The Combinations, page 88
knedlo-zelo. Got to look after yourself, kiddo. A man’s body’s his temple, mnnnnnn?
And yesterday, what’d he done yesterday?
He cast around for indications & found the usual mess. Then, feeling
through his pockets, came up with a photograph. It was the one the caretaker
had given him weeks if not months before — the Prof’s doppelgänger seated at a
chessboard on the Barrandov Terraces — folded in among bits of crumpled
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xerox paper. He smoothed out the corners & stared at it in the halflight. The
peculiarity of that younger Hájek’s expression. The good & the bad bishops. The
attaché case on the empty chair. People in the background. Not camera shy in
those days, was he, the Ol’ Geist’s corporeal personage? No doubt the world
looked somewhat different in nineteenfourtywhenever. He wondered. Just how
different. At this late stage, anything could be a clue. Now if he’d been Major
Zeman he’d’ve already staked out the scene & worked backwards by deduction,
intuition, random strokes of aided & abetted genius. But he wasn’t the Zee-man.
Not by a long shot. Still. The day hadn’t turned entirely bad yet. There was
always a chance something might come of it.
Buffing his shoes with a scrap of newsprint — crossword section, A small
purple turban-like flower, eight letters* — & re-pocketing the Prof’s likeness,
Němec left the semi-scaffolded house on Jánský Vršek heading towards
Smíchov. A cold rheumatoid wind blew across the wet hillside. Half an hour
later he was standing in front of the Red Army tank on Arbes Square that Diva
Černobýlová had reputedly painted flamingo-pink before the old Commies had
wriggled out of the woodwork & painted it green again. Then on, past Victor
Hugo Street, the fountain with gypsy kids even in that weather splashing in it
stripped to their underwear, down Kirovova — Jesus Lives! sprayed on a wall,
Elvis Lives! Lennon Lives! — old women in headscarves on a bench, old men in
their cardigans & fat younger men in string vests — across Plzeňská, where the
eyesore of Moskevská Station stood out like a chancre. At its rear, an expanse of
cracked bitumen, zinc hoardings & meshed glass smeared with mud & coaldust
& random numbers on signs like some leftover Soviet disorientation
programme.
Played Arseways
The stop for Bus was beside a shelter carpeted with smashed glass, cigarette
butts, chewing gum & dried spit. A torn DISKO DUCK poster was plastered
across the mesh at one end, over an ad for D.I.Y. silicon. A pair of fake tits
protruded from a weatherfaded gash in a cartoon disco ball. Two drunks had
plonked down on the seat, shoulder to shoulder, & were sawing the air in
tuberculous fits & starts. He had no idea how long he’d be stuck waiting there,
the timetable was buried under a dozen layers of spray enamel, red black pink
* nogatraM [:]
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green. There was a kiosk selling refried klobása, booze & porno mags by the
road. Němec bought a half-pint of Slivovice & stood there drinking it, trying to
stave off the unrelenting ache, the aimlessness.
When it finally arrived, the bus nearly ran him off the platform. Its route
took it south along the river, past the brewery & the train station, to the
interchange at Strakonická, where Němec was advised to wait for the . He
downed half the bottle under the dripping concrete overhang. By the time the
came into view he’d mastered the ache, but the aimlessness would have to
take care of itself. The only seat was right at the back over the engine, he had to
clench his teeth so they wouldn’t get shaken out every time the driver changed
gears. The air had the rubbery disinfectant smell of lurking contagions cut with
spent diesel. Half the passengers must’ve been outpatients or their wives, making
the weekly trip to the Poliklinika on the hill…
‘Poor Martin, they told him he’ll have to have his prostate taken out.’
‘Ooh, you don’t say?’
‘Size of a watermelon, they reckon. No wonder he was all clogged up.’
‘Dear me.’
‘Couldn’t barely move for weeks. Thought he was about to burst. Shplock!
You know, like a great big soggy balloon.’
‘Yick!’
‘Lying there in bed all day & wouldn’t even touch his beer. Well, look on
the bright side, I tells him. At least now yer hair won’t fall out!’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did ’n’ all.’
‘But your old man wears one of them toupee thingamajigs?’
‘That’s what I mean — the poor dear won’t need to now.’
The belched its way up to the Barrandov Plateau, which took its
name from an overgrown outcrop of Palaeozoic sediment above the Moldau,
festooned with trilobite, graptolite, coprolite, brachiopod & mollusc — before
the Havel Bros raised up Little Hollywood there at the start of the ’s,
christened in honour of that celebrated scavenger of fossilitic rocks, every nerdy
-year-old’s hero, Joachim Barrande. By the time the bus got there, the sky was
entirely lost behind clouds. Němec disembarked in the drizzle at the entrance to
the film lots. Across the traffic circle stood the crumbling façade of a restaurant,
blocked-out like the grimestreaked totem of a Functionalism that didn’t. What
the age had demanded & received in abundance. Die neue Sachlichkeit.
