerky arrhythmic
spasms. Then suddenly, with a feeling delirious clarity, I understood that my
reaction was a premonition connected to my ailment, and to my arrival in
this country. Without thought, I simply told him why I was there. I felt as if I
had peeled my skin off in front of him. I felt that having told him my secret,
I could not draw a breath without his having permitted it. I felt a drowning,
tremulous emotion as if I had put my life in his hands. I had powerful urge
to kiss his hands.
“Your shadow.” He said this, not as a question, but as a repetition so exact
I realised he had not understood the word. His English must be regulation
minimum and solely connected to his job. He stamped the passport and slid
it to me with the visa folded on top. As I took it up, I felt as if I had shown
myself naked to a blind man.
But by the time I walked out into the night carrying my bag, I understood
that this had been a necessary encounter; an emotional proceedure to be
endured, and no less vital for entry to this country as getting an official visa.
I felt stronger, though more detached than ever.
From the timetable, it seemed as if I had missed the last bus to the city. A
short, swarthy man sidled over and asked if I wanted a taxi.
“Special taxi. Very cheap for you.” He had grasped the handle of my
bag and was trying to wrest it from me. I held on and he ceased pulling at it.
Perhaps he was surprised at my strength.
“It’s impossible,” I said. “I don’t want to take a taxi.”
He looked around furtively, and I had a memory of the Thomas Cook
woman warning me about taxis in this city. She had claimed the majority
were run by a vicious local maffia, and many of the drivers acted as pimps for | 195
gypsy prostitutes. She had told me of a taxi driver leaping out of his cab and
beating two American tourists with a truncheon because they had crossed the
street too slowly in front of him. Such fearless brutality suggested powerful
if illicit approval had been bestowed officially. But the man holding onto
my bag did not exude any air of power nor even of particular malignity. In
fact, he looked more desperate than anything else. His clothes were ill fitting
and grubby, the cuffs of his jacket and trousers badly frayed. I wondered if
he really had a taxi, or merely sought to lure me to a discreet corner of the
carpark and mug me.
“I don’t have the money for a taxi,” I said. He stared at me in
sullen bewilderment and so I made a dumb show of the day’s events, reaching
for my wallet and discovering its loss.
He let go of the bag. “No crown?” Now it was I who didn’t understand. Was
it that he now somehow imagined I was like royalty who are reputed never
to carry money? “You no want taxi?” This possibility appeared to confound
him.
“Later,” I said, pointing away from myself as if at some hours distant.
Then it occured to me that the best way out of my dilemma might simply
be to ride about in a taxi until morning, when I could visit a Thomas Cooke
office.
“I don’t want a taxi, but I would like to make a tour of the city?”
“Tour? Now?” He gaped at me.
I nodded firmly. “An all night tour. Fixed price. No meter.”
“Tour,” he said, as if he was sucking the word to decide if he liked the
taste of it. He nodded judicially. “Fixed price tour. Cheap. You come.”
I made him name a price, then let him take my bag. After all, it contained
little other than a change of clothes and several changes of underwear. He
ran ahead into the misty darkness, and I tried to calculate how many hours
since I had slept last, but was defeated by the time difference between my
country and this one, and by daylight saving on top of that. Did they bother
saving daylight here, or did they save night instead? I realised at some level
that I was becoming dangerously light headed. My nostril hairs seemed to be
on the verge of freezing and the air was so cold it hurt to breath it in.
He was standing by a car. “No taxi,” he said.
I took off my jacket and let him bundle me into the car.
He drove quickly and it seemed to me it was uncannily dark outside. There
were no lights along the highway, and no moon or stars. I told myself it was
overcast, yet I could not help but feel the darkness was thicker here than back
home, congealing at the edges. He did not slow as we reached the outskirts
of the city. I stared out at the streets which flickered by like a jerky old black
and white movie. Everything looked grimy as if the dense blackness were
slowly rubbing off onto the city.
196 |
“Metronome,” the driver said, nodding at a set of dark steps leading
up from the roadside, and pointing up. “Up,” he said.
“A metronome?” I asked doubtfully, thinking I must have heard wrong.
“Doesn’t work,” he said. “Bad. Stupid.”
Another taxi roared past us so fast the car shuddered. Its red tail lights
burned like coals in the misty air. “Taxis very bad here,” the driver muttered.
“All criminals.”
All at once we rounded a sharp bend only to find our way blocked by
the taxi that had passed us. Or perhaps it was another taxi. It had parked in
such a way as to block the road completely. My driver stood on his brakes
and tried to turn without stopping. The car slewed around and mounted
the sidewalk with a great thump that at first made me think we had struck
someone. Before I could speak, there was the sound of running footsteps and
the drivers’ door was wrenched open.
He gave a thin scream as two huge men dragged him out of the seat
and began punching him savagely. He did not fight back. He merely held
his hands over his face, and when he fell, he curled into a foetal ball. I could
not see properly then, because another of the assailants was blocking my
way with his back. I groped for the door to let myself out, but the lock button
had been removed. There was a lot of screaming and shouting outside, most
of it from the driver. Then there was an ominous silence filled with heavy
breathing.
The big man whose back had blocked my view, climbed into the
front passenger seat and turned to look at me. His hair was dyed white, but his
eyebrows were dark and almost joined over the bridge of his nose. Another
thin man with dark greasy looking hair slid into the drivers seat and turned
the key. The big man continued to stare at me expressionlessly as the car
backed down from the sidewalk. Then he pointed solemnly through the
window. As I turned to look, he hit me on the head hard, and a second,
deeper night consumed me.
*
I woke to find myself lying full length along the back seat of the taxi that
was not a taxi. My jacket had been thrown over me. From that position, I
could see nothing except that it was still night. Gathering my strength, I sat
up. Outside the car windows the darkness sped by. There was no sign of the
city nor of any buildings. We were on a straight open highway, driving very
fast.
The driver said something and the big man turned and lifted a truncheon.
I shook my head.
“There is no need for that,” I said.
I don’t know if he understood me, but he lowered his arm. He studied me as
if my calmness interested him, then he said something in his own language | 197
to the driver. The other man shook his head and began to shout. The big
man said nothing until he was silent, then he turned back to me and pointed
through the front windscreen.
“Kavu. Coff-ee,” he said.
Looking down the road, I saw a faint illumination on the horizon.
The brightness grew until I could see that it was an all night petrol station
attached to a fast food restaurant. The car pulled off into an access road and
curved round to come to a grinding halt in the gravel car park. We were at the
farthest point of the light. There were only two other cars parked alongside
the restaurant. One was very new and red.
“You come,” the big man said. He said something else in his own language
that sounded like a warning, and I nodded.
They walked one each side of me as we approached the restaurant.
The driver pointed at the bowsers and the big man shrugged, steering
me deftly through the shining glass doors. The harsh light hurt my eyes and I
was glad of the thick paw on my shoulder. I thought I might vomit because
of the light, but could not think how to express this. The big man pushed me
into a booth and eyed two men sitting in the opposite booth.
“I just wish you wouldn’t bring up the war,” one said in an American voice.
“It’s a sore point with these guys. They think we betrayed them.”
“You did,” the other man snorted in laconic German-accented English.
The thin driver sat down, and gave the two men a dangerous look, but the
big man patted his breast pocket and shook his head.
“All of that is ancient history. It’s in the past,” the American’s tone was
irritated. Neither he nor the German seemed to have noticed our arrival.
“Nothing is past here. Haven’t you learned enough to know that?”
Silence fell between them, and I wondered what had become of my original
driver. Had he been killed? The big man rose and went to a phone. The driver
squinted at me through a fug of evil smelling smoke, looking as if he wished
I would make an attempt to escape or call for help.
“We could have got coffee closer to the border,” the German said.
“Coffee. Sure,” the American’s voice was ironic. “We’ve got a
deadline, Klaus. Why don’t you wait until we get somewhere civilised.”
“You don’t understand,” the German said with friendly contempt.
“You don’t understand anything but disinfectant and prophylactics.
You’re afraid of everything, including your own shadow.”
The mention of shadow galvanised me. For the first time, it occured to me
that the final step on my journey might be death. I realised I had known that
all along, but had feared to look at it squarely. To distract myself from the
horrifying realisation that I was not much troubled by the thought of dying,
I wondered what border we were to cross. Or perhaps we had crossed it
already and were travelling in the opposite direction to the German and the
198 | American.
“Aren’t you afraid of getting a disease?” The American asked, fastidious
but curious too.
The German laughed. “The possibility makes the pleasure more
intense. Darker. But this place offers deeper pleasures.”
“A stretch of god-forsaken highway where the snow looks like dirty sperm.
And those women. The way they just loom up suddenly in the headlights
with their black leather skirts and fishnet tights and fake fur coats, their eyes
like petrol bombs about to blow up in your face. They scare the hell out of
me. How can anyone stop. How can you get aroused by that?”
“They wouldn’t be there if no one stopped,” the German said almost coyly.
“I’ve stopped every time I pass this way, since the first time and every time I
do, I am afraid. Nothing is more terrifying that to stop and take one of these
women into the car. They take me down into the dark so deep I don’t know
if I’ll ever come up. If it’s possible.”
“But they’re just whores. Terrible rough whores with scars and thick thighs.
I read in Time magazine that they’re the worst most dangerous prostitutes in
the world.” The American’s voice was lace-edged with hysteria.
“It’s true” the German murmured.
“I’m not afraid. It’s the disease...”
The German laughed and called for the bill, and as he paid, the big whitehaired man returned from the phone. He nodded at two men as they left,
then slid back into the booth beside me. It came to me that the phone call had
been about me. That they had been waiting for it to decide my fate. Would
they now kill me or beat me up and leave me for dead? Were they going to
try to ransom me? Or use me as a hostage? These thoughts fluttered distantly
though my mind, like leaves blown along a tunnel.
The waiter brought three espresso. The white haired man must
have ordered them when my attetion was elsewhere. I drank, enjoying the
cruel strength of it. I had never tasted such bitter coffee before, like the dregs
of the world. The caffein hit me like a punch to the heart.
An hour passed and the phone rang. The waiter glanced at our table
in such a way that I realised he knew my assailants. Probably even knew that
I had been abducted. The big man went to take the call. He nodded. He shook
his head. He shrugged and said a few words. He nodded again. He put the
receiver back on its cradle and came back to the table decisively. He said two
words to the driver. Who lit another cigarette. Neither of them spoke to me.
Neither of them looked at me.
A strange tension devoid of emotion filled me.
“What will we do?” I asked.
The big man tilted his head. “We? There is not we.”
I grasped for something to say, to link us. To hold me to the earth.
“There is the war,” I said.
| 199
“The war is always going on.”
I felt a sense of lonelieness, of being finally detatched that overcame a dull
surprise at his speaking English so easily.
There was the sound of an engine approaching. Both men looked
away through the glass and I felt abandoned. The noise increased until
the headlights loomed and fused with the light from the petrol station.
The car had tinted windows so it was impossible to see who was inside.
There was the sound of a horn and the engine continued to run. The big
man rose from the seat beside me and nodded to the driver. Who reached
into his pocket and threw a set of car keys onto the shining Formica.
“You have your own business, eh?” the big white haired man said, and
he winked solemnly and paid the bill. The two of them sauntered out the glass
door and climbed into the waiting car. A taxi, I saw, as the doors slammed
behind them, and it sped away sending up a spume of gravel in its wake.
As the car drove out, another car pulled in. A young couple emerged
and stretched. They entered and I watched them slide into the booth where the
American and German had sat. Their bodies touch all along one side from
shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far
more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly.
Walking into the freezing night some little while later, I glanced back at the
blazing lump of cement and glass. It looked surreal. Like some outstation at
the end of the world. It began to snow lightly, white flakes swirling against
the blackness. Climbing into the drivers’ seat of the taxi that was not a taxi,
I inserted the key. The car started the first time despite the rapidly dropping
temperature. I let the engine idle a moment, then put the car smoothly into
gear. I felt no impatience and no fear. My body felt weak, but my hands were
steady as I drove out onto the verge of the highway. I had no idea which way
was the way back to the city.
I went left remembering to drive on what was, for me, the wrong side
of the road. It produced a queer feeling of unbalance in me, and as the light
of the petrol station fled behind me, I reflected how strange and surreal it was
to be driving into the unknown with such a feeling of absolute rightness. I
could almost feel the proximity of my shadow in the paradox of it. The snow
was still falling, yet blackness pressed against the car so hard I fancied it was
slowing it down. After several kilometres, I realised that the car was indeed
slowing. The petrol gauge showed the tank was empty.
The car coasted and I steered it, my mind a blank. I felt no need to make a
decision. I had gone too far to pretend control over my life now. I had gone
out of the blue and into the black. Snow flew like huge moths. I squinted to
see the white line through them. The snow thickened and I realised I could
no longer discern white from black.
The car was slowing right down, and I directed the wheel a little to the
200 | right, and at the same time, the snow ceased to fall, and I saw her; a woman
standing beside the road against the vast rising mass of the forested hill
behind her. She wore a slick black jacket and long black boots. As far as I
could tell, she wore no skirt or stockings. Her long legs shone with the same
blue-tinged white as her neck and face. Her hair was so blonde as to seem to
give off its own radiance.
The car rolled to a halt a few steps from the woman. She turned slowly and
my heart beat slowed. I told myself she could not see me; that it would be
impossible to see anything in all of that streaming light, but her eyes seemed
to swallow the light, and penetrate to me.
She came towards the car, approaching the passenger door in a
sturdy undulating stride. She tapped at the window with nails as long
and curved and transparent as a dragonfly’s wings.
Aside from her hand splayed against the window, I could see only
her torso; the patent leather, a liquiescent black, outlined her round hips and
breasts. The passenger door opened and she entered the car as smoothly as
a dancer to slide into the car, and with her came an icy blast of air. She was
older than she had looked from a distance and more stocky. Her hair shone
with such a silvery pallor that it might have been stranded with grey. She
might have been close to fifty, and although her skin was like fine velvet,
there were intricate webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes like the sort of
embroidered lace created by wizened nuns in some strict fanatical order of
silence. Her mouth was purple-black, as if she had sucked some dark potent
fruit whose juice had stained her. Eve’s lips might have looked like that, after
she bit into the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But her eyes were the bright
shining miraculous blue of the skies above my own land, and nothing is
more pure or relentless than that.
“You are tired?” she asked in mangled English.
“I have not slept for a long time,” I said. The words were difficult
to formulate, as if my lips were reluctant to obey me. As if it was too late for
that.
“It is long. The road.”
She reached out and switched off the headlights. We were plunged into the
intimate ghastly green of the dashboard light. The colour made her look as if
she were a corpse and her eyes seemed transparent. Her hair was black now
as if it had become saturated with the night, or with something seeping out
from the heart of all her whiteness. “What do you want?” She spoke English
as if through a mouth full of liquid.
“I am looking for my shadow,” I whispered. My own voice
sounded foreign.
“But it will cost you,” she said.
She leaned away from me, and slowly, her eyes on my face, drew aside the
slick black edges of the coat like the lips of a wound, to reveal the full smooth
curve of her breasts where they were pressed together into a voluptuous | 201
cleavage. They were white as milk and downed like a peach. She reached a
pale hand between them and scooped one breast out. It was so soft that her
fingers sunk in it. Only now, with her hair swept back to bare her throat and
bosom fully, did I notice that there was a vein coiling from her neck to her
breast. It writhed under her skin as if it had its own life. It was as delicate
as the threaded flaw in purest marble and it moved towards the tip of her
breast as if to drink, or escape.
I began to shake my head. I wanted to tell her that she was mistaken. I was
ill, but not old. Not so old. She reached out her free hand to slide around
my neck, and pulled me towards her. She was strong as a peasant and a ripe
odour flowed over me as she lifted the breast, offering the thick nub of her
nipple.
First published in Dreaming Downunder, ed. Jack Dann &
Janeen Webb (Sydney: Voyager Books, 1998).
202 |
Photo: Lou Charbonneau
Louis Charbonneau
The 217 Bus to Hell (or Klamovka)
Everything had been cool up to the point we had to part. Alex to his bus to
Bratislava and I to mine to Prague 5 the other side of the city might as well
have been Slovakia. We hugged goodbye I felt like crying realizing how
emotional HYSTERICAL I sometimes am. This was the moment feared
twelve hours now the clocks had ticked on too long time to go our separate
ways. HYSTERICAL. It seemed like days since we’d taken the cardboard
squares with Bart Simpson on one side cut them in half with my knife
swallowed decided immediately take the other two Bart dismembered racing
through our bloodstreams wreaking havoc due to heavy doses laced across | 203
his cardboard body. You and your fucking connections all you did was drop
the names and the door was open the waiter even brought the doses like they
did the spaghetti when I was babbling on about the actor I knew who died
on the way home from a concert how one day he was there playing a guy
who died in a play I wrote the next day gone you begged me to stop talking
about death and we realized we were tripping. Choked up I climb the steps
of the Dejvická metro alone for the first time in twelve hours twelve years it
seems. Prague never looked so ugly rain pouring down and muddy fucking
muddy. Don’t worry it’s just a bus ride. But the rain. Spring rain fall rain
summer rain winter rain. Always rain here why and mud so much mud on
the streets all the time. Thinking about World War Two again can’t help it
think about mud you think about war the two are intimately connected at
least in Europe I’m part Jew anyway WHY ARE YOU SO OBSESSED WITH
WORLD WAR TWO can’t be in Eastern Europe and not think about World
War Two and how in this European rain I’d never survive didn’t survive too
weak would have ended up in Stalingrad or Auschwitz or both part German
part Jew take your pick but me and my weak constitution deutsch no blonde
beast here der Untermensch get every cold that goes around lying in
Stalingrad Auschwitz Terezín abandoned like I am now dying of
gangrenepneumoniatuberculosisyounameit begging for a shot of penicillin
but it’s hopeless ‘cause the nearest cc of penicillin is hundreds of kilometres
away MY GOD WHY ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT THIS? It’s the acid
should’ve known me and my paranoia been seeing pickpockets all morning
starting to badtrip I guess RELAX. After all it’s just a bus ride keep telling
myself twenty minutes and you’re home that’s all that’s nothing. Checking
the times what luck one minute. Already a crowd bad sign lots of people
equals little space liable to freak GET A GRIP. The 217 to Klamovka is always
packed you should’ve known maybe walk it’s too far here it comes no turning
back now. All that fucking mud and rain why today of all days where’s the
sunshine Prague so fucking ugly sometimes never seen it so gray so dead so
bleak so wet. Generally my Prague has no Old Town Square no Wenceslas
Square no fairy tale buildings is just a boring ugly European city that I work
drink trip feel isolated in bullshit it’s a beautiful city most beautiful city you
ever lived in and you know it though part of the beauty lies in the fact that
also ugly city of contrasts BABBLING AGAIN IN THE HEAD SHUT UP. Got
a good seat by the window fogged up can’t see out don’t they ever clean
these fucking windows. A young lady sitting down she caught my eye
reading a book don’t know what about better her than some babbling babička
with a dog in a bag couldn’t take that this morning not today with Bart still
kicking my ass the mud’s bad enough don’t need a dog in a bag JUST BE
COOL RELAX KEEP YOUR HEAD IT’S JUST A BUS RIDE NEVER FORGET
THAT ALEX WHERE ARE YOU. Rain falling gently mud sliding bus creeping
204 | slowly here HERE WE GO! So many people in the bus wondering DOES
EVERYONE LIVE IN FUCKING KLAMOVKA? Can’t talk to the lady with
the book. Under normal circumstances no problem speaking Czech but not
today. It’s been a good trip for a novice tripper even the melting faces were
fun for a while took acid a couple times never took such a strong dose
should’ve taken half too late shut up tune in turn on freak out RELAX. The
faces on the morning metro. Never forget that. Prague’s morning faces. Faces
of people beaten down defeated by half a century of communism. Never
seen so many deformations tumors boils scars folds of fat faces here sure are
different. Americans look so much younger. CAN WE NOT TALK ABOUT
DEATH? They’ve been through so much here DO ME A FAVOR FORGET
ABOUT WORLD WAR TWO PLEASE OK. The environment fuck it’s killing
me too can’t even breathe these days. Eastern Europe. Fuck. The guy with the
fucked-up jaw must have had an abscess or something it was moving all
over his face you didn’t even see it Alex. The old man with the fucking
greenyellow boil on his neck that was ready to explode and fill the metro
with pus palpitating throbbing before my eyes I didn’t mention it to you at
the time because I knew you wouldn’t appreciate it. The faces in the metro in
the tram in the rain on the street faces never looked so foreign realization
shock that I’m in a foreign country guess this drug just brings out what I’m
really feeling and what I’m feeling is now is alone scared paranoid. My own
hands keep melting everyone’s melting except you Alex. That’s what I like
about you Alex you’re constant and you proved that by not melting once this
morning. I melted had to run from the mirror when I saw what I’ll look like
in forty years not a pretty picture already getting old that’s a fact wrinkles
aches thinning hair it’s happening try to ignore it nothing here may be real
but the aging process is the clock keeps on ticking like it did this morning
when it sundered us sent you to Bratislava me to the 217 to Klamovka which
is after all JUST A BUS RIDE Still raining look at the mud FORGET THE
MUD. What’s the lady next to me reading anyway don’t look could be
dangerous Lev what’s that znamení sign horoscope Lev wait Lion Lion what
do we call it Leo that’s it OH GOD AM I LEO. No wait Scorpio ex-girlfriend
maybe no she’s Taurus oh yeah mad for each other according to the stars
that’s why it lasted six years some nice some difficult went away to
Czechoslovakia because I knew it was all over. The lady next to me can go
ahead and read her Leo and everything’s going to be just fine just get me to
Klamovka that’s all I ask hope she doesn’t ask me my sign wouldn’t want to
answer not in Czech not today besides no not talking to no more women
today no no no. The girl at Borát club what was her name MARCELA
demanding that I go home with her couldn’t even talk babbles at me then
tries to drag me to a fucking night tram to my bed her bed some fucking bed
to fuck in oh Christ Thank God didn’t do it would hate to wake up and SEE
HER MELTING. Self-control prevailed didn’t do it you helped me through it
Alex otherwise would have made some VERY WRONG DECISIONS the | 205
woman at the club of which I am a card-carrying member the trippers’ club
daytripper I really am it’s day and I’m tripping PATHETIC the bartender at
the trippers club sitting with me we staring into each other’s eyes not saying
a word if I’d fucked her the big dude would’ve demanded two thousand
crowns or more from me in the morning and busted my arm cut my throat
beat my head if I didn’t pay all the time he’d be melting before my eyes BAD
THOUGHTS. How do you know she was a prostitute anyway maybe she
just liked you you just sat there silent tripping your face off hands trembling
smoking a cigarette looking into her dark dark eyes couldn’t even light the
cigarette she had pity on you reached over lit it holding your hand gently we
held hands for a while you just sat there silent she waiting for you to say
something then she just sighed stood up and walked away letting you know
you’d missed your chance your bus 217 it was better that way because she’d
have started melting in the morning. I didn’t fuck up with either girl Alex
‘cause I wouldn’t think of abandoning you LIKE YOU DID ME the bus is fine
YOU’RE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. A little tense that’s all good to be alone
wish I was alone too many people in this bus the air is close no oxygen. No
one here speaks English that’s for sure melting people don’t speak English
except for me who’s American and melting and can also speak Czech maybe
they aren’t the ones melting at all had that occurred to you ALEX WHY DID
YOU LEAVE ME MAKE THE MUD GO AWAY. What’s that five or six guys
getting on the bus what’re they speaking that’s not Czech not Polish not
Russian it’s Slavic that’s for sure harsh guttural maybe Yugoslavian sounds
like gangster talk to me fucking gangsters talking gangstertalk wish they
were speaking deutsch AM I A JEW gangster talk OH SHIT CAN’T TAKE
THIS. Strahov hill rain girders garbage rust tractors industrial junk of various
shapes and sizes trucks uphill moving uphill uphill uphill CAN’T WE GO
DOWNHILL PLEASE What’re they doing six Yugoslavian gangsters probably
killers look like it that’s for sure what’s that in his hand covered in cloth a
knife Christ it’s just like Hrabal they arrive knives flash before you know it
throats are cut blood gurgling knives sticking in backs legs arms fingers
severed on the floor quick clean up the blood THEY’RE GONNA ROB US
irrational just a bus ride remember GOING TO KILL US THEY’RE
EXCHANGING SECRET GLANCES NOW GESTICULATING IN A WAY
ONLY THEY UNDERSTAND ABOUT TO GIVE THE SIGNAL WITH A
LAUGH AT WHICH POINT TURN TO US ANNOUNCEMENT GIVE US
ALL YOUR MONEY I’VE ONLY GOT 50 CROWNS MAX THEY’RE GOING
TO GRAB THE HOROSCOPE LADY HER BOOK’LL DROP TO THE FLOOR
THEY’LL CUT HER THROAT IN A FLASH SMOOTH CLEAN CUT RAZOR
HER BLOOD SPRAYS ON MY FACE ALEX YOU’RE ON A BUS TO
BRATISLAVA I’M ON ONE TO HELL THERE’S NO ESCAPE HERE AT
STRAHOV IN THE EUROPEAN MUD WORSE THAN STALINGRAD IN
206 | THE RAIN THIS FUCKING HUNGARIAN-MADE BUS WISH I BELIEVED
IN GOD TIME TO START PRAYING. Things turning white hyperventilating
signal to act KILL still hasn’t been given how many seconds passed three
four a century heartbeat faster faster in fact MY GOD I’M HAVING A HEART
ATTACK cardiac arrest on Strahov hill going to die in Eastern Europe in the
mud in the rain in a Hungarian-made bus surrounded by people none of
whom speak my language not at all like I’d have died did die in Stalingrad
semi-heroic but surrounded by Yugoslavian cutthroats gangsters thugs
refugees from a war I don’t even want to think about where people are
starving forced to eat grass concentration camps blow each other away for
no reason at all that’s what war is you fucking dodo obsessed with it aren’t
we CAN’T BREATHE they’ve seen blood and violence toss me corpse that is
out the bus without thinking don’t forget to grab my wallet first and watch
and the Reeboks GOT TO GET OUT OF THE BUS CAN’T BREATHE
ASTHMA ATTACK HEART STOPPED NO PULSE. Standing up pushing
past the lady with the Leo she’s looking at me in horror all of them thinking
I’m crazy guess I am this morning thanks to Bart Simpson son of Homer
Homer shit THEY’RE ALL DOOMED TO A VIOLENT DEATH NOT ME I’M
GETTING OUT OF THIS BUS THEY CAN TAKE A RIDE ON THE READING
TO HELL BUT I’M SAVING MY YANKEE ASS. At the back of the bus are
they following me stop bus please stop please stop don’t give the death signal
before I’ve had a chance to jump let me escape please. Stops, I jump. Out in
the pouring rain I run like I’ve never run before uphill away from the bus in
the pouring rain tears streaming down my face I don’t care if they think I’m
a lunatic of course it was crazy just tourists probably not even Yugoslavian
just happened to be dark guess that means I’m a racist. Crying like a baby
don’t even know where I am FOLLOW THE BUS SIGNS now it’s time to run
down the hill alone goddamn it fucking alone ALEX HOW COULD YOU
ABANDON ME LIKE THIS I STAYED WITH YOU DIDN’T GO HOME
WITH ANYONE BESIDES YOU KNOW THIS COUNTRY AND I DON’T
OR I DO BUT I REALLY DON’T I NEVER WILL NO ONE EVER WILL NOT
EVEN YOU OR MAYBE JUST YOU. Still sobbing running down the hill at
least it’s down now trucks splashing mud on me go ahead and splash deserve
it feels good actually soaked to the bone wet hat my trademark Reeboks full
of mud and rain gonna catch pneumonia probably already have 28 years old
I can’t take this anymore living the life of a 20-year-old I’m a weakling why’d
I do this to myself And suddenly I realize how silly I am 28 years old sobbing
muddy wet at 10:45 on a Friday morning running down an Eastern European
hill. And I ask myself: Is this what I threw away a PhD for a place in a program
at a prestigious university I busted my ass to get into then getting in more
than two years of assandballbusting success decided was headed for a
nervous breakdown just up and went to Prague Professors shocked confused
shrugging shoulders a year and half I’ve been here would be done with my
coursework now working on a dissertation proposal on the road to a PhD | 207
and a cushy job talking about literature getting paid for it what could be
better. Another truck splashes me. Good. Splash on. And I ask myself: Who
the fuck are you? Do you even know? Mom and Dad think you’re a fuckup
and that’s what you look like right now fucked up and a fuckup never wanted
me to go into academia and when I decided to chuck it they decided it was
time to want me to go into academia and now they never stop asking whether
I’ll go back before my Leave Of Absence is up in another six months maybe
I should go back. Calmer now still running down the hill coughing and I
spot it like a sun after a hurricane the blind see the deaf hear the crippled
walk and scales fall from my eyes. Klamovka. My sad little hill with the
broken park benches and the patches of grass now mostly mud I want to
shout for joy when I see this little hump of earth looking like the bald head
of an old man me in 40 years. I’m crying again but this time it’s ‘cause I’m
happy feel like shouting HOME I’M HOME And I remember the bus ride
which I survived like the battle in Stalingrad though I’ve still got both my
legs arms ten fingers just a bus ride but more than a bus ride the war is over
time to pick up the pieces. I survived life was on the line SIX GANGSTER
REFUGEES SPEAKING GANGSTERTALK A HERO SHIT. I feel like falling
to my knees and kissing the earth mud dancing in puddles like Gene Kelly
feel like running into the pub there where the old drunks are hunched over
their beers lips trembling whiskered sad wrinkled Eastern European faces
sagging drowning in a neverending beer THEY MADE IT THROUGH THE
WAR TOO want to hug them buy them all a round shout JSEM DOMA
KAMARÁDI JSEM TADY. I’ll shout out loud and kiss them all one by one
my Czech friends who don’t even know they’re my friends ‘cause it’s HOME
and suddenly I’m no longer missing Alex ‘cause I’m HOME and I know now
how Dorothy felt returning to Kansas. And I tell myself: I’m gonna shout at
the top of my lungs at the Klamovka tram stop and tell everyone how I just
survived the WAR most harrowing bus ride of my life was on a bus ride to
hell and everyone on that bus is in hell now assuming there ever was such a
bus in the first place. I’m gonna tell them all in Czech at the tram stop at 10:59
on a Friday morning how happy I am to be in Prague that I’m not going
home after all I am HOME I’m a journalist got a job here it’s HOME because
I live here. Then I see a woman in a skirt and high heels under an umbrella
moving with quick little steps heading home to work to her children to the
store to her lover who knows where on a Friday morning like any other
Friday morning like everyone else going on about their normal daily business
and it hits me what a fool I am they don’t care that I’m glad to be HOME after
all I’m privileged and can afford to trip to waste an entire day work when I
please got no kids no pressing responsibilities they all have real lives and I’m
just like other Americans here living in some kind of limbo running from
myself and my problems which followed me here anyway to je jasné. And I
208 | realize: I’m no free spirit just a parody of a free spirit afraid to grow up and
take a job that’ll force me to sit behind a desk afraid of growing old which is
happening anyway tick-tock afraid of being a professor in a suit talking
about Hamlet for the thousandth time writing articles about books about
books about books by people who never lived and experienced nothing and
that’s all Prague is for me a fairyland a floor between floors where I got off
because I want to be young forever and 30 is just around the corner guess
that’s why I’m tripping on a Friday morning like I was an undergraduate
again and I think to myself I’m not sure I’m really experiencing anything
here or if any of this is really real or if it’s all just make believe and I’m just
fooling myself or maybe I’m being unfair again and there really is something
more to Prague than fantasies dreams paranoia and in this way my thoughts
wander I an American an insignificant mixture of flesh fluids and mixed up
thoughts wonder on a Friday morning in the Year of Our Lord 1994 frying
my brains in a Europe no longer divided in Prague in the Czech Republic
formerly Czechoslovakia nearly half a century after the Allied Victory in a
war I can’t get out of my head IT’S BART’S FAULT but neither can the Czechs
for that matter the war in which my father was shot on German soil by
Germans by SS goons the race from which my mother descends my brothers
look so Aryan why don’t I JEW shot while carrying a white flag crawled to a
foxhole nearly bled to death six hours at the same time I recovering from
Stalingrad in a past life which I never lived though I feel as if I did why am I
thinking about the war again it’s won it’s over besides history’s over the
fucking postmodernists tell us what crap and what do you really know about
the war SIX OF THEM you need a psychiatrist that’s what you need and to
stay away from LSD besides you were thinking about Americans in Prague
one of which you are ALL OF ‘EM GANGSTERS. The lady under the umbrella
with the quick little steps disappears around the corner she to her life I to
mine never know who she was THE WAR’S OVER FELLAS LET’S ALL GO
HOME PICK UP THE PIECES all these voices in my head it’s Bart again at
the tram stop my silence amidst the roar of passing trams I cross the street
and walk to my door knowing I look like hell coughing up shit knowing I’m
coming down with a cold nerves shot and I remember the speed in the acid
realization that it’ll be a long time before I sleep like that Robert Frost poem
I love so much “miles to go before I sleep’’ and “the woods are lovely, dark,
and deep’’ and they really are like that in Klamovka and “I have promises to
keep” and I do I really do I have promises to keep GANGSTERTALK and I’ll
keep them I swear Just you wait but first I want to sleep a long time just sleep
and when I wake then I’ll see I don’t know when I wake and this drug’s out
of my blood MAKE WAR NOT LOVE BABBLING AGAIN SHUT UP and
things have stopped melting we’ll talk about something else and we’ll see
and we’ll figure out together if any of this at all ever happened in the first
place.
| 209
210 |
Věra Chase
Fluidly Along The Beach
A queen-size beauty dances in the aspic on the beach.
Her face, arms, just as her shoulders, are specked with freckles
and the translucent jellyfish look like gelatine mud-pies;
spat out of water, they swiftly rot.
| 211
Sunday Mail
From the very beginning that letter promised nothing good. It was delivered
during the time of my Sunday siesta by a Sunday postman in his blackand-yellow uniform, the unmistakable outfit of the dangerous. Usually I do
not answer the door at such times or places. But the key to the successful
completion of this delivery was the powerful minutes-long pressure he
applied to the bell, which took me for one terrifying moment back to my
civil defence training.
Such a rough awakening, which unfortunately coincided with an
unfavourable point of my sleep sinusoid, caused a flood of sweat to cover
my body, with two doubly unwelcome effects: exposed to the cold air, out of
the protective capsule of a blanket, it chilled my whole body and moreover
made dressing almost impossible. In addition, with every other breath I
suspected I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia.
Even after I’d woken up and opened the front door, I still wasn’t sure what
was what. Automatically, I grabbed the pen as soon as I saw it, ignoring the
fact that the Sunday postman was using it, and in the next moment I signed
212 | the delivery document in a blank field adjacent to an unfamiliar name. Then,
clutching the parcel, I immediately retreated into the safety of my house.
Without delay I switched off the electricity in the house so I could avoid the
danger of any further ringing doorbells.
I suspected the worst: if it wasn’t literally a bomb, then it must be a bomb
in the figurative sense. But the parcel contained only a cassette tape with no
label, just an original pencil decoration sketched on it in an urban folk style.
“So,” I thought, “the tape is infected and the virus will first spread to the tape
player and then to all the remaining electrical appliances.” Both to be safe
and also because I didn’t want to turn the electricity back on, I played the
tape on a battery-powered player.
It was worse than I could have imagined: the tape contained an emotional
outpouring! An outpouring so intense and private that even my handy
flashlight dimmed in response to it (the outpouring was especially surprising
considering that I’d only ever seen the sender of the tape once, and that while
waiting for liver-test results). The message not only informed me of the
depth and state of this person’s emotions but, in addition, passed on to me
the instructions which I was to follow from then on in order to eliminate the
risk of her suicide. The list of tasks was clear and long, including such things
as: move to the sender’s apartment; make sure your active vocabulary includes a
minimum of one hundred romantic diminutives; and do not pass your new telephone
number on to any female persons. The consequences, should I choose to ignore
the advice, were made quite clear. Obviously, by signing the receipt I had
unknowingly gotten myself entangled in a dense web of responsibilities and
risks.
“That black-and-yellow Sunday beast!” I swore out loud in the stress
of this unwelcome situation. And then an idea occurred to me: What if my
signature was invalid since I had placed it next to the wrong name? And before
this small spark of hope could die out I found myself unlocking the fifth
safety lock on the door and, clutching the explosive audio-letter, preparing
to run out after the Sunday pyro-postman.
| 213
214 |
Photo: Audrey Chibbaro
Julie Chibbaro
Skin
There’s a skin over him and we want to take it off because you should take off
the skin that forms, it’s the one that is too tender, too sensitive, that absorbs
too much and gets infected too easily, but he doesn’t want us to take it off
because it’s the second skin that’s grown on him, the thinner one, and that’s
the one that hurts the most to remove. He says, “even the light is hurting
me,” and he wants us to “please turn off the light.”
He, this new fellow, name Steve Grantis, age 28, eyes blue, height
approximately six feet, with a three-week dermal as well as hair manually
removed from the roots (though there is still evidence of follicle, and thus
| 215
regenerative hope), has uttered only worries. This is often the case with
second skinners, they focus on their original skins and find it difficult to
move into more pressing issues, such as their new removal experiences.
He can hear the preparations in the next hall and beyond that, in the
outer corridor, and probably beyond, in the domed room where we keep
everyone when they come in as he did. The sounds of the preparations make
them nervous, they seem sensitive to sound, like horses, all of our arrivals
do. The scrapers make a terrible noise similar to the hay makers far afield
grinding up all the overgrown yellow grass, although, we assure him, the
sound is much worse than the procedure. He cries when we tell him this and
we ask him to stop, the salt is no good for the skin, it being an irritant and
not a tenderizer as he needs. You’re fighting against time, what happens to
everyone, we patiently explain. We don’t know how far we can go with this
one. He is at the point where we normally find it necessary to take them to
the eleventh ward.
Steve didn’t come to us for his first skin, which is the mistake often made,
and so he doesn’t know procedure. We hesitate to move him to eleven
because he’s a strong one, we can tell, and with the strong ones there is the
possibility they will do damage to the others on eleven. Our choice is to
move the gurney to twelve for the more serious cases, following the Jons
Robin Gordy rule for strong, second skin cases.
All of our arrivals tell us how it happened, if they can speak, which helps,
it helps us to know how to remove or add the skins depending on the way
the difficulty was encountered. We try to encourage this kind of first entry
disclosure. It allows us to consider our array of tools and caring techniques
and decide which is proper for each individual. Our facility is equipped to
handle 149 skin types, and so far that has been adequate for each removal or
addition that has come to us in our six years of service.
The Jons Robin Gordy Skin Addition and Removal Center is where we
work. Our job here is to point out the positive, to keep our people’s minds
on what’s ahead and off the noise of the grinder or the light pains or the
stretching tears of skin growth, which is where their minds tend to wander.
We depend very much on this facility; it is home and safety and security and
good smells and the past and the future. The white walls assure us that there
is a consistency in the world, and that it exists here. We live on the grounds of
the facility in bungalows off the main farmland where we raise sheep, cows,
chickens, goats, rabbits and corn. All of these live elements have proven
useful to our experiments at some time or another over these six years as
we insist on doing all our testing on other living matter before reaching the
human skin. We did have horses, two of them with muscular brown flanks,
but we failed to preserve their live material, which is always a sad event
around here.
As often is the case, our new arrival begins his disclosure on the elevator
216 | between six and seven. He is strapped tightly to the gurney.
“He was my best friend. I don’t know why I did it.”
In soft tones, we reassure him.
“Jim wouldn’t have done it to me. They were his.”
The eyes water. We let him know that we are not interested in any further
information. It is best at this level to show no interest, in standard reverse
psychology fashion, because with these new ones, only the simplest, most
basic operations function. His blue eyes examine us, warily we presume.
They stop when they meet our unaffected gaze.
“The design was his. The design was his and I said it was mine.”
It is only through many years of practice that our auditory memory is
perfect, and we can hear and store without any false recording devices. We
often use our photographic memory for the same purpose. Steve admits that
he studied the plans for his friend’s car. He was divided, he says, between
being loyal to his best friend and to his company. He knew what the design
could do to his status in the company; however, the ideas were Jim’s. The gap
and its crossing were clear to him.
“They weren’t mine.”
We nod unassumingly and record.
The twelfth floor door opens and we roll Steve off. He has begun to speak
about Jim’s house, his wife and children, when the coughing starts, giving
his underskin a purplish tinge that indicates danger. We start him on a drip
in his arm. The skin is not thick enough for the drip, so we remove it and
restart it in his thigh. There is a definite rapidity to the drip; most skins feel
its effect within 20 seconds. It slurs Steve’s speech immediately.
The many-step process of grinding and regrowth that Steve has to look
forward to cannot be taken while he is anything but fully aware. He must be
able to tell us when the pain is too great, for nerve endings are the indicators
of wrongful movement along the body’s highways. At the Center, we
believe pain is a useful weapon against other pain and we stand by using it
wisely. We feel we have thoroughly studied the myriad levels of pain, both
obvious and subtle, that the body and mind are capable of supporting. With
full confidence in Steve’s recovery, we return to the main receiving area.
Throughout the night, we tend to processes that benefit from our attention.
Only one emergency occurs on ward three.
Those on eight have lately begun to exhibit excessive, rather tumorous
growths. Our hypothesis is the typical one bad apple, a Mr. Warren
Freely, who’s been on eight for almost a month and has proved resistant to
treatment. Our impulse is to farm him out, perhaps to four or twelve, floors
for difficult cases. Yet, although his growths are numerous, they are not
caused by an innate drive, which stills our hand to move him, as these floors
are for deliberate resistance and not natural adversity. Both his cysts and his
tumors, similar in contagion to the lower form of wart-like growth, appear
smooth, round, and ultimately pierceable. Isolation is our only choice with | 217
Mr. Warren Freely, that and the constant drain and release of his growths.
Vigilance is key.
When we start the grinder on Steve’s first morning, we tell him: You are
a pioneer. We say to him, it is your job to tell us when we go awry and this
is a challenging mission. The word ‘mission’ makes Steve’s blue eyes widen,
and we see the perimeters of vulnerability and detection to which we are
extremely sensitive: Steve has not passed the test. Perhaps it is the sound of
the grinder that unnerves him.
“What is your name?” he asks us, though our surname is written on our
lapel. We remind him that he has voluntarily submitted to the grinding,
that he wants to be healed. We have many booklets of speeches for such an
occasion. Our name isn’t important; his removal is.
“I want to know who I am dealing with. Yes, I came to you, but you can
tell me, treat me as a person. My name is Steve. What is your name, your first
name, what is your name, doctor?”
Name disclosure is a number one contraindication of the treatment as
it potentially opens an alter personalization in a grafting which only takes
to the oneness of the being undergoing the procedure, and this is what we
must explain to Steve. His protests form a barrier to incision, which is why
he’s strapped on twelve. For removal to be successful, all barriers must be
exterminated.
“It’s just a simple question, doctor. I can’t understand why you won’t tell
me your name.”
We inform him politely but firmly that his case will be made to wait if he
insists on learning data about his caretakers.
“It’s such a simple question.”
His rebuffs are partly a defense mechanism to the start of the procedure,
and are not to be taken personally. We tell him that his mission requires him
to spotlight on the self, and in so doing, all other elements will remain in
shadow, where they need to be for the duration of his treatment.
“But I know everybody’s name. It makes them somebody, and I think if
I’m going to do this with you, you need to be somebody to me.”
We signal once again the partial naming on our lapel and maintain he must
be satisfied with that, that any further naming is virtually useless. Islands of
his skin are becoming blotchy and patchy with the blood rush to his nerve
ends. We navigate Steve’s barriers with 300 ccs of one of several choices of
opiate bases, returning to him in infrequent intervals while he readies.
It seems putting Mr. Warren Freely into isolation had the opposite effect
intended, although it is not entirely evident to us how quarantine and the
loss of speech are connected. Before his final quietude, Warren expulsed his
sureness that he was placed in solitary as punishment. His inarticulateness
cannot define what he thinks we might be penalizing him for; however,
218 | several times in the past he has expressed a certain extreme disgust in
view of his growths. We surmise a projection of self-loathing onto us, an
assumption derived from witnessing his frequent attempts to lacerate his
own excrescences. Warren has decided to close all communication, leaving
us no choice. After having probed every avenue of treatment open to Mr.
Freely, we move him to five, to the terminal ward, where the spread of his
growths will do little harm.
We return to Steve’s drip response, monitored until we feel his priorities
have changed. Steve’s pupils are tempered and dilated; we ask him to tell us
more. Starting at low, we turn on the grinder, the alpha vibrations background
to our suggestion.
“She was my wife’s best friend in high school,” he says faintly, “Jim’s wife,
Sandra. We all went to school together.”
We ask if the wives are no longer friends, touching the grinder ever so
lightly against the skin.
“No, not after what happened,” he says, flinching and pulling back.
We offer that we understand that Jim is still his friend, skirting the more
direct question as we reapply the grinder.
“In my own mind, yes,” he nods, “I made a choice that I didn’t think
would affect anyone,” he stops, and we notice those few tears the grinder
brings to the eyes, those rimming his, and we wipe them away for him as his
arms are strapped comfortably to his sides. “No, no, it’s not true, I did know,
but the mind is an awful place and it made decisions that some part of me
said were right, or worse, said these decisions didn’t matter. Do you see?”
We hold the grinder to one spot. Although it doesn’t appear to be, Steve’s
second skin is tough with layered callouses and other dermal renderings
nearly 4mm thick, and will take some patience to remove, to get through to
the first, especially with the grinder on low.
We ask what caused these decisions to be made, encountering and
assuaging with smiles and nods the intermittent thresholds of his pain under
the many tiny incisions.
“They were made by someone else,” he cries out, “they were made by
someone else inside me, someone who wasn’t thinking about friendships
or consequences.” A small ejection of the salivary glands shows a slight
loss of motor control in the lesser oral muscles. We slow the drip to 200ccs,
meanwhile holding the grinder steady.
We ask Steve if there is actually someone else inside him, appearing to
take his claim seriously.
He convulses perceptibly. “Of course not, not a real person, but it felt like
that, like someone else was making these choices, don’t you see? I would
never hurt my friends or my wife.” The tremors are a routine response to
the grinder and are no indication of malfunction. Such malfunctions are
rare at the Jons Robin Gordy Center: since its inception, the Center has
experienced only twenty-seven deaths and four suicides, mostly accidental | 219
or of seriously abnormal skins, and of those deaths, we have incurred only
fourteen wrongful suits, which our lawyers handled with grace and charm.
We point out to Steve that he said he has adopted another person inside
him, one who makes decisions without him, and we ask him to recognize
that that is not normal, and that it is potentially harmful.
“I think,” he says, “I think anyone who does anything wrong has to turn
off some place in his mind and turn on another. I think it’s normal.”
We ask what exactly he thinks he’s done wrong.
“She helped me take his idea, she let me into his study. She let me.” We
steady his shoulders for the duration of a large spasm. After it, he meets our
eyes; his rims are clear of fluid. We check the tightness of the straps under
him.
“I hate it. I hate what I’ve done, but I can hardly claim responsibility
because I feel it wasn’t me who did it.”
That, we tell him, is a convenient trick of the mind. Who else, we ask, is
responsible? The extra fellow inside him is still inside him, part of him, and
so it is himself. Steve’s eyes once again, against recommendation, overload
with tears. The salt causes a stinging pain that we recognize. We wipe and
warn him.
“I … I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do,” Steve stutters. The grinding
is going slowly as all grindings with denial do. We tell him he hasn’t told us
everything, and that disclosure aids in the removal process.
“But I have told you everything,” he says.
He’s kept us on a level, we tell him, that we don’t believe; unless, we say,
he tells us everything and tells us truthfully, he will never recover, never
ever, and his removal will be unsuccessful.
He gasps and turns his head away. We return the drip to 300 and tend to
more pressing business.
Both growth and removal are long-term processes that require patience
and steady minds and hands. Upon waking and before each meal, all cases are
reminded of this. Our inspiring speech plays over loudspeakers imbedded
in every room. Each day, it lets them know that bit by bit we can conquer
a small part of our trying worlds, and we do not let minor incidentals like
tumors or bald patches get us down.
220 |
Fractal Swing
They swung. Her hair swished as she strode, his feet rocked out as he
sauntered beside her. Her calves were Grecian vases, pushing against
the tight black stockings she always wore. His pants were forever baggy,
gathered around his ankles like elephant skin. They were a merry-go-round;
their attached hands a swinging connector between them.
I saw them sashaying together in an ethereal rhythm on unstraight streets
that curved in cobbled waves, dank and small and old, warping up, folding
down. They leaped ahead, in and out, sudden licks of red in an all-gray
painting, surprising me as I made my way around town. I’d latch on to a
loop, let it carry me along for awhile, step off at whatever door was mine. I
didn’t know them; I wanted to.
An opening came. In an ancient tea room before an enormous fireplace, I
lunched, my face pressed into a new novel I was editing, my elbows resting
on books I was intending to read. The yellow fire flickered dully on the page
as I scribbled marginalia. I was between sleep and waking, tired from a
nightmare about an old girlfriend. The novel was feeling pillowlike, the air
too warm, the place too homey and personless for me to stay awake much | 221
longer when they swooped in. A draft flew in with them, bringing a crisp
snap to the room that cleared my head of the webs that were forming. I was
aware of them behind me, their banter. They sat at a table, weren’t satisfied,
sat at another closer, parallel to mine. He ordered darjeeling, she Earl Grey.
“My hands are freezing,” she said to him. I looked over, her lips were
whiter than her dark skin. I had never really seen their faces before. They
seemed wizened, older than I thought. He reached for her hands and rubbed
them in his own. Blew his breath on them. The gesture was so tender, I
turned away, played with my tea bag, tearing it apart as I listened to their
conversation.
“It won’t turn over,” he said.
“I can’t get the tongues in the grooves with this one,” she said.
“It’s the distributor,” he said.
“I used the router, the hand saw, the plane, and still,” she said.
“Though I replaced it, so maybe it’s not that,” he said.
“Maybe I have to make the tongues smaller,” she said.
“The transmission?” he asked.
“Or the grooves bigger?” she asked.
Their words swam by each other, tropical fish flashing in an undersea
world only they understood. ‘Tongue and groove,’ I thought, wood held
together, joints, what was she making? And he, the distributor? I had never
seen them in a car.
They were from somewhere else, had just planted a shoot of a business,
they were still exploring the strange twisted streets and alleys. Those were
the things they spoke about. I wanted to pipe in, make myself a part of
them, ride the upswing of their sentences, but their exchange was seamless.
Neither of their utterances entered the other’s, but wafted independently
past, statement upon question, ducking under, slipping over like braided
hair. I took breaths to interrupt, but felt that whatever I’d say would fall to
the table before them, so I listened.
“I called the man; he said ok,” she said.
“They dropped the concrete off in the wrong place,” he said.
“He said I didn’t need soundproofing,” she said.
“It’s going to take days to lay the floor,” he said.
“He said the neighbors don’t care … “ she said.
“How am I going to do these two cars?” he asked.
“… if there’s a crazy carpenter lady next door,” she said.
“He called you crazy?” he asked.
“You have to do two cars, I thought you only had one?” she asked. They
faced each other. She scratched his chin reassuringly, he mussed her hair,
they turned simultaneously back to the fire.
“Two,” he said.
222 |
They didn’t speak again; I struggled to find an opening that would fit in
their silence, one that would make sense, make them like me and want to talk
to me. I heard him say, “Oh, that’s that book,” and knew immediately, from
the way his voice came to me, that he was talking about one of the books
supporting me. I waited, hardly daring to think my opening would be so
easy. She said, “Yes, that’s the one. I haven’t seen it anywhere.” Slowly, from
my peripheral vision, I could sense them waiting for me to become aware.
“Hmm?” I said, pretending I was emerging from a deep freeze of
concentration.
“That book, your book, where did you get it?” he asked.
“We’ve been looking all around for it,” she said.
“It just came out, right?” he asked.
“We saw it once, but didn’t have any money,” she said.
Opening my mouth several times to speak, I realized my timing was
off with them, that I would have to find a decent diving board into their
talk, or not say anything at all. It was worse than jump rope, it was mad
double Dutch. I stomped on his next sentence awkwardly—“You, do you,
you want to borrow it when I’m done?” and she cut right in, “Yeah, yes,
yeah, definitely.” She looked at him, and I looked at them, and noticed they
weren’t wizened, it was the firelight that had wrinkled them. With the same
swing, they turned and smiled at me. Their faces were so beautifully curled
and bright, I felt like kissing them. I smiled back, near to laughing. We took
each other in for a long minute. Just as I wondered if they really had their
attention on me, he asked, “Is this your town?”
“My town?” I asked.
“You from here originally?” he asked.
“Well, why, yes, as a matter of fact,” I said.
“The roofs are nice, that green,” he said.
“I think it’s copper,” I said.
“Horses, the stables in the North, are nice,” she said.
“Or bronze,” I said.
“It’s good to stay in the place you’re from,” he said.
“They both turn green, I think,” I said.
“I always loved horses, big ones, black, or brown,” she said.
“It could be an illusion of green, that is possible,” I said.
“Though it’s also good to move around, see new sights,” he said.
“Just painted green, masquerading as metal,” I said.
“I like the way horses’ nostrils flare,” she said. She nodded at me, flaring
her nostrils, “you know?”
“Nostrils, yes,” I said.
“Camels’ lips flap when they run, did you know that?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“We just saw Lawrence of Arabia, opening scene, right there, camel lips
flapping as they ran across the desert,” he said, making flaps with his hands | 223
together at his lips. She provided loud sound effects, “flap, flap.” It was
striking to see a grown woman making flapping noises in the tea room.
“Great movie,” he shouted. Their enthusiam was so unchecked, I looked
around to see if we were disturbing anyone, but there was no one but us.
“Oh, hey,” he said, “what time is it?” I showed him my watch. “We’ve got
to go.” They stood together, gathered their things.
“Nice meeting you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, wondering how to meet her, them again.
“That book,” he said.
“How can I get it to you?” I asked.
“When you’re done, drop it by,” she said, rummaging through her
oversized bag. She handed me a card; I’d lived on the street they lived on.
“Will do,” I said, still examining the card, “Rosie and Derek,” I read aloud,
“We Fix Your Cars and Make Your Furniture.” They smiled expectantly, “I’m
Marty,” I said.
“Ok,” they said.
“See Lawrence,” she said over her shoulder. I nodded, watched them swing
through the door, away. The tea room creaked and settled, the fire crackled. I
gathered my books slowly, meandered home, taped the card to my mirror.
The next morning, as I was walking to work, I saw them. They were not
so much ahead that I couldn’t catch up, so I did.
“Oh, hey,” they said.
I fell into step with them, found myself swaying alongside down the
road.
“Going to church?” she asked.
“Work,” I said. It was Sunday, and I was headed to the tea room for some
editing. I was carrying the famous book with me, and saw her eyeing it. I
offered it to her from the top of the pile. “Why don’t you take it, I’ve got
enough to read,” I said.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Can I have it after?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. We split into different directions at the end of the street.
The breath of them came into the tea room with me, stayed, kept me awake
in my contemplative, grammatically correct hours.
Dull days I looked for them; didn’t spy them anywhere. Their absence
made me long for a glimpse of them. Finally, one cloudy morning, I saw
them again, two drops of rich, velvety maroon in a darkening gray. They
were too far for me to merge. I trudged behind their loops, noticed they
were not holding hands, though their swing was intact. The separateness
was strange, like a huge hole in the middle of someone. At the top of a slope,
they waved a short hand raise, he careened away from her, and they began
224 | independent undulations in either direction. I had never seen them apart;
singly, each seemed to gain a layer of their intense red. Hers became more
brown, his a yellowed orange flaming off on its own. I went in the direction
she went in, threaded the blocks she did, began to become aware of my
feet, heel-ball, heel-ball. A rolling jaunt galloped from me to her, holding
the distance between us like a tight wire until a corner light stopped her,
loosening the wire, closing the distance. I slowed my roll, slid into place
behind her. Looked at the sphere of her head while she looked at the light.
She felt me, turned.
“Marty,” she said. The fact of my name from her mouth gave me a chill.
“Rosie,” I said.
“I read that book, thanks,” she said.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Museum,” she said.
I nodded. “Huh,” I said.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
‘Nowhere,’ I thought, ‘following you,’ I thought. “Museum, too,” I lied.
“Which are you going to?” I asked before she could ask me.
She lifted and twisted her chin and head to somewhere down the road.
The Museum of Developmental Science for the Society of Woodsmen was a
few streets off.
“Ah,” I said, “I am headed that way too. I’m working on a book for forest
fire fighters. Need to do some research,” I again lied.
“Writing?” she asked.
“Editing,” I said, “and you?”
“Checking out the wood,” she said. The light changed, we crossed
together. I varied my gait to match hers.
“Is that that thing you were doing?” she asked.
“Wood for what?” I asked.
“Cherry mahogany,” she said.
“Yes, that book, which was why I didn’t have time for the other book,” I
said.
We marched lollingly. She didn’t say anything, I didn’t. She didn’t seem to
mind me next to her. I felt like touching her hair, it looked so soft.
“Could I join you?” I asked spontaneously.
“Thought you were,” she said with such acceptance, my heart popped
and thickened. I walked a fraction of an inch behind her so I could see her
walk. Derek was a lucky man.
“After, would you like to grab a lunch with me?” I asked her.
“Grab a lunch,” she laughed, “sure, Marty, we can grab a lunch.”
Her laughter came from a place inside her that was somewhere near her
toes. It wasn’t at me, it was in delight of me.
As she mulled through the woods, I watched her eyes change as they
focused and concentrated. Toothed gears turned; she scratched measurements | 225
on a pad with little arrows and notes and pictures. I put my face in the space
between her shoulder and neck to see what she was drawing. She laughed
and tapped my nose away with her eraser.
“It’s a secret,” she said, “no one can see. It’s for Derek.”
“I won’t tell,” I said, “promise.”
“No, because you’ll run into him, and he’ll know you have a secret,” she
said, “he’s like that. Knows stuff.”
“So how do you keep secrets from him?” I asked. “Not to say you have
any, but if you did?”
She looked behind herself at me, her imperfect eyes shining with question.
My face was very near hers, so near, I could bite into her like a plum, one
of those ripe, clear red, fresh, cold from the refrigerator plums. With juice
coming out of the opened flesh of the fruit.
“Ok, you won’t tell?” she asked, turning, opening the front of her to me.
We were inches apart. I shook my head, held up my fingers in a Boy Scout’s
salute. “It’s a dolly, special one for his back for when he rolls under cars
to fix them.” She switched her notebook around to show me her drawings.
The scratches outlined the width of Derek’s shoulders, tapered down to his
waist. The dolly looked like a broad back with wheels on it. Rosie circled
the penciled lines with her finger, “holds his spine just so, do you see?” she
asked excitedly.
“How will you get the wood to bend like that?” I asked. Her soapy smell
floated to me, made me want to take a bath.
“You wet it, press it, carve it,” she shouted, her voice filling the empty
museum, notebook pages fluttering in the wind of her animated hand. I
looked quickly around. Her breath smelled of cashew nuts. “Just need to
find which wood,” she said, pulling her body back into itself and around, to
the wood in front of her, and on, from exhibition to exhibition. I trailed her,
bath scent still in my nose, an invisible hand pressed into my stomach.
From the floor and walls of the museum, a shuddering, huge feeling
of wanting swept up into me. I wanted to touch her, I wanted to express
myself to her, I wanted to kiss her until she couldn’t breathe, I suddenly,
overwhelmingly wanted her so badly, I could barely stand. I needed to part
us, to put a barrier between us, to unpassion my burning heart, so I asked
her to lunch.
“Is it time?” I asked.
“For?” she murmured into the wooden bust of a man.
“To go, to lunch, a lunch, is it time?” I asked.
She looked at me with mild eye, and I knew she didn’t feel what I was
feeling. With a dash, she finished off her drawing.
“Time,” she cried, and ‘time, time, time,’ whispered around the oddlyshaped woods.
226 |
She skittered away from me, relieving my tension, and brandished her
notebook, a prize on the end of her extended arm. “He’s going to love it,
he’s going to love it, he’s going to love it,” she yelled wildly, giddy with
her creation. I forgot where we were and laughed, then remembered and
stopped, confused by my own self. Already she was down the hall, near the
entrance, laughing to herself and hugging her notebook joyously. “Come on,
Marty,” she called, and with her whole body, waved me towards her, “move
your feet.” I wanted to run to her, but I just sped up. She made me want to
sing, and that unnerved me. I didn’t meet many women who made me want
to sing. “Let’s go get Derek, bring him with us to lunch,” she said when I
aligned myself with her. We started walking. My heart dropped an inch.
“We, you just left him,” I said. I shook my head at her surprised look. “I
saw you,” I explained.
“Oh,” she said, and faltered in her step. Groups of things to say moved in
and out of my mind, but none came close to my mouth.
“He’s got cars, two antique Royces,” she said, “I’ll show you.” Her voice
was lower.
“Rolls’s,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“You mean he has two Rolls Royces,” I said.
“That’s what I said,” she said. Like a paper airplane, she sent over a small,
forgiving smile. I smiled back, a tiny one. She crossed her notebook over her
chest, held it there. “I pledge allegiance … ,” she said.
“To the flag,” I continued.
“Of the Untied States,” she said.
“United,” I said.
“Untied Shoes,” she said.
“United,” I insisted.
“Untied tie-dyed shirts,” she screamed, laughing wildeyed.
“United, United, United,” I repeated sanely. I wondered where she was
taking me in the myriad of multiangular curvatures we were trundling.
“Pah,” she said, “here,” she said, “sharp left.” I was on the left, in her way;
she bumped into me to turn me, pulled the material of my coat to lead me
into an alley between closely set buildings. An edge of a fantasy bloomed
then dispersed when I saw the low, flat outline of an old Rolls through a
door.
“Derek,” she called as she passed the open frame.
“Here,” he answered and appeared, wiping thick grease from his hands
with a tattered rag. “Hey, sweetface. Oh, hey,” he said when he saw me.
“Derek,” I said.
“What are you guys up to?” he asked.
“Saw Marty on the way over, told him about the Royces, he wanted to
see,” she said.
| 227
“I’m almost done with that book,” he said to me.
“You almost done with the car?” she asked.
“I guess I’ll have to read it next,” I said, shifting my eyes from him to
her.
“You have to see the Royces,” she said.
“Rolls’s, honey, it’s Rolls’s,” he said.
“One’s a convertible,” she said.
“That’s what I told her,” I said to him. Man smiles passed over her between
Derek and me.
“Stuck on names,” she said, clucking her tongue, taking hold of my sleeve,
tugging me carwards. I let myself be led over the ragged, torn up floor, heard
Derek chuckling behind us. The sound reminded me that there was such a
thing as friends. I plucked a glance at him from the air above Rosie’s head; he
was wiping each finger clean distractedly, smile still on his face.
The hood was open mouthed, marring the perfection of the car. Derek shut
it so I could see its beauty. It was a sculpture, all straight lines interrupted
only by rounded insides that were revealed when Derek put the top down.
“Marty, you gotta see this,” he said. He clicked the ignition one notch, and
pressed a button on the dash, which set off a series of events inside the car. A
strip of interior lights went on, the seat bottoms motored forward, the backs
relaxed back, and classical music started playing from invisible speakers.
“Wonderful!” I cried.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried.
“And look,” he said, lifting up the felt of the inner side panels. Speakers,
the finest.
“Ah,” I said.
“Magic, it’s like magic,” she said. “A car miracle.”
“A car miracle,” I repeated, “miracle.” I looked at them, and they looked
at me. We beamed.
Derek opened the driver’s side. “In,” he said.
“Me?” I asked, frightened to muss its pristine condition.
“You. Rosie, other side,” he said.
“I, but you see, I …” I started.
“Can you drive?” he asked.
“Well, yes, but I …” I started.
“In,” he said, crazy smile on his brown face.
“Derek, it’s been …” I started.
“Rosie, get him in, I’ll get the door,” he said to her, and disappeared down
the length of the garage.
“Ok, Marty,” she said, clapping her hands, “you heard the man, in.” Her
smile was as crazy as his. For a moment, I felt I was watching the untamed
flight of two loon birds, and feared I was about to soar with them. “What’s
the problem?” she asked.
228 |
“Oh, no problem,” I said, “it’s, I, no, no problem, Rosie,” I said as I got in
and awkwardly adjusted my body to the too-relaxing seat, “see, here I go,
ok?”
“Good,” she said, patting me.
“Vroom, vroom,” I heard from the front of the garage. Derek bounded
over, vrooming as he came. Rosie began vrooming next to me. Derek got in
the back.
“You comfortable?” he asked. I shook my head. He pressed a button on
the side of my seat and it motored up straight. “Better?” he asked. I nodded.
“Check your mirrors, Captain,” he said.
“All systems go,” she said.
“Roger, roads clear,” he said.
I still hadn’t put my hands to the steering wheel. Rosie lifted one up, shook
it. It hung limply. “Let’s go,” she said. I didn’t move. “I think he’s scared,”
she said.
“You scared, Marty?” he asked. I nodded. “Out,” he said, “switch.” I got
out, got in the back, he got in the front. I began to breathe again.
“Test run,” he said, starting the engine.
“Missed opportunity,” she said, looking over the seat at me. My mouth
hung dumbly. “Flies’ll go in there if you keep that open,” she said, reaching
over to touch my chin. Derek let go of the clutch, put the gears in reverse,
held onto Rosie’s headrest to direct the car down the bumpy floor of the
garage. “And away we ride,” she said, nestling forward.
A gang of three, we whistled through the streets and out onto the highway’s
maze, into tunnels, over bridges. We whipped by intersections as we skirted
town. Secretly, I gratefully grasped the leather pads of the seat while Rosie
and Derek yelled words I couldn’t hear to each other over the flurrying wind
and whirring engine. Bugs and pebbles slapped and spattered the windshield.
I kept picturing myself as one of them, and tightened my grip. Rosie put her
arm out of the opened side window and let it be pushed by wind like a girl
in a motorboat letting her hand be pushed by water. The air’s dynamics did
funny things to her face, blew her lips around, flattened her cheeks. Made
her hair dance, her eyes water. Derek rested his fingers on her thigh, lifting
them only to shift, faster, slower. They seemed to forget me, forced to hold
their heads forward by the car’s high speed. As I watched them, made so
happy by the simple car ride, I began to let go into the low, strong hum of the
engine and the chill wind about my head. I imagined myself in Derek’s seat,
director of an adventure, found myself longing for some white wine, room
temperature, and a good book in a lamplit room.
We downshifted, slowed into the half circle of the garaged street, nibbed
over bubbled tar into the cave where Derek worked on his fancy cars. The
outside was dilapidated, the walls and floor becoming unstuck with age.
Derek coasted the car to a stop. My head continued moving. I unfolded
out, warmed the cold edges of my ears with my palms. Rosie shook and | 229
fixed herself like a cat, Derek opened his door and stretched his legs out, not
leaving his seat.
“How was that, Marty, how was that? Ride of a lifetime?” he asked. His
voice roared, not yet adjusted to the fact that we were off the road.
“Life ride, ride of a lifetime,” she said, echoing Derek’s roar.
I unruffled my hair. “Nice, it was nice,” I said. I pictured an orange pekoe
with lemon and honey by the hot fire of the tea room. Maybe a sandwich.
“Italian, Indian, or we could go to that new place, Mexican,” she said.
“I’ll follow you,” I said.
“Mexican then,” she said. She crouched over the seat and kissed Derek’s
cheek, crawled out of the car and unfurled herself. Slammed the door. Derek
stood, fanned the top down, secured it.
We took a short alley street to a long main street. Fanny’s Fajita’s was on
the corner. Its doorways were beaded and walls tapestried, a man with a
banjo played to the near empty space. A fat woman sat with a small child at
the window table. Two lovers bent over fajita plates at the opposite end. The
waitress showed us to a middle table for four. Rosie slipped into the booth
against the wall; Derek and I faced her. A famous bandito photo hung above
her head.
“Pancho Villa, leader of the Mexican Revolution,” Derek said.
“Saw that,” Rosie said.
“A brave leader, wild man,” he said.
“Saved many, killed many,” she said.
“Fajitas and margaritas?” he asked.
“For me,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, worried about having a margarita in the middle of the day.
Wine, maybe, tequila, dangerous. The flames of the tea room fire flickered in
the back of my head.
“Do you think seventeenth century man had fajitas?” she asked.
“Maize, the food of the people. Indians made a lot with maize,” he said.
“They probably had tortillas, but I don’t know if they had fajitas,” I said.
“The women crushed tons of things and cooked them,” she said.
“They even had a god of maize. Corn God, don’t know the Mexican
name,” he said.
“Wheat, corn, potatoes, nuts, seeds,” she said.
“Quetzacoyatl, maybe, or Xolotl, I think,” he said.
“They flattened stuff, fried and baked it,” she said.
They went on, over and under each other, layers of history in their talk.
I began to think of the book I was editing. There was a problem with it, but
I hadn’t been able to see it exactly. It was in the order of the chapters, or the
paragraphs, or the sentences, but I wasn’t sure which.
“Chicken or beef?” she asked, and I realized the waitress was waiting for
230 | our order. I came back to the restaurant, to Rosie and Derek, shook my head
a little bit, ordered chicken.
“Peach margarita,” Rosie ordered.
“Banana margarita,” Derek ordered.
“Regular for me,” I said to the woman.
“Oh, try something different,” Rosie said. I felt I had tried enough different
for the day. “They have all kinds, even blue ones, though I don’t know what
a blue margarita tastes like,” she said.
“It tastes blue,” Derek said.
“Regular’s fine for me, thanks,” I said.
“Marty, Marty,” Rosie said, “what are we going to do with you?”
“Do?” I asked.
“Live a little,” Derek said.
“I live,” I said.
“He lived,” he said, pointing up at Pancho Villa, “that’s living.”
“I’m not a bandito,” I said.
“Marty the bandito,” she said.
“Watch out for Marty,” he said, “he’ll shoot your hand off.”
“You two are silly,” I said.
“We’re silly,” Rosie said to Derek. “Did you know that?”
“Silly as jelly,” he stated.
“Silly Putty,” she said. “Did you ever play with Silly Putty when you were
a kid?” she asked.
“I used to eat it,” he said.
“I liked the colors,” I discovered myself replying.
“I made statues of my parents with it, gave Dad a big nose, Mom purple
hair,” she said.
They were gone on Silly Putty; I was back to teasing out the problems of
my author.
Food came; we unfolded napkins, clanged fork and knife.
“You have a girlfriend?” Derek asked in the aftermath of a chew and
swallow.
“Did. She left because I didn’t have enough time to give her,” I said,
surprised at the question.
“You didn’t have enough time, or you didn’t want to give her enough
time?” Rosie asked.
It took me a second to figure out what she was asking. “Probably the
latter,” I said. “But I did like her,” I added. She nodded, mouth full.
“You’re a lone wolf, aren’t you, Marty?” Derek asked.
“I suppose I am,” I said. I got lonely, but I liked to be alone. Alone was
always stronger than lonely. Rosie began to howl.
“Aaaooowww,” she howled.
“We know some wolves,” he said.
“We like wolves, they’re good,” she said. Our smiles and nods crossed | 231
the food filled table. I took a sip of margarita; it was tangy and loaded with
tequila. I started to feel free, comfortable with Rosie and Derek in a way
I hadn’t been before. We finished our meal and agreed to part. I watched
them swing down the long road away from me, their hands knotted between
them, holding them together. I turned and headed for the tea room.
First published in Optimism Monthly (1998).
232 |
Photo: Ahron Weiner
Joshua Cohen
Cafédämmerung
(or Allen in Prague, King of May, 1965)
He’d been in Cuba sunning, fucking. But he’d only hugged and kissed Fidel.
Reek of cigars! rum!
In that embrace, two of the great beards of our time had grown into one
another: Allen’s and Fidel’s, they became inseparable. Grew intertwined,
then knotted. Uncomfortable for all involved. Finally Castro had to call his
chief executioner, the executioner came with his chief machete but instead of
cuttingoff Allen Ginsberg’s head a hipsterheaded angel of Yahweh arrived
in sunglasses and porkpie hat to redirect the blade to only sunder their
| 233
beards.
Fidel put Allen on the first flight to Czechoslovakia. Allen brushed his
smokestained suit before disembarking. He still had Fidel’s hairs on his
lapels, that’s what he declared to Customs.
Students of the Polytechnic School, even a few faculty members, remember:
the first sign they had of Allen’s coming was the beard. It was edged out the
window of the plane. Out the window of the taxi from Ruzyně (airport), as
if a flag for a new order, his nový kingdom. But he was not yet King. It was
still April.
Allen’s beard was not a religious beard, yet neither was it a beard of
dereliction, of dissolution, a lazy facial hirsuteness—the mark of a man
who did not care about appearance. It fell under none of those categories,
contra surveillance and Nomenklatura speculation. Truth is, Allen’s beard
had always been there, and his face grew from it—Allen’s face, his head,
that was the effort, that was the true growth, it was conscious, its expression
beatifically made.
The beard was of a million fingers of vermillion, ten tenthousand threads
of rust and purple sunrays, flecks of recitative spittle and a dusting of light
sporelife, the ermine fuzz that forms around immemorial potatoes.
That expression: comic, fishily bulging lips and eyes, exophthalmic but
glassesed, Jewish. He’d gotten chubby during his Havana sojourn. All those
fried plantains and anus. Also, Allen was balding above. And he was ancient,
he was forty.
What comes between men is the beard. The beard is philosophy, hairs on
the face are a politics, what keeps one brother from another. What hides, what
obfuscates. The beard is that thick fat wilderness where miscommunication
causes lives to come to their ends—the forbidding forest in which compatriots
would be shot, had been shot, for example outside Moscow toward the east.
*
But this was Prague, Western enough to expect Allen’s Yiddish to be
understood as inept German. Here he would be crowned King of May—
“which is Kral Majales in the Czechoslovakian tongue,” he wrote in a poem
about the experience because he wrote poems about all of his experiences (it
wasn’t an experience until it was a poem). The poem was called Kral Majales,
and it was called that because Allen could not be bothered with diacritical
marks—it should be Král Majáles, with vowels long like pleasure—here are
its essential lines:
234 |
For I was arrested thrice in Prague, once for singing drunk on Národní
street,
once knocked down on the midnight pavement by a mustached agent who
screamed out BOUZERANT,
once for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dream opinions,
and I was sent from Havana by plane by detectives in green uniform,
and I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian business
suits,
Cardplayers out of Cézanne, the two strange dolls that entered Joseph K’s
room at morn
also entered mine, and ate at my table, and examined my scribbles,
and followed me night and morn from the houses of lovers to the cafés of
Centrum— And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in
amour
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard of my
own body
And
and
and
and every culture besides America, which is not a culture but has cultures,
has its own version of this, its own indigenous tradition: May the fertile
month, May the month of fecundity, the First of May—before the communists
usurped May Day for the sake of International Workers—the first day of
an Eastertide celebration during which young studentgirls are whipped by
young studentboys with limbs of birch. Eggs are served with young alcohol.
