The Combinations, page 135
piece pinned by two knights or two pieces by one… Der schwarze Reiter.
880
To complete the picture, Němec hauled the recordplayer out into the
crepuscular nonlight of this anteroom, balancing it atop the mound of rubble —
pill jars, brandy bottles, electrical wires, gas pipes, radiator grills, squares of
parquet, smashed tiles, wall cabinets, doors, door jambs, a stainless steel sink
with all the plumbing still attached, the Prof’s bathtub like some allegorical
lifeboat tipped on its side… It had all the appearance of a shrine buried in a
middenheap, with its squat machine-idol perched there, surveying a wilderness
of shattered masonry — an archaeologist’s trophy in the jungle, emerging from
the roots & undergrowth, wind echoing among the stones as if the godhead
wished to speak but unable to merely wailed or sometimes sang… The workmen
had left an extension cable they’d run up from the mains downstairs: he plugged
the recordplayer in & put on a Berlin Philharmonic recording of Mahler’s
“Resurrection” in Cm with the Klimt on the cover, Rafael Kubelik conducting,
Norma Procter contralto. Those funereal violins! Those aggrieved cellos!
Outside, the workmen were beginning to arrive. Above the strains of
Mahler’s symphony Němec could hear their voices echoing in the stairwell —
the stomping of boots on the steps. Soon the jackhammers would begin again
tearing up the road in front of the house, while men with black masks would be
shovelling tarmac from a brazier, huge steel alembics, fumes & bellows, sealing-
over the trenches only recently excavated — one side digging while the other
filled-in, like opposing teams in a game with no apparent purpose. Behind the
scaffolding, the rooftops were like white & black squares, lopsided under
shadows belonging neither to day nor night. From the courtyard, a whoosh! of
something in mid-collapse — sheets of snow coming down from the rooftop —
then the sound of the giant funnel, like an articulated windpipe, belching debris,
grey dust drifting in from the stairs — a conjurer’s ghost changing shape in the
spectral half-light, suffusing the air.
Between the roar & crash of debris being fed down the funnel, echoes of
heavy boot-tread in the attic above — ceiling plaster cracked, sifting down with
each hobnailed stomp. There they were, disposing of all the evidence — a
demolition crew sent to obliterate every last trace of something that’d never quite
existed in any case. Could Faktor’s hidden hand be detected in all this? Another of
his pedantic little games, where one player’s moves are calculated to undo the
probabilities implied in the other’s — thwarting plans as yet unrealised, barely
formulated, unravelling the gambit before it’s been offered, tying up loose ends
well before the end’s in sight, punching holes in defences still unbuilt, pulling the
rug out from under grand schemes that were never more than a far-off glimmer of
881
hope, turning the clock back to cancel each & every one of your moves before
you’ve even made them, like a meticulously deconstructed falsehood.
For all Němec knew, it was a pattern being repeated all over the City —
like the wine cellar on Jilská Street, the cabaret on the Island, the archives at the
Strahov Monastery — where else? what else? who else? The Bugman, Volta,
Alice Steinerová? What if, at this very moment, they too were being made to
disappear, taken out of the script, buried in a drawer in an office with no name,
for all intents & purposes dead — as dead as the old lady’s parrot?
And all this just for your sake, kiddo? You’ll tell yourself next they’re waiting for
you to leave, before packing up the last of the show, put it all away in boxes somewhere
for next time — allowing you to find a bit of manoeuvring space… to put things to
rights, get it over and done with, the way once-upon-a-time they’d leave a man alone
in a room with a loaded pistol, one shot only, because that’s all he’d need. Real
considerate of them, wouldn’t you say? Gone to a lot of trouble over a complete nobody,
eh? Well, like the wiseguys always say, beggars can’t be choosers…
But even as he was thinking it, the walls echoed with the work of
demolition on all sides. How long before they gutted the entire house in a mad
orgy of erasure, with just the façade left standing — for authenticity’s sake —
flogged-off to developers, KELLEY’S TOWER HOTEL, already at work on
their plans for a multistorey underground carpark, indoor swimming pool, sauna,
recreation area, tropical fishpond in the lobby, restaurant & giftshop & elevator
up to the observation deck, five-star panorama, glass-ceiling, luxury, exclusive, all
modcons? The world just keeps getting better all the time, haven’t you noticed?
