The Combinations, page 5
‘Well, the thing about Mongo-the-Magnif,’ the ghost said, ‘was he could
walk around with his head tucked under his armpit. The head talked, rolled its
eyes, cracked jokes, while the body went about its own business, sat, stood,
danced a tango, a charleston, a softshoe shuffle, high-kicked, pirouetted, gyrated,
performed one or two other buttock-squirming indecencies. He’d slot the head
back on, spin it around for effect & take it off again — dress it up in funny
costumes — sing folk songs, play skittles, tell limericks — recite a little
Rachmaninoff here, some Rimsky-Korsakov there — the whole vaudeville
routine, always showing off. No-one believed any of it was real, of course, they
all reckoned it was nothing but a jukebox magician’s hat-trick. Like sawing old
ladies in bits & picking the pocket of the fat balding man in the second row. But
it made Mongo the talk of the town nonetheless — his name in the daily papers,
picture in magazines, face on posters stuck up on hoardings.’
A spasm of coughing caused Němec to double up. The Prof waited
patiently before continuing —
‘One day,’ he said, ‘a janitor at the theatre where Mongo was due to
perform found him with a rope around his neck, hanging from the catwalk above
the stage scenery. There was a note pinned to the front of his dinner shirt: ECCE
HOMO, was all it said. No-one was sure what it was supposed to mean, though
all agreed it was in questionable taste. For a while the boys at Homicide
entertained the possibility of foul play — professional jealousy, a jilted lover,
skeletons in the closet, a predilection for underage boys, some stigmatised sexually-
transmitted disease perhaps, a split personality, a file at the Interior Ministry, an
unacknowledged illegitimate child, a secret cough-syrup addiction, a minder on
the make, a maker on the mend, a fatal attachment to irony, you know the rap.
But nothing was ever proven.’
Němec, meanwhile, was down on his knees gasping for breath. He could
barely hear what the Prof was saying anymore. Something was pounding inside
his chest. He coughed again, racked by an excruciating pain. Beside him, on the
pavement, his doppelgänger had turned into the vague shape of a man collapsing
into himself. Němec felt his hands give way & slid over onto his back, down into
the snow. The orange glow of the streetlamp made a halo around the Prof’s
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silhouette there up above. Němec groaned. The Prof leant down towards him &
continued the story —
‘When it came to the inquest, the court had no trouble establishing the
identity of Mongo-the-Magnif’s head, but who in their right mind could’ve
attested — beyond doubt reasonable or otherwise — that the rest of him, or
rather her as it turned out, was in fact the real McCoy? Habeas corpus & all that.
In addition, there was a general suspicion that someone had been tampering with
the evidence, made a switcheroo out of sheer spite: the conspicuous bosom, the
decidedly, er, female genitalia (virgo non intacta, if you must know). Bit of an
anatomical freak of nature, you might say. Some questions better left unasked.
Quit while you’re ahead, so to speak. Death by misadventure, is all they could
agree upon under the, er, circumstances.’
The eyes of the ghost glistened down at Němec moistly.
‘You know,’ the Prof whispered, his face in sudden close-up, a strong
whiff of stale garlic, ‘nothing’s ever only in the mind…’
Němec
Němec blinked & the ghost was gone again. Where he’d stood, falling snow
flickered in the lamplight. From a great distance a sound like laughter echoed
through the night. Coming closer. Louder. Louder still. A rumble. A roar.
Thunder. The ground shuddered, the fake playing-card façades teetered, swayed.
In perfect synchronicity they all began to collapse: an ace of spades, queen of
diamonds, eight of hearts, scaffolds, dropcloths, guywires, ropes & winches, all
the backstage paraphernalia of a big production being pulled down after the final
show, wheeled away by invisible stagehands to be scrapped, put in cold storage,
rejigged for next season’s main event, a fresh coat of paint slapped on here, a
stencilled silhouette there.
Němec stared up at it all. Things shifted in & out of focus — solid matter
dissolved by light — even the sky was a fake, the snow, the orange streetlamp,
nothing now but an horizon receding into paradoxical depthlessness, a milky
haze of white on white. Němec remained there on his back unable to move,
barely breathing at all now, gaping up into nothing, the non-light before
Creation. And then the nothing began to take shape, like the bottom of an
enormous elevator coming straight down on top of him, as if from a very great
height, slowly at first, then gathering speed, faster & faster. And at the last
possible moment Němec remembered something the Prof once said —
‘You can hammer a nail with a samovar, but why with a samovar?’