A revel. Prechristian. Bacchic. Maenadic. Pagan. And presiding over the
festivities: a King who’d emerge from the woodlands every year to lead local
men to potency or, alternately, to inseminate their women Himself.
In Prague, where this rural tradition acquires a metropolitan irony, the
newest of folklorists—detectives, cardplaying dolls in green business suits—
have been busy constructing a throne since Winter 1948, and their orders were
always to construct this throne out of books that are banned. This stipulation
is intended to serve two purposes—to be both a sign of great disrespect, as
if to say observe how we abuse these books of ours that mean nothing to us,
and, paradoxically, to be a sign of great respect, as if to say observe how we
honor these books by fashioning them into a seat for our King. They are to
serve as the seat of his fattish, often violated rectum.
And the books being censored into his throne are: A Handbook of Practical
Messianism (poems), Kaštany (a play in three acts), Hasidische Geschichte (two
vols.), How to Build Bombs for Personal Use (w/ 10 full-color illustrations),
The Kitchens of North America (ed. Čapka), A Guide to the Literary Cafés of the
Kingdoms of Bohemia & Moravia (nonfiction), Famous Homosexual Salons of
Middle Europe (fiction), How to Prevent Parasites in Horses (fiction)…. Allen’s | 235
feet are bare. Happy happy First of May!
*
The coronation banquet is to be held in the lobbycafé of the Hotel Ambassador,
where the waiters attending used to be writers, novelists and storywriters
and poets now prevented from publishing freely, demoted to servitude.
Only the best of them—the best writers making the best waiters—receive
permission to work in cafés in the city center. The cafés of Centrum, like the
lobbycafé of the Ambassador, were allotted formerly to what might be called
an intelligentsia, and still to this day retain a superior aura (and lionfooted
cakestands, matching the verdant billiard tables). While the farther cafés,
located toward the cemeteries, in outer districts called Žižkov, called
Želivského, were once upon a time for the workingclass, the proletariat, and
they are called pubs by some and by others bars, and a slot machine shalt in
time be allotted to the lone bathroom of each but no toilet.
Hurry hurry through the streets as you’d expect them: picturesque (a word
found scrawled as signature on only the most subversive of postcards);
antiquarianly narrow but empty. Now give each the throne of a chair and an
unstable table—listing left to right, if you find yourself dizzy gaze toward the
iron pillar below the marble top—now grant each a waiterwriter uniformed
in a worn black tuxedo piped with white gold, cummerbunded with a used
handkerchief, bowtied with a cummerbund, handkerchiefed with a bowtie
unraveled, armbanded with napkins and the napkins are all soiled, then
each street could be—in every hour of weather, we will survive—a café of
sorts. This rush through the streets is a rush for good seats along the parade
route. Hurry through this human accordion. It never rains on Coronation
Day. Twilight of the cafés: Cafédämmerung.
But we will not speak of the actual crowning, or of the processional per
se. There are films to that account, the files of multiple intelligence services.
Instead we will speak of the waiters. A class unto themselves, this species
of priest clad in aprons. Their menus, umbrellas. Their umbrellas opened,
stood on their ferrules, umbrellastands. They will perform attendance upon
their King, and in this wise shall they divine his secret. Om Sri Maitreya. Om
Sri Maitreya. Om Sri Maitreya. Om Sri Maitreya. Om Sri Maitreya. Om Sri
Maitreya. Om Sri Maitreya. Om Sri Maitreya. Om Sri
Writerwaiters’ clothes must be, like scandal, secondhand, but their hair
should be suspiciously freshly cut (this being a provision of management),
while their necks at their Adam’s apples are always, but this Management
does not know, marked with gashes and incisions indicative of hasty morning
shaving.
The marks, there are three of them, are as follows: once down the center
236 | from just above the Adam’s apple to where the collar is buttoned for the
bowtie; and then again down the neck’s two edges, from the dangling lobes
of the ears (or, if the lobes are connected, from their connections), tapering
to meet the central cut so as to form the shape of the Hebrew Shin, which is
a name of God.
Their socks and underwear and undershirts and shirts are boiled monthly
in the kitchen, on last Sundays when the kitchen’s closed and all one can
order is coffee. Only the apparent portion of the shirt, the diamond exposed
through the jacket’s opening, is weekly ironed. The staff is short, also heavy
and tall and light. They have been reeducated in unobtrusiveness, trained
in stealth accented with a hint of derision (obtrusive). They’re quick with
the jokes, have you heard, but only with the jokes supplied, we have heard.
They’re quick with the orders, too, but are themselves constantly hungry.
Always will rage their thirst.
Their coffees are strictly five: espressi, cappuccini, Café Au Lait, Kaffee
Wien, the coffee of the Turk (available sade, or çok şekerli). Service is roughly
“cosmological.” On each table they place a saucer, on each saucer they place
a cup (demitasse), next to each they put a shotglass of tepid water, a pitcher
of cool cream. A napkin. On the napkin, a spoon. In the spoon, reflection of.
Nothing more sexual than a spoon except, perhaps, fire.
An ashtray like an ancient castle defense, like a ceramic turret with a
cigarette, newly rolled and licked sealed, wedged into a crenature. A box of
matches adjacent. (Waiterwriters should have been rolling cigarettes since
morning.)
This is turning into a poem, a listpoem, a list.
Alcohol will be made available only after the festivities.
Waiterwriters are informally required to be familiar with an array of
trivia: Alcestis was a Grecian princess and a tragic play in Greek; Bucephalus
was a horse while boustrophedon is the alteration of written lines in two
different alphabets, one line—in this alphabet, the Roman—reading left to
right, another line reading right to left in another alphabet, such as that of the
Arabs or Jews. Rodin, a sculptor, employed Rilke, a poet. The decadent jazz
“standard” September Song is most often performed in the key of C Major,
which is without black notes and so is, like the majority of Slavonic jazz
interpretations, all white. Blake. Portraiture the lowest form of flattery, viz.
Picasso’s formalistically distorted Mme. Stein. Marijuana grows wildly in
America, Mexico, Cuba, from where Allen’s flown on the wings of a beard
that has nine wings like the leaves of a cannabis leaf. “O it’s a long long while
from May to December / but the days grow short when you reach September.”
Rilke was born in Prague but denied it. Near the Main Post Office. Jindřišská
ul. AKA Heinrichsgasse. From which he mailed himself to Paris c/o Rodin,
a sculptor. Kafka rarely escaped. Incidentally, what was the inspiration for
Kafka’s giant bug? A local roach or desiccated scarab, displayed in a case at
| 237
the Natural History Museum?
No, your server will tell you.
It was a coffeebean, imported from South America, future continent of
émigrés and Mengele.
A bean no more impressive than a prostitute’s gnawed thumbnail,
bifurcated down the middle, segmented as if an insect. Dead. It is ground in
a grinder, chewed by blades into a powder—a fine powder like ashes.
Then, warm water is pressured through the powder set in a straining
mechanism: some form of filtration, whether a paper pyramid or plastic
colander cone. Thiswise the powder flavors the water—and so the water
becomes coffee to drink.
To keep you up at night, writing. The only time you have to write, all
night.
The cigarettes are rolled of cheap Cuban tobacco. Rilke rarely smoked,
Kafka never did.
Annotations for a translator: One drinks a coffee. One reads a poem. One
writes one.
However, kaddish must be howled.
At noon tomorrow, the waiters who write who are the writers who wait
will pause their preparations at the sound of a huge Slavic Om: the hum of
the horny crowd from the Polytechnic massing in the squares—polytechnic
means they can be taught anything: they can be taught engineering,
mathematics; from which they might learn napping, dissent—awaiting a
word from their King.
They claw the cobbles, awaiting a word from Král Allen.
Krallen (meaning, in German, “claws”).
Kafka on Prague: “this old crone has claws” (Dieses Mütterchen hat
Krallen).
“Bouzerant” is misspelled Czech, should be buzerant: derogatory term for
“homosexual” (in the sense of “buggerer”).
Awaiting word from Allen:
A howl, or kaddish in its memory—
*
Do not think this was his first kinging. Thirty years before Allen’s crazy
mother brought him across the river parted with a bridge, they took the
rotten yellow bus into the city of York and there walked south through its
gross & inimitable streets:
(list poem number one)
and there on the streets were Whitman addicts
and there were Latin men picking noses with knives
(and which was a switch and which a butterflyknife?)
238 |
and there on the street was a fish scaled like brassknuckles flopped its
guts open on the sidewalk alongside crumbs of pumpernickel bread that are
to the pigeons, loaves
and there were Negroes as thinly wound and unreliable as the Gstring on
a dreadnought guitar
(experimental) wirehanger-mobilemaking milkmen whose righteous charity resembled that of Engels to Marx unfigureouttable Asian furnituremovers
(repomen) of the Baltics or Balkans and through mixed marriages both Polack
florists glassyeyed rheumatic glaziers a chimp with erotically long toes who’d
done silent movies but now was retired living alone with a chandling harem
of Swedish sisters and their midget Armenian pimp, this was just Union
Square—not named as many think for labor unions like radical politics like
why Allen and his mother were here but because this was where two major
streets once came together, entered into Union: Broadway & the Bowery.
Allen and Mother passed the Above on their way to an unlit storefront.
They entered, stepping over the threshold—Ma lugging Allen over the
threshold—that was only a drunk slumped who was also the meeting’s
watchman and the, if also unremunerated until now, lookerupper of skirts.
Allen’s mother’s vagina was violently dark and its lips clapped like erasers
to flatulate chalky dust as she walked. She’d been a teacher in Joysey
publicschools before she crazied enough to stop wearing panties—but in this
meeting, because meeting it is, Allen will be teaching. He’s passed up to the
front, a low stage. Hands hands all hands. He stands on a chair atop the stage
facing his audience, he’s already the pro, his passion has been from the very
Genesis beginning memorized, stagy. He has no text with him, nothing to
read from on cards or to crib in ink from the palm, he makes his memory as
he goes along, he improvises. Come what may to mind or tongue. Care not
lest ye be cared about, in the wrong way. L’chaim and damn the thoughtcops
(later his epithets would grow stronger)!
He talks about socialism.
He talks about (another poem) everyone being equal but
he talks about (no but) the Worker the workers of the Spanish Civil War
the purges
the poyges! (what a family they were)
the showtrials the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev and ev ev ev
Amen because Stalin has begun to sour around here, despite
how he mentions the Eighth Congress Molotov the Nazis and Hitler and
how Stalin though appreciated world Jewry at least Molotov did because
Marx was Jewish and,
Allen recites: “the Jewish people gave many heroes to the revolutionary
struggle & continue to produce more fine & gifted organizers than any
other,” etc.
Nachas, nachas. Namaste.
| 239
Irwin! Irwin!
(Ginsberg’s given name, whose meaning is “boarfriend”—Ir “boar,” win
“friend”—so you can understand why he went with Allen because what Jew
befriends a boar?)
And the audience loved it! They weren’t a movement so much as an
audience who loved Irwin Allen and applauded Irwin Allen and hugged
Irwin Allen and kissed Irwin Allen and everybody everybodied him, and
this audiencelove told Allen that he needed to be loved and this need to be
loved made Allen a poet but also the fact—the fact!—that he hated that he
needed to be loved made him a good poet and he did become a good poet,
as if against his will, as if against his nature (Europeans like the socialists
applauding him had will, American hippies such as he would become had
nature), but that night he was still an acersecomic toy boy reciting by rote the
words of grownups.
Ma was triumphant—walking him out of the meeting through Union
Square toward the buses where rumbling home they’d plan amid the empty
seats to plan his next address.
Vendors swarmed the square but there was nothing to vend. A Muscovite
roasting his own hairy nuts. A clutch of wilted daffodils, bouquets of weekold
leek, parsley, parsnip, turnip, onion, garlic. Potato. Soup starters, starches. A
Chinaman making shapes out of newspapers, he was folding the morning
editions into odd origami if not to sell then just to pass the time not selling:
foldbeaked birds perched to graze upon the backs of wild animals that
grazed on ink, a crown. Two cents of a nickel, celebration! Ma bought Allen
that crown made out of frontpage, a headline for banded jewels: Franco
Refuses Immunity to Foreign Refugee Ships. She paid the man like all other
men, then kinged her son, who ruled her world already. Allen kept his head
down, had to hold his new crown down on his head as he walked toward the
busstop, the other hand in his mother’s hand then in his mother’s pocket—
“foreign refugee ships,” two sails stooped by the wind.
*
Allen was not allowed to leave Prague with the crown the students gave
him. The police, the secret police if that is not a paradox to speak of them,
confiscated the cardboard partyfavor before deporting him, just like Castro
kicked him out of Cuba (just as Generalísimo Franco banished poetries in
Basque, Catalan, Galician/Portuguese). For masturbating publicly, for stroking
off on hotel balconies with a broomstick up his ass, biting a taperecorder to
mute his pleasure: Allen, for that no glitter garland, for such no diadem.
The crown endedup on a hatrack at the headquarters of the Czech Secret
Police.
If that is not a paradox to speak Czech of them.
240 |
Street, Konviktská.
Allen was in Prague for only a month. The following people were in
Prague longer than Mr Ginsberg: Rilke, Kafka, Pan Novotný who drove a
taxicab and was born in the town and died in town and was a plumber, too
(unofficially, for friends and his wife’s extended family), and never deserved
the poem that was written for him because he was unambitious, which is to
say he was honest.
Sources are not saying he slept with Allen but.
He didn’t leave the room till morn.
(And was the author of a novel on the subject “a marionette from Josefov,”
who came alive at midnight to restore the interiors of neglected provincial
churches, unpublished—unless you count three copies mimeographed by
friendly brewery assistant Jiří.)
A last word about your wraiters. During breaks or at night, they wrote
their poems and stories with pen on the papers they used to roll cigarettes.
They rolled cigarettes for Allen with these papers and he smoked them,
unknowingly, perhaps, or perhaps this, too, like fluid exchange during
sexual intercourse, was a form of smuggling, an alchemical samizdat—a way
of internalizing their precious words for later disbursal as coughs, sneezes.
Cancer, cancer, one for each lung. Allen took their words into his lungs. He
filled his winebarrel chest with verse. His last Prague afternoon the King
already crowned—about to be dethroned through deportation, about to
abdicate to London—sat in the Ambassador’s lobbycafé, uncomfortably.
Agents surrounded. Critics (agents) hid behind walls. Their aperçus were
wallpaper patterns. In the kitchen Allen’s wraiters spit more of their poems
into his coffee, thick and heavy poemspit in his coffee they served him cold
because they loved him—he was their King, and they wanted to make his
own poetry even better by making the life that wrote it worse.
| 241
242 |
Laura Conway
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
It was a dry state. It was a yellow house—the base all around of gray- and
mustard-colored Arkansas stone overgrown by lilac bushes—you got
drugged by the lilac—on summer nights snuck out and crouched—black as
cast-iron—against those stones—waterstones—they sounded of a well—they
sounded fulled of water—it rung down and down—the trickle belling
The yellow house was the last bit of green—and then the plains began—full
open—flat and neat as a well-hung door—In this house you watched a man | 243
build a bookcase without any nails—framed—with three wide shelves—
When you sat with him watching—and asked: why no nails he said: you
don’t need nails—and asked: how did you get here he told you: Shoe Leather
Express.
He’s probably dead now. He was old then. You don’t know how your mother
made his acquaintance or why she asked him to—she was alone and made
friends easy and often with odd fellows—she once invited a liquor salesman
into the house because she was worried he’d get caught selling booze in a dry
state—a photographer came once as well—and dressed you and your sisters
up in white ruffled dresses and your brothers in littleman vests with clip-on
ties—and stuck you five like dolls on a couch with your legs straight out and
the soles of your shoes looming in the camera—
It was a rent house. The family didn’t live there long.
Then the family moved and took the bookcase with them
Night arches—in this sky the mouth the sex the red thread and the pillar—
perseverate the body.
Night frames—in this sky a false light worlds—rectangular—illuminates
and cicatrixes worlds.
The first time you died you felt a warmth, a flood of goldenness—as if you
were glass the sun struck
The second time you died the glass got stuck in your throat
You moved around the corner. You moved to the white house with the
blue porch. Your youngest brother was born there. Daddy was off selling
toothbrushes and combs in Little Rock Memphis Oklahoma City. There was
a pecan orchard in the backyard—beyond the pecans a bamboo patch—
Down the block a vacant lot with a creek—you had two friends: a boy with
a splayed inheritance of webbed fingers; a girl with a big, horribly swollen
purple tongue from an illness no one ever explained—
The afternoons: when you went down to the creek and caught tadpoles and
put them in a dish and hunched over watching and waiting for them to pull
legs from their sides—when the kindergarten teacher’s teenage daughter
would call you and your sister into her garage and thrill you with her being
a teenager and the radio playing “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka
Dot Bikini” and “Charlie Brown, what a clown…”—and pull down your
pants and play with you and your sister’s private parts—when you and your
sister went off to the rich part of town and industriously gathered armfuls
244 | of prize rose petals—enough to make an attar you had read could be made
by squeezing the petals enough—when you and the big-tongued girl made
tea parties with gumdrops and lukewarm water under the huge weeping
willow on the front lawn—when your mother took you and the other four
on long walks—to the Cowboy Museum and the reservations of the Five
Tribes—as she was afraid and wouldn’t drive—and didn’t sleep very well
when Daddy was away on road trips
The afternoons that informed you
The yellowjackets wove paper houses in the house joints. The wasps rose
from the dry mud. The wind picked up of a sudden and scared people and
they came out of the houses and stood on their lawns yelling back and forth
to each other about the roof holding—
The red bird sang from the bamboo. The bees went crazy in the lilac
blossoms.
Upon the stone where sex writhes they smeared honey.
How the old man across the street called the bees, captured them. When
you sat with him watching and asked how he said: It’s a trick made to look
divine: shit on moss: the bees love it. How the old woman next door told you
she ‘opened up’ the state of Oklahoma
The porch of the new house was painted blue. When you scraped at the
paint bubbles the heat made, they bled blue: it’s a good house, it survived
the last big one. The blue got under your nails and you ate it. In the backyard
were pecan trees—the four of you that could walk took bricks and smashed
the nuts to get at the meat. Sometimes your older brother would get in a
little fake car some relative must have given him—and pedal furiously up
and down the driveway—but you can’t remember you or any of the others
fighting with him for a turn.
Beyond the pecans was the windbreak of bamboo. You hid here. Here was
the fierce wind and the Chinese maiden and your great-grandmother’s ghost.
Here was the little girl in her red and green dress, before her murder years
later by the dark man in the hansom cab on the Long Beach sandbar.
Their invisibility made them truer than real
I know the geography of that place has a great deal to do with who I am but
I can’t tell you how or why
| 245
from The Cities of Madame Curie
But the blessed time is effaced.
She must leave the land of Science
To go out and struggle for her bread
On the grey roads of life.
Often and often then, her weary spirit
Returns beneath the roofs
To the corner ever dear to her heart
Where silent labor dwelled
And where a world of memory has rested.
Marie Curie, ca. 1893-94
SAN FRANCISCO 1988
When I wake the
cats are still on their backs
arms in the air
Red flags flutter from the greengold rooves of Chinatown
246 |
Here on the Pacific Rim the City stutters
Builds and falls
The witch upends the globe
Snow falling on the cable cars
A
field full of California poppies
I wake
with a
Headache and 17 cats
Last night I
felt the earth
shudder under the Sea of Japan
This morning Alaska shifted under the weight of young men looking
for summer work in the canneries.
It’s a broken plate from another country the
Family’s carried for years
I came out to its cracked edge nine
years ago
I was looking for Korea
I was looking for something to be born into
larger than
four walls
All around were the houses and the houses continued
to be built and torn down and built again
Hammers in the afternoon
78,965 miles
The car dies at the Boss’ door.
The woman gets out and
walks the Marin Headlands A
Golden eagle trapped in the air currents
The Pacific chiseling the end of the earth below
The woman walks
78,965 miles away from
Sweet Sixteen
She leaves the body in the
bed where it sleeps: a
child spelling loneliness among all the words
The lean black cat of Delano Street
Tiny tennis at the bottom of McLaren Park
Summer drought stripping the bark from
Eucalyptus trees
:This is no weather for hats!
What are these--------?
Purple-----? I see them
everywhere
At Pier 23 on the backwater porch in deep 2 AM tar
on the barge of Jazz
prevalent and
wild as onions and now
Coming through the trolley tunnel
Duboce to Cole
—Purple! Purple! I would like to be
its entire
| 247
Tall and thin
Gracious
with her feet in fountains of green ribbons
Not Naked Lady
swaying by the side of the road to Santa
Cruz
Not Oriental Poppy that breaks apart/its
delicate parasol crumpling with one
light touch
What are these
these
Purple
Dignified
Common
Everywhere
doubling Quad
rupling
persistent and increasing
Flowers
248 |
I see going to
coming back
from the job each day?
At night she says we are
Dancing like lizards
shedding our skins
the raccoon’s mask
Through the tunnel to Broadway
Caterwauling at the Adler Museum
I listen and
Bark at the dangerous sounds
A woman naked among blue flowers the
murder and fruit of sleep
: I was dreaming the
Cities I’ve slept with
The stones and glass in the black hole of the trumpet
The fingers of Miles Davis luminous as Marie’s
In a dark room he
gives off enough light to read by
: I was dreaming the
Sailors at the Lost & Found get crazy drunk during Fleet Week
Move to old ironic rhythms
Songs from the last war when they were five and
making bunny ears with their shoelaces
I live
with the others in the
tail end of the city
Between The Rock and the
hard place downtown
The old man from Malta born at the turn of the century
has no one to speak his dying language to
Fog fills Visitacion Valley like a
thousand white birds
The City of Madame Curie is
over there
inside my blackblue house
I gather up the Birds of Paradise
We drive silently
along Third Street to the channel
The sax player, the
poet, my
friend
Dead three years this winter from AIDS
The current takes the flowers
We search the black water for a bird to fly away
Through the dense rain a lost seal barks rolled in its
dark rug under Lefty O’Doul’s Bridge
on pitchblende nights
Numinous and salty
We say Goodbye
Year after year
The earthquake comes
These nights
When the dream hasn’t a doorway to stand in
| 249
At night the wind whips rough as
horses
through the Valley
250 |
I imagine we are approaching Patagonia
that frigid windswept desert at the tail end of the world
An old woman on this block was born there
of a Welsh father and a Nambicuara mother from southern Mato
Grosso
: On his ninth voyage around the Cape, father found mother.
She was thirteen and wretched and dancing for the sailors
at Punta Arenas
Her language is the oldest surviving tongue in the
hemisphere
Her profession when father met her
Older than that. He said he saw her soul shining through
Her name is unpronounceable : Tlingling? tling ling? He
says it means
Bell
That is what everyone calls her
I see
movement in the hills and
scrub of McLaren Park : Wind?
Wolves.
In a winter so severe they
descended on Paris.
So wrote a writer who had spent some time on
the Mississippi and wrote a book about a
woman who
embodied the spirit of her times
The Well of Night
Hearing the dark rut, the first stars forming, the wind from Jutland: a clean
tongue of wind after rain.
The sudden light startles the mosquitoes. In the village it was like that. Air
spawning water after the night rains. Thin lips intent on blood. And from the
mouths of the girls, a warning song:
“Don’t cut the white birch in the forest
The white birch in the forest is my body”
A book of blood in my lap. Opening this, a colophon of red: what is inscribed
in a body
This morning I missed the ravens. They’ve gone to Sweden. Their huge nests
in the high thin trees empty.
Today Eli’s book came in the mail: old poem about love clinging to a cliff | 251
face new poem about love that left and took the dog with it: Eli’s dead four
months now.
In this language August is a scythe.
Mosquitoes everywhere. They say between your legs the moon looks
miraculously small. So black out there it could be Christmas. In this sky even
Eli is still alive.
*
STALKS: The map is never not there. On the desk or thrown on the floor next
to, underneath the threshing floor: What you’ve gleaned is No. No is a clear
Thing to say. The body is taking it in, the body is writing it down
WINNOW: What Updike was doing when he said “Handke is widely
regarded as the best young writer, and by many as the best writer altogether,
in his language”—: was masturbating; stroking his member inside the clean
white box
SIFT: The clean white box is what they professionally assemble when
someone orders more than a few pastries downtown. Your box is red
SHIFT: a world like Schrödinger’s cat. Tiny towns, black threads on a black
river. Marked Tree: faces like that. You wrote of a three-legged dog. Yellow-
eyed blues the day Elvis died.
WEED OUT: Winter carving poems in stone: put lie to the young girl who
cut off her breasts for the Lord. Delicate Self-Cutting as opposed to Coarse
CUTTING: The sloe-eyed man came all the way from Guadalajara to bring
you a hot house gardenia. You are the voice of the wife of you singing warning
songs: each note a poppy seed
THRASHING out some magnificent miniscule fugue: thunder eggs: some
piece of the red planet: gleanings you gather in your skirt, steal away with,
bring home to a woman said, “Call me Bitter.” Said, “Don’t tell. They will
fashion it in such a fashion.”
THRESH For ten years here: people currying. You move through that:
shadow of the cherry tree on the thin linen curtain: a woman dancing as she
is fucked. Poetry scalds. When it takes its hand away: bruises. Airfare, white
boxes: to see herself as “object”: another story, another continent
SEPARATE: distance embodied in walking away from one house and one
state of mind to another house and another state of mind. There the red girl
spoke of the blood house that made her a red woman. The red boy laughed
easily, spoke of co-producers, promotion, careless murders—
CUT BACK: Schroedinger’s cat appears dead. The white box strokes itself.
You were never frightened in New York or Memphis or Mexico. There was
252 | always a sharp knife, some blood on it: you would find that person. You
were a lucky woman back then. Watch them, watch how it
PLOWS under: When the fever occurs the map unfolds on the passenger’s
lap: she is the wife of you who drives and drives, the right side you never
listen to: the smart move in the UNsafe haven: the one trying to find the exit
you lost as they
MOW down the body—and what it is—brain moving your hands—eyes,
mouth mapping: let it not be some perverse strategy—these inscriptions in
bone how you
SCYTHE memory.
*
Today the boy crouching by the bus stop, a bikeless wheel. A rat running
under the orange berries.
I am down by the Vltava when the wind comes up eerily violent: A woman
and I back into it. Tornado! I yell. Jesus Mary Joseph! she yells. We spit dust
from the construction site. The rook nests twist in the high branches, hold.
Note: Meet K in Moravia: the skull there, Upper Paleolithic: a prime example
of artificial injury. All the flesh carefully scraped away. Flesh subject to
obedience. Buried with a man carved in ivory.
What is remembered is not always memory. Look at your shoes: leaking
blood.
Sun wheeling across the sky. Bursts of wind. Through the wall the baby two
floors below crying.
At times the force of the wind triggers Oklahoma.
Obedience of the corpse: such a long horrible word in German. Obedience of
the nest: male and female, stick by stick.
In every blood there is a complement = that which acts against poisons.
*
How you got lost. You of the Bird House: fifty years: one long night: a single
iron bed, face facing the wall: dark of the moon.
He had left his Hungarian village a teenager, a conscript for some Russian
war. He was wounded. He told them who he was but no one understood
his language. He was shunted to a field hospital, after some months to a | 253
camp. Eventually: when he continued to talk nonsense: he was sent to an insane
asylum in the far reaches of Soviet Russia.
If I sing you an old song will the years return?—
“O brother, what are they doing in this room?
They are kneading the war bread
They are rolling out the war bread…”
The iron bed of night, its utter silence: “Did no one—in all that time—?”
Doing this.
Doing this, you worry you’ll lose something—
How something as simple as terrain determines language, gods.
And then one day they found him. Curled in a bed towards the wall.
In the report, they called your fellow inmates your “neighbors”: “He keeps
himself to himself,” says Ilya, who has slept in the “neighboring” bed for the
past twelve years.
And no one to speak to—: what did you do in that room, needing this? You
of the Bird House? Needing to speak: so as not to. All attempts to talk to you
in German failed. Half a century. Your face to the wall. In the dark a bird flies
into glass: “It’s been more than fifty-three years since he last had a proper
conversation.”
First a POW camp in Siberia, then a psychiatric hospital deep in the endless
rolling whiteness—
Living here you often watched the empires replaying their tragedies.
The glass dome of each
Shattering.
Going home. But realistically there is probably no trace of you there.
“O brother, what are they doing in this room?”
A bird sings this. It can be traced to the Ukraine and begins with a bird
bringing war tidings to a family. The youngest brother must go off to war…
and after a time his horse comes galloping home alone and tells of the horrors
of the battlefield.
254 |
How you got lost. Said wrong. Said nothing. One sentence after another.
*
Through the black glass a slab of light from across the courtyard—suspended
within you: illuminated—womb-like: what you make of that image- inverted,
desperate: almost a god, almost a human
A gold-winged moth excites the cats. You pull nervously on your hair: no
money for the magazine, no money for anything: classes cancelled, your one
white shirt getting dingier with each washing in hard water.
What costs nothing: at M’s near Šeberov she greets you with excitement,
leads you into the garden. By the tall old fir she puts finger to her lips, and
points up: the yellow eyes of a young Velký Vyr [a great-horned owl], stare
down at you. “In daylight,” you whisper. “In daylight,” M echoes, pleased.
The arrow of time: looking harder out there—you, the entire room—moving
into the red shift. Out there the owl—wisdom—hunting—sustenance.
Radio loops: The movie star kidnapped by bandits, howling wind from a
glacier that swallowed an RAF plane crash 50 years ago, swath of wild fire
larger than the continent you now sit upon
It blinked, shook. At your feet two soft tiger-colored feathers. You took them
home, put the feathers under your pillow.
You certainly won’t qualify for the Jains. Your walls are a bloodbath of
mosquitoes. You turn off the light. That owl left its heart on your breast while
you were sleeping. Now you tell your secrets to everyone.
*
Peering out—the RED goodbyes—its weather and light—invisible in the
blackness
Listen you—
What was going on in the 18th century that Herschel was able to see
the RED
beyond red—And perturbations of a body speaking of other bodies there?
As you are grave-stepping with Death—and the smell of the blood and the
rot makes you attractive to crows—nests you in your father’s death—
where broken faith was never found
Oh god, oh god you are tired. The house spins. Out front are the wolves. But
not yet Dogs: There are no fearsome Dogs. The Dogs have yet to come.
Do something sensible. Perhaps breakfast, a bath—
First you must wash the images of the gods from the gods: He was a father—
and has made the wealth of dead evident. Say: This is enough. Say: For god
sakes, the entire city is a threshold!
Peering out—a dark female has arrived—just outside you—Dress buttoned
wrong—shoes leaking blood—a dark female taking up the blood, carrying
the blood all the way back into the terrible hollow—Where you are singing
My love and I
see you there
Red
radiant in the black glass:
Listen—You don’t care what anyone tells you. You don’t die with the name
of god on your lips.
Hush. Go to sleep. It’s late. The candles from Cincinnati have all burned down.
*
| 255
A perfect sickle hidden in the moon’s bowl. To the West: fire. To the South:
Black mountains, blue sea.
You’ve just reread a story by the late Yugoslavian writer, Danilo Kiš: A
young girl holds a mirror in her palm. And she sees everything before it
even happens.
B writes from the desert outside Las Vegas: “It’s 115 degrees…and I’m aching
for love.” He sends you a poem about a little rhinoceros so happy he doesn’t
need to call it that.
As a child your great-grandmother told you the story of Padre Pio: This
was a lesson of sorts: “He can read what is in your heart before you even
know…”
Walking to the tram this morning you saw an older woman in a shimmering
sea green sequined prom dress—circa 1950s—and sparkling purple opentoed pumps, go into the lahůdky on the corner. You followed her. She stood
on line, oblivious to the grim stares queuing behind her. She ordered 200
grams of potato salad and a small crescent roll, and took her plate over to the
256 | counter and began to eat ravenously.
You reread the story and thought This is the seventh dimension: this is
revolving just out of sight of your skin.
Montenegro is gearing up for war. Analysis from the World Service: “If
it comes it will be brother against brother. Civil and bloody.” A lesson of
sorts.
The happy rhinoceros must be his son. As he isn’t exactly happy. He’s having
a hard time of it: the miserable desert, the thought that perhaps he’ll not find
love again.
She held the mirror in her own hands—as they cut each other down. And she
was asked: Why not warn them, knowing this?
That the word civil is employed—
You said, “How can he know? How can he know what is in my heart?” “He
has the god’s body,” she said. “At three in the afternoon his hands bleed.”
The white rhino is one of the rarest animals in the world—as they are coveted—
for their horn, for the promise of virility: a condition often demanded of gods.
There are, perhaps, only 40 of these magnificent beasts left, and most of those
in captivity—where it might be safe to assume they aren’t exactly happy.
And as she gobbled up her potato salad you watched her—imagined she’d
gone swimming eons ago, among the purple mussels of an ancient secret sea
lying under this landlocked country, and had only now come up for air.
“Tell me about it.”
This is the month they reap the red wheat. This is the month they whet the
stone, sharpen sickles. What will they do with that swimmer? Cut her down
to size.
There’s a little white rhino running around Bohemia: they have more luck
breeding these rare creatures here than anywhere else in the world.
The brotherless sister glances in the mirror. She is asked, “What have you
seen there?” to which she replies, “A sliver of moon.” In that mirror—sickles,
men of straw. In the heart—what is known before it is known.
She walked out of the lahůdky. When you went out after her, to look for | 257
her, she was gone. She rose from the sea where there was no sea but her:
shimmering, sea green .
*
…the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from
a metaphor into a literal reality…
Gil Elliot, Lucifer (1978, Wildwood House)
This happened
as July became August
a year later
during morning rush hour
this happened
just over the fence
a week later
downtown
in the Family Camp
as several cattle cars barreled through the Polish countryside
this happened:
He was thrown backwards, the entire window embedded in his back.
One survivor testified—he had often
looked over the fence into the Gypsy camp and felt jealous:
they were all of them together: mothers, children, fathers, old people…
45 years removed:
You and Yoko sit at the round table in her bedroom glued to episode 12 of The
Reign of Sei i tai shogun, Ashikaga [a soap opera on SF’s Japanese TV channel].
A woman in white face, butterfly hair, kimono of iris: iris imprinted over pale
green background: takes the note from the maid, reads it and shrieks, then
assumes an extraordinary calm. The maid falls to her knees, breaks down
in tears. The white-faced woman speaks [SUBTITLES]: “I am ready. Prepare
me.”
This happened as
July turned August
before you were even born
they were saying there could have been life there
The legacy of a red planet:
The Big Camp the
Great eight-island nation
258 | Yoko gets up suddenly, rummages in a drawer, comes back. She places in your
hands a black and white photo of a young Japanese woman in traditional
dress. “This is my mother,” Yoko says. “O it is the same kimono,” you say,
thinking that is the point. “No, everyday kimono,” Yoko says. You laugh.
“What?” Yoko asks. “The way you said that—‘every day kimono.’”
The maid comes back in holding a silver salver. She bows and places the
salver on the table before the white-faced woman. You ask Yoko: Kore wa
desu ka? Sore wa desu ka? What is this? That? You can ask this now. You
have practiced the letters: pictures you stare through to the actual thing:
Abunai. Be careful. You can say this now. You watch and listen carefully
Hearing
Of a morning
A light
even the blind saw
On that afternoon a lone aged Polish Rom
Black suit, black hat
walking across the fields towards
Auschwitz.
Everyday
People going on about their business
Those worked to death
Staring through the picture—for Yoko in her face, in the throat cut by the
kimono’s severe lines—you say, “She’s beautiful, Yoko.” On the screen—
on the silver salver there is a single item: a small stiletto. The white-faced
woman stretches out her white hand and grasps it. It is this day, as the whitefaced woman draws a firm clean red line across her throat, as you hold her
mother in your hands: as this is going on, you learn Yoko is originally from
Hiroshima.
And then there was the morning
As July turned August he awoke and
looked over the fence and
they were gone, they had all disappeared.
He dreamed
“a great bare eyeball bigger than my life”
He received a letter: an
uncorroborated report from a survivor:
that they were not gassed but burned alive in the crematoria
And told you women like her mother, women from there, pika women: were | 259
scrutinized by the families of prospective grooms: “They were looking for
the spots—there was the pika, the light—then the kuroi ame … that black rain:
bruises like splashes of sumi you couldn’t wash out…”
This
Happened
There—
a year
a day:
two large scale summary executions on two continents.
A program for each that succinctly explained the reasoning and necessity.
For example: weather as good as it was going to get
For example: room had to be made for the Jews of Łodz Ghetto.
Do not think such things couldn’t happen in the month that is: magnificent,
venerable.
Primary burns are injuries of a special nature and not ordinarily
experienced
in everyday life
it is 8 AM
Before him: “shimmering leaves”:
the temperature 80 degrees the wind calm…
Below him, the branches of the Ota River infiltrating the city
appearing as an open, extended hand
And behind:
what is not seen
Zigeunernacht:
Night They Burned The Gypsies.
happened
horrific fire:
happened
Bones houses rivers
of people afire
10 August
It’s good he’s here. Good he’s come. After seven years living so far from voices
you loved, reckless idiots you loved, he walks in the door with the souls of
the dead and the resurrected: you break out the beer.
J R: finally, a job, a pretty good one: “He comes by the house one day in a 99
Ford something and we go driving. Then he stops. We get out. He goes to the
260 | back, opens the trunk and says, ‘This is it, T, this is the deal.’ It was ALL his
writing. He’s got it IN the trunk, he DRIVES it around with him.” SLAM
A year ago his mother died. This is a hard thing. “You see early pictures of
my Mom, she was gorgeous. Then a few years back, she got so big. Huge.
She said: ‘It’s great, T. When you’re this big, nobody bothers you anymore.’
But right before she went, she lost it all, the cancer ate her, she went smaller
and smaller…”
You put your arm out. You tell him the life of a star: “Just before a star dies,
it grows enormous and reddest red. It becomes a Red Giant…”
“K L’s writing Ghazelles.” “Riding Gazelles?”
“Wri—TING!” “Gazelles?” “They’re SLAM short bursts…”
You say my father died far away in a perpetual summer. You were here. You
had no idea. You looked out the window. It was February, snowing. Crows
from Sweden picking over dead leaves in the park below.
He goes out for beers. You slam your hand against the wall. Over and over.
These mosquitoes you kill: one up on us, or so Arthur Koestler maintained.
In his book, The Ghost in The Machine, Koestler, an ardent anti-behaviorist,
argued that the mosquito “chose” to acquiesce to its physical reality. He
thought them an excellent example of non-deviance.
Then this year her mother died. So they had to come back. To a village outside
Budapest. Where as a favor to her family he begins to scrape a hundred years
of paint off the family home: “Get the baby out of here. I guarantee you this
shit is lead-based.”
“It has to do with what it makes of its life, with the heat and light inside it,
growing all out of proportion…”
The mosquito’s stomach runs right through its brain. Eons ago, it came up
against a sobering crux: if it went for intellectual growth, it would slowly
starve to death. If it ate well, eventually it wouldn’t have a brain in its head.
You grab the old linguist’s dictionary: “Arabic. Ghazal…”
“Which is?”
“Solomon’s gazelle…”
“I’ve got the kid now,” he says. “Sometimes I think: I can’t afford her; how
am I going to keep on…”
But you knew. You looked out the window. The crow had a calling card in
its beak like that magpie in Goya’s portrait of Manuel Osorio. It said, “Your
father wears a red vest.” Suddenly the tether just snaps. You’ve got about
one second to decide whether or not to hold on.
“She can pull herself up now. She’s nine months old. In Hungarian her name
means Wisdom.”
“I tried to get my father to come. We’re from here. ‘To Hungary?’ he said.
‘No. Nono,’ he said. I heard this in his voice: a terrible hunger: he wanted to
but he couldn’t.”
“It begins to consume itself. It begins to eat its own light, use itself up…”
The mosquito neatly solved this quandary of sustenance vs. intellectual
development: enough to think of blood, go for blood.
“We took everything out of the bank to come here. We were painting the
house. We put the baby in a tree, she was safe there. One night she tells me
her mother’s sister was taken out—in ’56—They just put a gun to her head
and blew her brains out. What is this? I finished painting. There was nothing
to do but walk up this one street, sit in this one pub, and drink bottles of
| 261
Slivovice with her brother. I looked around SLAM I said to her father, ‘Have
you noticed? Everything’s falling down around us! We don’t have a cent—
but we Hungarians SLAM keep the knives sharpened!?’ I finally told her:
‘I’ve gotta get out of here. I’m gonna’ go to Prague and buy a typewriter.’”
We, on the other hand, made deviant “choices” [i.e. lower AND upper brain],
that led to contradictions with our physical reality. We, Koestler, claimed, are
an aberration.
“I’ve done concrete. SLAM Walls. SLAM I’ve laid tiles. You can go out on a
tile wall plumb centered. You can do a 3-4-5. The Mexicans are brilliant at it.
The deal is you can take one look at a wall and read if it was laid out right.”
“Then there’s : Ghazi: n. Mohammedan anti-infidel fanatic—” “Jesus that’s a
tad dated…”
SLAM “From Arabic: Ghaza: to fight…”
“Well, they do have a punch to them…”
“What was I going to say? ‘I am a magnificent ruin, I am falling down without
falling.’ I wasn’t going to tell them that. I moved to a village east of Prague.
262 | Cirque Berousek lived there in off-season. There were camels. An elephant
and a Grizzly. Hail all the time. Rabid foxes. Night after night I peeled off
my face, my father’s face was there. I come from a bunch of pagan gunrunners with Byzantine underpinnings. They weren’t exactly run-of-themill. They ran speakeasys, or died young of shipyard asbestos. The women
popping out kids in double-digits. They said the soul lives in the hair. They
believed stones walk at midnight. They made sure the dead had a good pair
of shoes…PAUSE …they said the heart knows…none of this may seem very
practical…”
You suppose Koestler simply meant we cannot always be counted on to keep
our brains and our guts in such sublime order. When did he write Ghost in
The Machine? While he was slamming around those women? After he raped
his friend’s wife?
“G’s still singing his life up and down the streets. A fuckin’ troubadour. One
night he’s over, we’ve just had the kid, the whole thing’s starting to SLAM
overwhelm me. He says to me: ‘T, just remember to sit upright and erect.’”
You said: “It could have something to do with SLAM Gaza…”
“But which?”
“Which what?”
“A place for beautiful deer or a killing floor?”
“It takes itself into itself. It swallows all the red. It grows smaller than we can
ever imagine. And then smaller even than that…”
“…and just looked at this stupid Russian girl in the bar the other night,
telling me, ‘No, you are NOT Hungarian. Americans are just Americans.’
And thought, ‘T, don’t SLAM ask her what she thinks those old Russian
ladies on 6th and Balboa think they’re supposed to be. Don’t ask her if she
knows what it’s like to grow up in post-war Detroit in a house speaking
Hungarian, a house reeking of SLAM booze and that hunger.’”
He wants another beer. You give him the key. Make up the couch for him.
“One night I heard the well draw up—of its own. I got up and looked out the
window. A huge shadow darker than dark was there. It dipped its head in
the well and then turned and moved back across the field, up the ridge…”
“What was it?”
“It was the big menhir from the hilltop…”
“You don’t believe that.”
“It may not make sense but out there, over time I realized, neither does killing
yourself over death…”
His breath goes in and out like sheets on the line. On the floor one of your
cats curls into the top of his typewriter case. 20 bucks at the Antikvariat. A
Mercedes superba.
Wisdom overwhelms him.
“…grows denser, more radiant. Then it implodes. Sometimes if it’s close
enough to another, it becomes the invisible companion.”
It follows, logically, that the well-balanced mosquitoes flitting about the
room here survive by feeding on aberrations.
11 August
[Wall of stone. High with regular open spaces in it. “How much are you
asking for?” a honeyed voice inquires. You take from your little pockets. “Like
this?” you say. Scoop it all out. Now it is a black briefcase. In the briefcase is
all your money. You walk quickly towards the train station]
“The Bosnian women who brought the suit say they have no expectations
of collecting. Earlier this year they told the War Crimes Tribunal harrowing
accounts of brutal rape and gruesome torture…”
| 263
[The dream shifts: you are having a casual conversation with E. E is telling
you about her recent trip to Monte Carlo: “The place is swarming with
people. The apartments are very small, one on top of the other. They don’t
need so much room, only for tax purposes.”]
Throughout the ancient world honey like salt: preserved the bodies of kings
And queens in a safe place: an enclosure: spinning eggs and honey
Pressure is measured thus:
A thousand days they stood in the square in Belgrade, protesting. The Women
in Black: all they had, gone to war
Hooke’s Law: In an elastic body the change of shape is proportional to the
stress, the pressure within the limits…
“As a result many of the Bosnian women were utterly ostracized, many of the
women killed their babies outright…”
264 | [Suddenly you sit bolt upright. You look around. No black briefcase. Your
eyes fill with tears. “My god,” E says. “What’s wrong?”]
: an ancient promise: honey mixed with blood: a resurrection
unless it is pulled beyond its power of springing back
Interviewing Albanian women refugees fleeing Kosovo, the WHO and
UNHCR were able to corroborate over 20,000 pregnancies among rape
victims…
[You run all the way to the railway station, down the ramp. The briefcase is
gone: your mouth fills with honey]
You think of J’s little book of poems: “My Body Is A War Toy.”
The six sides of everything; in and around us: the six sides of a noise
Swarming, particularly round prey or enemies
A honey jar: all that preserves the “cold rage of money,” pushes into a woman
its fisted coins, sets the curve of the earth on fire:
24 hours:
Overnight, through Hungary
A high wall. Behind it the terrible contractions of war, the dulled eyes of
young girls, abandoned wives. Behind it the matriarchs scooping clean the
hollow below their breasts above their knees
What lit on the blossom, what invaded the dream
An odd root: bhi = quiver, fear
Many of the Albanian women have been utterly ostracized, many of the
women killed their babies outright.
[ Far off a siren. You open your mouth—a tense hand straddles it, pushes the
breath down in you…]
10 x 10,000 nights at least
Much the way some say you can learn a foreign language: at night you let | 265
the radio drone on, and in the morning, you are able to recite all the horrific
things people have done to each other the night before—
“Her bright shining is never laid to sleep…”
[You shut off the alarm. Behind your eyes light fragments]
Behind your eyes, the bills: what comes due: what war has taken from these
women: what people say via explanation: all this, all night, you dream inside
the honey jar.
12 August
In the dream you spoke another language, you wake yourself, write it down.
There is a B, an R, a V; the rest a slew of geometrics: circles, trapezoids,
triangles…
You may put The Book of Stones in the exhibition. Yes. And afterwards you
may ask some of the people who come to destroy them. You are thinking
what you thought earlier about Obedience. And the elements of Choice. You
wonder would everyone comply? Of those who complied, what would they
give as their reason? That you asked them to do it? Would the destruction
bother anyone? Would they admit so? Would anyone refuse?
When the stylus pulled through the stone, the S wavered, the crossed T
muddied: you were with they who engraved the shapes of sound:
In the dream the trapezoids and triangles were vowels. And nouns of a sort.
This is the rough geometry you spoke
First the stones must be photographed. You can’t destroy them without having
some record. (Well of course you can. This is a choice.) And translated—take
the words from the stones and put them down on paper.
Simply to stack and heft the pages: you can’t shuffle stone. Placing each tablet
on your lap: the weight of a leaf of stone, 23 pages of stone. Is this how George
Smith felt transcribing The Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal’s
great library in Nineveh? It took you all winter to carve these words into
stone. And now on this hot summer day you are typing them—from stone—
into a computer. Ludicrous (Choice). But the translation, K says—certainly
that can’t be in stone!
266 | The clay books of Nineveh murmuring under the earth. The stories crack
under the weight of machinery and salesmanship. The stories broken and
stolen and burned and fitted together again and again.
You don’t really want to destroy them. You’ve seen enough of the obedience
of ourselves. Bury them: with some teeth, some shards of pottery, the ashes
of a fire. A hundred years from now someone you’ll never know might get
a kick out of it. When you read from the first 9 stones at the reading last
November P had to give you a ride. You wrapped them carefully in towels
and still one broke in half. P said, How many stones is this book going to be?
Because you’re going to need a forklift soon.
13 August
Tonight’s news: Red Star supporters have been warned: at the upcoming
match with Dynamo Kiev in Ukraine the chanting of political slogans such
as “Slobodan Milosevic, Go Hang Yourself!” WILL NOT be tolerated.
Framed in the window: fragile night a Smith hammered:
Tomorrow you go to Vyšehrad: to the old stone altar.
Bring salt to bless the stone. An adequate substitute for blood.
Dream of an iron bowl
slowly filling with water
Blue coming through black
A lake of clouds
14 August
Sailors under the stars: so far under: metal-swallowed, listing: men growing
quiet: speech needs air.
In the morning you go to the cliffs by the river: shimmering: hammered
pyrite, the breastplate of a myth: men on horseback, going over.
In the old cemetery you put corn seeds in the laps of stone women. You pass
Nezval’s grave, wave at his blue bust. But the useless grandeur, row upon
row of gold leaf, polished black stones roofing the dead, leaves your mouth
parched. One grave, mounded, fresh-grassed, revives you .
Shallow breaths. A barren sea. Men closing their eyes. Through the walls a
sound of water rushing through pipes. The cat shaking in its sleep. Under
the Arctic Circle, a huge tree revolving, Hell’s cauldron full of men.
T says, “I can leave now, I’ve finished The Song of The World.” You crush beer
cans. Say: “You are in trouble, you are drowning, you don’t have to.”
You climb over the iron railing, you work your way down to the 12th century,
another level of river:
In Memphis years ago, the river swollen, moon cutting the black threads, the
child swept away. A shattered breastplate. You stumbling down Beale Street:
red dress, black heels.
On the radio, an old Russian woman cries, “We want to know how come it is
taking so long to save our lives?”
Here is the ancient bridge. And below it the invisible river 800 years old.
Here is the cliff where he went over. He and the horse. They entered the
water and swam away. Here is the myth found everywhere: the myth of
conquering death.
| 267
The BBC loops. And loops: you learn that Russian sailors make 50 US dollars
a month.
Here is the well. She dreamed once her face within: looking up.
Men at the bottom of the sea hear footsteps. On such a night Perseus stole the
eye the three old wise women shared among themselves. The cats stretch out
under the white plate of the moon. In the dark waters they drift into sleep. At
one time we were fish. Our poems then sang of water, strong currents. Down
there, pitchblack, you can’t see the fin in front of your face.
When you look up, the blue eye of the womb, wincing. You fear there won’t
be rescue. The pride of men men die from. Under the stars: a dull knocking,
men curled in the sails of their sheets.
15 August
The umbraic moon: surrounded by thick blue: palm trees should be there: a
Bethlehem blue from childhood bell of snow:
268 | It is possible to drown in air: he was doing that, you’ve done that
Now however you can only think of this horror under the sea. One of the
men on board is named Dmitri. He’s young, you heard his mother’s voice
on the radio tonight, pleading for help. And then you heard it again. And
again.
The heat dumbs you. You sit on the tram dumbly staring down at the knees
of car drivers.
You look out the window: not at anything in particular: the moon comes out
suddenly: its waist wrapped in smoke: bright as a gong: and a bird begins to
sing, and you think: all day the city hunkered miserable in its heat and now
the night’s reprieve: thin song of water pouring out, awakening.
Bread (15KC). Milk (16KC). You stare at the change. It’s enough.
You sit dumbly as the young bank executive you teach English says America
is responsible for the plight of the Russian sailors. How so? you say dumbly.
An American submarine crashed into the Russian submarine, sent it to the
bottom. Your eyebrow goes up: Where did you get that?
You rouse yourself: “There were about 200 Russian vessels in that area going
through their war exercises; how did a US submarine slip by them, crash into
the sub and get out undetected?” “They’re hushing it up.” “The Russians
wouldn’t hush that up, it’s got too much propaganda value…”
The whole goddam place is a mess. It is a bowl of soured blood. When you
pick up the newspaper, the newspaper seeps blood.
Okay. It isn’t enough.
It is 34 degrees C and you have to vacuum.
“It was in the paper…” “What paper?” “Pravo.” “Rude Pravo—that old
communist newspaper? You work for Citibank and you’re quoting Rude
Pravo?”
Cat food, kitty litter, toilet paper: 26 Kč + 56Kč + 24Kč = 106Kč.
Tomorrow. You stare out the window. You must
Vacuum.
Two weeks til the end of the month, rent, the dark of the moon.
What would you do down there? Knowing what they must know: no one
is coming. Everything hushed. Break glass, swim your way out. But the
pressure on the body. There’s no telling.
16 August
What is that—?
It might be a nightingale.
A fierce darkness wrapped in a powerful wind.
You look at your words:
There are only two stories:
Niobe, turned to stone while weeping for the slain children.
Naomi, returning from the red land after seven years of famine.
A fierce wind wrapped in a powerful darkness.
You look up: Blowing over Norway: a galen: mad, furious
Blots out the shower of gold
| 269
notice:
Nothing you resolved to do was done
That, really, there is no story
The drag of dog days: in the laps of stone women
seeds of corn; water night leaves behind
17 August
Piano drills. Recorders. All afternoon your lovely musical neighbors.
You need to read the last letter again. Subtle: is he saying he might come?
Good god.
Slyness in the Queen Mother’s warm smile:
These lovely hats on my century old head were bought with the sweat of 1/3 of the
world, duckies
Silence. Seaweed Night. This afternoon a white shirt on the line
A person soon walking down the street clean and presentable
270 |
Some guy telescoping Galileo:
Why don’t you take the soul and we’ll take the universe?
A violin preluding Bach under a humpbacked moon
There will be an excuse a
Plea regarding the
Exorbitant interest (the usury to be met with usury)
Between jobs you will do the chores
You are the white shirt
It will occur. Once he told you
Todo por servir se acaba
Get ready
18 August
From the railway station, through the dark fields
Paint the raven missing from this picture
Use his nicotine-stained gold
Don’t let’s talk Dutch about masters
The smudge oppressive as Original sin
An intricate courtship
Burned bone
She wore a man’s wristwatch
He was disciplined
Never snow. He was sure she was lacking
Applause
The heat of the plaza
The gestures of whores
He said, You must dream in the other language before you can speak it
Gray walls. Green baseboards.
They lived together for several years, deeply attached
19 August
Can’t cant—About to turn the lights off when B writes from Vegas with
blind faith in the muck no patience even for that [you wonder has he gone
Buddhist?—maybe sunstroke] the cats crazed by moths over goes the phone
pick it up right it it rings:
A: I am going to run a warm bath and slit my wrists
O wonderful [it may be the kid he’s dead serious in that department]
everything from the eyes down tired weeks of poets sleeping in the other
room [in the states at least you had a car]
Purposefully: Don’t. Forget that forget the
Rest
Take a bath leave the wrists intact Okay?
20 August
An oddly Osiris-Odin connection: hanging upside down days in a deep blue:
a blindness, a darkness. The keening of the women. The women knew full
well. They would be cut off. Sacrificed. Still they indulged in the ritual, they
spoke of rescue: To revive the member—revive the virility: Take the sickle, wait
| 271
for that Dog in the sky: And shut your ears to the gods we’ve made.
There was the smell of earth salt blood wafting up, stars to go by:
Where?—down there—those songs they sing sound like howling—
24 August
He writes again and you think, No I don’t understand it. Must I?
Tell me about her, you write. Tia died, he writes. Tia died. I got through it by
saying she is still here in my heart. No—her, you write. I got tired of making
buildings, he writes. I waited. I thought you went to New York. She’s an
old friend. We’ve both failed. It’s less expensive this way. Why did you go
there?
I just did, you write. The blue bowl broke. Then I came here. I dreamed of
you. I heard it snowed in Guadalajara for the first time in a hundred years.
In all that time together we never saw snow.
That they made significant gestures of limb and body. You are alluding to
272 | that, yes? Cats have this talent as well.
The child withered. After that you began to wander. He went away on
business. You brought home chairs you found on the street. He didn’t like
that. It’s a Queen Anne’s chair, you said. It’s junk, he said. You brought home
a French boy from The Plough & Stars. He didn’t know that.
No. It isn’t finished, he writes. We left ourselves there unfinished. Today, you
write, I was staring out the tram. Far off on the Letná Plain I could see a man
in a bathing suit. He stood quite still, propelling his arms through the air. As
if swimming, furiously, vertically in place. I watched him as long as I could.
Something about it disturbed me. I thought of you then.
You woke up crying. He put his hand through the wall. You know all the
words, he said. Get out, you said.
Maybe she’s good for you, you write. It’s lunacy, he writes. I have stripped
everything down. It’s not love, it’s convenience. I’m incapable, you write.
You never got that, you never understood. I’m sorry about the blue bowl, he
writes. Do you still have the lace—the lace from Spain? Do you go back ? you
write. I got tired of the corruption there, I became a citizen—Oh you write,
and then: Well you were always more capable than I, you write.
You walk the esplanade here. You stand with two very drunk men, drinking
a shot of green rum in the rain, and stare at the necklace of swans strung
out behind you. Every six months. Try again. Dinner. You would dress. You
would tell yourself you don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to think
about it. Stop asking yourself are you good for him?
Yes. And the lace from Ireland. And the wedding dress from Mexico.
You write, I thought something terrible had happened to you. I woke up
and my heart was hammering and I thought how can I know that? It was
snowing and the room was like ice. I tried to find you, he writes. I called R in
New Mexico. I went to the Café, the Beach. I went anywhere I thought you
would be. It is lunacy, you write, it’s berserk; today, I had an overwhelming
desire to throw myself into the arms of the man holding onto the tram pole
next to me.
You walk the iron bridge here. Hold tight to the railing. Feed the swans the
ends of the bread.
You write, I thought there must be something terribly wrong. I thought: I’ll
put an ad in the newspaper in Guadalajara. My father had died. Perhaps | 273
that was why. It was very early. I don’t sleep well here. I think it is the color
of the sky. Why did you, he writes. Why there? He comes to me in dreams
sometimes, you write. I can understand, he writes. I loved her terribly. Just
tell yourself: he is still here in my heart.
30 August
She wrote yesterday: Aunt M. passed away . She said she didn’t know her
own children at the end.
She’s the one in the belly in the story. There were twelve years between
Grandma and her. They had the bottom floor of the house. They had a
Baltimore heater. It was right across the street from the speak. By then we
were very crowded
Grandma told you: Boss Carney had gotten an extra shipment in. There was
no room at the speak. Put it in my basement, Great Grandpa said.
She was 5 months pregnant with the 11th child. They came knocking. Not
on your life she said. Listen to him she said. Him with his delusions of
grandeur.
She marched across the street to the speak. He sang there. He had a beautiful
high clear tenor. He sang for the judges come down from Court Street.
She chased him home. Grandma came home from Coney Island with the
youngest three. All the way down the block they could see the crowd in front
of the house.
She did love him. He had terrible problems with the breathing. She put
Caruso on the wind-up. Rolled up strontium leaves for him to smoke. It
eased the asthma.
They were in the front window. Shade up. He had on his white shirt, red
suspenders. She was 5 months along with M then. Big as a house. She held
the butcher knife high. He had her by the wrist. Go on he said. Go on, Mae.
Grandma moved through the crowd. Pretended she didn’t live there. Well I
don’t know who I thought I was fooling. He held her wrist with the butcher
knife high and said, Go on, Go on Mae, do it. He could antagonize her.
She went berserk, Grandma said. Lots of women went berserk. You don’t
know how it is. They don’t tell you nothing but it’s a blessing. He’d been
274 | blackballed for starting up about asbestos in the shipyard. They didn’t
know scientifically what it was but they were all getting sick. Then he fell
in with Carney. That was the wrong crowd. Mama said our side always had
a screw loose for the pretty boys. He had delusions of grandeur, he had big
plans. She’d tell us Don’t tell me, blame the tripe in white sauce on his new
occupation. She could cut him down quick.
You’re laughing but I could’ve gone right through the pavement. I never
even told M that story until I was over 50 years old and drunk one night on
Bloody Marys. It’s strange how you can remember a day. How you can be
standing in your body and make yourself not be there.
31 August
Of his arms
Which have gone with the crows
A year then a year then a year
Of his blue tattoos speaking,
Night cells stuffed with ink:
“Is that a language there?”
“You can make it make sense”
Advice from the recently dead is something you fail to
Appreciate right now
You may never sleep again.
It will probably not be that simple.
| 275
276 |
Photo: Alan Pogue
Christopher Cook
The Cyclops
High above the zócalo, an eagle ravaged a serpent. The raptor clutched the
snake with beak and talon, tore at the writhing flesh. The rattlesnake bared its
fangs, striking back—two predators imprisoned in death’s embrace, ancient
glyph of a nation. The battle waged, then for a moment hung motionless as
the wind dropped.
The Cyclops watched from his balcony, sixth floor of the Hotel Majestic,
as the soldiers lowered the flag. Ceremonial trumpets on the plaza pierced
the grinding noise of evening rush hour below. The summer air, acrid with
fumes, hung exhausted over the city. In the yellow haze to the east, a Boeing
757 angled its bullet nose downward toward the airport.
| 277
A crowd had gathered to watch the soldiers lower and fold the enormous
tricolor—red, green and white. The uniformed men fell into formation,
marched the flag across the gray expanse of the zócalo toward the Palacio
Nacional. The colonial building’s ornate façade stretched along the far side
of the wide plaza, stone blackened by pollution. Place where the president
worked.
The Cyclops tried to remember the guy’s name, couldn’t. It didn’t matter,
he was a rich bastard, like the rest, with a gachuzo name and white skin
and soft hands. He looked down at his own. Brown as coffee, scarred and
calloused, huge. Working hands, the tools of his trade.
He returned his solitary gaze to the plaza. Once, when the Colonel was
busy, the Cyclops had taken a tour of the buildings facing it. The Palacio
Nacional, the guide said, sat on the very spot where the Aztec Moctezuma’s
palace once stood. The city back then called Tenochtitlan, one of the great
wonders of pre-Columbian America. Cortes ripped the palace down, built
his own. The Great Temple, center of the Aztec sacred precinct, had sat just
to the north. A pyramid to the sky where they’d sacrificed thousands, cutting
out hearts with stone knives, devouring the hot trembling meat to ensure
the sunrise. Cortes demolished it, too, put up a Christian cathedral. Using
the same stones, and Indian slave labor. There it sat now, the Metropolitan
Cathedral, slowly sinking into the ground, leaning to one side, its tower clock
frozen with grief. The tour had blown the Cyclops’ mind.
Fucking Spaniards.
Where he came from, down in the Chiapas highlands, they had the right
idea. Throw the bastards out, the aristocratic landowners and oligarchs
with their European blood, the mestizo politicians and priests kissing their
prissy white asses, all of them conspiring to steal Indian land, wipe out the
languages, annihilate the customs, reduce the indigenous peoples to citizens
of a nation they didn’t even believe in. The Zapatista rebels, those guys were
onto something, alright. Sometimes the Cyclops even thought he should go
down and join them.
He thought about it most at times like this, when he was about to finish
another shit job for the Colonel. He stood on the balcony, a dark eye peering
from the broad flat face, massive head crowned by a thick shock of straight
black hair. He reached up and tugged at the leather patch over his left eye.
The hollow dead space beneath it sweating again, a constant irritant.
He heard the room door open behind him.
“Cyclops, I’m ready for you.”
He turned to see the Colonel standing outside the door, waiting. He
was a short man, slender, wearing a sleek blue Italian suit with a metallic
sheen, the one he’d bought at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. “You should see this
fucking store,” he’d told the Cyclops. “Fuck that, you should see this fucking
city. Nothing but highways and glass. More shopping malls than any other
place on the planet, Cyclops. Christ, you wouldn’t believe it. Someday I’ll
278 | take you there, buy you a decent suit. That piece of shit you’re wearing, it’s
embarrassing.”
The Cyclops hadn’t said anything. He rarely spoke. He’d discovered long
ago, as a boy, that talking accomplished nothing. Talkers talked. When they
wanted something done, they ran their mouth. If they had money, then they
hired someone. This was the basis of his and the Colonel’s relationship, why
it worked. The Colonel talked. The Cyclops did things. The Colonel paid him
some money, enough.
He’d had worse jobs.
The worst thing about this one was the suit. The trousers were short in the
crotch, the jacket tight across his shoulders. He’d always had trouble finding
regular clothes. He was too tall, his chest too deep, gut too big, shoulders too
broad. You never saw guys his size in Mexico, not wearing suits. But the man
had insisted, saying it was important, had bought the damned thing off the
rack, telling him to wear it. At least it was black.
“Let’s go,” the Colonel said, glancing at his watch. “I have a dinner
date.”
The Cyclops pulled on his suit jacket, went out the door, shutting it behind,
and followed the Colonel past a jungle of lush potted plants to the room next
door. Wrought iron grillwork to one side opened the walkway to the central
atrium and its arched glass ceiling. The hotel always caught him by surprise.
An intricate design of enclosed space and lavish colors, of inlaid blue and
white Talavera tiles, elaborate woodwork and iron and mirrors. Extravagant
place, a long way from a cinder block hut in Chiapas. Expensive, too, but the
Colonel paid the bills. The Cyclops felt awkward in the Majestic though he’d
never said so. When in Mexico City the man stayed only here. And he always
stayed near the man.
The Colonel opened his door and went in, the Cyclops followed. The room
just like his own in mirrored reverse except for a room service table sitting
by the small sofa. On it a bottle of Scotch whiskey, an ice bucket and several
glasses, one half full, beaded with sweat. Another of the man’s acquired traits
he didn’t share.
The Cyclops did not drink.
He stood at the end of the bed, waiting. The Colonel sat on velvet cushioned
chair next to the room service table and opened a packet of Dunhills, lit a
cigarette. He leaned forward, straightened his tie. The tie, too, imported, a silk
Gucci. He picked up his drink, swirled it, took a sip, gave a sigh. “I’m afraid
that our business relationship has reached its end,” he said. “It’s something I
deeply regret.” He sighed again, sadly.
The Cyclops listened, reading the Colonel’s mood. He stared directly
ahead at the hazy sunlight drifting through the curtains shrouding the tall
windows of the French doors. The man always liked to make a little speech
on such an occasion. There was the disappointment, the remorse, the feigned
melancholy. All essential to the moment. It seemed silly to the Cyclops but
the Colonel enjoyed it.
| 279
No one else did, certainly not the guy in the corner.
The Colonel finished his whiskey, glanced again at his watch. Some Swiss
job called Jaeger-LeCoultre. “Well, I’m afraid I have an appointment soon,”
the Colonel said, his voice seeped with apology. “Let’s get it over with.”
Only then did the Cyclops remove his jacket and turn toward the man
seated in a straight-backed chair in the corner. The chair was placed on a
clear plastic tarp spread over the carpet. The man was tied with nylon rope,
head slumped forward, his arms pulled behind him, hands cuffed. His legs
were tied to the crosspiece between the chair legs. A white Hotel Majestic
washrag was stuffed into his mouth, one corner hanging between blue lips.
The man’s shirt was soaked in blood. It was a long-sleeved yellow shirt
with an open collar. Some kind of soft synthetic, rayon or nylon, hanging in
pieces. The ivory handle of a large skinning knife protruded from just below
the man’s left collarbone. An ice pick lay at his feet. His pants were rolled to
the knees, his shins dotted with small black holes where the point had gone
in. The plastic tarp was speckled red. So the Colonel had done some bonetickling.
The Cyclops thought the man was unconscious. But he abruptly thrust his
head upward and strained against the rope, writhing on the chair. His eyes
rolled toward the ceiling. His face was bruised and swollen, blood trickling
from the corner of one eye. Both nostrils had been sliced. Dark clots of dried
blood clung to them. After a moment he gave up and slumped forward again.
He was a tall man, not muscular but big-boned. The Cyclops wondered if
that was where his name came from. Señor Redbone, from New Orleans.
He had strange hair. Almost African but not kinky. His skin, too, seemed
odd, the reddish-orange color of fired clay, with dark freckles on his face.
His eyes were light green. Altogether a strange man. He spoke English with
an accent, talked about eating shrimp and crawfish and a dark soup with
rice called gumbo. He wasn’t a white man but he wasn’t a nigger, either. The
Cyclops wondered what race he really was. Some kind of mestizo they had
up there.
Still a gringo.
Once he removed his jacket and rolled the shirt cuffs above his wrists, the
Cyclops moved quickly. The man lifted his head, green eyes flitting left and
right, but the Cyclops was behind now, gently cupping the man’s chin with
one huge hand, pressing the other against the back of his head.
“Wait,” the Colonel said quietly.
The Cyclops paused, hands in place, unsurprised. This, too, part of the
Colonel’s ritual. This, too, the indulgence of an incurable talker. The Cyclops
didn’t like it. When it was time to do, others should keep quiet, let the doer
do his work. But he waited.
The Colonel put out his cigarette, poured two fingers of Scotch, lifted the
glass in the air. He smiled forlornly at the man in the chair, as if composing a
poignant farewell to an old and very dear friend.
“In one hour, Señor Redbone, in your honor, I will enjoy a broiled shrimp
280 | dinner with a young lady at the Perro Andaluz. A very nice restaurant, as
you know. Afterward, I plan to fuck her eyeballs out.”
He sipped the whiskey. “I regret that you cannot join me. But I know you
have other plans.”
It wasn’t a great line. The Cyclops was sure he’d heard it on some TV
show, probably more than one. But the Colonel seemed pleased. He smiled
broadly, his lips twitched as if holding back laughter. Then he lifted his gaze
to the Cyclops and nodded.
With one sharp motion, the Cyclops broke the man’s neck. He heard the
dull crunching sound, calmly laid the head down, chin to chest.
“Well, that’s too bad,” the Colonel said. He slapped his thighs and stood
up. “He was a good client. Then he got greedy.” He raised his arms, palms
open, gave the Cyclops a bewildered expression. “So you help some guy out,
he’s making a ton of money, then what? He wants more. He wants it all. So
predictable these days. Why do they do that, Cyclops? Tell me.”
The Cyclops shrugged.
“Well, what the hell, that’s business. We’ll have to find someone else in
New Orleans. But this fucking guy, he was really tough. Jesus. He never told
me a fucking thing, even with all that encouragement.”
The Colonel shook his head, amazed. He patted his pockets, put the packet
of Dunhills in his suit jacket, looked around the room.
“You finish up here, Cyclops, then eat in the hotel café. I’ll take a taxi to
the restaurant. We’ll swing by Pozos on the way to Nuevo Laredo tomorrow,
drop the body down a mine shaft. The suitcase is under the bed.”
He paused, turned and went into the bathroom. The Cyclops heard the
man in there taking a piss, humming to himself. Jorge Negrete’s “Mexico
Lindo,” sounded like.
The Cyclops stripped to the waist and began untying the body. He wrinkled
his nose. Señor Redbone smelled bad. He supposed his bowels had loosened
at the end. At least there was less blood than with the last guy. That time the
Colonel had wanted a Colombian necktie—slit the throat, reach in, pull the
tongue out through the hole, messy work. Drop the body in the street to be
found, sending a warning. But Señor Redbone would simply disappear.
The Colonel reappeared, zipping his trousers. “I wasn’t lying, Cyclops, this
young lady is a real babe. A fucking TV reporter, thinks she’s an intellectual.
But when the stallion puts it in, she whinnies like a mare.”
The Cyclops didn’t reply. He lifted Señor Redbone with one arm, moved
the chair to one side with the other, lowered the body onto the tarp. He
glanced over, saw the Colonel standing by the door holding a pair of aviator
shades, his other hand on the doorknob. He was staring at the larger man’s
bare torso, marveling.
“Christ, you should have been a professional wrestler. And in this fucking
corner, the Cyclops!” The Colonel grinned. “So don’t wait up. I plan to be
late.” He winked and went out whistling.
The Cyclops felt his stomach rumble, considered going to dinner
before finishing the job. He was hungry, and sometimes lost his appetite | 281
afterward. The hotel café was pretty good. They served spicy meat dishes,
generous side orders. Thick buttered bread, fresh tortillas if you wanted. His
stomach growled again. No, he would wait. He was not one to leave work
unfinished.
First, though, he had to get out of these fucking suit pants. They were
pinching his cojones like a pair of goddamn pliers.
Stripped to his underwear and shoes, he rolled the body in the tarp and
carried it into the bathroom, unrolled it into the tub. In the bedroom he reached
under the bed and retrieved the suitcase, a cheap vinyl-covered thing, but
big. He took it into the bathroom and opened it, removed the short, heavybladed saw. A butcher’s saw. He stood over the gleaming ceramic bathtub,
the saw dangling from his right hand, stared at Señor Redbone.
For a while, he did not move. He watched, thinking about his work.
Thinking, Sweet Virgin of Guadalupe, wearing that ridiculous suit was bad
but it wasn’t the worst part. He’d wear that suit in his sleep if he didn’t have
to do this other thing. It wasn’t the killing. That wasn’t so bad. He was good
at that, clean and swift. It was what came after that sickened him.
The Cyclops fingered his eye patch, wondered what the Zapatistas did
with those they vanquished. He contemplated what the Aztecs had done. No
doubt the Toltecs, too, and the Olmecs before. And as he kneeled on the tiles
at the edge of the tub and began to saw into a kneebone, fighting back the
spasms in his belly, he wondered if he really had any Indian blood at all.
And then he wondered if the café still served cabrito.
282 |
Photo: Helena Fehrerová
Christopher Crawford
A Whistling Sound
From the North Sea oil fields
comes a song of fern
holes of the sea
and the hole‘s voices singing
and what would you
have them sing
oh you wouldn‘t
have them sing
you wouldn‘t remember
when you
or perhaps it was I
or all of us sang
in the halls of the great schools that sank
sang in the smallest
voices we had
it was you and I and all of us jumped before we knew we had and sang
as we fell
of the great schools of the sea
of the deep blue fern
and of a whistling sound
of holes
we could take for a voice if we wanted
| 283
head holiday
Deciding to stay on at the petrol station
coincided with the diesel blossoms
exploding overhead.
The forecourt reeked with the mingle
—cherry trees as beautiful
machines—a dab of fuel
behind each
ear.
The vulgar excitement of benzine
up his snout
seemed to be what he was after
284 |
so Italy was cancelled,
tents set on the cracked tarmac,
eggs fried each morning among the tourists
filling their cars, no chance
of coming to hate their faces
since they left so soon.
He worked up a tan,
ate stale baguettes from the truckstop cafe,
sniffed the clear foul air,
spilt himself by the highway sunslicks,
purely happy
and readied himself to clinch
the new steel contract or whatever
nine sharp
Monday morning.
