Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

We held frequent byznys meetings and sociable briefings, sitting around telling stories and fables and mythical parables … mixing narrative techniques and shaking our heads in amazement, spitting tobacco … jingling our silver ornaments … trading experiences … various silver things were worn in those days … talismans, charms, each crew had its stars and crosses and menorahs and labyrinths … animals … dogs, snakes, and dragons are good … my dragon was green, but I hid him in my skin, I’d had him tattooed on … by putting him on my chest I thought he’d help me find my sister … various tribes, most of them actually pseudotribes, but they had protective colors too … the Vonts’ color was yellow … that struck me as unsafe … clans, groups, defensive alliances … the Cellar People, spider worshipers, they put on plays … BKS, also believers … the Ginga Disciples, they took their power from trees … the Machines … the Window People, devotees of cyberspace … the Northerners … the People of the Tower and the People of the Castle … various clubs, gangs, and bands … it wasn’t too wise, back in those days of today, to be on your own … the other reason for wearing silver was that in those fast times it was best to know right away who you were dealing with and who belonged to who, there were multitudes of muddled sects from all over the place … I myself wore one important silver thing that helped me out a lot later on at the Dump … my mom hung it around my neck one day as I was going out … said something like: Hope to see you soon. Dear son! And it hasn’t happened yet, and due to certain circumstances, whether favorable or unfavorable I hesitate to judge, now it never will … my most powerful piece of silver was a medallion of the Black Madonna, the Blessed Virgin of Czestochowa, the one with the spear slash on her cheek, the one that weeps eternal … it was a real old thing, some great-great-great of mine’d hiked all the way to Czestochowa from his home in Lithuania for her, made a pilgrimage … I was real fond of that Black Madonna, she had great power, I wore her under my byznys suits and all of my disguises, even slept with her on … some people cleaned and polished their silver, but I let mine live its own life, and that ancient artifact, that piece of jewelry, turned black …

Various stuff was worn … Bohler for instance had an eagle, eagles see a lot … yep, he’s a seer, said Bohler … tends to be seen up high, an besides he’s fast, an admit it! he looks good too … he’s medieval Indian an isn’t afraid, an besides, there’s not many eagles left, are there? Yeah, cool, Cassock, your eagle’s cool, seriously, way, we all jingled our silver … and maybe that was also the reason we got along with the Laosters so well, they had all kinds of wild pig tusks and shark teeth … they were also believers … being accustomed to the relatively homogeneous population of Bohemia, we confused them with each other at first, this is Tino, said Bohler, well that’s not his real name, but we wouldn’t know how to pronounce it, it’s too tough for us, an that one with the shark tooth’s a great hunter, Lady Laos told me …

It didn’t take long for the Laosters to spread all over the city, all over the country in fact, because the planes just kept on flying … Micka began to forge plans for a small private airport, a definite potential was shaping up to dump Asian junk on a few other countries that had shed the yoke of communism and were in dire need of fresh goods for their nonfunctional markets … our ground floors and cellars turned into a Laotian initiation camp … and bastard Bohemia’s hardened arteries got hit with a fresh dose of Asia.

With their immaculately forged papers, the Laotians were just getting going, the only ones that still lived with us were the original six-member crew, plus a few wives and kids now as well. And then Vasil showed his stuff, teaching the Laosters how to make samurai swords … he’d picked it up in Kiev from the Vietnamese … with the help of various tricks in the metal shop, tricks with the temperature of air and metal, soaking them in water and burying them in sand at the right point in an appropriate place, soon Vasil and the Laotians were making antique samurai swords. Production soared as Japanese, American, German, and other tourists began bringing home not only imitation Czech glass, rubbery Czech dumplings, and shooting-gallery-prize Czech Švejks but gleaming Ukrainian-Vietnamese-Laotian-Czech samurai swords … Bohler authorized the construction of a forge in one of the courtyards, and Micka went shopping for a few thousand dull rusty surplus bolshevik officers’ sabers to use as raw material. Vasil’s value climbed, and if not for his howling Chernobyl nightmares we probably could’ve arranged for him to move in normally instead of sleeping on a shaggy cloth down in the cellar.

