The Combinations, page 101
about, doing his chicken dance, saucer-eyed, red knitted cap, a tattered white
raincoat hanging on him like greasy plumage. Tourists clapped. Tourists
snapped pics. Tourists jived on the crazy old guy. No-one bought the tin cans.
At the bottom of Národní a couple of Christian Science nuts were
handing out flyers: Say NO to Evolution!* All praise to man’s unimpeachable
optimism. When it comes down to it, someone said, you give a monkey a choice, it’ll
turn itself into someone’s undigested dinner for the hell of it, thinking it’s moved up in
the world. Squeegee boys at the intersection extorting five-second carwashes.
Horns blared, drivers shouted through their windscreens at the offending world
the way they probably shouted at their TVs. Under the traffic lights, a woman,
brown overcoat & a knitted hat, was singing in a faltering soprano an aria from a
Verdi opera. La forza del destino. Standing next to her, a blindman with
* Jesus, Mary & Josephus! And Hogo Fogo too! [:]
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walkingcane held a bowl out for change. Pedestrians passed. Traffic passed. The
bridge across Střelecký Island. Riverboats tooting, pedalos plashing, ducks
quacking. A happy duck’s a tasty duck. Fishermen in wooden skiffs, moored under
the bridge, cast their flies with that bored, fatalistic air it takes decades of out-
waiting carp & catfish to acquire.
Němec crossed over between the cars & headed towards the Island,
zoning-in on one more stone left unturned. He descended the steps. The park
was crowded with all types soaking up the last of the weather. Wizened bums on
park benches, old dowagers hawking outdated copies of The Watchtower,
boneheads with sleeping dogs, dreadlocked rastas & buttoned-down insurance
drones, geeks with medieval broadswords, semi-nude environmentalists, one-
armed thalidomide panhandlers, do-gooders out to save the world & sell you a
tshirt, abortionistas peddling selfservice DNA, gene-selection automats, the
works. They wanna fix things for the better? What’s in it for them? Let me tell you
something — can’t trust a fanatic — the type’d put a bomb under their own arses and
set the fuse, only they’re just as likely to put a bomb under yours. When Paradise Rose
comes whistling down the tracks, kiddo, grab your hat and hold onto your pants, and
don’t wait around to watch the fireworks…
Navigating the lunatic fringe: autistic stick-up artists, soup-kitchen drop-
outs, survey-takers, undercover narks & junkies hedging their bets (if the junk
don’t kill ’em the water they boil it down in will), each with the lowdown on the
Meaning of Life.* Man does not know wherefore he seeks… Yessir! Always
someone waiting around with a finger itching on a button — like The End just
couldn’t come soon enough, for all them saviour-types dyin’ to be made new, the
little Emperor in his birthday suit grinning into the big mirror & God grinning
back. Some pocket Galileo glued to his telescope in search of the collective
doomsday already at hand, the movable feast of recantation, to undo the
Original Fall from Most-Amazing Grace, the Holey of Holies, the Great Error,
the Sin of Sins — call it History stuck on an oblique axis, like a cosmic suicide
note waiting to be signed: pristine, typed, no drafts, as is, a clean copy, not a
word or letter exxed-out. Just the way Adam’s navel. Eve’s, too. Nothing to stare
into but the earthapples of each other’s eyes, little firmaments full of forbidden
fruit, all of them with their very own pet name, whole constellations of cutesy
naughtiness unbeknownst to Big Daddy, the incorporeal poetry of the zodiacs,
telling themselves this was how their little universe was created — & stayed that
* As close as the nearest trashcan. [:]
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way, fixated, till one turned into a tree & the other an asp. Stop! Go back! You’re doin’ it all wrong!
It should’ve come as no surprise that the château was completely boarded
up — the ubiquitous REKONSTRUKCE stencilled on plyboard. There were
dead leaves piled against the steps where the wind had blown them. Inside a
fenced enclosure, bags of cement were piled around the steel door where the
entrance to the Kabaret Grünegast had been. Another one bites the dust, eh, kiddo?
Kinda narrows the options from here on in. Down by the shore, a couple of Frank
Zappa lookalikes were strumming guitars — deep shadows under the purple
trees — ducks on the water, looking on bemused. The kids sang, Smoke it till
you’re slaughtered, flyin’ in the sky… Other kids sat around on blankets drinking
box wine, passing joints.
Němec stood there for a while listening then climbed the steps again,
trying to decide if next he should see if maybe they’d shut down the Zrcadlo
Theatre as well, & if not, on the off-chance, Alice Steinerová, or instead just
head back to The White Whale, call it quits for the day while he was still, so to
speak, ahead. He decided to toss for it: heads, Zrcadlo — tails, the other place.
It came down tails. Overhead, rivergulls shrieked in an orange-grey sky.
