The Combinations, page 22
out all the creases in the world. Volta looked like someone in the grip of their
own hypnotism. The room grew more sombre, even, as the sky outside
darkened. Grey wisps of snow coiled at the edges of the windows.
Volta spoke of masters & slaves, of dialectics, of the impasse of Reason.
Němec stifled a yawn.
‘You might say,’ the doctor leant back suddenly from the desk, breaking the
spell, ‘that man himself is really nothing but a fantasy. The fantasy of a fantasy.’
He looked at Němec & sighed again. His fingers spread out on the table as
if he were groping for something that wasn’t there. But it was only an impression.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
The question was a rhetorical one but Volta still smiled at Němec
hopefully. The silence produced no perceptible effect. The doctor tapped his
fingers. Back to normal, then, Němec thought, wondering what the hell he was
really doing there, sitting in that office. Volta stopped tapping & brought his
hands together to form an apex in front of his mouth —
‘Right now you’re probably thinking that everything I’ve just told you is
sheer mystification?’ he said through his fingers.
Němec kept his face blank. He had no idea what the doctor was getting at.
‘I wouldn’t blame you,’ Volta sighed, as if he’d read his listener’s thoughts.
Němec experienced a moment of mild panic, but the doctor was staring
emptily into space, hands clasped in abstract prayer, evincing no other awareness
there was anyone else still in the room. Alone amongst the décor, he’d’ve had all
the appearance of some disenchanted melodrama pretending to be a man & not
getting very far with it. His voice by now was a kind of drone sliding farther &
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farther into the bass register. At any moment the whole room would start to
shake & the pictures fall from the walls.
‘We are,’ Volta seemed to moan, ‘deadened by a dying language no longer
capable either of expressing the truth or of telling us what “truth” actually means.’
Volta’s eyes gazed deadly, as dead as the lightbulb lying on the floor —
‘I’m a doctor,’ he said, as if gaining confidence in stating the obvious, ‘I
know the value of anatomy, but the body I must be competent in treating isn’t
some cadaver anatomised in text books, but the whole living social organism —
the world itself, you could say, & the world’s mind. Because the world really does
have a mind,’ Volta grimaced, turning his gaze towards Němec as though
suddenly reminded of his existence. ‘It’s thinking us, you & me, at this very
moment. You don’t believe me?’
Outside, the snow was falling heavier & faster. And behind the whirling
of the snow, the mind of the world, working-out its hidden design, making
ordered chaos even of these most evanescent & fragile particles. The kernel of the
wordsoul, as the old Prof had been fond of saying. Not world, but word: Wort,
nicht Welt. He’d taken the idea from Plotinus, or Plato maybe, or Polonius — it
hardly mattered. Conjuring some voice at the dawn of time, in the time before
time, author of the Beginning & the End, etc. But the voice Němec was hearing
belonged to a man who was merely that, with his back bowed under the weight
of a conscience that wasn’t his. Němec could just about picture the apprentice
apostle Volta on the hill of Golgotha, silent at the foot of that particular
crucifixion, eyes fixed on the nailed & broken feet of his crucified God, flyblown
already, thinking — He’ll never be able to walk again, they’ll have to wheel him
about on a trestleboard — but still, in some abstract way, committed to the
Hippocratic task, the little daily acts of salvation & resurrection. As if he, too,
had found his soul’s Eternal Janitor, his Pigeon Man.
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10
___________
The church on Husova stood barely a stone’s throw from a well-frequented
drinking establishment called the Golden Taige &, on its southern side, was
divided from the buildings of the Philosophy Institute by the cobblestones of
Zlatá Street. Contrary to popular belief, the heretic Jan Hus, burned at the stake
on the shores of the Bodensee in for sins against the Church of Rome,
never preached there. “Hus,” a name deriving from Sklavic origins meaning goose
or possibly Saxon origins meaning cough, was uncommon already by the
seventeenth century.
It was morning, sometime between the Prof’s funeral & the Rehab Unit.
Němec was still doing his rounds, but not for very much longer. Unknown forces
were gathering, he could feel it like a twitch beneath the skin, the signs were
multiplying, fair warning given, soon it’d be safer to remain behind locked doors.
In the meantime he wandered the points of the constellations: the Chop House,
The White Whale, the foggy embankments, the humid libraries & musty
bookshops, the smoky movie houses on the Square, the brown coal-haze of
Blecha’s rooftop.
The Old Man’s death brought an air of cloying mortality. It was a new
feeling. Everyone Němec had ever known had simply disappeared from the
picture, immaculately so to speak. Death, the omniscient stage director, had so far
declined to put in a personal appearance. It gave Němec pause to consider where
he’d come from, where he was headed. In the scheme of things, Nowhere could be
the underside of everything or nothing at all. Whoever tried to find such a place?