Men at Sea The sombre toll of the sea and its endless distant rhythms. Such music yet to be made and miles of it stretching ahead
like a long black muscle unspooling itself. Men are driven mad anyway, out there among the other men and turn inward, dying of thirst like the salt-eaters, like those born sentient and suddenly who understand at once: How it is to feel yourself beyond the curve of the earth. To know the home of the dark waves and to go there. | 285
Divorcee Disco Music …like a man who has cut himself off from the soil
and his roots among the people…
F. Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
An eye, an eye at the end of a tunnel, a green eye with popped pupil the black yolk leaks an inky thread through the iris. A flawed eye, a freckled eye, a sick eye that guesses. An eye that chooses but always chooses wrong. On the edge of town 286 | a flap of skin and a polyethylene bag have a fistfight, whirling and punching their way to hang exhausted from a barbed wire fence. A red-haired ear weeps in the dirt. Oily cinders make a soft place for it by the roadside while off the coast on a luxury liner a pig‘s ear sits down to eat bacon at the breakfast buffet and in the suburbs a rigid arm goes out for cigarettes, walking on its fingers, and never comes back, and is sighted for months after in Melbourne, Guyana and Istanbul while the real arm lies at the bottom of the ocean. Now the elbow softly bends with the sway of the kelp. A blind nostril stuffed with earwax listens by a hole, a mine in the earth: an old gramophone record or thunder or something that sounds like a woman’s laugh lives down there.
First published in OVS Magazine (2010).
| 287
One Two Three
288 |
He leaves her his last two cigarettes.
You’re a good person, she says. Yes,
he thinks, I’m a good person but I do bad things,
though that would make me evil. From
the nineteenth floor he watches a woman
in the car park rub her man’s back, detail so small
she might be stabbing him very slowly. Here above
the building sites, over the masterbuilders, girders, the cranes, a childs playpark
is nothing but a fenced-in patch of dirt. A bright field of rape
floats on the city’s vanishing point;
A fire-green tree eats children
on bicycles, there they go:
one
two
three
Letter to Self from Deathbed
Saline infusion to left side:
straight drop to hanging arm
which takes each slow drip evenly.
A sea swells somewhere
beyond your white room.
A blood-orange sun burns low on the water
and sears the circling gulls who cut the air.
Yet this sun is on you too.
Past the skin.
The sharp, ridiculous pain
of needles: far away, quiet.
A deep slow pain turns you in its hands
like Mother with infant.
Close by, the sea shifts again,
the sun melts
and the gulls skim so low they seem as one
with the indigo-black of the water.
Only Mothers remain.
The Mother of Night comes.
It’s night.
People catch aeroplanes,
a man buys a postcard somewhere.
First published in the Cortland Review (2010).
| 289
O’Hara at the Beach
at Fire Island, the sun already long gone
down, perhaps he heard the low murmur of lovers laughing
beyond the dunes, the sand muffling the sounds they made, perhaps he lay
down a moment, exhausted suddenly
or exhilarated for some reason, the sky
for example, and scratched his head and found his fingernails
full of smashed and powdered sea shells from his scalp
and laughed one last soft laugh, he was playing hide and seek with himself among
the tall cliffs of the beach and imagined New York
skyscrapers
and the boys back there in the bars still sinking
sundowners at 3 in the morning and him out here, the sea out there
breathing in and out behind the darkness like a jazz singer, her lips
on the mic , the sea out there
like something being torn in half
and the sand
290 | muffling what he couldn’t see coming
through the rippling boulevards of the beach at night
on Fire Island
where the sun had long gone down and the fire
just out of sight, coming toward.
First published in Evergreen Review (2010).
Cellar
Dad comes down.
He has the fresh milk for us. An old
curtain sewn from my childhood dresses
hangs lopsided from a railing and cuts off
my bit of the basement
from the bare bulb-light. He pulls it across
when he wants to play
the happy game. He still calls it that. We play.
Like always, my head rolls sideways so I can see
the sunflower dress, the loveliest, the colour
now fading. Dad finishes. He won
he always wins. I hear our children
beyond the curtain, rattling like seeds
in a dark hand; like little bone dice.
| 291
The Tablecloth Trick
Have you ever seen someone
do that trick with the tablecloth
where they whip it from the table
quickly
and the bits and pieces
laid out
are expected to stay where they are?
Only it goes wrong,
things fly
and it seems as though
the room itself was whipped
away, so suddenly you see that bare table
for the first time,
the deep wound scored
292 | through the nut heart
of the old wood.
That it sits shackled and caged
into form,
the legs hacked from the body
then screwed or nailed back on.
Gangs of stupid fat-eared wingnuts
that couldn’t come ankle-high
to a dandelion
must have lived the high life long
under the cloth
that hid them.
This wood was years under the cosh:
The world filtered
through polyester roses.
The utter distance from sunlight.
The folding away of oneself
without a sound.
Jammed and shattered joints shaken and stretched.
The choking varnish.
That it‘s come to this
from a place of quiet dignity
or a time spent breathing sunlight by a stream.
That it kneels now amid the laughter,
like an old woman, naked, surrounded by the broken pieces
of all it tried to lift.
| 293
294 |
Photo: George Lewton
Lewis Crofts
And so they came
And so they came. They would always come, mother said. Sometimes with
cloth and salted meats. Sometimes with pepper. And sometimes they came
with amber and copper, those muddy handfuls of shining. They always came
with swords.
I wasn’t even born when they came to our village for the first time. I’ve
asked around but no one will say how many summers of “visits” passed
before they made me and Hilde. Mother brushes me off but still I ask her for
the story: the story of my father. “Fathers,” she says. One of several. But she
can’t remember which one. Or at least she says she can’t be sure. “Why?”
I ask. She doesn’t answer. But when the wind blows in my hair and it is | 295
matt-tangled from the sea, she says she can see an echo of their features.
The baymen. They are features which, some days, I know she sees in other
girls. Like Hilde. Like Liff. Mother stops and looks at other women’s girls,
crouching to stroke cheeks and hair. “An echo,” she says. Hilde and I both
make the same face when we sneeze.
And so they came. The baymen clambered out of their longboats and
strode up the gully. The water only came up to their knees. Young Baed
ran forward and took their blades, collapsing on the shore, a speckled and
spattered body. He flapped like a fish and then stopped. “A hero,” say some.
“A fool,” says Aethel. Young Baed sucked up their swords leaving nothing
but punches for the older men like Aethel. He says their swords were taller
than the men. “Glinting slices of iron,” he calls them in his craggy voice,
his toothless mouth. Mother says that every year Aethel just goes to his hut
and closes the door when they come. That’s why he’s still here, living on
the edge of the village, the only man of his age. No one brings him wood
or food, though. Not now. No one shares their furs. Even the baymen no
longer seek him out when they come in the summer. There’s nothing in his
little hut apart from the heap of stones and shells he gathers from the beach
when the storms die down. He has nothing the baymen want. Instead, they
move through the village to where there are younger men who want a fight.
Their doors never recover from the baymen’s heels. Nor do their women’s
backs. And after the baymen have stolen whatever they can find they fold
the mothers over the tables. Then they push their dresses up, Aethel says.
Sometimes they rip them straight off. Then what? I ask. Aethel doesn’t say.
Hilde just frowns. We have the same frown.
Mother says he comes back though, the one she thinks is my father. He
comes back every summer with his band of baymen. And every summer the
same dress needs to be patched up. The same door needs fresh boards. But
mother has given up. There are no men left to repair it. And, anyway, the
baymen’s heels will always be stronger.
When they came last summer I hid in the log pile by the door. I was small
enough to back into the hole, squeezed against the moss and woodlice. “Not
a word,” said mother. “When can I come out?” She shook her head and
passed a hand over my brow. “They know no ages, darling. They know no
ages. Stay here till I come for you.” She straightened her dress. The stitching
was jagged across her lap like the scars on her back.
We wait all winter. And I grow more rounded, like Hilde. In the spring
mother calls Aethel as usual and he nails slats across the door. But he is even
older now and she takes the heavy axe from him and must split the wood
herself. She takes the longest shards and pins them to the door. Like all the
years before, she won’t defend herself when they come but she must at least
look like she is trying. She does it for me, I think. Her hand raises high and
296 | she strikes the nails into the door. A sweat-tear hangs on her cheek. I am
taller now. I stretch up and wipe it from her face. I can help her.
This year, we don’t see their longboats. It is the smoke in the far village
that we see first. We see it before the wind carries the screams of women and
the crackle of flames. The same wind blows the mat-tangled hair across my
face. Mother pulls it back from my eyes. “Go hide, my love. Don’t come out
until I say so.” I back into the hole and she packs the logs up until my face
is covered. It is a tighter fit this year. I have to hold my breath. She places
the woodaxe in between the logs. She knows I won’t be able to lift it but its
handle points towards me. I peer out of a gap and watch her walk back to the
hut. She looks over her shoulder at the log pile and then goes inside. I hear
slats drop behind the closed door and hold my breath.
And so they come. They speak in harsh sounds. Grunts and gruffs and
growls. The words are familiar yet different to our tongue. House. Field.
Sword. Fire. Cow. Sword. Wife. Scraps of sense between the grunts and laughs.
They walk past Aethel’s hut. Two of them carry rocks on their shoulders and
drop them outside his door, rolling them tight against the wood. They toss a
flaming torch onto the roof and then walk away.
The logs are tight against me now and I can’t turn my head to follow
them from hut to hut. I can only hear the screams. Then I hear the chapel’s
heavy door crack. There is a whistle and others arrive from the longboat,
striding against the water in the gully. They rush towards the chapel with
their heavy swords held high. Moments later they return with the cross and
the candlesticks, passing them from hand to hand, their faces lit up by the
reflecting metal. Only one of them has blood on his sword. They toss a torch
inside.
They move on to our hut and shed their furs at our door. The vast hides
drop in soft lumps on the mud. They talk among themselves and agree on an
order before kicking the door down in a shower of splinters. I hear mother
scream. Then there is the sound of ripping cloth. And then just laughter,
jeers, grunting. First one man comes out and then another and then another,
tugging at their calf skins, refastening their swords. They pick up their furs
and splash their faces from the trough outside. Then they move on to the
next hut and the next woman. I can hear my mother crying. I can hear others
start to scream. I want to shout for Hilde but I bite my hand instead. As the
baymen walk away, slowly, I push the logs out one by one until I can squeeze
from my hole. I pick up the axe with both hands and creep to our door,
dragging it at my side. I turn to see Aethel’s hut already in flames.
I see mother’s ankles first. Then I see the smeared legs and the streaks
leading up her thighs. The dress is up over her head but I still know it is her.
I know my mother. I recognise her sobs. A man stands above her, pushing
flesh back into his trousers. He looks at me and lets it swing free again. I stare
at it. He laughs and steps towards me.
Mother’s legs twitch and I watch the muscles tense in the backs of her | 297
thighs. She stands up as the bayman tries to corner me. I see the torn dress
fall from mother’s body. She is flecked in blue and red.
The bayman pushes the long blond hair away from his face as he spreads
his arms and shepherds me towards the straw, all the time smiling. He wipes
his mouth with the back of his hand and I can hear it scrape across the bristles
in his beard. There is something familiar in his eyes. He talks to me but I do
not recognise the words. I walk backwards, holding the axe in front of me,
its head dragging along the ground. He laughs and reaches forward but I
jump back against the wall. I feel the cold stone against my neck. I can feel
the straw bedding under my feet. He reaches for my throat and I try to lift
the axe. But I can’t.
He bends me back onto the bedding. His thick fingers clasp around the
back of my neck and the straw scratches against my face. I feel the cold on
my back as he rips away my dress. My mother screams and out the corner of
my eye I see her make for the hearth. She hurls one of the bowls and his thick
forearm bats it away. Pepper sprays over his furs. He shakes his head and
sneezes and sneezes and sneezes. As his eyes close against the spice-burn, he
drops to his knees. Next to the bedding is the axe, its handle pointed towards
me. It feels lighter in my hands. I am taller now. I can help.
298 |
Photo: Pierre Daguin
Pierre Daguin
Three Poems
73
Quit the land of animals
legs curve around flabby arses
and the sex comes and goes between lips
worn by humidity.
Hobbled I go on under a leaden sun.
Here and there, a few decrepit palm trees
shed their bark.
Your body, suspended
in the coolness,
shudders
against the piping.
“Tepid and dank”
The state of mind, instant in the blitzkrieg
is a ticket for Mars
and ethical dilemmas
linked to caffeine inflation.
A hail of laughter makes furrows
under your make-up.
Your pitted skin brought a smile to my face.
94
Through the window
A mongoloid bellows your name
suspended from a branch.
(MA - GNO - LIA! - MA - GNO - LIA!)
And you—you bite the coffee table.
| 299
100
A White Wig Adorns my Jacket
Chewed mince on the chopping block
You salivate from the corners of your lips
Deportation of the missile stuck in your arse.
Liquid Vaseline.
I found the lost poems
written in their thousands on scraps of paper
in my straitjacket
between the highway, motor-cross, expressway.
In Nice.
Ballads in the plastic car
at 2 km an hour
Pair of Ray Bans
... and: “let the girl speak” ...
She had hazel eyes
and long blond
eyelashes
“Can I interfere in the discourse?”
300 | plum mouth
and trickle of water.
Translated by Louis Armand.
First published in the PLR 1.2 (2003).
| 301
302 |
Photo: Michal Mecner
Stephan Delbos
Honeymoon
All she left when she left:
a chest X-ray from Arles,
where she died, green-tongued,
lungs gurgling, for two
getaway days. I smoked
at the window, boiled
tea she couldn’t swallow.
Outside, shouting
men and bulls
rumbled like a river flooding
streets to the rubble
stadium of matadors; swordblades in the unconsidered sun
or lamplight I see through her bones.
| 303
Tiny Miracles
Tonight I watched the tiny miracle of street lamps
waking—false stars strung where sunlight
failed as I leaned on a phone booth by a boulevard
thick with numb machines. Tungsten teaches us
darkness falls but rise and burn, yes
nevertheless. Stumbling home on a decade-old dawn,
I saw stoplights blink like beating
hearts, but the bloodshot stare of a high school
drop out all-night gas station cashier shone
lonelier. In youth I did not know the body
is a hollow place we hold a spark. O matchstick
life please keep me lit.
304 |
The Rusted Door
Castaway at a laughter party,
I climbed the fire
escape to the glittering
hull of night sky docked
on city rooftops.
Sunlight seeped
the seam of air
and earth.
A rusted door
on the neighbor roof
disrupted dawn.
Perhaps I was some cheap
champagne Prometheus
that unhinged hour,
but the rusted door
called out like fire.
Spidering across the steep
roof, I reached
the guttered edge.
Paused at the long drop off
to concrete.
.
What malicious, blessed dreamer
pries us from our common sleep
to see the secret
radiance of the ordinary,
and sets us groping
again among rough stones?
.
| 305
I turned back saying
it’s a rusted door.
Shuffled to the dying
party.
.
Every morning, if I wake
in time to watch the ancient
sun flood night’s floating
city,
I feel that door’s dull burn
bolted like a secret in my brain.
306 |
Advent
Oxidized, autumn
slows to stop.
The great freight trains
: trees unload
black air. A cavity
gnaws our ears.
To what do we listen?
The wheeling of seasons.
Riddled with hope,
we pitch makeshift stations
in the grifted, intermittent
awareness we live
to death under a canopy
of nothing.
| 307
This Lighter,
wrapped in plastic decal:
a woman in the forest, breasts
peeking through birch branches,
purchased for kicks at the Indian market
one block from Gallery Manes the night
I got livid vodka drunk
with Ukranians in my building
and came to Globe to meet you
an hour late, blushing,
brash until we walked
riverside under a sober moon
where I cut my finger on a champagne
bottle dropped then blood-stained your pillow
before next morning, my way
home by the brewery, passing a car
horseshoed on a lamp post, just
308 | burned out.
Verdant; A Word
I’ve heard
or understand:
two cigarettes
smoked shirtless,
open window,
drifting curtains,
late April,
Montpelier,
junipers, soft
towers, her
womb bedroom.
Dusk.
| 309
What the Poet Told Me
He’s tired of talk about
poetry’s power of redemption.
Thinks of Rimbaud pissing on Paris
café tables then leaving a tip.
Or Hart Crane folding his overcoat
and hurtling into shark-slit wake.
Even Shelley, gentle soul, stole
two sisters and fled England. Flames
devoured him in Italy. He’s tired
of redemption. Poetry is nothing
but a graceful way to fall.
310 |
Chris Crawford, Ken Nash & Stephan Delbos in the bar
under Nosticovo Divadlo after a reading at the AngloAmerican University, May 2009. Photo: Natalya Dotsenko.
| 311
Lea Hamrlíková, Michael Brennan & Keith Jones, at
Galerie ArtNatur, October 1999. Photo: Clare Wallace.
312 |
Photo: Cory Permack
Danika Dinsmore
a girl in prague is a temporary thing
(14.7.00)
the boy next to me
doesn’t speak english and I speak
not enough czech I offer him
apple gum which he declines
he gives up his window seat
for me a bird hovers
over corn fields grey
clouds loosen rain
there is energy in decision and
direction that lets me get
comfortable in my aloneness
is it that all poets are lonely or
that loneliness is poetic?
I go there it’s different
each time I eat a plum
stop in the street to rub
ashes from my eyes I buy
a bus ticket
| 313
26.7.00
Toyen liked to paint eyes, sad and large
and seashells in cloaks, owls, felines
desire in darks
sex in cartoon humor
in every photograph the intensity
of loneliness makes me kin
as tourists glance and move
some simply here to get
out of the rain
Bernadette says I should be
thankful the way was paved and now
it’s easier to be a woman and an
artist in this world
but I ask her what there’s left
to do how
314 | to say anything
to dent perception
it’s so noisy out there
so automatic
what has become of surprise
I write to say I am coming home
even my spontaneous constructions fall
predictable to friends these days
even I love you
stands in for something else
28.7.00
i’ve attached myself to things again
attracted to the way space
opens up
one flame
that carries me away to burn
in a new direction for a while
last night we cooked fancy meals for ourselves
veggie burgers rice wine greek salad ice cream
with blueberries strong coffee
in the morning omelettes with creamed spinach
and for late lunch blueberry pancakes
in that space of determination bought bus tickets for Split
craving at least one day of sun and beach
for all the dark rainy days
suddenly i’m on vacation
or pre-writing as Bernadette calls it
which is anything you do when you’re
not writing
it’s all about mortality
or why we need to love
i’ve become afraid of flying
been smoking cigarettes instead
there is so much smoking time here
it passes the meantimes between more rational fears
| 315
Mostar, Bosnia (6.8.00)
Mother misses her sons
the after-tragedies of war
people afraid to come home as
what has home done for them?
Father says How can I explain this,
I don’t understand it myself
bank 2 blocks away completely
shelled and gutted. I look from the balcony
notice random shots fired from what
striking off the cement?
today in the heat of sea-side
who can imagine such terror?
everything eases into infiniteness
of water. but back home
history lingers.
316 | Mostar is still divided. Muslim on one side,
Croat on the other. this apartment
stands on the former front line. the young
recover. find love. 4 marriages this
weekend. at 4 AM I wake to hear singing
echoing through the city, the dawn Muslim
service signalling it’s time to put the fires out.
13.8.00
almost full moon over Croatia
you are looking out onto an
orange ocean there are loved
ones in disguise of seahorses
they blink in dreams and bring
you fresh cabbages they storm
several castles and call it a day
you are writing a letter to
your mother who lives in a
pigeon hole you may feed her
nibbles of corn in the courtyard
on a good day you have
forgotten that your life
is a handful of moments that
one day you will join your
family tree in the great rotation
you look this up in a dictionary
and it says: begin here
you order a plate of buttons
and sew them to your sleeve the one
made from a flag that waved
from the chimney signaling your birth
you are dreaming again you wake
to find all your comforts
stolen you start over under
an alias and ask to be relocated
to the seaside
you pick mushrooms and basil
you write a book you
staple all your spare minutes inside.
| 317
Dol, Croatia (11.8.00)
I am so full and so missing
orange stars crickets a town like from
Italian dreams no cars no voices
bats circling under the one street light
tobacco smoke Cassiopeia a sick friend
still air donkey shifting in stall
Adriatic Sea over the hill one week
in Bosnia war stories an owl?
ancient stone church steeple
forever sad strong eastern
European mothers comfortable
medieval towns castles pizza with
shellfish olive trees vineyards
a bottle of the neighbor’s red wine
crickets skinny cats
318 | soldiers with missing limbs Croatian
cigarettes wolves howling?
cities under siege sun burned
arms diving into stepping of off
something climbing a tree scratches
last nights buses buses buses
stone paths sleepy days lovers on
opposite sides of the world dreams
of lovers on opposite sides of the
world rocky beaches
temptations food with the heads still
attached whistles dobra dans
doviđenjas missing teeth topless
bathers Italian tourists in love friends in
train stations friends writing at
3:15 everything to do nothing to do
all the you’s
in me all the me’s in you.
War Story (10.8.00)
Not able to bury the dead
through sniper fire on the
plaza Muslim bodies pile up
a scavenging dog runs through
the streets carrying a human head.
| 319
320 |
David Doubek
Artistic exercises
I used to go to the Café Seaside, which was immediately opposite the theater.
Often I would see actors sitting there after a performance or a rehearsal and
would secretly admire them. They would all come in together, wearing black
suits like they wear in films about paratroopers, and quietly sit down at their
tables. There were so many of them that they would occupy half the room,
but they never made a racket. In fact, they were very much on the quiet
side, as though they were communicating by way of grimaces. They were
perfectly professional and always looked frightened, their bristly beards
outstretched like open arms—not to mention the rather helpless and bashful
motions of their hands and eyes as they drank their coffee. They would arrive | 321
from the theater all smokey and scorched, sometimes even still smoldering.
The director of the company forced them to jump through burning hoops,
as many as five in a row. In a play about an airport, they set fire to one of
the actor’s sleeves with which he then gave signals to the pilot. The actor’s
flaming hands symbolized the semaphore flags. In a different play four
actors, pretending to be sailing on a pirate’s ship, drank burning gin from
an iron cup.
“Artists,” the director would say to everybody before each performance,
gesturing broadly, “must burn on the stage!”
And the actors, frightened, would nod their heads, and many would
reflexively tug on the straps of their black dungarees and then let go.
“Like a torch!” the director would proclaim before nodding at the
pyrotechnicians. The stage would be lit up and the actors would race forward.
The director would grasp the balustrade, puff out his chest and from behind
half-closed eyes observe the dance of fire on the hoops. “Fine bonfires, aren’t
they?” he would then say quietly to the empty backstage.
Translated by G.S. Evans.
Then good fortune was unexpectedly
worked in
Kulhanek was hiking through the mountains. A condor’s cry echoed through
the stone cliffs of a canyon that lay below. In one stretch the trail went along
a narrow rock ledge above the canyon. But Kulhanek was fearless by nature,
and so he continued along it without a second thought. But just as he was
crossing the ledge something in the mass of rocks moved, the ledge gave
way and with a terrible rumbling it brought Kulhanek down with it into
the thousand-meter deep chasm. At first Kulhanek fell silently. “Ahhhh,”
he cried suddenly when he realized what had happened. “AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhAhhhhhhhhhhh,” he continued as he fell with terrible speed
into the hole and it appeared to him that his fate was sealed.
Then good fortune was unexpectedly worked in. From somewhere came
a wind which carried Kulhanek along for a thousand kilometers until he
finally landed on a haystack. And all this without any injury, besides one
small scrape. Strange, that. By total chance he was borne along by a stout
322 | wind for some thousand kilometers, and then his fall to the ground was
cushioned by something so nice and soft that he wasn’t smashed to pieces.
Kulhanek walked away from the haystack, pulling pieces of hay from his
hair and pants. He reflexively pulled his rucksack up to his shoulder and
furtively looked all around, even up to the sky, but didn’t see a living soul.
He felt more confused than he had ever felt before.
Translated by G.S. Evans.
Alexandra Büchler, Louis Armand, Jeffrey
Young, Natasza Goerke, Gail Jones, at Svět
Knihy, 2002. Photo: Hana Vojáčková.
At the old Globe bookstore, Štěpánka and
Brad DeLange. Photo: Gregory Linington.
| 323
324 |
Young woman at the Marquis de Sade. Photo: John Bruce Shoemaker
Daniela DraZanová
Ezra’s Bar
When I was six, I thought that we had travelled to America on a spaceship,
docked on the shores of Lake Erie, and descended into the mighty city of
Cleveland. How the others made their pilgrimage, I wasn’t sure, but their
entrance had to be at least as dramatic as ours. Like us, these fellow aliens
had touched down in middle-class, steel-working, blue-collar Cleveland to
begin a new life. “Seven dollars and you,” my mother would say, “that was
all we had.”
Many of the aliens colonized the area near a restaurant-bar every-one
called Ezra’s, although the neon sign on the pole above the window read:
| 325
“A Bit of Bohemia.” Our first apartment was three bus stops on the local line
from Ezra’s. My mother worked as a cook there. If one of her new friends,
Slávka or Eva, couldn’t sit with me, she made me change into a “nice” dress
and took me with her. Proudly I carried my bookbag full of crayons, puzzles,
books, and Barbie dolls onto the bus.
At Ezra’s I sat in the back room, intended for dinners but rarely used,
opened the bag and stacked all my cargo on the table. Occasionally I coloured,
but most of the time I would skip into the kitchen to watch my mother knead
the dough for rolls of knedlíky or stir big pots of sauce and soup. Just before
closing time, my father would have a beer at the bar with Ezra and then drive
us home in our first car, a Ford Grand Torino which I christened the “Yellow
Monster.”
When I was ten we moved, and like many other Czech families, settled
deep in the suburbs: it took two buses and an hour’s worth of time to travel
to Ezra’s. Our new Plymouth made the trip in forty minutes. Much of the
community had dispersed, attempting to blend in with the native inhabitants,
but my father returned to Ezra’s at least once a week. “Just to have a beer
among friends,” he would say, but my mother was worried.
The summer I was fifteen, plump and wearing thick glasses that I thought
hid everything from everybody, my best and only friend Emily moved to
Pittsburgh, leaving me endless sunny and humid days to fill.
Vlasta and Iveta, the only other Czech kids I knew, had both worked at
Ezra’s before they left for college: cleaning tables, washing greasy pots, and
breading butterfly slabs of pork for the cook.
That summer, Mom was sorting ball bearings at the Bearman factory and
my father was a foreman at the steel factory downtown until they laid off
six hundred workers. By the time we drove to the local stadium to see the
fireworks on the Fourth of July, he had been home five weeks. I was stretched
out on the couch staring into a book when I heard an explosion of rapid- fire
Czech corning from the kitchen, aimed at my mother.
“What do you care about what people say?” my father shouted.
My mother replied in a soft, unassuming murmur.
“I just go to drink. What’s the matter with you!” His voice boomed.
I put the book aside, sat up on the couch and leaned forward.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. All I want to do is sit with my friends
and have a beer,” he said.
The pitch of her voice rose and fell evenly, yet there was something odd
in its tone: plaintive, pleading. “That’s complete nonsense and you know it,”
he said.
I stood up and crept toward the kitchen.
“All right, I won’t go there anymore.”
There was a pause. I stood still, listening. I thought I heard my father
breathing. Big deep breaths ending in a slight wheeze, caused by the thick
326 | steam and smoke rising from the cauldrons of molten steel from the factory.
“Kateřina wants to work at Ezra’s,” my mother said into the silence
between them.
“What, that no good place? The men will tell her pathetic stories that they
think are funny.”
“Vlado, she wants a job.”
“She doesn’t need a job. She’s too young.”
Leaning against the doorway, I peeked in. My father’s work shirt hung
limply from his broad shoulders. His reddish blond hair curled around the
slack collar. My mother stood to the right of him, her long, straight blonde
hair let loose from its usual ribbon. She twisted and untwisted the gold chain
she wore around her neck.
“It’ll be really good for me, you’ll see. You’re the one that said I shouldn’t
flop around the house reading all the time,” I said louder than I intended as
I stepped into the kitchen.
My father turned around. His lips were pressed tightly together so that
the lines that ran from his nose to the edge of his mouth like parentheses
deepened.
“She’ll earn her own money,” my mother said. “It’ll help us this year.”
“Shut up, Alena. You’re always talking about money,” he said. “I don’t
want her working there.”
“I practically grew up there, come on. It’s either Ezra’s or McDonald’s.”
“She’ll know what it means to work.” My mother moved closer to him.
“Not there, not with those people.”
She reached over and rested her hand lightly on his upper arm.
“They’re your friends, aren’t they?”
He shrugged her hand away, exchanging glances with us.
“A man loses his job and women think they can comer him like an animal.
If I’m not there to watch over her, she doesn’t go.”
“Vlado, please.”
“No.”
And we stood there, like we always did: my mother with the strands
of her hair partially covering the curve of her mouth and her reproachful
brown eyes; a face he ignored, but which I thought beautiful, and I, pushing
my glasses up my nose, looking at her thinking about him. At some point,
I stared into a boiling pot of soup on the stove, filled with a beef bone and
a large bobbing onion, conscious that my mother’s eyes were locked on the
same spot. She stretched out her hand to turn down the flame as my father
strode out of the kitchen, manoeuvring his large body so that it would not
touch either of us.
The following Saturday, alone in the doorway of Ezra’s, the nervous
twitch of my stomach rose up through my whole body. I waited there for a
long time, matching what I saw with my memories, letting my eyes adjust to
the tobacco-brown light of the room. The room smelled of cigarettes. A thin | 327
cloud of smoke hovered near the low ceiling. Above the long wooden bar
hung a picture of Švejk, a rotund soldier with a button nose, holding a beer
mug topped with swirling foam. The print behind the glass had wrinkled,
the glass had yellowed from smoke. Staring at the back counter stocked with
bottles of whiskey, cognac, vodka, and schnapps, I wondered how many of
them my father had sampled.
Behind the bar , Ezra was washing beer mugs and singing to himself.
During my visits to the bar with my mother, when I wasn’t colouring in the
back room or getting in the way in the kitchen, I often crawled up onto the
bar stool and ordered a beer from Ezra, taking care to imitate the solemn,
business-like tone of my father. Ezra always laughed at this. “ A beer for the
little one,” he’d say and fill a mug with pop. For good measure he’d add a
coloured straw and a plastic stirrer with an animal head or a funny shape on
its end which I’d run and show my mother as if it were a prize I had won.
On rare occasions, my father, carrying a mug of pop for me and his own
beer, joined me at my table in the back room. He’d sit down, set the mug in
front of me, and press his finger to his lips: “This is secret, don’t tell your
mother.” He’d tell me how he got the big scar on his knee trying to jump on a
moving train, how his maminka had always beat him when he returned late
from school, and how he was almost struck by lightning on the day he first
met my mother.
Ezra was still singing when I walked over to the bar to ask about a job. At
first I spoke in English, and it wasn’t until I grabbed his soapy arm and used
my hesitant, barely grammatical Czech, that he even stopped to look at me.
“Ezra, it’s me, Kateřina. Vladimír and Alena Doležal’s daughter.
Don’t you remember?” I loosened my grip and stepped back. “I was a lot
shorter then, and skinnier.”
Ezra looked like he was about to shake his head, when he suddenly leaned
forward. “You don’t look like either one of them.”
I laughed. “They used to argue over whose side of the family I took
after.”
Ezra picked up a glass and ran it under the faucet. “I don’t know if we
need…”
“There’s been a lot of layoffs this summer, at the factory. I could use a job,”
I said, lowering my voice, making it tremble a little.
“Come by tomorrow and talk to Katja. She’s the one that runs this place,”
he said, turning around and placing the mug on the drying rack behind
him.
On the bus the next morning, I rehearsed what I’d say to Katja. I had
never met her. She had married Ezra the year we moved to the suburbs, but I
knew about her. On nights that my father worked the late shift, my mother’s
friend Slávka would come and visit. My mother would make gin and tonics
328 | for both of them, mixing the drinks with one of the coloured stirrers that I
had been awarded by Ezra. I usually sat in the kitchen, my textbooks and
papers spread before me, studying, but I was distracted by the clinking of
the stirrers against the thin Bohemian glass and by the secretive timbre of
their voices.
Ezra’s new wife had disembarked in Cleveland as a divorcee from
Germany. Within six months she had delivered the mild, unassuming Ezra
from bachelorhood and seized control of the bar: drinks were watered down,
and sauces were skimped on. She wore tight white blouses and high heels.
Hairspray stiffened her frizzy curls into place and accentuated the blonde
glints in her hair.
“I’m sure Jindra is sleeping with that bitch,” Slávka said. “Did you see the
way he was falling all over her at the party last week?”
My mother said, “He was just a little drunk, that’s all.”
“You’re altogether too nice,” Slávka said. “It’ll get you into trouble one
day.”
Ezra stood behind the bar, and Katja was handing him a stack of drink
trays when I tugged on the brass handle and walked in.
“So you’re the one Ezra told me about,” Katja said, leading me by the
elbow to a table where we pulled out chairs and sat down. “And you’re
Vladimir Doležal’s daughter?”
“Yes, but “ During the pause, we looked at each other. She took in my thin
blonde hair and my thick glasses. I tried to appear confident.
From the way she held my gaze with her own, I knew Katja was afraid of
nothing: guns, dogs, border guards, even any stray communists, I imagined,
who might have gotten in her way.
“But he can’t know that I’m working here,” I finally said.
“What?”
“I want a job, please.” I tried to copy her expression, look at her directly,
but all I really did was thrust out my chin and cross my arms.
Katja, leaning back into her chair, said nothing.
“He says I’m too young, but I want to work. Here. For the summer.”
“What am I supposed to do if he sees you?”
“He won’t.”
“Do you think we’re going to hide you in the attic?” Katja smiled.
The smile lifted the corners of her mouth and pushed her cheeks into
small, round, rouge-covered apples. Her hazel eyes glowed an approachable
amber in the dim light. I uncrossed my arms and rested them on the table.
“He told my mother he wouldn’t come here anymore. It’ll be all right.”
Katja sat up straighter. “I’ll work very hard, Katja, you’ll see—really
will.”
“I don’t know.” She was going to refuse. I saw it in her face when she
stood up, pulling down the black skirt which clung to her thighs.
“My mother says okay for me. Really.” I also stood up. She took a few | 329
steps toward the bar. I grabbed her wrist and whispered fiercely, “He’s not
coming anymore. She thinks he drinks too much. Do you?”
I looked into her eyes, feeling a warm film slip down over my own.
She paused for a moment, then stretched out her hand. “You’re going to have
to pull this back into a ponytail. We can’t have it falling into the food,” she
said, stroking my hair.
Katja walked me to the door. “One more thing, Kateřina,” she said as I
blinked in the white light of afternoon. “Don’t tell anyone whose daughter
you are.” My scalp tingled from the light brush of her nails.
On Saturdays, I would weave in between the tables in the front and back
rooms, gathering up plates with the silverware crossed European-style.
I mastered the art of carrying six beer mugs at a time and developed the
ability to balance a tower of empty bread baskets in the crook of my arm. I
wore the purchases I had made at the local mall with the first envelope of
cash I received: a black skirt that hugged my hips and a blouse that I couldn’t
fill the same way Katja filled hers.
“That’s not the way you do it,” Katja said one Saturday. “Take the cloth
and wipe it around the pan evenly.” She didn’t take the pan into her own
hands, but stood over me, occasionally patting her frizzy curls back into
position.
“I thought I told you not to talk to Mr Hrbol,” she said, frowning as I tried
to wipe the cloth the right way.
“He called me over and said he had something important to say.”
“That man has nothing to say after his first three beers, believe me.”
“He said he had a really good story. One that every Czech girl should
know.”
“Let me tell you, I’ve heard them all. There’s nothing you need to know
from him or anybody.” She stared at one of her lethal-looking fingernails.
Mr Hrbol, who confessed to forty-eight but must have been closer to sixty,
always sat on the far left stool at the bar, nursing his nightly beer. Wearing the
same brown pants and faded blue sweater he wore every day, he leaned his
elbows against the counter and occasionally sat up to comb his hair, tossing
his few remaining strands over his shining scalp. The more he drank, the
farther down his hair slipped back to its natural position on the right side of
his head.
When Katja wasn’t looking, Mr Hrbol waved his hand at me. He sat next to
Jirka who was a tall and lanky man with thick, slightly greasy strips of brown
hair Calling over his forehead and large nose. Beer affected his sinuses, and
you could hear him sniff and snortle throughout the bar.
I walked over to Mr Hrbol who casually put his arm around my shoulder
330 | and began:
“In a bar in Prague, on ... oh, I forget the street now. It’s not important.
It was the best little bar I ever graced the tables of. The beer was cheap, the
company was good. And there, I met ...” he paused for dramatic effect, took
a sip of beer “... the most beautiful girl in the world. Her name was Dana.”
“No, no, he has it all wrong,” Jirka said. “Alička was the most beautiful.
She worked behind the counter in a vegetable store in Cheb. I fell in love
with her when I was thirteen.”
“Dana was tiny, with small white hands and thick black hair,” Mr Hrbol
said.
“Alička was big-boned and blonde with deep blue eyes.”
I peered into Jirka’s face. I had taken to forgetting my glasses at home so
that his smile blurred into a partially wistful, partially ironic arc. My father
sometimes had that same look when he talked about being able to go home to
Cheb one day to see his mother, to visit the friends he left behind. I pictured
him tucking his feet, clad in a pair of large tennis shoes from Sears, around
the metal legs of the bar, the way Jirka was doing now. I saw the square
knuckles of his hand curving around the handle of his beer mug.
“How come you remember them as the most beautiful?” I asked, because
it suddenly became important to know.
“Dana was special because …”
“The way her voice sang when she talked to you. The way she moved like
she was part of the earth. The way her smile made you feel like you were the
only one in her universe,” finished Jirka.
“But you didn’t marry them? They’re not with you now?”
“That’s why they’re the most beautiful,” Mr Hrbol said, patting his, hair
into place. “Because you leave them behind.”
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would help Herbert the cook in the kitchen,
mostly stacking trays of pre-cooked food into the large chrome refrigerator.
I’d also stir the goulash soup for him, staring down into the mini-vortex I
was creating, seeing my mother standing above the same pot, gripping the
wooden spoon, her face flushed paprika rose, the steam dampening the
edges of the scarf that tied back her hair. Afterwards, the image vivid in my
mind, I’d walk to the kitchen door, staring out the porthole at the crowd in
the front room. Several times, I thought I saw the reddish halo of my father’s
hair on a man sitting at the bar, lifting a glass for a refill. It wasn’t ever him,
but I ducked beneath the window anyway, my heart thumping beneath the
small lumps of my new breasts until Herbert called me back.
My mother never visited Ezra’s while I was there, but she kept our secret.
She would tell my father I was at the library, the movies, or at a friend’s
house, and he never questioned either of us. I think she might have even told
him I was dating. I asked my mother why she was helping me, and she said,
“Because your father isn’t always right,” with a sharpness I’d never heard
before. I thought it was because he haunted the house, a silent, morose figure | 331
hiding behind his newspaper, circling the want ads. No one was hiring, even
if he did have his green card.
Only once when I came home late from Ezra’s, having forgotten to change
out of my black skirt, did he seem to acknowledge my presence.
“You’re keeping very busy this summer, Kateřina, no?” he said. I looked
at the floor and at the blobs of colour on the TV screen. “I’ve made lots of
new friends,” I said.
“And these new friends, are they good to you?” He held a beer can in his
hand. My stomach rumbled and rolled.
“They’re interesting, my friends. I’m learning a lot.” I didn’t dare glance
at his face. I felt if I looked into his eyes, like I had into Katja’s, I would tell
him everything.
“You be careful. You may not always like the things you learn,” he said
and turned back to the TV.
He was absorbed in some sit-com when I emerged from my room wearing
my glasses, dressed in cutoffs and one of his old work shirts.
The canned laughter was the only sound in the house, and he seemed to
have sunken deep into the cushions of his chair.
In early August my father signed up for a night course in computer
programming, and my parents fought over the added expense. He went
anyway, dressed in crisp, clean shirts and slamming the door after him for
the first few weeks. My mother worked overtime, picking up extra shifts
whenever she could. At night, I massaged her neck and shoulders and shared
Katja’s gossip.
“I heard Eva is having an affair with Venca Hudák,” I said.
“It can’t be him. He’s living with Milena. And besides, he’s not her typetoo short.” My mother shook her head.
“Miloš found out and smashed all the windows of Venca’s car.”
“Slávka thinks it’s Jirka she’s having an affair with. She told me Miloš
stole all of Jirka’s hubcaps. Can you imagine what your father would do?”
“No, I can’t.”
For a moment each of us tried to picture my father arriving to find his
newly-waxed Plymouth even slightly dented. We laughed, and my mother
reached behind her to pat my arm.
“Katja says Eva also went to Milan Klička’s apartment.” The muscles in
her neck tightened.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” I kept my hands still on her neck, waiting. She sighed.
“I knew a boy named Milan once. He loved me very much.”
“But you chose tata. Because you loved him more?”
“I thought so at the time.” She leaned her head forward, and I kneaded the
332 | muscles gently; the bones beneath her hands suddenly seemed very frail.
Saturday nights were the busiest time for Ezra’s. Katja, Herbert the cook,
Elena the waitress and I scurried here and there, washing, cleaning, serving,
and smiling. Those nights were my favourite, not only because they hid the
monotony of the week, but because I could just tilt my head and people’s
lives would fill my ears. And when I had finished walking between the tables
and clearing most of the plates and when all the patrons finally left, that’s
when the real nights began.
Mr Hrbol and I, Jirka with his battered guitar and Katja sat at a small blue
table near the bar. Empty beer mugs stood at the centre of the table as well
as a tray I hadn’t gotten to, filled with half-eaten salami sandwiches and
dirty plates covered with cigarette ashes and butts. I glanced at the mess and
thought about the extra cost of my father’s classes. Jirka was tapping on his
guitar and humming to himself.
“Wouldn’t you like it if I came in tomorrow to help clean up?” I asked Katja
who had just lifted her legs up on to a chair and was rubbing her kneecaps.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said.
“What about Monday?”
Jirka stopped humming. Both he and Mr Hrbol stared at Katja.
“Don’t worry. We can manage just fine without you,” she said, her fuchsia
fingernails continuing their concentric circles on her kneecaps.
Mr Hrbol adjusted his falling hair and cleared his throat.
“Did I ever tell you how I came to America?” I shook my head.
“My brother Viktor and I. We took a bus to Vienna. A tour, you see,
something I had always wanted to do, but all along we intended to escape.”
“I don’t want to listen to this again,” Katja said, suddenly looking up at
him.
“Would it be better if I came on Tuesday?” I asked.
Jirka began to tune his guitar, strumming the strings, bending down to
listen to the sound.
“No, I don’t think so,” Katja said.
“Kateřina wants to hear the story.” Mr Hrbol winked at me.
“You old fart, she’s only doing it to be nice,” Ezra yelled from behind the
bar. “She must have heard it fifty times already.”
“Wednesday?”
“What do you think? Do you think I shit money?” Katja said, dropping
her legs from the chair, the heels of her shoes scraping against the floor. I
looked into her face, but she shifted her eyes away from mine.
For a long moment, the only sound in the room came from the discordant
notes of Jirka’s guitar. I watched him twist the pegs, thinking I could actually
see the strings tightening. We wouldn’t be able to sing if one of them snapped.
Mr Hrbol cleared his throat again.
“I was young then, a couple years older than you, I guess, but not much.
| 333
I didn’t know what I’d get when I got to America.”
“A beat-up Chevrolet, dirty streets, Nixon, and a steel factory,” Jirka said.
“None of us knew,” said Mr Hrbol.
Ezra walked over with his hands full of beers. I took one. He sat down
next to Katja, crossing his large arms and resting them on his belly.
“When I was on that bus, I thought I was going to the land of freedom.”
“Yeah, freedom to be poor, the immense freedom of having no one care
about you,” Jirka said.
“There are good things here, too.” I felt as if I were the only defender of
my country. Mr Hrbol leaned back in his chair. Ezra looked at me. So did
Katja. My face felt warm, and I leaned over to swallow some beer.
“My brother Viktor had this way. I don’t know if it was his smile or his
voice,” Mr Hrbol continued. “Whatever it was, he could charm oranges from
a storekeeper that swore he didn’t have any. Strangers gave him chocolate
when he was just a child.”
“He was good-looking, I bet,” Jirka said.
“He was, but that wasn’t it either. Women loved him, but men did too.
They helped him fix his motorcycle, brought him spare parts from West
Germany, even offered him fish they had caught at the local reservoir.”
“So what happened already ,” Ezra wiped beer from his moustache.
Katja sighed and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into Mr Hrbol’s face.
“Viktor charmed the tour guide into giving us our passports. One minute
I was on a bus filled with tourists singing to pass the time away. The next
minute the bus is in line to pass through border control, and Viktor asks to be
let outside to take a leak. The bus driver opens the door. Just opens the door
for him, and Viktor grabs me.”
“So you ran,” I said, smiling at him.
“We dodged between cars until we came to a field.”
Mr Hrbol’s voice broke. I knew the story. I imagined this youth, Viktor,
this golden boy, racing across an open field filled with wild flowers, pinecovered, snow-capped mountains rising majestically in front of him like in
The Sound of Music. I could feel his breath coming out in short, sharp gasps.
And then the shot and the soldiers, and a young Mr Hrbol and Viktor trying
to run faster than ever before. Mr Hrbol ran through the field until it seemed
to him that his heart would tear into two. His brother Viktor died on the field
that day, and Mr Hrbol had never forgiven himself.
And just as the moistness appeared in the furrows surrounding Mr
Hrbol’s eyes, Jirka’s strumming became something else. Music poured forth
until even Mr Hrbol tried to sing, his voice hoarse with emotion while we
drank and sang his pain into the dull ache it always was. Somehow in those
brief moments, his pain and their longing became mine too; I was Czech, and
I belonged there in Ezra’s bar, among them.
I didn’t know the words to a lot of the songs we sang. Jirka liked tramp
334 | songs, the kind that, he told me, burst into being on open roads or late at
night by the campfire. I mouthed the words, trying to keep the unfamiliar
syllables in my brain long enough to remember them.
Katja did not sing, instead her eyes roamed over and onto every one of
us until they finally came to rest on me. I sipped my beer and felt slightly
queasy.
“I’m sick and tired of you telling lies to this child,” Katja said, standing
up from her chair. Jirka placed his hand flat against the strings. “Přemysl
Hrbol, your brother Viktor lives like a prince in Prague and complains that
you don’t send him enough money.”
I felt Mr Hrbol turn to me as I stared into the fading foam of my beer.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“Stop it. Look at her, can’t you see that she believes every word you
say?”
“Well, Katja, we know how much you have her best interests at heart,” Mr
Hrbol said, slamming his glass onto the table. I lifted my face slowly, looking
at him first, then at Katja. She was suddenly quiet, gazing at Mr Hrbol as if
she might murder him in his sleep. Ezra headed back to the bar.
“You’re a stupid old fool,” Katja said to Mr Hrbol.
And then I was part of nothing. Their faces were swollen, their eyes glassy
from too much beer. I heard a dull, hollow thud as Jirka set his guitar down
on the next table. Katja reached over to stroke my hair, but I pulled away.
Mr Hrbol would not look at me.
“Is it true about your brother?”
“Kateřina, you are such a beautiful young girl,” Mr Hrbol said.
“Is it true?”
“Well, a part of it is a little of how it happened.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
“It was such a wonderful story.”
“I believed it. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“That’s what made it so wonderful.” Mr Hrbol shrugged his shoulders
and took a great swallow of beer. I wanted to run from the table like Mr
Hrbol’s imaginary Viktor, run into a wide open field to ease the sudden pang
in my chest and the fear in my stomach. I looked over at the bar and even
Švejk seemed to be laughing at me.
“It’s nothing but stories you’ve invented, that’s all.” I shrugged my
shoulders. “I’ve got to go, or I’ll miss the bus.” When Katja walked me to the
door, I heard Jirka playing his guitar. A soft, slow ballad. She offered to drive
me home, but I just shook my head. “Didn’t I tell you not to talk to them?
You can’t go around believing everything you hear,” she said, closing the
door behind me.
The next morning, while my father was still sleeping and my mother was
buttering a slice of toast and waiting for the kettle to boil, I told her I wasn’t
| 335
working at Ezra’s anymore.
“What happened? Tell me the truth. Did you see your father?” she asked,
lowering her voice. A great clump of hateful words rose in my throat, but
I did not speak them. Instead, I moved mechanically past her to open the
cupboard. The kettle began to whistle as I poured grounds of instant coffee
into the mug I had found.
“He doesn’t belong there with those people. And neither do I.” I lifted the
kettle off the stove and made my first cup of coffee thick and black, stirring it
calmly as she hovered around me.
“What happened? Tell me.” I felt her hand brush my shoulder, but I
shrugged it away.
“How am I going to make any new friends if I’m working at Ezra’s all the
time?”
“I’m sorry,” she said as I left the kitchen with the mug, careful to manoeuvre
around her, avoiding any contact with her robe-clad body.
She looked tired; there were blue circles under her eyes. Her voice never
rose above a whisper.
I carried the coffee into my room and slumped down onto the yellow
patchwork quilt my grandmother had sewn, sitting cross-legged, sipping the
bitter liquid, staring at my painted yellow walls. I hated my mother; I hated
the people at Ezra’s; I hated my father for being right.
As I sat there, the sun blazed in through the window, casting the room in
an agonizing golden glow. When I made myself swallow the last mouthful
of coffee, I realized that I had to return to Ezra’s to pick up my money for
the week. I imagined them laughing at me, knowing I had believed their
romantic, fabricated tales. The room was so bright it hurt my eyes, and I
closed them to confront my shame in the darkness.
That Monday night I took the bus to Ezra’s for the last time. My mother,
looking worried, offered to drive me, but my father had taken the Plymouth
to his computer class. When she suggested she should go with me, I refused.
I watched rivers of rain stream down the windows and traced their journey
on the glass with my finger and listened to the rhythmic movement of the
windshield wipers.
And then I was standing in the stairwell, water running through my hair
, streaking my glasses, running over my face. The rain had stained the wood
of the building a deep brown-red, and the “A Bit of Bohemia” sign creaked
in the wind as it swung back and forth on its metal pole. I pulled open the
handle and stood in the doorway, breathing heavily.
I think I expected to see Ezra’s differently, but everything was the same.
Miloš and Venca played cards at a table in the front room with Milena leaning
on Venca’s shoulder, looking at his hand. Mr Hrbol sat on his usual stool
talking to Jirka, their voices merging into the general murmur of conversing
people. Ezra stood behind the tap. I heard a few shouts from the back room.
336 | Eva was flirting with some young man. Franta held Jirka’s guitar in his lap.
No one glanced in my direction.
And then, in the far corner, I saw him. He wasn’t drinking; he wasn’t
holding a beer in his hand. Instead he had both arms wrapped around Katja’s
waist. His face was bent low to hers, and he was whispering something in her
ear. She was smiling. I slumped against the doorjamb and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, he was gone, lost in the murmur of Czech
voices soaked with mugs of beer and glasses of whiskey and vodka. But then
I heard the boom of my father’s voice asking Ezra for a beer.
“Did I ever tell you about the most beautiful girl in the world?” Mr Hrbol
said to him.
Someone was laughing as I ran out into the rain.
Eva
Miloš is a big man, his belly slung low on his hips from too much beer but I
liked when it slapped into mine. Big loud slaps that shook the bed and made
the neighbours in our first apartment pound on the wall.
In the beginning, he only hit me when he came back from Ezra’s bar, when
he tripped on the steps and couldn’t find the doorknob, when the apartment
was strange and he couldn’t remember where we put the furniture. Miloš
was a boxer before he went into the Army. Every time we rented another
apartment, the first thing we did was hang up the picture of him in black
shorts with the gloves tied tightly around his wrists, taken at his first fight.
When he came home from Ezra’s and found me sitting on the couch waiting
for him, he’d circle me, shifting his weight back and forth from one leg to
another, waiting for me to open my mouth. His face resembled the one
captured by the photograph: his eyes half-closed and puffy, his lips stretched
tightly across his teeth.
“I heard Pavel say you were a slut. Are you a slut Eva? Why is the
apartment a mess? The dog’s hungry. Where’s my dinner?” And no matter
what I said or how still I sat, his arms would curl up in front of his chest, and | 337
his fists would tighten and I’d close my eyes and let him win.
When I opened my eyes again, he’d still be standing there, his arms
swinging loose at his sides. I’d lead him to our small bedroom and unbuckle
the belt, unbutton the shirt, unzip the jeans. In the bed, he’d curve his heavy
body towards me beneath the blanket, reaching for my breast with a tentative
hand. He wanted so much for us. He would buy me a house, he said, a big
house like his parents had. I deserved it.
It only happened once a month or so. It wasn’t that bad.
The women who stood beside me on the assembly line, their fingers
pinched red from packing fish hooks into boxes, thought it was bad. They’d
never tell me to my face, but I know they talked about the bruise on my
cheek at lunchtime or when they huddled in the smoking room lighting each
other’s cigarettes. “What a husband she has. What does she do to make him
hit her?”
I didn’t wash the curtains. Mounds of cigarettes filled the ashtrays. The
dog needed a bath. The dishes sat in the sink for a week so that when I
lifted a plate, a roach scampered out and disappeared behind a canister of
flour. Things would change, Miloš said. We saved our money. He bought us
a house.
It was a small house with a bricked-in front and aluminium siding along
the sides and back. Miloš picked it out himself and didn’t tell me about it.
It had an apple orchard, twenty-five trees. I let the apples fall to the ground
and rot.
But when we first moved in, I bought brand new furniture: a beige
upholstered couch and a glass-topped coffee table for the living room, a
brass bed and a princess vanity for the bedroom. I covered the bed with a
white comforter, pink pillows, and a flounce of white lace which just brushed
the shag carpet. And when the house was finished, when there were new
copper pots in the kitchen, and fluffy pink towels with matching carpets in
the bathroom, I thought that maybe we could be the people we wanted to be
when we first saw the tip of the Terminal Tower through the clouds.
The first time we made love on top of the new white comforter; my head
sank into pink pillows that still smelled of plastic wrap and the store I bought
them in. Miloš kissed me between my legs; a kiss so deep and so final that
I thought he really meant it. I thought that everything would be easier; that
he would know what I meant when I said I was lonely, that the women at
work would talk to me about something other than the weather, that I would
speak English and the lady behind the counter in the grocery store would
understand, and that the wives of the men who drank at Ezra’s with Miloš
would stop accusing me of sleeping with their husbands.
The next morning, I woke up with Miloš’s head resting on my chest. I
moved his head onto the pillow and stood naked before the window. Miloš
338 | slid out of bed and stood behind me, pushing my body against the glass
until my nipples pressed into it. I watched the dog darting between the apple
trees, his tail waving behind him like a feathered fan. The grass needed to
be cut. I would dig a plot for a garden like my mother’s behind the house,
tomorrow.
Then Miloš decided we would throw a party. He didn’t even hit me when
I said I didn’t want to. We had held parties before, in the second apartment
off Prospect Avenue, the street with the whores, and the movie marquee with
SEX spelled out in red neon. There was a group of us Czechs who all arrived
in Cleveland about the same time. We’d buy beer and someone would bring
whiskey. I’d make pots of potato salad that I’d spread on slices of French bread
and decorate with salami and ham slices. Jirka would bring his guitar and
we’d sing tramp songs until we were drunk with homesickness. And while
Miloš sat on the couch with his arms around someone’s wife, I’d stumble into
the bathroom with another man, and he’d lean me up against the sink and
fuck me, watching his own face twist and his eyes grow bigger in the mirror
above my head.
The day of the party, I greeted everyone at the door. I was wearing a new
dress and had washed my hair. The husbands kissed me and their wives
tugged on their arms, pulling them in toward the table Miloš had set up as a
bar. Jaromil the doctor was there with his wife Marketa, so was Jan, the owner
of the Prague Castle restaurant and Olina, Ladislav and Alena, Slávka and
Jindra, Venca and Milena. About 30 people crowded into the living room,
listening to the latest Supraphon record my mother sent me.
Later, the women stood together in the kitchen, nibbling at sandwiches
and sipping their drinks. I knew that tomorrow they would call each other
on the phone and tear our new house apart just like Honza tore the fabric of
the couch with the keys he chained to his back pocket, and ruin us the way
Karel did when he threw up on the bed and left a stain I couldn’t wash out.
They would sit on their couches drinking weak coffee and say here was
a man that America couldn’t help. I heard he beats her. Did you see how the
dog was afraid of him? How about those Happy Hooker books on the shelf in
their bedroom?
I woke up after the party with a film of whiskey on my tongue and teeth.
There were bottles all over the kitchen and plates piled up on the table in
the living room. Franta, who had just been deposited in Cleveland the week
before, lay crumpled up on the couch.
Miloš was the first to make friends with the dps. He’d invite them to the
house, hand them a beer and wrapping this thick, strong arm around their
shoulders, tell them all his stories: how he used to win all his fights, how he
was almost promoted to sergeant in the army, how he told the boss a thing
or to at his construction job, and how he had always known he was destined
for great things.
I told them which factories were hiring, who to go to for their green | 339
card, and where they could find English classes at the local high school.
Sometimes, if they drank with him long enough, they’d follow me into the
kitchen to make a pass and when I wouldn’t respond to their grinding hips,
they’d talk about me with the other men at Ezra’s, listen to the stories, and
believe them.
But I wasn’t such a bad wife. There were times when I took Miloš’s fat dick
into my mouth when I really didn’t want to. And when we first bought the
house, we sat together at the kitchen table and talked about the toaster and
the Mr Coffee we would buy, and the tomatoes we would plant in the garden.
Or we would read Xavier Hollander out loud to each other and laugh until
Miloš pushed his chair back from the table, and came over to me, lifting me
up into his strong arms to carry me into the bedroom.
There I would close my eyes and remember how he looked when I first
met him. He was a truck driver, steering the giant camions that carried wine
across Czechoslovakia. He and his partner would pull up in the truck in
front of my house so that Miloš could kiss me in the doorway before they left
on a run. He dressed in blue cotton overalls then, and covered his head with
a brown cap that plastered his blond hair into his eyes.
On nights that he’d take me to dances in the factory in our village, he wore
a brown jacket and tie, and asked me to unbutton the top button of his shirt
after our fifth dance. I remember feeling his warm breath on my forehead
and the blood pumping through the veins on his neck.
It felt good on the bed, with my eyes closed, his belly slapping into mine,
and I could love him then and be everything that a wife should. He rested his
weight on top of me when he was done. I couldn’t breathe but I’d just run my
hands through his sweaty hair, and try to believe that I could really be close
to someone. After a few moments, he’d get up, pull on his jeans, and drive
the Ford over to Ezra’s.
I think I got pregnant the week of that party. I wasn’t being careful and
I kept forgetting to take my pill. I didn’t want kids. The dog was enough. I
used to take him for walks, but he’d pull on the leash and drag me behind
him and I felt like people were watching me behind the lamps in their picture
windows, so I let him out into the orchard and waited until some angry
neighbour brought him back to me. Miloš usually left him alone but one
time, I was in the kitchen washing the dishes, and the dog snuffed under my
skirt, and Miloš kicked him in the ribs with his boot and then leaned me over
the kitchen table and said that the dog didn’t want me as much as he did.
The next morning, the dog rested his head on Miloš’s knee, leaving a trail of
saliva that stayed until I wiped it off with a towel.
Miloš seemed happy about the baby and it’s not that I wasn’t. I was just
tired all the time: I didn’t make the beds, or sweep the kitchen floor. I rubbed
the ashes of my cigarette into the carpet and didn’t vacuum. In the bedroom,
340 | the sun peeked in through venetian blinds covered with dust. When I stood
in front of the mirror in the bathroom, my hair was stringy, and I could feel
folds of fat growing beneath my chin. The baby felt like the bags of welfare
groceries I used to carry home every night from the supermarket, but now
I couldn’t put the weight down. I was 32 years old. I wrote my mother once
a year. When she had me, her mother lived upstairs and rushed down the
stairs at midnight to show my mother how to rub my chest with lard and
cover it with towels for the fever.
But one night before Miloš took the Ford to Ezra’s, he sat down at the
kitchen table with me, took my hands and clasped them between his.
“Son or daughter, it don’t matter. As long as it’s born healthy.”
I looked down at the hands that held mine, they were rough from
working at his construction job: the fingers callused, an arc of dirt under
each fingernail.
“You don’t ever have to worry. I’ll take care of him as well as I do you.
He’ll be an American, you know. We can give him a better life.”
His eyes were wide open: the pupils large and black, the iris’ soft, pale
blue, the whites clear. He wouldn’t let go of my hands until I nodded. I even
smiled a little.
“I love you,” he said as he turned to leave. I wiped my hands on my
duster and thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Miloš boasted about the baby at Ezra’s. When he came home and found
me sitting on the couch reading a baby care book my mother sent, he just
stared at me with his puffy, half-closed eyes and tight-lipped smile. I knew
he didn’t see me, he saw his son curled up in the basketball that was my
stomach. I rested my book there, knowing I was like a bottle that he couldn’t
break, because the liquor would spill onto the carpet and drain away.
The women at the fishhook factory were waiting for me to pop like
champagne on New Year’s Eve. They began to talk to me, asking when it
was due, what I was going to name it, and what colour scheme had I chosen
for its room. They surprised me with a shower.
I oohed and aahed, and said “It is wonderful,” and “thank you” in my
bad accent for the pink crocheted booties, the Donald Duck bibs, and sterile
baby bottles. I tried to make my face as happy as those people on the Price is
Right when they win the big prize, but I couldn’t help wondering how soon
they would change into the women whose murmuring turned into silence
when I walked into the smoking lounge. In the middle of the shower I went
to the ladies room, catching myself in the mirror. There was a big yellow
bow teetering on my head, and I had bags under my eyes. I felt like an old
dress that my mother didn’t wear anymore. She would wrap it in bright new
paper, write my name on the box, and stick it under the Christmas tree.
Miloš brought a pair of bright red boxing gloves, Adidas, and a black
felt cowboy hat to the hospital. He frowned at the nurses that brushed past
him, and scowled at the doctor who turned to me when he spoke. He looked | 341
very small in that white room and he kept looking out of the window at
the parking lot, rubbing the chrome bars at the side of my bed. I named the
baby Josef after Miloš’s father. He liked that. He held Josef in his arms like
something that might escape from him. “He will be tall and strong, Eva. Like
me.”
Miloš waited three weeks after I brought Josef home before he gripped
my arm and pulled me into the bedroom. When Miloš was on top of me, I
asked him to stop, to let me heal, but he kept going until I saw the doctors in
their masks floating above my face. There was one with blue eyes that held
my hand the whole time even when I screamed all the swear words that Petr
Kozak taught me in the hayloft in the back of our house. Miloš stroked my
face. There was blood on the bed. I waited for him to leave and then went to
check on Josef.
I saw that doctor with the blue eyes again when I took Josef in for
his appointment. He looked at the bruise on my face, but he didn’t say
anything.
Soon, Miloš decided to have another party. I wanted to say no, I really did,
but Miloš strutted around the kitchen, writing short lists of things we needed
to buy on the scraps of paper by the phone, and I knew if I opened my mouth,
his hand would come flying out and my knees would shake because I wasn’t
strong enough since the baby came. I was worried that I would cry.
“I’m going to call Venca and Milena,” he told me holding the phone to his
ear, “maybe that’ll wake you up.”
I sat in the chair in Josef’s room and held him to my breast, listening to
him suckle, feeling the weight of his small head in my hand.
Venca and Milena had come to our house about a month before the last
party. Miloš had taken Milena into our bedroom, and Venca and I took the
guest room. I let it happen because I thought that Miloš would finally know
how good he had it with me. Venca had a ring of flesh above his hips and
a widening bald spot in his curly hair, but I pretended he was one of many
boys I used to walk home with after dances and made love to on a raincoat
in the woods. Venca heard Milena moaning, and he stood naked above me,
his dick hanging there like an old purse on a doorknob so I took him in
my mouth until he stiffened, and pulled him down beside me on the bed. I
knew he couldn’t touch me, the same way those boys never could, no matter
how deep they thrust. They thought they were strong, and powerful, and
they had me, but I really had them. They would buy me dinner, take me
dancing, or show up in the doorway with shaven faces and faded flowers,
and sometimes hey even listened when I talked to them. So I got up on top
of Venca, and ground my hips into his belly, watching his face, and I knew I
had him, the same way I had those boys, the same way I had Miloš.
Afterwards we sat on the living room, listening to a Karel Gott record
342 | I had placed on the phonograph, all our smells mingling with that of the
open bottle of Czech rum on the table. Milena sat on one end of the couch,
smoothing her rumpled skirt, her face flushed red. She cleared her throat
and then told me I had a nice house. Miloš tried to speak to Venca, “It’s
an adventure. Just like in Xavier Hollander,” he said, but none of us said
anything. Miloš rolled the ice around in his glass and stared when Venca
draped his arm casually over my shoulder.
Gott sang a ballad about love and Milena ran to the bathroom. I found
her splashing cold water on her face. She looked up at me, the hair around
her face flattened against her cheeks and forehead, and whispered, “I did it
for him. He wanted to try it. He did.” I tried to pat her on the arm, but she
jerked away from me. I went into the kitchen to fix more drinks and I heard
her shout, “Venco, we’re going home.”
In the doorway Venca leaned over and kissed me full on the mouth and I
smiled at him. Miloš stood beside me, still holding his drink. I saw his hand
tighten around his glass. The ice shook. “How could you act like that in front
of me.” Miloš punched me in the jaw as soon as their car pulled out of the
driveway.
So the same people that came to inspect our new house would come to look
at Josef like he was a new piece of furniture. It’s not that I didn’t like them.
Perhaps they’d all stared at the same map in the refugee camp in Austria,
trying Cleveland out on their tongues and liking the way it sounded. It was
safer than New York, had lots of factories, and their children could swim in
the big Lake Erie right beside it. Since their arrival many of them did really
well: Jan had the restaurant, Ezra his bar, Jaromil his practice, his office, his
condo. I think Miloš envied them. But he has the house now, and he threw
great parties—everyone came. “They’re my friends,” Miloš would say, “and
you have none.” He was right, so I bought the French bread and made potato
salad, and hoped it would be over soon.
Miloš invited a band from Plzen who had stopped in Cleveland as part of
a tour of America to play for the party. They slept in the spare bedroom, on
the couches, and on the floor for a week. They drank with Miloš every night
and in the mornings I tried to clear away the empty beer cans, overflowing
ashtrays, underwear, and socks that littered the house. I made eggs, salad,
and pots of goulash. Miloš came to bed at 2:OO AM drunk and didn’t wake
up to shove me out of the bed when Josef cried. They poured tons of ketchup
on their eggs in the morning, fed the dog beer, and tickled the bottoms of
Josef’s feet when I brought him into the living room.
The day of the party, Miloš and the band members set up tables in the
backyard while I sat in Josef’s room and watched him play with his blocks. I
liked the way he decided to pick up the red block and not the yellow one. His
fingers barely curled over the edges. I took one of his hands in mine and saw
how small they were and I wondered if they would ever fit into the boxing
| 343
gloves that dangled over his crib.
I stayed all day in Josef’s room. Miloš didn’t come to see me until I started
dressing for the party. I sat in front of the vanity in the bedroom, carefully
putting on makeup. Miloš came up from behind me and unsnapped my bra.
In the mirror, I saw the jagged scar on his left breast, and the few stray hairs
that curled around his nipples. I couldn’t see his face. His hands gripped my
shoulder and he pressed his body into mine as my breasts tumbled forward
out of the bra. He knelt down and twisted my nipples with his fingers and
I sat there and let him, listening to the chords of music drifting in from the
living room. The dog scratched on the door. Josef started to cry. I tried to
stand, but Miloš wouldn’t let me, his fingers kept twisting. The harder Josef
cried, the harder he squeezed my nipples in between his fingers. I couldn’t
leave because Miloš’s hands held me there, his body held me. Josef kept
screaming.
Miloš carried me to the bed and I closed my eyes, then opened them again.
With the new house, with Josef, he was supposed to be different and I was
supposed to be different. But the hand that stroked my hair was suddenly
pulling it until I felt the back of my head snap back toward my neck.
“Shut that screaming kid up.” He pushed me from the bed.
I stood up and tried to pull the dress I was going to wear that night, black
sequins and lace, a May Company sale, over my head when I heard the door
slam and his footsteps heading for Josef’s room. I felt like I would suffocate
beneath the heavy blackness of the dress. I couldn’t find the sleeves, or the
hole for my head. I threw the dress on the vanity and ran down the hall to
Josef’s bedroom.
Josef was crying so hard he started to hiccup. I saw Miloš gripping the
sides of the crib; his eyes narrowed, his knuckles white. I knew he wouldn’t
hit him. But he took a step toward me and I grabbed the first thing my hand
touched, a Mickey Mouse lamp, and swung it at his head. The lamp struck
his left temple. He staggered back and then fell to the floor.
I stepped over him, wrapped Josef in a blanket and ran into the living
room. The band was playing, “My Beautiful Gypsy,” my mother’s favourite
song. I hugged Josef to my breasts. One of the band members wandered in,
chewing on a piece of bread. He stared at me while I stood there, singing to
Josef, rocking my son to the music.
*
The floors in my new apartment in the Sunshine Hills apartment complex
are wooden slats. If I swept the floor the slats would shine and I’d like to do
that soon because when I picked Josef up, dust balls clung to the knees of
his sleep suit. I shake out a blanket and spread it on the floor for him. Josef
crawls right off it, looking for a toy. I don’t get up from the couch, because I
344 | don’t have to. It will take time for Miloš to find me here and even if he does,
I’m not afraid.
Josef grabs a square block with the letter A carved into its sides. He has
my dark hair and grey eyes. He smiles at the block and puts it into his mouth.
For a moment I believe it is me that he is smiling at, that the small dimple in
his left cheek marks his approval.
First published in Yazzyk 4 (1995).
At the Marquis de Sade, Templová 8.
Photo: John Bruce Shoemaker.
| 345
The Globe opening party, July 1993.
Jenny Becker, Holly Kennedy Price & John
Bruce Shoemaker. Photo: Mark Baker.
346 |
Photo: Martin Štoll
Vít Erban
A Small, Cold Sun
In the City
The temple? It doesn’t seem that I’m standing in it. (Low, very low ceiling
and no windows anywhere. Everything here is white. White ceiling and
white walls and from the white floor to the highest vaulted arch is a mass of
forms, decorations and ornaments, a fragile white matter, indifferent and as
endless as a coral city). But in spite of that, yes, in spite of that I ask: “Where
are the pews where I could sit down, and where are the aisles through which
I can pass? Where is the altar to which I should turn?”
| 347
The Hunt
The teeth aren’t that sharp. For the time being there’s no pain. At first it
appeared to me that the strange, divided animal (half horse and half pig) was
quite incapable of escaping and that I would be able to keep it in our garden.
But suddenly it clamped down on my hand and all at once everything was
different. So here I stand with hand in snout, standing and thinking, while
that pug-nosed grip slowly tightens. If I don’t want to lose the hand, I will
have to snatch it away.
Dance
I don’t know. I don’t know her and I have never seen her before. But she
came and so now we’re rolling on the floor, gliding along the wall, crashing
into the furniture, climbing to the ceiling and then coming down, across the
breadth of my room, slowly and softly like a large, inflatable ball.
Avalanche
And then it will happen. All at once the hall is full of white globules (just a
bit smaller than ping-pong balls) bumping into the dancers, restricting their
motion and throwing off their steps. The dance continues but after a while
we are swimming in that white mess as one would swim in the midst of an
avalanche, gasping for breath and blindly stepping forward. Valiantly we
swing the chairs. Valiantly we crouch under the tables and press our faces to
the parquet floor. The globules squeeze their way into our eyes, noses, and
mouths; the dancers cough, choke and suffocate.
At the Fair
I hear all of your words, questions as well as answers, I hear the crackling
of the air rifles and the cackle of children’s voices and the blast of the fair
whistle. Yet I see so little of you, so terribly little—only a shifting spot far
below me—and soon enough not even that. (Yes, I admit that I was afraid. I
was afraid that the centrifugal force would lead me away and that I would
always be clinging to the passenger next to me. But now I can already see
that it was worth that little bit of spare change.) And so we twisted round
and round as we climbed ever higher—it seemed as if we would go on like
this forever. I felt that what I’d left behind of myself down there was stupid,
useless and cruel and that I’m now pure in a way that I’ve never been before.
I don’t think I’ll go back.
348 |
The Journey
My face is raised to the sky and my legs blindly stumble through the high
grass. “I mustn’t trip! It mustn’t disappear behind the trees!” But even as I
approach the woods, that small, cold sun keeps sinking lower and lower.
And then (when it is barely above the tops of the trees) a small black spot
appears in the sun’s middle (as if somebody had touched it there with a
small paintbrush dipped in india ink) and the spot grows, spreading out
until finally it devours the sun and I can no longer continue. Then the sky
goes out.
Translated by G.S. Evans.
First published in Café Irreal 3 (2000).
The Belly of the Centipede
The Crab
He really doesn’t see me? Maybe he doesn’t even know I’m here. Or if he
does, it doesn’t mean anything to him. He’s content to just charge ahead with
his clumsy regularity (never backwards!), and neither space, time, nor my
feet are of any interest to him. He must be old, very old. Maybe older than
the world itself. I want to call out, I want to proclaim: “A blue crab! A blue
crab from the Tertiary is here!” but somehow this doesn’t seem appropriate.
So I stand here watching him, and I say to myself: “Where is he going and
when will he get there? And what about me? With my hands behind my
back and my head tilted to the side—am I truly here?” I can’t answer these
questions, but it seems to me that even to swallow here would be impolite.
The Dog
My dog has run off somewhere, and now I can hear him whimpering. This
leaves me with little choice but to try and find him, as I’m worried that he
| 349
crawled or fell into someplace that he can’t get out of. And so I race through
the building and look into all the little nooks and crannies, even opening all
the squeaky wardrobe cabinets and fumbling through musty coats. Finally
I go down to the cellar where, in the darkness, in amongst the old lumber,
I suddenly spot an animal. But it isn’t my dog. It’s a strange little creature,
larger than a weasel but smaller than a rat. We stare at each other, both of
us turning rigid with fright. I can sense fear taking control of me, my heart
pounding and my breathing growing quicker, while my face stretches into a
menacing grimace. My lips turn up so I can bare my teeth while a malevolent
growl emerges from the deeper depths of my being. The hair on the back of
my neck is standing up. My body is tensed, ready to leap. But at that moment
the animal twitches and disappears so fast that it’s as if he was never there. I
hurry upstairs, glad to get out of the basement, and feel like I’ve just woken
up. And then I hear my dog whimpering again, as if he were somewhere
quite close. But where, by god, where…?
