The Combinations, page 113
out the faces behind the windows on the viewing deck & the afternoon sunlight
reflecting off the glass…
They walked past the stalls selling hot wine & the giant chess pieces set
out on cobblestoned black&white squares. Past the tower was Christ’s “tomb.”
And past that, the cablecar terminus & a planetarium. Alice led him through the
snow to peer inside at the firmament of nested spheres, the vast sidereal wheel,
God’s eye onto the self-created universe. For no reason he could point a finger
at, Němec felt disappointed.
‘It’s always sad looking at stars,’ Alice said, as if sensing his mood. ‘All
those extinctions. It’s like the truth is always being kept from us. Look how pretty
death is. All those beautiful lights. People forget that Heaven’s just a mortuary with
all the candles left burning.’
‘Heaven’s just matter & entropy…’
‘…’
‘There was an ancient Chinese philosopher, Chun Tchi, believed the
whole night sky’s invented.’
‘It’s the same thing,’ Alice said, taking his hand & leading him out past
the maze of straggly boxhedges & a gate with a sign reading:
HRY JSOU V BLUDIŠTI ZAKÁZÁNY*
At the end of the path was a small baroque chapel with a paved courtyard in
front of it. And across the courtyard, a House of Mirrors.
‘Let’s go in,’ Alice said.
She let go of his hand & ran up to the ticket booth. Němec waited at the
entrance. Just inside was a diorama in a glass box: “The Battle of Charles
Bridge,” it said on a card pasted to the side. It depicted a skirmish between
armed students & Königsmarck’s Swedes in the process of ransacking the City,
in . The painted figures were entirely unconvincing — the students
barricaded at one end, the bluecoated Prods at the other — the whole thing
might just as easily’ve been made-up. Besides, what was it doing there at all?
‘Come on!’ Alice called, going in ahead of him.
Half-reluctantly Němec followed. He heard Alice’s laughter somewhere
* “Whatever you do, don’t feed sour cream to the bloody Minotaur.” [:]
735
on the other side of the glass wall. No sooner had he entered the maze than he
lost all sense of direction. Everywhere he turned, he saw his idiot semblable
knotted & stretched apart. Alice’s laughter drifted further away. He resisted the
urge to call out. Eventually the laughter died entirely. Then there were footsteps.
Children’s voices. Running. Giggling. He wandered around like that, blindly, till
he found his way out again.
Alice wasn’t there. Němec watched to see who came out behind him, but
no-one did. There must’ve been some other exit — secret passages — a fourth
dimension maybe. He parked on a bench in front of the chapel & waited. It was
almost five o’clock. Someone had left a copy of the Golem City Tribune stuffed
between the slats where he was sitting — he unfolded it, browsed the headlines
unenthusiastically. Several times he caught sight of someone he thought was
Alice, but was mistaken. People gathered outside the chapel for the service. A
bell tolled. A group of kids kicked a ball back & forth in the slush.
To pass the time, Němec took a pen out & began circling words here &
there at random in the newspaper. It was something he’d learnt to do in the
Home, like using a dousing rod to read between the lines in his schoolbooks for
what they didn’t want anyone to see. He found it worked with pretty much
anything. Secret ordinations of events. Trees hidden in the woods. Messages out
of the ether. When that got boring he turned to the crossword puzzle. down:
“person so deficient in mind as to be permanently incapable of rational conduct,”
letters. across: “opening in wall, usually filled with glass,” letters.
across: “chatterer,” letters.*
Mmm. Never was much good at that sort of thing.
