The Combinations, page 66
ethnocomputerology, grotesque Zhid-monsters, masked menaces, vaudeville Frankensteins, Nilus’
Protocols, Meyrink’s Pernath, Wegener’s three films, & Čapek’s cyborg apocalypticon, R.U.R.
[Čapek, K. — author of War with the Newts, whose last play was completed on the eve of Hitler’s
invasion, died on Christmas Day (few people are aware he left behind him a unique
collection of African & Central Asian music, recorded on vinyl s). His brother — Čapek, J. —
perished at Belsen concentration camp, . R.U.R. = “Rossum’s Universal Robots”: from robota,
drudgery or servitude, forced labour — & rossum, echoing rozum, reason — Whose light like Phoebus lamp throughout the world doth shine — the divine radiance, the empiric illumination.]) [:]
* Founded by Charles IV in . [:]
* Between November & May all the universities in Golem City had been closed by
order of the v. [:]
417
peace in our time.* The Prof himself had never spoken about the War. It made
Němec wonder: What’d the Prof been doing those six years (he & those two
muses of his)? When did they meet? How did they live? Where was he when the
students protested in ’, on the th of November, against the murder of Jan
Opletal, only to have their leaders arrested & shot? Why wasn’t he* one of the
twelve-hundred students rounded-up afterwards & sent to concentration camps?
Where were they when the deportations began, to Terezín, Belsen, Auschwitz?
What was he doing on the th of May , when Golem City — last capital of
Europe — finally rose against its oppressors? And what was he doing on the
morning of the th, when Red Army tanks rolled through the suburbs for the
first, but not for the last, time?
Němec wondered more when he discovered the Klementinum’s
antiquated card catalogue had no record of a dissertation on Rabbi Löw by any
student called Hájek, either before the War or at any time after. The on-duty
librarian suggested he check the graduation records. Sitting in a cubicle, with a
viewing-machine fast-forwarding & rewinding through a dozen reels of
microfilm, Němec eventually found what he was looking for. It wasn’t much,
just a record of the Prof’s final undergraduate exam — Státní závěrečné zkoušky
bakalářské —listed among the materials for September . It included a one-
page typed synopsis & two examiner’s reports, each roughly a paragraph long.
From these it could be concluded that the Prof’s “dissertation” was mostly
bibliography, a survey of Papal & Imperial edicts (“From Quattrocento to the
Present Day”). The typed synopsis pointed to an underlying subtext of “race
odium, questions of,” “the problem of political emancipation” & its attendant
“perils,” with a side consideration of Löw’s legendary Golem as the depicted
“allegory,” in an embryonic form (like a caterpillar in a cabbage, a serpent in the
breast, a rat in the granary, a goat in the garden) of the “struggle to overcome,”
etc. Which in had its own very particular significance — in case anyone
needed reminding. The examiners’ questions, modestly couched in the
unprepossessing language of the global anti-Zhiddish conspiracy, were mostly to
* ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is,’ Mr Chamberlain said, ‘that we should be digging
trenches here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know
nothing.’ With the backs of England & France turned, the Nazis immediately occupied the
Sudetenland — Poland annexed Silesia — Hungary seized Ruthenia & southern Slovnikia — &
on the th of March, , Hitler’s forces let all pretence fall away & marched into Golem City,
declaring all of Bohemia & Moravia a “Protectorate” of the Reich.* An instructive coming-of-age
story for the modern nation. [:]
* Or that Hrabal? [:]
418
do with comparative points of scripture & ecclesiastical law, civic if not secular,
categorical though hardly catechistic, mutatis mutandis & with due alteration of
details, etc., placing the burden of responsibility for historical (A) wrongs & (B)
wrongdoings, not to mention (C) unmitigated sufferings, squarely upon the
shoulders of God’s favoured scapegoat. The Prof’s responses were omitted.
d
Below the Malá Strana end of Charles Bridge, on a narrow street backing onto
the Čertovka moat, stood the entrance to PROSPERO’S USED BOOKS.
From the entrance a spiral stairway led down through three conjoined rooms.
Coming out of the heat, the air in the shop was damp & chill, but it was only an
impression. In one corner an antique samovar steamed — it wasn’t the sort of
thing you’d ordinarily expect to find in a bookshop. Everywhere else, shelves ran
to the ceiling, but there weren’t enough of them for all the books — there were
books piled up everywhere in towering columns, in every available space in
homage to the temple at Byblos. The trick was to find to what you wanted
without bringing the whole teetering construction down on top of you. If there
was a system at work, it appeared to consist of the books being grouped by size,
the lower reaches reserved for the largest — folios, atlases & catalogues, etc. —
& those at the top for pocket editions which, as a result of the diminished
perspective afforded by the narrow aisles & ceiling’s height, were almost
invisible.
