Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

David studied hard and we were amazed how much we knew. Micka taught him the fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat, I taught him how to run for it, and Bohler taught him the Our Father and gave him his first rosary. It was moving to see the way he gaped at that holy rope. Bohler’s Laotian lady was the first person to truly touch David, and it was such a beautiful experience for him that he spent weeks tagging around after her like a puppy, not realizing it wasn’t some special trait of hers but that all our female friends were more or less capable of the same.

From the moment Micka found David at the train station, spotting his hidden strategic capabilities with that old practitioner’s instinct of his … man, I saw him standin there starin … right into the chrome parts, through all the guards an everything … he was hungry … an I could feel it in the air, he was runnin through combinations, it was intense … it was obvious he was broke, an then he disappeared, an three minutes later he had it … I could tell he had no idea where he was, but without even stoppin to think he took off in the right direction, under the bridge, hand raised, keepin the edge of his left pinky between him an the river, I don’t think he even knew he was doin it … there was just somethin in him sensed what to do, I mean he walked right through the Ghoul’s shadow an didn’t even get scared … an I could see that the kid knew how to get what he wanted, sniffin it out, wanderin through the usual spots, steerin clear of the useless stuff an gettin through the essentials without a scratch … an it was obvious to me that he saw, that he knew what was goin on … so Micka brought him in, and by a tacit but irrevocable decision the young David instantly became a member of the pack, which took care of him from then on.

David constituted a solid clause in the contract, we protected him as long as necessary, and later on he protected us too.

We were a community, and while a strong shock could’ve caused it to crumble, one of the reasons we had it was in order to withstand the shocks. And besides, we actually liked each other. Despite all the jokes, the gags, the booze … the daytime paranoia, when the street turns gray and the buildings at either end suddenly start tilting toward each other … and the nights when you feel the pounding of your heart, like the sound of some distant hammer, the forge … dark love tearing you up, because it’s a serious thing when you couple with some stray bitch amid the chaos and you don’t really know … who’s who … despite all the low blows and fast moves, despite all the spirals of speech, when you hurl the fury of your hangover into your partner’s face, suddenly a bare hand is offered, palm unarmed, your droog’s bare back, exposed for the biting, it seems, but you know that in reality it’s there for you to defend … and that person with his eyes turned the other direction is going to defend you too … because you both want to survive, waiting as long as possible … at first we went everywhere with David and only took him to our establishments. He had to change the way he talked. Look, better yet, don’t even say another word to that girl … cooch … don’t call her that, aright? … just tell her the air pressure’s weird today, Micka lectured the boss, slicing into shapely morsels the animal flesh on his plate, David was still growing, and he scarfed it down like crazy. Yeah these pink earphones’re pretty cool, I told the boss, no seriously, they go with your scarf, aw shit, they just fell in the ditch, don’t worry, I’ll buy you some new ones. No, David, really, Micka lectured our boss, you can’t have Kyusu, I’m serious, the only ones you can use are Toshu, nothin I can do, that’s just the way it is.

David was very quick to grasp what is, what isn’t, and what could be, and which truly mattered at any given moment. He started to think around the corner. Suddenly he was popping up in underpasses and vanishing down hallways, waving to us from the ramparts while we were still dashing toward the moat. He got into the slang so quickly and used the right words so perfectly, it hit me that Czech had exploded along with time.

Then he began to pull away from us, sending out signals on his own and keeping in motion the octopus whose tentacles wound their way into government offices and out among byznysmen and goon squads, whom we also had need of now and then … he began to steer us, which suited us just fine … since all us savvy Praguers with the heroic past of the Sewer were actually a little squeamish of the warts on the tentacles … and then Sharky came in as foreign minister and we expanded.

I saw She-Dog again and David violated our little entente, tripped up on the water mill, lost all fear of anything, it all merged, and he lost his mind.

At the outset, though, good spirits prevailed. We were the Knights of the Secret and we were waiting. We and our assistants worked like robots. It even struck me once that if there was anything human about this transformation, it was something out of Frankenstein.

Sometime at the dawning, in freedom, we decided to make money, to engage somehow in the changed world around us. What I liked most were the coins, the eyes of a wide-ranging organism, their gaze as cool as the distant stars, the cold wind blows over them too … we soon realized money wasn’t the metal we used to buy our beer or red wine and the Northerners their rum, but that money was debts, stamped and unstamped papers, money grows from money, multiplying by division like cells … money is words, friendships, low blows, promises, money reacts magically when the right doorknobs are polished, stacking up with each smile in the right place at the right time … currency is attracted through courtesy to this bank and hostility to that one, and the one with the most money on his hump isn’t the mad dog, or the exotic tattooed dragon from the murderer’s dream, but the clever eel.

Micka wanted cash, I was killing off the rest of my power and feeling the motion and searching for my sister, and David was taking shape, starting to live, he’d been born into freedom. We were cranking up the machine, and though we suspected it might destroy us, death during those tense moments of conveying the treasure out of the cave was just another sparkling secret you could set your own rhythm to. In that single everlasting instant of frenzied time, death is there as your invisible girlfriend; and we also relied on instinct.

If the Monster, with all its tanks and troops and police, hadn’t cut us down back in prehistoric times, what did we have to fear now? Prison … if anything leaked out, if all those cleverly scattered connections were unable to cover it up … would be like a leper colony for kids, once you’d seen the spooks’ ugly mugs from below … prison now: yeah right. Either the laws didn’t exist, or they did but no one was paying enough attention to catch us in a loophole, those paragraphs didn’t apply … I’m still talking about years 1, 2, 3, etc. after the explosion of time … didn’t apply to us because we were fast.

So instead we concluded a little entente among ourselves, because we feared for our souls.

We said no, David told Bohler, no rackets, no Ukrainians, no Yugos, no Russians. Eyetals maybe, Greeks maybe, no Albanians, no Poles, nobody from Prague, no tough gangs, fuck em. You’re racists, Bohler mumbled upward, imploringly, in the direction of his Bog, he’s been bought off, I thought to myself. You’re racists, Bohler the helper pleaded one more time. No we aren’t, but you’re a moron, said David. From time to time Bohler tried to cut his shady business friends in on our ride, but David, now the boss, kept a firm grip on him. Whenever we began to give Bohler a hard time about his great compassion for dubious types, he countered by dropping a few words to the effect that our buildings, a dependable source of revenue, had in fact been obtained through his prayers. After some consideration, I had to admit there was something to this.