The symphony had reached its final movement by the time Němec
retreated for good to the hidden room, the monk’s cell, the captive’s closet, to
prepare a last stand.
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’m
Wirst du, Mein Staub,
Nach kurzer Ruh’!
Unsterblich Leben! Unsterblich Leben
wird der dich rief dir geben!*
In the pitch dark the space seemed huge, though all he needed was to reach out
on either side to feel the walls. He struck a match & by the dull flicker of
candlelight set about barricading the entrance with the little at hand: a writing
* “From dust till dung [sic], the Golem rides again…” [:]
882
desk & other miscellaneous. Temporary measures. Still the effort overwhelmed
him & he sank into the cot-bed conscious only of his breathing. What roused
him was the renewed sound of footfall coming from above & a weight,
something very heavy — like a piano, mnn? — being pushed across the attic
floor. The shifting stopped at a point directly over the wardrobe, where the
Jacob’s ladder led up: one more avenue of escape barred — no denying a certain
“finesse” to all this. There’d have to be some other way.
Němec stared at the scars on his hands, trying to read something out of
them. If this were in a film, what would happen next? How would he script it,
given the chance? The protagonist putting his mind on a wavelength with the
thing that needs to be found & opening up a channel… static in the ether…
pictures flickering on the inward-sided screen… the whole motley montage of
unlikelihoods… & just maybe, among them, the key, the Eureka moment:
replaying that Eve&Adam scene under the apple tree that must’ve been lived a
million&one times before Newton called it gravity, guessing what goes up must
eventually come down, in fallen days of yore before the first rocketman, the lost
Voyager soundtrack playing to angels out beyond the reach of God or solar
system — garbled greetings to distant eons, time-capsuled archaeo-blather, “The
Sounds of Earth” with a special message from U.N. Secretary-General Kurt
Waldheim (that Nazi), addressed to spacefarers & dwellers of dark matter,
savants of the spiralling colostrums of remote galaxies, warped beyond any
dopplereffect, becoming the nascent Logos of other heavenly hosts & other
Gods. Like Jacob’s ladder, first you ascend in order to descend… Establishing
shot, mid-shot, panoramic shot, close-up… Scenes of civilisation’s rise & fall,
beginning in the depths of the sea, newts evolving into man, machines with
brains, aliens abducting the planet by corporate proxy, evolution sub-contracted
running backwards into the future & the closing credits: a chorus of time-
wearied messengers of apocalypse, purveyors of cosmic doom, builders of
rhetorical arks against the onset of the Great Inundation…
But oh, when you get down to it,
right in the muck of it,
ain’t life just…
When you get down to it,
right in the filth of it,
ain’t life just graaaand?
883
And so, taking his cue, with nothing to lose by it — getting down on all fours,
rooting at the bottom of the wardrobe among the shoes & shoehorns, the
transformers & busted crystal sets — the accumulated dust, dead bugs, hair, lint,
loose threads of years or decades — managing with fingernails turning bloody to
dislodge a puzzle-piece of parquet with a metal ring recessed below. The ring
belonged to a trapdoor which came up from the floor with an effort — &
beneath the trapdoor, a narrow shaft led down, steel rungs protruding from
mildewed brickwork — candlelight too feeble to reach the bottom of it. The
gust of a clammy draught — the flame guttering…
No time to evaluate the pros&cons. Němec gathered what he needed. The
Proxy Polygraphia & the secrets insinuated in it — avatars of some
uncompleted, undisclosed project that’d begun with a deception & ended by
confusing itself with the Big Truth? Who else than Hájek had known the real
form of that puzzle which only in appearance resembled it? Severínová? Elsbeth
von N____? Hájek’s wife, Alžběta Seifertová? And Faktor? Bareš? All the other
co-involved conspirators, clutching at straws, machinating this entire drama in
the hope he, Němec, or someone like him, would unearth what their own
exhausted labours had failed to? Unaware that the secret & the puzzle weren’t
equivalent, but only as like as a reflection in two parts — the visible part & the
invisible part* — which, when brought together, would describe at best a
chronicle of omissions, a secret codex of the misplaced, a Pandora’s biscuit-tin of
abominations, disjointings, farces — last word in the Book of Errors — penned
in the most erroneous script imaginable, as if thereby to remove them (& it)
from the world. Real or fake? No-one would ever know: the story ended here.