It was a bit surprising when, at one of our parties, Vasil began to speak Czech … a twisted Czech traveling a roundabout route through the roughly two centuries since his family had left for the land with the dark rich soil called chernozem … entirely without warning and out of nowhere and in a blink it seized him, right under the picture of the Mother of God: kottige, kow, feeldz, gorse, plou, fyer, sojers, he spewed out what was evidently his family history in a nutshell, and collapsed in an ecstatic fit … Bohler daubed his temples with acid and Vasil came to and began to tell his story, and he has yet to finish to this day, because the Great Mother’s people got him when she decided that bad good old Prague was a good place for her and the People of the Faith … I’m getting ahead of myself. But it was chiefly his good fortune that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil and his family stumbled into our path. Because he gave Vasil a blood transfusion that cured his epilepsy, for the short remainder of his life, anyway.

It was like this: one day our little group was playing and singing in Micka’s mobile on our way back home from the Rock when we saw the Doctor’s family pack. A dappled old nag towed the caravan, and walking at its side, into our life, was a slightly battered example of our generation, a scarf with a red cross wrapped around his neck. Various children, big and little, peered out the caravan windows. It was the Miraculous Doctor Hradil with his sons, daughters, and wife. Just to be safe, we pulled over and jumped out. Seeing this, the Doctor got nervous and reached for a small silver scalpel hanging around his neck. But then he noticed Bohler’s cassock, our crosses and amulets and altogether friendly armaments and accoutrements, and gave us a slight nod. We stood leaning into the hill a little, waiting to see what power he had, and he spoke: All right, all right, okay, if anyone should ever need an examination … a minor operation or two … or even something more … all it takes is a few dumb moves at some inappropriate moment.

It was obvious right from the start that this was our man in medicine. One word led to another, and around the fire that night we learned that thanks to restitution, in those magical, adventurous Klondike yesteryears of today, the Doctor had been able to reclaim his predecessors’ good old autopsy lab, located, coincidentally, right in the capital’s center. The Miraculous Doctor Hradil worked mainly with blood, and after dinner, once the littlest children had gone to sleep, he showed us some of his cupping glasses, and he was also the proud inventor of a new medicinal trick: the laying on of people to leeches and vice versa. It works, fellas, like a charm, he wound up his lecture, rubbing out with a metal-tipped boot the graphs he’d drawn in the sand. We learned that the U.S., especially the army, had shown interest in his discovery, and that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil had lived some time in Canada, illegally, on their tab. He and some of his sons had spent a few years as hostages of the Mohawks, and in fact it was the old medicine men there that had given him the basic ingredients for Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir. He was from the old school. Taught the Mohawk shamans Latin. Understood aeronautics even. I see I can trust you fellas, but do you trust me, Priest? said the Doctor, clutching a flask in his calloused palm. Yeah sure, said Bohler politely, and the Doctor stabbed him in the face with his scalpel, slicing open his cheek. Then, quieting our crazed war whoops with a reassuring nod, he splashed Bohler’s face with a jellyfishish liquid. The priest gasped for breath, sorta tingles, right? the Doctor said proudly. Yeah. The wound was practically gone. All you’ll have left is a minor manly scar, actually I concocted it for those little rascals a mine, they’re always pretendin to be Mohawks an slashin each other up cause they think scars’re cool. A couple of his growing sons smirked. What else can it do? Micka asked. I could sense his financial timepiece ticking into action. David nodded approvingly: it was obvious. You name it, said Hradil, M.D. The Elixir can fix anything, but there’s still a few kinks in it. Sometimes it acts organically, sometimes inorganically, sometimes as an acid, sometimes as a base. Depends on the patient. Bohler blanched. We soon realized one important thing: Doctor Hradil was indisputably an excellent physician, but human life was of absolutely no interest to him. He preferred gutting corpses. The autopsy lab was his now and he was looking forward to hanging up health care. Micka took the Doctor over behind the trailer, and they sat down with a calculator on the grass. Occasionally we overheard: School in winter: 19 pairs of shoes. Or: per week: 7 kilos of flour and 6 pots of boiled beef. Or: we’re Katholiks, no big deal, the Lord’ll provide, man … Micka’s astutely persuasive voice. And then: Breakfast: 8 kilos of molasses, large melons, jelly doughnuts … it went on like that almost all night. Meanwhile we traded experiences with the Doctor’s growing sons, ever so slightly, properly, and over our shoulders sneaking peeks at his growing daughters. Doctor Hradil’s wife was the first normal human the Medicine Man had tested the Elixir on, and she was so kind and beautiful, and moved with such fawnish grace, we kept confusing her with her sixteen-year-old daughters. But we had Jesu in our hearts, and we hoped the Miraculous Doctor Hradil didn’t confuse them too. The next morning we learned that Doctor Hradil had been persuaded.