Riverghouls. Down below, the horn of a barge as it passed upstream, prow
emerging from the shadows of the bridge with its cargo of gravel piled into
ziggurats, the long flat hull, the pilot’s house with its light on, smoke from the
stack, flag hanging limp at stern & the chugchugchug of it, brown wake washing
out of the lock. Němec retraced his steps. The blindman & soprano were still
there at the intersection — the soprano with hands clasped in front of her like
someone at prayer, or maybe Verdi was just her way of doing penance. Němec
tried whistling it but couldn’t get the notes, keeping one eye on the pavement &
doing hopscotch around the dogshit, thinking a drink would indeed be welcome
right about now.
The antiquariat with the gibbet over its door had a folio edition of Mayakovsky
in the window beside back issues of Kino magazine & a book about circus clowns
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with a grinning dwarf on the cover. Some things, Němec considered, are just
bound to turn up like that, eh? He scanned the discount boxes, a stack of old
Telefunken discs, faded purple & orange sleeves like bits of ’s wallpaper.
Němec eyed a Kerstin Thorborg recording with serious intent. He weighed the
cash situation: vinyl or vino, but not both. The White Whale was only two doors
down. It was an unequal contest from the start.
By now the place was empty except for a waitress in a denim vest & a
customer sitting alone in the gloom beside the coat-rack: a woman in a felt coat
searching for something in her handbag without seeming to find it. Thursday
evening blues. Not Wednesday, not Friday, kinda not anywhere. He took the same
table by the window, though by now the scenery was nonexistent & the street
pretty much dead. There was a different waitress on shift, she made one of those
faces at Němec when she got close enough for a look at the welt round his eye &
the dent in his hat. Far out, her eyes said. She obviously took him for a character.
maybe one of those bums gonna sleaze off without settling his bill, cause her a
whole lotta unneeded grief. He gave her his stupidest lopsided grin & asked for
a jug of frankovka, then changed his mind & decided to move onto the real stuff
so asked for a slivovice instead —
‘On second thoughts, make that two.’
The waitress waited with her mouth open till she seemed more or less
certain that was the whole order & drifted back behind the bar. A faint herbal
scent drifted after her.
Němec smoothed himself down & stretched his legs under the table &
gave his head an airing, punching the dent out of his crown & hanging the hat
& stick from the back of an adjacent chair. The damp of the winecellar still
somehow clung to him. It set him to thinking, going back over the course of
recent events, the whole accumulation of incidents, circumstances so to speak
conspiring to his general disadvantage. And what was it with all those attaché
cases? Was Faktor starting up a collection? And that whole VF Entertainment
shtick — moving up in the world was he? What’d be next, President of the
goddamn Republic? His drinks arrived. The waitress ogled his head
unabashedly. Němec made that grin again. Ran a hand over the fissure lines.
Winked his panda eye. The waitress shivered —
‘One of those days, huh?’
‘Story of my life.’
‘You wanna smoke something, make you feel better?’
‘I dunno. You ever see ghosts?’
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‘Ghosts?’
‘Yeah, like dead people come back from the grave, ’cos maybe they’re
lonely & need someone to talk to…’
‘That’s awful. I never thought of it that way. I always kinda figured you’d
have lots of company when you’re dead. Y’know, all those other dead people?’
‘Maybe it’s like the first day at school. Lot of strangers. New rules. Hard
to know your way around. That sort of thing.’
The waitress frowned, nodded, fidgeted in one of her vest pockets & came
out with a thin joint & a BIC lighter. She lit it. Němec watched her inhale, fold
her arms, look thoughtful, nod some more, exhale. He raised a glass —
‘Here’s to it,’ he said.
‘You want some,’ she held the joint out.
Němec downed his drink, took the joint, dragged on it, passed it back.
The woman with the handbag glanced myopically up, then kept on rooting for
whatever it was she couldn’t find. The waitress sat down, still hugging herself
with one arm. Němec exhaled, the waitress inhaled. He hit the second glass.
The burn of the slivovice cut through the burn of the smoke.
‘What’s with the ghosts, anyway?’
‘Occupational hazard,’ he said, putting the empty glass beside the other.
‘…?’
‘Writer.’
The waitress worked the joint down to the butt, made a grimace —
‘Is that how you did that?’ she blew smoke over his head.
‘The competition these days,’ he massaged his scalp, ‘is downright brutal.
Don’t be deceived by all the niceties…’
‘Yeah,’ she pocketed the butt with the lighter & got up. ‘You want two
more of those?’
‘Two more,’ Němec said, ‘would be just fine.’
He stifled a yawn, rubbed his eyes. Strange, the way things happened, just
the way they did. The deadman at the monastery, the soprano, the gulls on the
river. How, in retrospect, each scene would be incomplete without them, no
matter how incidental or absurd or unconnected with anything else. The
waitress, the woman with the handbag. A movie poster in a cellar full of junk. A
voice he couldn’t put a face to.
Two double brandies arrived. The waitress pulled out a chair & sat down
again, thumbing the flint of her lighter —
‘So what d’you write?’
