Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

BUT I WASN’T SURPRISED. ODD JOBS. I WAIT. I SEE … THE CURVE OF HER NECK.

Černá wasn’t there. At the entrance my heart was pounding and I had to lean on the banister, the rest of the floors I sprinted up, and burst in the door … and she wasn’t there, she couldn’t be. Everything was as she’d left it. As if nothing had happened since. I remembered our last night together. Never did forget it.

There were candle stumps and dust all over. Her clothes and mine. I went through the flat. A bottle still chilling in the bathtub, refrigerator full. I threw out the spoiled stuff, wiped off the dust and swept away the cobwebs. Calmly and quite methodically tidied up. Fine, I’ll start over. With everything. I’ll wait and ask questions. And if she doesn’t turn up, I’ll hit the road. Just as soon as it gets warmer. I was lured to her desk, maybe she had some papers in there. But I didn’t dare yet. That was her territory. I could turn to the authorities. I mean there’s no way a girl could just vanish, is there? In a small country like this? Oh yeah, there’s a way, you know there is. I sat on the bed. I was scared to lie down. I might start howling and tear up the pillows.

And that little piece of metal was gone. The one I swiped that proved to me the whole story was true. It wasn’t there. But I wasn’t surprised.

Černá’s didn’t exist anymore. Galactic had different owners. I realized I knew a lot of people only by their nicknames. I hunted around for Micka. Couldn’t find him in the phone book. At the Dóm they told me he showed up from time to time. With his partners. But where he was or what he was up to, they couldn’t say. Or didn’t want to. They didn’t know me. I’d sit around the Dóm, nursing my drink, hadn’t found much money back at the attic. Everything here was going fast, and the loot I’d saved up in the Organization era wasn’t valid anymore. I took it as a sign.

You been gone long … said some of my friends … yeah, an far, I laughed. And I admit I spent a night or two with Cepková … out of loneliness I guess. Hers and mine. But. I couldn’t make love. I was sick a long time, I told her … an you probly still are, that’s okay … I think we were both secretly studying our wrinkles and guessing at the deep scars in each other, yeah, more that than sex … didn’t see each other much after that, and when we did just said hello … slowly I sank back into the old acquaintances and habits and talk … nobody’d heard about Černá, Spider an Hadraba’re in Germany, got some clubs goin there … the bartender grinned, but bartenders never know nothin … I began asking around for work and eating out of cans, it was a shock after the fare at the convent, but I was used to extremes from the train station … I didn’t really believe Černá was living with someone else out there, and if so, that’s fine too, as you like, my dear, you’re free … but I’ve gotta see you an it’s gonna happen, you’ve got to come to the little mother, you she-wolf … where’re you traipsing around, girl, which way does your path lead … I sent out signals to her, and she was in my dreams.

And one day … one of those smiley city days when the autumn sun so casually bestows its gilding as generously on any rat snout as on the faraway deep forests’ ancient trails … having bottomed out on cash, I strode into some new establishment to make an inquiry … there were more and more tavernas every day … I walked the city, put myself on the job market … I got up early, when it seems like the air is still fresh, and the people are too, everything just getting under way, like how many times before … striding through the underpasses and taking it to the sidewalks and crossing on green, I eyed Prague the Pearl like a hawk, and I studied the rotten vegetables, how their leaves’d gracefully float to the ground while the salesman impatiently stuffed em into some held-out plastic bag … and I saw clouds of dust, mysterious maps changing in the air, and windows full of things I don’t need, but someone might … and I noticed the wires running out of the walls, and I liked the movement of the wires woven into the bicycle that just rode by, and the traffic lights with their three-stanza composition, the pedestrians as the refrain … I shook my healed head in wonder, striking out with the footsoldiers, like when the king sends out his army into the labyrinth of the streets, but watch out which king, and watch out, your labyrinth’s mirrored … I gawked at colorful jackets in bookstore windows, and some of the books sent out a signal, I went after them … I’d begun to read again … since my honey wasn’t around … and besides, amid the city noise, the slalom, the rattling trams, and the chattering waterfall of the crowd when you go fast and the voices merge … books at least seemed polite … saying: Here we are, take us or leave us, guess you’ll be leavin us, huh? Yep, books’re polite, don’t bark an pounce like those fucked-up Martian machine melodies, alla those computerized hits churned out with impunity by the brutal robot narcomafia to fool you along the way … a book you’ve got to fold open and weigh for yourself if you want it, that’s your business.