Němec spilled the contents of the folders into a plastic garbage bag —
bundled the Nazi Manuscript together with the facsimiles & tossed those in too
— the undeciphered Black Book coming apart at the spine — all the evidence
needing to be disposed of — his Miranda in her coffinbox with bundled useless
scribblings — Kulička’s postcard… He slipped the two photographs — Hájek’s
double, the two bishops, the deathshead staring out, seeming to grin & wink at
him in the candlelight — face-to-face together in his jacket pocket. Looked at
one way, the pictures made no sense, or only the opposite of sense — the
alternative was to reduce everything to banalities: a scam gone wrong, whose key
was a list of names, a dramatis personae in a tale of forgery & stolen loot. The
only person with the answers was probably dead by now — Němec was free to
* There’s always more to anything than meets the eye. [:]
884
invent whatever comforting fictions he chose.
Out in the bureau the record had played-out & was starting at the
beginning again. There were footsteps in the hall: they paused outside the
entrance to the room, as if aware of his presence within. In the courtyard it was
probably snowing again by now — the doors & windows along the ground floor
with no sign of anyone. The dead parrot. The broken tea pot on the floor of the
caretaker’s flat. And what of the other inhabitants he’d never laid eyes on? Mere
ciphers? Unpaid extras who’d been edited out of the script? Němec took up his
inherited hat & walkingstick (he’d soon have no further need of such props: they
might yet become evidence of some obscure allegory, were anyone to pay heed to
them — like the smear on the ceiling of Faust’s workshop — false clues leading
nowhere), the flashlight, hammer & chisel. What else would he need?
On the bookshelf stood a shaving mirror that’d once belonged to a man
called Josef Kulička — one last look: that breached bastion of a corpus — a face
you’d barely notice because all it described was the broken silhouette of
something else — Mr Nonentity — a scarecrow in the wind with its stuffing
knocked out… Němec snuffed the candle & dropped the bag into the hole,
easing himself down after it, one foothold at a time. How long would they wait
before they came looking? Would they ever? Already he’d forgotten what day of
the week it was. It didn’t matter.
As Němec descended the Jacob’s ladder, the music echoed weirdly in the
gap above — the shaft was narrow, sunk through a space between two walls with
pipes running at intervals on either side — brick & mortar giving way to wood
sheet-piling, tongued & grooved, extending down through foundations ending
in an air vent squeezed between bottle racks in the cellar. Scuttle of rats’ feet —
muffled voices beyond the gate — dampness suffusing the air. He cast the
torchlight through the hole in the far wall, pushed the bag through & climbed
after it, rubble strewn about on either side.
A faint current stirred
beyond the threshold — far distant,
the river’s beckoning whisper,
conjugating in all its moods —
hark! — calling on, down into the
cave of itself, torchlight &
shadowspiel, the guiding spirits
casting back a sheep’s eye — as up
above the cranking of machines
885
drowned-out the last strains of
Mahler’s “Resurrection,” while
from the east dawn’s pond’rous
relay, eight o’clock, & the stink
wafting up the valley, the TV
tower’s unblinking eye above a
greyblack cobblestoned sea — the
beleaguered Erdshadow receding
km/s — faint secondhand light
through west-facing window-holes
making dumbshow silhouettes on
the recordplayer’s dial.
