The Combinations, page 120
lady’s knitting lay beside it. Who it was for, all that knitting — involuted browns
& greys that never seemed to go anywhere, to progress — Němec hadn’t the
faintest idea. The parrot, maybe. A faint hiss issued from the T.E.S.L.A. radio.
‘Lemon or honey?’
‘…?’
‘Tomáš always took his without. I’m sometimes partial to honey, myself.
Forest flowers. The man at the post office brings it from Šumava. You have to
be so careful nowadays, you never know what they put in things. Real honey
candies, but when you heat it, it clarifies. That,’ the old lady winked, ‘is the
secret. How you can tell if it’s real or not.’
Němec couldn’t say he’d ever actually seen the Prof drink tea, with or
without the genuine article. The caretaker offered him a little gingerbread man
with raisin eyes & an icing mouth & coat buttons. The parrot, ensconced on its
perch, made beady eyes at him. The forecast had been for snow but it was slow
in coming.
In Greiffenberg the old count, Gasper von N____, staged balls with
dancing lifesize dolls. He commissioned Granddad Hájek, apparently, to make
them for him, which was how the two families first brushed shoulders, as the
expression goes. The way the dolls worked was that they had a hole in the back
for a wind-up key — a complicated gadget kept the pairs synchronised while
they waltzed around the room in time to Schubert. There was talk of
commissioning a regiment before the Great War, but nothing came of it. At
length, the elderly von N____ & the toymaker grew quite fond of each other, as
did their sons (it sounded like the stuff of fairytales already) — though neither
the Prof’s own father, Tomáš Snr., nor the younger von N____, Eldrich, shared
the slightest interest in puppets, clocks, or mechanical automata. They, unlike
their fathers, had instead a singular & indeed quite consuming passion for
antique books.
Gaspar von N____ (†?)
Grandad Hájek (?)
Eldrich von N____ (†?)
Tomáš Hájek, Snr. (†)
Elsbeth von N____ (†)
Tomáš Hájek, Jnr. (†)
781
After the toymaking gramps shuffled-off, his attic workshop, right there in the
house on Jánský Vršek, was made into a nursery, where the future Prof — all
rosy cheeks, blond hair & greyblue irises — commenced his fingersucking
existence in the company of dozens if not hundreds of wind-up mannequins,
stuffed animals, midgets, golems, commendatores & myriad other mechanical
nightmare-inducing knickknacks, doodads, bibs&bobs, even a green-eyed
clockwork parrot that squawked on the hour, half-hour & quarter hour: thrice,
twice & once respectively.
Němec gave the caretaker’s pet bird a scrutinising look. Eh, Polly? How
about we stick something in you and give it a nice sharp twist? The parrot leered.
The Prof must’ve been over the bloody moon when his old lady showed up with
this character to make his conjugal life a misery. All those childhood horrors
revisited in the Oedipal adventures of our fine feathered friend here. He tried
picturing the little homunculus Prof up there under the heavens, going rockabye
in his cot, goo-gooing & gah-gahing, coughing up the wetnurse’s milk, crapping
his nappy, turning crosseyed from mobiles of spinning planets, stars, moon &
sun, picking his nose, singing a song of sixpence, learning his ABCs, poking in
his nanny’s drawers, riding a cockhorse, dressing a wooden mannequin in a red
clownsuit, unstringing a violin, measuring his uncut dingus with a ruler, pouring
glue in keyholes, building a treehouse among the rafters, stashing treasures
under floorboards, blending magic potions in beakers, intoning strange prayers,
raising fungus in jars, reading under the blankets with a T.E.S.L.A.-brand
electric lamp, doodling naked pictures of the school mistress, repenting in the
dark, constructing his first jejune erector set, listening ear-to-the-floor to the
domestic drama downstairs, pinning textbook diagrams to walls, dismantling a
music box, perving on the servant girl next door, coming down with diphtheria,
swearing eternal love to dusty tomes, etc & undsoweiter…
And when were the happiest?
It was afterwards, back upstairs, that Němec had the feeling someone else was in
the room. He went through the motions of checking. Something about the old
lady’s Yunan tea, perhaps. Or the lingering presence of Alice Steinerová.
Heebiejeebie stuff. The rooms, however, were as deserted as he’d left them. His
whole existence summed-up right there. Like the old men of yonder days
782
wandering around inside their memories, each in its appointed place, greeting
each new bit of entropy like the arrival of a long lost amour. Ah, my dearest, my
dust! Come! Breed, dust! Breed!
Němec sat down on his camp bed & stared at the typewriter lying on the
floor, black chesspiece perched atop. Funny, that. He picked the knight up &
turned it around in his fingers. Another one of those “clues” that kept cropping
up with unnerving frequency? He slipped it in his trouser pocket, perhaps it’d
work as a talisman of sorts. Or not. No skin, either way. He peered down at the
paper wound into the wordmachine. Ideas for failures yet to be attempted:
NOTES ON FAILURE 1-8
8 PROJECTS FOR AN OPEN-ENDED ETCETERA
RESPONSES TO 8 UNASKED QUESTIONS
8 ANONYMOUS TIP-OFFS
8 PROPOSALS CONCERNING IMPOSSIBILITY
8 HOURS 8 DAYS 8 MONTHS 8 YEARS
IMPLICATE DELEGATE INSEMINATE MICTURATE
DISCRIMINATE ENERVATE COMPLICATE DEGENERATE
A SELF-CRITICISM (IN 8 PARTS)
8 SOCIALIST PASTS & NO FUTURES
LETTERS TO NON-ENTITIES (?)
