The Combinations, page 48
which there would indeed be a cherub seated, holding (as convention often
dictated) — a little harp, or a bow & arrow. A third “bishop” might then be seen
peering at one of the remaining two horse statues, implying a sort of generally
obsessive behaviour by members of the Curia (gathered here possibly to
determine the fate of the Church — opposing factions in a secret schism of dark
horses & white knights that couldn’t be directly spoken of but construed
merely), by means of subtle choreographies of perusing.
Others, cunningly disguised, would be the game’s true custodians, setting
the play, the back & forth arranging & rearranging of what to the unsuspecting
eye could only appear as a type of garden furniture (one laden with arcane
symbolism admittedly yet furniture nonetheless), as if to obtain nothing more
than a pleasing or contemplative disposition — consonantia, claritas — the
balancing of contraries, feminine & neuter, Pope & Anti-Pope, the ecclesiastical
gnostos, the dialectic of the Trinity, & onward & outward, from white square &
black square to the infinity of the cosmos. Amen.
Fisher of Men
It was only half an hour later when a short bearded man came out of a doorway
in the far corner of the Reading Room, approaching Němec along a red
ceremonial carpet — it must’ve taken him a full minute to cover the distance. It’s
possible to tell a lot about a man by the way he crosses a room. A little out of
breath, the man puffed out his cheeks & introduced himself, too quickly for
Němec to catch what he said. Presumably this was the head archivist, Fišer. He
fidgeted with his cuffs when he spoke & didn’t offer to shake Němec’s hand.
There was a small gravy stain on his shirt collar.
298
Němec looked at the man expectantly. He seemed to be waiting for
something, catching his breath, working his jaw into a more lateral arrangement.
This might’ve gone on for some time, if Němec hadn’t muttered something
about the Prof’s notebook. The man, Fišer, made a glum expression. Poked a
finger inside his beard & fished about with it, but came up emptyhanded.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘yes, as it happens… I don’t suppose you happen to be a
relative, do you?’
‘Assistant,’ Němec leant forward slightly on his walkingstick to meet the
man halfway.
‘Vlasta said you might have reason to believe…?’
He meant the brunette presumably.
‘Yes,’ Němec said.
‘Oh, well in that case…’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘Mmm,’ Fišer stroked the tip of his beard, ‘tricky business…’
‘True.’
‘Not the sort of thing we’d really want to…’
‘I agree.’
‘Still, can’t be too careful…’
‘No.’
The long & short of all this was that the Prof’s papers weren’t where they
were supposed to be, at least not where the sorting clerk had looked, & not
where Vlasta the brunette had looked either, nor Fišer the chief archivist. As it
turned out, the Monastery was undergoing a bit of reconstruction. It’d been
undergoing a bit of reconstruction since the 1960s, but this time they’d had to
temporarily relocate some of the archive from the South Wing to the East
Wing. The records showed, apparently, that the Prof’s papers had originally
been catalogued with various other recent acquisitions & deposited in the East
Wing basement. But now there was no sign of them. All this Němec deduced
from Fišer’s noncommittal mutterings.
‘Seems…’ this Fišer explained. ‘But most likely… In due course, you know.’
In the meantime he suggested Němec fill-out an official request form, the
one in blue, with his contact details & they’d look after the rest. And if he’d be
so kind as to…
‘Of course,’ Němec grinned, ‘how about I post it to you?’
The little bearded man nodded profusely. Muttered something. Gestured
in the direction Němec had come in. Oh the message was clear enough.
299
Something odd about all this, he thought. For one, the archivist’s story didn’t add
up. The inventory was over fifty pages long, hardly the sort of thing you’d just
misplace like that. Or maybe it was? In a state institution with how many — six-
point-eight million? — items on deposit. But even so, why enlist the chief
archivist to give some nonentity off the street the runaround? But what if that
wasn’t how it looked to them? Mmm. Still, something fishy about that chief
archivist. Something… familiar. Sure he’d submit an official request, made out in
triplicate, stamped, signed & countersigned, from here to next Sunday. Nothing
like a bit of paperwork to keep everything in order, the anodyne for every pain.
Could they have already known that the Prof’s papers were missing? The
idea seemed far-fetched, but not too far-fetched. Not in the recent scheme of
things. As he retraced his path along the corridor, Němec thought about the
parcel on his doorstep & who might’ve left it for him, & all the other obvious
questions. Was there anything at all he could even begin to assume? Don’t look at
me, kiddo.
On his way out, Němec fancied Miss Petrovná gave him a more than
usually peculiar look over her rimless glasses. He winked at her & she bit her
pencil. She had very fine little teeth. Very white. It occurred to Němec this
Petrovná was actually a piece of government apparatus like one of those filing
cabinets they probably kept Hájek’s inventory in. Her human appearance was
really just a disguise & her real name wasn’t Petrovná at all but Agent K-.
