The Combinations, page 3
Němec’s attention, meanwhile, had been caught by the house across the
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street. It loomed there behind a gateway, utterly decrepit, with the stucco
crumbling from its façade. He was fairly sure it hadn’t been there before, either.
He glanced around. On every other side there was only a grey vagueness, as if he
was standing in the middle of a soundstage ten metres wide with the set taking
up the back wall & a camera crew hidden behind the fog.
While Němec was busy with the scenery, the Prof shuffled away through
the snow, his sepia-brown shape receding from the lone lamplight. It was a set-
up for a scene by Hitchcock, Carroll, Wilder, Huston, Lang. It’d been done a
million times before, but that didn’t change anything, it could always be done
again. Němec wondered what the Old Man was up to this time. He stopped in
front of the house & pulled a large key from his pocket, stuck it in the lock in
the middle of the gate, & turned it. The gate creaked open on rusty hinges.
Behind it, the mustard-coloured façade was knotted with snow-covered ivy,
baroque scrollwork above doors, mansards, roots poking through the eaves,
sheets of ice hanging down.
‘What’re you waiting for?’ the ghost called back, stamping snow from
sodden suède, ‘you’ll never get anywhere standing around like that!’
Němec trudged across the street. When he reached the gate, the Prof was
gazing up at the eaves above the fifth-floor windows, as if he was looking for
something. Němec stuck his hands in his pockets & sighed.
‘I have the feeling,’ the ghost said, ‘you’ve been here before…’
Resigned
Resigned, Němec followed the Prof’s gaze. In one of the grimy high windows a
painted smiley-face, like a dull half-moon, was sellotaped to the pane. The place
indeed seemed familiar somehow, a detached fragment of a lost memory. While
Němec puzzled at it, a swishing sound came through the air & something
thumped heavily into the snow at his side. It was a sheet of ice that’d slid from
the roof & ricocheted off the wall. It stuck in the ground like a cracked
guillotine blade. Němec backed away in alarm.
‘Incredible, when you think about it,’ said the ghost, unperturbed, gazing
up through the flickering vortex, ‘that in a vacuum a snowflake falls at the same
speed as a grown man.’ He tilted his head to regard Němec over a brown
herringboned shoulder. ‘Except, of course, that neither snowflakes nor grown
men are customarily found in a vacuum…’
‘…?’
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The Prof turned around & levelled his gaze at Němec.
‘Surely they taught you that much in school?’
‘I didn’t go to regular school…’
‘Well, my little misfit, consider this: With an open parachute it takes
approximately twentyfive minutes to fall from a height of fortythousand feet.
Which is to say, twelvethousandonehundred&ninetytwo metres — as countless
poor blighters crossing the channel from imperial to metric learned during the
War. Without a parachute it takes a little over three minutes. While to fall with
or without a parachute from the fifth storey of an apartment building, takes
barely any time at all…’
‘…?’
The Prof gave him the “hairless Mexican” look & walked off through the
gate into a yard.
‘Hold your horses!’ Němec said, stumbling behind. ‘Where’re you…?’
A tarnished brass plate fixed to one side of the gateway read:
•DĚTSKÝ DOMOV
CHILDREN’S HOME
And now Němec knew why the mustard-coloured building was so familiar. It
looked like the sort of place that only existed in dreams, but no, it was real
alright, he’d been there before, he’d spent half his life there, like the squill-
headed smiley in that window, wanting nothing more than to escape. The ghost
turned & looked back at him. Fatherly now, with careworn eyes drooping under
a weight not of this world, the Prof in a quiet singsong voice said —
‘ Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir…’*
As he spoke, the Old Man’s phantom drifted away along the pathway
through the concrete garden with posts, benches, ungainly statuettes half-buried
in snowdrift till he reached a pair of great black doors rising like a weathered
cliff-face & dissolved into them, truly a ghost at last. High above, the face in the
window peered out between crossed bars — a pair of black eyes that seemed to
ask, Why am I here? What type of punishment is this? From somewhere in a
muffled distance, Němec heard the ghost’s indistinct laughter. The Prof, he
* “Come here, liddle kiddy, have a sweet. We’ll play a nice cosy bedtime game…” [:]
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thought, sure knew how to piss on a parade. But whose parade was it?
Like a helpless idiot in one of those films, he followed the ghost’s
footprints down the path & up the stairway, the years catching up with him as
he went: deleted mysteries in a scenery of filing cards, lost, occulted, gaussian
blurs of long-forgotten names & faces in reanimation, filmed with white-out.
Overhead, the snow came down with renewed insistence, swirling & spiralling
through the lamplight like the auricle of an ear. And somewhere in the back of
Němec’s mind, an echo, faint sounds like shattering glass, & the picture of
something, glittering with light: light shattering falling — reverberations
through gusty dormitories — darkness — a strange puppet-body in a stranger
bed. Whimpering. And a voice. Shut up! it said. I’ve wet myself, the puppet-child
answered. And the child was him. In the glory days of his young youth. Best
years, they all smilingly said. Wine & bloody roses.