LETTERS TO FAMOUS PEOPLE (MOSTLY DEAD)
1. LETTER TO BOHUMIL “WHORABAL”*
2. LETTER TO ZDENA TOMIN
3. LETTER TO PAUL LEPPIN
4. LETTER TO TOYEN
5. LETTER TO HERMAN UNGAR
6. LETTER TO JAN PATOČKA
7. LETTER TO MILADA HORÁKOVÁ
8. LETTER TO MAGOR
The answer wasn’t in there, either. (For that he’d need a reading machine as well
as a writing machine, hehehe.) Němec sank his head into his hands, closed his
eyes. And once more saw the key falling through the air. Why not a wind-up
parrot as well? He blinked & the image crumbled away. But again that sense of
something in the room that didn’t belong there. He parted his fingers & glanced
* A.k.a. “Bo Hrab,” ghostwriter of Too Silent a Multitude & Lessons for Saving Your Own Neck: “As pre-eminent Chesk scribbler & legend in my own lunchbox, I feel deeply connected to the Antik
Chesk People, with its grandiloquent socialist past & incredulous future.” [:]
783
out through the bars they made. As assuredly as ever, he was alone, & yet the
outline of his dream was still present. The walls, however, had all gone grey.
Slivers of stormcloud showed around the edges of the window. Němec could feel
the barometric tension working its way inside his head. Outside, a fierce wind
had begun to blow. The windows shook, the stairwell groaned. It was a sound
like the groaning of someone disturbed in their sleep, in a room at the end of a
long tunnel, deep beneath the earth. The imaginary sleep of an imaginary
someone in an imaginary room. And in this imaginary room, an imaginary
wooden table, perhaps. And on the table, a book of white marble. Entirely
imaginary. And in the book, a faceted stone…*
The Prof had always given the impression of being a devout believer in the
symmetry of happenstance, but how d’you know the shape of what you can’t see?
Somewhere in the back of Němec’s head, the weather was like something
watching him over his shoulder. And while it watched him, everything started
coming back into focus. But not an ordinary focus — more concrete, somehow.
The dream in all its detail, with unusual vividness: the key, the sleeper, the
room, the desk, the text inscribed in the stone book. The hand is gone but there
remaineth writing. And somewhere, a stirring as of dry tea leaves spilled on the
floor. His mind woke suddenly from its lethargy like a cat: the architecture
around him more sharply delineated than ever. It was as if, inside himself, he was
standing at one end of a very long room with a door at the other & all he had to
do was reach out across all that distance & turn the handle, & on the other side
would be a room within the room, the essence of the room made manifest. If he’d
had the presence of mind, he might’ve typed that out, it would’ve made a good
beginning to a story in an agonised, portentous kind of way.
* Now a leaf of that book is turned open, & there is written on it, but I cannot read it yet. Now
I see it. I am who I am, who gave and will give you a law: from which perpetual peace and happiness
will come to mortals. I see a hand appear, a very great one, white, with the fingers spread abroad.
The hand is gone, but there remaineth writing. You will shortly see and hear everything. If in the
meantime… It is as if it were upon the side of a white globe afar off. The globe turneth so swiftly that I cannot well read it. …your souls, joined together for the better… The globe turneth so swiftly that I cannot read it till it stands still. …will subject themselves to me and mine in the manner of sons.
All sins committed in me are forgiven. He who goes mad on my account, let him be wise. He who commits
adultery because of me, let him be blessed for eternity and receive the heavenly prize. Now the globe is gone. [:]
784
Instead he stood up & began walking through the apartment, trying every
door in the place. It was ridiculous, but he couldn’t help himself. And then
things started happening all by themselves. As if by silent command he began to
search through the apartment for something that he was painfully aware couldn’t
be found simply by looking. The key? Some sort of key, at least. He went
through each of the rooms, opening & closing doors, scrutinising the cupboards,
drawers, alcoves, pantries, all the obvious first places any imbecile would look.
And from the most obvious, by declensions, to the least likely. He made subtle
inspections of walls, ceiling, stray shadows, corridors of air, hide-in-plain-sight
& all that. He factored-in as many elements as could be construed from WHAT
WAS KNOWN: the Prof’s history, the suicided muses, the madman in the
attic, the Manuscript, the Black Book & associated polygraphic cryptobabble —
but that got him predictably nowhere. Intoned vague ridiculous spells, names,
numbers, mumble, snatches of Mahler for good measure. The rooms looked no
different. A little more pathetic, perhaps. Or perhaps it was simply that he
looked more pathetic in them?
