The Combinations, page 64
former doers of mighty deeds, those superannuated Titans, unaware of how ridiculous they’ll
appear once their Ozymandias moment’s over & the image-makers have boiled them down into
the stuff of tourist trinkets, mementos to keep in a jar with those tinfoil B.V.M. medallions you
pop a coin into a slot for by the cathedral exit. [:]
404
rubble, headstones piled so deep they looked like rotten overlapping teeth in a
jawbone eaten away by cancer? A short beak-nosed woman waving a sign on a
stick, HOLOCAUST TOURS, led a mob of camera-wielding gawkers towards
the cemetery gates — Nikons, Minoltas, Kodaks — to extract their pound of
celluloid. Even the dead didn’t get let off the hook, it was like a gold mine in
there. A hundred square-foot Shangri-La! You couldn’t make a wrong step,
anywhere you plonked down your crêpe soles there’d be a picturesque corpse
right there, just an inch below, dozens, hundreds of ’em, cheek-by-jowl, stacked
one atop another all the way down to the very foundations of Zion! And if the
Nazis’d refrained from bulldozing the lot, it was only so this most photogenic of
cashcows might one day (soon) serve as a monument to the Wholesale
Extinction of the race.
Filing out from the gates a troupe of exhausted sightseers in blue&white
yarmulkes threaded their way down the street between double-parked
blueyellowgrey tourbuses from Talinn, Sofia, Warsaw, Minsk — red urban
transit buses, , , , — blue longhaul coaches, destination Paris,
Stockholm, Madrid — brown clappedout exschoolbuses Zagreb-bound. Němec
followed them for a short way, with no specific direction in mind, still mulling
the lawyer’s parting words. Interior Ministry. Public Registry. Anything with the
words “Interior Ministry” in it made him shudder. In combination with the
word “public” it sounded like volunteering for a Siberian holiday. Come on in,
sign the guestbook, I hear the weather’s lovely this time of year…
He stopped in the shade, the heat suddenly getting the better of him, &
waited for the crowd to thin out. All it would’ve taken, they’d said, was for him
to sign a couple of forms. But he’d known better than to trust that sort of talk.
They’d’ve had him back in the Home before he could’ve said Gustáv Husák &
still no Mamitati, just a file with a stamp. Well, kiddo, you think they might’ve got
dug up since? Eight years. That was their statute of limitations: you sign the
paper, start the clock, when the flag drops it’s like the Prof being poured into a
metal urn & left on a shelf. And Němec wondered, who paid the rent? All those
dead files & dead ends. The Prof’s ashes. But who paid the rent? If he went out
there to the cemetery, whose name would he find on the registry? He looked up
then & found himself more or less alone on the sidewalk. A few feet away, a
plaque’d been set into the Philosophy Faculty wall. It caught his attention…
405
First Zhiddish Criminal
to be Hanged for Atrocities
Němec came closer & read the small print. It commemorated the death of one
Paul Raphaelson — kapo, during the War, at Terezín — whose eye was as dark as
his spleen… Executed in Golem City, April , “for cruelties perpetrated
against his fellow prisoners.” The enemy, it seemed to say, is also within. No-one
else appeared to be particularly interested in it: the tour busses were busy
jockeying for position in the narrow street, the tourists trying to squeeze in
through the Old Cemetery gates to make the quota. It was ridiculous & sombre
at the same time. He felt like waving his stick at them: Hey, why don’t you come
over here and take a picture of this for the slideshow back at home? Why should he
care? There were millions of Raphaelsons in this world — for every one they
hanged, a dozen were born. It didn’t matter what their names were, whether
they were sons of Mönchengladbach factory labourers or millionaires, which
regime they stooged for. All those measly dupes of Mephistopheles no Goethe
would ever pen a monument to.
He pictured the crowd that day, gathered to watch the black pillowcase
being pulled over Raphaelson’s head, before he was hoisted by the neck like a ף
against the grey page of the firmament. Hanged right there where the cemetery
gawkers could’ve taken a pretty snapshot. And with every one of those snapshots,
would something’ve been proved that they weren’t even aware of? Němec jabbed
his stick at the cobblestones & slouched morosely towards the tram tracks.
Someone had renamed the street after the Revolution, though he couldn’t see
why. On one side a cemetery & a mausoleum to higher learning, on the other old
Red Army Square with an enormous air duct sticking up from the middle of it
where winenumbed homeless men & women owned the sanctuary of the park
benches. Students with opened books, radios, lunches, crowding the steps of the
Rudolfinum where parliament once sat but now only concert-goers polishing their
arses to the sound of Mahler, Smetana, Dvořák & the rest of the national
patrimony.