Rewind
Rewind, eleven years: lying on a stretcher in the infirmary of the Children’s
Home with a pair of bandaged mitts. It was the end of autumn & the beginning
of winter. Němec couldn’t remember what he was doing there. Smell of
purgative, sal volatile, & all around, light glinting off beakers, bottles, jars &
phials in glass cabinets. A nurse was shaking her head, tongue clicking behind
nicotine-yellow teeth, threading a needle with surgical twine. Starched uniform,
blotched with crimson, the stains darkening outwards from their centres in
bands like ancient treetrunk chronography, drying to black. Next to her, one of
the androids stood scolding with shrivelled Babajaga-mask & pointed finger.
The android leered at his nakedness below the red Little Pioneer scarf knotted
around his very breakable neck. Wiry nose hairs & nostrils twitched —
‘Doesn’t deserve to be saved,’ the android hissed, ‘little dog, little brat, little
beggarboy. If it weren’t for those bars on the windows he’d be right where he
belongs, belongs, belongs. The little mutt. Doesn’t deserve. Little brat. Where he
belongs. Beggarboy. Doesn’t deserve…!’
And then the nurse stuck the needle & twine in him & began stitching up
a hole in his side without bothering with the anaesthetic. The pain made him
throw up. Not then, but now.
Fastforward: Němec, doubling-over in the doorway of the Children’s
Home, bile matting the grey slush round his shoes. His body went slack against
the doors, while the door remained fixed there as fast as Sinai granite, bolted by
Iron Necessity. He heaved again. Something laughed. In a distance more figural
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than literal, Němec could hear giant footsteps, like something played on a
Wurlitzer in an ancient movie hall. And in-between the giant footsteps drifted
the Prof’s singsong voice, ever-receding & perhaps already replaying itself at a
yet more remote point in time Němec would only ever reach by imagining —
‘In seinen Armen das Kind war tot…’
In his arms the child was dead…!?
Němec gasped to get his breath. On his knees now, beating his fists
weakly against the door. A small frightened child’s fists. He hammered without
making so much as a noise. There was something wrong with him: he stared at
his hands, a mock of paracelene glinting on unpared nails slimed with blood —
‘Ein kleiner Mond im Fingernagel erinnert uns an etwas wie Ichor, das
Blut der Götter…’
A little fingernail moon reminds of the gods’ ichorous blood…?!
Němec’s sleeves were wet with it also. The very air seemed saturated with
the taste of blood. From beneath the black doors a grey plasma seeped & spread
out, viscous as a Siberian river. The door gave a hydraulic shudder as if a flood
was about to burst through at any moment & spill over him. Then all was
black… Licorice blood?? Icarus’ blood???
‘Guilty,’ Němec heard the distant voice intone, ‘are those who are punished!’
The Revolution
The Revolution came & it was a different story. November, . Year of the
Snake. When the apparatchiks all went slithering off to shed their skin & slither
back unnoticed to dollars in suitcases. Left to wander the corridors of the
Children’s Home, in the interzone between the chaos of rioting tribes, Němec
spied through a door left ajar that selfsame Commie android blubbering behind
her Babajaga-mask with the staffroom idiotbox (a Magneton “Rovesnik,” top-of-
the-range in ’) bewailing the lost Workers’ Paradise. It was enough to break a
scorpion’s heart. Wrapped in the gloom of the TV set & a stew of old farts, the
old hag looked like a museum exhibit incompletely brought to life, some
embalmed Pharaoh’s Numidian concubine, or a funfair freak — The Oldest
“Woman” in the World! The pallor of her face was off-green.
Němec stood & stared. And as the fear melted away from him, his eyes fell
upon the handbag lying on the floor at the android’s feet. And beside the
handbag, a big bunch of keys crying Freedom at Last! He made a bee-line so fast
the TV commentator didn’t even blink. The android sat there howling into her
handkerchief. Němec bolted, the sharp teeth of the keys biting into his little fist,
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as the hag android’s moans pursued him down the hall & past the vacant porter’s
lodge. As he fumbled the lock, almost choking on his own breath, he remembered
how in the androids’ language the hag’s name meant deathbed — & how that was
what all the kids at the Home called her behind her back, Ol’ Deathbed, or simply
The Witch, or Babajugs because of her shrivelled tits & evil eye that sized you up
like she’d just as soon stew you in a soup pot & eat you. Finding the right key at
last, Němec strained with all his little might against the weight of the door till a
crack opened wide enough to slip through & the bright day flooded in. And
while Babajaga’s horrible sobs echoed, dying as the door swung shut behind him,
the megaphones in the street blared the National Hymn, unbetrayed by irony:
Kde domov můj?
Voda hučí po lučinách,
bory šumí po skalinách,
v sadě skví se jara květ,
zemský ráj to na pohled…
Oh where oh where is my home-of-homes?
