The Combinations, page 76
shoulders? An anatomical deformity, a squillhead? How the world saw him through his own
eyes… ( Stretching it a bit aren’t you?) What would he have to say for himself if it really was HER
sitting there at that desk, pondering the imponderable ( Of course, mummy’s gotta care about little
numero uno right to the end, right?) — that he’d been pushed, or that he’d jumped? ( What a waste. ) Or nothing — Mum’s the word. Was SHE out there somewhere playing dead, in a cell no-one had
gotten around to unlocking, because the past SHE came from was too much of an affront for the
world to face? Buried under redtape, deemed no longer to exist for lack of evidence to the contrary.
Trying to summon a picture of HER, all the images were in silhouette, black&white — no matter
how hard he tried, he couldn’t see HER face or the colour of HER hair. Even in your dreams
they’ve succeeded in wiping them out. Mamitati. Tatimami. And what about the other photographs
missing from the files? Of the Loved One on the mortuary slab? In the ditch? In the torture
chamber? In the cell? On the filthy mattress?
The dead don’t remember (you),
the dead don’t get old,
the dead don’t bleed,
the dead don’t go mad,
the dead aren’t terrified,
the dead feel no pain,
the dead can’t be broken,
the dead are immune to humiliation,
the dead can’t betray,
the dead have nothing to be deprived of,
the dead can’t be persuaded,
the dead don’t confess,
the dead don’t love (you)…
And what the Prof said: The most difficult thing to understand’s the nature of the quest. But it wasn’t HER Němec was searching for, was it? But a clue in a photostat, of something universally agreed
to be the height of all senseless undertakings — as inscrutable, in that bogus high language of the
Great Navel-Gazers of Yore, as the piddling human soul of which Němec felt most grievously
bereft. Why care about that one thing & not all the others — not them? “Because,” the voice in his head told him, “they don’t exist. Because for you to exist, the things that don’t exist must continue
not to exist…” Or, conversely, “for you not to exist, they…” etc. (And did the soul exist? The
learnèd spoke of “it” as if it did — was that enough? Was the conviction of a truth sufficient to
make it so? And if he believed, that somewhere, after all these years, SHE was still alive — what
the chances would be, accidentally… & if so, would he know HER? And how would he picture
HER if he could? Timeless, unchanged, as SHE would have been? A redhead, for example, sitting at a desk? Just the way, at that very moment, picking a sharpened pencil out of a vase to take notes
on a blank sheet of paper. Pausing, the rubber end of the pencil dipping down to catch in the folds
of her blouse, pulling the fabric to one side & beneath it, a lace bra through which the outline of
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lamp — a cone of enamelled black arched over a heavy base, ivory button poking
up from the middle of it — her features, in the wash of light, released from that
physical perplexity, though still some residual trace, palimpsest, the bifurcated
aura of the afterimage.*
The Voice of Reason
What interrupted Němec’s thoughts was the redhead speaking on the phone —
Indian fruits, she was saying. Acclimatisation… Transmutation of black oats to
rye… As she spoke she turned the end of a pencil in her hair, eyes not seemingly
focused on anything. When she hung up she gave him one of those reassuring
smiles people do when they think you might be worried about something, to put
her left breast’s clearly visible? Entirely against his will, Němec was dragged along by his Id-self’s
yearnings: idly, yet with what untold purpose, this mental doppelgänger began tracing the seam of
her brassier with the rubber end of the pencil, then, letting the pencil drop to the desk with a
thunk, scratched between her breasts with the tips of her fingernails — a scratching that only
agitated its cause further, as if she were beginning to overheat, a type of rash appearing around her
neck in red splotches, throat wet with perspiration — hand now rubbing up & down along her
larynx, then plunging inside her blouse, buttons snapping, rubbing with her hand inside the lace
cup of the brassiere, the movement growing more agitated, tugging the swelling gland out into
plain view, vermillioned aureole oozing a milky sap like chicle, flame hair spread out like the
fronds of an exotic & possibly also dangerous fern, eyes wide, dilated, the green cornea radiant?)
Well, well, well. And wouldn’t the our dear dirtyminded reader like to know what happens next?