After a while of stabbing in the dark he’d had enough. Still no sign of
Alice Steinerová. Chances were they’d never’ve made it through another night
anyhow. Denying the obvious, or else unconsciously acceding to it, Němec
stayed sitting where he was & played join-the-dots with the words he’d been
circling earlier, making bits of phrases out of them — bringing the whole
pointless exercise to a kind of occult fruition by copying the results into the
margin of the puzzle section at the back, arranging & rearranging the lines till
something that wasn’t complete gibberish came out of it. He’d successfully killed
another hour by the time the last “t” was crossed, the last “i” dotted. What was
left, traced beside the day’s Bumper Super Combo Crossword, was this:
* � Intermission. [:]
736
It was late — the sky overwhelmed us, shapes
& forces from invisible mind-rays. In the green
orbit of thought, impulse, disintegration —
removed from the five senses, is indeed the end.
Clocks glow weirdly underwater — a depth —
rewound: order, which appears / does not appear.
River, cloud. Least careless, least logical.
To see contumacious eggs hatching (if their white
be skin enough) all in one piece. Switches & amulets.
The ensuing of many arguments, sighing.
She kisses you with transparent teeth — a kiss
full of vertigo & premonition. Order being
tied up backwards, forwards — liquid from mineral.
But it was too late — the sky overwhelmed us.
If it was a poem, he supposed it ought to have a title, like Poem or Sonnet, only it
wasn’t a sonnet because, well, it just wasn’t. He thought about that national
monument of a wanker, K.H. Mácha,* lying beneath a springtime bower just
down the hill there, with one of his dozen regular Šomkomite floozies — flagon
in hand, wafting on about LOVE in that dreary repetitive spät-Romantisch
uppercase enunciation — & afterwards, confessing to his Secret Diary in
excruciating religiotic detail, of the ones he’d played stinkfinger with & the ones
he blushed to think about while having a quick J. Arthur behind the
rhododendrons. And so, in honour of the Big Blouse’s noxious drivel, Němec
took up his little ill-starred creation & scratched the letters “R-O-Z-E-R-V-A-
N-E-C”* across the head of it, whispered a solemn curse, & gave it life.
* Author of the only poem so far discovered to’ve been penned in the Chesk language, memorised
by every schoolchild. [:]
* “R.S.V.P.” [:]
737
53
___________
THE EMPEROR’S NEW COCK
No more will the scurvy Sphinx
With beggy prophets their prophecies relate…*
So after the old maestro, that rachitic degenerate Zhid,* fritzed it at fifty-one
from a dose of bacterial endocarditis (“always an intruder, never welcomed”), his
Freudful widow & career man-eater, Alma née Schindler, on her way to
becoming a Gropius & thence a Werfel, took to bed with a twentytwo-year-old
aspiring portraitist of sickly children, name of Oskar Kokoschka, in whom
(though in no way unique in this respect) Misses M inspired a famously squalid
amour fou.* Dear Darling Koko, overwrought, obsessive, ridiculous, all the things
a young man of temperamental qualities becomes when he loses his grounding,
gets himself into a wrong perspective, stuck in the ideoplastic quagmire trying to
impress a woman almost twice his age. Cirrhosis of the Ψ-function. The story
could be called Die Puppe. After beating the bedsprings flat for two successive
winters & summers, the composer’s ex-concubine’d had enough of neurasthenic
little Oskaroschka & moved-on to fry bigger fish, though not before informing
the poor pup by post — C.O.D. to a Habsburg field hospital on the Isonzo
Front, where cavalryman Karko lay terminally afflicted & certified non compos
mentis. Kokoschka: in a fever of unrequite, many a restless a.m. spent
thereafter, discombobulating over wishful imagined ghostkinder, little lifeless
versions of his Oskar-self, viscerally aborted by this least likely paragon of ideal
womanliness — Alma, loved, despised Alma. Come the Armistice, demobbed
undead Kokoschka, wandering lonely as a clod, over hill & under hill, till at long
last coming upon a Munich dollmaker willing (for a few shekels more) to
faithfully fulfil a rather particular commission. To wit: a lifesize surrogate of the
aggrieved artist’s Lost Liebling, precise to the last velvety anatomical detail. For
* Amnesia in Memphis. G.C. [:]
* Thanks to Max Burckhard for the kind words. [:]
* “My neurosis does handstands, what’s yours do? Play all the Goldberg Variations simultaneously,
blindfolded, while offering a King advantage? Pawn to Queen’s Gusset one?” [:]
738
six months did war-crippled Kokoschka cohabit with this permanently lubricated
travesty — shrinkwrapped, perfumed, flossed, depilated, contactlensed,
blowdried, bleached, siliconised, self-sanitising, universal adaptorised, prêt-à-
porter & all modcons. A veritable pêche Melba. Till, one pre-incendiarised
Dresden night, during a whorish boozeslopped orgy of impotence, he, Koko
Loko: . came finally to his senses; . fell into a blind cathartic rage — & with
one fell stroke beheaded that insatiable celluloid coquette with the clenched
crook of his walkingstick.
