The Combinations, page 10
when I was the world’s most tremendous lay!
Oh, if you’d only seen me then…
‘Man must take his miracles as they come,’ the Prof intoned, rounding the story
off on a solemn note, ‘even in an ass’s ear…’
As the occasion required, the Prof was standing under an umbrella in the
courtyard of the old white house with the relic of Kelley’s Tower butting out
above the eaves, a headless neck. Němec, for whose benefit the tale had been
retold, stood at his side, slightly bored, watching a wet clubfooted pigeon trying
to make a roost for itself under a drainpipe. It was several weeks since their
inauspicious first meeting over a chessboard at the Klementinum.
‘In fact,’ the Prof said, gesturing up at the drizzle, ‘our nasty alchemist with
the clipped lobes was supposed to’ve installed some manner of lightning rod up
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there on the Tower roof: a copper globe atop a mizzen mast. They say he used it
to perform magic & conjure lightning out of clear sky — a stunt, presumably, to
impress the Emperor, surrounded as he was by an endless retinue of quacks &
conmen. Spectators, avid for miracles, gathered along the streets & castle walls.
Passersby saw sparks flash beneath their heels on the paving stones. Night after
night, streaming blue lights were seen all over the City, till the burghers grew
restive & the mast was petitioned to be taken down as a public nuisance.’
It was this that’d deformed the house’s architecture, he said. The Prof
scratched his left ear & pursed his lips like a picture of someone pondering the
imponderables, then continued —
‘Kelley was the type of impure genius society conspires to produce in order
to persecute. A man whose soul may easily be parleyed for a parable — existing
between the yet unknown & the unknowable — a vain, all-too-human creature,
trading in the world’s dark secrets & darker fantasies. What is it Zarathustra
said? Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst the fragments and limbs of
human beings!’
Another pause & then, by way of a postscript —
‘I never could find any official record,’ he confessed, ‘of the woman in the
story, or of her unfortunate brat for that matter. Perhaps, after all, they existed
merely to facilitate a myth, or give birth to a fable…’
As a young student during the last heady days of Masaryk’s First
Republic, Hájek had acquired a taste for such apocrypha, going so far as to
attempt a dissertation on Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel (known to the elect as
the Maharal — notorious cabbalist & legendary maker of the Golem from Vltava
rivermud) & thereafter his scholastic bent was almost exclusively towards the
science & esoterica of the Mitteleuropean renascence.
The Prof kept a library in his apartment. In it were many unusual books,
including a collection of leatherbound antiques & rare editions, of potentially
dubious provenance (communist-era blackmarket underground networks of
Culture Ministry junior clerks, library technicians, museum guards, archivists,
petty thieves, restoration artists, junky antiquarians hungry for western currency,
smuggling illicit merchandise cross-border). Doubtful, at least, to’ve been
financed by a Privatdozent’s salary. The titles were as exotic as their bindings:
Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius, a sixteenth-century translation of Mattiolli’s botanical
writings, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, the Fama Fraternitatis, Columella’s De
Arboribus, Kepler’s Mysterium & (in several dozen black hidebound volumes) the
monstrous Codex Gigas, the Devil’s Bible.
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k
After ’ the house on Jánský Vršek had, like everything else, been
communalised by the Gottwald regime & the Prof himself convicted, in
absentia, of Illegal Abandonment of the State, sentenced to five years, pursuant
of the Law of October, , “on the Defence of the People’s Republic,” No.
, articles & respectively. After the moment’s euphoria of ’, all this
waits to be undone. With all the resentment of lost prerogatives the courts —
determined to work, when at all, with Dickensian slowness — look askance at
the Prof’s documentation — the existing tenants, benefactors of the system,
appeal — the State drags its feet — obstacles are put in the way, conditions
attached, a general airing of vested interests. Red tape mounts: the Law of
April, , No. , article ()(b), “on Judicial Rehabilitation” — the Law of
October, , No. , “on Mitigation of Property Injustices” — the Law of
February, , No. , “on Extra-Judicial Rehabilitation” — the Law of
February, , No. , “on the Conditions for Transfer of State Property to
Other Persons (Privatisation)” — the Law of May, , No. , “on
Regulation of Property,” etc.
You might think Democracy would have something more to say for itself,
but judges don’t grow on trees (though sometimes they hang from them) — still,
at the end of the day, there’re “principles” which in some quarters at least have to
be seen to be adhered to — the rights of property & so forth. Finally, if only for
lack of achievable alternatives, they decide in the Prof’s favour — taxes in arrears.
