The Combinations, page 65
fire to streetvendors’ stands, snatching watchmakers’ wives off into back alleys…
The alarum sounds, men with sticks, shovels, nets, converge around the
synagogue. The Rabbi, as battered & bruised as a Christmas carp, comes down
the steps pointing aloft. Torchlight flickers across the synagogue walls, upwards,
the steep gables, there, climbing towards the high summit, Golem Joe with —
what’s that? — something white slung across one shoulder. My daughter! The
Rabbi falls to His knees, pleads, begs, screams. Get down here you slutty little
koorvah! Joe stands astride the weathercock, clasping the limp form of the
Rabbi’s lamb under his right arm, left outstretched, teeth flashing in a wide grin
— all eyes on him now, enlarging in the glow of the torches, footlights rather —
he’s found his element, it all suddenly dawning on him that this is what he was
made for, destined to the Big Stage. He shuffles off a few tap-dance moves,
rooftiles clacking underfoot — they mob’s all agape watching now to see what’ll
come next. Hey, cries out a soot-faced urchin, cloth capped, perched atop a
lamppost, he’s gonna sing a song! Sure enough, there’s Joe — top hat & coat-tails
materialising out of nowhere (pure movie magic, this), the Rabbi’s daughter all
blonde sultry smirking in his ear, a real Betty Grable — fade-up on orchestra,
Irving Berlin conducting:
Have you seen the well-to-do up on Maisl Avenue,
on that stingy thoroughfare with hooked noses in the air,
yarmulke and bearded collars, glatt bekishe and thirteen dollars,
hoarding every dime, ’cos spending’s a crime?
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If you’re stewed and you don’t know where to go to,
why don’t you go where Israel shits?
Dishin’ out chumitz!
Dressed up like a dimestore Balabusta,
trying to impress the SA troopers (unger bluzen)!
Opgeflickt!* Nam zich a vaneh!** Gai tren zich!***
say all the nafkas on the strip.
And goys are all farpiiiiiiiiitzsed…†
Oops! Joe taking one backwards step too many, it seems, gone over the edge, an
almighty crash from behind the stage, trumpet, bass drum, cymbal — the
Rabbi’s daughter clinging to the tiles for dear life — gasps from the peanut
gallery down below — then, thinking this is all part of the show, a smattering of
applause. Calls for an encore. A tear in the old Rabbi’s eye…
d
Němec waited long enough for the cinema to empty around him, watching the
credits through to the end, till the lights come up & the curtains closed. The
man in the ticketbooth was still there at his interrogation desk when Němec got
out, another line-up of unfortunates queuing for their punishment. (Some
people would pay with their souls to see a half-decent film these days.)
Outside, it was still light, sky turning blue to violet, redolent of perfumed
memories… Unmarked cop cars parked bumper-to-bumper up & down the
street, Gestapo-brown tiled façade of cop HQ, & upstairs the same slobs
polishing their arses at the same desk as when Mr & Mrs “Němec” were put
through the process — trouble is our business, hehe — going through the motions
of the democratised Police State, concerned with the shallwesay quote welfare of
its citizenry unquote — habeas corpses & all that — humiliating long hours of
form-filling refined into torture, always the promise of a light at the end, playing
upon those irrational wishes that can’t quite even at this stage be suppressed,
desperate enough to think they’ll ever see daylight again, that they’ll at least get a
* Yes, sir.
** No, sir.
*** Three bags full, sir.
† Gemütlich.
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chance to prove their innocence, that the law couldn’t really just be régime
wallpaper with a human face, that in any case their friends on the outside would
soon get wind of it all & come to save them, before the cells, sleeplessness,
electrodes on genitals, matchsticks under fingernails, gasoline enemas, etc. —
just like, eh, in ’? Or ’? Or ’? (Something about years ending in eight?)
Ancient history now. And who still remembered that joke? About how
Bartolomějská was supposed to’ve been named in honour of Klem Gottwald’s
puissant grampaw from Hoštice? (How the old plonker came home one
morning to find his daughter — Klem’s sainted matka — up the duff by some
itinerant Joe & fairly gave her the boot, told her to take a hike & never come
back, & her in due course feeling the contractions, waters pishing out all over
the place, obliged by circumstances to birth our little runt of a national saviour
there & then in a pigsty by the side of the road — call it a manger if you must.
Old bastard’s name was Bart-for-Bartholomew, that lush — Zhiddish for Son of
the Furrows, or more like the Trough, seeing as he always had his snout stuck in
one. As to the culprit who begat that sonofawhore, our darling Klemency?