�
V. Neuman & the Golem City Philharmonic (Supraphon): Mahler’s unfinished
th — in hope, perhaps, of summoning ghosts. Some sort of ghost.
Through the rooms of the empty apartment, the faint music crept as upon
the waters. Roared & swished about. Raged. Blew. Petered out. The
recordplayer thutted. Němec got up off the bed, weaved through brainfog,
shakily swapped discs. The Rückert-Lieder (Deutsche Grammophon). Ich bin
der Welt abhanden gekommen. A voice that long after all else has passed, etc., if
there be a twittering machine to mouth it. And what would Kepler have made of
this child’s toy, stylus in a windmill, spiralling orrerie? Or of the craven
Kapellmeister, for that matter? Herrgott himself. Proteus of the Winds or
flatulent Laocoön? Mistral or minstrel? And that Schlampefrau of his! Talk
about a grey mare. Well… She could nourish a grudge like the best of them.
What comes of winding a woman the wrong way, paying through the nose for a
piece of patented posterity.*
From the street below, headlights turned shadows across the ceiling.
Disarticulated zodiacs formed & deformed. Naked bodies, anagrammatised,
wound with gut-string, flesh bulging between the knots. What kismets of doom
were being undressed up there on the Big Screen? What eructed abysms? Němec
closed his eyes, but it did no good. Behind every thought she was waiting, blue-
eyed, Alice Steinerová. Evocations as puerile as Kokoschka’s lovedoll. Well you’d
be bound to develop a unique way of seeing things after a while in that kind of
arrangement, wouldn’t you? Němec forced his mind to go blank, waiting for the
record to end. The shadows danced. The stars in their fixed firmament. Her
* When it came to just deserts, aggrievèd Alma could sure strike a bargain below the belt. [:]
739
body. Alice in the house of mirrors… What’s gone’s gone, kiddo, the great skidoo!
Inquiring minds did however wonder. As for example, precisely how
Mahler’s ex-Muse inspired such gargantuan efforts of the phantasmic faculty.
Rutting with a cardboard cutout not exactly scoring in all categories, unless of
course, a certain chaffing at the bit, a certain comment dire flagellated frustration
at abseiling from pedestals. Like running a starched petticoat up a gristly
flagpole. Or a frozen handjob in the Himalayas. Or a bit of the old frottage
among the statuary. A mug’s game by anyone’s standards. Thinking there’s a
myriad of mockeries a man can wake up to on any given day of the week, but
someone’s gotta draw the line somewhere, right? And that dour puss Kokoschka
barely grown out of his pimples, as jaunty as a rectal suppository from all
accounts, hauling his misery around with him like a pair of balls on a chain for
all the world to see. Supposing he’d really put one over on the old tart now, eh?
Try this for a pose, lovely. Prodding his paintbrush into the blushiest of
sanctimoanies the real flesh&blood wouldn’t’ve let him dawdle near in a month
of Sundays.