When he closed his eyes, however, the image was still there. It persisted in
an entirely uncanny way, clearer than any actual thought. As if it was part of the
space he was walking around in, the proverbial room-within-a-room — which
could only be seen by not looking? Not with the outward eye, not directly, but
askance? Like Kircher in that queer portrait of his, catching the Devil coming at
him sideways, hehe. All things considered, perhaps what the Prof’s paltrygeist
had been trying to tell him all along was that the mystery Manuscript was really
a metaphoric Mind map, replete with diagrams & ciphers, a psychic cartography
of Floating Islands N beyond any Latitude > across Far Seas R through the
Northwest T Passage of the Cosmos H where the Tree of Being I sits upon
the Sacred Mountain C its Path of Ascent | & the ! that marks the Precise
Spot at which are buried the Keys to the Kingdom of Knowledge e — that
“Sovereign State of Consciousness” entered solely by means of herbs,
meditation, dreams, sickness, allegory or madness…
Well why not? But thinking so wasn’t much help to Squillhead there.
About as illuminating, in fact, as flashing the halogens at a fogbank ten miles
deep. Still, there was something to be said for that Blue Beard & Barnacle Bill
stuff. Bringing back memories only faintly awful / humiliating / appalling — of
that day when the Spastic Girl, down by “the Lake,” many summers ago… Bury
it! Bury it! Pretending not to see. Playing the game of Pirate’s Island, mutiny on
the High Sargasso, walking the plank, a bit of the old keel-hauling for good
785
measure, being advised by every wisearse within cooee that it’s really the
Treasure Inside that matters when all the accounting’s been tallied up for the
Big Audit. The measly little shit with the heart of gold. Ah, for fuck’s sake, kiddo,
you really do take the bloody cake some times.
Němec groped around like that, eyes half-shuttered, over every square
inch of the Prof’s apartment, but nothing out of the ordinary presented itself. No
hidden ghosts, no blind bats, no mezuzahs cunningly concealed in doorposts, no
false compartments, no loose fittings, no sliding panels, no trapdoors. Only the
tap-tap of chisels through the walls, the thump of a jackhammer, a generator’s
hum, all fusing into also vague evocations of elsewhere. “Vague,” being the
operative word. The rooms, for their part, were all “empty” — excepting for his
own personal detritus, of course, & the wreckage of Pretty Poly[graphicunt].
Discount the obvious by way of the obscure & what was left?
The hiss of recordplayer static followed him around the apartment like a
mocking accompaniment. He gave up the blindman act & switched it off.
Intimations of yet another migraine coming on. Well, let it. He wheezed into his
hands, a pair of beautifully rounded gobs of brown phlegm. Wiped them off
with a sheet of facsimile paper (what else was it good for?). It was obvious he
was sick, but was he also losing his mind? He poured the dregs of a bottle down
his throat. Another dead soldier. He had quite a tally by now, so many notches
on his whatever it would’ve looked like a hedgehog in heat. The alcohol burned
in his gut, he could feel the blood circulating through the lower intestines,
stimulating the Inner Void somewhat. It helped. Pushing the black plastic aside,
he opened a window & breathed the cold air deeply. Ah! The world’s my egg and
I’m its sticky yolk, hehe.
Outside one of the construction workers stopped chiselling the stucco off
the wall & looked at Němec with a queer expression on his face. Němec pulled
his head back, before it was too late…
What was it the ghost said? The tree can’t be escaped by means of the tree? Two
more hours of tapping on walls, gouging out plaster & prying up floorboards.
Digging behind shelves, sinks, under the bath, inside the goddamn toilet. Trees?
What’d trees have to do with it? Between stubborn & stupid was a fine line
forever narrowing. It had Němec going crosseyed sitting there in the hallway
staring at the cracks in the wall, the hinges jointing the built-in broomcloset, the
786
articulated gloom from which empty space spilled out. He stared & stared.
Nothing going on in there, just the desire to crawl in behind the shelves & the
empty shoe racks & lock himself in. Forget all about these idiot notions of his.
Then a funny thing happened. While he sat there blankly staring into the
shadows, something creaked. What it was that creaked was the back of the
closet seeming to come away from the wall. Slowly, as if in a dream, he stood up
& walked towards it. Pushing the racks out of the way, he reached into the gap
in the panelling & pulled. A cunningly disguised door yielded with little effort,
revealing darkness beyond. Němec groped inside the frame & found a switch.
Suddenly a narrow cell-like room appeared, every bit of it layered in dust. Well
I’ll be fucked.
Amazed, Němec stepped through.
It really was a room.
In it there was a chair, a writing desk & a bed, & a dry musty odour that
tasted decades old. A cloistered quiet pervaded. The place obviously hadn’t been
visited for a very long time. He gazed wide-eyed. Had the Prof known this place
existed? He felt like a child stumbling on a pirate’s cave. It was as unreal as that.
And yet it was all too real. Someone had intended it this way…
The walls were bare, except for a couple of hooks & the outlines left by
pictures that’d been removed. A single bookshelf was set into the wall opposite
