Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

No shit? They did? Micka said gleefully. Go an find me that priest, Potok!

Most of Bohler’s friends in those days were heathens. He’d kept his old racket from the era prior to the Organization, before we had David. He would drive around the countryside in a big black beat-up delivery truck, then head back to the city with hundreds of liters of stupefying red wine. He called his truck Maria. He li’e tha’ truck li’e coffin an’ wi’e li’e bloo’, like blood, I corrected Lady Laos on the subway home from an office where she’d played the role of Madame Hoi-Tsu, a big-shot Japaneez industrialist.

I was the interpreter and they swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. We didn’t actually want to buy anything; we just wanted to keep the firm in question out of the hands of another outfit that we needed to squelch. Before the officials could think to call the embassy and check on us, we were gone at the speed of the setting sun.

Bohler’s wine shops turned a pretty good profit, though he didn’t need the cash now that he’d become helper. He taught the Laosters to love the red stuff. It was a pleasure to see that crew coming home in the evening from one of their trips. Bohler enthroned at the wheel, all in black, with that happy, perverted smile of his. In the back, six sloshed Laotians, sitting or reclining in various states of bliss, eyes shining joyfully. Through the glass of the old funeral wagon they looked like life-size statues of Buddha … except for the belly … they were agile, nimble fellows … sometimes, when drunk, they sang songs … dark, wild songs, about their dark, wild women, I guess … or the water boofalos … no longer waiting … out in the jungle, there were times it sounded like two bamboo stalks scraping against each other, and the only one who could stand it then was Bohler, with the divine patience he’d learned in seminary … but occasionally it got on his nerves too, so he taught them a few Czech tunes … the one they liked best was “Re’ ke’chief, re’ ke’chief, roun’ an’ roun’ you whi’l, my swee’hear’ is angry, I don’ un’erstan’ the gir’.”

The Laotians managed to sell off all the junk that came in on the lost-and-found-again airplane, we gave it back to them in return for a percentage. Through the Organization they hooked up with Hadraba, a Northerner with a company called Fab Rocker a.s., and soon those bizarre caps and hats and fans and pipes and stimulants were all the rage at the clubs, which Hadraba had his dirty paws all over. Teenage boys flocked to his stores, buying heavy leather jackets and T-shirts with skulls, some even went for the boofalo spears. And girls began carrying fans around, to refresh themselves and their pet lab rats.

Sacred Buddhist incense burned on every dance floor, it was hip and the metal flowed and Bohler just grinned pervertedly. It dawned on me that the reason why he was unleashing those heavy fragrances into the face of his Katholik Bog was in order to spite Him, he had a beef with Him, he’d betrayed Him, or been betrayed by Him, when as a boy in the slammer he’d been raped and kicked, or the other way round, and now Bohler had hardened, waging war on Bog from the doomed position of the lone warrior, like all of us in fact.

And when the Laosters opened the last few boxes, which we’d overlooked, there were masks inside … magnificent, terrifying masks … and Czechs were stunned when they saw those ghastly masks from Laos, yellow and green and red and wooden, boarding the trams in years 1, 2, and 3 … after the explosion of time. They were slaving masks, Bohler’s Laotian lady told me. Not too long ago in her country, she said, warlike tribes had come down from the mountains, slaughtering the French and hunting for slaves, and the cruel demons of the mountains and forests must’ve been laughing now … to know that people in the Pearl were wearing the masks of mountain jungle killers. Even the skillful Javanese who ran the tattoo parlors in Hadraba’s clubs got a little unnerved, and there was nothing for them to do except burn the new, mystical tattoos off the masks and prick them into the skin of people’s arms and thighs and backs … our Laotians rode and sold and piled up the metal, which came to life in their nimble hands, changing into other metal, more metal.

Hadraba tried to take them away from us, and despite their having already put their thumbprints on a contract with him, we persuaded them to stay with us and spun them off a percentage, and when the lady from the third floor finally passed on … we persuaded the ground-floor tenants from another of our buildings that they would be better off in the smaller space upstairs, and we did it in such a way that they were quite willing and happy to squeeze themselves in. The Laotians opened a shop downstairs, we gave them the cash for another plane, this time with Micka and David keeping a sharp eye on the percentage, and the commerce in Asian junk started up anew.

To tell the truth, the tenancy of our buildings did drop off a little, Bohler gave a bit of a dressing-down to the ones that occasionally complained about the noise from his flat … and there were other problems too, for instance when he told them they were forbidden to walk across our lawn … that lawn is sacred, people, the theologian said, and he who does not hold good housing in high regard deserves tough treatment that he may discover and open up the sources of humility within himself … another few relatives and pals of our Laotians arrived unexpectedly on the next plane … and on the next plane … and the next … securing passports for the stowaways took up a lot of my time, Lexa started to bridle, and violated the law of the community, so Micka and I dug up a few minor allegations, some staler, some fresher, and shot him down, because to aid fugitives is an especially righteous deed, particularly when they turn out to be so good at taking care of themselves … and at bringing in proceeds … and the Laosters just kept selling and selling, and some of them lived in our buildings too … and our slightly disgustingly racist tenants claimed they were scared of them when they went to fetch water from the well … it’s true that around that time a few of our tenants’ children went missing, but we just assumed they’d taken up with the scamp packs … Bohler shuttled back and forth settling disputes between the tenants and the Laotians, a few of whom he’d already persuaded to be baptized. Things came to a head when the Laosters converted the drying room into a pub and the baby carriage room into a Buddhist temple, which Bohler oddly enough permitted … he was getting a little worried though, and one day at our briefing he said the well had begun to lose water again and there was something weird about it. None of us cared, since we preferred the Fiery stuff anyway, but we gave Bohler approval to make Vasil the superintendent. Vasil was a young Ukrainian he’d brought in from South Station to our greasy pots and cruel freedom.

In those rare moments between business and pleasure, we would lounge around our private domains, take naps in Bohler’s flat, play backgammon with the Laosters in their dive … and the new time, in the years 1, 2, 3 … etc., kept us warm and cozy, and a few times, spinning around abruptly, I glimpsed it, even touched it … and several of the Laotian women gave birth … we threw enormous parties, which as a precaution against openly racist sentiments we required all our tenants to attend and bring lavish gifts for the happy mothers … and as time went by, it was sweet to see some of the children growing beautiful flaxen hair, genuine manes … some of the men congratulated me … I just smiled … maybe I forgot to mention that my buddies … well, most of them were Balkan-Ugro-Finnish-backwoods Romany types, Bohler had a few traits that were positively negroid … Micka was missing a few teeth from birth, and the dark-skinned David, like most mountain men, had some difficulty walking on floors … all of us were a little damaged from various acid storms and accidents, but I think I had a few genes that were actually European … as the M.D. eventually confirmed … from the olden days of the Lučan Wars,* the genes of my foreforemother, who stuck by foreforefather Čech* when he chose to settle down here … I’ve got fair hair, totally typically Slavic … and it came as no surprise when my friends Cepková and Elsa the Lion said they had a hunch a few of the Laotian men would happily return the favor, I wasn’t at all opposed, but I left it up to the girls, after all it was freedom …