The Combinations, page 69
somewhere indulging his lethargy, but he isn’t. If we could interpellate him, he’d be unable to tell
us why he insists on sticking-out this ridiculous meandering non-quest, even if he wanted to.
Which is doubtful. To all appearances ready to give-in at a moment’s notice, yet somehow
compelled onward, with nothing in mind perhaps than some crackpot story slowly incubating
itself, sweating itself out — about the why & wherefore of it all & his nonself in the midst. Just
another day’s laborious hard work, you might say, cogitating the cogs, wiling the wheels & no
endstop in sight — like the whole world’s made of nothing but carriage returns. A man could
crisscross the City for all eternity & still not get down a satisfactory dénouement, let alone a
fullstop, forever caught in the middle of things — presentiments of Purgatory — the doggerel
beneath the skin — the bridge before the chorus going nowhere. If by ten miles you want to know
when too long began… [:]
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boarded a Braník-bound tram. It shuddered & swerved along the quays, past the
steel rail-bridge, the blank stare of the Smíchov façades across the water turned
white in the glare, under the rock of Vyšehrad, Šemík’s leap, slow clouds
gathering over Chuchle, past the drydocks & marinas, the Maternity Hospital
co-opted in the War for v casualties “lucky” enough to make it back from the
East, the Water Purification Plant standing out from the hillside like some
grandiose mausoleum, past the islands with their deserted campsites, rowing
clubs, corrals, the Braník distillery, the tram clanking disconsolately into the
terminus. The lone rider disembarking. Heat-shimmer rising from the tracks.
Then down to the river on his own legs, a dirt path half sluiced away, a wooden
bench to watch the ducks drifting by, empty the mind of its arcane dross — the
air less suffocating here but still not exactly what you’d call breathable.
Němec spread himself out & took in the bucolic serenity of it all. The
Barrandov Bridge like a king rat knotted in concrete, sprawling among rotted
overgrowth, flyovers, underpasses, bits of weathered armature exposed all along
its length — the Terraces on the further side, glass tower a ruined lighthouse
high on its rock over the train tracks — & all the while the river funnelling in on
itself, the vanishing point, always somewhere just there ahead, countervailing,
balancing, throwing the whole borromean morass of the City into a kind of
hysteria, spilling over the edges, coming apart at the seams, like a sloppy drunk
clutching hold of the bottle for dear life.* Well let it flow! Knowing the one
* MINISTRY OF INERTIA
Now it just so happened that, had v-Obergruppenführer R.T.E. Heydrich got his way, back in
the annals of ancient history (before Himmler quietly seized the opportunity to have him done in,
haha), he’d’ve demolished that whole wretched dunghill in one fell swoop, freezing the lymph in
its gland with that fatuous ice-maiden stare of his, and Němec would’ve been left to contemplate a
real doozy of a vista.
For, once he’d filed away his little Zhiddish Problemo in that shoebox under the bed where he
kept his Charles Atlas postcard collection, it was to’ve been young Reinhard’s next Big Project for
the summer: to level that whole Sklavonik eyesore of Golem City, everything from Malá Strana to
Strahov to the National Theatre — history’s detritus (the “lesson of Rome”) — bulldozed by a
battalion of the Reichsarbeitdienst to make way for Moses Händel’s long-cherished boyhood
vision, the Ideal Picnicground of the Twilit Gods, paradise of button-pushers & seat-polishers,
parade-artists, pornographically-minded proceduralists & Aryanised pedants of the statistical
neckjob.
In short, the whole Cecil B. DeMille panoply of a doomcrazed mind descending from its
mount bestowing upon the world a plethora of carbon-copy reviewing stands, pavilions, stadiums,
barracks, opera houses in the hypermodern style, faux-marble galleries & cathedrals of the
Authentic Light — the whole thing set in a pure geometric resonance, ringed by colossal
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autobahns whose suburbs are Berlin, Paris, Schnitzelstadt, Beijing — one vast transmission nerve-
centre of future global dominion, the celestial stepping-off point of untold cryogenic eons of the
March of the Übermensch, the Ville Radieuse, Babel Everlasting! An architecture pure, masterly,
vast. Powerful masses and slender elements. A beauty of a more technical order…
Oh, indeed, it would’ve been the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable, supreme monument-of-
monuments to the Eternal Greatness of the Nouveau Reich — & of Heydrich, first among them,
of course. (Well, who needed a town like Golem City anyway, with its thousand spires-in-yer-eye
& brokendown alembics & bald monkeys on yer back?)
Speer (Albert), that fanatical ballsack, was already hard at work mocking-up a passable
prototype out of cardboard blocks on a table half the size of Nuremberg in his private office —
known among the Czernin Palace wits as the “Ministry of Inertia” (the glories of ’ already a
fading memory now that War Production had begun in earnest). Since, despite the vast wealth of
self-aggrandising monomania Heydrich had invested in him, Speer’s construction schedule
amounted to a barely disguised recycling project for turning the leftovers of a ruthless v pillaging
of every available Protektorat resource into nothing more than an exorbitant array of dust-
gathering maquettes. (These were still the days before busy Albert’s unexpected “rehabilitation” &
the economic “miracle” of .)