Supposedly there were times when people had to cut each page open as they read. Not only did they read with a knife in hand, which is always a great advantage, you never know who’s out there creepin around disguised as a mail carrier … but they had to at least dance with their wrist bones, move a little at least, and surely when it was gripping, their breathing speeded up, an impatient curse or two sounded out, and so their words merged with the book’s … by the kiosks I spotted a fella, the one I’d come to see, at Galactic they’d told me he worked here and might have a job for me.

Hey-hey, Kája! What’re you doin here … in the dust, like a nut … ciao …

Potok, lookit you, you look like a ghost, I work here, head honcho! Where you been all this time … what do you want?

I’m lookin for work. Lucky coincidence meetin you. Got anything?

Heh, Potok … can you lift that crate?

It lay in back of the vegetable kiosks, thing would’ve been a hard job for four guys.

What’re you pullin on me, Honcho, this is like out of a book … forgot the author though …

What’s an educated guy like you want peasant work for?

Rather have somethin physical, but somethin away from people.

I took it thinkin it was short-term too, but, man, I stayed with it! It’s different nowadays. You’re a hired hand, you’re a hired hand. Boiler rooms’re different too. Don’t you know anyone?

I donno. I know you. To tell the truth I’m broke. I was gone a long time an got behind on rent … I was amazed at how practical and to the point I was … growin up, yep, happens to most.

An Karel … know this one … I don’t need work, I need cash?

Yeah, I know it … that’s me … I’ll take you to the warehouse. You’ve done stock before, but this is different. You’re gonna be unloadin fruit. Give this piece a paper to Burda. An don’t let that scumbag forget about the gloves! Remind him, gloves.

Thanks, I owe you.

Yeah, but you can bet I won’t be lookin for work with you.

I wouldn’t take you anyway.

So I got a job. Socialized myself. It numbed me.

But then … I saw the Romanian Gypsy ladies with their kids again … the beggars, and it hit me, aha, He sends em here, I get it now … hey Honcho, I said one day on our noontime break, I figured out the theory of relativity, here’s how it works, listen: He sends em here, an there’s times it seems to em like they’re in Paradise, what with the packages an the leftovers, yeah, this is the Vest, an they can get by on a couple crowns, but the real reason they’re here is for the sake of the native inhabitants, that’s the theory … What? said Honcho, but it began to dawn on him too … notice, Honcho, nowadays it’s fashionable to say: I don’t have time, it makes people feel tremendously important that they don’t have time, that they’re workin, makes em feel almost American, sittin in those meetings a theirs tryin to solve the unsolvable an not lookin around anymore … they wanna look like the people from the TV series, pissed-off professionals, success, dude, satellites, fast cars, five blondes, etc., get it? Yeah, whenever I’m in a pub I ask: D’you read War and Peace an Gilgamesh yet, or how bout The Man Without Qualities, or Welzl the Eskimo,* you can get through it in a night … yeah, you oughta see the look they get on their faces, like: That’s thick! I don’t have time for that … these days! Isn’t there a movie of it? Like the Bible? Yep, when someone tells me, all dignified and lofty, or with a drained look: I don’t have time, I hear the rattle of the spit an shudder for the fate of humanity … they wanna be like machines, like slaves hitched to the clock, an the only result is an increase in the number of zombie varieties … an what they see on the evening news, those lousy wretches gettin mangled under the wheel of the world, Monday the Kurds, Tuesday the Somanians, Wednesday the Cambodians, Thursday the Halases, Friday the Rennets, Saturday the Ethiopians, Sunday the Bosnians, an the other days’re full of it too, an sometimes it’s all at once, so the dear viewers end up not believing it anymore … that there’s people without plastic, without grub, without teeth, it’s not real anymore … an so crafty Bog sent these raggedy Gypsy women with their deadened urchins out into the world, into the metropolises, so people could see … poverty an how it dulls you, get it? It’s a new tribe, a secret an very important community, they’re everywhere, you know … I saw on TV, the Brits’re tremendously surprised to find they’re even in London, how did those barefoot brownies make it across La Manche without any pounds or ID … not like Venclovský,* that’s for sure … they marveled in Parliament … the witches flew there, straight from His palm, to provoke. An every disgusted glance at them is also the question, why me? Why not you? An every time they give their breast to one of their frozen children, it’s like they’re tellin that pedestrian dashing past with his tie aflutter: Just wait, maybe tomorrow you’ll be the one to fall, you never know, fella, heh … you know?