Němec wondered where the brunette was lurking. He grinned to himself as he
closed the door behind him. The Dodo watched him from its glass box — no
worse off, Němec supposed, than the rest of the participants in this sham.
Except it’d got its suffering over & done with sooner, & didn’t have to sit
around & watch the rest of the world go to hell in a handcart as well.
View through the Periscope
Instead of taking the tram back, Němec decided to act on a hunch & hailed a
taxi outside the Monastery gates instead, a blue Favorit from Captain Ahab’s
Cab Company, pondering as the traffic slid by the same questions over & over
again. By the time they’d reached the beltway the traffic had come to a standstill.
For the next ten minutes it barely crawled. Němec stared out the window at the
grey river, car horns blaring.
‘Like this all the way to Braník,’ the driver said.
A long barge was slowly chugging up the river with a cargo of gravel piled
300
up on the bows, heading towards Libeň.
‘Every afternoon it’s the same. You ever get constipated? I get constipated.
From sitting in fucking traffic all day. You’d think in a democracy they’d be able
to figure it out. Get things moving, you know? It’s worse now than when the
Commies ran the show.’
‘Sure,’ Němec said, ‘when the Commies were in charge no-one could
afford to drive anywhere.’
The river barge passed under the bridge & out of sight. He heard the
driver reply —
‘It’s all those fucking Krauts. They come here because it’s cheap. Cheap
beer & cheaper cunt.’
Němec looked away from the window. The driver wore a plaid shirt that
barely managed to cover his paunch. He was waving his hand at the car in front
of us. It was a black BMW. Next to it there was a slurry tanker with the slogan
Number in the Number Business painted on the back. Déjà vu.
‘Kraut shit,’ the driver growled.
He leant on the horn, a tinny sound came out from somewhere. A tin
trumpet in the street.
‘SCHEISSE DEUTSCHEN!’ he bawled through the windscreen,
‘DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT A ROAD IS?!’
The driver slumped back in his seat, apparently defeated by the effort. To
hear the sound of his own voice Němec asked him where he was from.
‘Jáchymov. You know it?’
‘Never been.’
‘Why would you? It’s a shithole. No-one in their right mind goes to
Jáchymov.’
The traffic began to move again in fits & starts.
‘Fucking uranium mines. Reason I drive a fucking taxi. Insurance liability.
Can’t get a fucking job doing anything else. Building sites are all gypsies &
Ukrainians. Who else digs fucking holes? Only job left for a white man with any
self-respect is driving cabs. Or trams. Wouldn’t drive a fucking tram if you paid
me. Bastards get cooked in summer, freeze their arses off in winter. Come on you
jerk, get a move on! And you gotta join the union. Who ever heard of a fucking
union in this country? A man’s gotta stand on his own two feet. Look at me. I
don’t mind driving this heap — I get to do my own thing, know what I mean? A
cab gives you independence. I take the fare, I know the route, how to get from A
to B, all the shortcuts — people rely on me, know what I’m saying? Mostly I enjoy
301
having the time to just sit & think, sometimes switch off the meter, cruise around,
maybe pick up a bird… Will you look at this arsehole! HEY YOU KRAUT SHIT!
WHERE’D YOU LEARN TO DRIVE? IN A FUCKING U-BOAT?? ’
They trailed the BMW down the exit ramp & turned left through the
underpass into Žižkov. The rest of the journey continued in silence, up through
Vinohrady, then looping back towards the traffic. Němec told the driver to stop
around the corner from the Český Rozhlas building & wait for him. The driver
gave him one of those scrutinising looks & shrugged.
Mrs Fialová was groping her way up to the first-floor landing when
Němec came in off the street.
‘Who’s that?’ the old lady shouted.
‘Just me, misses,’ Němec waved, hoisting himself into the elevator.
Up in his apartment, the Black Book was right where he’d left it on the
kitchenette counter. He grabbed a binbag from one of the drawers & wrapped
the book in it, stuffing it under his arm. Better, he thought, if he didn’t keep it
lying about like that — somebody obviously knew he had it, & maybe there were
others who’d try to get it. Friar Tuck & his merry band of Jesuits, maybe.
Besides, it had to mean something, there had to be clues, & one way or another
it was up to him to find out.
Back in the taxi Němec directed the driver to Jilská street. This time they
crossed the beltway down Žitná, past the Golem City Teaching Hospital &
right at Spálená. An unbroken stream of invective poured from the driver’s
mouth all the way downtown. Sweat glistened behind his ears. Outside Svoboda
& Slovíčkář Němec told him to pull up. A gang of tourists breezed by along the
narrow sidewalk.
‘Fucking Krauts everywhere!’ the driver snarled.
Němec got out with the binbag still wedged under his arm & paid the
driver ten crowns over the fare.
‘Buy yourself a drink,’ he said pleasantly through the window.
‘With this?’ the driver spat disgustedly, but still pocketing the coin.