Once more retracing his steps, the resumed journey, the retold &
aforesaid, if only to hear the end of it — burrowing under the City, the atavism
of the descent, guided by the torch’s one eye, Golem in the land of the blind,
deeper & deeper into its undermind, Orpheus returning under Lesbos, Eurydice,
her bittersweet tears…
Down through bedrock,
sediment, clay, mud, protoplasms
& toxic waste, regurgitated bile &
tuberculous spittle — sack of
broken books dragged behind, by
hooked crook of walkingstick. And
as Němec progressed, the distance
behind did seem to swell, while the
distance ahead did seem to contract
to a hovering speck of fairylight: he
desired to touch it, but it was
always just beyond reach. Patience,
my dear…
Further & further crawling along the shaft into the very heart of the
labyrinth — Minotaur long dead — you wouldn’t find any trace of it down here,
not even a ghost — it was a place from which everything seemed to’ve fled, of its
own will or under some elsewise influence.
There was an ancient
proverb, that only in accursèd places
can sanctuary be found: the pariah
886
who dwells in cemeteries among the
dead, Mydlář, the headsman,
faceless, camouflaged among the
outcasts of the Ghetto — the
Golem-fearers, the sewer-builders,
sootmouthed frackers of gold from
subterranean vapours, mudmen,
creatures of the Maharal.
Piranesi dungeons of irrational dream architectures — opposed &
intertwined dimensions in labyrinths of time & space — turbulent, overflowing,
mephitic…
Narrowing, the descent grew
steeper. The ever-accompanying
whisper, louder. Ahead, just a little
further on, the blackness beyond
the torchlight resolved into a solid
form. Němec breathed hard but the
sound of his breathing was lost.
Closer now, the dancing spot of
light touched the surface of a wall
barring the way. Faintly it
glistened. He set down with his
tools upon the ground, barely room
to hunch in. It could’ve been
anywhere, a tunnel beneath a
pyramid on the Nile & he a thief
squatting at the door of Pharaoh’s
tomb. The stones bore the marks of
something that’d clawed them so
that they bled. Some elementary
self-sentience prowling the dark.
The Great Voice whispered,
swelled, beat within.
Němec
strained to give a shape to the
cacophony — the voice inside the
voice, the whisper inside the
whisper. Shush now.
887
To go on? Or not go on? To wait again for the violent sleep to come over
880
To complete the picture, Němec hauled the recordplayer out into the
crepuscular nonlight of this anteroom, balancing it atop the mound of rubble —
pill jars, brandy bottles, electrical wires, gas pipes, radiator grills, squares of
parquet, smashed tiles, wall cabinets, doors, door jambs, a stainless steel sink
with all the plumbing still attached, the Prof’s bathtub like some allegorical
lifeboat tipped on its side… It had all the appearance of a shrine buried in a
middenheap, with its squat machine-idol perched there, surveying a wilderness
of shattered masonry — an archaeologist’s trophy in the jungle, emerging from
the roots & undergrowth, wind echoing among the stones as if the godhead
wished to speak but unable to merely wailed or sometimes sang… The workmen
had left an extension cable they’d run up from the mains downstairs: he plugged
the recordplayer in & put on a Berlin Philharmonic recording of Mahler’s
“Resurrection” in Cm with the Klimt on the cover, Rafael Kubelik conducting,
Norma Procter contralto. Those funereal violins! Those aggrieved cellos!
Outside, the workmen were beginning to arrive. Above the strains of
Mahler’s symphony Němec could hear their voices echoing in the stairwell —
the stomping of boots on the steps. Soon the jackhammers would begin again
tearing up the road in front of the house, while men with black masks would be
shovelling tarmac from a brazier, huge steel alembics, fumes & bellows, sealing-
over the trenches only recently excavated — one side digging while the other
filled-in, like opposing teams in a game with no apparent purpose. Behind the
scaffolding, the rooftops were like white & black squares, lopsided under
shadows belonging neither to day nor night. From the courtyard, a whoosh! of
something in mid-collapse — sheets of snow coming down from the rooftop —
then the sound of the giant funnel, like an articulated windpipe, belching debris,
grey dust drifting in from the stairs — a conjurer’s ghost changing shape in the
spectral half-light, suffusing the air.
