Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

Lady Laos sensed the dark wave first. I sat absorbed in daydreams. The train was just passing under the Vltava where an iron gate straddles its path, so if anything went wrong, the tunnels between the stations closed, and the metal plate chopped the car in two, hopefully we’d both be on the same side of the guillotine, together till the water washed over us … I thought to myself, it’s always good to be prepared for every possibility … meanwhile Lady Laos crept off to a seat in back, in the corner, and huddled up, even managing to shrink a little, cats have a knack for that … I look up and see a pair of skinhead stooges garbed in black, obvious hitlers … know why those jerks’re bald? I flashed back to a recent conversation with Micka, cause they’re not men … he’d said … remember the advice Chief Joseph gave General Champollion: Tell your young men to let their hair grow long so it’ll be an honor to kill them … so said the chief of the Nez Percé tribe, that old murderer … till they killed him of course … they’re pussies, they’re scared a losin their scalps … Micka concluded, but unfortunately he wasn’t here right now … he’d’ve seen that these two weren’t scared, they were champin at the bit … from the next car over two more shuffled in … one stalingo was in the car with us already, I’d been too busy daydreaming to notice … he stood up … so five supremacists total, an that’s plenty … they stood there leering at me … one made a grab for Lady Laos’s hair, she knocked his hand away … an here it comes, the whole folklore. I narrowed my eyes, preparing to take all my power and dance my way into the real world, summon up my darkest demon, the one with eyes set in dark slits, gashes of wrath, and howl and twirl in the air like a beast, and bite, and always land on all fours … the hitlers were so much in love with their dark power that only pure insanity could stop them … sometimes … but I can wait, I thought, I’ve got my rosary … and Lady Laos’s moist palm slipped in between my cold clenched fingers. Meanwhile two of the boys in leather jackets casually passed a bottle of Myslivec* back and forth, spluttering with laughter, the third flashed his skull-and-swastika T-shirt, the fourth the chains around his hand and a spare around his waist. The fifth calmly surveyed the alarmed faces on the rest of the passengers, I’d forgotten all about them. How long till the next stop, three, five minutes? Can we make the door? An then what? I ran through tactics like a field marshal. But the graves in the distance looked dark and damp, as victims’ graves tend to be. Fine, I put on my tough-guy face, I got a blade in my pocket too, dickheads. Yeeellooow whooore, the chain guy warbled, the chief, I figured, rocking up and down in his boots. He was still just playing around though, the frenzy hadn’t caught him yet. The people around us stared into their newspapers, at the ceiling, at each other’s shoes. A little girl next to me dropped a tasteless pink-and-yellow webbed toyfil on the floor, looked at it, opened her mouth. “By underground rail, through all Prague we sail, on steps another elderly mother,” a tune buzzed in my head … slaaant-eyed scuuumbaaag, warbled the guy with the chains … “the cat’s aboard too, purring loudly for you,” I lay Lady Laos’s arm around my shoulders so it’d be obvious to everyone, “riding the metro, the underground track, Vanya with his bass and kitty in back,” I hummed the tune to her. Hey, the chain guy leaned toward me, Potok, you old brook,* I could make you bubble so bad you’d pee your pants, dumbshit. Zat so? I replied bravely. Fok yu, the Martian said to my face, even thumb contracts don’t get broken, an if you wanna know more be at Černá’s tonight … Černá’s, I realized he’d said. And I was pretty relieved, for a second I thought they’d found out that I’d stopped tossing scraps to their bro in the yard. The train pulled into the station. Die, human pieces a shit, the Martian bid the other passengers farewell and got off. So did his boys.

Trash, said the man with the little girl next to me, are you from Japan, he asked Lady Laos, r yu jappaneez, ma’am? Yes, I said, she’s looking into buying the City Brewery. I was pretty prompt in my role as interpreter. Good for her, another passenger joined in, we can’t afford it anyway. Can’t afford it, you wanna sell it all to the furriners? someone else chimed in loudly. A wave of satisfaction rippled through the debaters. So we end up slaves, yeah, mister, you can stick it up your you-know-what! Look everyone … if the Castle sells out to the Jews, we’re screwed! What are you, some kina intellectual? … Stupi’ hiyenaz, bluddy fucksy itty-its, said Lady Laos, full of fury, her beautiful Czech tongue so brutal it tugged at my heartstrings. I comfortably stretched out my legs. Lady Laos too. It was behind us.

But not entirely. As we pulled up to our buildings, back in the car with the chauffeur again, I saw Bohler the Great swing the olovrant.