Maybe this mutant mumsy of his’ll get so worked up her face starts to melt, revealing the inner
workings of an… an… android? Great gusts of smoke coming off the exposed circuit board, a
weirdly distorted voice redolent of tape-delay & Richard Nixon echoing in the room, saying love =
evol, evol = love… But the whole fantasy need not be so elaborate — concerned, as it’s impossible not to be, with certain quote inner-workings unquote. And what, after all, is this whole textual
phantasmagoria than a type of reverse striptease, presented as the bare fact of itself & daring him
to dress it up with his eyes into some Venus im Pelz, hehe? (The tone’s all wrong, but Němec can’t
help it — rewrite this bit later on, eh, chum. [:])
* (Who was it who said readjustment & adaptation have their cost? The process of synthesis,
which might take moments, eons, whole apocryphal mental reckonings — to preserve, to elevate,
to cancel — subtly, or not so subtly, transformed from blossoming youth to old age, vitality to
putrescence, virginity to lasciviousness, the purity of soul to the corruption of the body led astray,
all the warring dualities that’ve ever summed up the human paradox, as if even the life cycles of
fungus were simply a mirror held up to Man’s inner reckoning. Imagining future intelligent
plantlife arriving from distant Mars colony on some Royal Intergalacto Geographic fact-finding
mission — Triffids with letters after their hyphenated names, bearing specimen jars &
microscopes & flat-headed tweezers — crating off, marked FRAGILE, representatives of every
known national trait (Members of Congress, Business Leaders, Media Magnates) to Martian
botanical institutes, to dissect & make detailed comparison — extrapolating, from the cancerous
colon & chronic gastritis of one, to the debauched phrenology of some other — for the sake of
some quaint evolutionary romanticism?) [:]
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you at ease, saying there was a colleague who might be able to make heads or
tails of it — it referring to the drawings in the Manuscript. Němec tried to make
his face into a picture of being at ease: he was, after all, really quite curious about
what she or this colleague of hers could tell him that he didn’t already know.
The colleague must’ve been in the next office because the partition door opened
almost immediately — framed in it was a tall thin man, grey around the temples,
with a spotted bowtie & bulging Adam’s apple. Zahradník, his name was — he
stooped to shake Němec’s hand —
‘What’s this I hear about mutating vegetables?’
He stooped again to get a look at the drawings —
‘Hoho, very good, very good. Where’d you find this lot, eh?’
Zahradník cast a humorous glance at Němec from under sleepy eyelids,
like a camel with eczema, amused at the thought of spitting in your face if it
could only be bothered to.
‘My dear girl,’ straightening himself to his full height so as to give the
redhead the benefit of his unimpeded condescension, middle finger brushing the
tip of his nose, almost caressing it, ‘haven’t you ever heard of the Voynich,
socalled, Manuscript?’
It seemed the redhead hadn’t, poor thing. It was Němec’s turn to do the
assuring smile, but it was wasted — her eyes were telling Zahradník to go & do
something unmentionable to himself, but the rest of her was saying she’d been
through this countless times before & why fight it?
‘ Yeees. Was a time when every man & his dog & its fleas had a theory
about the Voynich, hoho, Manuscript. Bit old hat now, I s’pose. Young people
have so many more interesting things to talk about…’
Zahradník picked the facsimiles off the desk & shuffled through them —
‘Mmm. Yale University, I do seem to recall.’
Well, so much for the cover story — now it was Němec’s turn to be glared
at: the redhead tossed her pencil on the desk & folded her arms. Němec
shrugged like it was all news to him. This Zahradník had the whole thing down,
of course — had even published an article once, back in the good old days,
chucklechuckle, which he recommended Němec go off & read (if it wouldn’t be
too taxing), in the Proceedings of the Cheskoslovnikian Botanical Historiography
Society, volume LXIX number , as it happened, doubtless available on request
in the, er, Library.
‘But to save you the trouble,’ Zahradník offered, ‘this whole thing’s a lot of
cock&bull. Baloney. Certifiable hoohaa. None of these… drawings describes any
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species of plant known to exist or to ever have existed.* From the scientific
viewpoint, they’re utterly worthless. Better, my young fellow, to enlarge your
mind reading Alice in Wonderland. But, from a bibliophilic point-of-view, who
knows? An expensive curiosity. Hum. How’d you get hold of these, anyway?’
Němec gave him the line about being the dead professor’s assistant.
‘Oh,’ Zahradník said, handing the facsimiles back to the redhead, who
handed them back to Němec. ‘Never heard of him.’
Němec supposed that, under different circumstances, they might’ve had
quite a chat, he & this Zahradník. But the man wouldn’t even let Němec thank
him for his trouble, just waved the oddball in the bowler hat towards the exit &
reminded him to take the right at the end of the corridor. He could hear
Zahradník tut-tutting the redhead as he went…
Babylon
The way out of the labyrinth left him where he’d started, past Ol’ Pete, standing
on the Museum steps blinking in the glare — the Devil still up there on his
billboard grinning down, as if to say a man can have all the light in the world &
still be in the dark. By the clock at the end of the Square it was midday roughly.
A helicopter was circling above the building, towards the river & back again, like
a drone stuck between two coordinates: there must’ve been something going on
— a dozen riot cops where lounging around a couple of green & white vans over
by Petschek Palace, waiting for a signal. The doomsayer in the ferret-skin was
sitting beside his placard on the ground smoking a cigarette, wiling away the last
moments before the apocalypse was to due to begin in the middle of family-hour
viewing, only it didn’t look like it’d be starting any time soon. Kids with red flags
were milling around The Horse, toeing their Doc Martens, bugeyed under black
hoods. Shoppers walking by. Tourists taking photographs. Usual crowd.