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2
___________
THE GREAT ESCAPADE
The commotion began down behind the pear tree at the
bottom of the playground —- among the reeds & rushes &
speargrass that fringed the small lake: orpiment, verd
antique, russet swishing in the breeze (when there was a
breeze), though really it was just an artificial carp pond,
but “the Lake” by general consensus was how it was called,
when it wasn’t “the Big Water” or less often “the
Atlantic” & only rarely “the Sea of Tranquillity,” gnarly
fishmouths of varying breadths gulping at its surface,
stirring ripples among the algal blooms & duckweed &
dappled saucer-shaped lilypads, skaters dodging between,
emerald & azure dragonflies & midges ahover —- spreading
by concentric stages outwards among the clusters of
children: playing hopscotch on chalked hopscotch squares;
skipping Double-Dutch (the white ropes like two halves of
a standing wave, the visible harmonic); hanging upside-
down from monkey bars skirts flapping down from white,
pink, polkadot knickers; digging great holes with chipped
& cracked plastic spades in the musky sandpit, or else;
gathered around in the shade of the sole linden tree (the
Nerds’ Club) in foureyed gravitas, much frowning &
lipchewing & headscratching, nodding wise after the fact
as they watch Rychlík, a.k.a. M-M-M-Mr Express, drag out
the endgame of a surely unwinnable Queen’s Gambit (Mr E’s
opponent, a tousle-haired fifth-grader with dandruff
issues, staring glassy-eyed off at some distant
unattainable vista of chess clocks & time-control), an
umpteenth Belomorkanal gone soggy between spittled lips,
shreds of tar-tobacco soldered to yellowed falsies -— &
only then, with Bobek in his drab forester’s uniform
craning a head over the playground fence, to attract, it
seems best to assume, the attention of the android on
supervision roster, today winsome Miss Freudlová of the
dark ringlocks, scarlet wrap-around shawl over pennant-
blue gymsuit (despite the weather, erring to sultry,
contrary to the morning’s forecast), who, woken from
untold reveries, looks up flustered from the beige-
covered paperback resting spine-on-knee which could’ve
been anything, a monograph on recent applications of
nutritional science or a handbook on the Ministry of
Education’s SPECIAL CODE OF CONDUCT (essential reading
for aspirants to the Senior Teacher’s exam) e.g., but was
in fact (as Robbo “the Rat” knew from scaling
surreptitiously the back rungs of her tennis umpire’s
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chair to sneak an opportunistic peek over her shoulder (&
catching a bit of unimpaired cleavage action in the
process)) an omnibus edition, volume 2, of Karel May
westerns, Old Shatterhand about to ride into an ambush,
no sign of Vinnetou to get him out of this fix… finger
poised mid-air just as she (Miss Freudlová) is about to
turn the page, a real cliff-hanger moment, interrupted by
Bobek’s expressive yet incomprehensible gesturing from
the fence —- turning to see what all the ruckus is about
now that her head’s no longer buried in a book & only
then taking in the unnerving spectacle of the whole
playground surging towards her in synchronicity, like a
slow-moving avalanche or mudslide she’ll say afterwards
at the inquest —- even M-M-M-Mr Express, cigarette bent
in half, looking like he’s been struck over the head by
something, carried along in the wake & casting helpless
entreating looks at her. In an instant the throng of
panicked children will have surrounded the tennis
umpire’s chair on which she sits: “ambushed,” like a swarm
of Red Indians rushing upon Old Shatterhand trapped in a
cul-de-sac at the foot of a canyon, certain death staring
him cold in the eye as the circle of braves parts to
reveal none other than the bloodthirsty warrior chief,
Awkward Buffalo, waist festooned with matted enemy
scalps, advancing knife-in-hand… But it was only the
Spastic Girl from the forth grade, ogling her with those
uncannily lopsided eyes, an expression half-beatific
half-sickly-smirk, thoroughly at odds with the looks of
horrible anticipation on the faces of all the other
children, thronging about at her feet —- stifled calls of
MISS! MISS! —- the Spastic Girl holding something up to
her now, hands cupping it darkly, a sudden & awful hush
all-round; Miss Freudlová, gripped by an immediate
apprehensiveness (the girl, frankly, gives her the heebie-
jeebs), though she couldn’t quite make out what IT was till
the girl got closer, raising her cupped hands to the
light…
The first to be drawn into the commotion was the ring
of boys & girls playing spin-the-bottle behind the paling
fence that ran into “the Lake” where it arched over onto
its side & lay there under the water & had been
collecting algae since the time the gully it once
traversed was dammed to make a fishpond, who knows when.