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Němec shrugged —
‘Whatever comes into my head.’
The waitress pulled out another joint & lit it. Her eyes fixed on a spot
somewhere above Němec’s left ear while she held the smoke in, then exhaled.
She nodded —
‘I can dig that.’
Just then Bill Evans started playing on the radio, something elegiac &
slow. Němec brought one of the glasses to his nose, savoured the aroma, sipped.
The waitress, he noticed, had one of those Celtic things tattooed on the inside
of her wrist — a maze of interwoven red & green. Outside the window, a truck
pulled up. Doors slammed. The sound of metal on cobblestones. The waitress
stubbed out her joint & waved the smoke away —
‘Duty calls,’ she sighed & got up. ‘Let me know when you need more of
those.’
Němec watched her cross the floor to the bar. Ballet slippers, thin legs,
elasticised miniskirt (lime green). She took out a rag & began wiping the taps,
head cocked to one side so that her hair just grazed the shoulder of her vest.
While she wiped she chewed her lip. She barely looked sixteen.
‘Hey,’ Merkin said, coming through the door with a keg over his shoulder,
talking to a delivery guy who was right behind him with a couple of more kegs
stacked on a dolly, ‘you ever been to one of them dwarf-tossing contests?’
Němec ogled them.
‘Nope,’ the delivery guy said, ‘but I’ve seen the odd bit of carp-punting…’
The two disappeared into a storage room behind the bar. Reappeared.
Went back out, bumping the dolly up the steps.
‘Got a cousin up in Jáchymov, breeds fightin’ rabbits, you ever wanna
come out one day for some hardcore blood-bunnying…’
The door slammed behind them. Němec dug a finger in his ear & stirred
it about. He could hear voices outside & expected Merkin to return any moment
& then he’d be stuck listening to the man for the rest of the night. He tipped
back the slivovice to put himself in the mood, trying at the same time to conjure
some sort of believable scenario out of the day’s events & maybe an alternative to
what was in store. There was still time to catch the second half of the show at
the Zrcadlo. Pictures of Alice Steinerová floating in a dressingroom mirror, etc.
And afterwards? The location, the lighting & the inner monologue suited to the
occasion? Some prospect he’d make.
He hit the second glass. It put hard edges on everything in the room. The
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waitress whistled along with radio. Coltrane. The riff meandered. Twisted back
on itself. It made Němec think of the dwarf, leading him on a fool’s whatever,
down the garden path, so to speak. But where’d he been coming from? People
didn’t just appear like that, on the street, out of the blue. The saxophone wailed.
The sound of Merkin’s laughter wafted through the door. Němec stared at the
table. Ordinarily it would’ve served to pass some time, but something was riling
him. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket & dumped it beside the
empty glasses. The waitress saw it & gave him a vaguely disappointed look.
‘Take care of yourself,’ she said.
‘I’ll let you know how it went,’ he said, aiming for the steps.
The delivery truck pulled away just as he got to the door. Merkin stepped
past him on the way out. His timing couldn’t’ve been better. Only now what?
He looked up & down the street. To the left, the street narrowed & ran straight
into an apartment block, turning at a rightangle (⊾) towards the river. Where
the rightangle formed was a garage. Someone coming past The White Whale
from that direction wouldn’t’ve had too many options, then. It might even be
possible to backtrack, get a general sense of the possibilities. Němec had in mind
the notion of getting to the bottom of something* — meaning the dwarf, the
two attaché cases, the rendezvous in the cellar. He couldn’t imagine the dwarf
had travelled all that far.
As Němec stood there weighing the options, a girl with a terrier appeared
through a gap in the garage wall & walked right past him: the terrier had an
orange rubber ball in its mouth. Němec watched the two of them continue along
the street till they reached the antiquariat where, unlike the dwarf earlier that
day, they veered left. So much, Němec thought, for his theory. Curious, he
swung his stick in the direction of the garage & walked inside. The place was
empty. What at first had seemed like a gap in the wall was in reality the entrance
to a passageway that wound through the ground floor of a semi-derelict building
— first left & then right — opening into a dank courtyard walled with cracked
& peeling stucco the colour of raw sienna & overgrown with weeds. A terrace
stood eight feet off the ground, closed on three sides by a crumbling balustrade
& on the fourth by a row of French windows, all with their panes smashed. A
square of night sky loomed above it, completing the sense of desolation.
On the farther side of the courtyard, the passageway continued, tending
once more to the left, past empty display boxes. A middle-aged charlady was
* One fiasco for the day wasn’t enough? [:]
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dragging a broom along the floor, sweeping a pile of litter (cigarette butts, bottle
tops, tram tickets, crumpled handbills) from one place to another. She muttered
something as Němec passed. Far from the song-struck charms of spring? He
stopped at the end of the passageway & looked back at the woman bent over her
broom, muttering & sweeping. Had he really heard her say what he thought
he’d heard? A tram clanged its bell. Drrrrrrrang! Němec stepped out onto the