Němec shrugged. The driver slammed the steering wheel & roared off,
tyres squealing on the cobblestones.
‘Ah,’ Němec sighed, ‘the veritable cornerstone of the nation.’
Along the street at number the coach doors were hidden behind a
façade of green mesh, another RECONSTRUCTION notice nailed to a wooden
scaffold erected around the arch. The Golden Goose trinket shop had been
closed up. A for-rent sign hung in the window, courtesy of T.E.S.L.A. REALITY.
302
Those clowns again. He thought of the girl in the folk costume watching from
the doorway, probably now with that same desperate look behind some market
stall on Havelská or waiting tables or pouting away her hours at a checkout desk,
the bright future ever-awaiting. Getting sentimental in your old age, eh, kiddo?
Němec grimaced & swung his crook leg in the direction of Messers
Svoboda & Slovíčkář’s shop window. He searched everywhere with his eyes but
notice for the Sphinx’s Code was gone. The bell jangled behind him as he limped
inside, startling the shop assistant.
‘Where is it?’ he said.
‘Where’s what?’
She ogled him with large watery eyes, her grey hair pulled back in a bun.
‘The notice in the window! It was there before, the definitive something
of the Voynich Manuscript!’
Her eyes grew a little wider —
‘Oh.’
Pointless, he thought. He lurched away down the aisles, the miniature
labyrinth, into the cul-de-sac where he’d found the copy of Heterocosmica with
Kircher’s letter in it. He wondered where he’d put it, the torn-out page.
Somewhere. Obviously he’d put it somewhere. He checked the shelves to see if
the journal was still there. Of course not you idiot. But something about it, a
niggling idea, that perhaps, maybe, something familiar… He peered at the
window above the shelf, festooned with bits of paper taped to the glass. He
searched them, the litter on the floor, bits of old flyers wedged behind the shelf.
Nothing. An amateurish ploy, was what Faktor had said.
Němec grit his teeth. He tried to think back. The notice, the journal…
There was no direct connection & yet the one had led to the other.* And then he
remembered them, the eyes in the window, the Mummler photo-plates falling on
the ground. The eyes were trying to tell him something. Not what, but who? But
before he could think, something else struck him. Not the plates, the portrait! A
man in musty clerical gowns, Master of a Hundred Arts, etched in what Němec was
suddenly sure was exactly the same style as that frontispiece in the Black Book.
* In this version of events, the letter was simply one in a series of poisoned pawns. The first,
presumably, was Němec’s meeting with the Prof himself, in the courtyard of the Klementinum. Or
perhaps it’d been something prior to that even, something entirely innocuous — a name on a sheet
of paper, a piece of unfinished music, the axe hanging on the Chop House wall — something
infinitesimal in the ultimate scheme of things like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing in Paris that
causes an earthquake in Peking. How would it ever be possible to know? [:]
303
Could it be? He grabbed the book out of the binbag & stared into it. The Devil &
the Carmelite. Then closed his eyes, trying to summon forth the missing image.
Damn it! If only he could remember what the fuck he’d done with that letter.
His head ached, the vertigo of coincidence once more clouding-over into
conspiracy. He lurched out of the bookshop & wandered through the streets in
the direction of the river. His body suddenly felt tired, suffused all over with a
dull pain. He suffered all along Bartolomějská Street, past the secret dungeons of
the State, the gauntlet of camera eyes, jerked forward on blind legs. There’s a
good little boy. A delivery van with the words GOLEM CATERING airbrushed
on the side clipped his arm at the intersection where Husova turned into
Karlova. Němec stared after it & a needle-eyed cartoon monster stared idiotically
back from the rear door. Meth. Emeth. A sign maybe. What did it mean?*
Without thinking he followed the street down towards the river.
Dark, lowhanging clouds menaced the rooftops. He saw the image of a
winged Devil astride a supplicating novice. The etching, he thought, had to be
the key. All those lists of crossed-out names, bits of haiku & gibberish meant
nothing to him, but the etching… Yes, the key, but to what? He knew he was
grasping at straws, but what else was there? A few minutes later he found
himself standing beside the derelict Karlův bathhouse, awoken from his
paranoias by the whisper of rushing water. His head was aching. He walked to
the end of the quay, past the statue of Bedřich Smetana, & stared into the
current pouring over the weir. It whispered of release from pain, of endlessly
flowing sleep. Strange figures moved in the swirling water, like shadows rising &
falling under the surface of a mirror.
Němec retraced his steps. At the foot of Charles Bridge the square under
the statue of St Francis in ecstasy was so crowded he barely made it across.
Planted in front of the Klementinum gates was a sandwichboard advertising a
matinee performance of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater by the Academy Orchestra. A bit
of uplift to carry the day along. Dum dum da da. Would you really pay Kč ,-
for that on an empty stomach? His head swam. The crowd let go of him once he
