The Combinations, page 105
With nervous fingers Němec picked behind his right ear, trying to
dislodge something, anything, to set his mind straight. Volta saved him the
trouble —
‘What d’you want?’
‘I don’t know,’ Němec said.
‘Then I can’t help you,’ he replied. ‘Can I?’
Outside, it was a typical October, rain streaking the window, lines drawn
in the sky like so many puppet strings. Perhaps because the doctor expected him
to say something Němec asked —
‘D’you think it’s possible, not just to hallucinate things, but the processes
behind them?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be possible?’
‘I don’t mean the reasons for things. I mean… Their inner life, how they
exist when we aren’t there to observe them.’
There was a thin line of smoke coming from the tall chimneystacks across
the river. The word desultory came to mind. Němec turned to look at Volta. He
was smoking his cigar with a detached expression on his face.
‘There’s an old joke,’ the doctor said after a while, a weak smile creasing
his lips now. ‘No doubt you’ve heard it.’
He turned the end of his cigar against the lip of the ashtray on his desk —
‘A man is walking alone through a forest when he slips on a banana skin.
There’s nobody else around to see him fall on his head. Is it still funny?’
‘What would a banana be doing in a forest to begin with?’
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Volta set his cigar down against the lip of the ashtray, very slowly, as if it
were the most delicate of operations, then reverting to a Vincent Price
monotone asked if there wasn’t anything else Němec wanted. Required, was
perhaps the word he used. His look conveyed only fatigue. Němec opened his
mouth to speak but nothing came out: another idiotic thought was going around
& around in his head, this time about a family of bears in a northern forest
waiting for the punchline of Volta’s joke to be explained to them — they’d never
seen a banana, didn’t know what one was.
‘You know,’ Němec finally said, ‘I saw a film the other day. Your former
patient, Alice Steinerová was in it. There was one scene, in particular… She was
dressed as a Carmelite, kneeling at an altar, while a black devilman with wings
came down from the sky or whatever… Sound familiar?’
‘Do yourself a favour,’ Volta said, standing up. ‘Try not to analyse things
too deeply. Just try to see them for what they are…’
Without further ceremony he took out his prescription book, scratched at
it with a fountain pen, & told Němec to come back in a fortnight —
‘If you’re still feeling the same way.’
Volta came around the desk towards him, holding a square of paper —
‘See if these do any good,’ he said.
The act wasn’t convincing to either one of them — the pretext seemed
to’ve gotten lost somewhere back along the way, the journey travelled, so to
speak. He stuck the prescription in Němec’s hand & led him to the door &
closed it behind him.
Or perhaps that wasn’t what happened at all. Perhaps, after Němec’d
described everything about the Prof’s Polygraphia, the doctor had simply stated
plainly that nothing Němec’d told him made any sense. And Němec’d thought
the doctor was probably right. And for several minutes he’d just stood there on
the landing outside Volta’s office not knowing what to do, wanting only to
remove myself from that scene, to disappear through a gap in the stairs or, like
Faust, through a crack in the ceiling. Poof! But why go to all that trouble when a
door would do?
Ó
Was Němec having difficulty keeping his version of events in check? And what
if Volta was right? What if he was the one playing a game with himself? Did they
have him as wound-up as all that? Well how d’you tell the difference, kiddo, between
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bein’ lost in the woods and just bein’ blinded by ’em? Assuming Volta was part of it,
what part was it? Ever since Alice Steinerová had told him her story, he’d
wondered how men like Volta existed. The Resurrection Man, she called him.
The Suicide Doctor. Němec flashed on himself six months ago — a speckled
egg on a sod, a pulp of shattered vertebrae. Was Volta trying to remake all the
dirty, broken, voided bits of humanity into some sort of model homunculus of
the World Redeemed? Echoes of The Abominable Dr Phibes, The Island of Dr
Moreau, Dr Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein, The Diabolical Doctor Z and his
Fiendish Creation, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Dr Logan from Day of the Dead.
And why’d he been born — he, Němec? The million little swimmers working
like idiots against the tide, contra spemo spermo, to bring this senseless entity into
being. Could the powers who’d made him have had some special task in mind?
Thrust into this absurdity. First they stole him from himself & turned him into
a shadow, then they stole the shadow. Hehe, not even the shadow of a man, eh
kiddo? Says right here in the contract, you’re owned, can’t even kick the bucket without
written approval. Well fancy that. And all those memories he’d thought belonged
to him — made up, to fill the long blank dormitory nights — barred squares of
lights drifting across the ceiling, afraid to close his eyes, till they forced him.
Thinking (but they weren’t even his thoughts) how in sleep the soul is projected out
of the body with the risk that it won’t return. And there, in his ventriloquist’s
dummysuit, being hoist from the rooftops, up into the grey (would it always be
grey?) — as now, over the embankment, the lapping river, the tenebrous
tenements, bedevilled mouths agaping. Do you see it? The thin cord that pulls down
the teeth onto the chopping block?