It reminded him of one of the Bugman’s stories. How back before the
War a dozen or so statues of all the most famous composers used to stand atop
the Rudolfinum’s façade.* Then one day in it was brought to the attention
of v-Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank that among them stood one
* Das Deutsche Kulturhaus. [:]
406
belonging to Felix Mendelssohn, Zhid. In his zeal to purge the City of its least
valued inhabitants (& thereby prove his fitness to succeed the recently
assassinated Heydrich as acting-Reichsprotektor), Frank ordered the offending
statue be removed.
Unfortunately none of the statues had been provided with name plaques
— & it went without saying that no-one in the v goon squad sent to execute
the order knew what Himey Mendelssohn was supposed to look like, either.
They decided, therefore, with impeccable Nazi logic, to remove the statue with
the largest nose — it having been established, upon certain well-attested
phrenological principles, that Zhids, unlike their Aryan masters, possessed a
telltale disfigurement in the form of a disproportionate, hooked proboscis (not to
be mistaken for the Roman nasum, that ancient patrician badge of honour).
After a brief inspection of the statues in question, the senior v officer presiding
identified the offending snout & had the effigy of the supposed Zhid duly
obliterated & dumped in the river.
Not long after, it came to light that the likeness Frank’s henchmen had so
demonstrably vandalised was in fact none other than that of Richard Wagner.*
Sweeping his blunder under the proverbial carpet, Frank promptly ordered all
the remaining statues to be torn down as well. It was subsequently rumoured
that no statue of Mendelssohn ever stood there to begin with.
* Der Furore’s personal fave. [:]
407
32
___________
ANTE MERIDIEM
Banality isn’t
Time itself might
The air on the boil,
After the rain, a
harmless.
just as well’ve come
reactor cores
thick heat steams
to an impasse.
melting down.
off the sidewalks.
A clock ticks, the
shadow of an hour
In the desert of the
By late afternoon,
Jurassic swamp
drags its own
boulevards, pencil-
black heavy clouds,
mists.
shadow behind it,
thin men search
lightning, rain.
like a movable
among dustbins in
Night brings no
border.
stopmotion.
A hot black rain
relief.
gushing out of the
It begins slowly.
A tomcat in a
sky like an
A black broth
doorway shading
upturned geyser.
poured from a can,
Even the weather
its eyes with its
stewing you up to
sets in by
tail.
And the City,
the eyeballs.
accumulation.
haunches spread
Figures dissolve in
for its sins to be
Come dawn, it’ll
Creeping through
the tissue of an
cleansed from it,
all’ve returned to
the suburbs,
architecture
wallowing in its
dust.
emptying the
wrecked in the
own muck.
streets in its wake.
Grand Manner.
Shrivelled back
A rancid
into the parched
July’s approaching.
The moment you
yellowbrown
clay of itself.
step out the door,
fluvium spilling
When it finally
the heat knocks
over the weirs, the
Leaving only the
strikes, it’ll be like
you flat.
quays, the locks
crags & ravines of
an assassin
like a neglected
a body as austere as
asphyxiating a
Traffic, gridlocked
gonorrhoea.
a Sybil’s
corpse.
from one end of
lookingglass.
the City to the
Tributaries
Everywhere the
other.
converging into
You ask, What am I
clocks are winding
rivers, rivers
doing here?
down & at any
Trams packed to
haemorrhaging
moment about to
the gills like tins of
into deltas.
stop.
sardines poached
in brine.
408
Der Goylem
A sodium lamp, gibbous-eyed, above an interrogation desk. A decades-old stink
of tar & nicotine oozes up from it. An ashtray — heavy, flat & round with a
bevelled edge, like something cut from an engine block — overflowing with
butts,. Beside the ashtray, a deck of Inkas — favoured brand of railworkers,
dockhands, stokers — someone making a point of their proletarian credentials, it
seems. When the disc of the ashtray threatens to get lost beneath the pyramid of
stubbed-out butts, a hidden hand materialises from outside the frame, empties
the ashtray into a bin, sets it back in its place to the left of the cone of light,
allowing the ritual to recommence — the pyramid-building, the dirty metal disc
like some exhumed pharaoh’s mask waiting to be put back into storage. The
silhouette of someone shuffles away from the desk & you move up to the font of
the line. A sallow, rat-face peers, crescent moons under eyes, through smoke
haze, impatient. Row number, seat number. You take your ticket & go…
Artificial moonlight drifts down from the corner of the screen, as if it (the
screen) is a window you’re looking out of at the night & the night is a stage set
cut-out at strange angles, walls & streets & streetlamps, but not of any worldly
place: this is the perceived cityscape of a disturbed mind & we, not knowing
how you got there, are trapped inside that mind staring helplessly out. All part
of a seasonal retrospective — Murnau, Lubitsch, et al. — at the National Film
Archive’s cinéclub on Bartolomějská*: what once was the chapel of St Maria
Magdalena for Penitent Women, later an organ school (Dvořák studied there),
then a concert hall, then this — the KONVIKT BIOSKOP.
