The Combinations, page 107
de se” notwithstanding,* hallowed ground etc., a sprinkling of Luhačovice Spa
Waters, % all-natural product, muttered over in Holy Roman Catholic &
Apostolic bureaucratese. There’d’ve been a ledger in an office somewhere, a
number in a column beside a name, oblique, in ancien régime cursive, as final as
any other resting place. He could’ve found out. He might’ve decided not to.
Circling back around towards the exit, Němec passed a homeless guy in a
torn overcoat sitting on a wooden bench in front of a blackened marble plaque
from which the tenants’ names had been eroded by time & the elements. He was
staring at a busted radio from which furious gusts of static blew as he wound the
dial in an effort (futile?) to tune-in on the voices in the ether. Beside the bench
stood a vending machine with candles coloured white or red, Kč ,- per. A
caretaker was raking rubbish into a bin. So long, Němec thought, turning up his
collar as the drizzle turned to rain & began to fall heavily on the cracked
pavement. From the other side of the wall came the tin trumpet of an icecream
vendor. The tune played & repeated & drifted away.
Němec just caught sight of the blue van with a giant icecream cone bolted
to the roof, pull into the parking lot down the block. The driver got out &
appeared a moment later with an umbrella & a pair of icecream cones coming
towards the gates. Němec stood under a shelter & waited for a tram to come.
Traffic surged, hissing on wet tarmac. The icecream man walked past &
continued through the gates with his two icecreams: a double-scoop of chocolate
& a double-scoop of raspberry ripple. Němec watched him along the treelined
avenue till he turned off to the right. If possible, it left him more depressed than
he already was. He stared grimly out at the rain.
Across the street, a line of corrugated iron hoardings marked off yet
another construction site. Through the gaps between the hoardings you could
see that it was nothing more than a muddy crater, thirty-odd metres deep.
Whatever they had in mind to bury…* A crane dangled a block of ferroconcrete in
midair like a giant tombstone. Němec watched it sway up there, seem to arc out
* Concerning those itinerant cop-out artists who met their end by their own hand & not that of
G.O.D. [:]
* The past couldn’t be relied upon to bury itself, so they’d brought in the subcontractors, hehe. [:]
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over the tramlines, then abseil out of the air, cables whistling. He braced himself
for impact. The concrete block vanished silently behind the hoardings as the
number trundled by in the wrong direction. Rewind fifty years: Valentine’s
Day, . A Flying Fortress dropping incendiaries scored a direct hit on the
tram on that same road. Love from Uncle Sam. Thought they were frying
Dresden instead.* Igne natura renovator integra. There was probably a plaque
somewhere to commemorate the fact. Sky Furies, Erinnye-voices, flaming
tombstones coming from the clouds. Blecha’s apartment building had sprouted
from one such demolition job. Nature in its infinite renewal. He thought about
the icecream man. He thought about the Prof’s niche in the wall. Faces behind
bits of glass. Bombs raining on a graveyard. Ten minutes till closing time.
Němec sighed, breathed the wet air. The composted vapours. The spent
exhaust. Bury, exhume & bury again. Look, says Yorrick, a philosopher’s egg! And there was a story, too, about a Waffen-v unit holed-up there for weeks after the
War’d ended, never got wind of the news, the Führer’s cop-out, Jodl’s surrender,
dug-in at the back of the cemetery awaiting the break-out order that forever
failed to come, though still refusing to yield, keinen Schritt — tunnelling crypt to
crypt, taking potshots at the dead come to bury their dead, appearing &
disappearing like spectral agents of anachronism & apocryphal doom. Maybe
they starved, or the rats got them, or they ate one another in desperation, or
were simply absorbed back into the blood & soil. No-one seemed to know.
When the next tram came, Němec hunched between traffic & boarded it.
Instead of continuing straight into town, it turned right at the park where a
concrete statue of a boy held hands with a concrete statue of a girl, symbolising
Universal Peace, the Incorruptibility of Youth, or the eternally happy prospects
of future realestate, take your pick. Through fogged windowglass, the dark grey
pre-War tenements gave ground to Soviet urban gulag archipelagos. Mass
mausoleums stacked against the sky. The glow of the first streetlights spreading
away, doubling, lighting the chasm of the underworld. It looked like somewhere
the Raskolnikovs of modern architecture had come to commit suicide or murder.
Possibly both.
The tram wound through Žižkov along Kalininova & got caught up
behind the traffic going down through the underpass. The tram clanged its bell.
The traffic stalled out completely. Some sort of breakdown up ahead. Němec
* One of that took a mile wrong turn somewhere between High Wycombe & the Free State
of Saxony. [:]
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stared through the grime-streaked window at the rail yards. Browns, blacks, a
dozen shades of grey. On a strip of wasteland a couple of circus tents had been
put up, with market stalls & funfair rides & lights strung on poles, like a
Mexican funeral barque decked-out with candles.