Facts being facts, there was nothing for certain Němec could say that he
actually knew about Alice Steinerová, even her name, let alone the things that
concerned him most: the nature of her relationship to Volta, or his to the Prof
(always somehow implied though never spelled-out) or Bareš the fingerman, or
Faktor, purveyor of fandangos, crackpot schemes & so much sand in the eye.
You put them all together & what did you get? THE SECRET COMBINE, a
between-the-acts magik show with smoke & mirrors: Volta, with his hypnotist’s
baritone, waving a plastic wand & wafting cigar smoke — Alice Steinerová, all
glitter & tinsel & unwrapped flesh — Bareš in the ticket booth counting the
stubs — the dwarf popping up when you least expected him, doing cute little
panto faces in a pink elasticised jockstrap — & topping the bill, Faktor the
impresarious Master of Ceremonials with his Cecil B. DeMille curtain routine
down pat, Ladies and Gents, what you’re about to experience is unique in this
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world… — while last, & quite very much least, he, Němec, the somnambulant
stooge in the eighth row who gets coaxed up onto the stage to be sawn in half,
while the lovely lady looks appalled & gasps, & the dwarf drops down from the
flyloft on a trapeze like a urinating cherub with cardboard wings, & the magician
pulls another rabbit from his hat, takes a bow, & him (Němec, lest we forget)
left lying there in a mess of bits & pieces that don’t add up. It’s all a gag of
course, the audience laughing their heads off, hahahahaha. But it’s not even
funny! Hohohohoho. He doesn’t even realise he’s just been turned into a talking
fish. Change all the names, transform the events — as in dreams, to reveal their
secret ordination? Bugaboo! Hoodihoo!! And not even a real fish, but some
rubber inflatable job someone’s just pricked a hole in. Squoosh! His entire walk-
on (hahahahaha) fin-flapping cameo boiling down to nothing but sea-damp
flatulence — a whoopee cushion after the fact — a wispy expiration aspiring to
the actor’s formidable instinct* of preservation by self-betrayal, fisheyed to the
optics of this grotesque guppy’s theatrum mundi: of a tremulous fat lip stretched
over hook & sinker, the parody of a garbage bin’s Christmas dinner — as
someone said once upon a tiddlywink…
It brought to mind one of those old stories from the Ghetto, about a
beautiful young girl, called Alička, who sold paper roses to passersby on Celetná
Street. One cold October evening, as she wended her weary way home through
gaslit streets, she noticed a creepy old man following her. It happened again the
next day. The third time she saw him following her, she became afraid & tried
to run away. But where the street passed beneath the Powder Tower, a pair of
carriages had got stuck, & there was no way around them. Poor Alička was
trapped. The creepy man was coming closer & so, in a panic, the girl rushed
inside the tower & up the stairs. The man was right on her heels, step for step,
all the way to the roof. In a panic & with nowhere else to escape to, the girl
threw herself from a small window, a desperate prayer on her lips. Jehovah,
who’d been watching the entire glib drama unfold, took pity on the poor girl &,
as she plunged towards her death, transformed her into a cobblestone.* Which
was exactly the kind of thing you could expect from Divine Justice.
* A technique, haha, that functions automatically. [:]
* Cobblestones, it is widely believed, should never be laid in a leap-year, for in a non-leap year one
might land on your head. [:]
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The stage of the Zrcadlo Theatre was flanked on either side by narrow
balustrades ornamented with cherubs whose wings had mostly cracked a fallen
off, relics of bygone days. Němec arrived just as the second act was beginning.
The small theatre was dark, bodies pressed close to one another on rows of fold-
out metal chairs — someone coughing, someone shifting their weight, whispers,
stifled laughter, then the stagelights & a sudden hush, all momentarily obedient
to the command of illusionism. There, where nothing was before: a sittingroom,
old War-era furnishings, wallpaper & carpet à la mode, browns, dark mauves &
forest green. In the back wall, a wide doorway. Through it, an office, decorated
in the same style, with a paper-strewn writing desk, bookshelves & filing
cabinets. Above the desk, a large historical map of Golem City stuck up on the
wall, like a picture within a picture, framed by the doorway of the sittingroom, a
frame within a frame. Its symmetry was soon broken by the entrance of a
charlady, middleaged, stage-left, bearing a large bouquet of roses, red, wrapped
in plane white paper. And so it went. The charlady put the roses in a vase &
went about her drudgery. To the right, a door banged closed. A youngish-
looking man in a grey suit, humming to himself (what was it? Das Klagende
Lied?), carrying an empty, unfastened briefcase, crossed the inner office to the
writing desk. Immediately he began stuffing papers from the desk into the
briefcase. Tesman, the programme notes said, a junior minister in the Justice
Department.