Home-sweet-home thus redeemed, & having since retired from the
pedagogue’s trade, the Prof, now emeritus, freed of all superfluous duties &
supernumerary distractions, is at liberty at last to pursue, unhindered &
undisturbed, his Old World proclivities for chess, the cabbala, cosmogony, &
the works of the misunderstood Moravian Kapellmeister, Gustav Mahler (-
), son of a Zhiddish shopkeeper & author of nine symphonies, number ten
unconcluded — these snorable autumn years especially devoted to the business,
ultimately futile if judged by the exacting standards-of-the-day, of deciphering
once & for all (his revealed lifelong obsession) the Voynich Manuscript. Till,
that is, one late October morning when, a Sunday, sitting in his bath,
chessboard balanced between his knees, a sudden aneurysm puts paid to all that
— a pantomime with the last act missing.
If it’d happened in a film, the rest would never be believed — the
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coldblooded madness of it, the unnatural symmetry of it, the absence of any
apparent justification for it — tragedy elevated to the dizzy heights of farce. In
their separate garconnières, & barely three days apart, both Alžběta Hájková
(wife) & Elsbeth von N____ (mistress) each asphyxiated themselves by leaving
open the gas valves. Wife first, immediately after burning all of the Prof’s letters.
Then Elsbeth von N____, having taken pains to put the Prof’s remaining papers
in a semblance of order — the blueprint & all the component pieces of his
mythic Polygraphia. The authorities were eager to rule-out foul play. Scandal
flared in the tabloids then died away.
Three Dead in Bizarre Suicide Pact?
Gruesome Gas Deaths
Deadly Tryst Ends Sordid Ménage à Trois
Confronted with this precipitous end to the Prof’s last labour, what was to be
done? The drama allowed for no postscript, no following instructions — what
began unforeseen concluded in a vista without prospects, like an immaculately
ordered room in which the one crucial element is missing & will always remain
missing, no matter how thoroughly one searches, no matter how fastidiously:
almost as if the whole thing had been staged simply to conceal the shoddiness of
the motive — a shoebox of burned letters, so anxiously culled — a half-dozen
(give or take) binders of notes belonging to an obscure investigation, tentative,
preliminary, by definition incomplete, so dutifully put in order — but into what
order could they’ve been put, other than the self-fulfilling order of tidied corners,
all neatly stacked, bound with lengths of ribbon? To what had they been privy,
the Prof’s muses? And who was the orderliness conceived for?
Since, after all, the singular consequence of this three-way tryst was the
courts, acting in no-one’s interest than their own, were left with few options but
to deem Professor Hájek intestate. No sinister character in the wings, no
unnamed claimant filing suit, no stealthy removal of the evidence. It’d all been
left there in plain view, to be signed-off by forensics, collected, sealed &
deposited by the State’s appointed executor in the National Literary Archive at
Strahov Monastery (perhaps the solemnity of it all gave the State cause to
suspend judgement, hedge their bets, who knows, all those papers might be
52
worth something one day — but did they bother with an expert assessment?).
There, under the supervision of a junior secretary, what’d seemed of an
almost irrational urgency in the task of mourning & in mitigation of two
suicides, was unceremoniously filed away inside a dozen metal boxes & promptly
forgotten. Or so it might’ve appeared.
Q
On the day the Prof’s ashes were put to rest, Němec sat out on the roof of his
apartment building with the superintendent, Blecha the “Bugman,” & got
properly soused. He looked like a scarecrow in the Bugman’s borrowed black suit
& tie, hands too big, feet sticking out of his shoes. And the more he drank, the
more like a scarecrow he looked, slowly sagging under its own weight, waiting
for a jackdaw to come & peck its strawman’s brains out, its button eyes.
‘Well,’ said Blecha, warming his hands over a primus stove, legionnaire’s
cap & a rug over his shoulders, ‘your friend’s gone to a better world to suffer in.
They all start out believing in the All-Mighty, till it’s just the bit about Calvary
that sticks. And Judas — a man’d be nothing without his sense of betrayal.’
Němec shivered. It was cold even for October. As for suffering, he had his
own theories. But something about the Prof’d never seemed quite right, & it had
nothing to do with God or Calvary or Silver Dollars. To die like that… And
then the others, the way they did it straight after… If they did it. He had a
strange feeling everything wasn’t as it seemed. And the longer he pondered, the
more he had an even stranger feeling, that he ought to be next — if only by
association. Death seemed to be contracting.
Gazing down from the ledge at the buglike things scuttling down below —
toy cars going around in circles, people hunched in their coats against the cold, the
universal entropy — Němec wondered what move would come next if all this was
just a game, the way the Prof used to say. But to ask the question you needed to
know what the game consisted of & Němec didn’t even know if there was one.
‘Like a man with a spade,’ as Blecha would’ve said, if he’d known what
Němec was thinking, ‘out searching for a hole to dig in the middle of the sea.’