I ask & seek but have yet to find! The longed-for
burble of the brooks across the maidenheaded meadows,
the caressive clefts & craggy-crags,
the perfumed peaches & airfreshened pinewoods,
the whole dolled-up suckable paradiso…!
Cut to: Charlton Heston wide-stanced on some remote briny Bohemian
seacoast. Picture him, square-jawed in loincloth, the giant fist of Kafka’s Liberty
jutting from the lone & level sands, lofting its rust-red flaming dildosword as a
timewarped Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack decibel-by-decibel drowns everything
else out, just as the closing credits come up on the screen…
You, too, are invited to join in & shed a tear. It must be awful to die & still go
on parading yourself in all that gore of pomp & mediocrity, ghosts in celluloid,
the Age’s myth, half-naked before an audience of informers, & their victims, &
their victims’ victims. None of them ever loved you! Can you hear me?
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Well who gives a toss for bygone days? Those little uproars turned to soap
opera puked in your face. The guilty childhood love affair with nonsense. Those
incomplete adventures of a world gone to the dogs & about to be recycled every
fifteen minutes. Winding-up the string section for the closing crescendo, & that
TV voiceover, first whispering, then shouting, sounding a long way off & then
very close, deep down resounding in the tympanum of the middle-ear the way
voices in dreams do —
‘Why, my little Squillhead, do the Masters put bars OUTSIDE the
windows, if their purpose is to keep all the children on the INSIDE?’
Die Fingernägel auf der anderen Seite…
Rewind further.
As If
As if a moral can or must be drawn from everything, & because he’d sleepwalked
through a window (cutting himself up nice & good, but on account of the bars
not falling to an untimely macabre embarrassment of a death), the Android
Home Central Committee decreed, in the best interests of all&sundry (as well as
society at large), that henceforth Little Dunce-Cap Němec, a.k.a. “Squillhead,”
should, with all due diligence, be buckled into bed each night before lights-out.
And so he was: a dozen white canvas straps crisscrossing the sheets, bandaged
mitts sticking out from under, for all the world* like a cartoon mummy.
Tied on his back in the dark Němec would wake up suffocating & try to
scream, but nothing ever came out — the whole dormitory leered, pressing-in
round the bed, laughing, spitting in his eyes as he gaped back mutely at faceless
assailants. He was never sure if they were real. Nights fed into days whose every
moment evoked panic, like a somnambulist who sees himself walking towards a
precipice unable to wake up, always about to fall but never quite. He’d find
himself alone in strange places, attic rooms, stairwells, toilets, fixated
inexplicably by such things as objects trapped at the bottom of a urinal among
the yellowsodden fag-butts, pubes, gobs of phlegm, bog-roll & chemicalblue
cakes of disinfectant like baby tortoises flipside on their shells.
Later, with the bandages gone, Little Dunce-Cap Němec discovered an
instinct for guile. Before lights-out, when the androids came to strap him into
bed, he’d hold his breath while they adjusted the tension, like some trick-pony in
a Wild West flick thinking to tip its rider on his head, saddle & all. If the trick
* Or only half of it. [:]
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worked, there’d be wiggle-room enough to squeeze out from under. Waiting
first for the dorm to nod-off, then stealing from the covers to stand watch at the
window he would’ve fallen through if bars hadn’t been fixed to the outside of it
— a rectangle of cold light that reached almost to the floor — scarred hands
pressed to glass. Below, a concrete garden with barbed fence-rails fronted
Leningradská Street. The pavement was hidden under embankments of grey
snow, like earthworks thrown up & then abandoned by an army in hurried
retreat. Concrete steps led past bricked-up windows, along a steep incline
overhung by sickly black trees.
All winter Squillhead kept his vigil. In place of the nightmares there was
the mocking invitation of the street with its promise of escape. The only problem
was how to get to it before his term was up. If they succeeded in properly fucking
with your his, by the time they handed him his freedom, he wouldn’t want it.
They had punishment down to a fine art. As for the street outside the Home, it
was a dead-end anyhow, butting against the murky grey façade of what once had
been a hotel. Its name was still outlined on a sagging bluegreen marquee:
HOTEL K____ — K for Kilo or Kolo or Kleč or Klíč maybe. The boarded-up
doorway was plastered with handbills in faded blues, greys, greens:
JOHNNY VRABETS & THE FANDANGOS!
ZAPOTEC VAULTS THE VLTAVA!
KAREL GOTT “LIVE” WITH THE BOLSHOI BAG BAND!
while in one of the broken upstairs windows a VACANCY sign still hung, dull
red type on white plyboard, veneer slowly peeling away at the edges from too
much weather. Flocks of soot-coloured pigeons had taken up residence under the
eaves. Stalactites of pigeon crap decades-old hung down from gapped palings.
In a utopia of housing-shortages, Němec never understood why no-one
lived in the old hotel. Sometimes, while he looked out at the darkened street, he