To the left of the rusting blue studio gates stood a construction site.
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Converted shipping containers were stacked along the roadside to quarter the
non-union labour bussed-in, in all likelihood, from points as far east as the
Schwarzesmeer. They made an incongruous sight behind a group of earnest-
looking kids playing with a camera that’d been mounted on tracks, a yellow bin-
bag wrapped around it. Němec half-expected goons in period costumes to start
appearing out of the scenery — some Goebbels lookalike, maybe, to drive out
the gates in a black Merc convertible, little swastikas pinned to the headlamps.
But no. A girl in a flapping green anorak ran back & forth with a lightmeter
while someone else mumbled into a walkie-talkie. A couple of lighting rigs
steamed in the wet air. A few more kids huddled in the back of a van with its
side door open, peering at video monitors. Němec took in the set-up. Were they
supposed to be in a film or making one? It looked real enough. But where’d you
draw the line? He didn’t know. He didn’t, as a matter or fact, care.
Penny Ante
The Havel Bros knew a business proposition when they saw one. After the War,
when the Reds took a scalpel to the Aryan Disease & to the Havels’ joint stock
company, “Uncle” Miloš did what the v failed to do & wired the Barrandov
sound stages with gelignite. Blew thirty-odd workers to bits, but the Studios
stayed standing. Miloš skipped town for the BRD*, subsequent — the family’s
wartime profits stashed in the bottom of a suitcase. Nephew Václav, who’d never
been able to stomach the idea that a man might be the product of his
circumstances, was obliged to earn his own pocketmoney stacking beer kegs in
the cellar of the Trutnov Brewery, with a gang of gypsies. He drove a black Merc
to the job every day, reckoned the gypsies thought he was a great bloke.* Lída
Baarová reckoned Goebbels was a great bloke. Meanwhile the Studios churned
out riches-to-rags regime fairytales at a rate of just under one-a-week. The local
smartarses called the grey crumbling workhorse the Goodyworks Factory. All
through the hedonistic decades of stagnation they kept the disinherited hope
alive, that endless packs of Marlboro & cell-time could make a simpering silver
spoon into a working man’s Philosopher Prince. As Blecha might’ve said, A man
should at least own his sense of entitlement.
But such things, alas, belonged to another time, another world.
* The West Fritzes. [:]
* “Ať žije Havel! Ale jinde.” [:]
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Němec reached into his jacket for the Prof’s photograph. A droplet of rain
fell on the corner of the picture, above the empty chair — or not empty, because
an attaché case was lying on it. The Prof had a gaunt look about him, staring at
the camera with an intensity of unease, the terrace behind with tables &
amputated bits of arms & legs, bodies without heads, shadows adrift from
whatever cast them. Němec brushed away the raindrop & turned the picture
over. . What was the Prof doing on the Barrandov Terraces in ? He
glanced at the Studio entrance, the film crew, then back at the photograph. Even
a figment, he thought, has to be real somewhere along the line. But where to
look? He walked over to the sentry box & asked where the Terraces were.
‘Yer fifty years too late,’ the old guy in the washed-out rent-a-cop uniform
said, jerking a thumb past the construction site. ‘Follow the road all the way
round through Havelville. You hit the motorway, you’ve missed it. Ain’t much
to miss, neither.’
‘Nice day for it,’ Němec eyed the weather.
‘Take it from me,’ the guard yawned, ‘they’re all the same.’
Over by the construction site the kids were wheeling the camera along
the tracks while someone in a duffelcoat held a microphone aloft on a boom. In
front of the camera, a redhead in a short fur jacket & black miniskirt was coming
along the street holding an umbrella. Němec’s eyes followed the sound of her
boots. A couple of grinning labourers in cloth caps leaned over a scaffold &
whistled. It might’ve passed for unscripted realism, except the redhead turned &
said something back at them. Ashen light illuminated the scaffold from behind,
where some sort of building ought to’ve been. The whole thing was draped in
sailcloth with a giant slogan printed on it:
T E S L A
T H E N E W S P I R I T
I S T H E S P I R I T O F C O N S T R U C T I O N
It was impossible to tell if it was meant to be part of a film or some kind of
advertisement. But an advertisement for what? Someone called out cut! & the
kids all huddled around the van to see how the shot came out on the monitors.
Němec slouched towards them, pulling his collar up.
‘Hey, fella,’ the guard called after him. ‘Yer wastin’ yer time. Ain’t nothin’
you gonna find down there, ’cept a lotta rich trash all gone to shit. Same ol’,
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same ol’. Shoulda bulldozed the lot when they had the chance. Now it’s all that
rest-my-tution crap, they gotta wait for it to fall down…’
Well some people, Němec thought, just bring out those little rays of
sunshine.
‘Hey fella,’ the guard called out again, ‘you don’t look like one a them!’