Habitually Nagel was the ring-leader on occasions such as
these, the circle of flattened paspalum behind the fence
being territory he’d marked out for the sole purpose, in
connivance with his trusty sidekicks, Robbo “the Rat”
(socalled for prominent buckteeth & the enduring fame of
having once risen to a dare to snatch Comrade Medvedev’s
toupee in the middle of class & being chased by the
Russian schoolmaster around the room with a carpet
beater, scuttling under tables & between legs on all fours
like an oversized rodent, to cheers of GO THE RAT!) &
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Buzík, a.k.a. Buzo, a freckle-faced Huck Finn always
talking-up big schemes to sail a raft downriver through
the East Fritzes & all the way to Hamburg, Liberty &
Uncle Sam —- a pipe-dream verging at times on obsession,
with the ginger-haired huckster devising countless plans
for every facet of The Great Escape, from dummies at
morning roll-call to tried&true methods of skipping off
on recces along the docks & making it back somehow
undetected, never failing to collect proof of these
nighttime escapades: a frayed section of mooring rope, a
metal sign with a red-painted ▼, a grimy fishing reel, a
jar of river water for “spectrographic” analysis —- while
day-by-day the painstaking accumulation of esoteric lore
on how to construct a river-worthy mode of conveyance,
one that’d actually float & not capsize or sink the moment
you set foot on it (Plan A entailing use of the fence-
palings behind which Nagel & his circle of conspirators
were at that very moment huddled, cross-lashed to forty-
gallon wine barrels scavenged from the boarded-up hotel
across the street from the Children’s Home —- hoarding,
meanwhile, all the empty plastic juice bottles he could
lay his hands on, lids intact, against the day, plan B, to
be bagged & ducttaped as a makeshift, reasoning if
nothing else you could always coast down the river like
they were Lilos & the river was just one incredibly long
brown swimming pool —- dubious Boy Scout lore here,
concocted mainly from hearsay & picture books & fervid
eleven-year-old wishfulfilment) —- diligently plotting,
red circles with dots or crosses, the locations of locks &
weirs on filched navigation charts (at such points it
being rudimentary to manoeuvre said means of floatation
overground, employing ropes or possibly shopping-trolley
wheels nabbed from the local nonstop, providing he could
get his hands between now & then on a phillipshead
screwdriver & create the necessary diversion to kidnap
the trolley): Ústí nad Labem, Bad Schandau -— lying low
till nightfall then slip past the border guards,
camouflaged with reeds, willow branches, faces charcoaled,
riding the current under the shadow of the bombed-out
Frauenkirche, & onwards, ever onwards, under searchlights
& gunturrets, four-hundred clicks north to the sea…
The empty 300ml PragoCola bottle had just come to a
stop with its neck pointing straight at petite blonde-
haired Lučinka —- pony-tailed & pinafored, sandal-straps,
white knee-socks —- whose eight-year-old throat Nagel’s
been itching all semester to get his tongue down, the
filthy little scallywag. Though a sixth-former, & with a
name redolent of some ancient-of-old from a Norse saga,
Nagel erred more towards the Swabian than the
Scandinavian, romantic in a way that in later years
would simply be called short, rather like a Tyrolean
parking attendant, to compensate for which he was
constantly working at novel ways to get his stinky
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finger inside some dívka’s snatch. It was just as he was
inclining towards goggle-eyed Lučinka for a hot snog,
thinking to drop the hand while he had the advantage,
when from the reeds came a bloodcurdling shriek. It was
the Spastic Girl, whose bush Nagel had not many moons
before managed to stick his nose in after a quick barter,
rushing out into the circular clearing, the squelch of
mud in plastic shoes, leggings festooned with thick
verdant strings of slime. As if by reflex, hands rushing
up to her mouth (Lučinka), recoiling from this precipitous
apparition at Nagel’s back -— who (Nagel) oblivious to its
cause is left with gob hanging open like a stunned mullet
(of which particular coiffure he’s indeed in proud
possession), bedroom eyes narrowing ever so slightly on
the little minx, thinking this one might be a harder nut
to crack than he’d anticipated -– her (Lučinka’s)
expression meanwhile sending out paradoxical signals
which only in their aftermath will he be able to fathom,
passing through states of alarm, distress,
incomprehension, terror, panic & outright revulsion, an
effect he’s never quite witnessed before & concerned a
stray bogey might’ve slipped out onto his upper lip or
there’s a great big tarantula’s dangling over his head or
someone’s chosen that particular M.M.I.* to play a gag at
his expense, or else the kid had issues possibly stemming
from who knew what traumatic infancy… interrupted in his
train of thought by the Spastic Girl virtually stomping on
top of him, shrieking still, though its intensity lessening
(the shriek), grown hoarse, more bellow than shriek now —-
the others in the circle covering their ears, wearing looks
of diverse shades of horror, fixated, as far as Nagel can
tell, by the thing she’s holding in her hands. ‘Jesus Christ,
what IS that…?’
Collectively in the backs of their minds, & playing
like a TV rerun on fastforward, is a recent-enough-still-
to-be-technicolor-vivid episode in which, bawling out of
the blue in the middle of morning assembly, all blubber-
mouthed, pooey knickers down at her ankles almost
tripping her head-over-tits, the same creature presently
in their midst had, right there in front of everyone in
the main courtyard, importuned dear delirious Miss
Freudlová to PLEEEE BOOHOO wipe her bum for her, & the
mortified phys-ed instructress standing there in her
eternal gymsuit, looking as if Martians had just landed,
their leader schlüpping ectoplasmically down the