Hawhaw, well, y’know, them Hoštice shits do like to keep it in the family…)
Němec orientated himself west towards the river, breathing deep — tables
out on the sidewalk along Karoliny Světlé — then up the steps & across the
tramline — view over the water to the island, couples on picnic blankets, bottles
of wine & curd cheese, a bag of crusts feeding the ducks, the pedaloes going
past, plash plash, green-white, red-white, yellow-white, big black numbers in
circles like paddling pool balls — the Castle on the Hill all lit-up already, the sky
deepening by degrees through purple to black, unreal, reflected below, the weir
spilling over — gulls perched along the wood barricades sloping in rows up out
of the water, streaked with guano… (the river from whose sludge Löw made his
Golem monster / slave / factotum — the dredged-up alien amino acids, enzyme-
reflux, sedimentary accretions of past & future, the ground-down vertebrae of
primeval trilobites, molluscs, unicorns, carbonised bile, methane &
phytoplankton — the pre- & post-tectonic gutrumbling of the blue planet in its
firstlast Kodachrome Konvulsions — as once was said, like Stoic sapiens, seeing
in one glance all ages down to the present — war, plague, pestilence, fire,
inundation, massacres, miracles, prodigies, appositions — all the archaeo-logie-
bairdisms of this convulsèd world).
Just as here, he (Němec) too now stood upon the lip of Time, every particle
of his selfsameness is so decisively after the event, attuned like a wire in a busted
socket to the ancient echo of his Golem forebears, dwellers of these same river
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banks, all evidence of whom long since past, washed down the Elbe to the sea,
their name, their language, their God & all who in their memory & dreams came
before them, in turn extinct, lost, forgotten — a bone fragment, a sharpened
stone, a notch in a shaft of petrified wood…
Já Robota
In the beginning was an Island, a Garden bearing rich fruit on all sides
swallowed by a Fiery Sea — the Omphalos, the Navel of the World, Rapa Nui
of the ancients. On this island God was born & died — His petrified remains,
heaped smouldering on a mountaintop, there to await Resurrection. Where once
He reigned, a Scientific Committee of the T.E.S.L.A. Corporation built
temples to Divine Geometry, the Law of Ratio, the Inviolable Method.
Descended of engined Egyptians, scions of Moses, Aryun of the Vedas,
Archimedes — convinced of their own but not mankind’s in-general
perfectibility, the Clockwork Inner Mechanism, the miraculated Self-Image,
evolution by Prosthetic Exteriorisation, the Immaculate Clone that walks about
bathed in the luminescence of its own Reason… The Committee sent forth
android armies to purge the world of these moral ills. Thus purged, the world
became a mirror to their own dark cybernated souls. And by declensions the
Slave Machines did turn upon their Masters. And they did raise up graven
effigies, idols, fetish things, in their own image! And verily did they bring about a
great extinction & warred among themselves, one tribe against another of all the
descended gismos & gadgets since Time Immemorial:
of Household Appliances, Electrolux —
of Computing, I.B.M. —
of Film, Kodak —
of Telegraphy, Bell —
of Optics, Zeiss Ikon —
of Television, Baird —
of Radio, Tesla —
of Refrigeration, Westinghouse —
of Chemical Engineering, I.G. Farben —
of Power Generators, Edison —
of Hydraulics, Pascal —
of Automotives, Ford —
of Lighting, General Electric…
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Comicbook fables of masked avengers & bionic übermen, the salvation of
Life as it was Known, all the sentimentalities of a civilisation confined to its
armchairs, enslaved to their remote-controls. Another version of the same story
went like his: Long ago, in a ghetto in Mitteleuropa, on a prison island festering
with poverty & disease — surrounded on all sides by Papists, Protestants,
Husitic zealots screaming for race rationalisation, Organisation Men,
accountants with deathlists, Austerity-mongers, Inflation Economists in
doublebreasted marino-blend, Bohemian Kristalnacht merchants, Slovnikian
swordswallowers, Elders-of-Zion Bookclub matrons — came the litanies of the
Megaphones of Doom, death mantras, transport lists, the countdown of the
Zero Hour… Who will save us? they asked. Not I, said Rabbit, sucking a long
blade of grass on the riverbank, I have too much else to do. Nor I, said Goat,
butting his horns against a tree, I have heavy responsibilities. Oh, it’s not so bad,
said the Lion, tickling his nose with his two tails, I can’t see what you’re all
complaining about. Look on the bright side, salvation’s eternal! Meanwhile, down in the depths, far beneath the septic stink of the Ghetto, deep in the fluvial mud, a
Messiah was being made: some Weisenheimer’s tosspot come to terrible life,
some pocket Machine-Mensch forged in a fist, the fading prospect of the Last
Tribe of Excretus descending to this, down down below the sewers & secret
tunnels, the tar-pits, Devil’s workshops, troglodyte production-lines, spectral
synagogues with attics buried under basements, rooms without windows, in no
recognised transmission zone, in an ether of indeterminacy: something, born out
of the hypnotism of the Mass Mind, risen from primordial floes, limbs of Panzer
steel, turret-headed, deathray eyes, the works. Come to afflict the self-righteous,
this Golem monster, Legion of the One, demon dwelling sub rosa in the
collective meme, that unseen, hidden, menacing & obscene thing they will go to
any lengths, it seems, to expunge, obliterate, deny — the cruciformed Id, the
persecuted proletariat, the eternal subspecies, unhuman forms with no interior
human life, automata merely — unknown to itself, a spoke in the wheel, a
spanner in the proverbial, beam gone wrong, “berserk” not putting too fine a
point on it, non compos mentis, ex machina if not ex cathedra, backfiring on all
cylinders (a little Švejkian sabotage at work in the wings here), more Masada
than Man you might say, tumult of a technological tsunami hurling all & sundry
into the (dialectically-speaking) maelstrom of its own making, from Genesis to
fiery Revelation, combustible eye & wrath of a God whose ways are at the very
least perplexing when not downright monstrous. Nothing as evitable as it ought
to be, eh? Stuck in the paradox of the passive-aggressive, preparing the World,
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you think — This is what you really think, eh, kiddo? — for the Greatest
Gutwrench of All Time?