The Sea Worm
Right away it looked strange to me. Right away I thought it was only
pretending to be dead, like a spanworm that immobilizes itself before
somebody spots it. And this thing resembled a spanworm—also looking like
a branch, or a wooden stick. I no longer know who it was that fished it out
of the sea and brought it to shore, but he’d scarcely raised it above his head
when the branch suddenly began to move around in his hand, wiggling and
squirming. Surprised, we jumped away from it; repulsed, we also averted
our eyes. It was only after a few moments that we dared to venture back
and take a look. There was no doubt about it. It was some kind of an ancient
evolutionary link on the road to the animal kingdom (it still didn’t have eyes,
nor any other openings, and didn’t have any limbs, though one end of it
was a little wider than the other and thickened a bit at the very tip, which
represented a distant forerunner of the head); such a venerable lineage,
combined with absolute powerlessness, evoked a certain unease in us. So,
as though I’m drunk, I lean over the water, hand on my stomach (while the
guy that pulled it out of the water strokes the creature along its belly, which
is as white as the abdomen of a centipede and segmented like a ladder, to
convince us that the animal doesn’t sting, burn, or bite, and that we don’t
need to loathe him) and wish I were somewhere else, somewhere away from
here. Where I could have hard earth under my feet. But before me and under
me is only the sea. Nothing but the sea.
The Cat
It’s a summer holiday, fine as once upon a time, and we play Indians and
350 | shoot at each other with toy rifles. We penetrate, at the same time, deeper
into the woods, which grow thicker, darker and wilder with every step. I
make my way through carefully, my eyes scanning the undergrowth, rifle
at the ready, when all at once, maybe ten meters in front of me, I spot an
animal. I stiffen. It isn’t aware of my presence. I sneak in a little closer, and
now I can see—it’s a cat. A huge, wild cat, almost as large as a dog. (A wild
cat! I’m hunting a wild cat!) But it still isn’t aware of me. So I go closer until
I’m almost right next to it, and then I clear my throat, intentionally step on a
dry branch and finally, impertinently, aim my wooden rifle at it. But it does
nothing. This stops me in my tracks. I feel confused. What does the tracker
do when the animal that he’s been tracking doesn’t hide? What should the
hunter do when the animal that he is hunting won’t flee?
The Horse
We’re not running, but flying! I look in front and I look down, but I still don’t
know where we’re coming from, where we’re going, or why—but I hold on
tight and I sense the pleasure, the wildness, the frenzy, the craziness. That
horse knows, he really knows, the way by heart! And we keep going like
this for some time, but—what’s this?—the pleasure trivializes it for me and
I start having doubts: “Are we going in the right direction? Have we lost the
way?” And these doubts change to certainty, and we lose speed, starting on
a downward trajectory until we fall directly into the middle of a pond. So I
stand, water up to my knees, and the horse begins to disappear right before
my eyes, until only a reflection of him remains and, finally, not even that.
(“That wasn’t a true horse. They gave you a bad horse,” somebody will say
to me, and I will say, in defense: “How do you know that? You can’t have any
idea what that horse meant to me!” “It was a false horse,” he will say to me,
and I will wake up.)
Translated by G.S. Evans.
First published in Café Irreal 6 (2001).
| 351
352 |
G.S. Evans
from Bohemia
“How could I have made such a mess of things?” F. wondered as he
walked through the streets of Old Town. He had just pawned the last of his
valuables—the watch his beloved mother had given him for his eighteenth
birthday—so he could afford to eat something for dinner.
Somehow, he’d always imagined that if he ever got his hands on a
large sum of money he would be prudent with it, using it carefully for the
furtherance of some deep and profound goal; he’d certainly never imagined
that he would squander it on some fast living. But when he’d received the
check for the article in The Bohemian Philosophical Journal he started spending
the money on anything and everything and kept spending it until it was all | 353
gone.
And it may well have been because of that sudden and unexpected
windfall that he’d made such a mess of things. F. had known for a fact that in
America—the so-called “land of plenty”—articles in philosophical journals
paid little or nothing and so had expected the same here. But he’d forgotten
that this was a country where they placed a much higher value on culture; the
payment, in fact, had been quite extraordinary. Too extraordinary, perhaps.
Which is to say: since he’d never expected such a large sum of money for
his article, he’d treated it like it was bonus money that he could spend as he
pleased and, worse, as though it would never run out.
F. plowed on through the myriad lanes and squares of Old Town without
even bothering to look up; past the businesses and workshops where so many
of his supposed friends worked; past the pubs where he used to buy one
round of drinks after another for those friends; and past his favorite brothel,
whose residents, also knowing of his money troubles, no longer bothered
to use their charms to lure him into their rooms. Things were so bad that he
was beginning to think that he might have to go back to his uncle and ask for
forgiveness. “Or maybe,” he said to himself, nearly in tears, “I should just
go back to America and give up on everything!” He was just beginning to
immerse himself in thoughts of the humiliation that this would bring when
he entered a crowded square and heard a voice greeting him by name from
up above—a woman’s voice, in fact.
Assuming he was being addressed from the balcony of one of the buildings,
he was surprised when he looked up and saw Doris, the pretty waitress from
the “Iron Horse,” standing tall on two stilts and smiling down on him.
“Hi Doris,” F. replied, “what are you doing up there?”
“It’s my new job,” she explained, “I’m working as an English teacher.”
“That’s great, “ F. said, “but isn’t it a little difficult to give lessons from up
there?”
“Not the way we do it,” she answered. “You see, it’s not a typical language
school. Our methods are actually very progressive.”
“I’m sure they are,” F. said, more than willing to indulge a girl as pretty
as Doris, “but I still don’t know what walking around on stilts or...” and here
F. noticed for the first time, so surprised had he been by the stilts, that Doris
was also dressed in a costume, “...dressing in the costume of a sea serpent
has to do with teaching English.”
“Oh, but it’s really very simple,” she replied. “Me and my fellow teachers
walk through the streets of Prague and present a carefully programmed
course of language instruction.”
As she was speaking she’d gestured to an area behind F., and when he
turned around to look he was surprised to see a large gathering of people
standing on stilts and dressed in strange costumes. It made for a very festive
354 | atmosphere, for in addition to Doris’s fellow teachers and their colorful
costumes there were balloons, pennants and a large banner that proclaimed:
WELCOME TO THE NEW TERM OF THE NATURAL ENGLISH SCHOOL
OF PRAGUE.
“So what have you been doing with yourself lately?” Doris asked, politely
not referring to the recent incident when F. had been unable to pay his bill
and had been, rather ingloriously, thrown out of the “Iron Horse.”
“Oh, nothing special,” he replied. “Right now I’m trying to find a job.”
Doris’ face brightened up. “Why don’t you apply for a job with us! They’re
always looking for English teachers!”
“You really think they’d hire me?” he asked, hopefully.
“Well, you’re a native speaker, and that’s a real plus,” she said. “Why
don’t you go ask? They’re taking applications right over there.” She pointed
to a table on the other side of the square.
“Maybe I will,” he replied, thanking Doris. He crossed the square and
approached the table; the man who was sitting behind it was wearing a cap
and gown, and the badge on his chest identified him as the schoolmaster.
F. asked him about a job and the schoolmaster gave him a book with some
short phrases printed in it—such as you could find in any tourist phrase
book—and instructed F. to say them out loud. F., in his clearest and bestspoken English, did just that.
“The job is yours!” the schoolmaster proclaimed as soon as F. had finished.
“You start right away!” He then gestured to his right and said, “You will find
your stilts over there.”
F. hesitated, and felt compelled to explain that he’d never walked on
stilts before. He naturally feared that the job offer would be immediately
revoked. The schoolmaster, though, seemed unconcerned, and assured F.
that he would be given full, step-by-step training on how to use stilts; he
then handed F. a slip of paper and led his new employee around the corner,
to what he called the staging area.
Here F. was introduced to the vice-principal—a large, gruff-voiced man,
wearing a suit two-sizes too small—who looked F. up and down doubtfully.
“So you’ve found another one?” he asked the schoolmaster.
“Yeah,” the schoolmaster scowled, his whole demeanor suddenly
different. With a dismissive nod in F.’s direction, he added: “And make it
snappy, we don’t have much time,” before turning abruptly on his heels and
walking away.
“Oh, he’ll be ready, don’t you worry none about that!” the vice-principal
shouted to the departing schoolmaster. Without saying another word he
placed a hat on F.’s head and then handed him a jacket, which F. dutifully put
on. Then he grabbed F. by the arms and with a single, effortless motion raised
him up to the fourth step of a stepladder. “Now stay put!” he barked, raising
a stilt to each of F.’s legs and strapping him to them. As all this was going on
F. became increasingly concerned that, given the man’s perfunctory manner, | 355
he might not get the step-by-step training course he’d been promised.
This fear soon became reality as the vice-principal, with a hearty laugh,
suddenly pulled the stepladder away. F., suddenly cast adrift, tottered around
wildly on the stilts as he tried to keep his balance. “That’s the way, boy, that’s
the way!” the vice-principal cried, bellowing with laughter. Indeed, to such
a cold-hearted observer this scene could certainly appear comical. From
F.’s point-of-view, however, it was anything but: he spent some number of
minutes tottering around dangerously, once nearly getting beheaded by a
clothes line stretched between two tenement buildings and another time
nearly running himself through a sword being wielded by a statue of King
Wenceslaus, before he finally gained enough control to make his way over to
the schoolmaster.
“Is he ready yet?” the schoolmaster shouted over to his vice-principal.
“As ready as he’ll ever be, I reckon,” came back the gruff-voiced answer.
The schoolmaster however didn’t seem impressed. Instead he looked up
at F. and shouted, “So what are you doing here? Get over there with the rest
of the teachers: we’re almost ready, by god!”
F. had wanted to say something about the lack of training he’d been
promised and about how little he’d been told about the school’s curriculum;
he’d then wanted to point out the adverse effect this would have on his
ability to prepare lesson plans and homework assignments for his students.
But he figured that the weekly (he assumed they would be weekly) teacher’s
staff meetings would be a more appropriate venue to raise such issues. So he
tottered over to his colleagues and looked around for Doris. It took him some
number of minutes to find her—so great was the number of teachers—and
when he did so he told her that he’d been hired.
“Why that’s wonderful!” she exclaimed. Then she winked at him, leaned
forward and, after licking her lips salaciously, whispered in his ear, “You
know, that means we’re colleagues.”
This behavior surprised him. It’s true that Doris had been friendly
enough with him when she’d worked at the restaurant, but she’d never been
friendly in that kind of way before. It immediately occurred to F. that being a
professional might bring more benefits than he he’d anticipated. Still, for the
time being he didn’t pursue the matter: having never worked in a professional
position before he couldn’t be certain that, unlikely though it seemed, this
wasn’t the way professionals normally talked among themselves.
A sudden blast of trumpets interrupted his thoughts; they were playing a
fanfare and the great crowd of people that had gathered around the assembled
teachers started buzzing with anticipation; it was clear that something
momentous was about to happen. The schoolmaster, now standing on the
balcony of one of the buildings overlooking the square, waited until the crowd
had quieted down; then he made certain that he had all of his subordinates’
356 | attention. A long moment of silence followed, full of anticipation; finally,
when he’d judged that all was in good order, the schoolmaster, solemnly and
with great dignity, raised a whistle to his lips and blew loudly on it.
Then, and only then, did the English teachers start moving forward,
slowly but surely, in a great procession.
“Oh look,” Doris cried, “we’re starting! Isn’t it exciting!” F., who could
barely hear her over the cheers of the crowd, shouted back his agreement.
Indeed, it was difficult for him to imagine how anyone could think
otherwise…
From Tajný (český) deník Fredericka Barona a jiné texty (Praha: Aequitas, 2007).
| 357
358 |
Robert Eversz
from Gypsy Hearts
Richard Milhouse Miller, fondly nick-named Nix by his devoutly Republican father,
is a young trust-fund wastrel from Southern California and a heartless romantic.
After defrauding a group of Orange County dentists with a film project titled, “The
Cavity of Dr Caligari,” Nix flees to Prague in hopes of redeeming himself by writing
the Great American Screenplay. Instead, he cons women into sleeping with him and
drinks so much he’s convinced his perpetual hangover is a brain tumor. One night
he meets a woman named Monika, who claims to be of mixed Danish, Czech, and
Romany blood. He falls in love.
| 359
I packed for Český Krumlov late that night. According to plan, I was to
leave the next morning. Monika would take an afternoon train to prevent
her brother Sven from nosing out the true purpose of her trip. We were
to be gone three days. First thing, I counted out a dozen lubricated supersensitive condoms from my drawer and tossed them into a suitcase. Call
me an optimist. Then casual clothing, a book for skimming on the train, and
lastly, a Hasselblad camera perfect for romantic snapshots. Just past eleven a
persistent finger on the buzzer forced my eye to the peephole, where on the
other side of the fish-eye lens stood Monika in a fetching black mini-dress.
The prospect of early consummation trilled through my groin.
“Put on your coat,” she ordered when I swung open the door.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“To a night club.”
“But isn’t it late?”
I tried to catch her in a casual embrace and maneuver both of us onto the
bed, but she adroitly slipped into the entry hall.
“If you don’t want to go with me, that’s okay,” she said, clearly meaning
that if I didn’t go with her, I might not see her the next day in Český Krumlov.
I grabbed my coat and met her outside. A taxi waited for us by the curb. I
reconciled myself to the probability that I would not sleep more than a couple
of hours that night. The taxi careened through streets designed for peasant
carts and the occasional horseman, streets no longer than one-hundred
meters laid out at oblique angles, like sticks bunched together and dropped.
When the taxi sped around a corner, I took advantage of centrifugal force
and leaned into her. She pushed me away but fell into my arms on the next
curve. As we kissed, her hand slid up my thigh. When we kissed again lights
flashed behind my closed eyes: her face an image pulled down, registered,
and shot through with light twenty four times a second. Everything I knew
about love came from Hollywood, as I was unable to love anyone, except
vicariously, through the performance of actors on screen. Celluloid moved
me in a way that flesh and blood could not. That night in the taxi I sat in the
dark of my eyelids and watched a movie of myself kissing Monika. I became
not only the audience, but the actor performing the scene, and the man on
whom the actor based his performance—I even felt in some vague way I
directed the scene. Though I’d watched myself perform before, I’d never
felt the performance connect to the man, and this merging of theatrical and
human identities fulfilled me in a way that I had never before experienced,
not even in the sanctity of a cinema.
There was something naturally theatrical about Monika, and when I
contemplate why she alone has been able to awaken human feeling in me,
I’m always drawn to the similarity between her and certain Nordic actresses,
particularly Garbo and Bergman, who could convey with a gesture, glance
360 | or single spoken word the existence of a rich and tragic past. I envied Monika
the Old World charm of having a past. I had a Los Angeles past: bulldozed,
paved over, re-zoned and rebuilt to gleaming modern standards, a past
pounded to dust by skyscrapers and ribboned in freeway. Every now and then
when something troubled me and I didn’t quite know why, I hired an analyst
to pull from my tarry depths an old bone. We cleaned it off and admired it
together and guessed its meaning: the thighbone of an uncaring father, or
the vertebrae of a distant mother? The truth of the archeology didn’t matter.
Invent a history to give it reason. But of the immediate past, the remembered
past, the un-invented past, I had none. The future continually re-invented
me.
When I opened my eyes again the road had widened and the taxi hurtled
at great speed through a canyon of stacked concrete blocks. A light rain
drew slashes across the passenger window. Squares of light gleamed in
monotonous pattern beyond the glass. Squinting through the rain, I caught
the blurred suggestion of laundry hanging from a balcony.
“Panelaky,” Monika said. “Socialist housing for the masses.”
The driver executed a dizzying combination of turns on streets identical
one to the next and pulled in front of a concrete apartment building claimed
to be our destination. I stepped into a landscape of tramped mud, asphalt,
bits of toilet paper, broken glass and the smell of spilled beer. Rows of
identical apartment blocks crumbled into the mud. Modern ruins. Monika
led me to the nearest ruin and through a set of glass doors to a sepia-skinned
man—I took him to be Indian or Pakistani at first glance—who demanded a
hundred Czech crowns before allowing us to pass. The floor trembled with
a retrogressive disco beat.
“You’ve discovered an underground music club,” I guessed.
“This is the culture house for Romanies,” she said.
My step faltered.
Concerned by my sudden sweat and paling skin, Monika asked, “Are
you all right?”
No. She did not say that. In my imagination she said that. She noticed
nothing. I needed an excuse to stop, turn around, go back. She pulled me
down a hallway lit with a single sputtering incandescent. At the end of the
hall spilled a rough stream of brown skin and black hair. My glance darted
from one half-obscured face to the next, searching for a familiar hook of nose
or twisting brow, any prominent feature to aid recognition of the Gypsies with
whom I exchanged my counterfeit bills. How was it possible that Monika,
who seemed to know everything, did not notice that I was turning to stone?
She led me into an auditorium muddied by cigarette smoke. A hundred men
and perhaps fifty women sat at cheap cafeteria-style tables or danced at the
opposite end. The moment I entered the room the men began to whisper
mouth to ear and the women to stare in my direction. Monika claimed two
chairs at the back wall, asked what I wanted to drink, and when I stuttered | 361
out my answer merged into the crowd at the bar.
As the only non-Gypsy in the room, I was watched by everyone; those
few not looking directly at me watched in the expressions of those who
were. I resisted the urge to glance wildly about, looking for the face that
would recognize me, shout an accusation in a language I had no hope of
understanding, and in that crowded room begin my dismemberment. I took
slow deep breaths of second-hand smoke. No-one could possibly recognize
me. I took precautions when changing bills. Baseball cap, jeans, tennis shoes,
map in hand and camera strapped around my neck; a perfect caricature of
the American tourist. Dressed that night in Armani herringbone sport-coat
and black slacks, I bore no resemblance to that other creature. It occurred
to me I was staring too long at my hands, clenched together on the table. I
glanced around. Naturally everyone noticed and immediately looked away,
so that it appeared no-one was watching me. A good front was all. I must
pretend confidence. I smiled. The man next to me huddled over a mug of
beer. His teeth looked like a line of infantry decimated by machine-gun fire.
He looked my way. I held onto my smile. He measured me in sections, like
a butcher might a cut of meat, and sunk his ruined teeth into the head of his
beer. I shouldn’t smile, I decided. Monika set my drink on the table, a doubleScotch on the rocks, and said she wanted to dance.
“Here?”
“If you don’t want to, I can dance by myself.”
Monika alone on the dance floor would be dangerous provocation. The
DJ played a song by Queen, the most popular group in Prague that year,
though most of the natives were happily ignorant of the slang meaning of
the group’s name. Where were the fiddles, the slashing dancers in peasant
skirts or shiny chinos, the raging fire, the bottles of wine; in short, where
were the Gypsy Kings? The young men affected the Western look of jeans
and button down shirts, the young women mini-skirts, dark hose and floral
print blouses, and together they danced the same amorphous disco found all
over the world. Their sartorial style varied little from one individual to the
next, as if a group decision had been made to adopt that particular veneer of
Western culture, with variations unacceptable. I shuffled my feet and bobbed
my head and tried to keep close to Monika, who could not sway her hips
in any way not charged with sexual invitation. The men watched her like
hungry prisoners smelling meat beyond the bars. The women looked like
they wanted to poison her. I was mostly ignored.
“You’ve been here before?” I shouted above the music.
“Several times.”
We returned to the table, where I bolted my Scotch.
Monika said, “The men here are different from the Czechs. They’re
violent, and violence interests me.”
362 |
“Why?”
“Because death interests me.”
I normally considered death obsessions evidence of an arrested
adolescence. My normal perceptions never applied to Monika. Just as her
every gesture held profound meaning, her brooding over death seemed
instead proof of a tragic nature.
“I don’t think I’ll live to be thirty,” she said.
“Nonsense. You’ll live to seventy.”
“But I don’t want to live to seventy. I don’t want to be old. I don’t want
plans. I don’t want a job, family, pension. In my family, the past is death.
The future is death. That leaves only the moment.” Monika took my face
in her hands and kissed me. I could taste the melancholy on her lips and
traced along the dolphin surfaces of her tongue a delight in personal tragedy.
Monika seemed as much in love with her history as bound to it. I closed my
eyes and drank as much of her as I could.
“Burroughs said kissing someone is like sucking on a thirty foot tube at
the end of which is a sack of shit.”
The comment snapped our lips apart. Her brother smiled down at us as
though his comment had been a joke, but I sensed nothing well-meaning in
his display of teeth. He set two glasses of amber fluid onto the table and sat
across from me.
“You drink Scotch?”
I looked at the glass, not knowing if I should accept.
“Monika knows I hate this club. That’s how I knew you’d be here tonight.
Monika has these people in her blood, from her mother. Me, I’m one-hundred
percent Danish. You ever read Burroughs?”
“You mean the guy who wrote Naked Lunch? Saw the movie.”
“What about Bukowski?”
“Sure. Mickey Rourke in Barfly. I didn’t think you were the type to
read.”
“Sven writes. Poetry,” Monika explained.
I couldn’t have been more surprised had I learned an ape could dance
a polonaise. It appeared Sven was a brute with a sensitive soul. I asked,
“Publish anything?”
“That’s what I like about you. Straight to the point. Am I successful. Do I
make money. Not as much as screenwriters, I can tell you that much. All the
poetry in Europe combined doesn’t pay as well as one Hollywood screenplay.
Come on, drink up. I’ll make a toast.”
I picked up the glass, expecting a cruel joke or insult.
“To my sister.”
Innocent enough. I drank. The Scotch tasted rough and bitter. Some swill
of a bar brand, distilled anywhere but Scotland. Sven drained his to the clear
bottom of his glass and asked, “Have you fucked her yet?”
| 363
Monika said, “Don’t do this to me, Sven.”
“He should know. That’s his right. He should know the risk he’s
taking.”
I downed the last of the Scotch, fought the urge to bolt from the table,
smiled at Sven as though sincerity could win him over. I said, “The way
Monika and I feel about each other, it isn’t just sex.”
“You’re not going away together.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Monika said.
“You know what happens to the men you go away with.”
“Nothing happens. Nothing at all.”
Sven stuck a cigarette between his lips and struck a match. The light
seared into my cerebrum. I rubbed my eyes, fighting a precipitous and
inappropriate fatigue. Sven smiled at me, pleased about something.
“She told you about her family, I’m sure. That romantic story of everyone
dying young and tragic. It’s all true. Everybody around Monika comes to a
bad end, except me.”
“You shouldn’t listen to him,” she warned. “He gets like this whenever
someone is interested in me. He just wants to scare you.”
“Did she tell you about the terrible luck of her boyfriends? They always
seem to meet with accidents. They fall off things. Get hit by cars or trains
or buses. Cops find them in alleyways, robbed and beaten, sometimes
stabbed.”
“Every time I meet someone, you come out with these crazy stories.”
“He needs to know the truth. It’s only fair he should know the risk he’s
taking.”
“You’re being a bore.”
“I’m sure she told you she has death in her past, and death in her
future. It’s my feeling she overplays that part. Too melodramatic, even for
Hollywood.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“You started to care for this one a little more than the last ones.”
Monika rose from the table and nearly pulled Sven off his chair.
“I need to talk to you, alone. Now.”
Lethargy seeped like anesthesia into the nerves lacing my brain. My
vision began to blur. I said, “Monika.” She turned to me and when I looked
at her it was like looking at glass.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said.
Monika’s black mini-dress vanished in the crowd. I thought about
getting up to follow, but I couldn’t convince my legs to support the weight.
It seemed that I was suddenly and horribly drunk. I cradled my head in my
hands to keep it from dissolving. In the distance, I saw myself sitting alone
at a table surrounded by Gypsies, and the figure that was me kept getting
smaller, as did the Gypsies, until I could no longer distinguish myself from
364 | the others. We were all diminishing together, a dot surrounded by darkness
that promptly extinguished to darkness itself.
Some time later, the brutality of individual consciousness returned. I blinked
the grit from my eyes to a diffuse, gray light. A few minutes before dawn.
My face lay flattened against a pebbly surface, the rest of my body twisting
behind in the unnatural angles of a bomb-blast victim. A sour-smell of puddle
at my lips connected to a memory of vomiting. I rolled onto my back. The
movement unloosed nausea and pain. I crouched on hands and knees and
retched a spidery gruel. When breath returned I stood on trembling legs
and attempted to hang memory to the hook on which I had awakened. I had
spent the night amid a cluster of garbage cans. My Armani coat was gone,
and with it my wallet. I felt pockets. My keys were missing. A circle and band
of bare skin chilled my wrist where a watch had been. I had been stripped
like a corpse of my shoes. I dimly recalled the previous night’s altercation
with Sven, and the horror of being too drunk to remain conscious.
I walked cautiously to the nearest street. The ground was intolerably
hard and cold and studded with broken glass. I had no idea where I was.
Some housing estate on the outer circle of the city. The communist architects
had cleverly flanked the neighborhood with facing mirrors, which reflected
ad infinitum the same littered pavement and block of concrete buildings. I
tried to read a street sign, and could make no more sense of it than a bowl
of alphabet soup from which all the vowels had been eaten. I saw neither
dog, taxi nor human being. Nothing moved on the streets at that hour except
stray bits of wind-blown paper. I walked on, certain by the dreary sameness
I walked circles. Eventually, I crossed parallel grooves cut down the length
of a street. I followed the grooves to a sign-post, and soon after that the first
tram of the morning rattled to a stop at my feet. I crawled into the seat at the
rear of the car and fixed my gaze out the window to avoid the stares of those
boarding at subsequent stops. I did not think about what happened to me. I
let my mind go willfully blank.
From Gypsy Hearts (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
| 365
366 |
Vincent Farnsworth & Gwendolyn Albert. Tábor, 1994.
Vincent Farnsworth
dalek bird poem
an orange hummingbird landed
on the hand of an orangutang
and became an opposable thumb
canadian geese fly at ten thousand feet
this is appreciated and
they get sucked into jet engines
the turbines rarely cough
meanwhile back on land lies
a wing with the bones sticking out
but the city hasn’t killed
all the good birds
even the sparrows will have
an interesting stripe
if you hold very still
in the garden
one might get close enough
to see what it’s really like
when you hold still
the ancient stone stairs
are worn concave which shows
every step and beating
of a wing or heart
or gums makes a difference
as if we have a choice
pigeons shit all over everything
people curse in many languages
yell guano bravo author
the world becomes coated
| 367
and hidden with words
the terrible mistake of language
the only thing worse is fluency
it is not song
singing is light of illumination
of light is singing of a world
existing with a different consistency
368 |
the bird without the wing
singing all the way down
singing all the way down
in one fell swoop
I fell I am falling
I have good balance but
I have fallen I am going to fall
again I was about to fall when
I will fall I was going to fall
I have good balance though
long ago I made an appointment
to fall someday
First published in RealPoetik (1995).
not long
(after Creeley)
the palms were slaughtered
everyone turned into animals
and jumped overboard
washed up and dug holes in the sand
that continue to fill with water and we
bailed buckets of fish schematics
and globs of loaves,
descended the here of the hole
filling with the there of the sea
as found in the oxford english dictionary
some old norse link but nothing
more than the meaning which is
elementary pothead revelation
everywhere you go there you are
yet even if you’re not going anywhere
and the bud’s worn off
the oscillation continues
as more pothead everywhere
in the emptying distance
everyone jumped, washed that bailed fish
scrubbed vanishing points better left unpainted
distance comparison turned overboard
their going off continues
disoriented in the orient
dude in a jeep
there’s no front there and
what am I doing here behind enemy lines
I should be home
filling my quota of shitty things
the ones we all got to do before coming off
old and nice
not driving burning tires
the smell obscuring our vision
sweat of my palms on the wheel
our entire crew is slaughtered and we
continue on to the next island
First published in Exquisite Corpse: Cyber Corpse 4 (2000).
| 369
They Have Arrived
the microscopic orbiter
he injected to fix his consciousness
with a little psycho-surgery
went bad, started strafing vehicles
on neural highways and
he had to poke into that blue vein
something even smaller
that will also have its own plan
370 |
amerika’s top forty
rubber frying; on the stove,
emotions stretch between two people
like a taffy pull
or a murder (plot.)
lies allowed; in love and war,
and
unreasonable
demands
in fact if
you pursue
love
you might get war, or
if the fascists shoot tear gas
we will cry (softly) anyways.
how many doors
are there
to heaven? (360)
three hundred and sixty heavens and would you
know my name if I saw you in
heaven 3-5-2 from 1-9-8 with a
rubber airplane frying; on the stove?
your lips
are a spark and I have a mouth
full of ashy gunpowaer: (underwater)
you are a walking charge card and I am drunken
bought and soiled underwear
you are trying
to return
for a cash refund.
guarantee; whatever I said I regret it.
looking at the lipsticky wineglass—
I probably did; do something wrong.
we’ll put on your music next time
(that crap).
babyface
(getting)
old:
you made me make myself all made up.
if in your goulash
you come across
some menudo; intestine,
just chew
and chew
like I do
a rubberband man frying on the stove.
| 371
Out Dying on the Vine
out dying on the vine
my soul fell off
from another cluster
a grape not wanting to be wine
I watched as bemused
as a Venezuelan president
couldn’t help choking
up the fresh pita
thumbs up
on a luckless hitchhike
gathered a storm of information
but it just drizzled
my spirit merged with the mist
where past and future laugh
I knew I was through and said so
everyone was relieved
372 | said Funny how I keep existing
everyone agreed
First published in Exquisite Corpse: Cyber Corpse 13 (Winter 2003).
she disappeared during a trip
she disappeared during a trip,
they stayed together,
I understood the language,
we decided
the boat went to the
semiwatery horizon and ripples
like in shiny clay swirled
and the boat seemed to go down
into the absurd funnel,
the inside was or wasn’t beautiful
for the witnesses are missing
and silent
she undisappeared but one half of her
people never knew because they died,
they stayed not together and unrelated
people knew,
I understood a different language and
a continent imperceptibly changed,
we thought we decided but
minds don’t grasp like hands,
in fact:
I made up my mind but from the outside
no one could tell
| 373
First published in RealPoetik (1995).
Spring
sun essence hangs in sheets
shredding through my mental dumpling slicer
into makeshift bandages on mortality
tourniquet me baby see the red soak
headlong we go
many a man in no-man’s land
many a widow on widow’s peak
with loose lips, rose hips
and acres of corn harvested by thought
and miles of limes subsumed by minds
and square kilometers of round watermelons
devastated by a child’s question
sunlight the tablecloth on blackhole table
saying a message for the differently-abled
a communication between strawberry and mold
from the front lines of the revolving door
374 | of a cycle that must sigh and kill
sprung forward like jack out of idiot box 1 2 3
war is a crime so I only bleed for peace
First published in Big Bridge 14 (2008/9).
twenty years of No Future
I’ve seen
Lux Interior come
out in
gold with a bottle down
the front of his
lamé and yanking
the almost-empty
accidentally pry out his
dick saying
Love Me, Love Me
What else Jello
Biafra, a nylon stocking
stretched over his face
bleating about the toast
of Reaganism buttered with
dead rock stars and the
legendary stench
of their bipartisan recording studios
before a riot at the Democratic
convention in San Francisco
set off
by the very plainclothes police
he had just identified
by their tie dye
this is even to Gary
Numan being
the real cripple creaking
inside his car, not fake twanging
but in an epoch
marksalot message
of pearls before teenyboppers
for Last Will of
KAL-X in Berkeley
slathering the
ruptures in his
part of america
| 375
with the sanity
of unpredictable music,
and to all of KFJC in
Los Altos Hills
playing Louie
sixty hours of Louie
376 |
to Mudhoney to Mudhoney
the Cramps that saved my life
the Fall that still
and stills the piles
of the Butthole Surfers
the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
slicing horns of plenty amperage
into hors d’oeuvre-ish ectoplasmic
chunks sprinkling
Alien Sex Fiend and Alice Donut
rubbing together
in the vibrating bootleg record bins
of El Cajon, California
Big Stick carried me
through the Grenadan invasion
Einsturzende Neubauten vomiting up
the deutsche id
like so many Bollock Brothers
tinkering with the Sex Pistols
this is to Johnny Rotten’s
canceled San Diego radio interview
because he wouldn’t sign
a promise not to
speak his
own language
crawling from
the Rorshach mess of Flipper
to Will Shatter choosing death
over posing
and the Fastbacks’ slam mandala
descending in the whirlpool
of subconscious history
to Pixies’ screaming reminder
of caribou and suburban body counts
while Kim Deal smirked and
planned and Poison Ivy
eyed the hole in her fishnets
while channeling
Link Ray
through high input A
Dave Thomas of
Père Ubu
his
the sounds
a housewife makes
when she’s alone
or the last thoughts
of a sentimental rummy
watching his legs swell
Gang Of Four knowing
they were alone
Exene deciding it’s not
worth it
all the unheard music,
electrified snails
in a salt of
corporate control
and hippie nostalgia
and the one and the same
this is stains
seeping into shapes
someone mistakes
for their messiah
the blessed mother statue
crying tears just
spat over a pew,
from the pit
for stains seeping
Psychic TV, the kindness
and logic of
utter alteration
| 377
refusing to mourn or scoff
at Kurt Cobain
finally
doing it
this is to no one but Lydia Lunch
inventing
possessing
and destroying
fucking
until a radiance glows out of her skin
and her dancing hands return to us
the language of the saints
this is the present of Lydia Lunch
this is light
rays, rage against the
t-shirt machine,
a chuckle at the
poison—
378 | corporate, governmental
voluntary, human natural
church sponsored, music videoed
computer enhanced
alternative
for sale
for free
force-fed
unavoidable
moving to cover the globe:
there is something molten under
fearsome over
this is to the mixture of
human spirit and
electromagnetism
occasionally sparking
fingers of electricity
crawling along a floor
reaching
nothing
but glimpsed
kept
transferred
home taping samizdat
tamizdat
finally these are just smudges
on the wall
from ashes
stolen off
the cremation
smears spelling
No Future
twenty years of No Future
and counting
First published in Exquisite Corpse: Cyber Corpse 4 (2000).
| 379
Years of Reprieve
I kept my dog in the dogfight even after all his skin was torn off. He looked
like a raw neck of a shrink-wrapped supermarket chicken, the neck with legs.
The sound he made was like there’s screaming in the next room, someone
getting raped by a half dozen soldiers and you can’t do anything about it. It
goes on for hours. Maybe if you make a sound they will discover you and
you’ll be part of it too, you’ll get raped and tortured too or if you’re a man
you’ll have to rape someone’s bloodied screaming mother. The sound my
dog made seemed like that, to be everywhere.
On the long tram ride into town every day I read smatterings of great
literature and over the years it had made me hypersensitive. Prague is
in teetering balance between the kind and the cruel, the absurd and the
mundane, the ugly and the gorgeous, and so the worst place to be that way.
Seeing the kid smoking on the stoop holding back tears, passed by countless
blithe dachshunds and their owners, would hurt my stomach. The tourists
asking for directions would become my personal responsibility until they
ditched me as a some sort of con artist. All the deliriously numbed faces
380 | on the metro orchestrated together into a symphony of hopelessness, an
unheard explosion of cause every moment.
The literature thing led to poetry readings and little magazines and
booksignings. At one an old poet, a crone from Colorado, read something
that conveyed a different angle of the world, one I thought I recognized.
So I talked to her afterwards and we went walking, ambled through the
streets and ended up in a huge park with ponds, Stromovka, in the middle
of the night. We couldn’t see anything, there was fog and darkness and no
lights and just these frogs croaking all around us and the sound of a distant
wedding and she told me to do this, put my own dog in the dogfights and
I’d be cured.
There’s really no story. Everyone knows someone who does things semiillegal, residence permits or drugs, and that person buys them from someone,
and that person knows men who run the whorehouses and they know where
the dogfights are. These men crowded around me with my dog in my arms
and laughed and spoke Czech, Russian and German. They were not literary.
It was in a building by the racetrack.
Before that I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t live day to day in the truth that
this world, all over, can be without a moment’s notice ruthless, violent and
unjust, and you have to protect yourself to the utmost. Depending where
you live you can have years of reprieve but that’s all it is. One of their friends
took me on as his project, showed me things, told me how it was going to
go. He was half Indian and half Lebanese and had only been in the country
for three months. He seemed satisfied in not being the newcomer, for once
to instruct and tell instead of being instructed and told. Or maybe he wanted
something. A really nice guy who really wants to pick your pocket.
The dog I’d had for three years. From a puppy. It would sit by the table
when I ate and stare and thump his tail on the ground. His fur was white with
tan patches and was very soft. He was a dog. There’s really no story. When
we wrestled on the ground he’d act like a maniac attack dog but without
really biting. When left alone he’d lie on his back and act like maniac attack
dog to his tail, twisting around in funny ways with funny sounds. I didn’t
really see what happened. I was talking to my special friend and everyone
surged forward and when I got to the pit my dog was looking like that.
Maybe they skinned it before they threw it in. He said “Do you want to stop
it?” with a funny look that might’ve been glee.
When I walked home some of the streets were wet like the water trucks
had come by and hosed everything down. I misjudged a wall and brushed
hard against a crumbling brick corner, and though my jacket wasn’t damaged
my arm was bleeding underneath it. A smashed bird was on the ground. I
carried my jacket and started approaching people on the streets, showing
them my scraped arm, asking them what it meant.
You can’t really stare at yourself, even in the mirror. You always see
something else. If you have a nightmare and think of the things in it, mull | 381
it over and over, that’s like staring at yourself without seeing yourself. Then
you can stare into your fridge and see yourself.
I knew someone once who had a nightmare that he’d lost his hands, they’d
been cut off, and he was walking and holding his own hands in his hands.
He knew this was impossible so he would look down and see his bloody
stumps. But then as he kept walking he’d feel his hands holding this missing
hands. When he woke up he kept looking at his hands. For a couple hours he
acted freaked, huddling around wherever we went with his arms crossed in
the Summer sun. He didn’t act like he normally did, like most guys I know
act. They get it from acting like rap stars or famous athletes, or something in
between. He acted kind of disturbed but also just quiet, thinking. I think he
was acting like himself. He was looking at the roofs of everything, the tiles,
the steeples, he sat in the Kampa Park on the wall by the river, where the
water flows loudly over the weirs. He asked me what’s my favorite word.
I said “hostile.” He laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t seemed
disturbed anymore.
I didn’t see him for a month and he hardly remembered the dream when
I brought it up. I had to remind him. “Oh yeah, that’s right.” He was being
jocular again. We walked along and a drunk woman came by us and silently
pretended to punch me, her mouth twisted. Someone else was holding onto
a pole but standing away from it, with her head tilted at an angle like she
was reading a poster glued up sideways, and then she tilted it a little more
and her body shook like a strong wind was blowing and she fell over onto
the sidewalk. One of the numerous vomit splats was in our way so we turned
around. A huge pile of brand new cobblestones was there near the Lennon
wall and I wanted to build something, set them up into a pyramid, but I was
afraid of being arrested.
I told him how I planned from now on to carry a knife, in a sheath on my
belt always ready. We were back in Kampa Park, open again because there
were no more demonstrations. He had a look on his face like he was going
to say “Why?” but then some kittens ran by. You never see cats in Prague.
He said “C’mon!” and chased after them. When I caught up he had cornered
one in a nook between the Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain walls. I said “you
better look out those things are totally wild.” He said he wasn’t going to hurt
it. He grabbed it and the thing made a noise that was not cat- or animal-like
at all. It was more like a buzz saw and looked like one too, just a blur. He
yelled “Ow!” and the cat ran up his shoulder and jumped off, up to the top
of the wall and sped along it. A bunch of ravens attacked it and it jumped
down the other side.
He had fang marks in his hand and scratches on his neck. The punctures
didn’t bleed much at all which I thought was a bad sign. My vision was
crystal clear like it always is when I drink and I could see two giant eyeballs
382 | on top of the National Theater, looking to and fro, watching nothing. The
fang bite holes were turning purple. I told him if I had the knife we could
slice it and suck the poison out. I saw he liked the word suck. He was getting
ready to say something. I decided to take my drunken nighttime walks by
myself from now on. This boy was like unbaked dough getting stale. I didn’t
want to wait for the mold.
My dog would’ve liked this knife, the shiny spot of reflection on the wall
it makes, would’ve chased it around and jumped. A silver UFO or the flying
pig for a Czech Christmas. But my friend didn’t want it near her baby. They
were opposites, the giant knife with it’s serrated edge and the baby, soft spot
on its head. During the birth the opposites met, it was a Cesarean. Opposites
met to make the baby too, during the sex. Opposites constantly meet, slam
into each other. Matter hits antimatter when I close my eyes. I’d always
wanted a baby but now I was choosing this knife. In that way they were the
same, they were potential. I don’t even know if the knife’s legal. It’s almost
impossible to tell what’s legal in Prague. Could those brass knuckles in the
display case really be legal? The streetwalkers in front of the police station on
Uhelník? The managers of collapsing banks who retire millionaires? Nobody
knows. People shrug.
At first I kept the knife in its sheath on my belt right where I could grab
it. I’d practice drawing it out quickly, carving the air, slashing the tree in
my walled minigarden in the courtyard. I fought off attackers in my mind,
repelled invasions of my minigarden. When I heard any noise on the other
side of the wall, or some pigeon flew into the courtyard, I would pretend to
yell “This is my land!” and whip out my knife.
Then I just wore it on my side, sometimes it was covered by my sweater,
then when I didn’t use a belt I just put it in my bag. It was in the bottom of
my bag and when I switched bags I forgot about it.
My friend asked me to watch her baby for just an hour and a half so
she could go to her winter sauna. Now that it was a bit older. It was nicer
than when it was newborn. It just slept in its babyclothes in the toasty new
apartment by the radiator under the windows. I stood and watched its
little closed eyes, tiny nails on its little hands. The tin roof on a shed out the
window looked like my old knife. The baby looked smaller. The tin roof was
just like the metal from my knife and the infant was getting smaller like I
could hold it in one hand. If I reached out the other hand and held it in front
of the shed’s roof it looked like I had a knife in my hand and when I held my
other hand towards the baby it was like the baby was in my hand, stockinged
head poking up. I stood there between the two with my arms out, looking
back and forth, between the impossible innocent softness of the baby and the
knife roof world, and realized I was in perfect balance. I was the meeting of
perfect opposites. I could just stay this way.
| 383
First published in the PLR 1.2 (July, 2003).
384 |
Photo: Karel Cudlin
Sylva Fischerová
Mothers
Mothers are always true—
beside their dogs, their lamps and scissors
where fate’s carpet lies
and adult children
like paintings on large plates.
Mother has one eye
like a cyclops
and the world’s full of dangers,
ants crawling all over.
Mummy, there was no Troy,
but many of us didn’t return.
| 385
Inside the Description
Safety-lamp Genius
small tomatoes in the garden
all those little
observations:
while the bus stopped for red lights
five leaves fell
from a tree.
Inside the description
there’s a void
nobody’s territory
waiting for the army
marching from Vienna:
Napoleon Wellington Suvorov
how they drink from their flasks!
Behind them, on the air,
386 | Columbus’s ships afloat
the admiral writes to the king:
Everything there was extremely
beautiful, grass as in Andalusia
in April, and birds so numerous
and so gorgeous it is impossible
to say, however
I hurried along
to look for gold
for your Majesties...
Here it is: gold, silver,
diamond “Night Star”
all this living
in the moment
that we step around
like a dead cat
servants in cowls
living at the foot of the castle
pecking at corn,
gourmets
safety-lamp Genius
blinking, signaling
Come in
The Language of the Fountains
I was holding a mirror in my hands for you,
and the ends of your shaved beard
floated in the soapy water,
little, everyday deaths.
The epochs stuck together like veneer to wood,
tight and precise, with a breath between
by which a monster changes
into a genius,
and the cafeteria’s windows into mirrors,
in front of which the dumb goblins learn to speak,
to score
a defeat.
A defeat of a nation.
And of all dead languages.
The era of quotation marks has begun:
a double mockery at the ideas
inflated inside them.
But the salt statues still stand by the Dead Sea,
there’s still Jerusalem, Athens, Rome,
still someone lives in Prague speaking Yiddish—
and memory, sister to self, sister of sin,
and guide to the saved
leads us back
to our own destruction.
Here the cafeteria’s a church for smokers!
Defeat’s a beer.
Cowardice
a bridge into time,
and whoever knows a thing about time
will tell of even a God—
will answer God,
that hole inside him
the coloured nooses of history
fall from.
And the rich and powerful fit nice and tight…
Who will tell of the dead children
on the trembling sands of history?
Who will see—will hear
the language of the fountains, sweet, predictable
as a throw of dice?
Who will speak of all the dead children
on the trembling sands of history…
| 387
This Century Blossoms Black and Green
We’re all just an image of an era,
solution to its equation.
And in the era’s frame, again that
masquerade of death, that doll with wooden legs
who blindly, smoothly like a dancer,
leads us
towards a place where leaves don’t fall,
there’s no spring, summer, autumn or winter—
as in this province of the world, history, spirit,
where the equation isn’t solved, but everything’s
its solution, ready in advance,
because arithmetic’s been invented by someone,
who wanted to chase after false results!
And you, you thought that memory’s
the tree of life, you scrambled against time,
wanted to break through, where
presence
388 |
grows like a graft from eternity.
You wanted to see the right hawthorn.
This century
blossoms black and green.
In the evening
the dark mists of technology and alcohol,
of Treblinka and pollen
from rustic apple trees,
rise from it…
Hope like a billiard ball
wobbles in the air.
And parents have sent their boy over the hill
to see a prophet on the white throne,
who won’t tell him why he was born.
He’ll say
he doesn’t know…
Dear mourners will eat
the stag with cranberries,
their mouths greasy,
missing the letters
on their foreheads
like the Prague Golem,
God took them away,
because He got angry with them.
Who Makes History
Who has grief and who has sorrow?
Who has a thousand years of woe?
—Impossible to sleep
with the roaring crowds of the elected
They pound on the gate
The glass of air shatters
Seconds pour out
and History phosphoresces
in the flash of battles
when time’s just stuffing
for the funeral guilds
How eagerly the brothers drink
from their immense steins!
And heads empty, a gutted field
of lost battles
History phosphoresces, through the loopholes
you can see
statues of mustard, statues of tears
pounding on the gate,
crying: History’s made by evil people!
crunching their lunch
Fate’s a lunch
a brunch
Fate’s overcrunched!
Who makes history?
Human inconsistency makes history
Time makes history
see how it spits
its time-killing liquors
into throats knotted
in the clouds of self
like footnotes
notes under the foot
of the universe,
and of free will,
meaning guilt,
mine as well as yours!
| 389
Road to Nowhere
We were silent in the trams
passing by yards fenced in grooved metal
our heads a seething pharmacy
of bad intentions
and good ideas
on the road to nowhere.
There was the Temple of Technology
made of newspapers,
its windows millboard,
the tower of matches,
and an altar of Industry
all alcohols
poured down from—
The Angels of Odd floated in the air,
drinking vodka,
biting into the incense of revolution.
390 | It smelled
like the end of the holiday.
Is this a man? Is this a God?
But still, poetry lived there,
shedding from the pale intestines of the city.
We ran after her,
a pack of desperates and expectants—
scraping through the ravine
of an umbel time,—
behind the words,
where you’re burned out, bathed,
forever branded,
and from the brand all questions
rise!
The Blind
There’s nothing for Lie
to gain
but itself
how you walk among its houses in ruins
its forests of words and pauses
Lie floats on trembling sands
like a snake eating its own tail
till it finds itself back at the beginning
There’s a chessboard with
the pieces refigured:
the king’s a bishop,
the queen a rook,
the knight’s on foot
So Lie reaches under the table
pulls out a Man, a Woman,
and puts them before the Father of Lie
on a high throne
Behind him
stands Treachery:
a new piece
with a red jaw
The throne’s built of
the eyes of those he deluded
and blind men and women
walk the world
one from another, to another,
the chessboard’s
interwoven
with fine threads of cries
the blind hold onto
so they can
move on
| 391
Draft in the Head, Draft in the World
And still, trying to find a changeable synthesis
in a world built of scraps,
discrete, separated
images of a filmstrip.
Oh, those enterprising carcasses in machina mundi!
Oh, that smoke, from the factory of dark pap!
Deep craters of crying!
There’s a draft in the head, draft in the world.
“How can you speak of liberty
if you have any memory?”
the man said heading to the pub, “At the Pork Rib,”
to balance humility and self-love,
let the sands quietly, intangibly
move the dunes in his heart—
there was silence inside,
392 | silence.
There’s a draft in the head, in the world
in a mixed day,
confused cocktail
of smells, gestures, words—
“We seek the unconditional
and always find just conditions.”
Compound the puzzle, catch sight of
uncreated light,
through a window of an icon, a window of the other,
catch sight of Jesus.
There’s a draft in the head, in the world,
twisted like a question mark
from mash
for the masses—
And you said in the morning,
at the kitchen table:
“If I were a protozoon
I could stand it soon.”
Merciful Madonna,
one distinct line on her face
spread her smile out at the world—
at me:
“So let you go,
let you go.”
Translated by the author and Stuart Friebert.
From The Swing in the Middle of Chaos
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2010).
| 393
394 |
David Freeling
Eulogy
Dearly beloved this here is the thing
here it is in a nutshell
the thing grew out of an old sandbox.
It was born and lived in Prague.
It fed on cheese, pie and ripped jeans.
The thing got big.
The thing found you sleeping on subways, or
eating salad out of plastic bags and tweaked your ears.
The thing caught you in crumpled late night corners
and got you off your ass.
It made you dance.
You couldn’t photograph the thing if you tried.
They tried.
The thing recognized its constituents
and you were it.
It devoured people
and incorporated.
But it also shunned. It was selective.
The thing multiplied.
The thing was a friend to the friendless
an enigma to mystery seekers
and a bane to those who scorned it.
Spectators misguessed the thing.
They called it an automobile or gravy train.
Finally they accused it of stealing from children
and donning hats from the grave.
| 395
The thing floated outside bedroom windows,
gray figure with a black cloak.
It had lots of good drugs.
It hung out in cheap bars
it stayed out late and was rarely seen in the morning.
Sometimes the thing lurked over your back 6 days a week.
Sometimes it had nothing to do.
It sat fat in the comfy chair and twiddled its ugly thumbs
driving people to lassitude.
They don’t know how the thing escaped.
Hungry poets gave chase
took flashlights to the mist
and leapt about for its coattails.
The thing was the great unirivited guest.
It showed up where there was somewhere to show.
It was vain.
The thing crashed parties at the castle.
396 | It slipped past bouncers.
When doctors were sent in
they prodded the thing with 10 foot poles
scratched their chins and pronounced
heart failure but could do little more.
This confounded the experts and baffled rookies.
Last came the pundits.
And while the thing slipped off to make its own verdicts,
they said the verdict was in.
Well, ladies and gentlemen
I know only one thing
and there it is.
First published in Optimism Monthly 7 (December/Janurary 1995-6).
Last Words, Café Colubris, Prague,
November 4, 1996
When I arrived,
The old bridge was scaffolded
traffic detoured
mail rerouted.
I needed to cross that bridge. I needed
a thousand beginnings I couldn’t bear.
*
This sweet and sour, loveless summer
that never came
the Yankees were gonna win the pennant
in six time zones
and me and T
were reminiscing anything
but sports
and history anything
but waiting
in the church beneath the pub.
*
Three hours till departure
a man smokes his last,
suits up,
keeps scores,
saves some, ships some, buries some…
Once
when time was less,
(incidents more)
people dotted the land,
postmen delivered hard cash,
and knowing a person who’s traveled
can rest anywhere,
I peed atop the Winged Victory Statue,
| 397
picked the Buddha’s nose,
tweaked the turban of Emperor Osman,
kicked pebbles into Athena’s excavation
all the while digging home…
*
T asks, What are you giving away?
Where are those ideas I lent you?
*
The boat is a me-shaped log
hollowed like my head
broken with wine.
I disseminate photocopies of my ticket
wondering, Is each a poem?
T presses the stress
in my spine
398 | and labels it all misplaced.
The body grinds bone into bone.
If I’m not gonna have a life, I say,
I at least want my own space not to live it in.
*
When I arrived,
a government toppled,
a town was shaken by its roots
a bridge observed how cities took shape,
going up ten percent a year.
A bridge may withhold
depending
how much ground
you need it to cover.
First published in Optimism Monthly 20 (June 1997).
Back, left to right: Julie Ashley, Alan Ward, Nicole Achs, Shannon McCormick, David Freeling,
Lacy (Eckl) McCormick. Front: Tim Simmons, Kate Fitzpatric. Photo from Julie Ashley’s camera.
Book launch for Lukáš Tomin’s Kye at the Globe, 1997. Louis Armand, Drew
Duckworth, Marek Tomin, Ewald Murrer, Kryštof Zeman. Photo: Kevin Blahut.
| 399
400 |
Photo: Jim Ziegler
Jim Freeman
Thinking Me
Did you think me into wakefulness
from there?
While I was here
in the midst of dreams?
Time zones playing games
against our psychic energy
A thought ran through your day
to intervene in my night
The rain has stopped
its end the noisiness
of sudden silence
and it brings me full awake
Was it raining where you are
and did it stop?
| 401
Muddy Water
I dreamed I was floating
in a tank of literary agents
Murky shadows
darting under me
Surfacing from time to time
for air and money
And giving me
the old fish eye
402 |
Setting Fire to my Life
Setting fire to my life, the spark of discontent
flares a tinder of broken promises and dreams
A roaring blaze, consuming yesterday
throws all too little heat and not much light
Flames lick, shadows dance against the wall
It needed to burn out and settle down, this fire
Needed to fall in upon itself in showers of sparks
turning much that’s gone to powdered ash
floating up, to drift away in spirals on the breeze
Leaving just a hidden core of warm red coals
The embers will last, maybe until morning
when new breath blows them softly into life
feeding smaller twigs to a more modest blaze
Lower flames, more capable of heat and light
Enough, at least, to make the morning coffee
It’s come to that, the things I need to know
Strong coffee and the squint of morning sun
An honest taste and promise of another day
Reflections from inside myself and all outdoors
Learning who I am, how to love myself again
It’s taken far too long and too much pain
shared by those who cared for me and lost
their friend and lover to a mindless pile
of things and stuff and heaps of promises
Now burned and blown away, well gone
There’s something here worthwhile to know
Reason to blow those embers into life again
Who can tell, when second chances come
if it’s really worth the cost of all the burning
But the gamble’s taken, setting fire to my life
| 403
Just Another Kid
He was born part of a profit structure
Breast fed, when she remembered
Her milk laced with heroin
he cried away his hunger and habit
Solitary by the age of five, learning
the cunning of hunted animals, the art
of not being seen, untrusting any touch
Eyes withheld from everything that hurts
A shadow life at ten, mixing darker shades
that slip down stairwells, dank with piss
Running with survivors, edging away
bold, when boldness is the only hope
Dealing, stealing, reeling at fifteen, his shoes
404 | a badge of honor in a dishonored life
Father to his own son, born of a nameless girl
Continuing the heritage of no heritage
Dead at sixteen, no major news event
Uncomprehending the history he’s left
at the bottom of a stairwell, blood and broken glass
Just another kid and life and death move on
Big Boats
Big boats and big horses alike
The same feel between the legs
of rising power, eagerness
Galloping across watery fields
this animate thing held in the hands
rolls and plunges under me, alive
A forty footer, close hauled and flying
Rail down in green water, she hisses
and wind hisses back from the shrouds
Shoulders braced against her wheel
leg out, to ride the thrust of sloping deck
so like a shying thoroughbred
The wind is unpredictable, untame
It lies peaceful and grazing, head down
then pricks its ears, neck swinging up
to snort, reminding who has power
who merely holds the reins, sits deep
in its roiling watery saddle, waiting
Then we’re off and hunting horns sound
sliding into blue green troughs and rearing
A bridle full of halyards, lines snapped taut
she’s breathing hard, this bloodline
carries years of careful breeding
She knows her way to the finish, running free
Wanting only a quiet word, a restraining hand
stretched along her neck, trimming sheets
to show respect for all these animated forces
No patience now for faulty horsemanship
Bring her close to the wind and heel her over
Big boats need their head to bring you home
| 405
406 |
Photo: Lucia Nimcová
Róbert Gál
from Agnomia
Three young female artists present their projects. One of them, a famous
photographer of the rediscovered theme of female bodies comes with a
collection of paper boxes in which some idea is always intricately glued, as if
it were a jack-in-the-box or cuckoo clock. I sit at a table with this photographer
in the sort of timeless space a café describes and I let her spill her waves of
acute anxiety on me—this anxiety owing to the fact that one of her colleagues
is nearly her identical twin. She describes her, detail-by-detail, with utmost
concerned. “Young, beautiful, passionate. A tough one in pursuing her
goals.” “Just like you,” I say. “Yes, you’re right,” she answers and breaths out
slightly. I head off to the old dingy building of a former train station. I enter | 407
a pub, it’s a complete dive, at the bottom of the price category. Right at the
entry there are a few steps down, which must be taken ritually—every
newcomer is thoroughly and silently measured by watchful pairs of eyes.
The tension between the regulars and me is nearly unbearable and yet I
continue straight to the bar. I ask for a beer and sit down at a little table set
strategically right beside the bar, shielded from possible attacks of invisible
regulars. They are slowly becoming visible. They are heavy-faced people
with the deep eyes of old men. The first one my gaze fixes on looks like the
double of Samuel Beckett in his old age. Quiet and photogenic, with an
elegant worker’s leader cap on his head. I see the other guests as well—each
is like a living monument, sitting at his own massive table—they all have the
exact same caps on their heads. One of them opens a newspaper in front of
him and looks at it, focused. I find myself in this place in the midst of a
discussion. The patrons are trying to convince the pub owner about the
necessity of some measure or other, but the man behind the beer-tap looks
bulletproof. Instead of an answer to a direct question from one of his guests,
who is pointing a finger at him as the only suitable addressee, the barman
suddenly picks up a newspaper from a table, opens it and hides his entire
face. The pages of the newspaper are black as soot. Even that must have a
reason. I read that the first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, is dead. And then
I dreamt that I was passing through the reception of a dormitory, posing as a
woman. One of the girls had gone to see her parents and so she let me take
her bed. In the morning, I got up quietly and informed the two young men
blissfully chatting on the other beds my name—this time it’s my actual name.
Then I ask them whether I can stay there for a week, as this was the deal I’d
made with the girl. They say it’s OK. We’re outside on a lawn and heaven’s
birds twitter nicely. I say to these fellows: “Look, I have an absolute bomb
here! Perhaps we could organize a show.” I pull from my bag the precious
contraband, in the form of a musical composition: Six Litanies for Heliogabalus.
I put it on. The music starts, ritualistically, from the first beat, at full throttle.
I realize that by the time the thundering of drums sets in (fired up by the
shrieks of the singer), there is already a merry dancing on the meadow. A
surrealistic painter watching it and keeping his distance writes in his diary:
“This goddamned vermin is spinning since the morning.” A smaller group
of dancers is like a squirming caterpillar moving across the hill. That’s where
the real authentic “voodoo part” of the composition comes in. And there is
some sort of totem being prepared. Won’t they chop someone in quarters alive?
Voices from the plenum can be heard. To come with objectiveness, waves, in
which objectiveness comes. Objectiveness is never objective. On the account
of one of Hegel’s books, Kierkegaard stated that, if the author noted in the
preface that his book is a mere thought experiment, it would be an interesting
piece of work. But Hegel did not make such a note and thus his thoughts are
408 | ridiculous. This reminded me of a scene from my relationship with L. One
time, before leaving for someplace, I pulled a condom out of my bag in her
presence, so that I could put it into a secret jacket pocket. And she immediately
started complaining, not understanding, why I need a condom in a secret
pocket when I’m with her. I didn’t know what to tell her. That the condom is
something of a good luck charm, the one that continually fortifies me with
the hope for something better? Yesterday I met Ben after two years at a
literary soirée. I asked him whether he’d come back to Prague or whether he
was here only for a visit and intended to return to Japan. He said living in
Japan was impossible. Two years ago, he said the same thing about Prague.
“Tell me something about Berlin,” he said. “My wife just applied to a school
there.” To date, I still don’t know his wife’s name, because every time Ben
talks about his wife, he uses the expression “my wife.” In my interpretation
this means some sort of balance between the two words, which are equally
serious. First of all, to point out the fact of ownership and secondly to point
out the fact of the object of the ownership, which is, conventionally, specifically,
designated as a wife. He spoke of her psychological anomaly, which he’d
discovered only recently after their relationship had already lasted many
years. I told him that when I first met his wife, she seemed to me …
hypersensitive. I called it that for lack of a better word and perhaps out of a
certain tact. The soirée continued with a reading (in English), which flooded
the entire inside of the somewhat humanized industrial metal organism of the
pub. I asked a friend of mine, a Slovak sitting next to me, whether he
understood any of it. He answered that he understood nothing but it was
obvious nevertheless that he was having a good time. He said that it reminded
him of the sermon at Sunday mass, where his grandmother took him at the
age of six or seven. The rest of the evening was ruled by magical Markéta,
who, after a dose of pot and plum brandy, got into such a weird spiritual
state that she needed to gesture with her body like an ancient Sun goddess in
the full fury of worship. Her hands were held up like the bowls of weighing
scales and her stare—like fiery magnetic rays shooting into the darkness of
the pub—was what these bowls were weighing. Recalling this, I perceive her
gesture now as some necessary tugging at the powers of stares. At the time I
felt somehow able to absorb whatever she was beaming—as if it were some
form of unusual nourishment. And this filled me with an outright sense of
victory. In the last stage of this game, during which Markéta was staring at
the quartered image of an emblematically multiplied vagina (a design by a
Slovak photographer, Miro S., printed in bright green on the front of my
black tee-shirt), she vomits into the ether some sort of curse which has to do
with a spider. She can’t figure out what’s on my tee-shirt, but I can’t tell her
either, because to do so would break the ice that holds things together and
expose the basic excess that truth entails. Because every reality is missing
something, in order to be generalized. “So, what’s up, little one?” L. asks,
now again two heads taller than me. As a child, I wondered what a doll | 409
would do if it suddenly came alive. But what does it mean to be someone’s
doll from the perspective of God’s providence? Isn’t God just a clumsy horrible
child playing, watching from above, to see what all his toys are doing down
here all the time? Let’s presume evil as an alternative option to good, good
altered by evil. As is the evil of the choice of evil, when even the good we’re
committed to is understood by us as evil. For a person has the need to say
something, but the words prevent him. I cannot forget little N. with her head
held high and yet strangely set forward on a tiny stretched neck, as if it kept
there only by force and wishing to be independent of it, so as sooner to be
shown as a litmus of its morality, as with Medusa’s head, whose remote
functional application occurs only once it’s torn from itself in the hands of
someone else. Always that automatic nodding of the head, that Yes of hers in
the ever faster tempo of a marionette play. Always that sharply focused stare
of the eyes which only see what they themselves project, because the power
of this projection gives them certainty in existence. A man who is, at a given
moment, certain of his Yes, simply doesn’t think. He’s nothing but a prosthesis
of his own need to have order in things and that’s entirely enough for him.
But things don’t need order in things, because order doesn’t belong to things.
Order isn’t a matter of things, but of matter-of-factness and that’s where
preciseness leads us. All this it was possible to intuit from N’s gestural
shortcuts, of whose uncompromising urgency she was most likely unaware.
The preciseness of her relationship to things—and the entire seriousness of
it—she no doubt perceived as a priori valid and which, therefore, was not
open to discussion. As if a goat pisses on a sheet of metal: a free description of
her stroboscopic laughter. “Actually, it was a sneer over his death,” she
replies, as if the reasons for it were planned. And could reasons in case of
suicide forcibly disrupt some plan? And then there are these delayers of
suicides, masters of the art of suffering, whose faces are mimetically silent
for years. And from the depths of their innocence, of truths spilled out as lies.
Because at every moment of a thought, to have a feeling of objectiveness is
precisely subjective, but thoughts don’t occur any other way. A thought doesn’t
think about what it thinks when it’s not yet a thought—a thought doesn’t
think at all. A thought in its embryo is always necessarily impulsive and, as
it broadens, it weakens. Prickly touches of fingers. You hurt me invisibly, she
says. As if I intended her pain? And above this, that exceptionally developed
sensitivity to falls and fractures. (“Do not touch drunks, even those fallen on
the ground,” was never valid for her.) My defence against her feelings thus
couldn’t be aroused, but there was no sadism in it.
Translated from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman.
First published in 3:AM Magazine (2009).
410 |
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412 |
Photo: Marc Brown
Thor Garcia
Dagger 1.
The sun fell down on California. Inside a large beach villa, lights flared. The
place belonged to Pete Dagger, all-star American writer.
Dagger was among the biggest of the writers, perhaps the largest of the
era. He was a top multi-millionaire popular artist who was loved by the
critics. He was huge with the academics, who sucked from his marrow, and
with the underground, which was hot and bothered by his slashing, ripping
style and bottomless defiance.
Like many of the greats, Dagger was no genius-come-lately. He had
been recognized only after years and years of surviving on ketchup soup | 413
and kool-aid, after years and years of struggle up mountains of scorn and
indifference. He had survived the painful years of short-story writing; the
dabbling in “journalism”; the job stints as dishwasher, data-input man, and
motel clerk. He had overcome the harrowing years of hostility and suspicion
from friends, colleagues and family. He had prevailed despite his stabbing
bouts of doubt; his frightening drunk sprees; a general case of self-loathing.
Few critics had initially discerned Dagger’s particular epochalness. His
first book, Copper’s Gold, had received vague, if somewhat polite, notices in
the small number of journals that chose to review it (many a career was in
fact badly tarnished by the early failure of critics and editors to identify the
breadth of Dagger and his achievement). The public response to this sterling
volume was similarly rather sluggish, and initial hardback sales of Copper’s
Gold petered out at about 910,000 copies.
However, Dagger’s second book, the cutting, bittersweet masterpiece The
Sun, Hey, Strawberries, was an instant global paperback best-seller, prompting
a renewed wave of interest in Copper’s Gold. The first book had mounted a
keen comeback, soon overtaking the second on the sales charts—and to the
amazement of Dagger and many others, Pete Dagger had become all the
proverbial worldwide rage. With critics from Maine to Madagascar suddenly
struggling to say enough good things about these two textual jewels, Dagger
was inexorably propelled to the summit of literary regard, a position he
maintained to the present day.
In the years since its publication, Copper’s Gold had lost none of its
legendary luster, remaining among the most pre-eminent of Dagger’s classic
texts. The 329-page standard American paperback version was now in its
twenty-eighth printing. At last count, it had been translated into 71 languages
(in editions of varying page-lengths). It was taught in all but the very most
pious high school districts of the U.S.A., as well as in most of the modernleaning universities of Europe, Canada, Asia and the former Soviet Union.
And it had made Dagger millions and millions of dollars, with no sign of
slowing down.
Dagger’s latest, the glam-stained sci-fi satire Is He In Pain, Queenie?, was
his ninth book. The most recent figures, fresh from the conglomerate headoffice, showed it had sold 41 million copies so far worldwide. And it was
still on the upcline. The rights had been sold in Malaysia, and a publisher in
Santiago, Chile had just put in what was believed to be a record bid for Latin
America.
The book, indeed, was quite universally loved, and had added another
coating of shine to Dagger’s literary reputation (which was already
glisteningly formidable, save for his mostly forgotten fourth book, the semiautobiographical Dromedary, which had initially been published in a limited,
premium-priced first edition of seven damask-covered octavo volumes) as
the most ruthlessly brilliant author of his generation. Indeed, the consensus
414 |
was starting to move beyond even that: Dagger’s name had started to crop up
now and then among the ranks of some of the more major Russian, French
and Portuguese giants.
History, of course, would be the ultimate judge. Yet there could be no
denying that Pete Dagger had the essential vitals—the question was simply
no longer open to dispute by serious people. Because Pete Dagger was the
actual thing itself—the real, the pure, the absolute, no-bars item. He was a
visionary, a shaman, a revolutionary, a humanist, a misanthrope, a true pro,
and pretty tough stuff. He just had it. He God to earnest had it. His books
were treasures, straight and unbidden.
There was, of course, next to no competition. Dagger had seen to that. His
singing, stamping excavations, his drench-filled revelations, his crushingly
excellent stories, death-defying prose gambits, witheringly incisive dissection
of the political situation—his lightness, his darkness—his faith, humor and
melancholy—hope, despair, joy—dread and wit—the scathing opprobrium—
his allusions to the Biblical Christ, his enraged assault on the organized
Church—his meditations re: man v. machine—that little bit of unnamable
insatiable—had basically killed off and rendered unusable all challengers.
By that we refer to: The pallid sardonics waving their flags; the clever cardsellers; the panting word-women; the thriller tripemeisters and the horror
turds; the university-learned phlegmatists; the technophile doughboys;
the cruddy computer crumbs; zhivagoing doctors; panoramic pie-pushers;
moody revanchists; dullardly ethnicians; foolish and mistaken A-students;
pea-brained peace prize candidates; gin-slapped country-club stemwinders;
bungling zeitgeist-sniffers; the hordes of goshing girls; provincial dreckkings; sports dopes; media-mooing mindtwerps; science-loving schlongnecks; Godly gabbling goonies; flatulizing financial finnanegans; ironicizing
trash-truckers; crime-crazed schtickmen; screenplay-flogging schlock-jacks;
plastic-fingered sex-phonies; the corporate-vetted dingbat dimwits; the
shoddily fallaciously shabbily drearily—Dagger had shot and smashed them
all down, to the cheers of a delighted, word-wary world.
As night fell down on California in early spring, Pete Dagger sat before
his electric typewriter and crafted, with his bare hands, another masterpiece.
He looked like a normal man of fifty-seven, about six feet tall, 195 pounds,
except for his face, which was creased like a De Kooning, and his eyes,
which looked like a pair of little blue fish freshly plucked from the Pacific.
As Dagger typed, passages of stunning luminosity took shape. It was as
though his fingers themselves were wired to the hot, burbling, frothing cone
of humanity—or anti-humanity, as the case would have it. The words spilled
forth, providing another piercing, rending glimpse at the secret whispered
soul of existence. The new book had the working title, Too Many Vikings. Well,
perhaps the title would need a little work, come to think of it.
Dagger’s beachside villa was a conventional-enough looking place, as
such places go. Of multiple split-level design, it featured a pool-jacuzzi- | 415
sauna complex, with direct beach access and special foglights; an expansive
French-Italian kitchen; a collection of functional Finnish-Dutch furniture,
representative of several design moments; five bedrooms, six bathrooms,
two studies, three dinettes, and one library; artworks, among them several
pieces by Chinese, Arabian and Salvadoran dissidents; a combined billiards
room/satellite theatre/bar-disco/championship-regulation Scrabble sanctum;
a six-car garage, filled with six cars, two bicycles and three motorcycles; and
detached servant’s hut (unoccupied for several years now). Dagger didn’t
care so much for all the stuff, but it had just piled up over the years. After all,
one had to do something with one’s money; one couldn’t just let it sit there.
Perhaps Dagger’s only “unusual” possession was a handmade stone
pornographic chess set, which occupied a place of prominence in the main
sitting room. This had been sent to him by a fan from Scotland.
The phone rang. Dagger’s hand snapped at the black receiver, seizing it
in mid-jangle.
“Hello?…Well hello, Jack,” Dagger said with a thin chuckle. “Hello to
you, too…well of course, of course…absolutely…send her right over…Oh,
fine…Yep, another one, you got it…Two hundred thou or so? Sure, shouldn’t
be a problem. I’ll have it sent over first thing…You betcha, buddy…Okay, be
seeing you…You bet, we certainly, certainly should…Toodle-oo to you too.”
Dagger hung up. He sat there, calmly, and stroked his brief beard. Then
Pete Dagger began to softly cry. His heart almost seemed to crack open.
Yes, it was that time again. Another girl was coming.
It was as basic as that, yet also more. So, so much, much more. It was the
most beautiful thing he could think of, in fact. A pretty girl. Well, now—a
pretty young woman. A pretty woman-girl. Dagger shut off his typewriter
and sat in his chair, drowning inside.
2.
Dagger never knew where, exactly, the girls came from nor, exactly, why.
He only knew his friend Jack would send them, by car or by bus, and they
would stay until they left. It might be a few hours, a day, a week, but rarely
much longer than a month. Dagger gathered that the girls were employees
of Jack’s—or if not outright employees, most certainly “associates” of some
kind. Something. It was all very unclear to Dagger. Yet he never inquired of
the details. It seemed he never quite wanted to know all that much.
Well, Dagger knew Jack was involved in what loosely could be called
“entertainment”—principally films and modeling and so forth, and also
the dancing industry perhaps, and perhaps also what might be called the
courier business. Dagger had gathered that—indeed, he was well aware of
it. He had, after all, bankrolled a goodly number of Jack’s projects over the
years. These had been far from profitable, at least financially, at least from
Dagger’s perspective—Dagger had never seen a single return off any of his
416 |
investments. But as I say, Dagger never properly inquired. He never missed
the money, and he just never inquired.
Dagger didn’t mind. Hardly. Pete Dagger had more money than he rightly
knew what to do with. Indeed, small armies of men and women toiled around
the globe to ensure that his money was being constantly turned into more.
Because the system worked to Pete Dagger’s benefit now. He had crossed a
certain fiduciary threshold, and there would be no turning back. There could
not be any turning back—not the way the system worked today, so long as
you had crossed the threshold. And Dagger had crossed that threshold—
lord, but he had.
He therefore donated to Jack whatever the other man requested, and
whenever he requested it. Gladly. In fact, joyously. It was the least Dagger
could do. He liked to think of it as his little unique role in the necessary
redistribution of wealth. Because Dagger was of the belief that the money he
gave Jack eventually, somehow, wound up in the hands of people who could
really use it—working people, struggling people. An utterly indistinct conclave
of poor souls, doomed dreamers and generally irresponsible laggards—in
any case, people to whom it might somehow make a difference.
Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all things considered—perhaps
it was a bit more complicated. Perhaps indeed. But Dagger chose not to
dwell on it, at least not for very long. One couldn’t worry about everything,
after all. One couldn’t avoid one’s responsibility, certainly, but one couldn’t
worry about everything—though one did, of course, have to draw a line
somewhere. Yes—at about murder and torture and nuclear war, Dagger
supposed. Terrorism, too.
Pete Dagger had met Jack several years ago—around the time of Dagger’s
now legendary Hollywood spree that had followed the premiere of Sasquatch
Plutarch, his seventh book for which he had written the screenplay in four
days. The country music had been playing rather loudly the one night, and
Jack had rather astutely meshed himself into Dagger’s circle of a groggy
midnight, weaving in with deep pockets of good cheer, jokes—and, as it
happened, a sultry passel of airy young beauties.
Now, years later, the beauties had not stopped coming—the cavalcade
had not ceased.
Certainly not.
Dagger trembled, just thinking about it. Gosh, it was horrible—yet he
could think of nothing better.