Had Heydrich been left to his mad devices, who knows, Speer might’ve been fiddling with
cardboard cutouts for the duration instead of churning out U-boats faster than Jack’s beanstalk.
There once was ein Mann from Mannheim,
who dreamt of great things all the time —
he could conjure machines
to make the world gleam,
but couldn’t perfect a war crime.
To give the bastard his dues, Speer, that congellated goobag, could hold his end up even with
nothing more than a bathtub of pulped woodchip & glue. In the Bundesliga of Coldblooded
Criminal Paperpushers, Speer wasn’t the type to be picking his nose on the reserve bench. So
when not manufacturing ludicrous maquettes for Heydrich’s Thousand-Year Hyderabad, Speer’s
“Ministry of Inertia” spent its time doing what it did best: generating redtape — everything from
phoney cross-channel invasion plans & dossiers on a proposed (equally phoney) invasion of Iran,
Upper Volta, the Andaman Islands & other farflung territories (to be indirectly leaked to the
Allies when the appropriate time came, to sew confusion, muddy the waters), to counterfeit
Roubles & Pounds Sterling (to be airdropped across enemy lines, flooding the enemy’s socalled
economies with bogus currency, Inflation Bombs hahaha) — including, long after Speer had
moved-on & the fortunes of War had taken a decided turn for the cataclysmic, the “Ministry’s”
piece-de-résistance, cranking-out technical blueprints of a top secret Wunderwaffe (a last-ditch
miracle weapon capable of turning whole cities to antimatter if their populations didn’t
immediately re-capitulate, codename: K.L.E.E. — a con to one-up even the most incredulous of
bullshit artists among them).
Historians will note that, even during the Final Hours, the “Ministry of Inertia” didn’t rest (no
sleep for the engines of entropy, hehe), but pressed on, down to the last ream & postagestamp-
sized bit of letterpress, providing the only rearguard action left now that Schörner’s Army Group
Centre had been pulverised into the mists of pure mythology… Cranking-out on a bewildering
scale, all things considered, everything from fake ration books & employment cards to fraudulent
mission statements for the Reich’s chain of Permanent Rehab Centres (oh-ho-ho), attempting by
office efficiency alone to erase all evidence of the Final Solution &, in addition, provide an handy
escape hatch for its numerous architects (so to speak), precognisant somehow of that wholesale
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meridian that can make sense of it all, keep it on an even keel so to speak, is
precisely the one that’ll never keep still. May just as well try propping yourself up
on the second hand of an enormous clock or build an embankment around the
shadow of a sundial. As even now, describing a parallelogram in single-point
perspective, shadowed right to left, then left to right, darkening by increments,
for all appearances (to the time-lapsed among you) flattened out like a two-year-
old’s doodle of a teepee in progressive stages of being rotated about a vertical
axis: ◮ ◬ ◭.
Geometry had never been his forte, but Němec saw what he saw. From
here the City was already an abstraction. A weak link. He sat there watching the
river like a man thrown back on his own resources and finding them wanting.
Or barely watching, the whole thing just passing in front of his eyes. It was
worse than being in a cinema, here he couldn’t even be sure where he was.
Unbridled nature, he realised with a vague feeling of wonderment, had always
terrified him, more even than Commies, shrinks & dormitories. In nature you
never knew what might happen, while with the others everything was hideously
predictable, there was at least that to say for them. There’d be nothing worse, he
decided, than taking a “holiday” on the Sázava, listening to bluegrass & shooting
carp — the almost certain boredom would be excusable, but you could never be
sure some unblinking catastrophe wasn’t lurking behind every bush & blade of
grass, just waiting to leap out & maul you to shreds.
Němec eyed the ducks on the river warily. They looked harmless enough,
planting of forged microfilms, sham diaries & other specious items during the mopping-up
sideshow at Nuremberg (the ever-reliable Speer taking one for the team yet again, while Eichmann
vanished into the paperwork).