The tram claaaang ed, but the traffic didn’t give an inch. The doors
wheezed open. Passengers climbed down between the cars to make the best of it
on foot. Němec dragged himself away from the window & followed suit,
threading his way towards the Big Top. Roll up! Roll up! Win the prize! Blink.
Past the shooting gallery with its Daffy Duck silhouettes, dude in buckskin
chaps shouting through a foghorn. Only five a duck! Five a duck? Yep, son, you hit
the duck, you win a fiver… Pop. Whiz! Look, there goes Rudi the Wonder Boy!
Watch him fly about in his magic cape, loop-the-loop, perform feats of derringdo! Tin
pots & accordions. Bottled mead. Pastries. Candyfloss. Lights. The whole
razzledazzle funeral cortège. Voodoo spirits emerging from the background, the
mirror-man, the metamorphosis of the stranger…
Some waxed-down type in a stiff collar demonstrating the latest
appliances to a bored-looking rent-a-crowd. Would you like to have the cleanest
house in town? Strongman on a hoist breaking his chains. A dog jumping in the
water. Splash! Reminds of the man who threw himself from the river wall with
lead weights tied around his feet. Whatsisname? Broke both legs but didn’t
drown. Like a mind that’s sick & wants to stay sick, mired in its wrong P.O.V.
Nothing looks real — or it all looks too real — some Arbogast forgery of runes
around the moon. Point a camera at it. Click. And suddenly you’re looking at
the backside of a fried egg that’s too well-done. Want a postcard of the occasion?
Someone’s fiddling the pixels? Paranoia’s war of attrition gets the upper hand,
the eye breaks down, prepared in the end to believe any scrap of nonsense.
Glimpsing the hand, you think, of the Master Ordinator — mantic arts of
conjuration, banal, exotic, phantasmatic — the , fixed passions, combinable
but not transformable — the sensual pleasures of classification… Psst! Lonely,
mister? Some embroidered Arachne in the shadows. The Punch&Judy Man.
Němec slipped through a cordon & crossed onto the tracks, back into the
night, along the rail embankment, cross the bridge, the black swathe of the train
yards, to the farther side. Signals, switches, megaphones. No-one there but the
rats to watch him weave the junctions, rain overspilling the gutters of his bowler
hat, tipped slightly forward, sodden shirtcollar, sodden boots. The sidings of
Masaryk Station. The station clock said quarter past six — hands wound back.
Like the old Gypsy said, only the Government’d dream up the idea of cutting a
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strip off the bottom of a blanket & sewing it to the top so as to make a longer
blanket. (In its dreams, they call Golem City, not the beloved, but the belated.) About Masaryk Station, the Bugman had a grim tale. May ’. The Uprising.
After the War had already ended in the rest of Europa. Hibernerbahnhof* (then
called) was the first place the partisans occupied. The Nazis, headquartered in
the basement of the local Y.M.C.A.,* shelled it with everything they had. Blew
the clock to bits. Set the Station vestibule on fire. Overran the barricades & the
kids pointing broomsticks & slingshots & God knows what else, Swedish
muskets from the Thirty Years War. It was like a scene from The Teratologists:
Rat-tat-tat from casement windows — pock-pock-pock of stucco & mortar,
plumes of glass catching the sunlight mid-air just so — old men in Sázava
Stetsons blasting from the hip, blam-blam! as another Kraut keels over &
tumbles from the wainscoting, a halfpike then whump! — muzzles spitting
fire from manhole covers, under burnt-out trucks, behind sandbagged
pillboxes… Sound-up on The Ride of the Valkyries as faceless extras clutch
their guts, lurching sideways over balconies, backwards onto the seat of
their pants, headfirst out windows, across saloon bars, down the stairs,
onto swinging chandeliers, bullet-holed playerpianos, card-tables,
matchstick chairs, gabled roofs… And all the while, an unknown woman
in black mantilla slowly wheeling a trolley full of old shoes through the
middle of the cross-fire, unscathed, kneeling to pray over each dead body
lying in her way, till a type of awe befell the men on both sides. Or they
ran out of ammunition. Or someone called an th hour ceasefire so the
Nazis, outgunned finally, could negotiate “safe passage” now that the Reds
were already in the suburbs & there was no reason any half-sane Kraut
would want to stick around a minute longer than absolutely necessary. As
one Oberst said to another, There’s a place shrouded in the mists of mythology,
called Shit Creek, and we’re proverbially up it, mein Freund, paddles ’n’ all. *
While negotiations where still in process, the Nazis rounded up
whoever they found in the Station, herded them onto the tracks & made
them kneel while an v officer shot them one-by-one in the back of the
neck with a luger. The ones they didn’t shoot, they marched out into the
street as human shields, in case the partisans had second thoughts. Always
a joy to do business, etc. Well, you had to admire a nation capable of
inventing the Mercedes Benz, the Space Rocket & a dependable train
schedule. After the Reds took control, the Station got renamed Golem
* With especial thanks to De Valera, that putz. [:]
* Whose membership Heydrich had thoughtfully shipped-off at the first opportunity to
Mauthausen, Belsen, Kobylisy as subversives-waiting-to-happen. Just like in the song. [:]
* “Es gibt einen Ort in den Nebeln der Mythologie genannt Scheißebach gehült, und wir sind
sprichwörtlich bis es, mate, Paddel und alle.” [:]
698
Central, motherboard of the zombie kingdom. When the Capitalist
bandwagon came to town in ’, they renamed it again & it became the
favoured congregation point for the local bums, panhandling for change &
stinking up the benches at the allnight vendor. A far cry from all those
Führerliebenden matrons slurping their gulashsuppe, gnawing their
schnitzels, crossing their eyes & dorting their teas, chomping chocolate
truffles with those little Mozart cameos on the wrappers, ein Monsieur
Klein at the piano — in their minds, perhaps, it’s always …
Němec got down from the embankment just shy of the Florenc viaduct. Seven-
league boots stumbling over ruts & clods. A gap in the fence. Rain slithering
down. A shape under a streetlamp, a flame snapped from a cigarette lighter.