These girls—what in silky blue heaven were they doing? Well, okay—
they were modeling and dancing and starring in film projects—this Dagger
had gathered. And he had gathered the films and other projects were not
being produced by the major Hollywood studios—at least not the ones that
churned out the movies and television programs based on his books. But
that was about all Dagger knew.
Well, Dagger knew—he was almost positively certain—that other men, | 417
perhaps many other men, were involved. On some level, Dagger knew they
most certainly were.
He cringed and trembled anew at the notion, at the idea of what might be
happening. Gosh, these were girls gone bad! Bad, bad, filthy little cheapies!
But so wonderful, too. Wonderful! So young and good smelling. So pretty.
So delightful. So quivering with life. So to be cherished. But so bad! Bad! So
very bad!
The doorbell rang. Dagger shuddered. She was there, she had come.
Dagger’s heart swished like an eyeball in solution. Thank God he had already
gotten everything ready. Her room was prepared, he’d double-checked it just
seconds ago. The kitchen was fully stocked, he’d checked. The bathrooms
were spotless. The boy had come earlier that afternoon to clean the pools.
Dagger jogged to the entryway and put his hand on the console. Would
he use the surveillance video monitor? No. Dear no! The first look-see was
always best in the flesh.
Dagger bent himself and peered through the front door fisheye. There she
was! Standing under the bright and glimmery porch bulbs. Ah, and pretty as
could be. Blue backpack over a shoulder. Auburn-colored hair, rolled up in
front, wavy on the sides. Snapping gum. Hooped earrings, the size of halfdollars. A cute little—what was that?—yes, a little glittery stud, stuck there
in the nose, above the right nostril. The eyes—approximately turquoise, it
appeared.
And those full lips, he was looking at them now—so hideously full! Well,
she may have been a bit on the short side, legwise, considered Dagger—oh,
but it didn’t matter, not that much.
Dagger’s heart raced and flipped. It somersaulted, darted, backstroked,
butterflied and chicken-winged. He drew open the door, a curious, expectant
beam across his bearded visage.
“Well hello there,” he said in a fell swoop.
“Hi.”
Her head cocked to a side. A hand raised itself in a tentative signal of
greeting.
“Yes,” said Dagger, “Jack said you would be here, and here you are.” He
laughed lightly. “It’s Sandra, isn’t it, yes? Sandra?”
She smiled. “That’s me.”
“Well come in, come in,” Dagger said, showing her the way.
After Dagger had hung her coat, he disappeared into the kitchen. He
called out, “May I get you something? A ginger ale, perhaps?”
“Okay.”
“With ice?”
“Okay.”
Dagger’s shaking hands fumbled. A block of ice pitched to the imported
pink stones of the kitchen floor, shattering in a crack of sliding crystal.
“Just another minute,” he called out. “I’m afraid I’ve spilled.”
418 |
Dagger at last returned to the sitting room. On his right palm he balanced
a chrome tray with two small bottles of ginger ale, glass tumblers, one bowl
of broken ice and another of macadamia nuts.
Sandra was seated on the white velvet couch, her legs crossed.
“That’s a interesting chess set,” she said, pointing. “Never seen one like
that before.”
Dagger’s knees buckled. Ice clinked. He set the tray on the coffee table
and slumped next to her, heart beating, air fluttering about his nostrils.
“Yes,” he said weakly, “I suppose it is rather somewhat rare.”
“Can I smoke in here?” she said, leaning forward suddenly. “Do you
mind?”
“Oh, please do,” Dagger said. “I’ll run and get you an ashtray.”
He sprang up and walked briskly to the hallway closet.
“Wow, Time magazine,” he heard Sandra say.
She rose from the couch to inspect the framed object on the wall. It was a
layout of Dagger from several years ago. He was on his strip of beach, hair
whipping in the breeze, staring straight into the camera. He was wearing a
black and red silk samurai costume. In his hands he held a huge, decorative,
curving sword, of the kind one might possibly find in a movie about pirates.
“He Writes The Books,” text said in large yellow type. Below that, in somewhat
smaller type, it said: “Pete Dagger Cuts to the Bone.”
“Wow, that’s you on the cover of Time!”
Dagger was returning with the ashtray.
“Yes,” he said, grinning and setting down the ashtray.
There was a soft clunking noise.
3.
It was morning, a little before five a.m. Pete Dagger rose in his bed chamber,
electrically awake. He went to the toilet, had a rub of his beard and a drink
of water from the sink. He walked blinkingly down the hall to his study,
hesitated a moment in the doorway, and finally set the lights a-burning. He
sat before his computer/typewriter and inhaled. He flipped on the machine
and began to labor once more upon the latest masterpiece.
Pete Dagger trained his concentration and worked. A diamond of a word
was quickly followed by a sapphire. Next came a ruby of a verb, a platinum
participle, a perfect pearl of punctuation. The resulting combination was
pure Peter K. Dagger—pure radiance.
And so the day began.
The clock was a strike or two past eight when Dagger paused. Was that
a noise? Indeed, it appeared to have been. Dagger froze, poised over his
keyboard. Now another noise. Noises. A door opening. A toilet’s muffled
groan. And now the muted spraying splay of shower jets.
Fingers stuttering, Dagger shut down his machine. Knees jerking, the | 419
back of his neck squirming, he scuttled past the bathroom in question and
descended the stairs to the kitchen.
When Sandra at last appeared, Dagger had the table miraculously set. It
contained a small silver decanter of steaming coffee; tea in a sturdy porcelain
crock; a pitcher of chilled grapefruit juice; lightly toasted bagels, still warm;
cream cheese, lox, margarine and apricot jam; muesli, in tandem with fresh
goat’s milk; ham slices and honey; and basketed fruit, still water-splendored
from Dagger’s focused rinsing the moment before.
Sandra damply crossed the ingress of the breakfast dinette, a candystriped towel about her head.
“Well good morning, Sandra,” Dagger said.
“Hello.”
The young woman was barefoot. In addition to the towel, she wore a large
mint-green T-shirt, torn in one spot at the collar, with the large inscription
VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS emblazoned in blue on the front. Sandra
glanced at Dagger, smiled from one side of her mouth, and sat down at the
table.
Dagger heard the tweet of birds, flutting and scruffing in the trees beyond
the window. Golden sunshine poured between the venetian window slats.
Dagger observed that Sandra did not appear to be wearing anything beneath
her T-shirt.
“Wow, thank you for breakfast,” she said. “You didn’t have to, you
know.”
“Oh, come now,” said Dagger. “It’s my pleasure. Sleep well, did you?”
“Yes, very well,” she said, offering a smile. “Really, thanks a lot for letting
me stay here.”
“Oh, no problem. Quite seriously, it’s not a problem at all. That’s a funny
T-shirt, by the way.” Dagger grinned.
“Yeah,” Sandra said. A glint of blue-gold jumped from her nose bauble,
surprising Dagger as it veered. “It’s a joke on world peace. Get it? Whirled
peas?”
“I do, I do.”
Sandra lifted a toasted bagel-half to her plate and picked up a knife. With
her other hand she lifted the pot of honey.
Dagger poured himself a steaming black dash of coffee. He gazed at
Sandra and felt his blood racing. His heart galloped, churned, leaped, and
broke into thousands and thousands of individually bruised and crumpled
pieces. In his ears, an inconcise roaring mixed with bird tweets.
“So you’re a writer, huh?” Sandra said. “Mmm, this is good honey.”
“Thank you,” Dagger said. “Yes, that’s quite right, I do write. Or type,
rather. It’s just a lot of typing, to be honest.”
He shrugged, smiled and brought a hand to his beard. “It’s a job, I guess.
And I’m lucky to have it.” He shrugged again. “Anyway. The honey’s from
Oregon, if you’re wondering. A friend sent it.”
420 |
Sandra ingested another bite and swallowed. “Did you ever write anything
for Jack? I mean, for the things he does?”
“Ho, dear no,” said Dagger, tacking on a light laugh. “But maybe that’s
not a bad idea, though, now that you mention it.” He chuckled, smiled,
then swept his hand once more to his chin. He plunged into a swirl of brief
thoughtfulness.
Sandra grinned. “I didn’t think so. I mean, because you’re kind of famous,
right? Cover of Time magazine, right? I think I remember them talking about
you once in school. I don’t remember what they said, but—well, they were
talking about you.” She smiled for a moment before biting her lower lip. “I’m
sorry. I guess I should have paid more attention.” She hunched her shoulders
and shrugged.
“Oh, no,” said Dagger, “dear no. It’s quite all right, Sandra. I don’t know
what they say myself, and would probably frankly rather not hear it, to be
honest. Some fool foolishness, I would imagine, neither quite here nor there,
as they say. Most likely. Where did you go to school, by the way?”
“Well, I went to high school in Tucson.” Her face and neck pinkening,
Sandra’s eyes darted to a colorful, prison-flavored Salvadoran wall print. “I
haven’t started college yet, if that’s what you mean. But I want to. As soon as
I’m ready—I mean, when I have my money saved and stuff.”
“Tucson,” said Dagger, “in Arizona?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a pretty place, isn’t it? Deserts and everything. All those empty
skies. Cacti.”
“Are you kidding?” said Sandra, her eyes widening. “It’s super-shitty to
the max. Excuse my French, but it is. Jesus Christ. Why do you think I came
all the way out here?”
“Okay, okay, point taken,” said Dagger, raising his hands in an “I
surrender” posture. “I was just there once. It did seem very pleasant, I must
say—but you’re far more of an expert than I could ever be. More tea?”
“Yes, please.”
The both of them ate their fill, or close to it. At which point Sandra
announced Jack was sending a car to pick her up in the early afternoon.
Pete Dagger and Sandra together cleared the dishes to the kitchen and set
them inside the dishwasher.
Dagger suggested a swim on the beach.
“Oh, really?” said Sandra. “Let me just run up and get my swimsuit.”
Dagger, sitting down, brought up his beard hand.
“Well,” he said, gazing up at her, “only if you want to, Sandra. It’s a
private beach access, you know. You can do whatever you want down there.
No one’s going to be spying or anything.”
“Oh.”
Sandra lowered her eyes. Her nose and lips tremored infinitesimally.
“Okay, I guess.”
| 421
“Fine, then,” said Dagger, gesturing at the sliding glass which led to the
beach. “By all means, do as you please. Feel free, as they say.”
Sandra quickly turned. As she did, Dagger caught a glimpse of a tattoo on
the outer flank of her right thigh. What the—was that a flower? motorcycle?
Sheesh. Some kind of death’s head?
Dagger wasn’t sure. Darn it, so many of these girls had tattoos. Between
seventy and eighty percent, at least, all with at least one tattoo, somewhere.
All kinds of tattoos. Navel rings, too. Nipple rings.
Dagger and Sandra strode over the warm expanse of redwood planking
that led to the ocean. Hot sunlight dabbled upon their heads, the heat
however made deceptive by the cool sea winds which ruffled the adjoining
arrangement of palm trees and bougainvillea Birds tweeted.
Surf could be heard, pounding muffledly.
Sandra suddenly said, “You’re probably going to want me to suck you off,
yeah?”
Dagger gulped. His breath caught. His heart skipped, tripped, shattered,
came together, fell and splintered once more. He lowered his head and
walked, one step after the other. He looked up and sniffed the breeze.
“No, actually,” he said, looking at her and scowling somewhat. “It hadn’t
crossed my mind. What makes you say that? Jack didn’t say anything, did
he? God, I hope not. He better not have. What a terrible thing to say to a
woman.”
Dagger cast a grim, beardful look at Sandra. He lowered his head and
shook it.
“No, he didn’t,” Sandra said. “But I just figured. A girl learns a few things
pretty quick out here in California.”
Dagger walked. His bare toes pushed the sand. He was hearing her voice,
but the words were disappearing, disappearing in the thickening salt-haze.
Dagger’s toes twinged against the scalding sand, the sun pestered his long,
lightly-haired brown arms. The air throbbed with the ancient incense of
rotting seaweed, tar and foaming froth.
These girls. Oh, these girls! Nothing but little casseroles of sugar and
water, dirt and mucous, proteins and pulpy things. Little squiggly things.
Pete Dagger walked, but slowly now, vaguely, drowsy from the heat. He
stood and stared at the sun-struck waves, at the geyser of brilliant white
on the horizon. Sandra had flipped off her sleeper and was jogging with
dancing steps toward the ocean.
4.
Well, Pete Dagger thought, things were pretty much squared away. The
New York trip was all arranged. There would be the awards ceremony and
poultry-fish banquet, followed by any number of parties. The usual routine.
It wouldn’t be so bad. New York was still a hell of a town, after all, plenty
422 |
of people were still promoting it. And Dagger guessed he had to see those
people, sooner or later. Business was business, after all. The system was still
intact. Yep—the same old unjust system, corrupt to the core, rigged to help
“the rich” and enslave the rest, or a lot of them. Yes, and it probably wouldn’t
be changing any time soon.
Well—and so what was to be done? The answer, reflected Dagger, was
not much. Unless, you mean, maybe blow it up? Burn it down? How about a
new revolution of some sort? Or—perhaps a quantity of strategic tinkering,
and a tiny spot of heavy lifting, to make things, uh, a little more humane
and equitable, locally and globally? Dagger chuckled. Bring it on, baby, yeah
yeah, mix it up if you’ve got the juice. Two steps forward and one step back,
and vice versa, and so on, depending of course on which side ended up with
more key ideological booty after what war, and how disruptive were the
technologies during which political hegemonic blah-blah, and whose scales
of economy were more terrific at what big moment of convergence. And
importantly, who did the analysis at which particular time, after everyone
was dead and no longer bothered…let the historians sort it out later. Fine,
just fine. Because about the only thing Pete Dagger was certain of was that
some people kept dirty asses, while others worked to stay clean. And quite
a large number, in fact the majority, tended to fluctuate. And therefore, i.e.,
human beings were born to suffer, and art was the only thing one could or
should have any confidence in, tee-hee…
Dagger did not necessarily believe in “throwing away” one’s money, as
such. But one was, after all, obligated to do something with one’s funds. It
was a basic obligation, in Dagger’s view—or did you have something else
in mind? Dagger chuckled. It was good, for example, to be able to hand
out checks, such as the one he had given Sandra when she finally left—for
$50,000. If it didn’t buy her all the way into college, thought Dagger, well,
maybe it would keep her in cigarettes and pantyhose and bus tickets for a
few months. Lord—well, and he had taken her at her word about that crystal
meth problem that had revealed itself. But what else could he have done?
He wasn’t about to have another woman around the house full-time. Dear
no—how could he ever get to work with something like that going on?
Well, Dagger didn’t care too much—but he did, he did. He actually did
care. He sincerely loved to write those checks. And he’d keep writing them
until—well, he supposed, until, for whatever reason, he no longer could.
Dagger was in the kitchen preparing a tray of drinks and nuts when the
phone rang. He snapped the hand-held unit out of its cradle on the wall.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello?” Dagger said again.
Nothing.
“I said, Hello? Who is this?…Hello? Is anybody there?…I said, Hello?”
Silence. Perhaps a slight hissing.
| 423
“Well,” he said, “if that’s the way you feel, fine.” His face drew itself into
a tight grin. “Hello-hello, hoo-hoo…Okay, whatever…Nice talking to you,
whoop-de-whoo. No, serious, really nice, heck of a darn time. Oh yeah, sure,
sure, pleasure’s mine, all mine, forget it…”
Dagger suddenly grew angry. “I hope this isn’t some damn game.”
He slammed down the receiver. He exhaled, blinked, and turned to face
his drinks.
The phone rang. He whisked the receiver off its hook.
“Hello?”
Silence. Then a voice, grainy, but unmistakable: “Hello? Hello? I said,
Hello? Who is this? …”
Dagger’s neck went erect. His eyelids flapped. The hand holding the
phone lost some of its power.
“…serious, really nice, heck of a darn time…Oh yeah, sure, sure, pleasure’s
mine, all mine forget it…I hope this isn’t some damn game.”
The line clicked. Dagger stood there. The phone was beeping. Well, he
thought.
He returned the receiver to its hook.
Well, so they were after him. They were coming for him. It was pretty
clear now. If it wasn’t clear before, it was now. Okay, so—they were coming.
What did they want? What did they already have? What did they know?
What was their program?
Well, Dagger thought, he didn’t care. Let them come. If that was the way
they wanted it, let them come. Let them take him down. Whatever the hell
they pleased. If it was going to happen, then let it. Just let it. The hell with
it. Let them come. Whatever they wanted. Let them take it. Let them have it,
if they wanted it so bad. What did he have to hide? Nothing. Just nothing.
Everything was in the open. It was there for the taking. Let them have it
if they wanted it so bad. Let them. They couldn’t take anything from Pete
Dagger. He was giving it to them for free. They couldn’t take what he was
already giving them, could they? So let them come. All of them, each and
every one. Damn it, let them come. Come!
Dagger inhaled purposely and clapped himself on the chest. He positioned
his lips in a composed posture. He walked into the sitting room. He placed
the chrome tray on the coffee table and sat himself on the couch.
“That’s some chess set,” said his guest.
Dagger grinned. “Why thank you, Robyn, thank you very much. Yes,
you’re quite right about that, it is a bit unique. You’re not going to find
something like that down at the mall, I suppose. Certainly not every day you
won’t.”
5.
424 |
New York lazed across the horizon like a dominoes game gone berserk.
On the 25th floor penthouse of a West 53rd Street high-rise, Pete Dagger
laughed.
It was the evening post-awards party, one of several. The room shined
goldenly, smelling of professionally aged cheese, toothpicks and leather. It
tinkled with the sound of jazz piano and softly clashing crystal. Pete Dagger’s
face was dark, a touch swollen.
A woman in her latterly thirties joined the circle, grabbing for Dagger’s
hand. Dagger gave it over. She spoke in a rush for perhaps 30 seconds,
introducing herself and so on. She was a literary editor, as it turned out,
employed by the conglomerate that ultimately owned Dagger’s works, but at
a slightly different imprint. Shortly it was discovered she was in possession
of a question she had always wanted to ask Pete Dagger. It concerned a
character in one of his early mid-period books, the buoyant, effervescent, yet
oddly elusive Picabo Street, which had sold 39 million at latest count.
“I’m really frankly much more interested in what you think,” Dagger told
the woman. “That’s really what counts, you know. I just wrote the darn thing.
The damn thing, excuse me.”
The woman laughed, taking Dagger’s remark as an invitation to elucidate
her position.
“Yes, yes, perhaps so,” Dagger said, nodding his head. He hoisted his
wine bottle and ingested a swallow. “Yes,” he went on, “now I see what
you’re getting at. I’d never thought about it quite that way, to be honest, but
I can see you do have a point. Quite a point, actually.”
Dagger rocked his head vigorously, taking in more of the wine, wiping
his mouth with his sleeve.
The woman nodded, smiled, retreated a step, and studied her toes on the
carpet of creamed corn.
Dagger gazed about, lazily. Quite a crowd of luminaries had shown up
for the reception, he’d shaken most of their hands: Tina O’Weishaupt and
L.M. Narda, Sandy Chuck and her husband Rolf, Clarence Dumanouga,
Jean-Pierre Pochon, Kris Scarver, and Feuilleton Hospoda, Bennett MorMorgentaler and Jasmine Hovnová. Not far away stood Koch Sauerlander,
Edie Guillermostein, Mondrian Finefrock, Tacoma Hopps-DeGoey and
Youssef Prout.
Aha, and yes, there: Robert Benko, Paula Wild, Abdelaziz Herrera, Geoff
Raynoch; and Peter Fnolegh, Uragan C. Smerch, Anna Blantag, Dieter Johns,
Alice Sheets Boyne, Jane Hutfless, Lester Tunbs, Claude-Ellen Robbins and
her notable son, Niall. Oh yes, and to the left: Padraig Solana, Tim Tuttle,
Thom Twyford, Ashtone Steavens, Vivian Rottnier, Lars Halford, certainly.
And over there, oh yes, in a row—Danny O. Hulka, Pietrefesa Tillinghast,
Laurence Bonaqua, Megan Pinckney-Gund, Nicola Shandybin, Tuck and
Randall Potes. And Porzo Vlak, James Shamkhani, Plaxico Sachs, Appolonia
Freund, Jean-Francois Silliere, Edgar Rabbani, Carlos Hongwu. Ah, lord—
the redoubtable Goerner Majlis himself, chatting with none the other than | 425
Wellmax Kinpers.
Dagger, gently rubbing his wine bottle, took a long look at Giga Meist,
whose red and white dress tonight was quite remarkable, as many had
remarked. And indeed, yes—Otak Omarska, Bryan Bergfriedhof, Joe Bocker,
Theresa Maria Aasenlich, Shigeru G. Schliem, Yoshi “Jay” Graham, T.P. Ajax,
Alec Scandalios, Richard Lee Ben Jackson Burton, Maxine Hurtado y Baker,
Danielle Piraino, Kirby Shelby, Bruno Hamenyakataa, Egon Lansky, Scott
Rondale, Vladimir Gonzalez, Andi Pugach…
To say nothing of the assembled assorted etcetera who always attended,
the faceless clutches of tenured professors, apprentice critics, Oxfordeducated athletes, actors, hosts, models, promoters of Internet sites, the
industry operators and the other various other lit-liking people, so many of
whom had been so kind to Dagger over the years, though not always, and
certainly not always on time, and with little risk to their career or whatever
damn fool thing…
Dagger swiveled his head, drank from his wine. They were all periodically
glancing at him, weren’t they—their lips crumbly from crackers and dried
fish—glasses refilling, nostrils flaring, lips writhing, fingers twisting. Lord,
Dagger thought—and so many of them, from Harvard or Yale, Princeton and
what have you. Quite a number of them, here in this room—gone on from
Yale and Brown and Princeton and so on, to make quite an impact on the
world—just as the universities themselves had advertised they would.
Dagger chuckled, suckling from his wine. He was removing the bottle
from his mouth when he observed his agent, Frick, darting into the hallway
that he understood to contain the bathroom.
Well, he considered—now was a good time. Dagger set down the bottle of
wine. It was almost finished anyway.
“You’ll have to excuse me, folks,” Dagger announced, none too loudly. He
shrugged, grinned, and began walking.
He strode purposefully past the host and hostess, waving jovially. He
breached the double door of the suite, ambled down to the elevator and hit the
button. The lift doors swept open at street level. He exited and maneuvered
through the revolving building entrance.
He was on the street, the lights of the New York night whirling and
whipping past him. Streetlamps and neon, traffic signals and headlights,
satellites and star glow bathed Dagger, disclosing and re-cosseting him in
multifarious shades of darkness. He stood there, inhaling mightily.
6.
Dagger wandered, roughly in the direction of Wall Street. He loosened his tie
and began unbuttoning his shirt. Whew, holy. It was time to relax.
He had almost completed the unbuttoning job, and was at the midway
point of jaywalking across a boulevard, when he saw a woman—a woman
426 |
who appeared to be his ex-wife. She was walking arm in arm with a tall,
black-haired, thick and rather Mediterranean-seeming man.
Was it his wife? Dagger couldn’t precisely say. It was quite possible she
would be in New York, perhaps vacationing, perhaps even living here now.
Why not? Dagger had made certain she had received a generous settlement—
51 percent of everything. He had demanded it of his attorneys—insisted.
Gosh but Pete Dagger hoped it was her. He watched the couple, shuffling
up the street, pausing to inspect the wares in a window. God, did he hope
it was Maggie. Indeed—and he hoped her date was a Greek or a Turk. Why
not? A strapping Greek or Turk, even an Italian, who was kind and told funny
stories and happened to know a great deal about cheese-making and wine
and gardening and so on, who knew about stained glass and Buddhism and
great places to go in Canada. A fellow like that. Why not? God to hell—
Dagger hoped it was. She deserved it. Damn it, but she did.
Dagger swooned, watching them amble down the sidewalk. He had made
it to the other side of the street but found it difficult to stand suddenly. His eyes
scanned for a bench or something, somewhere to sit, but none appeared. He
cringed all over. His heart gurgled and writhed and choked and squirmed.
What he had done to the poor woman—what he had made her do.
Pete Dagger stood there, crying.
Things had just happened. Everything had been so confusing, so difficult,
and then it had happened. He didn’t know, he still couldn’t explain—it wasn’t
what he had meant, what he meant to do. No, he hadn’t understood properly
what it was really all about. He had been so wrapped up in his “plan”—
believing there were such things as plans and that his was good. And it had
happened. He had done it, it had happened, it couldn’t be reversed.
He and his wife had gone on, they’d had children. But it had happened.
He watched the woman and her companion go, disappearing down the
avenue. No, he supposed. It wasn’t her after all. He sighed.
Dagger continued in the direction of Wall Street. He finished unbuttoning
his shirt, then took off his black tux jacket and set it atop an overflowing wire
metal trashcan. A pair of nearby bums noticed, but did not immediately rush
over, being otherwise occupied.
It was just so horrible. Dagger was going to rot in hell for what happened.
And he deserved to. His wife didn’t share in the blame—he had made it
happen. Him alone. He had been the bully, anyone would say so. Lord, it
was true. God, it was so long ago, but as near to him as last minute.
And he would burn for it. There was no justice in this world or universe,
not a chance of it, but if there ever were, Pete Dagger would fry forever, deep
in the bowels of the nethermost craters of hell. It was that simple—it was not
at all complex. The rest of it be damned. The hell with all of it. All fucking
all of it.
Dagger was not far from Wall Street now. It was still humid out, but the
warm breeze was soothing against his chest. He felt his sparse nest of chest | 427
hairs, the sensation of some of the hairs wiggling individually.
Things were very bad. The breeze could not make up for the fact that
things were not right.
Dagger couldn’t walk any longer. He came to a small public park. It was
dark there, many lamps broken, one slowly blinking. He sat hunched on a
bench and sobbed, wiping the tears from his cheeks and eyes with the back
of a hand.
Some time passed. Dagger got up and began to walk once more. He didn’t
have an idea where he was going, what time it was…
He came to an underground subway entrance and stood, gazing at the
dim yellow light seeping out.
7.
The doorbell sounded. Pete Dagger was in his massive California villa. Not
Nearly Enough Vikings was complete. He had shipped it off to the publisher two
days ago. The advance “buzz” was already starting to hit the newspapers and
the chat shows, while the internet nuts had been foaming with speculation
and anticipation for months. The movie-people were howling at his agent’s
door; Frick had been stoking the price for nearly a year, dangling a carrot
here and there in the snouts of the top two or three music video directors.
Several so-called “A-list” actresses were said to be spitefully cat-fighting it
out for the lead and supporting roles—to say nothing of the scads of script
bumblers scrambling for a shot at the scripture. Over at the conglomerate,
meanwhile, design and marketing plans had been launched for The Alligator
Chalice and Other Typings, a five-volume compilation of Dagger’s early stories,
novellas, poetry, college and community newspaper articles, as well as a
recently discovered cache of hundreds of guest registration carbons he had
personally filled out during the motel clerk days.
But now night had come again, and the front doorbell was ringing. Dagger
closed down his computer, shut off the light in his office and sprinted down
the stairs. He poked into the eye-peep. He nodded and grinned.
There they were, as promised.
“Well hello, Jack,” Dagger said warmly, throwing open the door.
“Shakespeare!” said the other man.
Jack, bare chest framed in a blue jean vest, strode in. He wore a blond
straw cowboy hat with a rainbow band, swimming shorts and tan cowboy
boots. No less than five chirping, clean-looking girl-women were trailing
him.
“So happy you all could come,” Dagger said, stepping back to avoid Jack’s
oncoming cowboy brim. “Everything’s all ready, I hope.”
And somewhere a baseball whizzed. A monkey jumped. A Japanese
ate, a wounded teen sat alone. A bunny rabbit sneezed. A tyrant traduced
and a document yellowed. A presentiment was occluded. Waves lapped
428 |
at Antarctica. Someone appreciated another’s concern. There was a noshow at the landslide. Pollution rights were traded, missile launchers were
lubricated, the sounds of seals were sequenced. The pontiff expressed shame,
a porcupine screamed, Van Gogh was exonerated. A manual was consulted,
an elbow lay on a tabletop. Cobblestones frothed in the rain. Extremists
rallied, a paperclip dropped—
The moon seemed to cover everything with its bright breath.
Pete Dagger sat in the warm, track-lit woodenness of one of the jacuzzis
out back. The enclosure flexed and shimmied, reflecting the innumerable
refracting illuminations of pool splash. The chamber echoed with laughter,
girlish laughter and the heartiness of men. Dagger brought a bottle to his lips
and listened to the other man. It was hot in there, getting hotter now. Sweat
slid from Pete Dagger, all-star writer, mixing with the chemicals and water
and bodies. He sucked from the bottle, excess dribbling down his beard.
“It’s bean curd, Shakes, that’s all,” said Jack. “You and I both know it is.
It’s nice and all, we can enjoy it, but we got to call it what it is. Bean curd.
Maybe somebody thinks it’s special. No, I don’t think you do. You know it’s
just bean curd, right Pete?”
Dagger nodded.
“Yeah,” Jack went on. “Beans. Beans and curd. Think about it. So why not,
you know? If it ain’t you, Shakespeare, it’s me—right? Or some other guy.
And vice versa—some other time, some other place, depending. Know what
I’m saying? You don’t think so?”
Dagger looked up at the man in the cowboy hat. “Yes, I do. I do, Jack.”
Jack laughed. “Of course you do, Shakes, of course you do. See, it’s hard,
but at the same time, it’s easy. It’s like, it’s only hard if you let it be like that—
if you think too much, which I can see you doing, no offense intended. It’s
easier just to think of it as bean curd. You see something—bean curd. You
hear something—bean curd. You hear something else—another stripe of
bean curd. Know what I mean? Don’t mean nothing. Just what it is. Got to
keep it simple. Don’t get carried away. Keep all your furniture in all the right
rooms. No mix-ups. Don’t let yourself get confused. Hear me, Pete?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Good.” Jack nodded. “All right then. Fine. That’s what I like about you,
Shakespeare. You can dig it, you can relate. You’re a natural, you got the
natural-built star power. It’ll look like you, it’ll seem like you, but no one will
ever believe it. Never in a million, billion years. Not you, Shakespeare. That’s
the fun, see? Everyone’ll think it’s a joke, special effects, digital hooey-gooey
and whatever. Except it won’t be. Me and her and her and her and her, and
her, we’ll know. And you’ll know, of course. Hell, you’ll never forget it the
rest of your life. And if you do forget, we can just show you the tape.”
Jack roared out a laugh, from deep in his belly, ending in a cough.
“Yes,” said Dagger.
“Oh, jeez,” said Jack, holding his side. “Oh, jeez. Okay, we’re ready then, | 429
I guess. Ready. Aim. Action.”
The blue-green waters churned. Slippery legs and arms entwined. There
was laughter, moaning, a grunt, a giggle.
“Can I do the dog now, Uncle Jack?” said Dagger. His voice was husky,
somewhat breathless.
“I don’t care a damn what you do,” said the other man. “God damn it, I
don’t care.”
He trained the camera at Dagger’s face. Dagger’s eyes were wide and
unblinking, his mouth wet, slightly open. From Tund (Prague: Adam Moss, 2001).
430 |
Photo: Jason Little
Myla Goldberg
from Cirkus
Cirkus is a novel that spans the final five days of Cirkus Kludský before the traveling
show is broken up by the onset of World War II. The novel is divided into three
parts: The Book of Dalibor, in which the circus’s last days are told from the perspective
of Dalibor Radosty; The Book of Days, in which those same days are told in thirdperson narration; and The Book of Cirkus, in which Cirkus Kludský’s history—from
its birth over a century before to its mid-twentieth century demise—is recounted
in the voices of the various members of the extended Cirkus Kludský family. This
excerpt comes from The Book of Cirkus.
Igor Kludský
How long. How long, you ask? Centuries! To make a circus of flesh and blood,
a circus breathing air. Father to son, generation to generation. A tremendous
accomplishment! Stop. Think back to the posters. The ones when your father
led you by the hand. Where are the Johenssons, the Emberts, the Heraldos?
Gone, gone! Yesterday’s bread. One name, one name remains. What is it?
Kludský. It carries, that name. Church bells on a breezy Sunday. Kludský.
Why? Blood of a hero. Running through our veins. The blood of my
great great grandfather’s great great grandfather, Jan Sobieski. A name you
know. No? Think! Before the Great War, when you were a child. In school.
Perhaps your father told you. Jan Sobieski, the savior of Vienna. Ah, now
you remember! It is 1683. The Turks are at the empire’s door. Heathens
with curved blades! The blood of Christians stains the ground! The mighty
Hapsburgs! A scourge from the east! The Turks, their talons reach out. Their
shadow falls upon Vienna. Vienna, the feather in Austria’s hat! One man.
One man rose to stop them. You know his name. Which is why, to this day,
we do not play Istanbul. Blood of this kind is a treasure. A treasure we share
with you today!
What, you think it happened overnight? Think of a baobab tree. At first? A
seed. A traveling puppet show. Rade Sobieski, the father of my grandfather’s
father. The youngest son of Jan’s great grandson. The year is 1815. It is all
we know. History casts a strong shadow, you see. Darker than a moonless
night. But, we have proof. An announcement, yellow from its journey to our
| 431
hands. The paper is over 120 years old! Trumpeting Jan’s son’s arrival, his
puppets seen by all. Come to my trailer and take a look! A personal tour,
only a little extra. A special ticket. The paper is framed in mother-of-pearl
above the family headboard. Above the bed from which Kludskies have
entered the world for generations. Mother-of-pearl. A powerful thing. Why
it is called mother? More reasons than one. Knock the family headboard.
Once for a boy, twice for a girl, then reach up and kiss the mother-of-pearl.
Nine months later, see what you get. My father made a family of seven. His
father’s father made a family of seventeen! The circus was young then. It
needed extra hands.
Come! I will tell you a story.
Once upon a time, the circus was just beginning. Let me hear you say its
name. Good! A circus in its first years. The hardest years. We had no teachers.
We had to learn for ourselves. What to feed the animals? How to make them
jump through their hoops? These were the things Jiří Kludský asked. Jiří
Kludský. My great grandfather.
There were losses. A long time for Circus Kludský to stand on its feet.
Our alligator died of malnutrition. What’s one alligator, you say? A friend! A
brother! You have to be circus to understand. There were losses. Jiří’s second
son, Pavel, mauled by the puma. They shot the puma dead, not for revenge,
432 | but because it’s true what they say. An animal that tastes human blood is
never the same.
The year is 1848, our first winter. The cold killed our exotic birds. So, we
started to think smaller. Bears, horses, dogs, animals of Bohemia. Know your
home before you leave her. But even home was a stranger. When Mojmir,
Jiří’s oldest, was killed by his most trusted bear, it was too much. Jiří Kludský
went into his trailer and wouldn’t come out. Food by his door, left untouched.
Mladá, my great grandmother. Sleeping in her daughters’ trailer. Jiří was not
coming out. He let nobody in. Mladá wore the same dress as the day of the
accident for two weeks. For two weeks, the circus held its breath. This was
before my grandfather was born. Hánek, the last of seventeen children.
But then, the two weeks pass. Jiří steps out and his eyes are strange. My
grandfather’s father walks straight out of the trailer and out of the compound.
He looks at no one, not even his wife. Mladá, whom he had just slept apart
from for the longest time in twenty years.
“He can’t look at us because he’s decided to saw the branch we’re sitting
on.” This from Mladá. She knew.
When Jiří went walking he was ready to sell it all. Animals, wagons, and
tent poles. Mojmir was one loss too many. The circus would go. Any buyer,
any offer.
But we are still here, you say. How can that be, you say? Come here. I will
tell you.
There are some trees which refuse to be cut.
Mojmir is dead, the alligator is dead, the birds are dead, a son has been
mauled and a puma shot. All this in less than a year. Jiří Kludský goes walking
in the space between two fields.
It is the harvest. A small girl collects the wheat left behind. She is in rags.
Her hair is wild. The grains of wheat are tangled in her hair. “Jiří Kludský,”
she cries. Only then does he see her. “Jiří Kludský,” she cries. She is blocking
his path. She is young but her eyes are old. Older than the eyes of birds.
“Jirsky.” She calls him by his boyhood name. “I know the seed sown two
weeks ago and the fruit it has borne. I’ve come to tell you, you harvest too
soon.” The girl with wild hair and ancient eyes holds out her hand. Her palm
is smooth as still water. Jiří holds it to his heart.
“Tell me,” he says. His beard is choked with tears.
“Do not let your grief cloud your sight. The problem does not lie in the
circus. If you sell it, you will sell your soul.” Jiří trembled. The truth made
Jiří tremble.
“You must see inside an animal to know whether it will allow itself to
be yours.” This from a girl with an angel’s eyes. “Only the animal can tell
you.”
And that is when she handed Jiří the mirror.
“An animal presented with itself can tell you what you need to know,”
she said. “If it holds its gaze, there is no room in its heart for another. An | 433
animal to be trusted does not stare. It looks away from its reflection. This is
the animal with room inside itself.”
What I tell you is true. The girl returned to the field. Jiří walked back to
the camp. In his hand, the mirror we have to this day. For a little extra, you
can see it. A special ticket.
Irena Kludský
I call it circus glue. I don’t know from words, I know from life and that is
what it is called. Break the skin of anyone who is real circus and you will
find it there.
My father, the Great Kopet, told me this when he put me for the first
time on the high wire. “Irena,” he said, his voice like a cannon, “the wire is
a slippery snake, but you are made of circus glue. When you feel the snake
slipping from you, use your circus glue to stay on.” And there I was, a little
girl in a red leotard with gold sequins my mother sewed on one by one in the
shape of a sun. The net was under me in case I should fall, but I was not going
to fall. I was the daughter of Kopet, circus in my bones, and if my father said
there was glue in my feet, then so it was, and I walked straight across the
rope. The look on my father’s face, I can not say it was surprise because he
knew already with me that to put my mind to a thing was to make it so, but
such pride! What else to expect? My mother a wire-walker and my father a
Flying Kopet, it was a wonder I was not born with wings! Let me tell you
circus glue. It is a powerful thing.
The Kopets were always circus, but from the inside. Never a circus of
their own. It was a good name for a circus to have, but not in the biggest
letters, the ones a person could see on a poster across the street. We were not
like the Wallendas with their chairs and poles, on the high wire like cats they
walked. No. Kopet was good circus, solid circus, but no surprises. For me, I
wanted something bigger.
I was twelve and just a woman when my family came to Circus Kludský.
Igor was fifteen and already he had the voice of a ringmaster. He was not the
oldest son, there were three brothers before him, but he would be the one to
take the place of the father Oldřich. Already he had girls to him like leaves
on a tree, but this did not stop me. After I heard the story of 1905, nothing
could get in my way.
In 1905, I was just seven years old. The biggest thing in my head was do
I wear the blue costume or the green. We were with a circus that is gone
now, Circus Janko. Already, I knew the name Kludský, but of course I did
not know Igor, who was ten then. While Circus Janko was playing Warsaw,
Circus Kludský was in St. Petersburg. There, in St. Petersberg, Igor was
already thinking like a man.
434 |
Circus Kludský was in Russia when Russia loved Revolution. Of course
they should think the circus loved it too. No one on the Outside understands
a circus heart. The only history we make is our own and it is the only history
we tell.
It was in St. Petersburg the police took the Kludský tent. There is nothing
worse to be done. It is an insult to the pride and to the family name. It is
like ripping off the clothes of the mother of your grandmother while she is
standing in the town square. The Russian police came with five men, they
started pulling at the tent ropes like it was a flag they could tear down.
Oldřich came at them like a tigress and so, of course, they arrested him.
Circus Kludský they called a political breeding ground. Now Oldřich was
growling. He growled at them the only thing the circus breeds is more
circus.
So now Igor and his mother had a troupe, no ring, and winter on their
fingers. The circus could not perform, there was no money to go somewhere
else, and besides, Oldřich was in the St. Petersburg jail. There were the older
brothers, but their hearts were not as strong and they turned to Igor like he
was maybe seven years past his real age. But what to do? Performers went
their ways, saying they will come back when Oldřich is released. They put
their costumes inside their moving trunks, beneath towels and sheets and
underwear. They pretended they were not circus. They hid their sequins
and sashes so the Revolution would not arrest them too. But a lion can not
dress like a peasant and go back to Łodz. Maybe the performers left, but the
animals stayed behind. Where else for them to go? There were many tears.
Igor and his mother were left with three bears, two horses, a llama, and
the elephants. Crazy Libor wouldn’t leave Kenye and Zaira, so while the
others went away, he stayed in St. Petersberg. The winter was hard. Do not
ask me how two elephants got along in the Russian cold, but they did. When
I tell this story to other circuses, always they think I am lying. It is impossible,
they say, for elephants to survive in that kind of winter. But in 1905, Libor
and his elephants had already been with Kludský seven years.
The performers who were not crazy like Libor had left for other places,
but they knew where to find their hearts. The rubles always came. It could
be a letter delivered by hand, but sometimes it was a mystery. A babushka,
maybe, would bump into Igor to almost knock him down. When he walked
away, he would find new rubles in his coat pocket.
It was a difficult time. It was three months with Igor and his mother and
his brothers before Oldřich came back. He arrived looking very bad. The
animals were not doing so well, but Oldřich was looking worse than even
the llama. Then, the llama died. For a time, they also worried for Oldřich.
My Igor says it was not the prison to almost kill his father, but the worry that
Circus Kludský might miss a season after so many years.
Time had been lost. Word was sent to everyone to come back to St.
Petersburg. There was happiness for Oldřich’s return, but the death of the | 435
llama was a big sadness. The body of the llama was packed in snow to await
Moshe’s arrival. There were railroad and telegraph strikes as often as there
were clouds in the sky, so it took a month for him to come back from the time
the letter was sent. In this, maybe, it was lucky it was so cold. The body of the
llama stayed preserved in all the ice and snow.
Moshe arrived in black clothes that were torn and ash on his face, as this
was the custom of his people. He growled at Oldřich for not burying the
llama in three days as it is written in the Old Book, but the circus knew he
was secretly glad. Moshe sat shiva for the llama for a week. Not enough men
had come back to make minyan and on top of everything they were not even
Jews, but Moshe said that the spirit of his law was being kept and Kaddish
could be chanted. Even though he was only ten years old, my Igor stood with
Moshe. This was the first time for him to hear Hebrew. He tells me that it was
beautiful.
Soon after Moshe finished with his llama, the rest of the circus came back.
Circus Kludský crossed the border quickly and has not looked back since.
Marek Radosty
It hasn’t been the same since the Hard Time, which came when my father
was a boy. The happy stories are shared over and again. This story has one
telling. The year we played Budapest was the time the tale was given to me.
I had thirteen years in my pocket. My father took me to the baths and that is
where he told me. There, I had my first glimpse of what it means to be an old
man. All those sags and bags in the baths. Men looking more like elephants
than they ever should. At the baths, I could see the beginnings of it in my
father. A scary moment when a boy sees his father starting to turn elephant.
Before that, time had only meant birthday parties.
He told me as we sat in the heat room. The steam breathed pictures to his
words.
Deep inside, I already knew the story he was telling.
That is the way when you have circus in your blood. I am fourth generation.
My father’s great great grandfather was the first to join Kludský’s puppet
show. When the only animals in the troupe were the horses who pulled the
wagons. He was a tightrope walker and I have his double-jointed toes. When
he fell, he decided that horses were good for more than wagon-pulling and
that perhaps tightropes were not. It was a good thing for me because higher
up than horseback, my head feels attached to my neck by a string.
Still. I have dreams where I am dancing above a village and the sun is
close enough to spit in. That’s the circus in me. Some stories you are born
with as much as your name.
Kludský had come a long way by the time my father was a boy.
436 |
There were monkeys and a puma and a water buffalo. Circus Kludský
was the biggest menagerie east of the Paris zoo. Trunks, claws, and tails, all
sizes and colors, fur spotted, striped and dappled.
My grandfather’s horses were the talk of Vienna. Those were the days
of Chieftain. A horse you could look in the mouth. The smartest thing on
hooves. They say when he waltzed, people forgot he walked on four legs and
not two. My grandfather received more than a few perfumed letters. Ladies
wanting time with Chieftain. Alone. To groom him and ride him, they said,
but why then the false names at the bottom? Madame X. Duchess B. The
strangest folk are outside the circus, not in.
My father told me on my thirteenth year because he was thirteen when it
happened. Like most worst things, it started small.
Prince, the newest chimpanzee, fell ill. It happens sometimes when an
animal comes to a new place. But then Momo also fell ill and there was talk.
The monkeys were put in a cage toward the outside, away from the other
animals. Polský sat with the two all night to feed them a tea he brewed from
herbs and roots. It was what he drank when he took ill, so for sure it would
work with his chimps. But Momo and Prince only grew worse and soon the
puma was showing signs. A listlessness and a snuffling, a dullness to the
eyes. Fur not as shiny as should be. And now Momo and Prince were losing
fur and could not use their hands so well as before.
The circus grew afraid. If the puma had caught the monkey sickness, then
who else? Within a week, other animals showed the same signs.
Polský gave up on his tea. It is hard to find a doctor who knows pumas,
but someone was called to give the monkeys a look. A doctor man enough
to know there was small difference between chimps and his usual patients.
He wore a mask and gloves. Hard to tell, he said, what it was. He guessed
Prince had brought it with him from Africa. Highly contagious, he said. Not
much to be done.
Prince and Momo were not well. Their eyes were shut with muck. They
had a hard time getting to food. The doctor said no change and the only
thing was to remove them from their misery.
He dug deeper and said any animal showing signs should be shot. To
stop the spread. An easy thing when an animal to you is just that. A different
matter when an animal is family.
Prince died days later. Polský’s violin played minor keys from sundown
to sun up. Polský’s violin was still when Momo followed Prince.
The Hard Time is also called the Silent Time.
From the puma, it was hard to trace the path. Soon, it was faster to name
the healthy ones. Shows stopped and word spread Outside that Circus
Kludský had fallen to a sickness. Strangers appeared at the gate at odd hours,
offering money to see the disease. They were sent away with a boot to their
backs, but the truth was Kludský needed money. The sickness had come at
the beginning of things. The start of any season is the most dangerous time. | 437
You live from one show to the next and the money does not wait long before
it meets a grocer’s or a farmer’s hand.
It is difficult to be practical when grief weighs you down like a cannonball,
but Kludský had to think of these things. He knew now that any animal
showing signs would not make it through. The puma was dead, along with
the water buffalo. At least one animal in each act was sick.
It was wondered if animals were not the only ones. Polský took to flu after
Prince died. It is said something made its way around camp, but it was never
as bad as for the animals.
The nights were filled with animals crying and coughing. Nothing made
a difference. I will never forget the look on my father’s face when he talked
about those nights. He said he would not wish it on anyone. The hardest for
him was Chieftain. Chieftain was his brother, as much a brother as four legs
can be for two. Everyone knew they had to take the animals away from pain
before it grew worse. Not a soul felt they could.
When Kludský called the camp together, everyone knew part of what he
would tell. A quarter of the animals were dead. Half the living were sick.
Someone would have to be called from Outside. Someone who understood
the kindness of a shot to the head without feeling like it was family they were
killing.
For a while there were only sobs. Then silence as Kludský went on. There
was no money, he said. The season was stillborn. There were people, he said.
People who would pay to see what none of them could imagine. A circus had
to eat, he said. A circus needed new animals to carry on.
That was how the killing shows started.
They were short, twenty minutes each. A few domestic and one exotic
animal. Kludský collected the money, an amount ten times normal admission,
then locked himself in his trailer until it was done. My father said he could
hear the shots even as he hummed with cotton in his ears. He said the sound
still echoed in his dreams and, sometimes, when he was awake.
After the first days, some trainers left and never came back. Money to
make a clean start with new animals was not enough. Some did not come
near another animal again. Evsen Strauss was the last of the Strauss family
elephant trainers. The morning the elephant Winzig was put to sleep was the
end of five generations of circus Strausses. Evsen boarded a train for Austria
that day paler than a shroud.
The day Chieftain went into the ring for the last time, my father could not
keep food down. A blinding headache kept him in bed soon after the show
started and for a few days after. He said the pain froze him more solid than
the North Pole, a sharp burst and then a pulse over and over again at the base
of his skull. There was one healthy horse, a mare, but she stopped eating and
died weeks later.
438 |
Only the old circus blood stayed. It was slow starting over—just basics:
more horses, more bears, some dogs. Exotics were too expensive, too risky.
Domestic animals would not carry strange diseases.
I think the Great War took us less by surprise because the Hard Time was
already inside us.
Karel Sukno
Stand an old man next to Kenye and Zaira and he is a boy. I asked my father
once how old they were. He said, “Kareliček, to Kenye and Zaira one year is
a small red apple.” Every bushel of apples he brought for their dinner, the
meaning of his words grew new branches.
Life was good with my father. Like me, he was small but not little. The
circus treated my father like a little man. It did not stop him from loving
the circus back. When I was a boy, it did not bother me that our trailer had
the least space in it and was closer to the cages than the others, because my
father was so big. He made me feel that to live as circus was the greatest gift
life could give.
I have met elephant trainers who were different—men ashamed of parts
of their job. My father took pride in every part of elephants, even in cleaning
out their insides so no show would be stopped by their digestion. If you ask
me, I say what comes out of an elephant is a fine end for a circus.
“This arm has come as close to nature as any part of man can,” my father
would say, and hold up his right arm like a holy thing. It was the same hand
he ate with, because to him it was no shame. He was bigger than anyone
knew.
I do not measure up. To me, there is no worse than an arm up an elephant’s
ass, no matter how great the elephant. I had expected something grand.
When on my thirteenth birthday my father said to me, “Karel, it is time you
became full circus,” my face lit up like a radio tube because I knew what it
meant I would be allowed to do.
I don’t know how I thought it would be. Love is like that. If my father had
told me to walk barefoot on a bed of thorns, I would have taken off my shoes
fast as a newlywed. When it was smelly and sticky and too warm, it was very
hard to act that I’d been given the greatest present.
My father, Libor Sukno, was born the oldest son of a cloth merchant in a
village called Drogobych. It is now in Poland, but Russia has swallowed it
and spit it back before. For centuries, Drogobych has stood in the shadow
of a castle, owned by a family whose name was said to be cursed. What
kind of curse? I don’t know and my father never said, but theirs was a name
you only whispered and even then only in the light of day. For generations,
the castle stood empty. The whole town thought the family was dead. Then,
when my father turned seven, a light was seen in the castle window.
In Drogobych it was said that the last living heir to the family name had | 439
returned. Soon, strange wagons arrived with shrouded cages of different
shapes and sizes. It was said in the village that the man was building a zoo.
After the wagons had stopped being seen, the man rode into the village on
a horse.
No two people saw the same thing. Some said he was young, others said
he was old. A few said he was a woman dressed in men’s clothes. People only
agreed on what they had heard. This person announced that every Saturday,
anyone was welcome to visit the animals. My father went that first Saturday
with everyone who wasn’t too frightened to set foot on the grounds. They
found the gates open, but the mysterious zookeeper nowhere to be seen.
“The strangest live animal I’d seen until then was a pregnant bitch,” my
father told me, “and the strangest dead one was a calf with a fifth leg.” There,
he said, he saw birds the color of dreams and a monkey who could dance.
But nothing matched the elephants. He said they turned his insides warm
and made his cheeks pink like a virgin’s first shot of slivovice. The first time
he saw them, he knew.
People are made of different things. Libor was made from wood. I do not
know how a wooden child was born to a family of cloth, but there it was.
No matter how you plant a tree, it reaches toward the sun. Libor Sukno had
always known he did not want to work for his father in the textile shop. Once
he saw the elephants, he knew why.
On days that were not Saturdays, Libor went through the woods to come
to the zoo from the back. He passed the lizards, the birds, and the monkey
without a second glance. He told no one where he went. In town it was said
he had a secret love. No one guessed this love had four legs and a trunk.
As soon as he could, my father started taking odd jobs. The extra money
he kept in a small pine box so when the time came for him to grow in a
different direction, he could make his way in the world.
“Kareliček,” he told me again and again, “my father was a man who knew
textiles. He knew loose and tight weaves and cotton and wool. An elephant
had no place in his world, except as tusks to be used for fancy buttons. There
was no way I could have told him.”
As my father grew taller, his time grew shorter. By the time hairs appeared
on his chin, he just visited the elephants at the end of each month. But he said
his feelings for them only grew stronger.
As my father neared eighteen, strange stories were heard about the castle
zookeeper. A rotting disease, it was said, had started with his nose and was
working its way down. How anyone knew was a mystery. No one had been
seen entering or leaving the castle in ten years.
On his eighteenth birthday, Libor put down a cord of blue linen and left
the shop to walk up the hill, a small pine box in his coat pocket. For the first
time, he walked past the gates of the menagerie to knock on the door of the
440 | castle. When the door was opened by a hunched, limping man draped in
bandage, it took Libor a moment to step inside.
The man who opened the door had once rode into the village on a horse.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” he told Libor as they made their way to a room
with a fire. Even the scent of burning pine could not hide the smell of decay.
In a chair opposite a rotting man, my father made an offer. The wooden
box lay open on his lap. “I do not have much,” he told the man, “but what I
have is yours and I will do my best to give them a good life. We were meant
to leave this town together.”
“You are a strong young man,” Libor was told. “Your money is not what
is important.”
The man left the room and when he returned, he held a torn page in his
hand. At the bottom of that page, the top of which had old writing, he made
a bill of sale for the sum of one zloty. That evening my father took the north
road out of town, a suitcase in one hand and a thick rope tied to two elephants
in the other, a childhood of zlotys in his pocket.
It was hard for my father, knowing what he’d lost for the life he chose.
Sometimes I wondered if he had regrets. I would watch him eye the cloth
of my coat as if he was going to say something with weight to it. Instead, he
would pat the top of my head and the moment would pass.
Libor did not receive word from his family. He would write every week,
giving the name of the next town where he could be reached. Before the
circus moved on, he would visit the post office, freshly shaved and in his best
jacket. Even after he had stopped checking, he still would write—long letters
filled with me and him and the elephants. A small forest of paper was sent
to that cloth family.
I had dreams of a grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles. When
I was ten years old, I wrote my first and last letter. I thought they only needed
a signal from me, who they could love because I had never gone against
them. I bought linen stationery with two months’ savings. I made sure to
give the post office of the city we would be visiting in six month’s time, just
to be sure. I heard nothing.
I think it was because my mother was made of cloth that my father fell in
love. She took the best of the world—the smell of cinnamon, the color yellow,
and ripples in water—and draped herself around them. From these things
came the shape of her words, the form of her thoughts. I think I was born
cloth, but raising me, my father gave me his strength and I grew roots.
At first I think she was happy. I remember a time when there was laughter.
But it was in my mother’s nature to want to rest, just as it was in my father’s
nature to spread and grow. This comes from a lifetime of thought. At the
time, I only felt something broken.
The day I told my mother I wanted to stay circus, I was seven. I had not
known it was coming. My father never hit my mother like I had seen others
| 441
do. I thought they were happy.
“Karel, I have had enough of elephants,” she said to me one spring evening
after the last show, “and I don’t think traveling is any way to raise a small
boy. Kludský and his circus move out tomorrow morning.” That was all she
said. It sounds like so little, but her every word unfolded and what had once
been a small thing could be draped across my shoulders. I knew that by
morning, she would expect me to choose.
I went to Kenye and Zaira to find my father. He sat with them on a stool
in the dark and though it was quiet, I saw his lips moving. When he saw
me, his lips smiled the saddest smile of his life. “I’m telling Zaira and Kenye
that they won’t see any more of your mother. I don’t think they’re taking it
well.”
I know now that I saw something in my father’s eyes to make me stay. My
father had already been left by one family for the life he had chosen. I knew
he couldn’t survive being left by another. Just as it was clear that he could
never leave the animals he had chosen to take his first family’s place. The
words for this did not come until much later. At the time, there was only the
feeling, strong as hunger, of what I had to do.
I am sure my mother thought it was her I was refusing when the next
morning I said I would stay, but I would have done the same for her. If it had
been a matter of her life or death and not my father’s. But my mother had a
special strength all her own. Cloth can be dropped from great heights and
still land safely on the ground.
442 |
Photo: Andrea Butman
Elizabeth Gross
Lines from National Geographic
In spring, when cherry trees were
tossing a heavy wake.
In some cases it will destroy the music
and how long I will remain a part of it? To
have been on the moon. It was beyond
the night outside before dying. To me
of my anatomy most unerringly myself. How
to malfunction. And their lack of adequate
sirens keening, lights fading into a total and
intimate a form as the
Ocean licks at a black beach. At the wheel is
the Japanese code name for this exchange,
silk thread and pieces of flesh.
Somewhere in the murk nearby lie the
marble, caught my eye. I realized it was a
note when struck. Such a flaw will ruin every
passage where that key is played.
| 443
Lines from National Geographic (2)
to begin in a room within a room
shaped like a twisted staircase—the famous
thread tying this one life to all life that has
found the secret of life. On a rainy October
what can happen to a piano concerto if
there are leaks?
she became ill, she welcomed the hard work
of our alphabet into meaningful worlds, the
past in different places. In most populations,
identity was safely silenced.
444 |
Icelanders have always had a passion for
glass smaller than a postage stamp, planted
at any of these 1,500 spots. But there may be,
feet below an angry dark tongue of the Arctic
within another room. Before passing
over to a chair by the fire.
the edge of the world in a red toy—
because it is my own.
Liar to Gardener (I)
Listen, there is a scarcity of light
in this town, and at night the people burn
anything that burns. That is to say, yes,
I received your letter, and it burned.
Some words curled out from the flames,
and you’ll be pleased by their selection: garden,
repair, love, perhaps the weather.
How is your garden? Has the ear returned to the bear
with spring growth? Has the swan recovered her head?
My friend, you have the patience of a rocking chair.
Here, it is so cold that everything is the same color.
If the weather ever returns, I would like a cutting.
| 445
From perhaps the weather, a correspondence
(a series of letters between a topiary gardener
and a pathological liar).
Liar to Gardener (II)
Have you ever been across the badlands?
There is a town where everything is up on piers
except for the livestock, and the air is dead
for 14 feet above the ground. When the wind
comes strong the system jerks and sways,
and at night the yelling whips from house
to house and every one can hear it so well
that no one knows who is fighting or what
the dispute is about. But the yelling at night
across the badlands cannot be ignored and so
the people all sit in their separate kitchens
and mouth words to each other that they know
are not their own—but without a little quiet
who can think of anything else to say?
446 |
From perhaps the weather, a correspondence.
First published in Versal 7 (2009).
Liar to Gardener (IV)
My father’s going blind and taking up painting.
He says he wants to document what he describes
as his conversion to abstraction, but he paints
strict realism. The exactness of shadows split
where floorboards meet the wall is remarkable.
What’s changed the most as his sight declines
is his choice of subject matter—he paints portraits
of parrots in rooms that are nearly empty, excepting
a single, simple chair. Every canvas in the series,
he paints the parrot larger in the room, and it’s true,
eventually he will have no choice but to depict
pure color if the bird should continue to expand.
From perhaps the weather, a correspondence.
First published in Versal 7 (2009).
| 447
Leaving Vyšehrad
There is no such place
as place. But I have loved
the lie of it—
the castle sitting still
and high on the horizon
like a promise,
and the bells that call me back.
448 |
Lines from National Geographic
(June 1975)
You will learn about pulsars, neutron stars,
silver, cast church bells, engraved political
matter so heavy that a single teaspoonful
rises in the west and sets in the east, although
even stronger is our innate urge to create.
Mars inward suffered heavy bombardment,
Venus turns lazily—and in the opposite
oceans, which Venus seems to lack, our
materials take form, gain beauty, become
matter and light.
And you will appreciate,
as the late British scientist J.B.S. Haldane
once remarked, that “...the universe is not
only queerer than we suppose, but queerer
than we can suppose.”
| 449
Questioning room, post-Fall
No, we aren’t what we appear. The dangling light bulb
yellows us, fixes our shadows to the floor. Let our shadows
be forgiven for what we cut out of the light. What other part
of a living person goes without a pulse? We’ll stand here, yes,
naked, even, as if that could help. You promised power
over language and animals but every word calls out
your distance, you, who formed us in the image
of a question, but, no, never promised to answer.
450 |
Lines from National Geographic
(date unknown)
The principal paradox in this land
would not be poisoned by religion.
“Will we be able to recognize the first
tornado in Iowa?” He was serious: He argued
eruptions in his tree-ring sequences—years
melt on the ice-covered Deception Island,
off the Antarctic—“like a great beating
heart,”
he added, as if in answer to a question.
| 451
Lines from National Geographic (3)
to begin in a room within a room
shaped like a twisted staircase—the famous
thread tying this one life to all life that has
found the secret of life. On a rainy October
what can happen to a piano concerto if
there are leaks?
she became ill, she welcomed the hard work
of our alphabet into meaningful worlds, the
past in different places. In most populations,
identity was safely silenced.
452 |
Icelanders have always had a passion for
glass smaller than a postage stamp, planted
at any of these 1,500 spots. But there may be,
feet below an angry dark tongue of the Arctic
within another room. Before passing
over to a chair by the fire.
the edge of the world in a red toy—
because it is my own.
Elizabeth Gross, Christopher Crawford & Stephan Delbos, 2008.
Richard Toth & Gregory Linington, 1995.
| 453
454 |
Photo: Bonnie A. Kane
Stuart Horwitz
Waiter Poem
you remember Steve
he came in for lunch
when I mentioned your
demise by implied overdose
polite powers stopped the room dead
someone spilled their wine
in a perfect circle
but the busboy caught the glass
that’s a miracle in itself isn’t it
it is extremely poor service
to make people afraid of death
everyone started drinking sparkling water
your coffin came down like a chandelier
above our makeshift ceremony
as the hostess dragged over extra chairs
apologizing for all the dirt
have you come to answer our burning questions
like why is it so difficult to love in the restaurant business
or how hypercritical can the chef get before someone smacks him
or could drugs take you if you refused to go
what am I supposed to do with a full station
and the knowledge no one really owns this place
how can I get anybody’s order right
wondering which door you came in by
and who I will leave behind
First published in Optimism Monthly 11 (May 1996).
| 455
Numbers
one
1 doesn’t use any big words
1 says
let everything work itself out
one-2 is an echo
one-2 is a rival
one-2 is a crutch
one-2 is sanity
3 is the beginnings of a world
3is an airmail letter
3 is community
and an ongoing code of secrets
3 stands up
456 | while 4 is stable
3 is an airmail letter
lying on 4, which is the table
4 is royal
one-2-three-4 is balanced
one-two-three-4 is sure
4 is a room where you can stay
for only so long
5 is alive
5 is where the winners win
and the losers go home
5 is the first ending
an innocence fit for the theater
6 6 6
one-two-three- four -five-6 running
one-two-three-four-five-6 on
6 is out of breath
6 shows no sign of stopping
6 never rests on her laurels
7 is a foreign country
7 is a find
if 5 is the mine
and 6 is the shaft
7 is the silver
or the gold
you don’t work your way up to 7
7 is a torn crease
at the edges of good news
9 is 8 turned on its side
8 is direction
9 is dimension
8 is everywhere
9 is elsewhere
9 is divine
one-two-three-breath-four-five-six-seven-breath
8 is the saints
and 9 is the rain that falls from heaven
0 means we’re all losers
0 means go back
to where you don’t even know
and start to stop
in most versions Hercules had 8 labors
but in some he had only 2
and one says it was 3 plus 5
meaning he didn’t know
any better than we did
Caesar wanted the number of months to be 10
but there wasn’t anything anyone could do about that
12 is a realization
that has changed into your blood
40 days is long enough
to know if a relationship is worth it
you take a round number like 82.00
and multiply it by the even more easygoing 8.25%
and you get the very martial 6.76
which just goes to show
it takes all kinds to make a world
| 457
458 |
Photo: Ekaterina Fedotova
Howard Hunt
The Ministry of Strange Affairs
The girl’s father was a surgeon, a good man, worked in one of the regional
hospitals, made do under difficult circumstances, got the job done, his
particular job being to sew up the old and frightful former communists
from the agricultural sector who had mishaps on their tractors; the old guys
were always getting drunk and falling off their tractors, or rolling around
under and coming into contact with the sharp parts of combine harvesters
and threshing machines, basically tilling the soil with mad abandon, losing
body parts left, right and center, and the girl’s father’s job was to sew the old
guys back together with whatever surgical material was on hand at the time.
Which was not a lot of surgical material. Because there was no money in the | 459
public sector. All the money was in private. The government had privatized
everything. The way it worked with health care was that you were required
by law to sign up for private health insurance; you had a choice of many
competing companies and it was your legal duty to pick one and sign up for
the full comprehensive. But no one did. Because no one had any money. And
there was also that thing where no one trusted the insurance companies,
especially not the doctors, so the health care system had slumped back into
the old way, which was the bartering system. The country was dotted with
plum trees, plums were free, if you had plums you could make alcohol, so
the engine of the regional economy was rattling away on homemade booze.
Which was why the old guys kept on falling off their tractors, and why the
girl’s father, the surgeon, had botched the operation on the taxi driver’s knee.
He’d been drinking on the job. Shot for shot with the driver. The two men
had been friends, or were from the same village, or had worked as assets for
the same intelligence guy; they had a history, they had lived through hard
times, so when the driver totaled his cab and came staggering into the OR,
it was booze economy all the way. Two bottles of distilled plum liquor and
forget the anesthetic.
Except the operation was botched and the driver’s knee didn’t take. His
clutch knee. The guy was in an immense amount of pain, something wrong
with the nerves, the kind of thing you needed microsurgery to fix, and the
girl’s dad was no microsurgeon. Worse, he couldn’t refer the driver to a city
hospital because the way it worked with the insurance companies was that
the second you were up on their radar, they hit you up for back fees, sent
the debt collectors your way, went after your assets with the full approval of
the government, so a signature on a hospital contract was instant death. The
girl’s father knew this. The taxi driver knew this. So the surgeon’s advice to
the driver was grin and bear it. Nothing he could do. He threw up his hands
and walked back into his office, and the relationship between the two men
turned lethal overnight.
The girl was working in the city at one of the big call centers. Masters
degree in economics, no work, so running a team of phone operators selling
cheap long distance phone packages to people from prosperous countries
who had no name recognition of or geographical idea about the girl’s own
country, yet immediately distrusted the accents of her operators. The accents
were wrong. Something sleazy about the accents. So after months of low
turnover, one of the foreign partners had flown in and called the girl into his
office and told her that the call center would be doing phone sex from now
on. If the operators couldn’t sell phone packages, they could sell phone sex
instead. Which had troubled the girl no end, but her job was on the line, so
she had gone out onto the floor and fired all the guys and given the women
an hour off to discuss whether or not they would like to move into phone
460 | sex, and the women had come back after twenty minutes and said, sure, no
problem. So the girl was running a highly lucrative phone sex operation out
of the call center, and the women’s accents were perfect. The whole thing was
so dirty and yet nobody cared.
The call center was on the river and the river had flooded. The river was
always flooding. But a seal had escaped from the riverside zoo and there was
excitement in the tabloids. The zoo was underwater, the animals were being
evacuated, but a seal had made a break and the public were loving it. The seal
was getting out. It was in the river, swimming to freedom, a cause celeb for
the tabloid reading public, everyone speculating on the fate of the seal. The
president was quoted. Top government officials, the men who had ignored
the scientific call for better waterways, were very interested in the seal. The
girl’s boyfriend, highly placed in the publishing company responsible for
the tabloids, was tracking the seal with the latest technology. His men were
out in the rain, screaming into handsets. Or in boats, sluicing through the
flood zone. The dockyards were submerged, the riverfront had collapsed,
the subway was one long tunnel of water, and families were up on their
rooftops, cheering the seal along.
Clearly it was time to leave the city. Fighting had broken out between the
skinheads and the gypsies, nothing new there, except they were attacking
each other in boats in torrential downpour. The gypsies had been flooded
out of their riverside squat, and were on the move with the skinheads
dogging them. Big fat kids, the skinheads. Perpetually drunk, but with the
excellent boating skills they had learned in the scouts. The girl’s boyfriend
was watching from his office and could see the whole thing. The heavy rain,
the flooded street, the boats. The gypsies had knives, the skinheads had
baseball bats, they were like pirates on the high seas. He was on the phone,
describing the play by play to the girl at the call center, her staff moaning in
the background, trying to make her laugh because she was worried about
her dad. There had been an incident with the driver. The guy was making
threats and was pain crazed enough to see them through, so it wasn’t safe in
the country either. The booze-economy had made the place volatile.
The riverside squat where the gypsies lived took up an entire city
block in the historic old town. A handsome row of art nouveau buildings
that had been thoroughly wrecked by the last flood. Prime real estate for
development, but no developer would go near them until the government
knuckled down and fixed the waterways. Canals needed to be dug, the river
dredged, the bank walls reinforced. Engineers had worked it out on paper
two floods ago. A tremendous financial commitment for the government,
so the government had thrown up its hands and tendered the whole thing
out to foreign investment; basically said fix the waterways and you can
have the gypsy block for free. But that was never going to happen because
it was contentious as to whether the government had the right to sell the
gypsy block. The deed of title was held by an angry baron from a bordering | 461
country who was suing the country in a court of appeal. The block had been
crumbling on the riverbank for decades, so the gypsies had taken it over
and turned it into a fortress. An unbelievable number of people lived there,
including a smoky-voiced old timer from the call center, who had been a
resounding failure in discount phone package sales, but was really hitting
the mark in phone sex. The smoky-voiced old timer was not a gypsy at all,
but she came from the region and had the look, and was openly disparaged
by the other phone operators, who were cavalier and pragmatic about their
own line of work, but unpleasant and critical about the smoky-voiced old
timer’s. Like she was this ghastly old witch who really enjoyed talking dirty
on the phone.
Everyone with a job was camping out at the office. A flood alert had been
raised, but the work situation was tenuous and people had stayed at their desks
in spite of the rain. Now it was impossible to leave. Since the privatization,
big business was in the hands of foreign corporations; heavily capitalized
outfits that had sailed into town and bought up stock in former communist
industry, stripping the assets and downsizing the staff and sweeping the
detritus under the carpet of their strong foreign brands, to the point where
local industry had been pretty much wiped out. Middle management
reported to foreign bosses who reported to foreign head offices where the
paychecks were cut, but for some reason the paychecks had stopped coming.
The paychecks were late, so the usual rumors of widespread bankruptcy
had started, resulting in a mass refusal to evacuate the city. All the big office
blocks near the river were crowded with people who wanted to get paid,
and if the girl’s boyfriend wasn’t up to his neck in seal, he might have sent
a man to check it out. But the seal was causing problems. It was somewhere
near the border, refusing to be caught, the human interest angle of the story
being the seal’s successful capture and tickertape homecoming. The intrepid
seal returns. The girl’s boyfriend had the funds and resources to recover the
seal if it stayed inside the country, but he was competing against foreign
networks that would clean up on the seal if the seal went international, and
he had received word that his opposite number in tabloid TV was looking to
scoop him on the seal.
The girl’s boyfriend and his opposite number were fierce rivals who
worked for the number one tabloid and tabloid TV station respectively.
Both men loved their jobs, loved the challenge of chronicling the day to day
humanity of a poor and struggling nation that somehow took comfort from
the exploits of the super rich, while at the same time being fully aware that
the super rich had grown rich at their expense; the fascinating paradox of the
tabloid-ingesting public being that it wasn’t stupid at all. The plight of the seal
was a case in point. Everyone knew that the government had facilitated the
widescale theft of everything, that ministers from the incumbent and former
462 | parties had cut deals with charismatic foreign businessmen who had jetted
in and asset-stripped state industry; everyone knew that the ministers had
banked the kickbacks they had received in offshore accounts and acquired
foreign passports and in many cases left the country as hastily as the foreign
businessmen; the tabloid reading public knew this. But getting angry and
complaining was considered naïve. Complaining was for amateurs. The
serious citizen quietly bided his time and got in on the stealing when the
opportunity allowed. It was a revenge mentality, but completely undirected.
Everyone had been screwed, so everyone was looking to square the ledger, it
didn’t matter on who, it was like being in a war where you were given a gun
and told to git some. The opportunity was there. But thinking about it drove
you crazy. There you were, up on your roof, your house completely flooded,
calculating in your head exactly what you had lost and what you needed
to steal to make up for it, but having no idea who you would steal from or
how long you would have to wait until the stealing could commence, and
the thing was, if you were the slightest bit intense about squaring the ledger,
you’d just go nuts. So the trick was to relax and read the tabloids. To take an
interest in the seal. To sit in a dark room with a bottle of plum liquor and
watch Pop Idol and Funniest Home Videos.
Which was more or less what the girl’s father was doing. The taxi driver
was outside, parked in his car, obviously up to no good, so the girl’s dad
had closed the hospital and was tucked away in the OR with the service
revolver he had kept since the army. A tough old army doctor turned regional
surgeon, watching Funniest Home Videos with one eye on the door. The funny
videos weren’t funny, and seemed for the most part to consist of horrific
accidents involving children. The girl’s father winced often. Maybe selling
the video helped cover the health care. He had no idea. The country had
changed dramatically since the state had gone private. There seemed to be
a lot of young, vibrant people in the city, making vast amounts of money in
really silly ways, while the sensible professions were taking a hammering.
His daughter, a trained economist, was working at a call center where the
women who answered the phones sounded like prostitutes. But obviously
doing well, having bought herself a flat on the hill above the city. The girl
and her father were close. Since the problem with the driver, she had been
urging her dad to come and stay at the flat. The flat was gated and safe, and
her dad was barely scraping by at the regional hospital. Perhaps it was time
he considered the future. The future was definitely behind a big gate, and all
he had to do was say the word and the girl’s boyfriend would have a tabloid
man drive out and relocate him.
This was the year little flags bearing the president’s name started
appearing in all the dog turds. In the months before the flood, the streets were
littered with dog turds, and someone had been sticking a flag in each turd.
The president was not popular. He was the man who had single-handedly
overseen the privatization, facilitating some quite stunning theft in the early | 463
years of non-communism. An outspoken advocate of free enterprise, he had
given his former comrades from the ousted Ministry of Finance the ways and
means to put communism behind them, which they had done in a big way,
jetting off to distant islands and surrounding themselves with bodyguards
and threatening to kill anyone who came sniffing around. But the president
had stayed. He was in it for the history. He had written books about the
privatization, arguing that his economic principles were sound. In theory,
the sale of the state should have worked. The president really believed this.
He was either a savant or a very clever man. So his super rich ex-colleagues
made some behind-the-scenes calls and swung the old boy the presidential
election, communism being like this prestigious men’s club in which if you
were a member, you really knew who you were, and now the president was
in the driver’s seat, showing all the signs of taking the job very seriously. The
guy really wanted to be on the right side of history, which was fine by the
ex-colleagues, as they had helped him hide a lot of money on their islands.
Protective measures were built into the arrangement. No one was talking,
the paper trail had been erased, the past was the past and the future was
beckoning. It was an exciting time for everyone.