Instead he reached for the bottle & Němec handed it to him. They passed it
back & forth like that till the evening settled in with a frost that made Němec’s
scarecrow suit glimmer in the light of the primus. By the time he made it back to
his room, he couldn’t feel a thing. Better, he thought, to wait & see what happens,
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let the other side make the first move. And the Prof? The dead, he muttered, half-
conscious, minister to themselves. He’d proved it by playing dead himself for so
long, faking his own existence, immaculately born full of holes.
The days after the funeral went by as they had before. But as autumn
progressed the leaves fell against the windowsills like a rustling in the mind that
wouldn’t stop. Little by little the routine of his existence stood more naked to
the eye — more pointless, empty, absurd. Němec thought back to the Home,
the desire for nothing more than to be forgotten, vanish into the narcissism of
amnesia, piss against his own crucifix if it came to that. Searching within
himself, Němec made the futile gestures of one digging for the sake of filling a
hole. He locked himself in his room & rolled empty bottles back & forth across
the floor. The floor became the foredeck on a seashanty with the weather gone
sour. Conspiring, as once before, in his own sabotage, the needling mitigation,
still tied by an umbilicus to his own mizzenmast, there in that monsoonal dark
second womb, the bosom of the failed State,* the wreck fast upon him, the
washed-out atoll & its cave. And the wind making voices in the cave. Voices of
the Ancient Prophets of Doom, the Undead Fathers of History’s Horrorshow:
We’ll have our happy ending now…
We’ll have our happy ending now.
We’ll have our happy ending now!
WE’LL HAVE OUR HAPPY ENDING NOW!
Sleepless, Němec listened to old vinyls on the scratchy recordplayer & sometimes
watched the vague shapes on the idiot boxes glowing in the windows across the
street: the comforting tedium of soap operas, old re-runs of nothing, commercials,
gameshows, the weather girl doing her ten o’clock reverse-striptease. More &
more he drank to keep the illusions from falling apart, till there were no illusions
left but the unpleasant ones. At least, he tried to tell himself, you could write it
down. Edify the soul. He stared into the typewriter like someone staring into an
empty Chinese Box: the misery, stupidity, drudgery of words, everything he’d ever
written seemed contaminated with it. It would’ve been better to heave that dumb
machine right out the window & be done with it.
But he didn’t. Untutored in the occult arts of patricide, Němec sat &
* What’d they get for their effort? Eight years after the Revolution the century bombed, the rest
was just a fizzle in a rain of sodden confetti hiding the fallout. [:]
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watched the cavewall shadows playing on the inner screen till the bottle won out
& everything went blank for a while, before it started all over again. Awake, he
dreamt that he slept. Time dragged, raced, leapt back & forth. For uncountable
days he languished in his cave on that barren sea-coast, setting out, being beaten
back, without ever arriving anywhere than the point he began, waiting for a
voice from the sky, a hand risen from the depths, a sign, any sign at all, to tell
him, what? Reduce existence to its ultimate particle and you end here?* Asleep, a
demon remained awake behind his eyes, calculating the set task, an existence by
metastasis, deadening the air in the room, leaching the mould that grew in
corners, along the windowsill, the stalactites hanging under drains. The future,
the demon whispered, doesn’t exist and never will. It was a childish idea, like a
seven-day weekend in which there was never any rest, too busy working to fill in
the holes that kept secretly reappearing.
The message came through loud & clear. Fingers tapping secret
commands on the walls — Morse transcriptions of alien traffic — the groaning
through the floor — the scampering of rats above the cornices — rubble sifting
down into sealed-up chimneys, dumbwaiters, coalchutes, hidden passageways —
the tireless inscrutable industry of ant colonies, weevils, termites, excavating
through brick, mortar, red clay, foundation stones — whole underworlds feeding
on the substrate of All Visible Things. But you didn’t need to see it, to know it
was true. The proof was everywhere.
* A late singular conjugation out of prehistoric miasma — the lost dream of the original composite
entity, Hermaphroditos, programmed to fail because otherwise it could not be? Mene, mene! The mortal soul in its x-ray machine, how beautifully it suffered! The languishing soul entertaining
itself to death with visions of its own torment. Sucked down into a mouldering compost, its dream
became a pretence for itself. Poor thing. [:]
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5
_________
INSTITUTE OF HUMAN STUDIES & SOCIAL MEDICINE
Psychiatric Assessment
Name: Jan Němec
D.O.B.: 04-05-1975
Address: Římská 499/15 120 00 Praha 2
Occupation: Unemployed
Admitted 30-12-1996 to the Traumatology Department, Golem City
General Teaching, with depressed cranial fracture, oblique
intra-articular fracture of the sixth cervical vertebra,
fractures to fourth, fifth & sixth rib on the left side,