Oh she’d’ve given it to him all right, but not the way prissily apassioned
Koko Poko would’ve put it in a postcard to himself. Lying there in some ethereal
eiderdown with her combinations in chaste disarray, like some vaselined Vestal
swooningly awaiting fulfilment. Well he’s got her where she can’t squirm out of it
now, eh? Ankles nailed to the bedhead & a modest little lace peekaboo, hehehe.
(Cuntstruck Oskaroschka could spout romantisch as drivelously as the next Nazi,
don’t you worry.) Could just picture him, too, keeping a sailor’s chest in the
cupboard stocked with a connoisseur’s collection of rubber masks, for occasions
when he really got the horn up: bullheads, horseheads, goatheads,
minotaurheads, dog&catheads, godheads, you name it. Heads in the manner of
Phidias, of Michelangelo, of Rodin, of Arcimbaldo. Valentino heads, Bonaparte
heads, Arch-Duke Ferdinand heads replete with muttonchops & bushy
eyebrows. Catholic heads. Atheist heads. Hieratic heads. Heads in the Cubist
manner, the Dada manner, the Kraut-Expressionist manner, etc.
Hydrocephalitic heads, shrunken cannibal heads, you name it.
Kokoschka deadpanned. Kokoschka drooled. Kokoschka stuffed a
turpentine-drenched rag in his mouth, to get himself in the right mood. Mmmm.
Snorting a few lines of undiluted cadmium yellow & coming on all mumbly
schoolboyish in some sort of Walter Scott Aberdeen Angus rig-out, winkwink,
& Didn’t she think it was about time for their “Perils of Pasiphaë” routine? Setting
his Betacam on a tripod & rearranging that overgrown pet Barbie of his to fit
740
the bill, hands & knees just so, & some kind of veterinary harness he’d no doubt
acquired just for the occasion. Clopclop of cloven hoof. Hmmm.
‘Oh Liebchen, do we have to already?’
‘But you know how much I dig making moo-moo, Almimulmi.’
Jesus, it was only last Sunday he put on that Pluto Pup mask & went to
work overtime tonguing her Manufacturer’s Premium Two-Year Warranty
“lifelike rubber sphincter,” the Mata Hari Mk, till she positively blew up in his
face. Boy oh boy! Not to mention the “Eunuch from Munich” routine on
Wednesday. The “Double Nelson.” The “Rabbit Hole.” And, gosh, the “Golem
in a Blood Moon,” that was something you could really write home about. Krazy
Koko had a whole variety act going, he was considering calling it The Weimar
Wildebeests of Alma’s Interbellum! (hehe) or One Man’s Manikin is Another Man’s Monkeybusiness! or (his personal fave) I Zoo, You Zoo, We all Zoo Zoozoo! Flipping
his footage on a showreel to peddle to some West End nob he’d met in a cabaret
in Kreutzberg, songbook & stagesets sketched down to the morbidest obsessive
detail, diptychs & triptychs, Die Windsbraut , & , hecatombs of underpaint
spilt in carnal selfsacrifice to the Goddess Mother of His Misery. A complete
vocation right there, all he had to do was stop filleting his fausse floozie long
enough to get the finished product stretched on a frame. God’s dingus, boy! Well,
there’s only so much celluloid one man can covet in a lifetime & not turn
himself into a strapon Mameluke. Did Kokomo, here, for even one measly
moment truly believe that vexed voodoo doll of his was giving Mrs Alma
Gropius the pins&needles in her prissiest of privates? Call it: Spooky influence
at a distance! Enough to turn any self-respecting architect’s stomach —
‘Alma dear, really, this is utterly inappropriate! At the dinner table of all
places! And in front of the servants, my God! You’re… You’re behaving like a
moose in heat!’*
�
There were times Němec wondered about these little flights of fallacy, lying on
his side like . little Henry David Thoreau pulling his pud by a paddling pool;
or, . a poisoned rat (take your pick). Grey dustmotes afloat there in the middle
of the room. It rained & then the rain stopped. Ashen light & then darkness &