Beyond the construction site, a long looping crescent wound around the
hillside past dozens of silent-film-era mansions stacked on top of each other like
headstones in a Zhiddish cemetery. Němec stumbled along it in the drizzle,
there was no sidewalk to speak of, only driveways & not a car in sight. Nada.
The road seemed to go on through the mist forever, like the proverbial Via
Dolorosa. Behind him he could hear the film kids trying for another take. If it
was shit weather they were after, it must’ve saved them a packet on special
effects.
The guard was right, Havelville was as abject as dead money can get.
What’d the Prof have to do with any of this? Fifty years ago, between the War &
Exile. In , Grigory Alexandrov was shooting Vesna on the main sound
stage. Bronstein was wiping the floor with the Golem City chess brains (he’d
have to check if Faktor’d been one of them — unlikely as it seemed, but then
everything about the man was). What else? Karl Hermann Frank, v-
Obergruppenführer (former), was being hanged in front of a sell-out audience at
Pankrác Prison. And the Barrandov Terraces, like the Studios & everything else,
were about to be nationalised for the good of the people. One moment, every
social climber in Golem City was angling to be spotted there, the next the
place’d disappeared from the picture. Bulldozed by the Commies, maybe, in
revenge for [insert political crime here], or torched by anti-Commie saboteurs,
or paved-over for a bypass, or zapped up to space by aliens with an eye for
realestate. Somehow Němec wasn’t convinced either way. He wanted to see the
place with his own eyes, see what image formed or failed to, whatever was left of
its leaving, whatever trace of its disappearance, whatever warp in the fabric of
Realism’s realism.
Cul-de-sac
The road, as he might’ve expected, went nowhere. Turning hard left, it came
dead up against the motorway embankment, becoming a gravel track. To the
right, Němec could just make out the lights of the traffic across the river, cut by
vertical lines of glass office blocks like pillars propping up a heavy ceiling of mist.
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Below, the river resembled a grey scar, fading into drizzle.
A wire fence was all there was to indicate a perimeter. Behind it, for the
most part invisible, were the thickly overgrown ruins of a manmade proscenium-
onto-nothing littered with stageprops, a general arrangement of masses &
volumes, a teetering pagoda here, a toppling lamppost there, brickwork knitted
into the brown foliage like the latticed combs of Mayan temples. Had Němec
not been looking for it, he’d never’ve found it. He pushed through a gap in the
branches. All of a sudden, the space opened out. The sweep of the terraces was
plain to see, arcing along the clifftop to a gutted white-brick tower with
boarded-up windows from which all the glass had long ago been bludgeoned. It
stood there on its precipice like a blinded lighthouse against the mist.
Picking his way among the debris, Němec came to the ledge & peered
down over the railing at the shadowed escarpment. His eyes followed the
southward sweep of the river, housing projects rising grey against the grey
horizon, Stalin-baroque. Behind him, barely a hundred metres away, traffic
surged along the motorway. It was impossible to get a sense of it all as it’d been
in the Prof’s picture, but still he tried to imagine it that way: the immaculate
stepped array of the terraces, café tables with starched tablecloths, waiters in
white coats, women in cloche hats. And would madame prefer radish with her
caviar, or asparagus? He held the photograph up against the scene as it appeared
now, fifty years on. The Prof’s ghost gazed uncertainly out of it. Was it the place
that’d disappeared from the picture, or the man, or both?
Perhaps this was what it would’ve been like had someone taken a snapshot
of Cortés on the steps of Tenochtitlan, the afternoon before la noche triste, when
the ancient world went up in flames & buried itself beneath its own rubble. And
there he was, Němec of the latterday nonentities, standing in a kind of hereafter
with all that dead History lying, in a manner of speaking, at his feet. Ah, the
eternal amphitheatre… He peered straight down over the edge. Strangely the
distance had no effect on him, he could barely see ten feet past the ledge in any
case. By rights the debris ought’ve been piled even higher. The iron railing
groaned against his trouser leg. Tempting fate was he? He stepped back. Then
taking aim, he booted a loose stone into the abyss. Waited. Listened. One-
thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand, nothing. Well so much for that.
And could the Prof have foreseen any of this? The doom impending in a
botched chess game? Or an unfortunate photograph? What did it know that its
subject didn’t? Ghosts flittering through archaeological gloom. But it was just a
picture, it had no reason to mean anything. Němec being Němec, he still tried to
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make sense of the scenery against the fading light. If he was right, the person
holding the camera must’ve been standing somewhere over there, midway up the
terrace, between the ledge & the tower & slightly to the left. He climbed the
rubble & positioned himself in the spot, took a few corrective steps sideways,
back. Yes. It would’ve been there.
But that was all. A perspective. A different light. He could just make out a
couple of boathouses on the other side of the river. They would’ve been right
behind where the Prof’d been sitting. He made a viewfinder of opposed thumb
& forefinger & the scenery contracted into it. And as he did so, the mist closed
over the frame & the darkness at his back seemed to rear up. Something moved.