Except for this perplexing business with the turds. In every corner of the
city, every turd had a flag. The cheekiness of it. There were literally thousands
and thousands of turds, so a large group of people had mobilized to make it
happen. It was a bizarrely effective form of dissent. Until the flags popped
up, the president’s historical legitimacy had largely gone unquestioned, in no
small way due to the fact that the publishing director of the leading newspaper
chain and the editorial director of the leading TV station—the girl’s boyfriend
and opposite number’s bosses respectively— served as media advisors to the
presidential office. It was their job to determine who was laughing at whom,
and no one laughed at the president as he was a serious intellectual with
many books on the shelves. A much touted fact in the print and broadcast
media. No one was messing with the president. So the flood was actually
quite timely as it had washed away the turds and flags, and the president
was out there among his people, handling the crisis very well, standing in
mud and looking distant and theoretical, the issue of the flooded waterways
a lot easier to address than the issue of why members of his constituency
were flagging turds with his name, the turds themselves having lain in the
streets for months on end as a result of the sanitation cuts the government
had implemented. Public sanitation was a disaster. But on the plus side, a
small and efficient private firm with a cheap regional labor force was ably
demonstrating the effectiveness of the private sanitation model up on the hill
behind the gates, and the president could vouch for the model’s effectiveness
personally, as he lived there and the place was very clean.
Up in the call center, the smoky-voiced old timer was sleeping under
464 | her desk. The riverside squat was completely flooded, so she was forced to
camp out with the rest of the girls. Contrary to what the girls were saying,
the smoky-voiced old timer didn’t remotely enjoy talking dirty on the
phone. It was humiliating and tiring work. The girls wore headsets and sat
at terminals and had no control over the incoming calls, which were sent
in rapid sequence from the foreign head office and consisted of rich men
shouting the most terrible things. The men on the line sounded unbelievably
angry. They were busy and powerful and needed to get off fast. Conversation
was discouraged. The guys were shouting when they got on and shouting
when they got off, and it was all you could do to keep up with them. The
smoky-voiced old timer had been at the center for a year. Prior to that, she
had worked as a contract cleaner for the private sanitation firm on the hill.
The call center paid better and it was a relief to sit down, but the thing that
really disturbed her, far more than the relentless stream of abuse from the
phones, was the look of corruption that gradually firmed up on the faces of
the girls around her. The girls were in their early twenties and were casual
and offhand about the nature of the work. It was no big deal. In fact the guys
were kind of funny. The girls felt sorry for the guys, which made dealing
with them easier, and there was always a couple of months of eye rolling
and suppressed laughter from each new girl who came to work at the center.
The pay was good, so there was no shortage of girls. Every time a girl burned
out, another girl would take her place, and after a two-day training seminar
in which phone sex would be presented as a bright and vibrant career
opportunity, the switch would be thrown and the girl would be fielding
eight hours of fury thundering down the line from the big foreign cities. The
smoky-voiced old timer had done twelve months of this, and her face in the
mirror was unrecognizable. But she was old and had lived through hard
times. The call center girls had their whole lives ahead of them, but were
ageing rapidly week by week, taking on the haunted look of people under
siege, the voices on the phones no laughing matter, listening to and saying
the most atrocious things imaginable and not meaning it and yet somehow
meaning every word, eight hours a day, five days a week with a moraleboosting staff party every Friday, the accumulated horribleness of each word
firming up on each girl’s face in a visible timelapse, these really pretty girls
who kept on coming and coming.
The girl who ran the center was aware of this as well, and took it upon
herself to make the morale-boosting parties as much fun as possible, setting
up the bar and mixing the mojitos herself and getting the girls drunk and
dancing on the tables. A well known DJ would spin some discs, and there
would be sushi and a cheese plate. Everyone would be in a profound state
of shock, but the parties were legendary, spilling out from the center to the
inner-city discos, where the girl’s boyfriend would turn up with a posse of
photographers and have the most requested phone sex girls photographed
with stars. More often than not, the most requested girl was the smoky-voiced | 465
old timer, whose smoky voice and no-nonsense phone manner had created a
word-of-mouth cult following in the big foreign cities, but the smoky-voiced
old timer never went to the discos. If there was sushi, she would wrap some
in a napkin and take it back to the squat, but that was as much of the game
as she was willing to play. She had the measure of the girl who ran the call
center, having cleaned the toilets and bathrooms of women just like her. All
those women on the hill, locked behind those huge gates. Very friendly, very
rich, but scared to death half the time, and the thing the smoky-voiced old
timer couldn’t help wondering was whether the thing that frightened them
most was themselves.
Before her country struck oil and became a threat to democracy, the smokyvoiced old timer had been a society columnist. She had written about society
for her big city paper without having any real idea of what society was. Society
was hats and dresses and amusing politicians, then hardline religious fervor
and rioting in the streets. Her city bombed to its foundations, an exodus
of raven-haired, dark-skinned, cheap foreign labor, racial profiling, bribery
and corruption, but still not getting society, not understanding it at all. Her
brother had managed to bribe a border official, enabling the smoky-voiced
old timer to be issued an under-the-table visa that got her across the border
after a harrowing interview, and after a year of hardship, she had fallen in
with a group of fellow refugees who were not gypsies, but who were subject
to the same hostility as gypsies, their raven hair and dark skin immediately
marking them as cheap foreign labor or violin-playing criminals. In the
country’s ancient language, the same word was used for “foreigner” and
“stranger,” foreigners and strangers being more or less the same thing back
in the Middle Ages when people lived in walled cities and were defended
by private armies, but in modern times, the two meanings of the word had
drifted apart. Foreigners were charismatic businessmen who jetted into
town with interesting news about offshore banking, while strangers cleaned
toilets and lived in riverside squats. In the city, the smoky-voiced old timer
was definitely a stranger. She would get on a tram and people would pat
their pockets to make sure their wallets were still there, and on the crowded
subway platforms, the police would immediately zero in on her and demand
to see her papers. She’d been locked up for no reason, routinely insulted,
and was living in a room without water or electricity. This was society, she
reasoned. The best of times, the worst of times.
But she was wrong. Her papers were invalid, the cops were shaking her
down, so she was forced to seek help from a fellow refugee, a kindly old
ex-judge who had a vital connection at the country’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. The ex-judge lived in the riverside squat. His chambers were on the
top floor, and after close scrutiny by actual gypsies, the smoky-voiced old
timer was taken to meet him. Up in his chambers, the ex-judge lit a fire and
466 | made instant coffee and spoke at length about racism, explaining that as
far as the country was concerned, the locals looked up to foreigners while
looking down at strangers. Strangers were considered untrustworthy, even
though they stole a fraction of what the foreigners were shipping out each
day. Foreigners were respectable. Strangers were not. It was as simple as that.
History had conspired to make an underclass of strangers, and it was their
lot to be mistrusted and reviled. The best the strangers could do under the
circumstances was stick together as a community and help each other like
he was helping her now. The ex-judge patted the smoky-voiced old timer’s
hand. Through his vital connection, he would see to it that her passport was
stamped with the appropriate visa every six months. It pained him to charge
her a fee for the service, but his relationship with the Ministry required
constant grift.
Out in the region, the girl’s father had long ceased to be amused by
Funniest Home Videos. He had drunk all the plum liquor and was wandering
around the OR with the gun in his hand. The driver was still outside. The
surgeon couldn’t believe the conflict had escalated to this level. The knee and
pain were understandable, but the surgeon knew the driver well enough to
know that the problem was compounded not so much by the man’s thwarted
ambitions, but by the man’s notion that his ambitions had been deliberately
thwarted by malevolent forces beyond his control. In this, the driver was
a typical representative of the tabloid-reading, revenge mentality public.
The driver was neither bright, nor ambitious, but fiercely believed that had
communism not come along, he would have been clever and successful.
Instead of sitting in the pub and drinking beer for forty years, he would have
been a charismatic businessman jetting around the globe at the helm of huge
corporation. This was the pub lunch dream of every man in the country who
had ever slumped into the lethargy of communism. And with this dream
came an immense amount of anger. Especially now that communism was
gone. The surgeon was sorry about the driver’s knee, but anger and booze and
undirected revenge had taken the guy to a place where he was dangerous.
He had been sitting outside in his car for two days, probably knocking back
the exact same plum liquor the girl’s dad had knocked back, and it was the
surgeon’s turn to get self-righteously angry. Revenge was not the way. With
revenge came the suspicion and envy that had created a nation of informers
and denouncers in the past. Everyone had been screwed because everyone
was screwing. Even now in a society that was crying out for trust.
The phone rang and the girl’s boyfriend picked it up. It was his opposite
number at tabloid TV. The word was in: the seal was out. It had crossed the
border, foreign affiliates had been briefed, however the news from the foreign
newsrooms was that the seal was perceived only as a mildly amusing human
interest story, way down the line on the list of priorities, so the mobilization
of resources was disappointingly modest. If the seal was caught, the tabloid
men could have it, but there was no guarantee that the seal would be caught. | 467
Which posed a serious problem as the seal was breaking news. Failure to
deliver the seal would be taken very badly. The public needed a victory. The
president had expressed confidence in the state’s ability to recover the seal,
so political credibility was at stake. People would be fired if the seal remained
at bay, so the girl’s boyfriend and his opposite number were thinking outside
the square, strategizing cooperative initiatives while privately pulling their
researchers off flood coverage and having them phone the foreign zoos to
see if a substitute seal could be quietly acquired. It didn’t even matter if the
seals looked alike. The public distrusted everything. An obviously switched
seal would provoke debate. But the important thing now was the speed of
delivery. The girl’s boyfriend was in the publisher’s office, discussing how
much money could be thrown at the problem, and a lot of money was the
answer. As much money as it took. A bogus seal would be delivered by
whatever means necessary; the project had the publisher and president’s full
backing. The girl’s boyfriend shook hands with the publisher and punched air
like a schoolboy all the way to his office. Outside the building, rain whipped
through the streets.
With the ex-judge’s help, the smoky-voiced old timer was able to work
legitimately for a couple of years, long enough to put the money together
to return to her own country, which was under foreign occupation and on
the brink of civil war. There were no big city papers to write for, none of the
politicians were amusing, hats and fashion were a thing of the past, but the
smoky-voiced old timer was optimistic. She had lived. She had seen things.
She was on the bus to the border, watching the countryside roll by, an older
and wiser person who understood society, frightened by the occupation but
ultimately believing that her people would prevail, and then she was off
the bus and detained in a small room while the border officials examined
her papers, and the next thing she knew she was in the cage of a police van
because the stamps in her passport were clever forgeries. The ex-judge had
screwed her. Her papers were false, but their falsification had been made
outside the usual channels. The wrong people had been paid, which was a
serious offence. The smoky-voiced old timer sat trembling in the cage and
realized with horror just how serious it was. The police were underpaid and
needed bribes to get by, so screwing the cops on fake papers was like stealing
from the mafia. Retribution was due, and of course her pleas of innocence
only made the cops more angry. The ex-judge was untouchable. He never
left his chambers in the riverside squat and the cops weren’t paid enough to
go up and get him, so the smoky-voiced old timer was going down alone.
All the money she had saved went out in low-level bribes, and by the time
her case was finally thrown out of court, she had spent the best part of a year
behind bars.
The surgeon picked up his keys and prepared to drive to his daughter’s
468 | flat on the hill. The revenge mentality infuriated him. The driver had been
sitting outside all weekend, in full view of the hospital, not leaving his car
for two days and two nights. Maybe his daughter had the right idea. Maybe
the wall and the gate were the way to go. According to his daughter, the gate
wasn’t protecting the rich from the poor, it was really protecting the smart
from the stupid. Stupid people were everywhere. You couldn’t help them.
She wasn’t forcing anyone to work in cheap long distance phone package
sales. All her staff had a choice, and if their choice was to sell cheap long
distance phone packages for an above-average salary with a really excellent
party thrown in every Friday, well that was their problem. She wasn’t forcing
anyone. The surgeon sighed as he unlocked the front door. His daughter had
been tense and emotional the moment she had bought the big flat on the hill.
She seemed to want reassurance. But reassurance from what? She and her
boyfriend were part of the new elite. They were the future. The country’s fate
rested squarely on their shoulders. Perhaps it really was time to stand back
and let the kids get on with it.
After her case had been thrown out of court, the smoky-voiced old timer
returned to the squat to demand an audience with the kindly old ex-judge.
The months she had spent behind bars had been terrible. She had aged,
gone gray, her health had deteriorated. This wasn’t something you could
easily forgive. In the cells, she had tried to understand why the ex-judge
had screwed her. He had invoked a sense of community, then needlessly
betrayed it, categorizing society in terms of foreigners and strangers, and then
behaving like a stranger to one of his own. The smoky-voiced old timer was
granted entrance to the squat and taken upstairs to the ex-judge’s chambers.
There, she sat in the corridor and waited. She had waited for this moment for
almost a year. Had she been a stereotypical gypsy, she would have brought
a knife with her and buried the thing in the ex-judge’s heart, but retribution
was not what she had come for. She lacked the temperament for it. After the
anger had burned away, rationality had taken over, and the thing she really
needed was to understand why. Why had the ex-judge betrayed her? If he
had told her that her visa stamps were forgeries, she would have paid him
the same money and probably extra to make the appropriate arrangements
for her to cross the border safely. Screwing her was needless. And, in light
of the long speech on racism, hypocritical and evil. Yet the kindly old exjudge was an intelligent man. The smoky-voiced old timer sat in the hall and
waited for the ex-judge to open his chambers. She had plenty of time. There
was nowhere else to go.
The surgeon opened the hospital gate and hurried back to his car.
The rain was sleeting heavily, hitting the windscreen with force. Steam
rose from every surface. The unsealed street had turned to mud, and the
gutters were clogged solid by a year of roadside trash. Outside the gate, the
driver’s car squatted ominously in the rain. An old Mercedes with yellowing
panelwork, blurred abstractly through the surgeon’s fogged-up windows. | 469
The girl’s father drove slowly past the driver’s car and meandered onto the
road through the hills. The service revolver was on his lap. The valley was
flooded. From the hills, it looked like an enormous lake. The road to the city
was slippery and dangerous, forcing the surgeon to drive with extra caution.
The driver followed at a distance, his headlights visible through the sleet, the
rain coming down in such incredible volume that it was impossible to see the
road ahead. Both men drove at an absurdly slow speed, weaving their way
through the hilltop forests, an actual car chase through fabulous scenery,
but frustratingly slow and uneventful, exiting the forest and entering the
grayness of the industrial zone, crawling up past the cement works and the
smoke belching factories, then spiraling out onto the hill above the city. His
daughter’s wall was immediately visible. The surgeon followed the wall all
the way to the gate. The wall and gate were enormous. Cameras swept back
and forth on their motorized perches, and two men in peaked hats were
standing by in their raincoats. It was the third time the surgeon had been
to the complex. He had found the place oppressive when the weather was
nice, but in the rain, it was like a massive correctional facility. But safe. The
world had become dangerous and people with money were investing in
safety. Safety was a commodity now. The government couldn’t guarantee it,
so private enterprise was meeting the demand.
The old ex-judge never left the ruined squat. He had enemies in the
city; refugees and needy people who had come to him for help and who
he had tricked and betrayed through various scams. His vital contact at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs did exist however. Through an intermediary, it
was possible to shuttle paperwork back and forth and have appropriate visas
stamped correctly in passports. But the simple truth was, forging documents
was easier. The ex-judge’s people were crafty and enjoyed the challenge of
counterfeiting papers. And needy people infuriated him. He had no sympathy
for the weak. His racism speech, honed to perfection after hundreds of
meetings with desperate strangers, touched on a concept he believed with
frightening certainly. Strangers, himself included, were perceived to have
low character. But who was to say what character was? Who wrote the
rulebook on character? Certainly not a stranger. So adhering to the societal
norms of a country that discriminated against you automatically was just
preposterous. Deceit and artifice were as much a part of human nature as
honesty and virtue. It just depended on which rulebook you chose. The old
ex-judge was a shrewd judge of character. He knew, for example, that the
smoky-voiced old timer was sitting in the hallway, and he was quite sure that
she posed him no physical threat. Humming quietly to himself, he lit some
kindling and boiled water for coffee, setting two cups on the carpet in the
middle of the room.
The surgeon pulled over in front of the gate and watched the driver park
470 | behind him. The chase had ended. The tension he had felt throughout the
drive was replaced by a fatigue as distant and familiar as the rain and the
fear and the pebbly grip of the service revolver he had worn but not shot.
The surgeon recalled his time in the war with sadness. His country was
surrounded by other countries that had fought, and their national character
had been built on resistance. They said no and meant no, whereas his own
country had said yes and meant no until the naysayers were winning. Then
it had said no. It was the smart versus stupid argument all over again. The
neighboring countries held the moral high ground, but their tourist potential
was laughably scant as their historic old towns had been bombed flat. Saying
no had cost them dearly. Whereas untrustworthy compliance had saved
the surgeon’s country from a similar fate. Tourism was thriving, foreign
businessmen were jetting in and out, so in the final analysis, his country had
been smart.
The surgeon climbed out of his car and walked back through the rain to
the driver’s Mercedes. Cameras and guards were watching from the gate,
so he felt quite safe as he approached the driver’s car. The surgeon and the
driver had an unspoken history that went far beyond the issue of the driver’s
wrecked knee. After the war, both men had worked as assets, then agents of
the secret police. This was not something the girl’s father was proud of, but
neither was the untrustworthy compliance of saying yes and meaning no.
Resistance was stupid, but as he walked to the driver’s car, he couldn’t help
thinking that the ease with which his country had slumped into lethargy of
communism was caused by a quiet disgust at having said yes in the first place.
For all his anger, surely the driver understood this. Blaming the communists
was silly because both men were the communists. They had helped supply
the fear that had driven the system, aiding and abetting just like everyone
else. The surgeon tapped his pistol on the driver’s window. He felt no anger,
just a profound, exhausting sadness. He knew exactly what it was to be a
secret policeman, to befriend and betray, to seek out and compromise, the
whole thing the most pedestrian form of evil. He carried the knowledge with
him every day in the OR, sewing up the same people he had helped compile
files on. He had never been caught, had never been held accountable, and
the men he had worked for were now running the country. It was hard to not
feel doomed.
The chamber door opened. The ex-judge looked out at the smoky-voiced
old timer. Their eyes met, and the smoky-voiced old timer saw what she had
expected to see, which was the self-serving logic of the criminal mind. This
has been your education, the ex-judge’s eyes told her. You took me for a friend,
but we were strangers all along. Never trust anyone. Not even your own people.
This knowledge will make you stronger. And he was right. It was a lesson. An
education. Society was cruel. Society was the cynical manipulation of the
stupid by the smart. Society had created an underclass and kept it under via
the imposition of laws, norms and standards so prejudicial to strangers that | 471
strangers would have had to be crazy to follow them. Strength was what
counted, not character or ethics. The strength to strike first. The strength to
take the fight upstairs. The fight was perpetual; a never-ending battle between
the strong and the weak, and the ex-judge wanted his people to be strong.
This was his Ministry. This was his gift to everyone he did business with. The
battle was raging and no one was exempt—except the smoky-voiced old timer
wasn’t buying it for a second. In prison, she had suffered for being a stranger.
She had been judged. The worst had been expected of her, and instead of
making her stronger, all it had done was force her to conform to the negative
stereotype. To survive in the cells, she had been forced to lie and cheat and
steal and betray. And the revelation that she could do this, that she had it
within her to do whatever it took to not get beaten-up or raped was not the
slightest bit liberating. It was weakness, not strength. Strength was character.
Strength was taking the beating. Strength was not looking away when some
other girl got it, and the smoky-voiced old timer had looked away too many
times. Standing in front of the ex-judge, frail and in poor health, but with
the furnace doors of Hades thrown open behind her, the smoky-voiced old
timer addressed the old man as an equal. No recriminations. No anger. She
had seen in his eyes what she expected to see and had accepted his gift in the
spirit it was given. And now she was putting that gift to good use. Find me
a room in this building, she had told him. The ex-judge had smiled. Of course,
he had replied.
The surgeon tapped the driver’s window again, and the window rolled
down slowly. The two ex-agents faced each other, fifteen years since they had
filed their last reports, the surgeon leaning against the car, his pistol resting
on the jam between the door and the roof, the driver cradling a shotgun in
his lap. Both men looked terrible. No one spoke. There was nothing to say.
Private health care had screwed them. The driver shivered with pain as he
braced for the recoil. He was grimly drunk as well. The surgeon had botched
the operation; as far as the driver was concerned, it was a deliberate attack.
The driver couldn’t believe his secret policework had gone unpunished.
The regime had changed without him, he was vulnerable and afraid, fifteen
years of fear had made him paranoid. In the old days, the preferred betrayal
method of the secret police was to ensure that your betrayal was engineered
by someone you knew. A familiar face. The driver looked at the surgeon, met
the guy’s eyes, saw the same weary torment, the same lethargy and disgust,
the same internal whitewashing that had gone on just to enable the guy to get
out of bed every morning, the whole thing etched and creased across his face
in the familiar geography of an entire generation, the face of the president
himself. Contrary to everything they had been brought up to believe, the bad
guys had won. And they were the bad guys. No one was coming after them.
There would be no retribution. History had moved on. The driver looked
472 | at the girl’s father and saw a familiar face from the other side of the pub
table, resigned, fatalistic, untrustworthily compliant, a face glimpsed from
the cage of the police van, not quite meeting your eyes but not shrinking
from them either, the expression perfectly blank; the guy at the pub who
engineered your betrayal. The driver saw this, because he was that guy. And
it didn’t matter. No one cared. All that betrayal for nothing. He looked at the
girl’s father and realized they had won.
Then he raised the shotgun and gave the surgeon both barrels.
The boyfriend snapped his phone closed and looked out across the city.
The skinheads and gypsies had gone. Only the tops of SUVs were visible in
the street. Shopfront windows had imploded and shops had been looted.
Rats clung to every available surface, squeaking miserably, coated in the
toxic river mud that covered everything. A tide of litter sloshed back and
forth. Electricity was fizzling and the landlines were down. Not the best
circumstances in which to negotiate the under-the-table purchase of a foreign
seal, but the tabloid’s research team was on the case. The girl’s boyfriend held
a master’s degree in journalism from a prestigious foreign university, and
often joked that his job at the tabloid was like dating a beautiful and wealthy
socialite who was easily bored. The pressure to entertain was tremendous.
The girl’s boyfriend was a skilled entertainer, but his specialty was bad news.
Bad news was everywhere. Bad news was incessant. It was morbidly comical
how much bad news there was, to the point where coverage was arbitrary.
You merely tapped the bad news pipeline and published what came out.
Unlike good news, which required rationale and planning, bad news sold
itself. But it was mercurial, like lightning. You never could tell where and
when it would strike next.
A crowd of security guards had gathered in the control booth and were
replaying the tapes of what had happened outside the gate. Three cameras
had caught the shotgun murder of the surgeon, and the guards were slowing
each tape down to watch the footage more graphically. In slo-mo, the
execution of the girl’s father had the same unsettling yet compelling quality of
the clips of war carnage the guards had seen on the internet, prompting quiet
discussion on the logistics of copying the tape and uploading it later. Local
police had been summoned and an ambulance was standing by. Two young
cops were overseeing the crime scene, a source of derisive amusement to the
guards as both cops had applied to work at the complex. They were on the
waiting list and making a show of being busy, sneaking occasional glances at
the cameras on the wall. The dead man had been identified and police were
running the driver’s plates. The link between the surgeon and his daughter
had been established, in-house insurance was checking the paperwork, and
the way it looked at this stage was not good. The dead man was technically
a resident and had technically been killed on residence grounds, and the
security guards had failed to intervene in spite of the dead man’s pistol being
clearly visible on all the tapes. A public relations disaster was the last thing | 473
the body corporate needed, as the AGM was approaching and three highplaced trustees had been caught skimming from security and maintenance.
Security was the thing that kept the status quo in place, and the dead man’s
death could be spun either way.
The smoky-voiced old timer lay under her desk and watched the girl
on the phone in her glass-walled office. The girl was crying hysterically.
Something terrible had happened, something requiring urgent attention and
presence, but the girl was trapped by the flood and going nowhere. The food
had run out, the staff were sleeping on the floor, the girls were watching their
boss with a kind of grim satisfaction. Chickens had come home to roost. The
motivational parties hadn’t fooled anyone. The girls were working in phone
sex not because it was a bright and vibrant career opportunity, but because
it was the only work a girl could get if she came from an industrial town
that had been asset-stripped and carpet-swept by foreign commerce. Smart
versus stupid had nothing to do with it. Regional industry had been gutted,
factories dismantled, old but good technology unbolted and boxed up and
shipped overseas with no government plan for alternative work, resulting in
a big city exodus by every moderately attractive girl over the age of seventeen.
Most of the girls who had burnt-out from the call center wound up dancing
or stripping in the big city clubs, and from there, it was only a matter of time
before the brothels claimed them. A big part of why foreign tourism was
thriving was because the city was teeming with desperate women. A buyer’s
market, the city. Astonishing statistics. The historic old town a crumbling
architectural marvel by day, a pulsing red light district by night, the law of
supply and demand creating the kind of no-holds-barred, cowboy outpost
environment favored by gangsters and villains worldwide. The old and
the poor lived in fear, the rich had relocated to the modern equivalent of
medieval walled cities, charismatic foreign businessmen were jetting in and
out, and the girl who ran the call center was crying in her office. None of the
staff went in to comfort her. Compassion, like work, was in short supply.
The two young cops were back in their cruiser, strategizing ways to turn
the crime scene around. When they had first arrived at the complex, they
had viewed the murder footage in the control booth, but hadn’t mustered the
courage to confiscate the tapes. Which was definitely a mistake. If they were
serious about upgrading to private security, what they needed to do was
walk back in there, impound the tapes and use them as leverage to force the
community’s stone cold, police-hating Human Resources Director to fasttrack their applications. On the hill, a gig at the complex was unquestionably
the best security job on offer, paying three times the salary the cops were
making now. The cops had streaked hair and thick silver jewelry, and looked
like celebrity sportsmen run to fat. They had seriously blown it by not asking
for the tapes. If they walked back in now, there would be conflict with the
474 | guards, and the place was crawling with suits and lawyers. City Homicide
had been alerted, detectives had been assigned, but they were trapped in the
flood zone and having trouble getting out, and the window of opportunity
to capitalize on the tapes was growing smaller by the minute. The cops sat
in their car and stared at the gate. This was their crime scene. They had the
authority. All they had to do was get out of the cruiser. Get out and walk
over. They were policemen after all.
When the girl called in full-blown hysterics about her father, the boyfriend
had been forced to put her on hold. A replacement seal had been located, but
the unscrupulous foreign keeper with access to the seal had been contacted
by the boyfriend’s rival at tabloid TV, and was auctioning the seal off to the
highest bidder. The timing couldn’t have been worse. If a deal could be struck
immediately, the boyfriend would be able to fake the seal’s capture in time
for the evening print deadline, however failure to close within the next sixty
minutes would ensure his opposite number’s victory. The next hour was
crucial. A vast amount of money hung in the balance. The boyfriend was up
in the publisher’s office, ignoring the phone vibrating in his pocket, watching
the clock and begging for more money as each minute ticked by.
The driver was back in his village, armed and dangerous, probably sitting
in a pub, but no one knew which pub he was in. Hillside cops weren’t welcome
in the region and tentative inquiries had been met with hostility. Clearly a
job for City Homicide. The stationhouse cops who had run the driver’s plates
were overworked men and women in their twenties and thirties who still
lived at home with their parents in their parents houses, moonlighting as
bouncers and security guards when the opportunities arose. A policeman’s
salary was nothing to shout about. There had been cutbacks, restaffing hadn’t
happened, calling in sick was an everyday occurrence, and this in the city’s
most exclusive of neighborhoods. At the community’s request, one of the
cops had made some calls about the driver, determining from a number of
sources that the driver and the surgeon had been secret policemen back in
the day, and the general consensus from the region was that the two old
duffers should have killed each other years ago. Which settled the matter as
far as the stationhouse was concerned. Apprehending the driver wasn’t their
problem. The guy was armed and had secret police training. They weren’t
paid enough to risk being shot by some angry old duffer. City homicide
was on an enviably larger pay scale, and a few of the detectives were actual
go-getters. They could have this one. All they had to do was drive up from
the city. The stationhouse cops checked their messages and waited. They had
alerted City Homicide hours ago, but no go-getting detectives had appeared
because of the flood. Definitely the worst of times. The police at the crime
scene had clocked off early, the dead man’s body was lying headless in the
drive, it was Sunday night, one of the cops had a gig at a disco, and the dead
guy’s daughter kept calling and calling.
But the seal had been caught! It was on the evening news, a tabloid TV | 475
exclusive, footage of the seal in the arms of zoo staff. The seal had been
captured by state workers inside the country’s border, the intrepid creature
having led the recovery team on a merry old chase for several days. A map
of the seal’s escape route was shown, and the segment producer had cheekily
used a well-known spy theme as a musical backdrop to the story. The seal
would be returned to the zoo shortly, although the future of the zoo was far
from certain. The enclosures were wrecked, foreign investment was required,
but asset-stripping a zoo was not an exciting proposition. There were far
more interesting ways to make money, and opportunities were opening up
in cities further to the east.
The driver sat in the pub and watched the seal on TV. Shotgun on his
knees, drinking beer after beer, waiting for the cops to come and get him.
The pub was the driver’s local. He knew everyone in the village, had drunk
with them for years, and felt exactly the same way the surgeon had felt
whenever they staggered into the OR after a booze-related accident. Which
was guilty and then furious. The driver knew the villagers knew that he had
helped compile files on them; files which in some cases resulted in midnight
visits by trenchcoat-wearing spooks who had hauled them out of bed and
sent them away for reeducation, in many cases never to return. Lives had
been wrecked, families had been destroyed, the driver knew that the village
pubgoers knew this. Yet no one had said a word. It was intolerable. During
the regime, he had pretended not to care, but after the fall it was worse than
frightening. Not a word. For fifteen years. The driver’s power base was gone,
he was alone and afraid, a group of pubgoers could have come with spades
and pitchforks, chopped him into pieces and buried him in the forest, and no
one would have bothered looking up from their beer. But no one had come.
After the regime had collapsed, everyone had woken up as though from a
deep sleep and gone straight to the pub just like the old days. And in the
end, the driver had joined them. Had sat at the same tables, year in, year out,
drinking himself to oblivion as the guilt and fury built. The entire village had
known what he had done, and yet no one had come for him.
Well, they would be coming for him now.
The boyfriend was in his office, trying to get the girl on the phone, but
the girl wasn’t answering. Had she really said that her father had been shot?
The boyfriend took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was unbelievably
tired. His team had been working on the seal for twelve hours straight, but
had been scooped by tabloid TV at the very last minute because the station
had more money to throw at the seal. It was as simple as that. The station had
the money, so the station got the seal. And now the girl wasn’t answering his
calls. The boyfriend picked up his phone and dialed again. Minutes after the
deal had closed, one of the foreign newsrooms had called with the surreal
and hilarious news that the actual seal, the one the fuss had been all about,
476 | had been caught by a foreign environmental group several hours before the
fake seal had gone up on auction, but instead of alerting the media as was
their responsibility, the idiots who had caught it had taken it to the very
same zoo the unscrupulous keeper worked for, furnishing the zoo with a
free replacement seal to the one the unscrupulous keeper had sold for an
absurd amount of money. The unscrupulous keeper had screwed the tabloid
media, and of course there was not a thing anyone could do about it, as the
missing seal had been officially recovered. There it was, on the evening news,
smaller and runtier than the seal in previous news footage, but nonetheless
clapping its flippers and honking intrepidly in the arms of a rescue worker
the station must have bribed. The country needed a hero, and here it was. A
circus seal by the look of things. Clapping it’s flippers and going arf arf arf,
the distinctive brass of a famous spy theme in the background.
The smoky voiced old timer huddled under her desk. The girl was crying
in her office, emitting loud, indulgent sobs that would have provoked a
remorseless prison beating. The smoky-voiced old timer hadn’t cried once
in prison. She had survived, endured, done whatever it took, and couldn’t
help regarding the girl with contempt. Whatever awful thing had happened
was probably not on the same scale of awfulness as the lifestyle choices and
employment opportunities awaiting the girls who burnt-out from the call
center. Character did matter, but it was like expensive taste. Sometimes you
couldn’t afford it. Sometimes they bombed your city or shipped your factory
overseas. The ex-judge had made an ideology out of this, but where was he
now? Certainly not in his chambers. The building was flooded, he was out
on the street, in desperate need of trust and compassion, and this was the
problem with his Ministry. It only worked if you were strong. The ex-judge
was old and his health was failing. He had betrayed his community and
had lost the protection of the riverside squat, and was now one more old
gypsy seeking refuge from the flood. Rescue services had been selectively
deployed, hospitals had been abandoned, police stations closed, the only
mobilized people in the city were skinheads. The smoky-voiced old timer
recalled the ex-judge’s eyes when she had gone back to confront him. The
total absence of guilt or fear. She had come to him in weakness and he had
given her strength, and she couldn’t help wondering whether someone in
the flood zone was returning the favor. She hoped so. No recriminations, no
anger, but yes, she really did.
The girl’s phone was still engaged. The boyfriend lit a cigarette and
stared at his office door. In a few minutes, his secretary would come in with
the bad news that the publisher had requested a private meeting upstairs.
The publisher was an avuncular fat man with a nasty line of rhetoric. His
consultancy to the president depended on the speedy delivery of solutions
and results, and the girl’s boyfriend had failed too many times. It was not
about the seal. It was about commitment and professionalism. The president
had expressed confidence in the apparatus of the state, and the paper had | 477
failed to meet his expectations. Once again, the tabloid station had triumphed,
and as long as the station kept triumphing, was there really any need to pay
the boyfriend’s huge salary? Not for the first time, the boyfriend wondered
this himself. There were too many hungry people in the city; desperate,
resourceful, clever people like himself who would kill for a job and a flat
behind a gate, and all the publisher needed to do was say the word and
the downstairs lobby would be swimming—literally—with familiar faces
looking to bump the boyfriend off. This was the way it worked, the way
the game was played, not just in the east, but in the west also, and the thing
the boyfriend wondered as he stared at the door was who was ahead of the
game, and who was behind it. Was it really the east catching up to the west,
or was it the other way around?
478 |
Photo: Sue de Beer
Travis Jeppesen
from The Suiciders
13. Matthew, or The Margins
Matthew’s friends ran away from him. They didn’t want to accept him in
this life as a savior no more. The truth is always marginal. I have teeth, too,
I called out. In a way, the only thing significant about that room was its
blackness. A geriatric child was mining dots. Can you put that last goal on
speaker phone?
I shouted out at the shitter, get me new turnips. No one else alive to listen.
Me and Matthew interviewing the same mechanic, he’s always gasping. A
seagull servant shouts out at my friend. Is now the time to bathe myself of all
| 479
imperfections. The goat named silence as a role model.
Matthew drove a jeep over his friend Zach’s new hairstyle. Droopy verbs
came out of the wind. I can’t believe the level of recklessness that has been
excised, my gurulike stint. I made an announcement to our fans through
dancing.
By the time our music video was finally broadcast, most of us were dead,
myself included. I go to the north pole to not be taken seriously. The way
this planet is divided confuses me at times. I will never write a novel with
less hair. Repetition is important because it valorizes the pope. Matthew’s
wearing sandals.
To put forth my goatless ambition, I’ll be sure to ride her. My salvation
is an ultimate plea. An opportunity rots in the fold. My fellow humans are
feeling the fire. A month of sundaes. People call me up to ensure my existence
hasn’t been harmed. Me by numbers on a train.
The satellite spelled exhaustion to our tributaries. Matthew was asked to
go up in a spaceship and fix it. No more children about here. Only something
with feathers and a moon. It hurt so much, sometimes I dreamed I had hair.
A spooky donkey walked out of the room. Mountains of innocence formed
the backdrop. When he finally got to outer space, and the journey took a long
ass time, he missed his favorite wine sauce. So he blew up someone else’s
satellite. There’s a certain amount of truth in most nouns. For instance, excess
ovaries grilled to perfection.
While in outer space, it is alleged that Matthew came into contact with
a soviet nun, who instructed him to X out his eyes before returning home
to save us. That would be the only way out of this drone, according to her.
Freedom from opportunity had lifted her out of the glade, into a sepia-toned
straitjacket covered with a thin film of spacedust. A bird inside the shadow.
The kitchen sink is rather mexican.
Matthew stood inside the hallway and counted to five, over and over
again. He was trying to reach something. You couldn’t really blame him for
wanting to wear the bandana. To not go outside and find himself a grave.
Accessibility was pertinent to those sheep spiders. A bloated magnificence
spun out of finance. A piccolo in his mustache.
Maniac residuals oh the sure fineness. Matthew was arrested for going to
jail. His causality’s all wrong, a distant feature. A mess of wills caused him
to change his mind.
The police over there were with him for most of the trial. He ordered
baked alaska. Tennisball engulfed his thermostat. Here is a puking vitriol
that is sure to be rebuked as a barking fossil fuel.
The silence was orange that night. The clock read 4:27. A mosquito bit his
soul. He wasn’t quite alone enough. But most of us went into the sink. He
wanted to be alone forever, a bottomless drifter. The clock read 11:04.
Morning combs the silence out of here. Where did Matthew go, there are
480 | some snakes it is true. There isn’t enough silence to bury. You can’t hold my
hand, it hurts too much mom. Matthew versus the police part five.
I’ll be so happy when suicide stops harassing me. You know how to play
her game? I sure as hell knew a secret that year. It was zz top on backwards.
My fellow monkey, Matthew fell into the margins. I open the window too
brave to stop thinking. Here comes a smelly mannequin, it’s falling all over
the whore.
We were there the night chip daniels died, someone could be heard saying
in the next hotel room.
Matthew went on a mission to take scotch tape to the moon. Matthew
brought the soviet nun back to earth with him to keep him company. I mean,
in-your-face mole. Matthew is so grandiose. Matthew wants to take the soviet
nun to live with him in the land of the female dictator. To be free on top of
someone else. There are no strings that lead to desire.
Matthew gets annoyed and takes a bath. He was sick of the others always
trying to out-compete one another on stupidity. Icky virus satanic reminder.
I go down for some real midnight shit once again you’re joking.
I’m sick of how fucking innocent you are all the time, Matthew said to the
nun. I only want to see you getting away from me right here and now.
The nun wants to be a superstar. She can’t go back to the soviet enterprise
anymore.
Come on you savior, I don’t want your shit in my mouth this night.
Matthew’s been a bad boy. He took the soviet nun away to visit her father
without a tourist visa. The father had a bathroom in the kitchen. That way,
he could sit on the toilet as he ate dinner. What went in came out at the same
time. This isn’t a political allegory.
Adam thinks of his mother.
Piano music playing softly in the hallway. All sorts of communists came
to feed at the trough. My head hurts. The muffin is dry. I am thinking things
over tonight. Immeasurable distractions. Ironize these sentiments, make
them fathomable. It is too late, the police are already at your window. I can’t
afford to fall asleep yet.
Matthew as a teenager. The silt-covered log he rested on was spooky.
Intentionality robs a liquor store. There were two pirates mining the cables.
The soviet nun doesn’t want to go back to california. You can’t blame her for
being so demented, she has family to consider. A wily beast moving towards
TV chapstick. Adam always bent down to lubricate the TV screen.
That salty encouragement is what I need or crave. Sometimes the wrong
word doesn’t occur to me on time. It hurts to have to be this bad. Now
Matthew was speaking to Adam’s pet spider.
The soviet nun knew how to turn the word trophy into a verb. She was
good at things that no one had any satisfaction for. There was a cool river
flowing in her left tit. The semantics of america did nothing for her.
Matthew became anti-digital in his last years. A certain phase went | 481
through his face, he grew allergic to mines. There weren’t so many fathers
out there to help him cope. Social indifference bled across the continent. An
entire paragraph could equal one song.
Here’s where realism shits its pants. Don’t think about god too much or
you’ll pull a muscle. The anchovies on that pizza were disgusting. Matthew
fathoms a blockade up ahead.
I can’t stand it when there’s a crack in the door. It seems some of us can’t
afford to play god, either. Toxic mushroom sauce on the whore’s artichoke.
That’s what happens when you let the soviet nun make breakfast tacos.
She wrote the word forgive on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on
her throat. I just assault those things I don’t know how to challenge. The
particularized sentiment is enough to squeak. Adam’s e-mail was doing just
fine. Hint: The soviet nun’s mother is a jewish psychiatrist.
Did the tight sanctity arrive yet? I made sure to strengthen his deception.
Teenage nuts are never tighter. You don’t mind mama do you? I’m a onearmed industry in silence.
There were cakes and he knew how to bake them. He’d bake them real
good. Sometimes he went to the bathroom. That wooden table over there.
Let this be called Matthew or the margins. Salt was the only foundation
I thought I could unlearn. Some truths are truly solitary. The man came up
from kansas to teach us all a lesson. A powerful reminder of truth’s solidarity
to form.
Matthew ate an apple inside of cancer. I could never survive living inside
this country of the mind. There were teenage survivors spread across the
platform. Take the edge away from silence, tropical tornado barks inside the
volcano.
A helicopter came down to rescue Matthew from the soviet nun’s embrace.
All his friends were on board. There is something quite ruinous about
survival. He wrote on graph paper to keep himself alive.
Trash is teenaged. She needs a thermometer.
There’s a static form of being at stake here. It is true that I masturbate to
too much wisdom at times. The goats stuck inside of silence are too late.
Chinese animals have separate meaning.
Nothing was.
Matthew wants to be a mental retard so bad, he can taste it in his shoes.
He told us about it in the car one time. This was before the whore had come
down to give us an imagination. We needed to transform the octagon on the
transmission. Chunky spider formfucker went off on holiday, a bird flew in
the back passengerside window to threaten Adam’s pet livelihood. Jesus H.
spat verbs on her breasts. When we went into the abandoned school, it was
empty save for a single torn scrap of sheet metal hanging from a thin piece
of rope.
482 |
I don’t want the authority figure to melt in my hands; sidelong tuna. The
silence in the distance. Matthew spoke of his hands. Matthew told Lukas to
shut the fuck up. Matthew told Zach what he was really feeling. Matthew
told Adam I love your spider. Matthew told Adam’s pet spider I have a gun.
Matthew told Jesus H. you squawk bitch I’ll mess up your variables. Matthew
told the whore honey you can’t afford this livelihood. Matthew told Peter
hey Peter what are you doing. Matthew has so many friends, he is minor.
We went over to the house to forget about something. This is in the past.
There were nails sticking out of her trash gun? We weren’t alert, but we could
surely masturbate. Over at the zoo, I put a nail file around my legs.
Matthew is a dickhead with problems. You’re not allowed to have a sex
party in the ocean. Being a whore is never famous.
Matthew wasn’t there the day they murderized the midget porn star’s
brains out through the widescreen TV. The whore takes her child to daycare.
The whore is a jewish psychiatrist. My culture is merciless. My situation is
theatre. Manic sincerity on the rise. I love the way you blink your eyes.
Adam did you find the goddamn suicide satellite. Shut up you imbecile
that’s supposed to be Matthew’s job. Matthew’s looking out the window now.
As though that’s supposed to mean something. All of my legs are teenagers
to begin with. Let’s try out satisfaction and really go somewhere. Circular
ovaries are my medicine.
Poet is a person that doesn’t know what he’s after. Take a vitamin. Do I
need to shit now? Know what you’re going towards, the underground is
nasty, silence never sounds the same.
I am a leopard, you remind him. Shift boundaries to de-insert the boundless
paradoxical. Shifted shadow oops and hogtorn. I reminded myself better. My
sexual life inside of a squirrel. The available wintertime. The career novelist’s
transvestite is floating.
Coked-out disaster mom is farming her sincerity. A living form of
spitelessness. Don’t get on that airplane in silence. The whore evades
responsibility by shrieking.
Adam took a pill to regain his livelihood. The great burden of the
satisfaction adventure tacos was weighing down on him. The black girl’s
name was concrete. Give me just one equal taste of your verb.
Concrete beats the soviet nun. Baby has vestibules. Matthew touches
Lukas’s crotch. A ten-foot tangerine. Post-racial as this existence is, there’s
a man outside the window. The soviet nun frowns, defeated by defecation.
Concrete throws away the coded diaphragm. Cops in need of friends.
Homeless faggots keep busting up our trashcans. I want a divorce. Call
Zach back at the hotel, tell him something important. It doesn’t matter what,
it just has to be something. No more lucidity, no more ambiguity. Shaved
substance is what got splattered. I don’t know what the internet is supposed
to mean.
Matthew and concrete had a replacement child. Its name was sanitation. | 483
I know Arnold wants you back in his life Matthew. You are moving me
out of substance. Matthew’s wife has green tomatoes for breasts. She is not
the soviet nun.
Then Matthew got a suntan.
I envy the previous generations.
The lace on your testicles has an accident. I want a movie to happen. The
perspective ring gets re-afforded. I mean, a man.
Matthew’s friends ran away from him. He had a fat fuck parrot for a
friend named Jesus H. Christ. All of this is a minority. The operation is one
we can all afford. Tomorrow has circumstances, today has logic and pills. I
jerk off one diameter away from protein. Pigs are fat and some of them have
throats.
In the springtime, we all had an awareness problem. Kelli called up the
superstition ring and told them where Taylor tried to go. Matthew was driving
the car at this time. He had an uncle. But the new orleans land destination
had already received its three vertebrae back from the president’s allies. It
was elaborated in a public document that only three percent of the earth’s
population was meant to know about. Zach drove an antique car out of
nowhere. That’s after we had killed the furcoated warriors that tried to steal
Matthew’s sandwich.
I am the other self you once dreamed of inhabiting. That’s what I told
Matthew. He wanted a disease so bad, he could feel it.
Your magnitude is sexual, someone says. Here comes the hot falloffer.
Oh shit—I have a leather fantasy night!!!
Are you still so screwed up by the silence that you can’t latch on to the
atomic dog? How many microbes created you? Do you want to screw me in
the electric tunnel? Unfortunately, I never learned to shit.
My dreams of naked recklessness aren’t as pretty as they seem. I’m a
teenage commando on high, there are no proponents to whittle my disaster
into shapeless. Adam’s mom is on the TV screen. My name is Matthew and
I’m watching you. The penis paradox has a sibling problem.
Former testicle glances, put my dick inside you. You’ll know you want it
too. Pour out kaleidescope, the journey begins. Oldness tupperware game—
gladstones bend their livestock gems.
Teeth are so unbreakable it creams from a distance. Salad abstraction
appointed. The hurt fields are glowing.
I want your dick inside me too. It glows so righteous at times, it’s hard
to know when to stop. Apply some pressure down there, sweetheart. A
watermelon follows.
The cheese of disgust is withered. Don’t unfold the brain—it is a lemony
angle. You keep being uplifted—that black spot in your mouth. Where prose
is misunderstood, pose follows. A venemous entropy. The seat of rising.
484 |
The social self and the invented self merge closer together upon
comfortability. You have to be careful when watching the smoke rise through
the tar. Sun bends like a diagonal stripe across the windowless building. Girl
outside sounds like a voice on the radio. Bound for rueful convent. My need
is scarlet and teenage. Teenage whore leads us into the shadowfire.
Matthew looks out the kitchen window. The day has a disease. Kettle
reminds him of xmastime in america. He doesn’t want to go back there.
He already knows he has. The three-pronged virus, more into the estate. I
unawaken. Noselike testicles hanging down from that tree. Here’s what it
means to have an inner life.
The lady wore two golden wristwatches. The one said stealth, the other
said prudence. Zach calls in the middle of the night to say this trip is a
failure, as though I didn’t already know. Afraid to turn the phone on now.
The constant desire to be left alone.
Can you smell how close I am to your face this instant?
Shut off in the long run, her steaming vestibules betray us. Is betray the
same as portray, Matthew asked his teenage whore mother. Yes, she replied,
wipe your ass son. This year is a total fogtrap. Synthetic euthanasia, down in
hollywood once again—buy me a new dog.
Little rectangles beyond the rain. The desire to sculpt something out of
sheet metal. Ass canyon. Frothy abundant moron, move on into the sceptre.
I love the sound this new motel room makes when it first begins to
function in the morning. What we need is a new cocaine dealer. High-minded
boyfriend, someone’s teenage queen, lodged in the network.
Matthew has the spider angle to deal with. Pure content, all my theoretical
blather. Art once meant something to these fears. What I can’t foresee isn’t
quite yet worth mentioning. Here we are in france once again.
The soviet nun ripped in pieces—my teenage trophy wife, ha, all over
again. Good to get across and to drown all spectaclish. The freezing dawn
welcomes me also.
Says Matthew: When I go to heaven I will seem to myself much lighter
than I actually am. There will be horses all around me, a caravan of force.
Weaving in and around the boundaries. To not be careful is sometimes
enough. I am spotted, so upsetlike, the air is a tangle of emotional truths.
Let it be that you are on your own now, seeking justice. Your own concept
thereof. Where needles enter the brain. Stab your own volition. Truth can go
no further.
The miracle of sappiness, my vibrational meanderings, oh yeah. Riding
out on the highway. Of someone’s ashy spine—you’re all mine again. Being
lost oh become a window. It will be more—to write poetry once one is in love
again. Yeah to know what that is all about—one big epic travel poem. Do you
believe in the earthly lord? A piece of caravan.
I want to use my own shadow as a curtain—a poetic idea—how will that
| 485
ever be possible? To mow a dog?
Sometimes a shadow bequeaths itself to me. Don’t be disgusting. There is
no such light as bitter triumph. What will I do may I ever learn how to sing.
You knew me salty—hear you see me vague.
The evening rape, dehydrate the soul. It hurts when you sing lighter, like
Matthew did the other night at the karaoke hooker bar, snot coming out of
his nose so subtitle. The extravagance of lice. I know you’re excited about it
too. I was almost an african hermaphrodite, I did something else. It is true
that subtlety is a dialect. Can you hold my fever watch it quivering your
hands, a small fetus perhaps? I and too.
Here comes the boss to tell Matthew he’s a friend of mine. Feels so good to
let time blow off steam. This proves the gesture is premeditated, his farts’re
like liquid hydrogen.
I think the meal. That clunker really got by autobiographically. Smarts the
real estate? And then the elements spoke out against fate. That shade of paint
strikes me as self-sufficient.
Wouldn’t it be enough to still be there? I was somewhere on the other
side of the sky. Like going to the bathroom in a moleskine notebook. All the
trendy fuckwads you once threw out the window—give me a bathtub full of
lice.
Licelike gravy the latticework. A terminal child. You go extravagandize
your belongings. Nancy sinatra buttraped by the prison guard.
Last night Matthew rimmed Peter in his dreams. He still remembers—
keep me so close to you. Matthew is heaven, Peter a tube of paint.
Sorry for overhearing what you never were. Sometimes walking down
the street makes me cry.
Young people. Expect something of my losses. Learn to shorten your
sentences please please me.
A subtitled conversation with Arnold and his friends.
An eagle flies out of Adam’s armpit. Rats in the prostitute’s pussy.
Definitely nothing to get upset about, those simple days and deaths, I love
you most when you soar higher than me. There is a window over the fold, oh
here we are. Specious lambs quite often, time is a value.
Here we go, let me be the grand announcer. I have so much to offer
this world of imageless thoughts, I’ll tell you something. Writing is telling,
showing with words. I have to go sneeze. Don’t contextualize anything
shadowy younger. I think you are brilliant too for what little you have to
offer this world. Are you destroying me yet? There is some wonder…
Trophies stuck to the ceiling reveal something about the past. There goes
my royal thermometer vacant. Legions of collars make up for that loss, my
wilted vocab. Just bring that dilemma on over here—my voice has already
been broadcasted, we need it too.
Hello, world, what are you looking like on this day. Escape all foundational
486 | precepts. A sort of anti-philosophy. Candles burn in heavenly abundance—I
want your soul to fall apart, the truth.
Some people truly deserve what they can’t even have—I am one of the
few. Write a letter to Zach, become the morbid identifier, moral highground,
bury me in fleas. To hurry it up and get it on out, once puke solidifies you are
never very free, though aren’t you?
Variables on fire, ecstatic mineway is so deep. Can I help out the film
industry by hiding under my desk? Won’t they disbelieve me by flying? I
hear some things and think about them just as well—you can’t blame me for
crying now or can you. I would have announced it, my tears never get very
far. Gone searching on the tower street among saris and shrines, shrimps
spines. Here the bitter announcement seems to chime.
| 487
488 |
Photo: David Kraus
Ivan Martin Jirous
from Magor’s Birds
I wanted to have another beer
with someone,
I turned away from my typewriter and discovered
I was alone
as if I were lonely.
Little loves, my birds,
alight on my shoulders,
seat yourselves on the keys of my typewriter,
those you choose to sit upon
I will carefully avoid.
Fly to me, little loves, birds!
With people I can’t… You know that.
Fly to me, I’ll legato
the clucking of my fingers
on the keyboard
I’ll decrease the frequency of the hits
I’ll slow down the quick tap of my heart
I’ll drop my manic-mindedness, my little loves, birds.
Translated by Toby Litt and Tomáš Mika.
First published in Inkshed 23 (Spring/Summer, 1992).
| 489
To Amalrik
There water is boiling,
I don’t know whose,
By having killed you,
They won’t destroy us.
There the sky is boiling,
I don’t know whose,
The KGB killed you,
But won’t destroy us.
I shall grow tomatoes in your place,
Until they kill me too.
But by killing me,
They won’t destroy us.
In heavenly Jerusalem
490 | We shall learn to play
Electric guitar.
It will destroy the Soviet empire,
As you yourself said, as you know.
Translated by Anna Bryson and Jana Klepetářová.
First published in Yazzyk 3 (1994).
[…]
Vráta keeps watch in Vienna
Autumn days approaching,
The Föhn blows to Vienna from the puszta,
And this year in Vysočina the flax
Is gathered without me
Perhaps from the bottomless pit
I should explore a few more fathoms,
I have fallen as far as Valdice.
No more drinking ersatz-coffee with Vráta,
I’ve got stuck here.
You will sleep alone
There in the distance beyond Iglau,
Ach, beyond Iglau.
At noon you will be sitting at the table,
A light breeze as from a fan
Faintly shook the countryside
Reflections of the winds blow weakly
From the South, the Föhn from the puszta.
It is only a short way through Znojmo.
And you will go on waiting for me
In the old world of the Celts
In Vienna—a little further on—
It’s with Marie that Vráta drinks ersatz-coffee
It is only a short way through Znojmo.
Translated by Anna Bryson and Jana Klepetářová.
First published in Yazzyk 3 (1994).
| 491
492 |
Alexander Jorgensen
“La Paix”
ZELDA: How’d you get back?
SCOTT: Took an aeroplane.
ZELDA: Didn’t crash, did yeh?
SCOTT: No.
ZELDA: You were safe, huh?
SCOTT: Yes.
| 493
The Wading Bird: Or, Gideon’s Ephod
I know about being a whore and lush/ High Noon/ “Do not forsake me, oh
my darling.” This wearing a cap on my head/ coal and steam/ speech full of
cultural indicators/ bald man/ a something borrowed during the moment
when/ carrying rosary beads in case I might croak/ I settled to buy/ the
room filled with prophets/ a few tracts of charley/ let me say/ c h a r l e y/
from some bartering who/ smile on greedily and wide his mouth/ “Yes...”/
A yahoo in the hand of a dick hoe.
And I’d smoked Gauloises to feel important/ supposing Frank O’Hara/
jerking to pics of African males with vaudevillian fatties stuffing smallmouthed blondes/ less than empty-handed/ or psychically broke/ that
spinster at the end of my road/ her matted dog/ both of them/ afraid to
be sociable/ telling myself the while I was breaking this habit/ smoking
twice some brand at some hour and five the next/ these fingers brown and
shitty/ my cute girlfriend the scent of bubblegum.
494 | Aunt Bev’d say: “Trifling!”/ drinking champagne at granddad’s funeral/
pocketing round wheat cracker with brynza/ sleepy-eyed/ holding out for
scrub typhus/ the old brood mare’s ear pressed deep into a conch shell/
each unlaundered cloud hanging on loops of bang-up starshine./ And still
my knapsack’s the mansion carried with me/ long unfactored miles/ no
place to go/ not many friends/ Chuff! Chuff! Chuff!/ All nights but terror in
foreign languages/ “It’s a quarter past two.”/ wetness on my face.
| 495
Terminal
(For David-Baptiste Chirot)
Know that Kiwi
who says he’s a pilot
‘s a twitching eye?
It kinda stutters
way our automobile’s brakes do?
And his indexForefinger’s always
a bit shaky, tad
behind the thumb.
Awful at getting lost.
496 |
| 497
498 |
Photo: Krista Katrovas
Richard Katrovas
Love Poem for an Enemy
I, as sinned against as sinning,
Take small pleasure from the winning
Of our decades-long guerrilla war.
For from my job I’ve wanted more
Than victory over one who’d tried
To punish me before he died,
And now, neither of us dead,
We haunt these halls in constant dread
Of drifting past the other’s life
While long-term memory is rife
With slights that sting like paper cuts.
We’ve occupied our separate ruts
Yet simmered in a single rage.
We’ve grown absurd in middle age
Together, and should seek wisdom now
Together, by finishing this row.
I therefore decommission you
As constant flagship of my rue.
Below the threshold of my hate
You now my good regard may rate.
For I have let my anger pass.
But, while you’re down there, kiss my ass.
| 499
The Boxers Embrace
In Prague or in New Orleans, my perfect night
Of guilty pleasure is to watch a fight.
I know that it is heartless past all speech
To thrill at two men’s pain as both must reach
Across the bloody billion-year abyss
To strike the other one, or make him miss.
Yet when I gaze upon the frank despair
Of spirit-broken people who must bear
The torments of cool fiends they cannot see—
Systemic meanness and brutality
Of bureaucratic processes that hide
The facts of who has profited and lied—
I see inside the grotesque and plodding dance
Of boxers something beautiful: a chance
To mediate the passions of the tribe
By what the ritual of fights describe
500 | (As arm a sudden arc upon the gleam
within that space); for public fights redeem
Our sense of being, at once, in and out
Of nature, and so map the human route
Across the razor’s edge of slow extinction.
Such is the truth of all destructive action,
Transcending histories of consequence
And serving therefore as a mottled lens
Unto the bifurcated human heart
Whose one true nature is to break apart
Revealing beast and angel wrapping arms
Beyond all consequence of temporal harms.
As systems fade, transform, reconstitute,
The fools will blather and the wise stand mute,
Then innocence must suffer out of reach
And over time our best intentions leach
Through all the lies we hold as history.
No yearning human heart is ever free,
Except when it has found its one true base,
Where the last bell rings, and the boxers embrace.
The Bridge of Intellectuals
If Crane had been a Czech, and deigned to live
Till ’53, he might have more than praised
A bridge, for in that year of Stalin’s death,
Artists and intellectuals of Prague—
But only those the Party had to fix
After an “elegant coup” in ’48—
Finished their bridge across the Vltava.
Each morning did they bring their lunch in bags?
Did they bitch and curse and clown around behind
The foremen’s backs? Were there foremen? Or did
Each man (were there women?) pull his weight
Unprodded by the ethos of his class?
Of eleven bridges down the spine of Prague
It stands the shabbiest and least necessary.
From the road leaving town one sees the tufts
Of grass and weeds muscling through the rusted
Transoms that trains, some say, must rarely cross,
And notes the webbed faults in the dark concrete
Of columns lifting from the water like
Wet khaki pant legs of old fishermen.
To those whose ambitions for bourgeois fame
Got them torn from their tasks to labor here,
Is there ironic consolation that,
As work is a matter of identity,
So many praised workers remain unnamed?
Anonymous bones of generations lie
The snaking length of China’s ancient shyness;
Unknown apprentices applied the strokes
That smeared celestial radiance onto cheeks
Of lesser angels in the master works.
The petty, silly little men who snapped
The blossom of a generation from
Its living vine have watched their own bridge crumble,
And even as this bad joke stands unused,
Dilapidated on the edge of town,
Perhaps its “rehabilitated” builders—
Most dead by now, though some, no doubt, at work,
Scattered throughout Prague, in little flats, alone—
Feel vindicated in their bitterness,
| 501
If bitterness survives absurdity.
I’d like to know that once or twice a year
An old man, whose hands are soft from idle thought,
Comes, by bus or car, to gaze a while
And simply marvel that the thing still stands.
502 |
George W. Bush was Very Nice to Me
as Bacchus rolled down St. Charles, and I chatted with him about politics,
local and national, especially the eleven-fingered idiot running against David
Duke for the Republican nomination for Führer of the Suburbs. I told him
flat out I hate the Republican Party and still he was nice to me, stood next
to me, in the back of the ten-deep crowd that yelled for trinkets, and chatted
for several minutes as though he really liked me, and didn’t mind at all that
I’d ripped a fine white string of beads from his grasp when he’d grabbed
it from the air at the same time as I. As we chatted about Duke and New
Orleans apartheid, about my having recently lived in the French Quarter
and about how the trees on St. Charles seem for months after Carnival—
indeed on some stretches all year round—like bearers of many-colored fruit
from where the bead strands get caught in the branches, I knew I would one
day write about meeting a president’s goofy son, a nice guy, which is to say
someone you shouldn’t mind standing around shooting the breeze with on
a pleasant spring night in New Orleans, though not someone you’d want
to be cooped up with on a long drive, say, from El Paso to San Antonio, or
| 503
certainly not from one paradigm to another.
504 |
Vít Kremlička
Tynia
Tynia is waking up she’s doing up her necklace
how clear the light? she asks
long, white
so as to light up the clouds perhaps
she loves you with her entrails and her joints
It was raining, and crayfish were running across the street
he said: I am moving. The horrible summer
(the time when I sold power plants)
a thousand suns are rumbling in my head
long, white
so as to light up the clouds perhaps
she loves you with her entrails and her joints
Translated by Petra Vachunová.
First published in The Prague Revue 6 (1999).
| 505
Cinema Arcadia
It’s mysterious it’s mysterious splendidly mysterious
words, constantly creating something, at the site of ruins
a grampa in a chequered vest burns some furniture,
the gambling house with the billiards is five houses further down,
the branding of the sea cows,
an immense lust at the Arcadia cinema
506 |
In the malt-house the guys
are arguing about how Bosnia
will turn out, silence
there’s an awful silence sometimes, the periphery is shattered to splinters
the school’s been closed for three years No Man’s Land,
the rocks and the church and the factories and the corridors underhill
perhaps it happened in past times definitely in times
of cruelty
Translated by David Vichnar.
The Attempts of a Commodities Expert
This grapevine here
there amidst the railway
rarest herbs are in bloom.
Stoppers, shambles and shit
have sprung beautiful flowers!
Nature fears rectangularity,
resists perpendicular perversions!
Rarest herbs are in bloom!
When a bronze shawl sets onto the horizon,
when irises ooze a balmy odour,
it seems the landscape is falling asleep
and the cigar at the coffee is going out.
Translated by David Vichnar.
| 507
508 |
Photo: Aleš Machaček
Jane KirwAn
A Shed in Bohemia
Not soothing but essential to hide
in the shed, stay in the dark with the geese
rather than sleep beneath walnut trees.
Squatting among them she knows
to kill quietly
the dark thick with scuffle, rustle,
shit and sticky white feathers;
can wring a neck deftly,
knows whatever it takes to live,
keep still, close shutters, listen.
It would have been so much safer
if they’d hid in the woods
but her neighbours stayed.
She heard them behind bolted doors
praying, not believing.
She didn’t betray anyone,
sat by her stove, waiting
as now—cold, old, strangely agitated.
| 509
Caffeine
It was looking at the single yellow tile fixed
among the blue, I realised
I wanted everything, immediately
had to wait while coffee was ground
in a souvenir from Amsterdam
rescued from a marriage, a small box
with a metal handle, built-in drawer
for collecting the grains
quick hit, bitter kick of connection.
Slipped from red berries
bean-like seeds are dried, pulverised
so that laid flat, shape lost
510 | there’s no resemblance to what was there before.
Simply a name.
I snip silver foil off the Lavazza
or meet you at a café, my cappucino
on the table your fingers brushing the spoon
or here
in this kitchen. Steam forced through expresso
your hand circling my cup,
your lips sipping my coffee.
Power Station, Ústí Nad Labem
(‘Model of a landmark situation’: sculpture by Jiří Sozanský, 1982)
The figure is part of the ladder
as if the building flooded years before
and everything crusted with salt.
How does this scrap and papier maché work
as art, pivot on more than your story, this country?
Is it the figure, its scale tiny in proportion
– twist of pipe-cleaner, the trace of threadbare feathers
fixed to its spine indistinct in clots of paint—or
the act of climbing
in a shell a mile from end to end that’s cracking up,
rusting wires weaving skywards.
Or is it the ladder, suspended up the middle, threading floor
to missing floor, that stops
halfway, above it space half as much again
roofed by peeling plaster and sealed.
| 511
One Made Earlier
She makes a mum out of old sweaters
uses jam jars—newly washed—
that scrubbing board for clothes found in the shed.
She makes it quickly, on spec, refuses to check it’s ok
trims off the odd thread but doesn’t care if the stitches are slack
– this version stirs the porridge briskly
considers corsets de rigeur.
She makes something solid and soft, stuffed with clean goose-feathers
each goose personally plucked, each personally butchered
makes one before breakfast in the summer, before it gets cloudy
carries on long after others have stopped for tea
512 | makes a genuine artefact, a hole, a cave, a source
gets rid of the sour smell, the sweat.
She could go for supplies, a Vogue pattern, but the tissue’s
so easily ripped, wishes she could match the silks.
This mum’s immaterial, shoddily made, a sort of tin-man
tin mother, all cans and Sambuca. Agitated she puts it in a pile
with the others. She was never a Girl Guide, not even
a Brownie, yet she wants to get it right
a snip here with scissors, more chalk, still something missing.
Teaching Czech to Foreigners
Room 221 of the Philosophical faculty
they’re doing a translation:
Mr Procházka gets up.
Has breakfast, goes to work.
Takes the tram and metro.
Has a meeting. Has lunch.
Mrs Procházková wakes
still lifting the small boy
whose sweater is unravelling,
holds up the solid muscled body
feels it fade away.
She holds only stuff unravelling;
unpicks the sleeves, the neck
until she has a lap of red,
tightly ordered balls of wool.
She crochets curtains.
The windows opposite,
neighbours who take notes,
are blotted out.
Dogs that pace the fences blur
between her densely twisted knots.
Her face, arms are layered with fluff,
scarlet dust that specks the lace
she has replaced. Before
it was all white outside, and flowery.
Now the roofs, the ashen trees
are suffused with crimson.
She takes a dustpan from
five she’s lined up by the door,
sweeps up all the traces.
| 513
514 |
Photo: Zoran Kovacevic
Maya Květný
Promise
Time clittered off into the brambles
“clagg” it said “o clagg!”
These are the sharly bits which sweat me, they drag, see
i’m held salvage…
Crumpets blow and off i go hark it!
Listen, whoof! go stars…springing up into place
Melluminous wheel unwinds. stop…is it moon? is it moon?
Yes, and unencumbered, yes, i thin by shadows.
Azure is umbrellaed over all.
Day. ..now that is another sex altogether,
but this, i am really a twin to…pop! pop! pop! there they go!
the onned planets, i mean.
Much ago we rumbled falsely and simmered,
falling ingeniously noggin first into
spilled brain forests.
Then muffled, rab our hampster-pink eyeholes wetsy.
No shame, oh the villian who quashed a larval possible.
But i bent only this way, that is forwards
towards shhhh …
purse-dark isles of glycerous promise.
At off beats our odd shots rimpled past, ughing from behind,
remorse had plunketed deep.
Know on and on i go. Curse the bargainers, i will make none.
Sun is no bedfellow, it is all whites and no pupil.
Glinty-gluey, i raunch the strands free.
| 515
Why is a know-it-not-never-nothing, why is a triple negative.
Aaho, had i broken earlier on, it seems there would have been more of
me.
Revegetate us maybe?
I long to submerge afresh
in mammary cambric tea.
First published in Optimism Monthly 11 (May 1996).
516 |
Opposite: Maya Květný, “Poodle Ruff Muzzle,” Gristle Floss 4 (1994).
| 517
518 |
Photo: Katie Cooke
Toby Litt
Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
You did not have to write these poems, and each poem
need be no longer than it is. You never tacked-on
or filled-in. You were content in the company
of silence, modest in the presence of words and frugal
with the generous world. You had an income of your own
and latin rhythms, so I hear, to occupy
your leisure hours. You were civilized enough
not to fret over the empty page, but could drink
something fizzy through a straw and gossip
wholeheartedly about the local animals, the real
celebrities. You could forget you were a poet,
and make of the remembering an accurate
occasion, fully looked, colourful and sounded.
| 519
Auerbach
Vocation, unlike dirt, cannot be washed off
at the end of the day. Instead, rooted down
in the flinty night of earth, the violence
explored by worms, vocation is bloody, like
a mythic tree which, when its twigs are snapped,
bleeds blood.
Lost in the upper worlds for we cannot
deny those basic, sub-iconic myths, of light
and dark, of up and down: more basic
even than male sun and female moon above
the tangle of non-angelic thought, this
is where you are not. Instead you are held,
beneath, within.
Instead the basics; the form before, and its
520 | appearance beneath a different kind of weather,
within the lightbulb’s cool, facetious gaze;
the shift of perception like the shift of clouds
without the clouds themselves: completion like
the cup in which the ignorant water rests.
To instantly make
the decision, breaking over the wave
of occurrence, to see immediately that the decision
was wrong, but not to regret the decision,
to make the next decision and to accept
the next mistake, knowing, at least,
that your past mistakes were wholly meant.
Celan
THE TREES play with their colours the
dead
the unimportant sea-distant river
the weather of the parks
the
inauspicious bee reaches
its sweet home the sugar collection and
Paul
his mind out a strong fog
the iceberg metaphor
out
the burnt spaces
wanting a utilizable god
alone
in a world of inexplicables
another painted soul one of those recent
men
| 521
Schnittke
I recognize the need of desolation,
of wood, horsehair and metal, of the light
of Russia in your work. xxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx,
xxxxxxxx, xxxx. The yearn of the lost ghost,
looking for the door back into the flesh.
The child, talking with owls. The mercury,
the waltz and the empty fields. xxx xx xxxxxx,
xxxx xxxx xxx xx xxxx xx? xxxx xxxxx xxxxx?
But how can we speak in the language of men?
How dance when our legs will not move? How live
when suicide is possible and how die
when God is not?
522 |
Great Railway Journeys of the World
No. We are not eachother’s final destination.
We didn’t stop eachother in our tracks.
Any emotion
we allow ourselves, today and maybe tomorrow,
will be glitter, not even glow,
and would threaten no clocks.
But, through derailment or unrepair,
on-the-way can lengthen out
into here,
to residence and constant thought;
even rigid timetabling cannot prevent
the occasional accident.
Some brief delay that neither much desired
might trick us into redesigning Chance
as Providence:
how strange if, during this short wait,
we found ourselves required,
by love and inept engineers, to destinate.
| 523
524 |
Photo: Rosabel Lord
Christopher Lord
Tres Mujeres de España
Dramatis personæ
Imprudencia, the mother
Tentación and Debilidad, her daughters
Scene One
There is a music of guitar and castanets. Two women sit at a rough wooden table,
shelling peas into a large bowl. The music stops, and Imprudencia sighs wearily and
rubs her forehead with the back of her wrist in a gesture close to despair. Tentación does
not look up, and continues to shell the peas in a joyless and mechanical manner.
| 525
Imprudencia: [Mournfully] Ay, ay, ay.
Tentación: What’s that you say?
Imprudencia: Ay, ay, ay. It is an expression of despair, my child. An expression
close to despair, anyway.
Tentación: Am I your child, then? Am I to be your child?
Imprudencia: Well, once you were my child. My daughter. I remember it
distinctly. You sucked at my breast with sharp little sucks.
Tentación: Did I hurt you, then, mother?
Imprudencia: Yes, you hurt me. You hurt me as no one else would ever have
been able to hurt me. I will not deny it. But still, I loved you, you see, so it
will all be all right. Praised be the Virgin.
Tentación: What? It is very difficult for me to understand you.
Imprudencia: The Virgin. We must praise her constantly. Haven’t they taught
you that?
Tentación: Who? Who would teach me such a thing?
Imprudencia: Why, the priests, of course, and the nuns. What do you think
we pay them for? You must praise the Virgin constantly, my daughter, for
that is the nature of things: the general nature of our situation. For we are
women, are we not?
Tentación: That much is clear, Mother.
Imprudencia: Yes, we are women, certainly.
Tentación: But what is this task we have before us?
Imprudencia: We are shelling peas.
Tentación: Well I can see that. But what is it for?
Imprudencia: You must not ask. We are women, remember.
Tentación: Yes.
[They continue to shell their peas expressionlessly for a while. There is a sudden
crash of thunder and a flash of lightning.]
Tentación: Oh sweet Jesus what was that, Mother?
Imprudencia: It was just the lightning, my dear, my dearest darling, just a little
lightning, that’s all.
Tentación: But… It does not disturb you, then?
Imprudencia: Oh, I am not so easily disturbed as all that, you know. A little
lightning… Well, I have seen worse things.
Tentación: What worse things have you seen than that?
Imprudencia: Oh… I could tell you… I could tell you so many sad stories. But
this is not the time for that.
Tentación: Well, what then?
Imprudencia: I suppose that the alternative is happiness. Yes. A little joy and
happiness to tide us along.
Tentación: Will you tell me a happy story, then? Or perhaps… I don’t know. A
happy song? A little dance? I know you are capable of it.
Imprudencia: Oh, yes, I am capable enough, I suppose, but you see for now I
must limit myself to performing this simple task of shelling these peas. You
see that there is still a great pile of them, and the task will not be finished
until every pea has been torn from its comfortable little womb.
526 |
Tentación: You make it sound…
Imprudencia: Yes?
Tentación: I don’t know. You make it sound rather medical, Mother. A little bit
clinical. They are only peas, you know.
Imprudencia: Yes. And we are only women. That much is clear.
Tentación: Do you wish that we were men instead?
Imprudencia: No, no. That is not what I mean to say at all. If we were men,
anyway, do you think that we would be sitting here like this, shelling these
peas? Do you really think that?
Tentación: Well I have never seen them doing it, now that you come to mention
it.
Imprudencia: No.
[She sighs again, and repeats her weary gesture of rubbing at her forehead with the
back of her wrist.]
Tentación: But what about the thunder, mother?
Imprudencia: What?
Tentación: And the lightning? What does it portend?
Imprudencia: Portend? Signs and portents, is that what you are looking for?
There are no signs and portents, my girl, not for the likes of us. Nothing has
any more meaning than that very first bit of meaning which is immediately
apparent.
Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: It does not surprise me.
Tentación: But anyway…
Imprudencia: Yes?
Tentación: Well, what about your story? I mean, since we must sit here and
shell these peas like this, then I suppose it would be good to hear a story.
Imprudencia: Oh very well. But I warn you, it is just imagination.
Tentación: That doesn’t matter. But does it have a point, your story: a moral, or
something like that?
Imprudencia: Oh no, I make no such grand claims for it. No moral, no point,
nothing like that. I hope you won’t be disappointed.
Tentación: Oh, I hope not. Just as long as it helps us to get through this task of
ours.
[There is another crash of thunder and lightning.]
Tentación: Oh, but I am frightened, mother! What does it mean?
Imprudencia: Don’t be frightened. It means nothing.
Scene Two
The same thunder and lightning, but now an exterior. The voice of Imprudencia begins
to narrate as Tentación and Debilidad are seen, huddled under their shawls against the
wind and rain.
Imprudencia: [off] Once upon a time—it happened in Spain, you know, and long
ago—there were two fine sisters. Their names were Tentación and Debilidad; | 527
but that is of no account, since they never used these names to each other.
They had no need to do this, since each knew quite well to whom the other
was speaking, for their lives were so arranged that confusion in this matter
was unlikely. They never spoke to another living soul, although Debilidad,
the younger of the two, would sometimes converse with the angels she saw
flying in the air around her.
Debilidad: Where are we going? I am frightened!
Tentación: Oh, don’t be frightened.
Debilidad: Why not?
Tentación: Because you will make me frightened too. And it would not do for
us both to be frightened.
Debilidad: Oh!
Tentación: Please stop, please!
Debilidad: Well we must rest then.
Tentación: Oh very well. We will rest. Come and sit over here.
Debilidad: And can you stop the thunder and the lightning?
Tentación: Oh very well. I will stop it. [She claps her hands. It stops.] There. It is
gone. Now come and sit over here and talk with me a little.
Debilidad: [still frightened] What will we discuss?
Tentación: We will talk a little on the subject of happiness, I suppose. That will
drive away these demons of yours, perhaps.
Debilidad: Oh I hope so.
Tentación: Yes. Now, happiness, you know, comes in many colours. [She pulls
a bunch of ribbons from her pocket to illustrate the colours.] Which one shall we
start with?
Debilidad: Oh, the red one! I like the look of the red one.
Tentación: Yes. [She holds it up against her sister’s cheek and studies the effect.] I
think the red one sits quite well with your complexion. Let me fix it on you.
[She ties it slowly and carefully into her sister’s hair as she speaks.] Now… what
shall we say about this red kind of happiness? It is the happiness of your
warm blood, you see, that slithers about inside you, so warm and wet…
Debilidad: Yes! Yes! I can feel it!
Tentación: I was sure you would. Shut your eyes, and you will feel it more
closely. This is the happiness of heartbreak.
Debilidad: Heartbreak? Oh, do not say so.
Tentación: Yes. Heartbreak. When your heart breaks, then this warm red
happiness oozes out, you see. It oozes out inside and fills you with its glow.
There. Can you feel it?
Debilidad: Yes. Yes, I feel it quite distinctly now. But you know, it is not quite
enough.
Tentación: Oh?
Debilidad: I feel that it is not quite enough for me.
Tentación: I have some other colours.
Debilidad: [opening her eyes] Oh yes! I had forgotten. I wonder why?
Tentación: Oh, it is the happiness, you see. Happiness can make you forget
things like that. You must be careful.
528 |
Debilidad: Oh yes. I see. Well, what about the green one, then?
Tentación: The green one. [She gets up and ties the green ribbon in her sister’s hair.
Debilidad closes her eyes again.] Green is the happiness of growth.
Debilidad: Oh good.
Tentación: Yes, for that is what we must do. We must grow; we must grow
and nurture living things; and we must grow ourselves, too, so that we are
capable, and so that growing gives us this green happiness, which fills us so
completely with loneliness.
Debilidad: Loneliness?
Tentación: Oh yes. It is a lonely sort of green sort of happiness, this happiness
of growing. Can’t you feel it?
Debilidad: Oh yes. Yes, I think I can now. Ah. Ah. Yes, it is very lonely, isn’t it?
Tentación: Oh, very lonely, but quite delicious, don’t you think?
Debilidad: It has a delicate sort of flavour, doesn’t it?
Tentación: Well, yes, it starts out like that. You’ll get used to it.
Debilidad: Yes… [opening her eyes again] But there are still more colours to be
had, aren’t there?
Tentación: Oh yes. [dangling the ribbons before her sister’s eyes] Try this pink one.
Debilidad: Pink? I have always been very fond of the colour pink.
Tentación: It is a colour associated with young girls, you know.
Debilidad: Yes, I remember that.
Tentación: It is the colour of sensation, you see. Sensation is pink like this. This
soft, translucent pink. And so here is the happiness of sensation for you. It
will tingle a bit, but don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.
[Debilidad flinches a little this time as the ribbon is tied in her hair, but there is
something sensuous in her flinching, too.]
Tentación: Oh, yes, you mustn’t be surprised. It hurts a little, this sweet pink
kind of happiness.
Debilidad: Oh yes… you are right, it does hurt a little, as you say, but after all:
what else is there to do in life but to search for happiness?
[Thunder. Debilidad throws herself face down on the ground in terror.]
Debilidad: I thought you said you had stopped it!
Tentación: Oh, I do my best, you know, but you can’t stop it completely. Sorry.
Just try not to think about it.
Debilidad: That is usually what I try to do.
Tentación: It is a good plan. Here is the last ribbon I will give you today.
Debilidad: [Without looking up] What colour is it? I am too frightened to look.
[Tentación holds it up. It is a black ribbon.]
Tentación: The colour is of no consequence.
Debilidad: I don’t understand you.
Tentación: Understanding is not important. Happiness is important. Lie still
now.
Debilidad: I am afraid.
Tentación: I know. This ribbon is the happiness of fear.
Debilidad: What?
Tentación: Yes. It is the ribbon which turns your fear into joy, my darling, and | 529
so I will just fix it to your hair.
Debilidad: But…
Tentación: Yes?
Debilidad: But won’t you tell me what colour it is?
Tentación: Oh, you will find out one day. Soon enough. There.
[She stands back and admires her handiwork. There is another crash of thunder, and
Debilidad moans and writhes as before.]
Debilidad: Have you done it?
Tentación: What?
Debilidad: Did you tie it there?
Tentación: Oh that. Yes, of course.
Debilidad: But I feel just the same as before.
Tentación: I know. It is because you are happy.
Debilidad: Happy?
Tentación: Oh, very happy. Can’t you feel it?
Debilidad: Well… Oh, yes. I suppose so. If you say so, then it must be true,
mustn’t it?
Tentación: Yes, that is a sensible attitude for you to take.
Debilidad: Shall I choose another ribbon?
Tentación: No, that will be enough for you, I think; for now I see that you are
very happy.
Debilidad: Oh yes: I feel quite happy now. I think so.
Tentación: Good. We can continue, then.
Debilidad: Yes, yes. Where are we going?
Tentación: Well, we are going to our castle, of course.
Debilidad: Our castle? I had forgotten.
Tentación: You must never forget it. Why, if you ever forgot, then there would
be no point in continuing, would there?
Debilidad: Oh, I suppose not. But tell me, what will it be like there; for I have
quite forgotten, you know.
Tentación: Oh, it is very grand, our castle. It has white shining walls, with
golden windows.
Debilidad: Golden windows, you say?
Tentación: Golden windows, and diamonds on the roof.
Debilidad: No!
Tentación: Oh yes. And… the moat is filled with peacock’s tails.
Debilidad: Peacock’s tails! That is very good.
Tentación: So that when the wind blows, there is a rustling, and the peacock’s
tails rustle like the mist in midsummer.
Debilidad: The mist in midsummer? I have never seen that.
Tentación: Hold your tongue.
Debilidad: Forgive me.
Tentación: You have quite broken my concentration.
Debilidad: Oh, I’m sorry. But I think that is enough. I remember now, about the
castle; and it is important that we find it, isn’t it?
Tentación:
Finding it will not be the difficulty, exactly. In Spain, there are many
530 |
such castles that we could find.
Debilidad: But not such beautiful castles as that castle you describe, surely?
Tentación: Oh, there are much more beautiful castles than that to be found
here. Don’t you know anything? That is not the point, anyway. The point is
that we must struggle to reach our castle.
Debilidad: Oh, but why?
Tentación: Why? Because that is what makes it all worthwhile.
Debilidad: But…
Tentación: What is it now?
Debilidad: Oh, but then I think that perhaps you have forgotten to give me one
of your ribbons. Yes! That must be it! Surely you have forgotten to give me
the ribbon… what colour should it be, I wonder… that brings the happiness
of worthwhile struggle.
Tentación: The happiness of worthwhile struggle?
Debilidad: Oh yes! That is the ribbon I should like.
Tentación: [Searching through the ribbons] I cannot seem to find such a ribbon
just now.
[Thunder]
Debilidad: Oh!
Tentación: But there. I think you are quite happy enough already.
Debilidad: [Weeping] I am sure you are right. [Collecting herself] I suppose we
should go on, then.
Tentación: Oh good.
Debilidad: Only…
Tentación: Yes?
Debilidad: Only I can’t. I am too frightened.
Tentación: Too happy.
Debilidad: Yes: too happy. That’s what I mean. I am too happy to continue for
the present. Perhaps you should go on without me.
Tentación: But what would become of you then?
Debilidad: Oh, I would be quite happy, I suppose. Why, I have my heartbreak
to console me, after all, and my loneliness. You needn’t worry.
Tentación: Well, if you’re sure…
Debilidad: Quite sure, thank you.
[Tentación shrugs her shoulders and strolls off. Debilidad begins to weep loudly,
and when there is another crash of thunder, she adds screams of terror to her pitiful
weeping. Her sister, looking a little irritated, comes back.]
Tentación: You’re still here.
Debilidad: Oh yes, I am still here. Just the same.
Tentación: Quite happy, then?
Debilidad: Oh, very happy. Did you find it?
Tentación: No. It’s no good. I won’t be able to find it without you. I realized it
as soon as I started looking. I must lead you to the castle, you see. It’s part
of the struggle.
Debilidad: I don’t understand.
Tentación: You will understand when we get there, perhaps.
| 531
Debilidad: But I cannot follow you. I am too… happy.
Tentación: Yes, I know. But I have something that will help us.
Debilidad: What is it?
Tentación: [Producing a blindfold] It is love.
Debilidad: Love!
Tentación: Let me help you with it. [Blindfolds her.] Is that better?
Debilidad: I don’t know. It feels just the same as before.
Tentación: But doesn’t it give you a sort of warm glow within?
Debilidad: But I thought you said that was the heartbreak.
Tentación: Oh no, it is quite different from the heartbreak.
Debilidad: Well in that case… Yes, I think so. I think I can feel it now.
Tentación: Oh good.
Debilidad: It is, as you say, warm.
Tentación: And reassuring?
Debilidad: Yes, I suppose so. Only…
Tentación: Yes?
Debilidad: Only… I cannot see very well.
Tentación: That is the price you must pay, I’m afraid. Are you ready now?
Debilidad: Ready to continue? Yes. We must find our castle, mustn’t we, for
after all, we are in Spain, are we not? And there is a castle here for everyone
who wants one.
[There is another crash of thunder, but this time Debilidad is able to resist the
temptation to throw herself to the ground, and, as the thunder continues, Tentación
takes her by the hand. Debilidad stumbles a little at first, but soon Tentación is able
to lead her in a spiral around the stage, until they are walking around each other in
a tiny circle.]
Debilidad: Will you tell me when we get there?
Tentación: It won’t be necessary. You will know.
Debilidad: How will I know? Will I be happy there?
Tentación: You are happy already, aren’t you?
Debilidad: Oh yes. Very happy. Is it just to see the peacock’s tails, then?
Tentación: Yes. That’s right. It is just for the sake of the peacock’s tails. That is
our only purpose in going there.
Scene Three
Debilidad, alone, faces the audience. She turns her head from side to side to conduct the
following dialogue with herself.
Debilidad: I am very much afraid of the future.
Are you?
Oh yes; most desperately afraid.
It is an unnecessary fear, though.
What?
I say, it is an unnecessary fear for you to have, this fear of the future.
That is no comfort to me.
532 |
Comfort? Who said anything about comfort?
Well, I thought that was your implication.
Hah! You think you are in a position to understand my implications, then?
I did not say so.
But you implied it.
Perhaps I did.[Pause] I am very much afraid of the future, you know.
Yes, you have told me that.
I know; but that has not reduced my fear, you see. That is why I repeat it to
you now.
[She drops to her knees.]
Oh, if only the Blessed Virgin would help me.
[She sobs for a while; then, calming herself, she gets up, and addresses the audience
in a different tone.]
I was not always like this, you know. I remember a time when the future
held no terrors for me. It was a happy time—happy enough, anyway. I
never gave it a thought. Every day was an end in itself, and every drop
of pleasure I could squeeze from things was—oh, it was so sweet in my
mouth! [She savours the memory of the taste in her mouth.] But now I fear there
is nothing left for me to enjoy but the memory of that taste in my mouth. For
everything is tainted for me now by this great and encompassing fear which
I feel. Each moment threatens to spring at my throat, and when it passes by
peaceably then I am not fooled, you know, for I know it was just trying to
lull me into a false sense of security, and lurking behind it there is another,
just the same, and equally threatening. [She thinks about this for a minute, but
it is too much, and she drops to her knees.]
Oh Blessed Virgin, let me address a prayer to you, since I am sure that you
will listen to me.
[She collects herself further.]
While some may pray for such simple things
As peace or understanding,
There’s no-one who is able
To lay upon the table
What secret song the siren sings,
What time the ship of fools is landing.
And so, Oh Blessed Virgin, let me
Request this one small grace And you should listen to my pleas,
Since I am here down on my knees Please wipe that smile off the clock’s cold face:
Don’t let tomorrow get me!
[She bows her head and mumbles, more ritualistically]
Every last peseta is a tear of the Virgin. For what we are about to receive,
straight into the bank with it. God bless General Motors, God bless Crédit
Suisse, God bless our shares in Coca-Cola. Amen.
[She stands up again. She looks one way.]
I would not lie to you, you know.
| 533
[She looks the other way.]
I know you would not.
Scene Four
Tentación and Debilidad are walking around each other in the centre of the stage, as
before. Imprudencia appears with a large sheet. She watches them walking around for
a while, and then drapes the sheet over them. They sink to the ground under it, and she
turns around to address the audience.
Imprudencia: Oh, it’s no joke being a mother, you know. Let me tell you.
Squabbling and screaming one minute, tears and recriminations the next,
and only the Blessed Virgin to turn to for comfort and a little consolation.
[She strikes a tragic pose and looks soulfully out at the audience. Tentación, peeking
out from under the cloth, tries to use this opportunity to sneak off, crawling on her
hands and knees. She has almost made it off when Imprudencia speaks to her in a
commanding voice.]
Imprudencia: And where do you think you’re going? Come here.
[Tentación picks herself up and strolls over. Imprudencia strikes her across the
head.]
Tentación: Ow! What’s that for?
Imprudencia: It’s a punishment. Now sit down and get on with your work.
[Tentación produces a piece of paper covered with figures and she begins to add up
the columns, talking to herself quietly as she makes the calculations.]
Tentación: 12, 27, 32, 46, carry 5 makes 15… [etc.]
[Imprudencia considers her sourly, and when she is satisfied that her daughter is
now fully occupied with her task, she addresses the audience again.]
Imprudencia: You can’t imagine the trouble I’ve had with her. You just can’t
imagine. But you can see she’s got a head on her shoulders.
[She speaks into her daughter’s ear, interrupting her calculations for a moment.]
Imprudencia: What are you counting?
Tentación: [ecstatically] Money! [She continues.]
Imprudencia: It makes it all seem worth it in the end, now doesn’t it?
When Cleopatra’s barge was propelled along the Nile
I’ll have you know it all was done in the very grandest style;
Upon the prow there stood a statue all in beaten gold:
A symbol that each inhabitant should do as he was told And in every case, that simple convention
Allowed no exception or contravention.
The statue, you see, was an upright man
With the sword of justice in his hand:
So we may do whatever we can,
But the Queen is the Queen, and her orders stand.
And Cleopatra, though she had her cares,
Was more or less happy with this state of affairs;
For all who saw her sailing by
534 |
Knew they need not wonder why,
Since in that statue’s sharp-edged sword
Lay the power of the one who lazed aboard
Casting a languid eye around
Careless of where her boat was bound…
[Tentación suddenly stops her counting and puts her piece of paper away.]
Tentación: One day, as Cleopatra was proceeding in her barge, in her usual
stately manner—propelled, that is, by her sleek brown slaves and their
well-tempered obedience—she let her gaze rest on the statue of which we
have spoken: the armed man, that is, who represented her power and her
justice.
[Imprudencia strikes the pose of a statue holding a sword. Tentación relaxes into the
role of Cleopatra, lying back on imaginary cushions.]
Tentación: She was greatly surprised, then, when the statue addressed her, in
a cold, metallic voice.
Imprudencia: Good afternoon.
Tentación: What’s that?
Imprudencia: Good afternoon, I said.
Tentación: But… It’s preposterous. You are a statue. I can’t have a conversation
with you.
Imprudencia: Suit yourself. [Pause.]
Tentación: Now wait a minute. Hey, you! I’m talking to you!
Imprudencia: There’s no point getting angry with me, your majesty. I’m only a
statue, remember.
Tentación: But what is the meaning of it, that’s what I want to know! And
how dare you address me in this contemptible manner! It is really most
upsetting.
Imprudencia: You can’t expect me to have much sympathy with that, now can
you?
Tentación: What do you mean?
Imprudencia: Well… If I may speak frankly…
Tentación: You most certainly may not!
Imprudencia: Well… I suppose you are right. But if I may at least pretend to
speak frankly with you for a minute or two, then I would suggest that you
consider my position here. My predicament, that is.
Tentación: Predicament? It is ridiculous. Statues don’t have predicaments. Your
function is merely symbolic. I won’t have it.
Imprudencia: Well, my position then.
Tentación: Your position? Well all right, I suppose I must concede that you do
have a certain position here… What’s the matter, then? Out with it. I haven’t
got all day, you know.
Imprudencia: It’s the idleness, your majesty.
Tentación: [outraged] Idle? I am not idle.
Imprudencia: You misunderstand. It is my own idleness that disturbs me so.
That is what moves me to address you like this.
Tentación: Idleness… Ridiculous! How could it be otherwise? You are made | 535
of… what is it? Gold?
Imprudencia: No, your majesty, it is just an illusion, I’m afraid. Why, if I were
made of solid gold, then I think your boat would sink beneath my weight.
Or on the other hand, I could easily slide off and be lost in the mud and the
slime of the Nile that bears us. I am quite hollow, that’s the thing.
Tentación: Hollow? Really?
Imprudencia: Oh yes, I assure you. As hollow as a promise.
Tentación: Well I am quite disturbed to hear this. Do you mean to tell me that
after all there is nothing to you?
Imprudencia: I am really nothing but air. There is nothing more to me than
that. This golden skin you see is just a deceit and a pretence.
Tentación: Not so loud! But what about that terrible weapon of yours? [She gets
up and inspects it seriously—although Imprudencia’s hand is empty.] Oh yes. It is
really a most comforting sight. It looks very sharp.
Imprudencia: Yes.
Tentación: And weighty.
Imprudencia: Yes.
Tentación: Certainly something to be respected, wouldn’t you say?
Imprudencia: Oh certainly.
Tentación: And so even if all the rest is, as you put it, simply deceit, and nothing
more than pretence, at least this weapon that you hold has some firm basis
in reality, wouldn’t you say? And that is just as it should be, of course. It is
the whole basis of my justice, and therefore of all my authority, wouldn’t
you say?
Imprudencia: Your majesty is right, of course.
Tentación: Well of course I’m right. And just you remember it. I admit that it
might be a little difficult for you sometimes, but that’s not my fault, is it?
I can’t be expected to look after all the little details. But what you have to
understand is that you yourself are of no consequence to me.
Imprudencia: I understand that, your majesty.
Tentación: Good. Your only function, let me remind you, is to bear before you
that one piece of solid reality: the sharp and weighty sword of my justice.
That is what the people respect, you see.
Imprudencia: I see, your majesty.
Tentación: That is why they revere and obey me; and for no other reason.
Imprudencia: I understand.
Tentación: Good. And now I am tired of this conversation. Was there anything
in particular you wanted to say to me?
Imprudencia: I think there was something, but I think instead I will simply
concentrate on this very important task of mine.
[After a silence, Tentación produces her piece of paper once more and begins her
calculations again.]
Tentación: 5 and 3 is 8 and 5 is 13 and 8 is 21 carry 2 [etc.]
[Imprudencia holds her pose for a minute, then turns to look first at her daughter
and then at the audience.]
Imprudencia:
When I was a girl, you know, we used to spend a great deal of
536 |
time shelling peas. That seemed to be the main activity of life, as far as I
remember it back then. We combed our hair sometimes. We fed the chickens
sometimes; I remember that also—but it is mainly the peas that I think of
when I try and remember that period in my life. You use your thumbnail
to split the pod open, and then you use the same thumb to push the peas
free of their little stalks, and they come tumbling out to join their brothers
and sisters. [Pause] It seems to me that that is the principal task to which, for
some reason or other, my life has been devoted; and yet I do not understand
why this should so far have been the case. I don’t know who it was that
decided it. It just always seemed to me that that was the most important
thing that there was to be done.
[She stares out at the audience. The mumbled counting continues, and now
Debilidad, too, tries to crawl out from under the cloth. She is still wearing her
ribbons and blindfold. She is at the point of escaping when her mother speaks in the
same tone of command as before.]
Imprudencia: Stop! And where do you think you are going?
Debilidad: Mother? Is that you?
Imprudencia: Yes, of course it’s me.
Debilidad: Oh, Mother, it is such a joy to hear your voice!
Imprudencia: Don’t give me that! Where were you trying to sneak off to like
that, you little hussy?
Debilidad: Hussy?
Imprudencia: Would you prefer me to call you a whore, then?
Debilidad: No! Oh, Mother, what is the matter?
Imprudencia: Fine words! Fine words butter no parsnips, my girl. [to Tentación]
Shut up! [She stamps over to stand over Tentación, who stops counting.] Didn’t I
teach you anything?
Debilidad: [Breaking down again, and sinking to the floor.] Oh Mother, don’t!
Imprudencia: And don’t you oh mother don’t me! After all I’ve done for you.
And get up! Stand up when I talk to you! [She stalks over, grabs Debilidad by
the arm, and yanks her to her feet.] And what’s this you’re wearing?
Debilidad: This? It’s love, Mother.
Imprudencia: Love? Is that what you call it?
Debilidad: It’s all I have, Mother.
Imprudencia: We’ll see about that! [She reaches up and pulls the blindfold off.
Debilidad looks around her in horror and sinks to her knees.]
Debilidad: Oh! Give it back!
Imprudencia: Why?
Debilidad: Give it back! I must have it!
Imprudencia: Why should I?
[Thunder. Debilidad collapses onto her face once more, and folds her arms over her
head, trying to hide.]
Debilidad: I must!
[She subsides into quiet sobbing. Imprudencia, smiling cynically and dangling the
blindfold from a finger, strolls over and begins to cross-examine her other daughter,
who answers rigidly, like a schoolchild keen to avoid punishment.]
| 537
Imprudencia: What is it?
Tentación: Love.
Imprudencia: Of what value is it?
Tentación: No value.
Imprudencia: Of what use is it?
Tentación: No use.
Imprudencia: Is it constant?
Tentación: No.
Imprudencia: Is it trustworthy?
Tentación: No.
Imprudencia: How long does it last?
Tentación: It does not last for long.
Imprudencia: [Contemptuously] Do we need it, then? [She goes to throw it away.
Pause.]
Tentación: Yes.
Imprudencia: What?
Tentación: Yes. We need it.
[Imprudencia looks around in surprise. Debilidad lets out a great sob, and
Imprudencia throws her the blindfold. She scrabbles gratefully for it and puts it
back on.]
Imprudencia: Is that better?
Debilidad: Oh yes. Oh yes. It is much better.
Imprudencia: Why?
Debilidad: I don’t know why.
Imprudencia: Why, I said!
[Thunder. Debilidad sinks to her knees, but once more she finds the strength to
stay standing. She is not completely defeated, and manages to stammer out her
answer.]
Debilidad: It is because of the peacock’s tails, you see, Mother.
Imprudencia: Peacock’s tails? What nonsense is this?
Debilidad: The castle, Mother! It has golden windows, and diamonds in the
walls, or… No! In the roof there are the diamonds; but the main thing is the
moat. It is filled with peacock’s tails. They shimmer like…
Tentación: They shimmer like the mist in the midday heat of midsummer,
Mother. That’s what she’s trying to say.
Imprudencia: Who asked you? And what do you know about it, anyway?
Tentación: I only know what I am told.
The windows they are made of gold.
The moat is filled with peacock’s tails.
The path is rough, and sometimes fails.
Debilidad: Yes! Yes! That is what I was trying to tell you!
[Debilidad looks around, her voice and manner full of hope. After a silence, Tentación
produces her paper, and begins with her calculations again. Fade to black over the
drone of her semi-audible voice.]
538 |
Scene Five
Imprudencia and Debilidad are sitting shelling peas in silence, as before.
Imprudencia: Shall we continue, then?
Debilidad: Yes.
Imprudencia: Where were we, then?
Debilidad: P.
Imprudencia: P is for peas.
[Debilidad is unimpressed, and looks satirically around.]
Imprudencia: [severely] Q is for quarrelsome. R is for reticent. S is for selfimprisonment. T is for troublemaker. U is for unenthusiastic. V is for victims.
W is for women. There is no letter X in Spanish. Y is for youthful. Z is for
zeal.
Debilidad: What about xylophone?
Imprudencia: What?
Debilidad: Xylophone. It begins with X. I’ve been thinking about it.
Imprudencia: There are no xylophones in Spain.
Debilidad: Ah. But if there were…
Imprudencia: What?
Debilidad: Well, if there were some xylophones in Spain, then it would have
to go victims women xylophones youthful zeal, wouldn’t it, and not just victims
women youthful zeal?
Imprudencia: I suppose so.
Debilidad: Or you could have “experience”, I suppose.
Imprudencia: That doesn’t start with X.
Debilidad: It sounds better though. Victims women experience youthful zeal.
Imprudencia: Well yes, but if you’re going to accept that principle then you
could have victims willingly exude youthful zeal, couldn’t you?
Debilidad: It should be volunteers, then. Volunteers willingly exude youthful zeal.
Imprudencia: Or wistfully. Volunteers wistfully exude youthful zeal.
Debilidad: I prefer xylophones, though.
Imprudencia: So do I.
Debilidad: So, shall we do the whole thing?
Imprudencia: I suppose so.
Imprudencia and Debilidad: [together] After being callously ditched, every
fool gets his ivory jewelled keepsake locket. Many new owners prefer
quite recently slaughtered turkeys: useless victims willingly extinguishing
youthful zeal.
Debilidad: What happened to peas?
Tentación: I don’t remember.
Scene Six
Imprudencia is pacing around angrily. Her daughters are seated, with slightly bowed
heads. They speak in unison, and without emotion. They stare blankly out at the
audience (though Debilidad still wears her blindfold).
| 539
Imprudencia: What did you say?
Debilidad/Tentación: Nothing.
Imprudencia: What?
Debilidad/Tentación: Nothing.
Imprudencia: And what kind of answer is that meant to be? Eh? How do you
expect me to deal with you when all you have to offer is insolence and
disrespect?
Debilidad/Tentación: I mean no disrespect.
Imprudencia: Shut up! I won’t have it! When you were a little girl, you know,
I said to myself, I said, One day… but I suppose you are too grown-up and
important now to listen to your old mother.
Debilidad/Tentación: Oh no. Please continue.
Imprudencia: Very well. One day, I said, she will be a grown-up woman herself,
and then Oh! How pleased I will be, to have brought another woman such
as myself into the world.
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: Understanding has no value.
Debilidad/Tentación: I remember now. Understanding is not important.
Imprudencia: That is not what I said. There are many things that are important,
my girl, but not all of them have value. You would do well to remember it.
Debilidad/Tentación: I am very grateful.
Imprudencia: I care nothing for your gratitude. It has no value for me. But if
you were to speak to me of diamonds, now, well then I admit that things
might be a little bit different.
Debilidad/Tentación: Diamonds.
Imprudencia: Well then I tell you it would be a different matter, that’s all. It
would really be quite a different thing. For they have definite value, you
know. There is no denying it.
Debilidad/Tentación: Apples.
Imprudencia: What?
Debilidad/Tentación: Apples, Bread, Cardboard, Diamonds.
Imprudencia: No! Stop it! I won’t have it! I won’t!
[But they start again, and Imprudencia breaks down as they recite.]
Apples, Bread, Cardboard, Diamonds, Eggs, Feathers, Gunpowder, Hens,
Inspiration, Jewels, Kings, Leftovers, Margarine, Newspapers, Overcoats,
Puddings, Queens, Rainbows, Silverfish, Teapots, Underwear, Vomit,
Whisky, there is no letter X in Spanish, Yachts, Zebras.
[Pause, as Imprudencia manages to control her weeping to continue.]
Imprudencia: What have I done?
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: What have I done, oh Sacred Virgin? Blessed Virgin, what have I
done to deserve this treatment? For didn’t I wash you?
Debilidad/Tentación: With your own hands you washed me.
Imprudencia: And your clothes?
540 | Debilidad/Tentación: Yes. With your own hands.
Imprudencia: Yes! [She strides over and hits them both.] With these two hands
of mine that are as similar as two peas in a pod I did it. And your clothes!
And don’t you forget it!
Debilidad/Tentación: I cannot forget.
Imprudencia: And what did I get in return?
Debilidad/Tentación: I cannot remember.
Imprudencia: Cannot? Cannot? Will not is more like it! [She goes to hit them
again, but stops herself at the last moment.] I would like you to answer one
simple question for me, that’s all.
Debilidad/Tentación: What question? What is it?
Imprudencia: It does not matter what the question is.
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: It does not matter whether you understand me. How often
do I have to tell you? It has no value whatsoever. No importance at all.
It is a matter, I tell you, of total and utter indifference to me whether you
understand me or not. I do not understand you, you know. I’ll tell you that
for nothing, if that makes any difference to your grand ideas. Oh no: I don’t
understand you at all! I’ll tell you that for nothing. But do you hear me
complaining about it? Do you?
Debilidad/Tentación: We hear what we hear,
We see what we see;
Diamonds are dear,
To one such as me.
Imprudencia: Shut up! This is not what I expect from you.
Debilidad/Tentación: What do you expect, then?
Imprudencia: [thinking about it] I expect a certain amount of respect.
Debilidad/Tentación: Certainly.
Imprudencia: I expect a certain amount of disagreement.
Debilidad/Tentación: Yes.
Imprudencia: I expect a certain quantity of unhappiness to arise in the course
of our relationship.
Debilidad/Tentación: Unhappiness. Yes. It is only to be expected.
Imprudencia: But these things, let me tell you, my dearest darling, even these
things are not in themselves what it is that I require.
Debilidad/Tentación: Yes.
Imprudencia: What?
Debilidad/Tentación: No.
Imprudencia: That’s better. [Pause. Imprudencia produces a knife and holds it
to her throat. It is an effort for her to control herself.] I will not be here for
long, you know.
Debilidad/Tentación: Oh, do not say so. I love you.
Imprudencia: Love?
[It is said very bitterly. Debilidad almost loses her self-control, and her hands go to
her blindfold. It is still securely there, though, and she calms herself again.]
Imprudencia: Shall I tell you what it is that I require from you? Shall I? But
there is no need for you to answer. Your answer is not important. It has no | 541
value, either. I have learned all your answers, oh, long ago, you see; and so
let me tell you that they do not convince me at all. Not at all.
Debilidad/Tentación: There is no need for me to answer you, then.
Imprudencia: There is no need for it at all. So just be quiet and pay attention. It
is not too much to ask. And now I will tell you what it is that I require from
you. It is sincerity.
Debilidad/Tentación: What?
Imprudencia: Sincerity.
Debilidad/Tentación: You must be joking.
Imprudencia: Sincerity!
Debilidad/Tentación: It is a game. Oh, certainly, it is a game you are playing
with me now.
Imprudencia: No! It is all I have ever wanted from you. Nothing more than a
little sincerity occasionally. It was, you see, the principal tragedy of my life
with my own mother, oh, long before you were born, my dear, and what it
was, you see, the tragedy, was just that there was no sincerity between us.
Debilidad/Tentación: None at all.
Imprudencia: And so all my life I believe that I have been searching just for
that one thing and for nothing else. I have devoted my life to it. It is here
somewhere, you know. Yes. Somewhere right here next to us. And we could
have it so easily, you know. So very easily. It would really not be so very
difficult. That is what I have always believed.
Debilidad/Tentación: Not difficult at all.
Imprudencia: And have you ever given me what I wanted from you?
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: Have you? Have you ever even for one second been really and
truly sincere with me? Really and truly told me exactly what it is that you
think and feel? Even for one second?
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: Evasions! Lies, hypocrisy, nonsense!
Debilidad/Tentación: I do not understand you.
Imprudencia: It is enough for me.
Debilidad/Tentación: It is more than enough.
Imprudencia: I am defeated.
Debilidad/Tentación: More than defeated.
Imprudencia: There is no future for me.
Debilidad/Tentación: I am not interested in your future.
Imprudencia: It is not a sincere remark!
Debilidad/Tentación: It is not a sincere remark.
[Imprudencia takes a last look at her daughters, tests the knife against her throat
once more, and goes grimly off. Debilidad and Tentacion burst suddenly into a peal
of mechanical laughter. Blackout.]
Scene Seven
542 | Debilidad and Tentación are sitting shelling peas. They are both weeping. Debilidad is
still blindfolded. Their weeping is very affecting. There is a snatch of mournful flamenco
music, and they manage to stop their weeping as they listen.
Debilidad: Where are we?
Tentación: Don’t worry.
Debilidad: But where are we?
Tentación: It doesn’t matter. Our mother is dead now. That is what matters. We
must be much more self-reliant. We must do what she taught us to do. That
is our function here in this world.
Debilidad: But… But Tentación, surely… surely we have arrived!
Tentación: What?
Debilidad: Oh, Tentación, we are here! Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel it? All
the glory?
Tentación: Where is the glory in shelling peas? There is no glory, Debilidad. We
are simply shelling peas, that is all, as our mother taught us to do. There is
no glory in it at all.
Debilidad: But can’t you see? [Craning her head around enthusiastically.] We are
here! Can’t you see it?
Tentación: [Carefully] No, I can’t see exactly what it is you’re talking about.
Debilidad: The castle! The castle! We’ve arrived! We’re here! Isn’t it beautiful!
Tentación: Oh yes, it is very beautiful.
Debilidad: Describe it to me, Tentación!
Tentación: [She is gradually isolated in a spotlight during this speech; Debilidad is
left in darkness.] We are seated at a rough wooden table slightly to the left
of the centre of the courtyard of our castle. We have arrived. We are here
at last. The castle is full of our friends and our servants, happily living the
life of the powerful and the carefree. High, high above us stretch the turrets
and battlements of this great and strong castle of ours; quite fearsome and
majestic it all is. Eagles and falcons swoop and glide there; and among the
turrets and spires there is a great display of flags and banners and pennants
and bunting. It is all waving gently down to us. And the walls…
Debilidad: Yes? Yes?
Tentación: They are pure white. And every single roof is studded with a
thousand diamonds.
Debilidad: No!
Tentación: Oh yes. And the windows…
Debilidad: Yes?
Tentación: The windows are made of gold.
Debilidad: Oh, good! Continue, continue!
Tentación: Although we are sitting out here in the courtyard, so as to enjoy a
little fresh air, there is an everpresent sound, a quiet sound that follows me
wherever I go in this beautiful castle of ours.
Debilidad: Oh, beautiful!
Tentación: It is the quietest little sound, you know.
Debilidad: Quieter than a mouse?
Tentación: Much quieter.
| 543
Debilidad: Quieter than an ant?
Tentación: Well, perhaps it is a little louder than an ant. For it creeps into all the
castle, from the lowest, blackest dungeon to the topmost swaying lookout
tower. It winds its way all around us, wherever we are in the castle. It reminds
us where we are, even when we are asleep in our great feather beds; even
when we are feasting and banqueting; even when we are sitting shelling our
peas in the courtyard in blessed memory of our poor dear Mother.
Debilidad: Blessed be the Virgin.
Tentación: It is the sound of the peacock’s tails, rustling in the mist on a
midsummer afternoon.
Debilidad: Oh yes…
[Sudden black-out]
544 |
Photo: Michaela Freeman
Paul Martia
Žižkov Pub
Workers salute shots
laughing souls resurrected
they pat their fat bellies, glorious
in their smoke stained sanctuary.
Gilded aged icons lord
over cabals shameful of indifference
their eyes the pulse of history
tearful, loosely tethered, cracked
slipping into musty foundations.
The bar maid becomes my obsession.
Beneath her skirt
dogs bark
on my midday stumble
through other men’s neighborhoods.
Sunlight threatens
ancestral as my own delirium
working the room face by face
a sad sack vaudeville wash out
loosing life to the talkies
spitting regret between swings of bath tub gin
…just go away, man, go away.
Mercury tosses yesterday’s mail
from his shattered windowed podium.
I crawl under the table
Searching for postcards
In the estate of my loneliness
| 545
Godspeed
A journeyman travels lightly
Of package and foot
Where there is a mirror
There is weight
So why bring more
Than you can give
Away.
“Goodbye…
again.”
The echo booms arrogantly
persistent
stalking
corridors infected of transit
moving moving past
546 |
faces familiar the strangers
mounting
I roam the mystic depots
and somewhere
there is a destination
after departure.
But a journeyman travels lightly
through the violent hour
meadows of larkspur and chicory
nights alone under wily moons
the rooms cold white
where loved ones flee
shamed at joy
squandered.
“It’s ME… ME!”
tease the shouts of the trees
when there is wind on the ridge
and the water below roars.
There’s a train out
tonight
so I’m told
and if we go
together
you will see
how simple
it all
is.
| 547
Before the River Flooded
Before the river flooded
jetties stood boldly
against the onslaught
of inevitability.
Winter’s
clean embrace
assured solitude.
Before the river flooded
yesterday lingered
certain of its place
secure.
Chests soon bared
the bloated men will gather
at the kiosk below our flat.
Scrawled tattoos fester paunchy flesh
548 | dusk lacquers dead water
and each night by ten
their boisterous love withers.
After waking
we take our stale bread
and feed the swans.
On the street above
crowds rush home from work.
With the next sunrise
we will finally see daylight.
Before the river flooded
the bridge alone
shadowed our steps.
Ghosts
Now pass asking,
“…Remember
the old skin of time.”
I look to my hands
for pictures engraved in my palms.
“Yes. Though there is pain
in the reflection.
We were beautiful.”
Before the river flooded
patience governed
a prophet of silence
and I
an anxious disciple.
| 549
550 |
Photo: Philip J. Heijmans
Jason Mashak
Opiate of the Masses
Goddamn the pusher man
Steppenwolf
That Moses needs to hurry back
with our tablets,
We’ve hocked all our gold with
his accountants
And his lawyers incorporated it
into a public mass, a con gealed conglomerate
The PR people then molded into
an icon of that which provides
milk.
Only there is no milk, so they tell us
to dance for it, but we’re tired.
We just want to enjoy the sublime
green cloud on the mountain.
| 551
First published in GRASP 2 (2009).
WTFWJD?
I lost all the forms of capital
punishment, the list I made thinking of crosses
chaining ladies by the neck.
A Jesus born another century
would give us tiny-jeweled guillotines
or gas-chamber bracelets,
lethal-injective silhouettes or logos
of firing squads on podiums in churches.
Perversion cherished!
I’ve never seen pictures of the dead
roadside Buddhas. More than cross552 |
ophilia, it defies psychoanalysis; it measures
the reversal of civilization.
So what could He do but lean back
with a bottle and wait
for the noose to set Him free.
First published in Rakish Angel 1 (2009).
On Questions
How many virgins, do you think,
did God ask, before Mary said yes?
R.S. Dietrich
I wanna know if Vestal Virgins fit
like coats without arms, why
when I stopped drinking I stopped seeing
dead friends driving cars, how
come Gone With the Wind had nothing
to do with farts, why not
being able to imagine a lack
of imagination seems better than
being gyp’d & jew’d by caucasians.
I build my art upon
why: when the metro station reeks
of burnt rubber, I think of rapid
sex? Let’s refrigerate the car instead
of carrying in the groceries.
Hooked sansgravity, I am upward-hanging
on the curved exclamatory of deep investigation.
| 553
554 |
Photo: Louis Armand
Tom McCarthy
From Men in Space
“You know Frieda Kahlo?” Klára shouts.
“Who?”
“Frieda Kahlo. She was married to Diego Rivera.”
“The Mexican muralist. Yeah, I know her. She always painted herself
surrounded by monkeys and things like that. And with nails in her skin.”
Ivan’s gone into the kitchen to make coffee, and he’s checking the
instructions on a bag of whiting powder while he waits for the water to
boil. He vaguely remembers the ratio as two to two-and-a-quarter measures
whiting to one measure gelatine to seven measures water. There are several
empty gelatine packets lying around, but they’re not all the same brand | 555
and have different ratio recommendations, and his mathematics isn’t up to
working out the median for one factor of a three-factor equation and then
segueing that one back in with the other two.
“You know why she painted herself like that?” Klára’s voice drifts from
the bedroom.
“No.”
Two at a ratio of seven-to-one, plus three at three-to-one is… He could say
four and a half, but it’s not very scientific. And then that’ll change depending
on what Nick and Heidi bring back. They’ve been gone four hours now,
which he didn’t mind at first—timing worked perfectly with Klára’s little
visit—but now he’s kind of itching to get back to it…
“She was in an accident when she was maybe eighteen or nineteen. In
Mexico City, on a tram. She was riding on this tram, and the tram collided
with another tram, and this steel pole skewered her. It entered her through
the vagina, and passed halfway…”
“What’s that?”
“Her vagina. I said the pole entered her through the vagina. It passed
halfway up her body. Can you imagine that?”
“My God!”
“But the strangest thing is that the passenger behind her was carrying a
bag of gold powder.”
“Gold powder? Like the…”
“Exactly. I suppose he must have been an artist too. An artist or an artisan.
And in the accident this bag split open and the gold dust showered all over
Frieda Kahlo. So when the firemen found her in the wreckage, she had a
steel pole stuck up her and she was covered in gold. A ready-made work of
art, just like your saint. That’s why she always showed herself with things
sticking through her.”
Klára’s lying on Ivan’s bed crumbling the pieces of gold leaf Ivan blew
across her body as a prelude to their lovemaking. It’s not cold in his atelier:
he’s fixed his heating since she was last here. She’s lying naked on his bed
watching the specks settle in the small puddles of sweat across her stomach.
They go back a long way, she and Ivan—back even before AVU, right to
middle school. They’ve worked together several times. When Ivan picked
up this odd commission he called her in straight away, and she got him the
blockwood panels, pilfering these from the crypt of St Cajetan, where she’s
working renovating altars. She dug up some old study notes from the MA she
did on icon paintings, and on her way down here she passed by the Malířské
art-supply shop and picked up, let’s see: lamp black, French ultramarine,
cobalt blue, raw umber, emerald green, plus viridian, red ochre, carmine,
cadmium red, cadmium orange, raw sienna… raw sienna… raw sienna…
ah yes: cadmium lemon, titanium white, then ivory black, then cobalt violet
556 | deep, and azure-manganese blue, chrome green, terra verte, madder deep,
plus rose madder genuine, caput-mortum violet, burnt sienna, yellow ochre,
cadmium yellow and zinc white, makes twenty-five. She’s still missing two
out, which annoys her: she used to know the range by heart. Lamp black,
French ultramarine, cobalt blue…
Crouching beside the fire, she pulls the jumper down across her knees
and looks at the painting Ivan’s being paid so handsomely to copy. This is
sitting in an armchair which is backed against the wall that separates the
main room from the bathroom. It isn’t huge: perhaps sixty/forty-five/three,
about average for icons. She’d say it’s nineteenth-century, because the borders
of the wood aren’t raised. The subject shows an ascension, but not Christ’s,
or for that matter anyone she recognizes straight away. The Byzantine letters
that should spell out the name of the ascending figure have either been
corroded away or weren’t there in the first place. There is some text: three
words painted at different levels above an ocean occupying the right side
of the painting’s bottom section, plus two smaller words dotted between
them—but they’re in a script she’s never come across before…
To the ocean’s left is land, on which the standard topographic motifs
can be found: a squat building with blackened windows at the bottom,
then a mountain rising up from this, studded with bending trees—only the
mountain also has some kind of very oddly formed birds flapping around on
it, on ledges at its sides. The birds, if that’s what they are, seem to be keeling
over backwards. She must have studied hundreds, literally hundreds of
these paintings, restored twenty, thirty of the things, and she’s never seen
these before. They’re oversize, misshapen, almost human. Another unusual
detail is a group of ships in the sea to the mountain’s right. Fishing boats crop
up frequently in these paintings, in particular in those of Simon and Andrew,
the fishermen—but there are no nets here. The boats seem to be stationary:
their sails are down, and groups of men in smaller boats are drawn up beside
them, doing something to them. Are they repairing them? Klára shuffles
forwards, keeping the jumper down over her knees. The men are carrying
planks towards, or from, the ships. How very bizarre. Building them? They’d
do that on dry land, surely. The men stare straight out from the painting.
So do the strange birds. The floating saint too, come to that. Axonometric:
there’s no variation in their distance from the viewer. Besides which, there’s
a general lack of continuity between the figures. Rather than collaborating
with one another to provide visual cohesion, they’re discontiguous, each
occupying a zone of his own, each wilfully oblivious to the presence of the
others. But the strangest thing of all is this: God’s represented not by a circle
but by an ellipse around the saint’s head. Very, very bizarre. The coding of
these icons is rock-solid: God’s always substituted by either a Christ figure or
a perfect circle in ascensions. But an ellipse, a kind of oval which itself seems
to retreat as though its top edge were being dragged back by some magnetic
| 557
force? It’s simply, well, just wrong…
Ivan walks in carrying two cups of coffee. He hands one to her and smiles;
he even bends down and kisses her forehead. He’s not usually like this. She’s
done favours for him plenty of times before, and all he usually does to thank
her is get her drunk and climb inside her knickers. He’s climbed inside her
knickers this time too, of course—but he did it with a tenderness he’s never had
before, apart from one freak time when she was so massively oversensitized
by hallucinogens that he didn’t even need to touch her for her to go off, so
that doesn’t really count. And showering her in gold was something else!
And even afterwards, when every other time he’s made no effort to disguise
post-coital boredom, his need for someone else or something new to entertain
him, now he’s being so kind. Kissing her forehead: what next?…
“Where on earth is this painting coming from, Ivan?” She shuffles round
and turns to him.
“It’s strange, huh?”
“It’s not right. Look: it’s got the four standard perspectives. There’s
your…”
“Four: that’s right. I remember that from Ondříček’s class.”
“He’s dead, you know.”
“I heard.”
“It’s got all four perspectives. There’s your linear one, from the mountain’s
edge up away and vanishing towards the oval zone. And then the trees all
being the same size—and all the secondary figures too—is, you know, flat,
axonometric. That’s the dominant one here. And the arms of the—what,
disciples? bystanders? these guys here—are converging out towards the
viewer. That’s its one concession to perspective. More a nod in its direction,
really. And the mountain’s surface is all curved, bending up towards the holy
figure. But then see here, there’s this fourth one: how the top zone bends
away into a totally different dimension. This slanting ellipse. I’ve never seen
anything like it before. It totally disrupts the sacred geometric scheme.”
“You mean the three-four-one…”
“Right: triangle, square, circle. An ellipse? What on earth was the painter
thinking? Who did this?”
“Don’t know.”
Klára leans forwards, picks the painting up and turns it over. There’s a
stamped mark on the back, some modern Cyrillic figures, but no signature.
She sets it down again.
“Who asked you to copy it?”
“This Bulgarian called Anton Markov. He used to live next door to
Nick.”
“That’s your new English flatmate?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he an art dealer?”
558 |
“Who, Nick?”
“No, Anton.”
“No. I don’t know what he does.”
“Why does he want it copied?”
“He didn’t say.”
“That’s really weird.”
“Who do you think the saint is?” Ivan’s crouched down beside her and is
stroking her hair as he asks this: miraculous…
“I was asking myself that just now. I can’t make out the letters. But it’s
certainly not Christ.”
“Simon?”
“Because of the ships, right?”
“Right.”
“I was thinking that—but look: the men here aren’t fishermen. There are
no nets. And they seem to be dismantling the ships.”
“Why would they do that? What’s the symbolism?”
Klára sighs, shakes her head, sips her coffee. “Not one I’ve ever seen before.
The obvious answer would be the soul leaving the body. It is an ascension,
after all. Abandonment of the old vessel, its decay…”
“And the building? The mountain?”
“Same thing. Icons are cosmic maps. They conceive space metaphorically,
as a series of levels leading into the world of the spirit. They narrate
transcendence.”
“So…”
“So the building represents the urbs, the polis: civilization, society, cities.
Everything that’s being left behind. Its windows are dark to represent the
fact that the world’s lacking knowledge, awaiting revelation. The mountain
is the passage upwards—a passage literalized by the floating upwards of the
figure of the saint. The top circle round his head is—should be—pure spirit,
God. Only it’s not a circle; it’s an…”
“But is he floating upwards?” Ivan’s peering forwards now, almost sniffing
the painting. “Everything else seems to be going downwards. The trees point
down. And these birdmen: they seem to be falling.”
“That could be to emphasize the saint’s ascendance.”
“Or to complement his fall. You must admit he doesn’t look too happy.”
“They never do. His look is unusual, though, I’ll grant you. His mouth
is more widely open than you’d expect. He looks as though he were
disappointed. As though there were no transcendence—and no pure spirit
either, no God: he gets up into the sky, and all there is is this ellipse, this void,
this slanting nothingness…”
“To me he just looks neutral. Deadpan. Disconnected. Maybe he’s stoned.
You want to smoke one?”
“Sure.” She sits back, sips her coffee again. Ivan starts rooting around in a
box behind the tins of paint. Klára wipes a fleck of gold leaf from her cheek, | 559
then says: “You know, strictly speaking, your copy won’t be a copy.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she shifts her weight as she turns to face him, “copying has
always been part of the culture of the icon. These zographs travelled…”
“Zoo graphs?”
“Zographs: icon painters. Vitan, Nedelko, Chevinodola, the Zaharievs,
and hundreds of minor ones whose names I can’t remember… They travelled
around carrying little more than their tools and the Hermeneia, and they…”
“Carrying the what? The Ermenia?”
“The Hermeneia, with an H: the zographs’ rule book. It supposedly
originated on Mount Athos, in Greece. They’d travel around, redoing already
existing subjects: literally copying older paintings. So you get the same
images repeating down centuries, mutating slightly with each iteration.”
“So Anton’s one’s a copy too?”
“Well, yes—but beyond that, for zographs, copies aren’t secondary pieces.
They’re iterations of the same sacred event. Each time you iterate you partake
of the event: belong to it, as much as the last iterator did. But…”
“Where are my cigarette papers?” asks Ivan.
She picks these off the floor beside her and throws them to him, then
continues:
“But Anton’s asked you to distress the painting, right?”
“Distress it?”
“Make it look old.”
“Oh, yes. He wants an exact copy, not a new one.”
“Why would he want…” she begins, but Ivan holds up his hand to cut
her off. Footsteps are coming up the final flight of stairs to the atelier: several
pairs of footsteps. And there are two, three voices, one female and at least
two male, speaking English. The footsteps stop and a key turns in the lock.
“That’ll be Nick now. And…” Ivan looks anxious. “You’d better dress.”
Klára darts back into Ivan’s bedroom and pulls on her underpants and
trousers just as the door opens. She hears Ivan say, in English:
“You didn’t precipitate,” and someone she assumes is Nick reply:
“The jelly was a bastard to find.”
“But you were successful notwithstanding?” Notwithstanding.
She’d forgotten that word…
“We’ve got everything on your list. Only, two eggs broke in my pocket on
the way back. My God, it’s warm in here!”
“The council sent some people round to fix the heating,” she hears Ivan
tell him. There’s a clunk and wrinkle as a bag is set down on the coffee table.
Klára pulls her socks on and walks into the atelier’s main room. There are
three men, all in their early twenties. One’s got short brown hair; one is tall,
with wiry, darker hair; the third’s blond. The girl they’ve got with them is the
560 | same age, and wears a headband and a stripy jumper. She’s looking at Klára
in a less than friendly way. Ivan’s sifting through the shopping bags they’ve
brought back with them. He pulls out a packet of gelatine and reads the
instructions on the back.
“One-to-fifteen. But that’s if you’re just making jelly.”
“When you’re gessoing,” Klára says, “you have to gradate as you layer.
So you start out with one-to-eight and end with one-to-twelve. And always
two or three measures of whiting powder into each saucepan of gelatine and
water.”
“I used to eat this stuff in rabbit moulds,” the man with brown hair says
in English to the girl. “When I was a kid.”
“Yeah, me too.” The girl’s accent is American, not English.
“We had this one with Mickey and Minnie holding hands. Only it always
sort of flopped and lost its shape when you took the mould off.”
“So did the rabbit one!” The young man with the brown hair’s all excited
now. “Hey, Ivan, this is Mladen, who you’ve met already. And this is
Roger.”
“A veritable pleasure.” Ivan shakes both their hands. The one with brown
hair must be Nick. Ivan brings the blockwood panels over to the table.
“You only need to prime one up,” Klára tells him.
“No,” replies Ivan, looking down now. “I think I’ll do them both. You
never know.”
She turns to the brown-haired young man and asks:
“This Bulgarian’s a friend of yours?”
“Anton? Yeah. He was my neighbour when I lived in Vinohrady. He used
to be a football referee, and now he’s a political refugee. I’m Nick. You’ve got
a piece of gold leaf in your hair.”
He picks it out for her. The American girl walks off into the bathroom.
“Hey, Ivan, do you remember when that Polish girl was round here and I
thought she’d got a charcoal smudge across her face and it turned out it was
a birthmark?” Nick says, letting the gold leaf flutter to the ground.
“I certainly do. You entirely spoiled my chances of seduction with her.”
“I’ve got to go now,” Klára says to Ivan, in Czech.
“If you want to be helpful,” she hears Ivan tell Nick as she walks into
the bedroom and puts on her shoes, “you might complete the joint I
was constructing. I find it concentrates my mind, and I have work to
undertake.”
The American girl’s voice comes from the bathroom:
“There’s a condom in here!”
*
…with the result that I am becoming something of an expert on the subject
of zography. Most of my knowledge is gleaned from telephone conversations | 561
between Ivan Maňásek and Klára Jelínková, which have been occurring on
an almost daily basis. Over the course of these, she has informed him that the
image he is copying most probably stems from a set of murals in Bačkovo, a
Bulgarian monastery founded in roughly 1100 [eleven hundred]; that, since
at this time Bulgaria was ruled by Byzantium, the monastery was in what
she termed “deep bandit country”; and that the monastery’s muralists were
trained in Byzantium then sent back to Bačkovo to paint in the official style,
this style being an extension of religious dogma, a putting-into-action of
Byzantium’s edicts. For example: Byzantium might decree that, when
painting ascensions (as Maňásek is currently), the Coptic-Egyptian code,
which depicts the body rising intact to heaven, must be followed; but at a
later date, Byzantine doctrine might change to decree that the Palestinian
code, whereby the soul departs the body—represented by, for instance, a
dove—must be observed. A painter could be imprisoned or even executed
for using the wrong code at the wrong time. On learning these facts, Maňásek
ventured that Byzantium during this period acted much as Moscow has
done during most of ours. I must admit that I find his reasoning sound—
indeed, compelling. In prohibiting modes of expression not sanctioned by
Moscow and in supervising and arresting dissidents such as Maňásek for
deploying such modes, was our state not performing a similar role to that of
the regional enforcers of Byzantium’s canons? The Emperor Comnenus,
Domesticus of the Western Byzantine army, Jelínková informed Maňásek
during their second or third phone conversation, realizing he could not crush
dissidence entirely, took to hiring Georgians and Armenians as priests—
people who, being closer to the Bulgarian natives, gave an impression of
independence. Comnenus thought, not unreasonably, that by being a little
laxer in Bulgaria than he was back in the seat of Empire, he would manage
simultaneously to monitor and absorb the energy that might have undermined
Byzantine doctrine, to channel it through an official institution: Bačkovo
would thus serve as (as it were) both loudspeaker and listening device. But,
she continued, as time progressed the muralists started taking more liberties
than Comnenus had intended, flouting the canons with heretical paintings,
and the regime of propaganda and surveillance envisioned by the Domesticus
slowly broke down. Was this not the fate, after Perestroika, of the empire of
which our nation formed a part? Maňásek and Jelínková talk; I listen and
repeat; and my superiors listen in through me. My car is cold, but I am loath
to leave the engine running for extended periods lest I draw undue attention
to my presence. Most of the time Maňásek works silently: I hear him moving
around his studio as he copies the painting—the odd scrape or rustle, but no
more. He seems unwilling to receive visitors. His flatmate has been absent
for the last 3 [three] days. The most recent phone call between Maňásek and
Jelínková took place at 17:42 [seventeen forty-two] on December 24th [twenty562 | fourth]. On this occasion he did have a visitor, with whom he conversed in
English while speaking in Czech to both Jelínková and, for much of the time,
his landlady, who had come onto the building’s party phone line. During the
course of this call, he informed Jelínková that he was making 2 [two] copies
of the painting, and would give the best one of these to Associate Markov.
Jelínková seemed flustered, and kept trying to tell Maňásek about an
unknown saint she had discovered among the ones depicted in the Bačkovo
murals. Maňásek, meanwhile, argued with his landlady, who repeatedly
requested that he leave the line to her since she needed to phone her sister
who had been ill for a week, and reminded him that he had not paid the last
month’s rent. He informed her he would pay the rent if she hung up her own
phone, adding that if her sister had been ill for a whole week she was unlikely
to die within the next few minutes, and joking in English with his unknown
visitor that party lines owe their name to the fact that there’s always a party
going on on them—a point with which I must, again, concur. The tone of
Jelínková’s voice suggested that the information she was trying to impart
was vital; she seemed quite disturbed by it. This unknown saint, she kept
trying to tell him, was not one recognized within the standard canon, and
was not even Christian in origin. Scholars seemed to agree that his provenance
was Greek: eastern Greek, either Lydian or Phrygian. After his first appearance
in Bačkovo, Jelínková said, his image cropped up, albeit extremely rarely, in
the work of several painters, the most prominent of whom were the Zaharievs,
a family of zographs operating in the last century. He was, she continued,
always shown ascending, just like Christian saints—yet, not being Christian,
there was no particular reason why he should be doing so. Despite the
imagery in which, for the sake of convenience, it cloaked itself, his presence
served another purpose, embodying other beliefs and sets of knowledge—
values perhaps long since defunct but which, through him, had found their
way into the zographic repertoire. This is the information to which Jelínková
attached so much importance, and by which she seemed disturbed. Maňásek
broke off arguing with his landlady and quipping with his unknown guest
to ask Jelínková if she believed that the artwork he was currently copying
depicted this same maverick saint. Jelínková replied that she thought it
possibly did, and that his painting might be by a Zahariev, since these were
the only nineteenth-century zographs in whose work the saint was known to
have appeared—adding that if this were the case, the painting was extremely
valuable. She expressed doubts as to the honesty of Associate Markov and
the legality of his activities. Maňásek seemed unconcerned by her anxieties,
and resumed goading his landlady, enquiring whether her sister was
attractive and implying that prior to 1989 [nineteen eighty-nine] she (the
landlady) had passed on information about him to the StB—a claim that,
while made maliciously and without any basis in evidence, was, as my team
had already established while attempting to recover details of previous
surveillances of Maňásek, true. Shortly after this conversation, I was forced | 563
to hand over my earphones to one of my men by a ringing which had
developed in my ears due to their extended exposure to a source whose
signal-to-noise ratio was, as previously indicated, less than ideal. As bad
luck would have it, council workmen were removing the loudspeakers from
beneath the street lamps on Lidická, and their activities caused further
interference to our reception. I left the car and remonstrated first with these
men and then their supervisor, divulging my identity and role to him. To my
great dismay, he professed himself completely indifferent to these, and went
as far as to question the integrity and, indeed, sexual orientation of the entire
police force. Something like this would never have happened three years
ago; a person in his position would immediately have acquiesced to any
demand a person in my position might have made. Listening to him speaking,
I was struck by a phenomenon of which I had been theoretically aware but
the full reality of which I had never had to face until this moment: people are
not afraid of us any more. We have, in effect, suffered the same fate as
Byzantium. I have sent my men home. It is Christmas. In 1 [one] week our
new state will be born. I sit in my listening post alone, listening. The ringing
in my ears is growing quite persistent. During a previous conversation either
by phone or in person, Jelínková informed Maňásek that zographs have
always reprised previous images, mutating these as they repeat them.
Listening to Maňásek and Jelínková’s conversations, I have the impression I
am tuning in, through them, to something quite archaic, or at least picking
up its echo, its mutated repetition, or its muted one. Maňásek works in
silence. Nobody has called or visited him for more than 24 [twentyfour]
hours now, and yet something is emerging, beginning to speak: of this I am
certain. I do not know if it is the cold or this fact itself which makes me
shiver. At 8:25 [eight twentyfive] this morning I was awoken by late revellers
dancing over my car’s bonnet…
*
26th December 1992
c/o Martin Blažek etc.
My dear Han,
What beastly people these are! Do you know what they eat for Christmas? Carp:
those ugly, tasteless fish that anglers of civilized nations, when they’ve landed
one, unhook and chuck straight back. Here, they serve them up in fillets, breaded,
with horseradish sauce—not that any amount of this can hide their lack of flavour.
What’s really gross, though, is the way they harvest them. In the weeks leading up
to Christmas, tanks are set up in the streets, and tons of the things are poured into
these—alive, no less, like lobsters in good restaurants. People queue up and buy
564 | them from men who fish them out and slaughter them right there in front of their
eyes. For a docile, peaceful people, the Czechs show an alarming degree of interest
in the spectacle, gathering in crowds around the tanks to watch. It is rather surreal,
I must admit: the streets running red with blood; piles of gut and head and scale
accumulating about the pavements like so many Juan Gris collages…
I celebrated Our Lord’s birth with Martin and Olga, Martin’s charming wife;
also her sister and her sister’s husband from Slovakia. The table talk was all about
the impending separation. It’s to take place on the stroke of midnight, just as 1992
lurches and vomits into 1993. Slovakia was an independent state before, during the
belle époque of World War Two, when Hitler turned it into a Nazi satellite. Its people
seem to have lost little of their kindness and compassion in the intervening years:
their elected leader is a man named Mečiar, by my hosts’ accounts a jumped-up little
Mussolini who intends to start his reign by walling Gypsies into ghettos to venture
out of which they’ll have to carry passports. Plus ça change. I bet they love queers
there. Martin’s brother-in-law is convinced that Mečiar had Dubček murdered—the
leader of the ’68 Prague Spring who died in a car crash last month. Turns out he was
en route to spilling the beans on the old communist regime’s more shameful secrets
to some official hearings—and that the main subject of his imminent testimony
was this very same Mečiar, who was trailing well behind him in the polls for first
Slovakian president. The usual conspiracy props littered the brother-in-law’s rap:
missing documents, an uninjured driver, a disappearing mystery car: their own JFK
myth. Kind of droll, but tedious after a while. So when the Becherovka (don’t ask)
came out, I unhooked my jaw, slipped the landing net and went to visit my new
friend Ivan Maňásek.
I found him busy copying an icon painting. Most artists here earn their keep by
restoring old art; copying it, though, is something I’d not come across before outside
of AVU, the main art school which I visited with Martin on my second day here,
where the students spend their entire first year mechanically reproducing the statues
and murals dotted round the studios. I’m still not quite clear about why or for whom
Maňásek was copying this work—but he was taking the job very seriously. I’d not
realized the degree of coding that goes on in these religious paintings. There’s the visual
coding, of course—but also a whole system of pre-visual formulae that regulate the
spatial layout of the whole thing. Pythagorean and Platonic notions about geometric
form get trawled through a medieval mesh to throw up the numbers three, four and
one—corresponding to the shapes of the triangle (three sides), the square (four) and
the circle (you guessed it: one). Which in turn correspond to the Trinity (father, son,
ghost), the earth (four corners: NSEW) and the Divine Unity—one-sided, round
and seamless, like your mouth, or… anyway, it gets really complicated: modulations
within these shapes require the artist to develop root rectangles from a given square,
along the lines of √2 √3 √4 √5 etc, spirals within rectangles, pentagons within circles,
Heaven knows what else. All of this has to be calculated and transposed before a single
drop of paint is placed onto the wood. Maňásek had a calculator out and was furiously
tapping figures into it, folding and refolding pieces of grease-proof paper, subdividing
the divisions with a pencil and so on. You have to find the “Golden Section”, a kind | 565
of Bermuda triangle—although it’s nothing so simple as a triangle—in which the
“divine mystery” resides. It’s positively Gnostic. Sorry if I’m going on, but I did
get really drawn into it. There was the material side too: Maňásek’s kitchen, former
scene of cunnilingus interruptus, had become a pharmacy full of pots of whaleblubber-like sauce. In the main room there were compasses and scalpels—and, of
course, these endless pages full of charts and calculus. It looked like a cross between
an operating theatre and a navigator’s map room.
The subject itself showed a human figure floating above a sea, beside a mountain.
There was a building at the bottom of the image, with blackened windows which
reminded me of your studio on Windtunnelkade. They also looked like Maňásek’s
own skylights, which are filthy. It was more than just a building: more a set of
buildings joined together to form a kind of city, with staircases and levels running
into one another like the Escher where the water runs round and round stone
passages. There was a sea, or ocean, and a set of ships—oh, and a mountain with
strange birds perched teetering on it. But the oddest thing was the oval shape of the
saint’s golden halo: it was like a hole into which he was disappearing head first. All
the rest of the image was flat and depthless and without background, kind of blandly
omnipresent—but then suddenly you got this other dimension entirely: an absence,
a slipping away. When I asked Maňásek about it he told me that the visual motif was
called ellipsis, but added that this motif didn’t properly belong to this type of image.
For some reason, he was copying the painting twice, so there were three saints, three
mountains, three oceans, goodness knows how many ships, being formed in front of
566 |
me while I sat drinking coffee after coffee…
Enough talk of icons! Do you know who I bumped into? Tyrone! Yes, Tyrone the
black tran who compères at the Roxy when he’s in Amsterdam. He’s got the Czechs
convinced that he’s some high-powered theatrical director back in San Francisco,
and they’ve flung their doors wide open to him. Their legs too: he seems to have the
pick of Prague’s young gayboys clinging to his shawls. I met him with Martin in
some club and he invited me to come to another club on New Year’s Eve to watch
him performing one of his cranked-up cabaret numbers with a bunch of Czech extras.
He said Flash Art or Art in Europe or someone would be covering it, but I’m not
sure that that wasn’t just the usual Tyrone hype. I don’t think I’ll go. He was quite
zonked, as usual—and he handed me a replica gun, which I then went and left, it’s
just occurred to me, at
Maňásek’s. A shame: I wanted to paint it blue and give it to you as a homage to
your hero Mondrian. Tant pis.
OK, I’ll run and post this overlong epistle. Should you desire to respond in kind,
you just have time before I leave for Tallinn. Did you pay the phone bill? If not, please
please do. Typeset the Harris catalogue? Ditto. Can’t wait to be with you corporeally
as I am now in spirit. Stay lovely, halo boy.
J.
xxxxxxx
*
The first stage, after the boards have been gessoed and gilded and the
drawings transferred onto these, is painting the background colours. On
the day after Christmas Day, Ivan Maňásek lays out the materials he’ll be
using. His pigments he arranges in two rows, ranging from light to dark,
from zinc white on the upper row’s far left to lamp black on the lower row’s
far right. The brushes he stands hair-up in a jar beside the phials. He’s using
fine best-sable riggers: two each of numbers zero, one and two, three each
of numbers three through five and one each of eight through fifteen. He
cracks an egg over a bowl, lets it run out onto his hand so that the white slips
through the gaps between his fingers, leaving the yolk resting in his palm.
Then, pinching the yolk between the thumb and first finger of his other hand,
he lifts it up, suspends it above another, smaller bowl and pricks it with a
needle so the orange liquid oozes from the skin, which he then throws away.
To the decanted yolk he adds roughly nine times its own volume of purified
water and three drops of vinegar. He stirs the solution, then transfers it to
the compartments of two ice cube trays, to which he adds the pigments, one
by one, by wetting a brush in the solution, dipping it into a phial, letting it
pick up flakes, then plunging these back into the compartment. The Prussian
blue, the terra verte and the raw and burnt siennas are gritty and need to be
ground down against glass. It’s just like chopping up Hájek’s speed: he uses
the same shaving mirror, hunched over it, watching his own face becoming
eclipsed by these powdery tones…
To apply the background colours of the sky, the sea, the mountain and
the saint, he uses petit lac, flooding paint onto the gessoed panels with wellloaded riggers, eight and up. As each wet load goes on it forms a puddle; the
next load goes no more than a centimetre from the first one, the third similarly
equidistant from the other two and so on; each one, forced by its volume to
expand, eventually runs into its neighbours, all the puddles merging to form
one large puddle or (whence the technique’s name) little lake. He’s already
incised the boundaries of each area so that different colours won’t run into
one another; all the same, he has to let each dry before starting the next.
The sea, of course, is blue; the ships, light brown; the strange, multilayered
building at the bottom, mainly black; the mountain, darker brown, with
white streaks which he’ll add later. The sky’s silvery gold save for the part
of it that’s taken up by the ellipse around the saint’s head: this is brilliantly,
almost luminously golden—he’ll have to burnish the leaf afterwards. The
saint’s robes are red. As he daubs the caput-mortum violet on, it strikes him
that, even though he’s got the original to work from, he’ll have to bring the
full-length mirror from his bedroom and dress in a sheet himself to get a
real sense of how the body’s articulation points define folds and creases. To
think that his corrupt flesh should be invading this image of piety makes | 567
him first laugh, then shiver—instinctively, for reasons that he doesn’t really
understand.
Is it while he’s copying the robes that Sláva Kinček drops by? Hard to
say. Time’s petit lac-ing too, mornings running into afternoons, days into
nights. When he’s particularly tired, Ivan sleeps—but as his dreams consist
entirely of saints, mirrors and mountains, of pools of colour flooding gessoed
landscapes, he usually opts, after a short while, to wake up and encounter
the material versions of these objects and events. It’s after he’s slipped the
bedsheet on, in any case: Sláva spends several minutes laughing at him, then
tells him to put some real clothes on and come out for a meal—he’ll pay, he’s
found a place, a new place, really chic.
When Ivan declines this invitation, Sláva huffs for a while and tells him
that he and Michael could have the whole thing scanned, photoshopped and
transferred back to wood in twenty minutes if he’d care to come round to
their office on Italská. When Ivan doesn’t even bother answering, he huffs
some more, then leaves, instructing Ivan to present himself at Pod Stalinem
on New Year’s Eve for the greatest party of all time.
Ivan pays Klára more attention when she calls round, but only because
she gives him pointers. When he’s reinstating the drawings, dragging the
zero- and one-riggers over the barely visible incised lines, he’s forgotten to
modify the egg-to-water ratio in the base solution; she tells him one-to-six,
then one-to-six for the lighting stage too, one-to-twelve for the nourishing
layer, then one-to-three for skin pigments in the final highlights, then… He
makes her write it down on a piece of paper which he sticks to the coffee
table’s surface with the rabbit-skin glue. She also points out that he needs to
model the saint’s face with a transparent glaze of raw umber mixed with a
little terra verte, to deepen the shadow slightly.
She asks him why he’s making two copies. He shrugs and asks her why
she brought him two boards. She throws her hands up, goes and buys some
food and brings it back to the atelier where it sits beside the table oxidizing,
glazing like the hues of the original. She starts telling him he shouldn’t have
accepted a commission like this without first seeing a provenance certificate,
that he should be more careful who he gets involved with—and he zones out,
loses himself in the contours of the two identical landscapes he’s creating,
their brown-white mountains and blue seas.
After she’s gone, Ivan turns his attention to the saint’s hair. It’s about the
same length as his, but grooved and greased back, almost plastic. He tries
wetting his hair and combing it the same way, but it won’t stay grooved. Does
Nick use hair gel? Nick’s been away almost constantly since—when?—must
be since two days before Christmas, when he went over to that Gábina’s. How
long ago is that now? Nick hasn’t even slept here as far as Ivan knows; he
seems to recall him having slipped quietly in and out with some girl in tow.
568 | Perhaps he dreamt that, let Nick drift past the incised borders of his mind,
entering elliptically. When was the last time he slept, in any case? Ivan goes
to the bathroom and looks through the cupboard by the sink, but doesn’t
find any hair gel. Then he remembers he’s got beeswax for the varnishing
stage, goes into the kitchen, melts a little in a saucepan, trickles it onto his
head and smoothes it evenly across. It works: his hair can now be moulded
into the same rippled, slightly undulating layer as the saint’s—a single layer,
as though one of several strata of a geological formation had been peeled
away, shrunken, then folded round his scalp. As he copies the original’s hair
onto both his paintings he moves his own head from side to side, watching
in the mirror the way the light slips over yellow ochre, raw sienna, ivory
black, glazing it with umbers. And if he opens his mouth just like this man’s
opening his…
It gets so that he can feel the saint’s way from the original on to the two new
boards, channel the multiplication not just through his hands but through
his entire body. His mind too: he lets his eyes glaze over so that the atelier’s
reflection blurs, and pictures himself floating in the sky over an ocean, up
above a mountain streaked with white, the world and its dark windows and
its people and the lower areas of sky draining away from him like egg white
through fingers as his own yolk is pinched upwards, elongating, waiting for
the final, divine prick that will release it from its skin to let it mix with purified
liquid, with the pigments that lie behind sky, earth, people, everything…
Mladen’s his best guest—Nick’s friend Mladen, the architecture student
from the former Yugoslavia. He comes looking for Nick, but when he sees
what Ivan’s doing he becomes enthralled and stays. He doesn’t try to make
inane conversation, or to force food on him like Sláva and Klára did—just
sits for hours and hours in silence, watching him paint.