From somewhere at the back of the shop came the sound of a toilet
flushing, running water, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum. The bookseller
emerged from behind a drape. He was a squat man, balding in the middle but
with long greasy black hair falling at the sides, wearing (it was July) a dirty green
gabardine overcoat which, even at a distance, stank of formalin. Without paying
any attention to his newly arrived customer, the bookseller went over & fidgeted
with the samovar, tapped some tea onto a saucer, dunked a sugar cube &
commence sucking it between his teeth. A pair of grimed trifocals pinching the
fleshy bulb at the end of his nose most precariously. Němec interpreted all this as
a signal to go ahead & browse. An hour of aimlessly scanning the shelves
produced no notable results, till he came across a grey, dogeared paperback with
columns of numbers printed diagonally across the cover, bearing the optimistic
title All About Unbreakable Codes and How to Use Them. Němec found it wedged
419
between Ottó Károlyi’s self-help book, Three Easy Steps to Suicide, & Luděk
Pachman’s Modern Chess Strategy (“The plan of play at a particular point in the
game as called the strategical plan; the way in which it is laid out, the collection
of principles we follow in its determination, is known as strategy. These terms
have the same meaning as in the science of warfare…”) in a fruit crate stacked
atop a pile of old service manuals. It cost the extravagant sum of crowns. At
first glance All About Unbreakable Codes looked like the kind of thing even an
idiot might be able to understand, though to this particular idiot there was
something curious, nay downright sinister, about the entire first page of the
book being taken up by errata, printed on a blue slip of paper & pasted in at a
wrong angle, viz: a convoluted flow chart for generating pseudo-random
numbers, Enter prime numbers here, followed by lines of “computer code” omitted
from page in the original printing:
PRINT “DECODE…INPUT NUMBERS 1 BY 1”
FOR K=1 TO Z
A$=”ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890.!?*+-/
INPUT X
P(K)=X-N(K), etc.
Beneath which, a note informed that page should be page & vice versa.
Maybe it was someone’s idea of a clever joke. Němec duly turned to the
offending page, but it looked just like all the others. He flipped back to the
introduction: Historically, it told the reader, there have been hundreds of ways to
keep secret the letters and messages of statesmen, generals and traders. In each era, once
a certain level of literacy is reached, cryptology is born anew. In each age, the means of
transmitting (and guarding) information has been determined by the technology of the
time. The author continued: Any method for hiding the meaning of a message should
meet four standards: First, it should be easy to create. It should be simple to send. When
properly encrypted, a message should be unambiguous. And finally, any system for
hiding messages should be difficult for unauthorised users to crack. Němec returned
All About Unbreakable Codes to its place in the fruit crate, thanking its author for
clarifying those couple of difficult points for him. Whatever the secret of the
Black Book, it wasn’t about to reveal itself without a key — Němec felt sure of
that. Besides, whoever had left it for him probably had other ideas in mind: what
they were was anybody’s guess. As Pachman said, The best plans come to nothing if
they’re not carried out correctly. So, assuming there was a plan, but not knowing
what it was, what would be the correct method for proceeding? Němec asked the
420
odd fish with the samovar — whether there was anything he knew about the
Voynich Manuscript…
d
The caretaker’s parrot screeched after him as he pulled himself up the stairs to
the Prof’s apartment. He bolted the door & glanced about, listening closely to
the apartment’s silence. Everything was as he’d left it. The mystagogical Black
Book beckoned — as soon as Němec was convinced of being alone, he sat
himself on the bureau floor & turned through its pages:
Was its gnomonic nomenclature, its Lethe-wise lexicography, simply a
collation of errata turned into a system for its own decipherment?
A scale model, so to speak, of the Voynich Manuscript?
To clarify the syntactical soup of it?
By implication if not by direct application?
Who was there who could understand it, other than a deadman?
Who, apart from the Prof, was the code for?
If there was, in point of fact, a code to begin with?
What coterie?
What conspiracy of pseudosavants?
What cenacle of cynics?
What caprice of the clueless?
Was that what the Black Book added up to, a list of suspects, crossed-off
one at a time?
By what process of elimination?
And if so, who really was Viktor Faktor?
Němec cast around for the tools at hand to cobble his own pre-electric
decoding machine:
Rega turntable with a recording of Mahler’s th primed to go — a
torn-up newspaper (financial pages, stockmarket reports, league tables, weather
forecasts, etc.) from which to extract some random randomness — a fresh bottle
of slivovice — ltyrosine, tryptophane, hyperforin, dextropropoxyphene in equal
measure — assorted other sundry items…
And so, with his tools arranged around him on the floor thus, Němec set
about constructing his machine:
He necked the slivovice, shuffled the pills.
421
Red pill, yellow pill.
Needle let drop blindly in groove.
Recordplayer hiss.
Music spilling out in notes gratifyingly wrong, dragged apart & shunted
back together by turntable-slack somewhere between & ⅓ rpm — as
though played by an orchestra in helicopters.
