Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

When I imagine our little Messiach joltin along on some train right now, Bohler said wistfully, his good, hardworkin carpenter dad an his kind, virtuous mom lookin out for some Egypt-type place to escape the Balkan or Angolan or Kurdish or maybe Cambodian … Herodiad … an the Messiach’s got just one sweater an only one pair of socks … an there isn’t a single country that’ll take the saintly family in, since they’re obviously economic refugees … Bohler let out a savage howl and rushed off to the train station to reward the next trainload of Gypsies from Romania.

But there was one other thing about the scamps that disturbed me, and that was their toys. Those abominable toyfil spiders from space … time flew by so fast in years 1, 2, and 3 … that all of a sudden there were totally different toys … I shook my head in disbelief, and when me and the guys talked it over we reminisced about our own childhood worlds.

I think those dolls and teddy bears littering the ground outside the German Embassy were the last normal make-believe beings before the Atomic Galactic Skeletons burst onto the scene … the Pearl’s toy store windows looked like ads for a Vampire Ball … hideous bloodsoaked grapplers everywhere … Nuclear Asexual Homonucleoids … all kinds of extragalactic wicked witches instead of that good old hag Ježibaba, alias Baba Yaga, the one the Grimms’ Hans and Gretel, or their Czech siblings, Jeník and Mařenka, polished off at the end, giving children’s souls a chance to recover from the horror … me and the guys reminisced about our childhood castles and teepees.

Back in the time before I had sperm or She-Dog, who relieved me of it with childlike innocence, I too played at the world, fighting countless battles with miniature knights and Indians, learning the ways of war to avoid getting lost in the Jungle, or at least not right away … just as my grandpas waged endless battles across the floors, golden soldiers in the castle, pinecones in the village below, tin soldiers everywhere imaginable … and in that world of childhood games, the Cheyennes and the Arapahos won, tearing across the prairie and stealing horses while the villains yowled at the martyr’s stake, and not the other way round, and the white knight struck the black knight down, and not the other way round, and Captain Cormorant and his bro the tiger saved the day instead of rotting up in the rigging, that’s the way it was and not the other way round, and maybe Brutus had a dagger but still he gave old Julius a chance, don’t try to tell me he didn’t … and maybe the real, cruel world turned out to be different, but at least that sweet little kid was clued in to a few of the basic rules … at the age when we’d towed around wooden ducks and dug through coal trucks, playing miner, the scamps were inventing worlds full of all sorts of fascistoid bolshevist Freaks and kapitalist Phantasms … Alien Space Invaders … toyfils and toyfilkins … the un-Christian Japaneez of course produced most of the merchandise … all sorts of small-scale dragons, spitting images of that blind old serpent in his underground lair … Gamera vs. Gaos, Monster X from Outer Space … in the end old outer space was just too scary and there was no use trying to be happy and quiet and wary, like a dolphin gliding through the sea. I mean if you don’t believe you’ve got a chance even in outer space … then what? … a dumb ending with no beginning … just one trapdoor after another … Spiders … El Beso de la Mujer Araña … Thinking Machines and Unthinking Furies … all those toyfils and not a single positively charged hero in the bunch, an accursed band of demented postmodern pests … apart from cute little critters of every race and species, all of our creatures were people at least, in most cases knights and men, whether cowboys, Indians, old carpenters, soldiers, scuba divers, or maybe, at worst, cosmonauts … little girls had princesses or Ribannas* or babies or elegant ladies with changeable wardrobes … all that’s left of that now is that stupid Barbie, the robot clone, may AIDS drag her into its pestilent grave! I cursed as Bohler and I drove out to Toy Central in his hearse.

He turned off the headlights, and then we went a pretty long way on foot, which irked me a little since I’d just put a nice good high on with some weed. He dragged me over to one of the windows and switched on a flashlight. It was hair-raising. Toyfils filled the shelves, and those freaks were alive! They busily communicated among themselves, the Thinking Machines whirling about spewing flames at frightening speed, Draculas jockeying Spiders, Gargoyles of Zador bearing down on the valiant Batman, the Mutant King and the Purple People-Eater chatting away in the corner, and Barbie … yeah, doin the nasty with a team of grapplers … good God! … talk about a wild ride … The most awful part, though, was what the nine-handed Blinking Martians were doing to a few Cheyennes I must’ve somehow overlooked back in my tough childhood … they had them bound and gagged, and in each hand they had a … nah, forget it.

When the freaks spotted us, there was a big commotion. Squirming like worms in a hunk of old cheese, they were back on the shelves in the blink of an eye, safely wrapped in boxes and cellophane.

Now you get it, said Bohler.

Yeah, you mean …

That’s right, he plants em here, the Dark Prince, he’s after the kids, it’s obvious.

An those stupid dads …

They buy em like robots …

I guess the problem is the human tribe’s fallen apart, said Bohler, yep, families aren’t what they used to be. I’d even go so far as to say the reason why moms an pops buy toyfils is cause they hate their offspring, deep down in their souls they’re happy to bring the dark stuff home, only …

the stuff’s power turns against em, I finished Bohler’s thought …

yep, they’re scared a their own offspring, wanna destroy the kids before they grow up … but a lot of kids survive their dark upbringing, an then they go out an start stranglin old codgers …

which explains all the family murders these days, I tossed out …

Raskolnikov, before he killed, had to train his power pretty hard in old Nietzsche’s superman theory … Bohler filled in my knowledge of literature and philosophy …

an nowadays scamps bump their weary old dads off just for a fistful a coins …

yeah, but Raskolnikov at least had that painted slut Sonia, said Bohler, she helped him out …

what? he had a sister? that caught my interest …

nah, said Bohler, just some whore … but she did bring him a Bible … later on … in the slammer … an before, he had that crybaby Marmeladov … an his mom an sis came all the way to mangy Moscow to see him, an he had buddies too …

wait, Bohler, what about that sis?

… yeah, I guess the problem is scamps’re so lonely these days, TV’s all they got, so they fill the hole with toyfils …

wait, Bohler, did Raskolnikov have a sis or not?

… the human community’s fallen apart, just a bunch a tribes fightin in the dark, Bohler mused … allied or opposed based on commercial considerations

… an the scamps’re so all alone, he said, choked with emotion … an they take to the warpath, them against the world, but they donno the rules, they don’t have any contract, they’re either on their own or they belong to bad tribes, pseudotribes, an since they donno about the contract they smother everyone else, an then they turn around an have more forsaken scamps … an they do it all over again … it’s just one great big circle …

wait, Bohler, was Raskolnikov sleepin with Sonia or was he sleepin with that other sis?!

… like atoms in some fucked-up model, wandering aimlessly through space, I bet some of em don’t even know they’re alive, Bohler concluded his discourse.