It wasn’t till twenty minutes in, that Alice appeared — dressed as she’d
been that first night, in the heroine’s role. It was only by the costume that
Němec recognised her, even her voice seemed strange. She entered from a
second door just as the man with the briefcase & the charlady went out by the
first. The floor of the office was strewn with papers. Immediately Hedda-Alice
set about gathering them up & sorting them back out into different trays on the
writing desk. In the meantime, the man with the briefcase had re-entered, stage
right & was standing just outside the doorway watching her. Someone coughed.
It must’ve been the man, because then, as if by involuntary reflex, Hedda-Alice
jumped back from the desk, turned to face him & stood there stiffly at attention.
‘Goodmorning, Comrade Minister!’
‘You’re late! Don’t you know what’s been happening? Slánský’s been
arrested.’
‘Oh no…’
‘Oh yes! I want everything that even mentions Slánský removed from the
files. Find the duplicates, the triplicates. Do whatever has to be done!’
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‘Immediately, Comrade Minister… but…?’
‘Remember, my dear, if anything happens to me, it’ll be your neck too.’
As they spoke, the charlady once again entered, stage left, & stood on the
edge of the shadows as if listening. By the end of the first act, Hedda Gabler had
become a fullfledged intrigue. Brack, the resident N.K.V.D. man, in the
company of two goons, had visited with insinuations, innuendos.
‘Between ourselves? Alone together, you mean?’
Hedda-Alice had found a loaded gun in the Minister’s desk drawer. A
Beretta. Known to jam at the most inappropriate times. (For reasons
unexplained she pockets it: it reappears later, a deus ex machina as they say.)
There was no question of whether the performance could be called faithful to
the original or not: it was a drama of divergences, echoes, transpositions,
elaborately concatenated to the point of grossness — a bureaucratic nightmare
from which whole nations were struggling to awake, suffocated by… By what?
Inconclusions? Perhaps the director (“Gideon Richter,” according to the
programme) had gone mad. Or else, mind wandering out through the eyes,
Němec’d already begun re-imagining things, seeing the actors perform the lines
as he would’ve scripted them — a costume drama holding a mirror up to itself.
Even then it barely made sense. As far as he could grasp it, the whole
arrangement hinged not on Ejlert Lövborg’s lost manuscript, as it did in the play
written by Ibsen, but on a secret analysis of a chess match — one that hadn’t yet
actually taken place…
The year: .
The place: Golem City.
It’s a match the Soviets are determined to win at All Costs — the
headache of how having been delegated from Moscow to the local Golem
City Politburo, giving rise to a crisis of unprecedented proportions, claims
& counterclaims of sabotage & conspiracy which reach to the highest
levels: whole ministries have been split right down the middle, between
those aligned with the socalled Classicist school (who favour the “closed”
form of the game) & those with the Modernists (who favour a more
“open” form). A small minority of Hyper modernists are keeping mum,
wisely biding their time. The Classicists so far have succeeded in retaining
the upper hand & heads are expected to roll. Emergency meetings,
backroom confabs, heated exchanges over the telephone — hackneyed
stageplay to convey a sense of drama missing from the script.
Enter Tesman, a type of Margolius-in-the-making — a nobody in the
larger scheme of things, in the right place at the wrong moment, cogging-
out another five year plan when the message gets passed down the line
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that if something isn’t done to get the situation in-hand, he’s next. With
the economy of the nation teetering on the brink, he doesn’t hesitate to
drop everything & dig his childhood copy of Pachman’s Modern Chess
Strategy out of his desk drawer (not noticing — curious oversight this —
the missing Beretta). He needs to swat-up fast: Stalin himself has taken an
interest in the matter — paranoia, always ubiquitous, is becoming palpable
— he notices it in the way even the janitor looks at him on his way to the
lavatory. Word’s evidently gotten around: he’s a marked man & knows it.
This brings us in on Hedda-Alice —
‘Goodmorning, Comrade Minister!’
The last we see of them before the scene change is him instructing her
to do whatever’s necessary to get a copy of that damned analysis.
Meanwhile, a thousand kilometres away, the members of the Soviet team,
all “Steins,” are being given a parting lecture on the tarmac by some brass
hat whose making it plain as day they’ll be expected to munch cyanide
rather than face defeat, before boarding a Defence Ministry Tupolev for
Golem City. Their chief adversary: Sammy the capitalist-imperialist chess
Wunderkind, a soda-chugging eight-year-old from Brooklyn, maybe. It’s
the first major engagement of the Cold War & orders are orders.
The next scene takes place in a pub near the Castle (Golem City): local
watering hole of the Politburo tidewaiters. They’re gabbing about the Big
Game over pints of Měšťan — they’re calling it The Show — filling us in
on the dramatis personae, the who’s-who & who’s-got-what-coming. It’s