It was almost high noon. We’d spent some time in a certain hotel … and now it looked like we were too late, me and Madame Hoi-Tsu, now slightly raspy from speaking … it didn’t look pretty, the sun, the roar … in shock, our driver slammed on the brakes, then immediately shot right off again … the car jumped, I swear, like a living thing … straight at one of the runts, and we saw the Laotians’ shop gasping its last in the flames … their fans, made with love and fear and inspired by the butterfly’s ineffable charm, fluttered amid the random occlusion of glassy fangs, the remnants of shattered windows, crackling in wreaths of sparks … not to mention the joss sticks and incense, whose fragrances had long since lapsed into the old walls, their perpetual moistness now being licked by an at first glance clearly obscene tongue … and as their red and yellow scorching breath reached up to the second story, there wasn’t a soul around … not one of our dear tenants … the street was empty … and two Laotians held firmly in check by a clamoring pack of hitlers were parrying with boofalo spears, what else, and one of the chrome-domes dropped to the ground with blood coming out his neck … skinhead scum, I almost wet my pants right then, and my legs began to dance on me, but this wasn’t the time for flight … now was a good time to die … this was the fast time of Chief Joseph … and the chauffeur lurched forward, screaming the car to a halt just two centimeters away from one scared-to-death skinhead’s mug … close enough to accommodate those gorilla mitts of his, I was glad the driver had em … and Lady Laos dropped into a crouch, ready to pounce, claws artfully trimmed and subtly adorned with henna … always prepared for loving scratches, I’d naively thought till then … and she let out a shriek, a shriek of power with hatred in it … because one Laotian lay on the ground, samurai sword snapped in two, and Bohler, now Bohler the Great, stood by the wall of the building as it blistered in the heat, and spotting us grinned through the blood on his face, flashing his teeth in that perverted old smile … and as a hitler with a crowbar came at him, he swung that olovrant of his and swatted him across the eyes so hard I hope the last thing that fuck ever saw was the bared teeth of the Lord’s dog … Bohler the Great … I approached the Laosters, and before they recognized me I sustained a minor stab wound over my left collarbone … to this day I wear the scar as a tattoo of that moment … but then I laughed and they knew who I was … I laughed because I knew it all, this was the old time back again, the time of the corpse, the time of the Monster, and I knew that I could handle it … my power was coming back, and good settled in where it always had been, face-to-face with evil again … and there were just two colors, black and white … like back in the body of the Monster, the intoxicating red darkness glowed inside my head, but not like before, when it had come while making love, because the time for that word too had come, only now in a brawl … I danced the attackers a first-rank dance, they were in the first rank and Potok was in top form … and had good shoes on … and in and through my dance, as the first bone snapped, I begged She-Dog to come back to me like my old power had so suddenly now … and because I still loved her, I danced as well as I had back then and only then and once upon a time in the dance of the rose … but instead of dancing the death of a rose, I whipped out my knife and cut a tiny étude of a rose’s life into the pavement, softly … carving out a few dance figures … till the boys were fairly dripping … and then She-Dog swore that she’d come back … that I’d see her … again she put words in my brain … not in some dark cellar this time … but on the blood-soaked pavement, in sunlight … in the fire’s warmth … in freedom, and then I saw the Martian … and his eyes showed neither anger nor fear … like the eyes of the ones the Laosters and I forced back step by step to the sound of their pained screams … he was eager … no bat … no crowbar … no chain, none of those fashionable items, just a long Solingen in his hand, gleaming, solid and grooved, wonder what for? I managed to ask one of the louts before finishing off his face … plainly the Martian didn’t give a damn about any showy bouncer stunts … and then the Laotians started howling, a furious throaty howl, and I felt the rhythmic frenzy of war drums pounding in my brain … I guess their forest spirits answering back … howling, with an instinct inherited from the slave hunters, they could sense the end was near, one way or another, and in fraternal harmony the two of them wanted a chance to kill their own Frenchman, before it was all over, whichever way it turned out … and the parishioner lay on the pavement with two lying underneath him but one standing over him … and Bohler swang his olovrant … but one of the boys snagged the string with his crowbar, and while they were playing tug-of-war a few more came at Bohler from behind, with a certain cautiousness, but still pretty fast … and the Martian left behind the dopes in the front row … and waited … and then I danced a hoof chop and one of the animals dropped and I felt like I’d knocked down a riser, clearing the stage for the Great Director’s latest dramatical tour de force … the Martian stepped through a gap in the bodies, parting in waves to make way for his fury, and She-Dog cried out: Darling! … for a little tenderness I gotta go to the threshold of death? you bitch! … I sent my words back into the darkness to her, and the knife blade sparkled at my chest … and out of the thus far incomprehensibly silent sky came a RRRRAAWWWR, a hole opened up in the ground at the Martian’s feet, chunks of cobblestone flying, and again: ROAAWEE! this time different as Lady Laos sprinted out of the building holding the shotgun at her hip … I felt pretty proud that she’d saved my life first, I’m a little conceited, I admit … just between us actors … RRROWEEE, this time blasting into the air … and the wounded went quickly limping off after the ones that were still whole … and due to the intoxicating feeling of victory, our wounds didn’t even hurt that much, luckily that’s how it tends to be, they say, in those kindsa battles. Only then we went into the building.