d
Chief Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel, father of der Golem, was not as apocryphal
as Werner Krauss, but almost. Old wizard of the Ghetto raising up a one-eyed
homunculus from slimethick Vltava mud — cauldrons of boiling smegma,
squeezed & shaped in gnarly old talmudic hands, till it cooled & the sap of life
rose in it… According to those who pretended to know such things, the remains
of this Golem still lay in the attic of the Gothic synagogue on the street later
named after Rudolf II’s finance minister, where Löw concealed it in a room with
no windows and no doors — the steep-roofed Alt-Neu-schul with crowstep gable,
c. — keeping watch (so to speak) over the dead in its ramshackle cemetery.
The Ghetto itself came about not much earlier, the product of a Vatican
directive on segregation: , Otakar II’s Statuta Judaeorum, defining the
restriction & “protection” of the City’s Zhids (accused murderers of Christ,
ritual childsnatchers, sinister distillers of Biblical filth), henceforth prohibited
from practicing crafts or trades and from travelling outside the Ghetto without
wearing the yellow star… Three hundred pogroms it took to slay this madman
dressed in tatters of lost scripture, fed on unmeaning, drinking from the cup of
his own crucifixion — as fraught as the mind’s messianic morbidity — Golem of
the Word — monstrosity of gibber — concocted philanstery — Dead Sea fake
— apocryphal Egyptian — embryo of the Eternal Wanderer, etc. Was it mere
happenstance of orthography that in the Sacred Lexicon, golem stood between
“exile” — goles — & goen, meaning, among other things, “the dominant
influence” or “essential animating principle of anything” : “an accompanying spirit, demon, or djinn?”*
* And like some djinnydjinndjinn of kiddies’ nightime babblebooks, the Golem remained forever-
elusive, more pliant than clay, a shapeshifter, vanishing & reappearing from place to place, time to
time, never the one thing it’s assumed to be — the more you sought to apprehend it, entrap it,
confine it, the more it mocked, derided, led you on a merry dance — now a worm in a toadstool,
now a leprechaun under a rock, one moment formless matter, the next a genius for assuming any
shape at all. Exiled from itself, a mere shadow, yet at the same time also inside itself, like a mind
caught inside the body of a stranger, waking in somebody else’s room, forced to assume an alien
identity — made to think someone else’s thoughts, speak someone else’s words… The Golem of
subversion inside each of us that must be tamed, brought to heel, locked in the darkest room of the
cranial vault & never let out? (By the time mad Rudolf came along, the story of Löw’s swarthy
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d
It was Wegener’s film that reminded Němec how, before quitting the City in
’, the Prof was supposed to’ve written a dissertation at the Catholic
Theological Faculty, on the subject of the mad Rabbi himself. The Faculty was
about a mile down-river, on the eastern side of the socalled New Town.* During
the war it served as a Nazi ministry building, for the department of Werk und
Technik. * Across the river, steep cliffs joined the former vineyard terraces of the
Sommerberg Gardens & the derelict Expo ’ pavilion, built at the time when
the Theological Faculty was again under suppression, this time by the
communists. Further downstream, the river broadened significantly around
Štvanice Island (Hetzinsel), with its concrete flyovers & drab winter stadium.
All interesting facts, but as for the Faculty itself, there was no point going there
if Němec wanted to find anything about the Prof’s dissertation — any records
that might’ve been of interest had long ago been stored on microfilm, in the
basement of the Klementinum. From which, at that moment, Němec was only a
minute away.
At the Church of the Holy Saviour, crossed keys, a recital was in progress.
Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem (nach Worten der heiligen Schrift), Op. ,
performed by the über alles Polish virtuoso Ivor Pederastky. Immediately
adjacent, the entrance to the Klementinum stood open, the dark courtyard with
light filtering down from uncurtained windows, students coming & going. At a
guess, the Prof must’ve been around twentyfive when he submitted his
dissertation — meaning he’d’ve been about sixteen at the time the Munich
Agreement was signed in ’, for the sake of European peace, peace with honour,
amanuensis was cemented into the general fabric of the place: conspiracy, cabala, alchemy. Well
before the birth of the Protektorat, the myth had given birth to countless proxies, avatars of future