It was this very same “Ministry of Inertia,” of course, which (even with the Ideal City tumbling
down around its ears, the last thing to go seemingly, cannibalised for bare necessities now that
supplies were running decidedly thin) furnished on bits of recycled maquette the escape documents
for those last remaining Nazi brass without the decency to follow their maker’s dog into the mass
suicide they themselves had orchestrated — including none other than Reichsführer Himmler
himself, fitted up for an improvised “démarche” via Lüneburg, destination undisclosed. Poor
Himmler, his escape was curtailed by his own wretched fastidiousness & a pathological concern
for detail that’d caused the “Ministry” to not only provide flawless simulacra of the real deal (easily
enough obtained, had secrecy not been of the utmost, just across the corridor from the “Personnel
Department”), but to somehow ensure the paperwork was altogether too much in order. A non-com
of the Second British Army making a routine check of civilian refugees thought something not
quite kosher about this little bespectacled fellow in the hat who turns out to be the only blighter in
weeks to have all his bleedin’ papers present & stamped, travel pass, paybook, the fully monty —
place of issue: Golem City. Weeell, we’d better take a look at this, eh, Mr, er, Hitzinger is it? Just step this way if you’d be so kind, sir. What’s that? Cat got yer tongue, has it…? [:]
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but appearances were often deceiving. Probably it was the heat. Well it would
be, wouldn’t it? Turning the mental faculties to canned lard. The hours of
walking followed by the hours of sitting. The self-sufficient entropy. Němec slid
the bottle out of his pocket. There were still two good slugs of booze left. He
downed one, breathed the fumes out through nostrils half-cauterised already by
the molten air. Downed the second. Wrung the bottle by the neck. Lazily he
tossed it into the water. Splock!
The ducks gave him an admonishing stare. Quaguack! Quaguackuackuack!
Němec smiled down on them with Socratic benevolence. Concentric lines of
scum settled back into a brown half-mirror, poked through with limp reeds.
Němec leant forward without quite tipping & peered between his feet. Ah, there
he was, down there in the sludge, the mad Rabbi’s lookingglass, like a Golem
drowned in its own sorrows…
Golem’s Lament
And all the best years turn to mud…
And the hag that eats you from the inside out
talks like a boatload of Russian ventriloquists.
And Time’s a needlejack on a carousel,
a hundred chairlegs and a flagon of rum,
pizzicato TV static, and ‘You can go to hell’
says the eyeball kid with the plastic gun.
They’ve all got tax returns tattooed on their faces
and a midget on each shoulder — ‘Its too late
to stand your own ground,’ they tell you,
‘the past only makes peace with the ones it buries.’
And the committees in their underwear proffer
palm-courts and free disposal. And the wallpaper
covering the sky keeps peeling. And dust
settles over everything in the belly of the whale…
Somewhere after midday one turned into two. Arse numbed, rubbing a little life
into it, Němec hunched back to the tram shelter to contemplate the journey in
reverse. Like the dialectic of childhood nightmares, the thing & its opposite, the
inescapable thesis, the inevitable antithesis. The terminus was a tin roof on stilts
with a wooden bench missing all its slats. Weeds swayed in puddles of slowly
evaporating piss. A stray dog (the same, perhaps) dragged its arse along the
gravel. A rat stirred a bit of undergrowth. The air was thick & hot & stank of
engine oil, tar & effluent. The tram stood there baking in the sun, the driver
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asleep with a wet rag on his head, fag plastered to bottom lip. Němec could feel
the sun burning through the crown of his Chaplin hat, shoe soles roasting on
pavement. He leant on his stick, swayed, bent into a sliver of shadow growing
ever thinner. A chorus of insects sawed the air…
Němec woke to the sound of the tram bell clanging. A somnambulist’s
stagger up the steps, arse planted on baked plastic, jolted forward, the sudden
movement after stasis. And voilà, the river once more thrusting in upon him,
snaking north, a mirror of blue-pink-red, taking its cues wherever they come —
a watery disc of sun tangled in the branches of TV aerials, the blackness of the
hole of Vyšehrad, flaring upon the City in all its vagrancy, the eight bridges
lined up like deckchairs for invalids, a hot-air balloon like a blind eye tethered to
the embankment, the river tapering off beneath the Metronome on the Hill,
filling in the null spaces of the mind beyond, transformed by nothing but a POV
— the same narrative in a different arrangement, light fading on Neolithic burial
markers, druidic circles, illegible time-travel maps of a place lost within itself,
their key as blank as a name left blank: ▲.
A Girl & a N
At Moráň, Němec poured himself off the tram & down to the quays, past the
riverclock. The transition barely registered now, as hot down by the water as it’d
been on the street — mopping sweat from brow, hat-band soaked through, a
Dead Sea tidemark bleaching the felt. His suit stuck to him like a wet plaster
mould starched stiff by the late sun even by the time he was halfway to Palacký
Bridge. A “MEYER’S” catering van was parked out across the walkway with its
shutters down & aircon unit making dervish sounds. A film crew was set up on
the other side of it in the shade of tents & umbrellas along the section of the
quayside that used to be the Friedrich Engels Embankment & before that
Reinhard Heydrich Ufer. Most of the crew appeared to be killing time in a kind
of trance — a couple were man-handling an oversized electric fan, trying to get it
to blow in a direction it didn’t seem able to blow in.
Under the arch of the bridge was a scene like a railway siding at the end of
the War where an army of extras had all been marshalled. Like everyone else
they were waiting for something, reading, sleeping, bumming smokes. Over the
west side of town slivers of dark cloud were now visible, in advance of the
thunderheads. In a few hours you’d be able to smell the rain coming. Or not, the
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slow boiling broth evaporating into nothing. Like an interloper in a wrong
timeframe, Němec lurched among the marooned film crew towards his