Seeing as he was in the general neighbourhood, Němec decided to drop in
on the Bugman & seek direction from the man in person. Accordingly, he
circled around the Museum & schlepped it through the underpass & up behind
the Český Rozhlas building. Being lunchtime a couple of workmen in
cementspattered overalls were making their way down the street, nozzling beer
bottles: it wasn’t the sapling they planted atop the scaffolds that’d stop them
falling on their heads, but angel’s wings, he decided. Miracle that anything in this
* Life, Jimbo, but not as we know it. [:]
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town ever got built at all — foremen on the take or under the table or flogging supplies
by night from the back of a truck to the same con-artists the company bought them from
in the morning…
When Němec rang the bell to Blecha’s mountaintop eerie there was no
answer, so he rode the box elevator the six floors up to the roof & invited
himself inside anyway. The Bugman was already well into his chalupář* routine,
watering his rooftop garden with a bright yellow watering can with the radio at
full-volume, tuned to Classic FM, Tchaikovsky’s in EL booming out over
the rooftops (Napoleon’s route at Borodino, half the Grande Armée & all that)
when Němec materialised on the Old Guy’s terrace. Just working up a thirst, as
he’d say.
This garden was really quite impressive — it stood behind a breezeblock
extension, on the back side of the roof from the terrace, beside the chicken coop,
south-facing (the terrace faced north so you wouldn’t get the sun in your eyes all
day). A chicken was roosting on one of the chimney pots. In the garden there
were tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, carrots, turnips, fennel, radish, onions, a
trellis with cucumbers & a swathe of pumpkin vine spilling over the side of the
roof. In winter Blecha rigged up a greenhouse around the lot of it, with plastic
sheeting — the vent from the basement boilerroom fed straight into it, up a flue
through the middle of the building, keeping it nice & temperate even under ice,
though you’d want to watch your step. Those pumpkins, Němec thought, will be
the death of him one day.
Seeing Němec standing there, Blecha hung up his hose & invited his
visitor to pull over a deckchair —
‘You’re looking dapper today, kiddo. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
Němec gave him the short version of the story, trying not to shout —
Trouble with a redhead — knowing the Bugman’s predilection…
‘ All work and no play… You know the rap.’
‘Yeah. Gives you colon cancer.’
Němec handed him the same envelope he’d shown the redhead…
‘What’s this?’
Blecha turned the music down, peered inside the envelope. He shook the
drawings out & peered some more.
‘What the Old Man was working on when he died. Some kindhearted
soul left it on my doorstep…’
* “Bungalow Bill.” [:]
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‘Sure, but what is it?’
‘Something dreamt-up by an idiot or a nutcase apparently.’
‘That’s what they told you, eh?’
‘Basic idea.’
‘Ah well. Put it down to experience is all I can say. Mind if I add these to
my art collection?’
‘Go ahead. Not much use to me. They’re not even copies, just copies of
copies. Hardly worth the ink.’
‘As noble a thing as the our bureaucratic state apparatus might be
accounted less, hehe. How about we sit down? On second thought,’ he thrust the
envelope back at Němec, ‘dump these wherever you can find a space & get us
both a drink, that’d be a good chap — brandy’s in the fridge.’
It was a warm day, so Němec supposed why not, except that the fridge was
also stuffed with packets of dried spaghetti & tinned goulash, even a bottle of
cooking oil full of air bubbles in suspended animation.
‘You normally keep spaghetti in the fridge, Blecha?’
‘Only way it’ll stay fresh.’
‘Fresh?’
‘Sure, try some if you like.’
‘Maybe I’ll just stick to my drink, but thanks anyhow.’
‘Can never be too careful, what they put in things nowadays.’
‘Put in what things?’
‘Food & stuff.’
‘Right.’
‘Things aren’t fresh the way they used to be.’
‘Eh? What’re you talking about? The word fresh was just Commie
propaganda. There was no such thing.’
‘I mean what they put in cans, packets, like spaghetti. It doesn’t taste right
anymore.’
‘That’s maybe because the old spaghetti was made in Kladno & turned to
glue the minute you boiled it. Now they’ve got real spaghetti, from Italy, that
doesn’t turn to glue when you boil it.’
‘You can say what you like, I’ve seen a thing or two’d open your eyes,
kiddo. You know, back in the gulag, they had a TB ward. There were prisoners
so desperate to get out they’d buy gobs of infected phlegm, dried into these hard
little yellowgreen nuggets, like pistachios. There was a male nurse, used to be a
school teacher in Minsk, would smuggle the stuff from the infirmary & trade it
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to anyone willing to pay — the younger the better. The idea was they’d get
themselves sick & be taken off the work detail, given a warm meal, put in a nice
clean hospital bed — a pipe dream. The infirmary was no better than anywhere