Between the roar & crash of debris being fed down the funnel, echoes of
heavy boot-tread in the attic above — ceiling plaster cracked, sifting down with
each hobnailed stomp. There they were, disposing of all the evidence — a
demolition crew sent to obliterate every last trace of something that’d never quite
existed in any case. Could Faktor’s hidden hand be detected in all this? Another of
his pedantic little games, where one player’s moves are calculated to undo the
probabilities implied in the other’s — thwarting plans as yet unrealised, barely
formulated, unravelling the gambit before it’s been offered, tying up loose ends
well before the end’s in sight, punching holes in defences still unbuilt, pulling the
rug out from under grand schemes that were never more than a far-off glimmer of
881
hope, turning the clock back to cancel each & every one of your moves before
you’ve even made them, like a meticulously deconstructed falsehood.
For all Němec knew, it was a pattern being repeated all over the City —
like the wine cellar on Jilská Street, the cabaret on the Island, the archives at the
Strahov Monastery — where else? what else? who else? The Bugman, Volta,
Alice Steinerová? What if, at this very moment, they too were being made to
disappear, taken out of the script, buried in a drawer in an office with no name,
for all intents & purposes dead — as dead as the old lady’s parrot?
And all this just for your sake, kiddo? You’ll tell yourself next they’re waiting for
you to leave, before packing up the last of the show, put it all away in boxes somewhere
for next time — allowing you to find a bit of manoeuvring space… to put things to
rights, get it over and done with, the way once-upon-a-time they’d leave a man alone
in a room with a loaded pistol, one shot only, because that’s all he’d need. Real
considerate of them, wouldn’t you say? Gone to a lot of trouble over a complete nobody,
eh? Well, like the wiseguys always say, beggars can’t be choosers…
But even as he was thinking it, the walls echoed with the work of
demolition on all sides. How long before they gutted the entire house in a mad
orgy of erasure, with just the façade left standing — for authenticity’s sake —
flogged-off to developers, KELLEY’S TOWER HOTEL, already at work on
their plans for a multistorey underground carpark, indoor swimming pool, sauna,
recreation area, tropical fishpond in the lobby, restaurant & giftshop & elevator
up to the observation deck, five-star panorama, glass-ceiling, luxury, exclusive, all
modcons? The world just keeps getting better all the time, haven’t you noticed?
The symphony had reached its final movement by the time Němec
retreated for good to the hidden room, the monk’s cell, the captive’s closet, to
prepare a last stand.
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’m
Wirst du, Mein Staub,
Nach kurzer Ruh’!
Unsterblich Leben! Unsterblich Leben
wird der dich rief dir geben!*
In the pitch dark the space seemed huge, though all he needed was to reach out
on either side to feel the walls. He struck a match & by the dull flicker of
candlelight set about barricading the entrance with the little at hand: a writing
* “From dust till dung [sic], the Golem rides again…” [:]
882
desk & other miscellaneous. Temporary measures. Still the effort overwhelmed
him & he sank into the cot-bed conscious only of his breathing. What roused
him was the renewed sound of footfall coming from above & a weight,
something very heavy — like a piano, mnn? — being pushed across the attic
floor. The shifting stopped at a point directly over the wardrobe, where the
Jacob’s ladder led up: one more avenue of escape barred — no denying a certain
“finesse” to all this. There’d have to be some other way.