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Sometimes he wondered if the files at the Interior Ministry weren’t just
part of some elaborate fame-up. And the Home. And now this. Some kind of
psychiatric experiment from the future to mess with the programme, retrodesign
the End of History, or whatever, find the missing keys to the omniverse. All in
the mind, of course. No arguing with that. Was any of it supposed to be funny?
Hoohoo, went the pigeons under the eaves. Haahaa, the bicycle wheezing along
the pavement. Overcoats flapped in the wind, handkerchiefs waved, gloved
hands gathered scarves around necks. It was a morning designed for portents. As
Němec navigated a crowd of church-goers loitering on the curb, he was
reminded of a couple of ancient Silesian proverbs:
It’ll come to pass as the old goose quacked…
&
A man with a cough cannot hide…
Zlatá (it was really too narrow to be called a street, but also too wide to be an
alley) ran out into a small square hafted on its farther side by Jilská Street.
Adjoining an archway with a pair of large wooden coachdoors, a folklorist’s
trinketshop stood with woven baskets arranged on the cobbled pavement,
containing puppets, carved dolls & ornamental Easter eggs six months out of
season. Above the shop entrance, a wrought-iron motif, gold-flaked, depicted
the Goose that laid the Golden Egg. From the gloom of the shop, a girl in white
folk-skirt & embroidered blue bodice gazed with a look of weird desperation out
at the street, as if for the price of a few dollars she might be saved from a fate
worse than this.
The girl in the white folk-skirt observed Němec’s approach. His actual
destination, the Svoboda & Slovíčkář bookstore, was diagonally opposite the
trinketshop — its façade in large part concealed behind a parked delivery van,
from which three men in overalls were currently unloading crates. The crates,
stencilled FRAGILE & vv
vv, belonged to an address one
door along: SKRIER & CO., PURVEYORS OF FINE CRYSTAL — from
whose entrance a fourth man came wheeling a trolley, humming loudly to
himself the theme tune from an old TV detective drama, Major Zeman.
Němec stared morbidly at the shop window papered with the usual printed
& handwritten notices. The girl across the street tracked his reflection in the gaps
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between. Then someone inside the trinketshop called out & the girl reluctantly
turned & disappeared inside. Němec, having never even noticed her, was standing
in front of the advertisement for The Sphinx’s Code, a definitive booklength study
of the Voynich Manuscript: observa hoc spatium. Blank. In his slept-in undertaker’s
suit & mess of unbrushed hair he looked the part, at least, ogling the sign in the
window with hunched shoulders like a scarecrow sizing up to let go a couple of
knockdown combinations at a wet paper bag. There were holes in his shoes. If it
seemed he’d come a long way, he still had much further to go. Němec sighed as
his gaze drifted across the notices, some of them layered four or five deep like bits
of uncovered archaeology. They all appeared innocuous enough:
Hanka’s Homoeopathic Herbal Healings, on Liliová Street, was hosting a
lecture by PhDr Ondřej Zeugma, “tonight at :” (no date given). Visits to
the last-known resting place of Rabbi Löw’s “Golem,” by arrangement at the
New Old Synagogue, please contact etc. Albino laboratory mice for sale, in good
health, ideal as domestic pets. Multidimensional services* to take place at St
Thomas’ Church, Mondays, Tuesday, Thursdays, Fridays at pm, everyone
welcome. The Centre for Theoretical Study, weekly workshop #: How to
Build an Orgone Accumulator in your Own Home. An exhibition of the
proteiform work of Rudolf II’s court portraitist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, about to
open at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Schnitzelstadt (the flyer showed a
portrait of the Habsburg Emperor made from a pallet of fruit & veg, like
surrealist grocery). The Psychic Flea Circus Trainer’s Manual, complete set, “as
new,” Kč ,- with complementary wall-chart…
As Němec pushed open the door, a draught of warm musty air swaddled
him — immediately his eyes drooped, the odour of decaying books was like a
soporific. Behind him a bell tinkled & as if summoned from nowhere an elderly
man, with thick square bifocals & a bowl-shaped fringe of hair around a
baldspot like a Capuchin’s tonsure, appeared behind the shop counter. Němec
recognised him from past occasions, but the bookseller’s face exhibited nothing
but the blank expectancy of someone who harbours few illusions about his fellow
man, least of all his customers.
They exchanged monosyllables. Němec asked about the notice in the
window. The bookseller just looked at him from behind his pasty bifocals with
eyes that grew a little blanker, as if only an idiot would expect him to know such
* Sic. (Did he mean “Multidenominational”? Call it what you will: “the name of the name isn’t the
same as the name.”) [:]
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things. You’d think people went there for no reason but to pry secrets out of him,
secrets he didn’t know he possessed but which he was determined to keep in any
case. It’d been like that when Němec asked about Mydlář, the mere mention of
the headsman’s name was enough to make the bookseller clam up. Němec tried
subtler approaches, but always in the end it was the same —
‘If it ain’t on the shelves,’ the bookseller grumbled, wedging a pencil stub
as thin as a toothpick between his teeth, ‘it ain’t on the shelves.’