Tonight’s a “triple bill”: the lost silent wartime horror, Der Golem (),
“Monster of Fate,” dir. Paul Wegener & Henrik Galeen, “restored” from a few
ghostly fragments, like bits of the original scripture, the filmic Ur-text, hallowed
in this city — & its laughable sequel, also lost, nothing now but a handful of
publicity stills, glass-plate negatives, enough at least for a slowmotion montage
intercut with a scratchy showreel dug from a basement after the Occupation, Der
Golem und die Tänzerin, set design Hans Poelzig — & last but not least, Der
Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, adapted from the story by Gustav Meyrink & shot
two years after Independence, set back in time to show how it all began: the
ghetto-Prometheus, transmuted mind-body of the Man-of-Clay, all the
* Conveniently across the street from former secret cop HQ: basement torture cells, rubber hoses,
wet pillowcases, lead-lined socks & all your other late night favourites. [:]
409
Spenglerian excruciations of a race forging its own consciousness, emerging from
the dark night of superstition into the light of Reason.
Final scene: little girl in white dress gazing up at the dark-complexioned
Zhid-monster, the implied offering, blood libel, Elders of Zion, nothing quite
what it appears now in the full glare of retrospect — Mogen David hovering
there in the middle of the screen, enlarging into close-up, more ominous by the
second, the monster staring out from those sinister equilaterals, Rosicrucian
pyramid, cyclops-eye in superposition, like Usury’s impending slaughter-of-
innocents. Envisage jackbooted golems of the soon-to-be Talking Picture Era,
shouting their Sieg Heils from that very proscenium, only metres away, where
Liszt, incidentally, Beethoven too, even Grigorievich once, struck a chord on the
resident pianola, not to mention the “Beast of Bayreuth,” Wagner himself. All of
History seems to’ve gathered here tonight. But even History has its hour & its
place, the subtle evasions, thwartings, outright contradictions of a theme
working towards the one apotheosis no man can fully predict…
d
Der Golem — “Josef,” the wily old Rabbi baptised it, he who will enlarge —
brought into this stinking world to slave in the synagogue & act the general do-
good protector of the downtrodden & oppressed, those illiterates of the Ghetto,
the tribe of Shem, sons & daughters of Babel, who couldn’t tell a mem from a
tau, a myth from a meth, & that, so the tale went, this proletarian Joe, grown a
mite too big for his boots, thinking himself more Mensch than machine (well
who in Himmel told you to think, boy?) & just about coming to the end of his
rope — mopping the floors, scrubbing the stairs, polishing the boots, ironing the
shirts, mending the socks, washing the underwear, tucking the sheets, dusting
the cabinets, waxing the wainscoting, pealing the spuds, shelling the peas,
baking the brot, boiling the borscht, brewing the endless cup-of-tea, ringing the
bell, dunging out the slops, humping the ashcans, shovelling the shit.
His one consolation, those furtive nightlessons by candlestump in an attic
closet with the Rabbi’s daughter, all first blush of tiny breasts under moon-pale
nightdress, pitying poor Joejoe, all alone, showing him her dollies & storybooks,
teaching him the alephbet, heavy crude lines in crayon, reading him her
favourite bits of Daddy’s Big Book — Susanna & the Elders, Eve in the Garden,
Solomon the Wise — & just when the flicker of Love begins to flame the Old
410
Man smells a rat & comes bursting in (sound up on a PDQ Klezmer variation of
the cancan), beating the sorry little slip of a thing with the knotty-end of his
prayershawl, her little girl-cries falling on deaf ears, witless Joe cowering in his
cupboard, fixed like stone. And that was the last straw, seeing the tears in those
little blue girl-eyes. Time to show at last what he’s really made of, roaring up out
of his wardrobe, muddy hand raised against his Maker, giving Him (the ruby-
nosed rabs) what He’s had coming all this time — & only then, aghast, seeing
that look of horror on his dear liebling’s picturebook pout where once affection
reigned, his sweet angel cringing in the corner & there, in a mirror behind the
door, that monstrous rage-distorted visage — his own! Shamed, Joejoe flees —
rages through the Ghetto’s night, howling, havocking & generally running
amok, smashing every moneylender’s windows from here to Hanukkah, setting