He thumbed the Book, tore out bits of newspaper, intoned from each in
turn: up five points — Kammler — morning edition — …
The stuff of poetry.
Thence, the innumerous scrawled or voided-upon orts & scraps, recycled,
wastepapered, inkblotted, adjected, doublevisioned, trebleverbed, shades of
Faustian fustian, thirdeye blither extracted from various places of concealment
on Němec’s person:
Hocuspocusdidleydocus, gargoylegargling, spiritleavening as of
unbehooved powers, eau-de-vied, usquebaughed — slapped-down plumpotioned
in the medias res of it all, floor-wise & distillatedly dribbling around-about
t’inscribe a circuitous as geometrically gerundive or diametrically indirect as ever
a mephistophalopian morphogenesis was:
Geomancer or Gaia-master — pig’s ear of pentagram — hexababble of
carbon molecoil — sempiternal — looped octet groove of eight-bit symphonic
bombast beelzebubbling voxes out of the nether ether — mind-blanked —
blinking — getting it all down to the last gibberished gerund, the inspired
nonsense of the truth-seeker, the machine exorcising its ghosts, the propounded
error speaking in tongues till it enlighten us!
Ouija-board fingers tapping-out streetnoise dictations, creak of parquet,
ruminated plumbing…
Feeding the consequent data into his word machine, clack clack clack.
Through obscurity & secret detours, a theme developed to the point of an
obsession, till there was no alternative but to confront it & be rid of it.
Němec beheld himself thus:
Hunched, splay-legged at his typewriter like a raggedy Golem, driven &
derided by an occult force at work in the nunceverse — not knowing towards
what ends, barely conscious of his own non-actions, becoming that diabolical
thing with its own secret life, the resurrection within, God-eye, Ninhursing,
Khnum, Nüwa, Kukulkán — forging from his own inferior rib a companionable
spirit, some equally unmenschlich creature of word-clay, papier-mâché, struck
inkily upon mouth, chest, genitals, upon its forehead th’inscribèd word:
422
Truth-Firmness-Veracity, Aleph Mem Tau — תמא — causing it to live!
The responding pliable muck of mottage, moulded, servile, inspired with
purple-prosed purility, animatronic, pneumatic as a pump-up doll, life-like in
every respect brothers — which, no sooner blinking its lashes up at the Almighty
(always fast upon the scene whenever our Joe tries his hand at a bit of
sympathetic pornography), turning the old tea-soak to blushes, gets the Sleeping
Beauty treatment, put on ice, laid as if to rest in the first flush of pristine
preposterity, exempted from all worldly non-labours, a most pious pin-up if ever
there was one — the lickspittled finger of Him Upstairs drawn prophylactically
crossways upon that poor misshapen dogsbody’s prepubescent pout, the W of
erasure, the undone first uttered syllable, Aleph, nothing now but the shadow of
a shadow, plunging into the void, dark whispering of death — תמ.
Begin now.
Input.
FAKTOR.
TWO-SEVEN-NINE-EIGHT-NINE-SIX-ONE-EIGHT.
Enter.
Goto.
Eena meena tethera gezisch!
Geknatter?!
Do you read me??
Come in Centrum!?!
423
Inte|mission
0
_________
‘Well it’s been action-packed from the first whistle, a real tug-of-war, & certainly
not a dull moment for us here in the commentary box today. We’re at the
halfway mark — how do you see the game developing so far, Klem?’
‘In a sit-u-a-tion like this one, Rudi — ’ead-to-’ead, bofe sides puttin’ their
backs right inta it, evryffin’ in tha balance — there’s always wot I like ta call un-
an-tici-pat-ed factors. Th’important fing’s not ta get a’ead a yerself ’n’ start
frowin’ round pre-dictions. It ’as to be said, tho — ’n’ I reckon I speak fer
everyone associated wiff tha game — this’s exactly ’ow we all ’oped ta wrap up
tha season. An ab-so-lute nail-biter. We’re def’nitely gonna see this one go right
down ta tha wire, ’nless sumffin’ de-cisive ’appens b’tween now ’n’ then a-
course…’
‘Too close to call, you reckon, Klem?’
‘I wouldn’t nec-e-ssar-ily go that far, Rudes. Question’s ’ow ya figure tha
breakdown this far inta tha game. I mean, ’ow offen’ve we ’eard pundits get over-
confident, givin’ tha advantage to one side over tha uvver early on, only ta ’ave it
turn round ’n’ bite ’em after? I’m speakin’ meta-phoric’ly, a-course, Rudi. Point is,
there’s oceans a diff’rence ’ere, oceans. But we’re talkin’ two very diff’rent styles a
play — ’n’ if ya wanna ask if a more aggressive tac-ti-cal style a play ’as an
advantage ’ere against a studied defensive stra-te-gic style a play, when fer all we
know we could be ’alfway froo already…’
‘You could say a lot hinges on the next half-an-hour…’