Němec gave the pseudo-Capuchin a sceptical look, but just then a couple
of students wandered in, so Němec drifted off down one of the aisles & began
rifling through the sections on History, Art, Esoterica, Theology. You could tell
that’s what the sections were supposed to be because someone who’d once-upon-
a-time tried to be helpful had written as much on strips of blue paper sellotaped
to the respective shelves. Once-upon-a-time it might’ve even meant something,
but it didn’t any more. You’d’ve had better luck with a jigged roulette table.
Just for the hell of it, Němec chose a couple of shelves at random —
picking through cardboard folios & back numbers of The Murmurer, thick
hardcover museum catalogues, star charts & handpainted tarot decks, yellowed
flyspecked theatre pamphlets & dusty letterpress poetry fascicles, Churchill’s
twelve-volume history of the War, Gray’s Anatomy, a black cloth-bound copy of
My Secret Life (vols. I-VI) by “Anonymous,” several dozen overpriced pirate
editions (printed in Leipzig) of the more decadent Western Imperialist authors
of the last two centuries, & — pièce de résistance — a full set of the Complete
Works of Comrade Marx&Engels, bound in fake vellum, gold-embossed &
lettered in carmine.
Whatever system might once have ordered the store’s inventory seemed
long ago to’ve been abandoned under the sheer bulk of accumulation. Books had
been fitted into every available space, from floor to ceiling, piled on stairs, in
boxes, teetering atop planks of bowed plywood ranged overhead into makeshift
bridges between opposing upper shelves. It was like a burrow or a bower. The
sound of a cash register clanked from the other end of the shop, muffled behind
the walls of books. Stairs wound down, around & back up again. Light filtered
through a window thick with dust & papered almost entirely with blank bits of
paper. Beneath it was a shelf stacked with periodicals dating back to the s.
Němec grabbed a bundle at random & sorted through it. Then another.
Kino, National Geographic, Přítomnost, Encounter, Typ, Erotická Revue & suchlike.
The dusty glue & newsprint smell of the fleshpots of yore, etc. It was in this
manner that he stumbled upon a pretentious-looking journal called Heterocosmica,
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in whose pages, as he flipped through, fanning away the dust that came off them,
he came upon a “letter,” translated from the Latin, sent long ago by a Golem City
book collector to a Roman priest. It wasn’t a particularly interesting letter by itself.
It was reprinted at the end of a long article about the Dialogicall Diſcourſes of Spirits
& Divels (London, ) — Declairing their proper offence, natures, diſpoſitions, and
operations: their poſſeßions and dispoſſeßions — under the heading:
An Apologia for Hermes Trismegistus
But something startlingly familiar about the letter caused Němec to jerk his
head, as if someone had stalked up behind him & coughed unexpectedly in his
ear. Then someone really did cough. The sound came from behind one of the
bookshelves. Němec stood like that waiting for several moments before he
realised he was in a cul-de-sac separated by only a couple of feet from the store
entrance. As if to confirm his deduction the bell over the door chimed. There
was a mumbled exchange at the counter. Footsteps. All of which might’ve
passed unremarked had at that very instant two pinhole eyes not been peering at
Němec from the other side of the window.
The eyes seemed to exist all by themselves, detached from any face,
floating in a square of smudged glass framed by paper scraps. Then a shadow fell
across the glass & the eyes were gone. He blinked at the empty space in the
middle of it, then down at the journal he was clutching in his hands, then back
at the empty space. Observa hoc spatium… Something in his mind struggled to
make a connection. A connection it would’ve been better not to make…
☤
Rewind still further: October, the last time Němec saw the Prof alive.
It’d gone eight o’clock & Němec was late. The weather was more than
usually cold for that time of year — ice hung in the air & the wind worked its way
through Němec’s tattered coat as he trudged up the street, cobblestones slick
underfoot. He was thinking through variations of a gambit he’d perhaps try out
against his wily foe, given the (unlikely) opportunity — Fromm’s, socalled: e!? in
reply to f — when he saw the white house standing there ahead, the vaulted arch
into the open-flanked courtyard, the lights in the windows like drowned embers.
He climbed the winding Tower stairs & rang the bell. The caretaker, an
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elderly bird by name of Severínová, opened the door wrapped in the aroma of
pickled zelí, giving Němec a blank stare. She knew him of course, but that’s the
way with some people, isn’t it, looking at you like they’ve never clapped eyes on
you before in their lives. From all indications, Mrs Severínová had been up there
cooking the evening’s variation on boiled veg & two cabbage, the Prof &
entourage being of that caste disdainful towards the flesh of beast or fowl. The old
bird had been leaving in any case & so ushered Němec in as she ushered herself