At this point Ivan’s finished detailing the ships and sailors and is putting
the bird figures on the side of the mountain, thinking of the seagulls under
Palackého Most, the moment as they take off at which they’re neither airborne
nor resting on the water’s surface but suspended between the two, in some
vague halfway state. His angel hangs behind him, still gazing upwards
and away. In Ondříček’s class they studied an old Russian icon painting in
which, as Luke the Evangelist toiled to represent the Virgin and her baby
who were modelling for him, an angel stood behind him, pressed into his
back, arm resting across his shoulder to guide his hand. When he restored
the Moravian monastery’s fresco, that monk told him that the early church
painters would fast while they painted, just like he’s doing now, in order
to get close to God, to angels, to their strata. What was that monk’s name?
He was trying to remember it recently: when was that? He doesn’t notice
Mladen going; just, as he adds the nourishing layer of base solution—oneto-twelve, unmixed with any pigments—to bind all the layers together, that
he’s not there any more.
His buzzer rings two more times while he’s on the finishing stage, but he | 569
ignores it. It’s too delicate now; there’s no room for mistakes. You only get one
go on the halo, the text and the panel borders. Ivan consults Klára’s list for the
egg/water ratio and finds it’s—no, that can’t be right: one-to-one! So rich: the
orange swallows up the cadmium red, then the red ochre, then the terra verte
without changing, and it’s only when he stirs it round in the compartment
that it takes on the scarlet tone of the original. That ellipse shape. He sits still,
waits until his breathing’s deep and regular before he paints the outline of
this. It’s not just a case of getting the curve right: it’s about stepping into the
right rhythm and inhabiting it, letting it move you… He pictures himself
in the air again, gliding along the groove of an invisible ellipse, or higher,
out in space, a planet orbiting a sun, around a ball of intense, burnished
gold—makes the line on the first painting, steps back, then moves straight in
again, dips the three-rigger back into the compartment, paints the ellipse on
the second. Perfect, both times. Then the text. Klára couldn’t tell him what
the three large words meant. Or the little ones dotted between them. She
said the letters weren’t Byzantine or standard Greek—and he knows they’re
not Cyrillic. He paints them on with a two-rigger. Then, finally, the gold
inside the ellipse’s red boundary has to be burnished. Ivan uses the smallest
agate and rubs systematically, first from side to side, then up and down, then
diagonally. To keep the agate warm he holds it to his nose every so often: that
way it’ll slide more smoothly over the leaf. As he rubs, the gold inside each
of his copies’ ellipses starts to glow just like the gold in the original, takes on
the same strange incandescence, as though it were not just reflecting but also
generating its own light…
When Ivan finishes it’s night, perhaps the fourth or fifth he’s worked
through. He can’t varnish straight away. You’re meant to wait weeks, till the
paint’s absolutely dry, but Anton told him that didn’t matter as long as the
copy looked the same as the original. He’ll still have to wait at least a few
hours, though. Then he’ll layer on a varnish of ketone crystals and beeswax.
He’ll need a stocking for the crystals. He seems to remember… yes, it’s there,
beside his bed, when he goes through to look: a single, laddered stocking.
Could be Heidi’s or Klára’s. The crystals have to dissolve for several hours,
suspended in a jar of warm white spirit. He should sleep. What day is it? He’ll
phone Anton now, to tell him he can come tomorrow. Which one will he give
him? He places his copies next to the original, one on each side. They’re both
perfect. When they’re waxed all three should look exactly the same. He’ll
phone Anton, then sleep, then varnish the paintings and collect his money.
The phone’s been unplugged from its socket and placed in the room’s corner,
by the plant. Did he do that? He should move over and phone Anton. But
he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to take his eyes off the three images—four
if you count the mirror in which he’s framed, standing, wrapped in a sheet
stained the same crimson as the saint’s robe, with his grooved, waxed hair,
570 | his gaping mouth.
From Men in Space (London: Alma, 2007).
| 571
572 |
John McKeown
Alcohol
In every bar in every town,
with every shot, you were my alcohol.
Bitter-sweet, you filled my empty skull
as Joe set them up and I knocked ‘em down.
You were sorrow that would never drown,
Venus glimmering on the half shell,
in every bar in every town,
with every shot, you were my alcohol.
Now it’s tea, three sugars, lemon,
a good woman at my beck and call,
but I prefer your hell to heaven,
those beds of flame where I drank my fill.
In every bar in every town,
with every shot, you were my alcohol.
| 573
Wild Poppies
I am with the wild poppies
Folded in the wet grass
With the other weeds, unregarded.
And the dark moss too,
Along the top of the famine walls,
With those tiny spring flowers in cocktail groups
Leaning out of it, delicate enough
To make me weep for happiness.
I am with wherever nature
Is breaking through in a green rash,
The lacquer of her ragged nails
Dripping unheeded where the cars pass.
574 |
The Day You Love Me
The day you love me is the day
the stone breaks like bread and bleeds.
Will be the day the manna falls
and can’t be ploughed away.
A rain of frogs in each gold ray,
locusts flying, clean cut as grass;
the day you love me is the day
the stone breaks like bread and bleeds.
The Sun will stop up in the sky,
kisses blossom on stony lips,
Israel embrace Palestine,
every no become a whispered yes.
The day you love me is the day
the stone breaks like bread and bleeds.
| 575
576 |
Maureen McManus
Collateral
Making love in a Baghdad hotel,
you’re Milwaukee, via MTV,
she’s Canadian.
Your hands on the ridge of her neck,
almost like you need the terrorists,
the adrenaline,
fingers opening up that space
between the collar-bones (further down)
the trail of spine.
You needed this,
kneading flesh. You’re journalists
her husband’s in Quebec.
Your back’s arched,
a slick of sweat,
TV reporters don’t carry much fat,
you bet
she can’t wait to get back.
It’s great sex.
| 577
Poetry Totem
578 |
See there, the figure
in the middle,
that’s the
mother of lampshades made from skin, and the father of high windows
below,
with an unidentified
figure
in between.
Speculations give it
as a bee,
or alternately a wedding party.
The woman
is a military
figure,
the sex exposed,
indicating that she is ready
to die
in action,
the male holds
a tumbler,
thought to signify privacy,
while
the three small figures
circling the top
represent the dangers
of offspring, differing
significantly from the native
use
of watchmen.
Oddly too, it lacks ravens,
the creator deity;or bears,
all the usual bird and animal
imagery,
though much freedom
has been used
to portray
the humans
as
half-demonic.
Turf
Turf broods in dilapidated sheds, once houses;
I sense the pookeys sitting on its pent-up warmth,
it’s like my farmer-ancestors, browned by sun.
Its hardening spirit draws us to it.
In the mud-stuck density of winter,
rears fixed to the heated range
we smell the dark sacrifice of burning earth
glowering at its own gnostic conversion
from which it learns the freedom of a new form.
And our limbs fill with its fervour.
| 579
Joking Apart
When you say I can’t touch your furniture
I think you mean I can’t touch you
and I say I wouldn’t.
I sit there looking away from your eyes
wondering, why your pupils never dilate,
why I’m alive.
“Whereof one cannot speak, one should not speak”
said Wittgenstein, that philosopher,
in his first book.
By the time he got to the next, his last,
he claimed language was a game. I don’t want
to choose between
580 | you and your furniture, but I want to know
if “this” can be true and not true at the same time.
Ambiguity,
a woman tells me is hard to come to terms with;
and I know what she means. When you say
I can’t touch your furniture
I say I won’t come round so,
but I mean
I don’t want to touch your furniture.
Deconstructing Eternity, A-Z
never again a love like this
Roddy Lumsden
It is the case, definitely the case, that x is y
or z looked at another way,
or t, t that is in certain circumstances,
(as in the intersection of the sets r, u v; namely the subset w
in which are found d, e, f, g and h);
then, it follows that i
(when, k exactly touches q,
and m appears, part ‘n’, part j,
with a complete p
made up of l and o
(and which when I act like s))
says a, says b
says c.
| 581
582 |
Photo: Aleš Rumpel
Joshua Saul Mensch
The Marvelous Marvels Forward
In extraordinary choices the ordinary prevails
sensibly for a time till the risk margins are set
against it—burn that village to save our town
or let the lot fall to ash, is there another option?
So goes the arm, and the hand, thumb, foot
toe grown cold and black and worthless.
To save the whole, so that it might be whole.
Thus the famished insects, worms, bacteria
react—their way of celebrating another operation
gone well, the patient saved, appetites sated
till other neighborhood war, bodies stacked,
fire, gutted cars, windows, widows—hurray!
Who is this nature who needs to keep the balance?
What’s this obsession with balance, anyway
when it’s in the tipping of it that the marvelous
marvels forward into the winking unknowable
clatter, plates in a heap by the sink until
one day all that progress is rudely washed away.
| 583
Quick Start, Long Night
By which I mean the speed one thing leads to a disaster. Here, an evil day at the bank tosses the river over its jetty till half the town is under water. No one bothered to say the drowned houses were ugly before, though they were. Just ask the declawed, water-logged cat riding a floater across the factory floor. With the right sentiments, pity will disable her rescue and release among the entrails littering the streets. By which I mean the full inventory: sofas, postcards, lamps, their trailing electrical wires like snakes among the roots of toppled trees. Yes, it’s a bad day in Bohemia when you wake up to all your dishes washed and no more soap for simple pleasures. Lady, forget the shower, get your man off the lawn, ride the mower into town and buy new wares at the store, what doesn’t exist anymore. 584 |
Art Appreciation
“And in this one he bends on his cane,
his neck a kind of shawl, his face…”
a drop of flesh against a zero wall.
What the rain hits, it cloaks, all the way to the bone, so that his back’s entirely soaked. Except he’s only as thick as paint, and like the rain, he must be dry by now. One girl raises her hand,
looks around. No one else?
She’s careful not to go too far. “I don’t see why this is here.” | 585
Gentle snickers, though, the truth is, who doesn’t think they could do better?
Our guide smiles. “The Curator
feels otherwise…”
We move on, compliant, to another
of a man raising his fists as he crosses a finish line in a wheelchair;
where a silent crowd cheers, inspired.
First published in Grasp 2 (2009).
My Third Arm
I love this salesman. I’ve grown another limb
To keep him standing over me.
His coat tells me he is thinking of his children.
His shoes tell me he’ll spend the summer in the Keys.
I love him. I’ve lost another limb. I need him
To help me sew it back on.
The salesman knows all about me. He knows
My third arm is an act, a way to grab pigeons
As they fly past. I touch his face
Where a shred of green has shot out of the mortar
And rooted itself. He’s ready now to commit
The last petals of light to the tar shingles of the roof—
To the leaves dead in the fire.
The incendiary does not complain—it’s not afraid
Of loss. Its bonds are complete, keen, and arbitrary.
586 |
New Continent
We saw it moving in the distance.
A white object, then two, then three,
as a cell of light splitting.
It was past dusk, on the deck of a friend’s house.
He had a view of the mountain,
and you could hear the river below.
The objects drew closer,
in my ears a soft throbbing like the bass of a passing car.
They hovered for a moment,
not too far away, and afterwards
sped off to somewhere behind another hill. We drew pictures
and wrote down what we saw.
There were three of us.
Our drawings looked pretty
much the same. Mine was badly done,
as if a child had drawn it. Still, you could see what I was getting at.
An object divided, taking space.
Scribbled approximation
Like a scrawled map of the state.
The real differences were in the lights.
For example, I saw only white.
First published in Poetry Miscellany (Fall 2009).
| 587
Seance
As if in a dream. The hideous beginning.
Bodies in a pan, fat separating, draining off.... Bridges, elevated roads held together by plaster, makeshift crutches, houses disassembled like protesters.
Where a man makes his home, cardboard or tarp, is a shiftless place in the world.
Who sees an angel broken down by the side of the road,
one wing sheared off, the other in tatters?
Someone come quick and rope his heart together,
bind his ribs like a cord of wood.
588 |
And so the River Passes like a
Long Blue Yarn
I am Achilles, heel unharmed, safe in my carriage.
I am Joshua, warrior of solid walls.
I am Orpheus, check the belly—great marriage.
I am Cassandra, well loved by birds and dogs.
Wherever a man sits alone, thoughts prevail.
If he be drunk or badly dressed, do they be more
or less true? Look at Ovid, nice house, no ails,
great view. I am Joshua, hair on fire, watching over
the pale moors; Hecuba tending to the warm
ashen dirt while a flower withers behind my ear.
Oh look, here comes God in the shape of a worm.
What was it you said about life being unfair?
I am Joshua sitting on a bench by the placid Seine
reconciling myself with the places I’ve never been.
| 589
The Fine Print
When tracking a wolf through the forest
keep in mind the different size ratios
between the middle two
and the outer digits
on the paws of a wolf versus the paws of a domestic dog.
On a wolf, the outer digits are larger
than those in the middle, distributing weight well
on thin, subarctic ice, while the dog’s penchant for cooked food
has bred a balance
favoring forward motion in the digits
closest to the heart of the paw.
To determine the direction of a rabbit,
on the other hand,
view the placement of the hind feet
590 | and the forepaws
in reverse, like the contrary cyclical motion of a piston
wheel picking up speed and distance
as it tries to outrace airborne dangers.
On idle rabbits, the forepaws
will appear as points between the long horizons
of the lucky feet—
should a bullet find one, sold for a dollar a piece.
In the sharp tundral air
at the edge of a lamp lit lot, the history of a fox scrambles
after the history of a vole
five feet from the side of the road and onto the road and
across the road.
Watch the car as it idles in its own tracks,
one history erasing the other
as the snow recovers the road from rig skids and hardbreaking drunks, as you slip-slide slowly home.
We are surrounded by the history of things
waiting to happen: the impact of claws
on impacted dirt;
beaks breaking out of the wire fence.
Notice the diligent weasels
waiting for the moon to rise while
still, quiet trees drained of water
wait for fires to consume the hills, houses, cars
so that they might finally reproduce.
When dry winds pass, follow the ashes
across the yard to where the pool was.
Climb down its black, broad, bowl cracked like a Cretan vase.
All this will pass, has passed, is past,
next summer or last.
It doesn’t matter—
dapper hunter, raise the rifle to your shoulder,
fix the sight according to the wind’s distance
and when you have a clean shot, fire—
Here comes the wind rocking the flames from the branches,
watch the seeds bursting from the sap.
The wolf you’ve followed is after a hide of its own.
Where the lead lands, a seed will follow.
| 591
592 |
Tomáš Míka
A Castle
A castle inhabited by spirits
weather-worn openings where windows used to be
stones half eaten
by salt and winds
only veins protrude
under the cliff on which I tower
waves are gnawing
working on me
to turn again into dust
on the walls
to turn again into a heap of stones
where limpets live and black weeds
a natural shape
not something marked with a human hand
and the memories of stones
no-one can see
only the memories
of stones
keep the remembrance
of a touch of a human hand
and they quiver with delight
a palm
a back of the hand
a palm
a delicacy which the stone
is longing for
which it does not have and never can
and waves
Translated by Bernie Higgins.
| 593
Life Delusion
a stream
over the stream a bridge
like a ribbon
rivulet in a gift pack
you cross to the other bank
it’s like a delusion
the same
you walk along the bank
and a bridge again
to the other bank
breathe in
breathe out
you cross
and are where you were before
in a gift pack
life
594 | delusion
Translated by the author and Bernie Higgins.
A Dream of a Foreign Land
In a dream I found myself
In a foreign land
Somebody was about to leave
Somebody stayed
I understood foreigners
Better than my own kind
And women
Better than men
But who is going to read my palm
My cards
Write my horoscope
Draw my genealogical tree
Explain the dream
Put together my image
Tell me who I am
| 595
Now that something is coming to an end
And nothing begins
Translated by the author and Bernie Higgins.
596 |
Ewald Murrer
End of the Circle
…any kind of implied theory, could even be the truth…
Paul Linde
A set of complex measurements and calculations was about to take place.
A concentration of figures was bent over a diagram. An old man quickly
waved his hand holding a wooden compass that was enormous compared
to the size of the drawing. The young, athletically built men followed the
circling hand, the professor’s gestures. Concentrating, they wrote down his
words into their notebooks. Then, as was expected, the door opened and
an inconspicuous young man entered the study. The bowed heads greeted
him deferentially. The old professor turned toward him, as all present had | 597
mentally assumed, and bowed to the inconspicuous young man, whose face
was not overly attractive, whose body was not overly athletic, it was even a
little corpulent.
“Through these steep calculations we are looking for the end of the circle,”
said the professor and the students emphasized: “the end of the circle.”
Roller—he was the young man—took hold of the large compass and
jabbed it into the middle of the circle. The professor and the students listened
to his hush-voiced computations:
“The first measurement—the number of homes on the streets through which you
have passed.
The number of windows in them.
Discarding the incorrect numbers.
Arriving at the mean.
A window with white curtains, recently washed, fragrant.
A figure in this fragrant apartment.
Descending the stairs.
The sound of keys in a pocket.
The second measurement—the purpose of the journey, a progression of thoughts
sliding away.
The third measurement—the journey, expectation.”
Roller straightened up and said to the professor and students:
“We must now clarify the essence of the circle. There are recurrent events
on this journey—in the life of an individual a succession of details circle
the center, circle the essence or possibly the soul, the original thought or
intention. Thus we now have the disqualified essence of our academic
(sample) circle: the figure from the apartment with the white curtains, whose
idea is a journey. We also know that this journey is repeated, it is a circle. It
comprises tiny numbers, points, thoughts, imaginings, aspirations.”
Continuing on, Roller presented this episode to the mind’s eye of those
present:
“Consequently, this figure, a girl, went down the stairs. She exited
the building out to the street on which high, today now old, houses are
constructed. She took the keys from her pocket, unlocked the garage door,
unlocked the car, and drove off. She drove down a wide road lined with
towns. The numbers ran quickly in the opposite direction, thus she was
approaching negation. After some time she arrived in the town she had
wanted to reach. She came to a stop by a curb on a street with different old
houses. She locked the car, opened the door, and walked up the stairs. She
unlocked the apartment, went in, quickly passed through the entranceway
to a room, and opened a window covered by white, freshly washed curtains.
From the window she looked out at the car parked by the curb. She then sat
in an armchair with a book she had just taken from the bookshelf, opened it
to pages at random, and read. The room became torpid through the torpor
of the reading girl.
“And in another town, as we are assuming, at precisely the very same
moment, in an armchair behind white curtains sat another girl reading a
598 |
book, the pages of which, however, were not opened at random. She was
the friend of our sample figure. She was reading a book, and from time
to time she glanced up at the clock, for she was waiting for the moment it
would be time to leave the house. The girls had arranged a meeting. They
were meeting, then, at the same point of the circle: the expected time of their
meeting. They met in a cafe. Upon greeting one another they each extended
both hands and thereby created the form that we are investigating. Over
coffee they each notified the other of what had happened in their lives since
they last parted.
“They met regularly in this manner, either in the town of the first girl
or in the town of the second. Invariably they marveled at the similarity of
their private experiences. In this way they felt like sisters even though they
were from different bloodlines. The startling similarities elated them. They
laughed and their mouths formed circles. Their earrings, rings, and bracelets
also must be included in our computation. And perhaps somewhere here,
Professor, we are at the essence of the theory of the circle. But if we were to
compute all the variables, how distant we would still be from its end! We still
have a long way to go toward completing the calculation.”
The students stood above the drawing in deep thought, as did their
professor. At that moment Roller left the room. The professor bent over the
sheet of paper, having taken the compass from it. He remarked quietly:
“Gentlemen, we have arduous work ahead of us.”
Translated by Howard Sidenberg.
Temptation
At present I lie alone on a ridiculously small bed…
Anne Hebert Kamouraska
The company gathered in the house at the customary hour. In itself, then,
this was nothing extraordinary. It could be said that all was as it should be.
Herbert Lusperto de Pedurac sat in his armchair, sipping a glass of dark red
wine that had been poured by the hand of his wife, Liesele. She had also
served wine to the other gentlemen, Mr. Poschleier and Mr. Kever, guests of
the house with whom Lusperto had just been conversing. The countryside
beyond the windows of the house was growing dark; it was evening and
the sky reddened the room. At the moment the walls were turning crimson
someone pounded on the gate with a resolute, perhaps even a nervous,
knocking.
“A visitor at this hour must be bringing important news,” said Lusperto,
“I cannot imagine an ordinary and insignificant caller at our door at this time
of day.”
They waited to see who would enter, hearing the opening door, the brief
conversation with the doorman, the stairs being ascended, the steps in the | 599
halls. The door to the salon opened and the visitor entered - a swarthy visitor,
unknown to the gentlemen. Yet Liesele had visibly become distraught, the
visitor had unsettled her. Lusperto rose and, with a quizzical countenance,
strode up to the visitor.
“I am Ion Lupulescu, I have just flown in from Bucharest,” said the visitor,
introducing himself.
“And what are you looking for in this house?” asked Lusperto,
astonished.
“I am looking for a girl in this house,” answered Lupulescu.
Lusperto no longer said a thing. He motioned to Liesele; she was the only
woman in the house and besides, she had just flown in from Bucharest not
more than an hour ago. Here, then, was the connection. Clearly the visit
was for her. Lupulescu hastily walked up to Liesele and solemnly kissed
her, it could be said with excessive solemnity, even confidentially, and with
a considerable dose of indecent allegory. Liesele seated him at the table and
poured him a glass of dark red wine. In a moment all were sitting at the
table and drinking the dark red wine. Lusperto attempted to resume the
interrupted conversation with Poschleier and Kever, but their chatter was
contrived; it was not possible to take up again the topic. Liesele talked with
the Rumanian, and their conversation confirmed the suspicions of those
present: they had flown in together, and had become acquainted, on the last
flight from Bucharest.
Their preoccupation with one another seemed vulgar and indecorous to
Lusperto and his friends - mentally they especially reproached Liesele. After
a short while Lusperto could no longer bear it and quit the company, leaving
the room. He paced the terrace, smoking a cigarette. Poschleier and Kever
did the same. So together they smoked cigarettes and from the room the
voices of Liesele and Lupulescu struck their ears.
“This situation should be resolved,” said Poschleier.
“How?” asked Lusperto.
“Let’s throw the Rumanian out of the house!” proposed Kever.
Lusperto nodded and they then went back into the room. They seized the
Rumanian Lupulescu and led him out to the front of the house without any
difficulty, as he did not resist. He walked off without even looking back.
“A bit peculiar,” Poschleier said of the incident.
Standing on the terrace, Liesele watched the man depart.
“A sign, if it were to be genuine, a sign from the heavens to convey the
import of the event!” called out Lusperto who was standing behind her.
“Look!” suddenly shouted Kever.
A plane, a wooden vessel of enormous proportions, a winged ship, was
drifting dangerously low over the hills. The body of this machine was so
immense that in passing it darkened the sky. It drew nearer the house, and
600 | the ingenious ornamentation carved into its side could be observed from the
terrace. It was a magnificent sight - the sky completely hidden by a wooden
machine that was reflected, together with the peaks of the mountains, on the
surface of the lake below.
“The plane from Bucharest,” said Lusperto.
“Look, Liesele, the plane from Bucharest is approaching, just like the one
you came in on today. Isn’t the fact that it’s flying over our house a sign? Let’s
wait for some detail that will enable us to decipher the precise meaning of
this communication!”
The wait was not long for the plane suddenly ended its fly-over with a
booming clatter upon striking a rock ledge. Some figures went scurrying
along the deck: an old man in uniform and several young women. Clutching
the frames of opera glasses and binoculars, the company on the terrace could
only mutely watch the catastrophe. The vessel tumbled over and rolled down
the mountain slope toward the lake, where it stopped for a moment on the
surface of the limpid water. It straightened up, and quietly, with dignity,
sank to the bottom. The clear water made it possible to follow the entire
descent. The craft sank slowly and disappeared in the depths, jolting and
quaking against the stones on the bottom.
The captain, the old man in uniform whom the company had spotted in
the air, swam ashore. The women could be seen, now on the bottom, sitting
dead in armchairs, swirling around in them, swirling - winding their way
upward, toward the surface.
“This was the sign we’ve been waiting for!” said Lusperto, and the whole
company left the terrace.
Lusperto closed the casement and went to bed.
In the morning Lusperto went for a walk to the lake. He found the prints
of five pairs of girl’s feet in the sand of the bank. The sole-prints of the dead
women’s souls. When he returned home, he said to Liesele:
“Your child is crying, go comfort little Rosali.”
And Liesele went and comforted little Rosali.
Translated by Howard Sidenberg.
Published in The Prague Revue 2 (Winter 1996).
| 601
602 |
Photo: Michaela Freeman
Ken Nash
Maurice Utrillo
If there is a place to start, it’s not at a doorway, it’s not on a sheet of parchment
or primed canvas. If there is a place to start, it’s with a wall, blanched whiter
than white, so white it’s almost not even there, a vacancy in the landscape, a
missing piece of town.
Maurice shouldered his way past the crowd and stood before the wall
so that it filled his peripheral vision and the whole town became a wall for
him. And as he peered closely, he saw that the vast white expanse was not
truly a vacancy, but a place unto itself, with its embossed craters, lips of
mortar, embrocated veins of brush stokes layered like intersecting pathways.
He saw the gradient shades that hadn’t been there in the distance. He saw | 603
the miniscule shadows of its pitted surface, the faint persimmon corners of
plastered-over brick, the verdant spores of lichen, the trace deposits of dirt,
ash and ecru bird droppings.
His eyes wandered the wall, in exploration. Here was a place to start
again. The cravings in his veins, like an army of red ants, began to slow their
march to a halt as the wall absorbed his entire attention. He did not think
about another glass, another smoke, another night alone. He did not think
about the garden of cherry trees, flowering bougainvillea and crocuses that
lay just beyond the wall’s cap of shattered glass embedded in mortar. Nor
did he think of the town hall, the breeze baring up the stripes of the flag. Nor
of the town and its people, its ridicule and gossip. Nor of his mother and his
drinking companions. Only the wall, which was absolute yet yielding to so
many suggestions. He ran his hand along its braided surface. It scrapped
against his palm and finger tips. There was depth here that could not be
recognized from a distance. How was one to convey this, to explain it?
He would need to work fast. If he hurried home now and got his paints
he might still capture the wall in this light and be able to reproduce its
expanse and the suggested possibilities it conveyed to him at that moment.
If he hurried. If he walked quickly. If he passed the café and no one called
his name. If the Russian waitress, Irina, did not call out to him. If Monsieur
Henri did not accost him for payment. If his blood stayed calm and the vision
of white stayed before him and did not leave him for one moment.
The Two Lives of Edward Hopper
Summer, 1953. Edward Hopper had been unable to paint for months. What
was left to paint? Nothing. He had pursued realism to its very end. The
course ran off into emptiness, like the road to Coast Guard Beach, bitten off
at the end by the hurricane of ‘38. Trying to proceed was hopeless. He risked
plummeting into an abyss where not even the guiding beacons of Nauset
Lighthouse could reach.
It was the year Communists invaded America. They were everywhere.
They filled the headlines of the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the
Brewster Herald. Their names were whispered amidst the static of AM
airwaves. In New England, the communists floated zeppelins carefully
constructed from cumulonimbus clouds, sea salt and gull feathers. They ran
stealth recognizance missions up and down the coastline.
Hopper kept up with the news. Stalin had died in March. Three months
later he was reborn as a hydrogen bomb. In six days time, the Rosenbergs
were about to pay the price for their atomic midwifery. The red menace was
said to have infiltrated the postal service, the film industry, food service
604 |
personnel—even street walkers were said to subsidize their income by
passing along reports and photographs to Soviet agents disguised as Roman
Catholic priests, medical veterinarians and trash collectors. Hopper knew
that even the local whippoorwills were suspect, their whistles beginning to
sound more strident and anthemic than like mere avian mating cries.
Hopper’s roof was leaking. The brand new roof of their Eastham cottage.
He carefully positioned an empty paint can on the wood floor. Every half
hour he rushed over to empty and replace the can.
Hopper sat in an Adirondack chair by the open door, watching the tall
grass undulate in the wind like green and silver waves. He thought of moving
his easel here and trying to capture the effect. Then he decided he would
rather eat week old clam chowder than paint another Cape Cod landscape.
Hopper longed to be in New York. When he was in New York, he longed
to be in Cape Cod. When he was in Cape Cod, he longed to be in New York.
“What sort of realist are you?” he asked himself. “A person who perpetually
longs for what isn’t there is not a real realist.”
During lunch, he had a momentary flash of inspiration. “I will paint this
Campbell’s soup can! Just that. The can and nothing else.” By the time he had
squeezed out a full tube of cadmium red, he realized it was a stupid idea.
Nothing felt new to him any more. Everything had been done. Not even
Jo excited him any more in the ways she once did. She had grown broad in
the hips. The sour skin of her buttocks had begun to curdle. He had grown
so accustomed to tuning out the sound of her voice that she had started to
pummel him with cutlery and house plants to get his attention before telling
him anything important.
Technically, Hopper knew that he was never going to be a better painter.
He was too old to improve. There were now only three things he could do if he
wanted to assure his place in art history. Stab Jackson Pollock repeatedly with
a fork. Shoot himself in the head. Or single handedly capture a communist
spy. He immediately ruled out capturing a communist spy. He wasn’t entirely
sure there even was such a thing as Communism. Communism was like light;
it had no real source, only its effects existed.
Hopper stood in the doorway and watched the dark clouds moving
overhead. There was a change in the air. The stench of sea awoke in his
nostrils. After a moment, he realized there was something unusual taking
place in the sky. One of the clouds seemed to be moving much faster than the
rest, nosing its way through the sulfurous haze.
Hopper stepped out into the rain. His balding, flattop head repelled the
heavy drops. Streams of silver and white water ran down the creases of his
face. He watched the cloud moving through the sky toward his home. As it
neared, he thought he saw lights blinking from inside, like a bellyful of stars.
The wind grew more intense. The tall grass whirled like ecstatic Sufi dancers.
Jo’s hydrangeas leaned forward and bowed their heads. The grove of locust
trees protectively wrapped their branches around each other. Hopper wiped | 605
rain from his face, while still trying to keep an eye on the cloud directly
overhead. It had slowed to a complete stop, yet all the other clouds kept
passing by. It struck him then. He had lived this moment before. This very
moment. Though it was not really this moment. It had been a moment like
this, but from another lifetime.
2
Hopper’s previous life had ended in the summer of 1953. That summer,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after making a daring prison escape, fled to
Cuba to help Fidel Castro gain Soviet support for his revolution; Senator Joe
McCarthy lead a Senate inquiry regarding the possible abduction of American
citizens by Russian spacecrafts; Albert Einstein had proven the possibility of
time travel; and Edward Hopper was placing the finishing touches on his
painting “Sexy Robot Slaying Dragon in Outer space.” His wife, Jo, had gone
out to visit a friend, pick up the mail, then buy groceries and a fresh bottle
of Scotch. That evening, they would celebrate the completion of his painting
with a dinner of baked potatoes and fried cod, then play cribbage, get drunk,
fight about money problems, and fall asleep after making love on the sofa.
Hopper knew he was at the height of his powers as a painter and yet he
was lucky to sell one or two canvases a year. His “sexy robot” paintings were
not doing well, but they sold better than the “Jungle Vixens of Venus” series
and the “Vampire Harlots Battling Squids” series before that. His last dealer,
Vivian Lieberman, suggested that if Hopper ever wanted to become famous,
he had only three options available to him: stab Jackson Pollock repeatedly
with a fork, shoot himself in the head, or move to Italy were they were more
likely to understand his visionary work than in America. Jo, in what Hopper
described as “her usual selfish and abusive way,” refused to move to Italy.
The ceiling was leaking. The wind was picking up. Hopper was
daydreaming about Tuscan villas and buxom, Mediterranean beauties with
bare, grape-stained feet hefting wicker-wrapped jugs of Chianti upon their
tan shoulders.
Hopper stood in the doorway. The tall grass was bent by the wind into
waves of silver and green. Crimson dragon blood clung to the tip of his sable
brush. He wondered if he had chosen the right path in life? What if he had
stayed in Nyack and taken over his father’s dry goods store? What if he had
married young, started a family? Why is it that we have only one life to
experience? The impulse seized him to smash the sexy robot painting and
denounce all art as a silly, useless contrivance.
Hopper heard a loud mechanical screech. He turned his head in the
direction of the ocean. Dark clouds were rolling towards the shore. One
cloud amidst all the others appeared almost luminous and moved rapidly
606 | through the sky past the other clouds. As it neared Hopper’s home, it began
to slow until it came to a complete stop. The cloud was nearly translucent. It
seemed to Hopper that there were stars within it.
Something hung down from the cloud. It tumbled forth and stopped just
several feet above the ground, nearly within Hopper’s grasp. It was a rope
ladder. It dangled there like an invitation. Such an event was like nothing he
had ever dreamed of, yet it was real and happening at that very moment. He
seized the opportunity, pulled himself up, and began to ascend.
As Hopper rose toward the cloud, he began to wonder if perhaps the
world was full of more possibilities than he had ever imagined. If even a
simply cloud could contain such mystery, why not a lighthouse, a barn, an
automat, a railroad crossing, a gas pump, an all night diner, a shaft of light
in an empty room?
First published in Border Crossings, Berlin (2007).
The Great Simanoa
One morning my father woke with a slight limp. He looked tasseled and
ruddy-faced as if he’d spent the entire night on the deck of a ship. “It was
different this time, Ken,” he told me, steadying himself with an arm clutched
to my right shoulder. “This time I saw the old Simanoa herself.” The Simanoa
was the great sea lizard he’d been chasing in his sleep for years. Each night
he returned to his unending dream quest, following traces of the Simanoa’s
carnage as he navigated his steamer through narrow straights and high
seas.
To understand these dreams you must first know that my father spent
many years as the captain of a Merchant Marine ship making runs from
New York all the way to the Pacific Coast of Asia. It was a hard job, equal
parts back breaking labor and mind numbing indolence. Not nearly as
romantic as how talk of seafaring ways is often made to seem.
“There were great hardships and privations,” my father used to say. He
spoke of times when provisions ran short and he, as captain, fed the crew
on “nothing but dreams” until they made the nearest port.
| 607
He had been a great man, well respected—an iconoclast who could
not abide by the rigors of wartime regulation, collusion and constraints.
He crossed over the line one too many times. Finally, when caught flying
the fictitious flag of the Federal Republic of Aphasia while in restricted
waters, his command was taken away. He was given an office in Brooklyn
near the docks where he collated timetables and kept track of fleets and
cargoes. And that’s when the dreams first began.
But before the dreams, before the demise of Dad’s sailing career, he had
actually seen the legendary Simanoa. It was off the coast of Indonesia. The
great beast had lurched up beside his ship, nearly toppling it with its wake.
Then, quicker than any ship he’d ever seen, the Simanoa slipped far out
to sea. That was his one and only sighting of the mighty creature and I
can find no one to confirm or deny the event since his crews were always
a nameless, transient lot, uneducated, unreliable and, as Dad would say,
unfit for human conversation. And even Dad, himself, was too easily ready
to dismiss the incident as just one ten-minute event in his long life. It was
the dreams that mattered to him. And no one could soundly dispute that
Dad saw a Great Simanoa in his dreams.
I had been on my way to buy groceries when Dad cornered me with the
story of his recent dream, how the Great Simanoa came into view on the
horizon, its horned head protruding out of the water, tail whipping a spray
of salt water into the air. He would have sailed nearer if the wind hadn’t
picked up so suddenly, slamming a fruit crate against his shin and filling
the sails with air that pulled him closer toward the shore.
He savored the sighting all day long, going over details with his
morning coffee, trying to predict the Simanoa’s direction and state of
health, planning his strategy should he come upon her in his next night’s
sleep. Now that he had retired he could devote his time entirely to such
thoughts.
The next morning, after having slept in, I entered the kitchen and found
my father with a raw steak over his right eye, lifting forkfuls of scrambled
eggs to his mouth. He was eating ravenously. I noticed several egg shells in
the sink and wads of grease-soaked paper towels on the counter from the
bacon he’d been frying.
“Morning, Ken,” Dad said with his mouth full, yellow egg and ketchup
caught in his grey whiskers. “She came again last night.”
“What? Who?” I yawned. “Who came?”
“The Great Simanoa! I saw her as clear as day. She tried to sink my ship
with them venomous fangs, but I fought her off but good. Shot a harpoon
straight down the old gal’s throat. Course in all that jostlin’ and runnin’
about I got myself one hell of a shiner.” He removed the steak to show
me the swollen wound surrounding his eye. It was quite a bruise—deep
purple and maroon like an evening sun—and I wondered what Dad had
608 | smacked his head against during the night to cause such a swell.
“Sit down. I’ll make you some breakfast,” he said, rising from his seat. I
sat, but could not take my eye off his eye. Somehow the swelling, the dark
coloring and the raw meat clutched in his hand made Dad seem years and
years younger.
| 609
Sarah Morris & Ken Nash. Photo: Molly Radecki
Anima Husbandry
She took apart her husband. Unhinged the knees, unsnapped the clasps at
each hip, rotated the head counter clockwise until it loosened enough to pull
free, then set about with the custom wrenches, painstakingly disjoining each
section, removing piece by piece and placing them each within its assigned,
contour foam rubber compartment in the large metal carrying case. It took her
nearly three hours to get her husband completely unassembled and packed
away. She wasn’t looking forward to the job of reassembly and thought to
herself that whoever invents a husband that can be taken apart and put
together in less than fifteen minutes is going to make a killing.
She was taking him to Paris. She had always dreamed of living in Paris,
the city of virtual appetites and gastronomic mainframes. She had all sorts of
crazy notions of life in Paris, but most related to the old Paris, the Paris of the
early 21st century when Parisians had given up speaking French and making
films and learned to enjoy American culture and English language. Those
had been heady times, the era of the Young Maldives. They had flooded the
city, able to afford living stylishly in Paris due to the immense strength of the
610 |
Rufiyaa.
Some of the greatest contemporary works in the English language were
written by the twenty-something Maldives of that period and much of the
greatest contemporary art—holographicmotion sculptures, subatomic
happenings, plasma canvases—were all created by young Maldives living
the bohemian life in Paris. But Paris had changed. People no longer spent
much time in the hot, arid streets. Life moved into environmental domes and
inhabitable theatres, great amusement parks of images and sound where
people spent their entire days. The subsequent generations of Maldives,
Timorees, Inuits and youths from other affluent nations were setting up
expatriate communities in places like Vladivostok, Calgary, and, for a short
time, the Prince Joseph Islands (before the tragic bioengineering disaster that
released hundreds of thousands of carnivorous moths).
Her husband hadn’t wanted to go to Paris. He knew that life there was
harsh for husbands and spare parts were overpriced and difficult to find.
Husbands in Paris were mostly K-12 Graduates, a popular model manufactured
by Hasbaro. Very affordable, but fairly unreliable. He was Princeton GP800, Fabio edition, with suped up Tickler and Black Mambo components. If
anything were to go wrong, he might lay idle for weeks on end waiting for a
shipment of replacement parts.
But then, how bad could that be? He had heard of a time when husbands
were flesh born, back when DI’s, designed identities, were still called artificial
intelligence or, among the vulgar classes, robots, and were far too primitive
to be suitable husbands. The flesh born husbands of that time stayed with
their wives, on average, a mere seven years, with the exception of some lunar
colonies where husbands changed wives every 72 hours. The development
of DI husbandry changed all that. Yes, some people still lamented the rapid
decline and near extinction of flesh born husbands and the days when, as
they used to say, it was a man’s world and men ruled the roost, wore the
pants in the family, brought home the bacon and inseminated organically.
But, most would agree, those were views born purely out of nostalgia and
served very little practical purpose.
As the lid came down upon his head and the latches clicked in place and
the tumblers turned, scrambling the lock’s combination, her husband thought
to himself, as all husbands are programmed to think, “Yes, I am very lucky to
have been made in these times.”
| 611
612 |
Photo: Sarah S. Boling
Scott Jonathan Nixon
Draža Mihailović
This is why I believe there is nothing
More foul than to be branded a Nazi.
Everything that was written about you,
My grandmother threw away; and now
The world and I remain baffled,
Deciding your part,
When there are still so many
That deny the holocaust.
In the summer of 1946, five hundred
Americans rallied and picketed for your honor
And chivalry, while the Partisans tried
And executed you as a collaborator,
Still no one recollects if you were willing
To surrender your arms, before they were
To begin killing every man in your village.
They don’t even see that in the streets
Of the white city, masses again parade into
The capital, with fiery gonfalons and graffiti faces.
They demand for the vile despot’s resignation;
Otherwise they will tape and rack him
Like a slab of Mussolini; dangling by the feet;
So the peasants may have a fascist, or rather
An Ustaše in Serb’s clothes, on which to spit.
Still, could you stand by and watch the excavations
Of the killing ditches and the deliveries from
The zyklon gas trucks? Or did your people’s wails
Goad you until you ran towards the mountains,
Only to came back down raising a feral hue and cry?
After all, that was the Chetnik way.
| 613
Five hundred liberated Americans begged
And pleaded to testify that you recovered
And shepherded them to safety, after their planes
Were shot down. But governments, no longer wishing
To get involved, still refused to listen and take action.
And on that sunken day of July 1946, your “allies”
Abandoned and buried you, along with
The Ravna Gora movement
In the forgotten and desecrated earth.
Čiča Draža! These days, people recite
Their prayers against what is left of
King Alexander’s legacy, and I cannot say
That I do blame them. I see no glory in
The underground mortuaries. I see dismay
And ignominy of soldiers; executing foul deeds
That make them feel lineally sanctified.
These Slavic yeomen tossed flowers on
The tanks rolling into Vukovar, but I can no longer
Contain the tears and spit, from hearing of
614 | The women raped by the rifle barrels of soldiers.
I sneer at the reporters and editors, calling
The people Nazis, and the hate mongers that speak
In defense, who none of them know the full history.
Five hundred American Veterans, along with
Many American-Yugoslavs, such as my grandfather,
Mourned when they heard the news of your death,
’though your son and daughter listened to the lies
And disowned you, during your incarceration.
No one remembers, except for my departed mother,
How you willingly surrendered before they began
Killing every man in your village.
You said that your life was not worth the expense of others,
And if what you said is true, then we lost our honor,
And I am left with a heart full of odium and mayhem.
the wastebasket
April is the most conceited slut, nagging
Blood clots out of Nixon’s lung, inducing
Labor after a ten-month pregnancy, prescribing
Valium to my mother after she delivered me.
Mature enough to steal but not old enough
To be decrepit when someone
Expects a favor or a lock of hair.
Autumn was all over me, coming towards
A broader path, forgetting the leaves covering
The graveyards and the streets; we drop by Galileo’s,
And go out of the moonlight, into the smoking section,
And drink merlot, and black out during the night.
In the Habana Inn, thespians come and go,
Angling for an Oscar and a blow.
In the bamboo cage, there I feel free.
I’m dragged throughout the streets
And put on display while a demented journalist,
Who looks like Dennis Hopper,
Gives me water to drink and takes my picture.
“This is dialectics, it’s very simple dialectics,
One through nine; no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
You can’t travel into space, you can’t go out into space,
you know…with fractions.
What are you going to land, one quarter,
three-eighths?”
HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S HOWDY DOODY TIME.
“What are you going to do when you go from here
to Venus or something?
That’s dialectic physics, okay, dialectic logic is
there is only love or hate;
You either love somebody or you hate them.”
What do you get married for Doc, if you keep strangling
Your wife with your best necktie on Valentines Day?
HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME TO MAKE THE DONUTS.
In the Habanna Inn, the men come and go
Wearing their letterman jackets, drinking Buds,
| 615
Getting into their fancy pick-up trucks, cruising
On 39th Street and looking for another fag to bash.
Another year goes by and ’though it’s been
His destiny, Ralphie “Gonzo” Emerson has yet
To discover a new source of energy
And his hair is beginning to recede.
He signed the registry at Shakespeare’s Birthplace,
Right under Thomas’ signature, but there are thousands
Of names to distinguish my handwriting from his.
Bruce Campbell has never given blood, for he’s always
Been afraid of needles, and there is now talk of a war
That’ll last for twenty-seven years,
Two weeks before his birthday.
He’s never seen a snail or a straight razor,
But he watches packs of domesticated hyenas,
Snickering from sniffing blood and glue.
Dream without thought, think before you dream,
Whistle a tune thoughtfully and then without
616 | Thought, now just be thoughtful and dream.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, famous philosopher,
Grew to be very senile; nevertheless is known
To be the wisest ass of language,
With a marked pack of death cards.
“Let’s see what we have,” said he, “two of clubs,
Four of diamonds, five of clubs, eight of spades,
Queen of hearts and there’s not one jack
In the whole bunch.”
I remember that card belongs to the poor
Bastard with pearls that were his testicles.
Indeed there will be time
To be a Titan or a Deadite,
And come up with all sorts of new ideas;
There will be time, there will be time
To send promising children to the finest modern schools;
There will be time for tremendous success
During this fascinating lifetime for life is very long.
You may not understand the young at first,
But you go along with the modern trends, too;
There will be time to dare and disturb the Petrarchan verse,
And show you fear in a handful of dust bunnies.
This is the way the poem ends
This is the way the poem ends
This is the way the stupid poem ends
Not with a bang or whimper, but a queef
“And with a queef, I’m splitting Jack!”
So goodnight ladies, goodnight sweet ladies,
And kiss me with your tongues goodnight, goodnight.
| 617
618 |
Peter Orner
Belief
An old communist who believed in it once and for all time but who also,
almost from the very beginning, nursed a healthy animosity for the liars who
carried it out and fouled it up—so he was never considered by anyone who
mattered to be a good communist—walks the streets of Nusle, northwest
Prague, with hunched shoulders. They’ve put him in a home, but still he
wears his slouched hat crooked as a sign that although he looks dead,
he’s not—far from it. Feet no good anymore and so he shuffles, wanders,
watching the changes with a cynical eye, watches the young men and their
cars, watches the apartment balconies crumble. What good was believing?
And yet the alternative was not having faith in men and so dying young—so | 619
now he shuffles and watches, not hating any of it, any of them, but at the
same time lording over them like the god he always swore he never wanted
to be, and if there’s been any change at all in him after forty-seven years of
working in grease in Kladno, it’s this: that he’s so old now he’s like a god,
not participating, only watching, not giving any opinions, not scoffing, not
pointing his glass and spouting off in the pub about the way things were
then—none of that. Only existing, whatever this means, if it can mean
anything for a man who no longer has the strength to work. And even the
love he once had for her has boiled down and hardened so that it’s not even
a memory anymore. She used to tell him not to be so serious, that he was
always so serious, watching himself as though from a camera on the wall.
It was true—but she was wrong that it was out of vanity. Not vanity but a
need to see himself through his friends, comrades, to make certain he was
sufficiently demonstrating that he believed in them and their work. Now he
doesn’t watch himself, only them, the young ones who have no names, and
even she is no longer, and he no longer hears her voice.
620 |
Photo: Louis Armand
Tony Ozuna
El Czechano
Chico stands at the fourth story window of his homeboy Art’s apartment
in Prague staring out across a little valley in the city. Trains covered with
graffiti pass by every few minutes shooting out or disappearing into the
tunnel leading to the main station. It’s not a beautiful morning; it’s cold and
overcast, but there is something intriguing about the haze hanging over the
city, Chico thinks, as he stands at the kitchen window absorbing warmth
from the only heater in the apartment. Art hadn’t fallen or jumped from this
window; it happened from the bedroom next door to the kitchen. Actually | 621
Chico hasn’t yet figured out whether his friend had fallen or jumped. No
suicide note was left behind, and Katka won’t tell him anything. So no one
knows what really happened.
The gold-plated trophies in the bedroom are starting to gather fine dust,
so Chico gently dusts them off as if they are plants needing to be watered.
Framed plaques and photographs of Art holding each trophy won from car
shows in California line the walls on another continent. Lowrider of the
decade. Most firme Bomb in the universe. Grand Prize in almost every county
of the state for his legendary, customized ‘57 Chevy. Chico had brought all
these trophies over for Art four years ago, for the wedding. Art had asked
Chico to bring them all because, he said, they were all he needed to make his
life complete over here.
Chico is in Europe for the second time in his life—and it is just another
short visit, but it seems like he has far more years of memories abroad
jammed into his head. Remembering when he had asked Art at the wedding,
“Why are Chicanos so obsessed with memories?” Art had replied, “It’s the
only part of our lives we can control.” While all Chicanos are obsessed with
memories, “cholos” that most violent subculture of Mexicans in America
are transfixed in the past even more so, by binding their histories to small
territories or varrios, sometimes the size of a barrio, but it could also just be a
street or even a street corner.
Chico dresses like a “cholo” though he isn’t too hardcore about it,
anymore. And this means that in Europe, he’s in vogue. This is because at
this moment in history, meaning always and forever, Chicanos represent a
unique population with universal appeal due to their convenient proximity
to Hollywood. Without a charismatic leader, or financial clout, they are still
worldwide in Images. Representing eternity, on one side, Chicanos are a
population able to successfully assimilate with Whites; but the subsection of
“cholos” as the truest representatives of American history refuse assimilation
and even the authority of Whites in power. Both sides of the culture are proud,
entwined, living together and apart. At the root of the problem is history and
the future. Chicanos are growing in number, second only to the Chinese. And
so, because they tend to have families of ten or more, they need more space
and cities like Los Angeles—this means territory that was already theirs to
begin with. Like any modern people, Chicanos just want a home of their own,
and a safe place to park all their cars, running or not; but they can’t compete
economically or politically in a region overrun by Hollywood which means
by people from all over the world. And so, Hollywood immortalizes and
exterminates Chicanos at the same time.
The day before, Chico had passed by some Ukrainian and Czech workers
with shaved heads, creased khakis, shiny-black shoes, and arm and back
tattoos to match any cholo homeboy back home. Like Art’s choloized
employees, these workers hadn’t surprised Chico too much since they looked
just like Art had described the new East Europe. Just as the cholo style has
622 |
already taken most of Asia, especially Japan and the South-East side of Asia
(esp. Vietnam), Eastside Europe quickly fell in line. Art said it was a trip,
how the globalization-cum-Americanization of the world ultimately meant
the choloization of the world. Because the U.S as the new world empire is
neighbors with Mexico, one of the oldest empires in history, the two worlds
have a fragile relationship based on geography, history and the future.
Sitting with Art’s Czech friends later in the evening, at a party in memory
of Art, Chico felt guilty because he’d been so out of control the first time he
had visited Prague; fighting like a maniac and chasing women as soon as he
had arrived. None of that this time around, Chico thought as a couple of Art’s
employees started a sloppy Bohemian waltz in the front room. A fat guy in a
replica Pendleton and khakis led the host of the party, who wore grey dickies
and a white Dogtown t-shirt. Everyone in the room was so smashed, no one
even bothered to laugh at their silly curtsies and bows.
Chico had just sat down on the couch when the dancing Czechs fell
on him. Automatically, he was ready to get up throwing chingazos but
instead remembered Art for reassurance, trying to hold a grin. He imagined
Art grinning back nervously. The crisis passed unnoticed. The drunken
employees were back in the middle of the room. How could Chico explain to
everyone that instead of laughing at the dancing idiots, he was fighting with
his internal programing. Back home, if two drunk assholes had fallen on
him, anywhere, anytime, he would have jumped from the couch swinging.
He would have first wailed on their heads then thrown them not only out
the house, but out the window on their way out on the street with the dogs
where they belonged. At home things were just different, and these unnoticed
incidents were again, quickly starting to drive Chico berserk.
Across the room, Katka smiled sadly then shook her head with a confident
nod, seeing that Chico had let it pass. Doing what she has been doing most of
her life, smoking cigarettes, her big hair and thick false black eyelashes made
her look like a very pale and beautiful homegirl from back home. Looking at
her, Chico could understand why Art had moved to Prague.
Chico did feel like swinging and punching his way out the room, but he
had promised not to get into any more fights. Especially not like the one he
had pulled off at Art’s bachelor party, then again at the wedding (not even
so long ago). Art had barely been able to explain that violent outburst to his
bride’s family. It’s due to jet lag, he had said. Now that Chico has decided to
stay for a while longer, after the funeral—who knows for how long—he had
to try hard not to kick on every ass that deserved it. People were less tolerant
of that kind of behavior here, and he’d just have to conform.
At the bachelor party, Katka and Art had actually missed the flurry of
blows. Chico had just arrived, his khakis still pressed stiff and clean. After
being shuttled from the airport, they all went out with Katka’s family for
lunch, and then the pounding down of beers began. Later that night, at the
party with all of Art and Katka’s friends, a pipe had passed their way to put | 623
everybody’s head in a crazed blur. Chico had been silent most of the day, but
he was always a reserved dude. It was just his cool way, sitting beside Katka’s
brother Ivan and Ivan’s American friend Freddie K.
“How can you explain why you play ping pong with a ping pong ball, but
you don’t play volleyball with a volleyball ball? The game is called volleyball,
so to play it you need a volleyball ball. And for football, a football ball?” Ivan
had asked Chico.
“Huh? Why don’t you ask Art or Freddie that kind of shit?’
“They said to ask you.”
Freddie K. told Chico that Ivan asks the same thing whenever he meets
anyone from America or England. Chico and Freddie ended up talking about
Prague, asking things all Americans ask each other when they meet abroad:
how long have they been away, where were they from, how much was this
and that compared to the dollar. Freddie K. came from L.A.’s lower eastside
mass of suburbs, and so does Chico, generally, but when Freddie K. said he
was specifically from Norwalk, Chico puffed out his chest and clenched his
fists. Fucking Norwalk! Chico had never forgotten his brother Pete once told
him if he ever gets the chance to punch out a dude from Norwalk—do it for
bro, cause dudes from Norwalk had once jumped Pete just for walking down
their street. It was something that had gone down years ago—something
that Chico had no real connection to—but he still had never forgotten his
brother’s request. Since Pete wasn’t from their neighborhood, those vatos
had fucked him up. All this is what Chico was thinking about as he looked
down at Freddie K. from Norwalk. Ivan’s American friend in East Europe?
He was a typical suspect flashed on the evening news every night back home,
somewhere between five-five and five-eleven and a half, 150 to 200 pounds,
aged 25-45, short black hair, swarthy, a Latino male. Any Chicano cruising
down any street in southern California. Chico had listened hard for a reason
to punch him in the face. He just needed something to pounce on. Who the
fuck did this vato think he was? Spouting off his plans to import thoroughbred
Chihuahuas into Eastern Europe. Global business, meet a demand, all that.
Chico thought of suitcases stuffed with chiquita Chihuahuas. Freddie K.
had already lost money importing chicharones. Not enough advertising and
marketing research done to prepare East Europeans for fried pork rinds.
Then he tried to sell Krager lowrider rims and tiny whitewall tires, but the
lowrider scene just hasn’t picked up outside of America and Japan. He told
Chico that one way or another, he was going to get rich quick in Europe. All
the way live, from Norwalk, California.
“From Norwalk?” Chico cornered him. “That mean you willing to back
that shit up? Pay for all the sins ever committed there?”
“What do you mean man?” Freddie K. asked.
“Orale!” Then Chico went off. He leaped across the table like a cartoon
action hero and punched the Chicano importer twice in the face, though
once would have been enough. Freddie K. was left sprawled out on the dirt
624 |
cold like a corpse.
“Don’t fuck with my brother, Puto!” Chico yelled, then as he was strutting
away, Katka’s cousin grabbed him by the arm.
“What do you do crazy guy?” The cousin was drunk, of course.
“You ever studied free-market economics in Czech? Well, I just cleaned
up an old account. That’s what the fuck I did.” Then Chico tried to pull away
but the guy held on tight.
Chico hadn’t even thought about where he was. At his best-friend’s
bachelor party in a roaming park on a hill with a panoramic view of Prague,
in the eastside of Europe. Cathedrals, gothic spires, all that. Less than 24
hours abroad and he was already flipping a drunk Czech guy over on his
back then jamming his shoe onto the dude’s chest to keep him from getting
up. A fellow Chicano was sprawled out cold a few feet away just because
he was from Norwalk. Chico hadn’t planned on this. When Katka’s family
rushed him, he panicked. Where was Art and Katka? Off for more beer. Then
all he saw was a fat lady swinging an umbrella, yelling in a language he
didn’t want to understand. How was he to know she was Katka’s aunt. He
grabbed her by her blouse, ripping it open as he threw her to the side then
tried to escape. A hundred hands grabbed him and were holding him down
by the time Art was back to cool everybody off.
The next morning, while taking photos for the wedding, the friction was
still in effect. Everyone was stressed out anyway because of the wedding but
the drunk guy who Chico had flipped over was Katka’s uncle. His neck was
now in a brace, and he was the one paying for the bash. Katka’s aunt was still
furious about her ripped blouse and the huge bruise on her arm. What type
of madman had Art invited over from the City of Angels? All such insane
maniacs in Pico Maravilla? Over and over, Art had to explain to his new
family that NO NO, his family back home wasn’t all so violent, even though
most of them were.
It may seem bizarre but the brawl at Art’s bachelor party never upset the
groom. Freddie K had just been stupid, he thought, so he didn’t even bother
to go and see him in the hospital where he was laid up for weeks. Fuck
yeah such violence, Art had thought to himself with pride, though he had
tried to explain it to Katka’s family with sincere embarrassment. His whole
friendship with Chico, since they were little kids, was rooted in violence.
Thinking back when he was a boy, he imagined a paper-skinned bull
striped in bright blue, orange, green, pink, red, and purple hooked to a
makeshift pulley, hanging from a tree and swinging up and down or like
a pendulum. The bull is stuffed with chocolates and pennies and other
little surprises for kids, and all of them are in a circle underneath the
swinging treasure chest, made of papier-mâché. One boy with a long stick is
blindfolded, standing in the center of the children’s circle, swinging the stick
with a frenzied desperation. It seems like he has a century of anger pentup in his less than ten-year-old body as he rushes around blindly trying to | 625
smash in the bull’s head or belly. Since the boy is practically standing beneath
the piñata, sometimes it is dropped down on his head but these contacts only
ensure that he’ll respond with a solid smack before it’s lifted again, out of his
reach. All the kids take turns getting blindfolded before they can take furious
swings at the piñata but Chico had always been the one to finally bust the
piñata open, spilling its guts of candies and coins out to the party. Even when
he was wearing a blindfold, everyone could sense in Chico’s eyes the fury in
his swing then the ecstasy when he’d hit the mark.
This is how Art and Chico had enjoyed parties as kids. Violently, and so
what. Art couldn’t have imagined growing up any other way or anywhere
else but in Pico Maravilla. Before the freeway had been built over that old
neighborhood, it wasn’t just old houses, corner liquor stores and open fields.
It had busy lives connected by gossip and shared memories. And the hills
over the little valley were another violent backyard for kids, not just because
rival barrios had fistfights there every Friday after school. In school, Chico
and Art were taught that mighty Egypt had risen from the banks of the Nile,
and the river united that culture, which was unlike the Greeks who were
raised in little valleys, and the mountains separating each valley kept regions
of people from uniting into one great nation. And so, just like the Greeks, the
history of Pico Maravilla was doomed to be small and divided.
In school, Art and Chico also learned in their real history class that the
valley where they grew up was once a Native American village called Sejat,
and the people who’ve always lived there still call the area Sejat, which
means “where the bees burrow into the ground.” An Awigna tribe legend
says that Sejat is the place where the world began and though it’s now
smothered by concrete, isolated strips of weeds still manage to push up
from the ground, and the undeveloped hills remain for children to follow a
custom which no one can explain. Children still go into the hills there and
dig holes into the ground, burrowing themselves into the earth for warmth
and solace. Art and Chico did this as kids, and they could never even explain
why. Other times with mud-packed faces, football helmets on their heads,
and carrying slingshots, they’d strut around the hills protecting their turf
against outsiders.
On weekends and summer holidays, Chico and Art had spent all their
time in the hills throwing lumps of mud stuffed with dog hair at other kids.
Assorted screws and lug nuts could be especially lethal with a powerful
slingshot. Because they had fought for years in overnight jungle-style battles
in the hills, they could describe the terrain’s surface and caves like their own
skin. Packing metal into mudballs, they had even attacked construction
workers nervously trudging alongside the future site of the freeway. Once,
late at night, they had camped out in a clearing between the weeds, gazing
down at the men constructing the soon to be hated freeway. With common
signals, boys from all hideouts unloaded their football helmets filled
with mudballs, hurling them down on the bulldozers and tin roofs of the
626 |
construction workers’ trailers. Then they simultaneously whipped out cold
cheese sandwiches and Kool-Aid to celebrate before nodding off to sleep out
there in the weeds.
Pico Maravilla doesn’t exist anymore, and that’s one of the reasons why
Art had been living it in Europe. Chicanos don’t have much but their territory,
and they fight everyone including themselves to the death to hold on to it.
Art couldn’t just move to another Chicano barrio because he just wouldn’t
belong. Acceptance rejected. His only reminders of home existed in the hills
where the weeds still tower like trees, and he had believed that one day he
would return home and find all his abandoned toys buried safely in the dirt
of those hills. Before the freeway was built, as kids, Art and Chico thought
the hills stretched to the south as far as the ocean and to the north as far as the
end of the world. But after the construction workers arrived, they realized
their lives were connected to forces they had no control over. Bulldozers had
leveled their houses on Manuelitos Avenue and everything else in the barrio
in a few hours. The playground of their youth was suddenly replaced by
chunks of sparkling asphalt, tar, canopies, wooden planks, piles of iron rods,
pipes, and a chain-link fence. Soon a smooth grey carpet of cement floated
above the exact spot where Art had lived; the rusty beams thrust into the
cement rising out like flag poles symbolizing all people who used to roam
beneath the site.
Just an area of dirt used to be home for Art. Not all of America, and
certainly not the hideous stretch of freeway covering that spot of earth now.
Before he had moved to Europe, every Sunday night he would return to the
land where was from, rolling over it slowly—a 20-foot concrete slab between
him and his true homeland. Other lowriders moved over their native lands
too, feeling all homesick and nostalgic like Art, blasting tunes straight out
of their baby crib: “It’s a Family Affair,” and “Me and Baby Brother.” The
booming speakers would get Art all softy till he felt the urge like everyone
else around him. In locomotion, all he wanted was to stand alone in silence
in the middle of the freeway and try to feel a connection to his roots. Driving
slow, oblivious to the pumping bass and blowing horns bouncing off each
other, Art would imagine voices from beneath the concrete. The chosen
one. Only he was able to hear unrhymed words retelling history beneath
the cement, though all the hopping hydraulic systems, sirens and stereos
blocked out the fine points. He could hear voices coming from where he had
been destined to live, and these voices from where the bees used to burrow
into the ground called him even when he was a long way from home.
Like Art, Chico accepts violence as the way things are, so his best friend’s
death had been accepted with stoicism, though he’s still curious to know how
it happened. Was it suicide or not? Katka refuses to sit down and discuss any
of this with him, and for the time being, he doesn’t want to push her; but
before he returns home, he intends to find out. All he knows is that either | 627
way it was inglorious. No witness, no reason. When Katka had made it clear
that Art would be buried in Prague, Chico first tried to persuade her against
it, for Art’s family’s sake, then he just gave up. Does it even matter where a
man is born or buried?
Chico never even knew where he was born, exactly, until he applied for
a passport to come to Europe. Before that, his dad had never wanted to tell
him where he was from exactly, because he had said, he didn’t want to limit
him.
Thinking back about the wedding, again, Chico remembers that the
photo shoot had gone down without a hitch. He and Art had looked royal
in their rented tuxedos—black cutaway coats with tails, silk grey lapels
and cummerbunds, black derbys and semi-flare bells, crush velvet purple
bowties, ruffled violet shirts, and walking canes. With Art and Chico just
standing there alone, the wedding couldn’t have been anything less than
classic. No wrinkles. Later at the reception, another pipe was passed, and it
was all going down smooth, until Art opened up a bottle of tequila. Knowing
well that Mexicans, tequila, and mota are a wicked combo, practically a threat
to global peace and security, Art passed the pipe and tequila over to Chico.
Again, at least for the two Chicanos in the house, the rest of the evening
became a blur.
Since Art had gotten together with Katka, he also became obsessed with
traditional Czech folk or polka music with its full brass band line up of tubas,
trumpets, trombones and drums. He had learned about the migration of
Czech workers in the mid 1800s, especially men working on the railroads of
southwest U.S. and Northern Mexico, and he had insisted that Czech music
had a spiritual link to Mariachi, and thus the essence of Mexican music.
Before the Czechs, the Mexican folk musicians already had their guitars
and rhythms, and they had their own style of dressing up, by stitching
jingling carracas, sometimes even seashells, along the seams of their pants
and sombreros, and most importantly they had their tragic love stories, or
canciones. But later, when the Mexicans adopted the oompah from the Czechs
into their tragedy, it became a sound of celebration but with tears of a broken
heart.
Mariachi is related to the word Marriage, since this music blossomed at
Mexican weddings in the 1860s, during the French intervention in Mexico
under the Austrian Emperor Maximilian. After explaining the musical history
of Mariachi to the Czech musicians at his wedding, Art had convinced the
men to blend their upbeat polka with a touch of Mariachi melancholia. And
as they played the faster songs, he had grabbed Katka and her family to form
a circle on the dance floor, clasping their hands together and holding their
arms up in the air. Art had instructed everybody, the little kids, old people,
everybody to put their wallets, purses, keys, everything from their pockets
needed to be set on the floor in the center of the circle then they all moved
in one direction, left then right, always facing the circle. Art was ordering all
628 |
the party around like a general. The only one not dancing was Chico.
In all of the commotion, Chico only remembers one girl dancing off to the
side, rhythmically moving in sync with the weird band’s beats. He was just
trying to check out her dancing, ignoring Katka, when she came up begging
him to dance with the others.
“Everyone is so stiff! Czechs dance like Germans, up and down all jerky
like puppets. Why don’t you dance Chico? Come on! Show us how Latinos
do it!”
“Who’s that dancing?” Chico asked.
“My cousin Fanny from France.”
After the musicians had packed up their instruments and all of Katka’s
older relatives hobbled off with them, a DJ took over for the younger crowd.
Soon after, apparently she’s the one who had come up to Chico and Katka,
then boldly asked him to dance, though she barely spoke a word of English.
Katka’s French cousin whose father had brought all the cheese for the
party. After dancing with each other for over an hour, she’s the one who’d
first rubbed her hips into his and then let her head dangle gently over his
shoulder. She’s the one who first brushed his upper back with her fingers,
as they slowly spun around to, “I’m Your Puppet.” Where had the DJ gotten
that anyway? Or was Art fucking with his head? Chico felt the thin strings
being tied around his neck, wrists and ankles; the fate of a puppet. He jerked
his head up to mock his inevitable fate, with Katka’s cousin wrapped around
him, seeming to be begging for a hickie—French love bites—and he knew
there’d be no quick road back home after this. No more GooGoo, her tattoos
and her fucked up family, all hypes. Slowly revolving around together on the
empty dance floor, Chico had felt like they were invisible, tangling up in the
strings which were binding them to each other for god knows how long.
When the DJ shifted to a 50s style rock beat, she slipped out of his grasp.
He was left dazzled; he just couldn’t take his eyes off her magical dance, and
she was dancing her ass off, ignoring everybody else doing the rock and
roll, French-style with precise spins. Constantly blowing bubbles with her
chewy bubble gum, or else shaking her long hair out at him, she had put on
sunglasses so he couldn’t tell if she was looking only at him or through him.
Were they really staring at each other from across the room? Her pouting
lips. Sometimes fast go-go shakes, turn left, turn right, twisting her body
around like rubber then in between songs, a weary, lascivious sway standing
all alone in a corner of the dance floor. Weaving and bending her body from
side to side, softly touching her shoulders with her chin, each movement of
hers sent screams up and down Chico’s spine and beyond. He pictured her
beside him, space walking, grooving around the stars and lost planets all
night. One long sweet dessert, banana time, whip cream and thick scoops
of choco-sauce on top of French Vanilla. Bongos beating inside his head and
pants. Somersaults flipping feet inside his stomach. Banana baby wow. Once
she finally took off her sunglasses—the dark circles, the lovely shadows | 629
under her sad eyes were all it took for Chico to lose his cool distance and go
do the babaloo boogaloo bounce up beside that precious girl.
Chico was so out of control he didn’t even notice the French guys collecting
around the dance floor eyeing him with a plan to contain the fire building up
in his semi-flares. Though French now have a reputation for being wimpy
and hardly worth a shit in a war, atavism can’t be ignored. The ruthlessness
of Genet’s policemen, or his hoodlum friends and lovers can still be found
in picturesque French villages around Mont Chanin and Macon, precisely
where Fanny, her boyfriend and his buddies had come from. Art once even
bragged about being one eighth French. From a village of thugs, one greatgrandfather of his had immigrated to California. Chico now pictured Art’s
great-great-grandfather as one of the depraved who had lurked around the
dance floor at the wedding. Jealous of Chico styling in his tux, white shirt
creased stiff and sparkling, he was in transcendence as the French thugs
formed a circle around him. He just kept on bumping up to Fanny’s gyrating
body. Watch your fangs, he kept telling himself, as she twisted around him,
coiling up and down his leg, pulling her skirt up higher showing him warm
enough thigh to be killed for. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck
resting her head on his chest for another slow dance.
Mexico’s greatest national holiday, Cinco de Mayo, meaning the Fifth of May,
celebrates the defeat of the French army at Puebla in 1862. Six thousand
well-trained French were brought down by less than 4,000 ragged Mexicans.
Though a year later the French went on to eventually capture Mexico City
for Napoleon III and Emperor Maximilian’s short-lived reign. During that
invasion, Mexicans called the ruthless French in blue-uniforms, “blue
butchers,” because so many prisoners were hanged in plazas. The French
had believed Mexicans considered public execution to be an honorable
death, and for many of them it still is. At the end of the song, Fanny moved
to the edge of the dance floor coaxing one of her girlfriends to dance with
her and Chico. But before the two girls got back to the gyrating descendent
of Mexican-Indian peasants, the exotic tourist from Pico Maravilla, two blue
butchers were on him, pinning him to the floor in a stunning reenactment
of French barbarism in Mexico over a century ago. The blood gushing out
of Chico’s nose met up with an outpour from his mouth to form a pillow of
roses under his head. How would Genet put it? Flowers, red petals spreading
out rapidly. The blood sucked up the side of Chico’s head then settled on his
aching face like an ointment to seep back inside where it belonged. Lying in
his soaky bed of roses, the petit French dandelion rushed over to comfort
Chico after the gang dispersed as quickly as they had descended. By the time
Art scrambled on to the floor to back up his homeboy Chico, the girls already
had him up on his feet and swigging a glass of red wine.
Everyone remembers that that’s when the free-for-all began. All Chico can
remember is that it had been him against Katka’s family, the Czechs and
630 |
their French cousins. Again a hundred hands grabbed and punched him
after he had knocked out two of the Frenchmen—flattened them out cold on
the dance floor. Cultural differences. Art had desperately tried to convince
Katka’s family to back away, and let his best man off the hook. Chico was
new to the country, still had jet lag, had been raised in a hard part of the
city, overwhelmed by so many exotic women checking him out, and Art had
to explain all this to his in-laws in a foreign language he was still learning.
Besides, he tried to explain honestly, that actually it’s a tradition for Mexican
and Chicano weddings to end up in free-for-alls, one family against the other.
It’s normal for police to come and arrest dozens of cousins at weddings back
home, Art had explained this, almost in tears. Assault and battery. Disturbing
the peace. Manslaughter. Sometimes people are stabbed or shot, but that’s all
part of the celebration! That’s how we do it back home, the bride’s family
versus the groom’s—punching and stabbing it out, it’s tradition. The only
problem was for this bash, Chico had been on his own. Art didn’t back him
up on that night, though Chico had held his own pretty good, Katka and the
new in-laws had to regretfully admit.
After clearing the floor at Art’s wedding Chico was so proud that his years
in elementary school, junior high and just two years of high school before
he dropped out, had made him a man to deal with in any Euro city. He
laughed about it back home for months, explaining that his childhood had
left him able to put up a good fight anywhere in the world. Now that he was
in Europe again, he’d promised to control his temper, or contain his survival
instincts. Now he needed to stay and help Katka decide what to do with Art’s
taco stand, El Czechano, and try to figure out what the hell had happened to
his homeboy. But it was also complicated to stay in the country longer than
a month, because his visa would expire.
He had just spoken to his sister La Lupe a few days ago, explaining all this
to her from the main post office, since Katka’s flat didn’t have a phone.
“What’s this, you’re not coming back?”
“What are you saying? Look I’ve just decided to stay here longer than I
thought. Can you please send me the original copy of my birth certificate?
You wouldn’t believe what the Foreigner’s Police needs just so I can stay
longer than a month. You need to get there at 4:00 am in the morning then
wait in line outside in the cold, with mostly Russians and Vietnamese,
dressed like cholos, who are really desperate to stay in the country. Well you
push your way into the building then into so many other offices just for them
to yell at you, shouting all the things you need to bring back. So now I need
my birth certificate, and here it needs to be translated into Czech, then taken
to a notary for final verification. I need one of Katka’s friends to sign me into
their apartment, so I have an official place to stay, though I’m just sleeping
on peoples couches. I need to borrow a couple thousand dollars from Katka
so I can open a bank account with a thousand dollars in it, to show that I
have money to fly home in case they kick me out of the country, and what | 631
worries me most is that I need a verification that I’ve never been arrested
back home. The U.S. embassy can’t show that anyway, so for the time being
I’m alright. I just need to “say” that I’ve never been arrested back home or in
this country. I’m just lucky no one called the cops when we were fighting at
Art’s wedding.”
“Lucky if you’re going to the Foreigner’s Police? That sounds like trouble
ese, maybe those people don’t want anymore Chicanos moving in. Why
don’t you just come back? Does Katka really need you there? And maybe the
embassies can get this information. There’s men asking for you, they keep
asking when you’re gonna be home. They come by early mornings, driving
Fords like FBI.”
“Probably insurance salesmen in training, working for my old boss.”
“I don’t think so. They were waiting for me when I came from work and
wanted me to go out for dinner, to a McDonalds, to ask me questions about
you. But I’m tired when I get home, so I told them No Way. So it sounds like
you are flying the coop like Art and Bad Rosie, or what? I don’t know if she
had told you, but she was planning to go to Prague too and stay with Art,
but now she has to change her plans. Maybe she’ll go to Columbia just for a
while to hide out. You gonna be an alien too?”
“Hard to say, but it’s not just those Fords. I gotta figure out what happened
to Art. He had good business with El Czechano. And what was I doing at
home anyways? Same thing Art was doing before he left home. Get up every
morning at 5:00 to catch a bus at 5:45 to get to Century City at 7:40, go buy
a coffee together then get to the office by 8:00. All day call people up and
pound fear into their heads. Buy insurance. Then wait around for them to
call me back, cause they finally were scared to die. Get off at 6:00, get home
around 8:00-8:30, eat dinner, watch reruns then try to sleep by 10 at the
latest. I’m in no rush to go back to that bullshit. I need more time here. I just
don’t understand w