Ahead, something always ahead. The psychic sensitivities of roosting gulls under
the stone arches. All the while picking apart thoughts in minutest detail
instantly unremembered, a nagging spirit at his back. Dim locators directing
towards whatever hole-in-the-wall presented itself. Out of the abknown like
Caliban in rainsodden hat & suit, raking the moon in puddles. Past the viaduct,
a sign, so dimly lit & covered in filth it was unreadable, hung above a door. Nunc
est bibendum. Němec pushed inside & brought the weather with him. The place
was ten-feet of silence — the kind of bar that makes you think the worst, for
once, mightn’t yet be still to come. Němec returned the stares & ordered two
brandies straight-up. They watched him drink. He ordered two more. They got
bored. He leaned against a wall. He listened to the talk slowly resume. He
watched time pass. He drank. Well, here’s to the Old Man.
The rain hadn’t abated by the time he left the bar, but at least now he
didn’t feel it. Swaying in the middle of the road, under the viaduct, gazing up
into the belly of the beast. A long freighttrain rattled overhead. Headlights. He
weaved back into the dark, pathways of no egress, tenement yards, upended
garbagepails, driftwood, cardboard boxes. Someone had sculpted a deathshead
out of flyover rubbish, leering down from a plinth of grey breezeblock, strips of
polyethylene & sheet-plastic. Totems of the borderlands, where the City
Planners had turned a blind eye: all the dead ends & entropy of a System of
Transmutations that’d broken down, where order faltered, came undone. Němec
gazed behind. The giant neon swan flickered there in the distance like the
competing totem of everything that was meaningless, a costumed charade.
Somewhere the World had disappeared & this was what remained — the
illusion & its ruins. Was that the reason he waited for the Profs ghost at night?
Němec plunged deeper into the wilderness, thinking if you go far enough in
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any one direction, you’ll end up exactly where you started. It sounded as good as any
other idea he’d had. And did he believe his own absurdities?* Not far now, the
rumble of the lorries entering & exiting the freight yards by the river. Lights
along a perimeter fence. A blank stretch of road. At that hour. Walls of shipping
containers piled high. Then further out, warehouses ceding to landfill. A kind of
limbo cast in a swathe through the lower reaches of the City — its unconscious
counterpart, some strange unrecognisable thing like the monster that hides in
dreams & can never actually be seen?
A nonstop Benzina stood across from the freight terminal, last outpost,
halogenated shelves beckoning. Němec re-emerged ten minutes later with suit
pockets sagging from the weight of two-dozen minibottles of random booze. He
aimed past the streetlights. Cracked a bottle, downed it, face drenched with rain.
Tossed the empty into the weeds. Walked. Cracked another. Downed it without
breaking stride. Not bad, Squillhead, only twenty more to go and you’ll be a fucking
champion. The road, as far as he could see, led pretty much nowhere.
Which was exactly as it should be.
* Credo quia absurdum est. [:]
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51
___________
DIE WUNDERWAFFE
Who was Heinz Kammler?
Somewhere along the way Němec had come across a story he couldn’t
help feeling he’d heard before in one version or another, only the versions didn’t
stack up & so he’d forgotten all about it in the general miasma. The story wasn’t
part of what he was supposedly looking for — E.K., the Prof’s magik book &
the world conspiracy or whatever — but the man’s name, coincidental or not,
was there, uncrossed, in the Black Book (⊛ KAMMLER ) & it was
there again in yesterday’s paper, human interest, page , the pull-out
supplement. It was the headline that caught Němec’s eye, like déjà vu:
WHO WAS HEINZ KAMMLER?
A grainy blow-up black&white candid showed an elderly gent, balding, wire-
rimmed specs & startled eyebrows, feeding pigeons by the Central Park
Reservoir, New York. According to the article, the Pigeon Man was none other
than Hans (a.k.a. Heinz) Kammler, born in the town of Stetten (of which there
were nearly a hundred), former civil engineer who in the early War years was
Oswald Pohl’s deputy at v-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamp (W.V.H.A.) —
the section tasked with overseeing the admin of the Nazi camp system,