Němec stared at the scars on his hands, trying to read something out of
them. If this were in a film, what would happen next? How would he script it,
given the chance? The protagonist putting his mind on a wavelength with the
thing that needs to be found & opening up a channel… static in the ether…
pictures flickering on the inward-sided screen… the whole motley montage of
unlikelihoods… & just maybe, among them, the key, the Eureka moment:
replaying that Eve&Adam scene under the apple tree that must’ve been lived a
million&one times before Newton called it gravity, guessing what goes up must
eventually come down, in fallen days of yore before the first rocketman, the lost
Voyager soundtrack playing to angels out beyond the reach of God or solar
system — garbled greetings to distant eons, time-capsuled archaeo-blather, “The
Sounds of Earth” with a special message from U.N. Secretary-General Kurt
Waldheim (that Nazi), addressed to spacefarers & dwellers of dark matter,
savants of the spiralling colostrums of remote galaxies, warped beyond any
dopplereffect, becoming the nascent Logos of other heavenly hosts & other
Gods. Like Jacob’s ladder, first you ascend in order to descend… Establishing
shot, mid-shot, panoramic shot, close-up… Scenes of civilisation’s rise & fall,
beginning in the depths of the sea, newts evolving into man, machines with
brains, aliens abducting the planet by corporate proxy, evolution sub-contracted
running backwards into the future & the closing credits: a chorus of time-
wearied messengers of apocalypse, purveyors of cosmic doom, builders of
rhetorical arks against the onset of the Great Inundation…
But oh, when you get down to it,
right in the muck of it,
ain’t life just…
When you get down to it,
right in the filth of it,
ain’t life just graaaand?
883
And so, taking his cue, with nothing to lose by it — getting down on all fours,
rooting at the bottom of the wardrobe among the shoes & shoehorns, the
transformers & busted crystal sets — the accumulated dust, dead bugs, hair, lint,
loose threads of years or decades — managing with fingernails turning bloody to
dislodge a puzzle-piece of parquet with a metal ring recessed below. The ring
belonged to a trapdoor which came up from the floor with an effort — &
beneath the trapdoor, a narrow shaft led down, steel rungs protruding from
mildewed brickwork — candlelight too feeble to reach the bottom of it. The
gust of a clammy draught — the flame guttering…
No time to evaluate the pros&cons. Němec gathered what he needed. The
Proxy Polygraphia & the secrets insinuated in it — avatars of some
uncompleted, undisclosed project that’d begun with a deception & ended by
confusing itself with the Big Truth? Who else than Hájek had known the real
form of that puzzle which only in appearance resembled it? Severínová? Elsbeth
von N____? Hájek’s wife, Alžběta Seifertová? And Faktor? Bareš? All the other
co-involved conspirators, clutching at straws, machinating this entire drama in
the hope he, Němec, or someone like him, would unearth what their own
exhausted labours had failed to? Unaware that the secret & the puzzle weren’t
equivalent, but only as like as a reflection in two parts — the visible part & the
invisible part* — which, when brought together, would describe at best a
chronicle of omissions, a secret codex of the misplaced, a Pandora’s biscuit-tin of
abominations, disjointings, farces — last word in the Book of Errors — penned
in the most erroneous script imaginable, as if thereby to remove them (& it)
from the world. Real or fake? No-one would ever know: the story ended here.
Němec spilled the contents of the folders into a plastic garbage bag —
bundled the Nazi Manuscript together with the facsimiles & tossed those in too
— the undeciphered Black Book coming apart at the spine — all the evidence
needing to be disposed of — his Miranda in her coffinbox with bundled useless
scribblings — Kulička’s postcard… He slipped the two photographs — Hájek’s
double, the two bishops, the deathshead staring out, seeming to grin & wink at
him in the candlelight — face-to-face together in his jacket pocket. Looked at
one way, the pictures made no sense, or only the opposite of sense — the
alternative was to reduce everything to banalities: a scam gone wrong, whose key
was a list of names, a dramatis personae in a tale of forgery & stolen loot. The
only person with the answers was probably dead by now — Němec was free to
* There’s always more to anything than meets the eye. [:]
884
invent whatever comforting fictions he chose.
Out in the bureau the record had played-out & was starting at the
beginning again. There were footsteps in the hall: they paused outside the
entrance to the room, as if aware of his presence within. In the courtyard it was
probably snowing again by now — the doors & windows along the ground floor
with no sign of anyone. The dead parrot. The broken tea pot on the floor of the
caretaker’s flat. And what of the other inhabitants he’d never laid eyes on? Mere
ciphers? Unpaid extras who’d been edited out of the script? Němec took up his
inherited hat & walkingstick (he’d soon have no further need of such props: they
might yet become evidence of some obscure allegory, were anyone to pay heed to
them — like the smear on the ceiling of Faust’s workshop — false clues leading
nowhere), the flashlight, hammer & chisel. What else would he need?
On the bookshelf stood a shaving mirror that’d once belonged to a man
called Josef Kulička — one last look: that breached bastion of a corpus — a face
you’d barely notice because all it described was the broken silhouette of
something else — Mr Nonentity — a scarecrow in the wind with its stuffing
knocked out… Němec snuffed the candle & dropped the bag into the hole,
easing himself down after it, one foothold at a time. How long would they wait
before they came looking? Would they ever? Already he’d forgotten what day of
the week it was. It didn’t matter.
As Němec descended the Jacob’s ladder, the music echoed weirdly in the
gap above — the shaft was narrow, sunk through a space between two walls with
pipes running at intervals on either side — brick & mortar giving way to wood
sheet-piling, tongued & grooved, extending down through foundations ending
in an air vent squeezed between bottle racks in the cellar. Scuttle of rats’ feet —
muffled voices beyond the gate — dampness suffusing the air. He cast the
torchlight through the hole in the far wall, pushed the bag through & climbed
after it, rubble strewn about on either side.
A faint current stirred
beyond the threshold — far distant,
the river’s beckoning whisper,
conjugating in all its moods —
hark! — calling on, down into the
cave of itself, torchlight &
shadowspiel, the guiding spirits
casting back a sheep’s eye — as up
above the cranking of machines
885
drowned-out the last strains of
Mahler’s “Resurrection,” while
from the east dawn’s pond’rous
relay, eight o’clock, & the stink
wafting up the valley, the TV
tower’s unblinking eye above a
greyblack cobblestoned sea — the
beleaguered Erdshadow receding
km/s — faint secondhand light
through west-facing window-holes
making dumbshow silhouettes on
the recordplayer’s dial.
Once more retracing his steps, the resumed journey, the retold &
aforesaid, if only to hear the end of it — burrowing under the City, the atavism
of the descent, guided by the torch’s one eye, Golem in the land of the blind,
deeper & deeper into its undermind, Orpheus returning under Lesbos, Eurydice,
her bittersweet tears…
Down through bedrock,
sediment, clay, mud, protoplasms
& toxic waste, regurgitated bile &
tuberculous spittle — sack of
broken books dragged behind, by
hooked crook of walkingstick. And
as Němec progressed, the distance
behind did seem to swell, while the
distance ahead did seem to contract
to a hovering speck of fairylight: he
desired to touch it, but it was
always just beyond reach. Patience,
my dear…
Further & further crawling along the shaft into the very heart of the
labyrinth — Minotaur long dead — you wouldn’t find any trace of it down here,
not even a ghost — it was a place from which everything seemed to’ve fled, of its
own will or under some elsewise influence.
There was an ancient
proverb, that only in accursèd places
can sanctuary be found: the pariah
886
who dwells in cemeteries among the
dead, Mydlář, the headsman,
faceless, camouflaged among the
outcasts of the Ghetto — the
Golem-fearers, the sewer-builders,
sootmouthed frackers of gold from
subterranean vapours, mudmen,
creatures of the Maharal.
Piranesi dungeons of irrational dream architectures — opposed &
intertwined dimensions in labyrinths of time & space — turbulent, overflowing,
mephitic…
Narrowing, the descent grew
steeper. The ever-accompanying
whisper, louder. Ahead, just a little
further on, the blackness beyond
the torchlight resolved into a solid
form. Němec breathed hard but the
sound of his breathing was lost.
Closer now, the dancing spot of
light touched the surface of a wall
barring the way. Faintly it
glistened. He set down with his
tools upon the ground, barely room
to hunch in. It could’ve been
anywhere, a tunnel beneath a
pyramid on the Nile & he a thief
squatting at the door of Pharaoh’s
tomb. The stones bore the marks of
something that’d clawed them so
that they bled. Some elementary
self-sentience prowling the dark.
The Great Voice whispered,
swelled, beat within.
Němec
strained to give a shape to the
cacophony — the voice inside the
voice, the whisper inside the
whisper. Shush now.
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To go on? Or not go on? To wait again for the violent sleep to come over
