Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

I wrote and drank and the dreams came and went, my wife’s anxiety weighed on me from afar, and that made my tongue … somewhere out there, my wife was playing computer games all night long … I was in bed too … but I was freezing. I worried about getting sick, but I was so sick already I didn’t even know it. My head blew up like a balloon.

The three of us would meet by the phone and try to get through to the caretaker, but he’d either say something incomprehensible or just hang up. We thought about phoning home … I’ll call up the hordes, said the Hungarian … don’t do it, Attila, the singer said … you know how that turned out … we didn’t want to tell the folks back home … what it was like here … we were ashamed we’d fallen into a trap, they all thought we were livin it up in some castle, they envied us … an it was obvious to us now what was goin on … the old Kulchur flimflam: Need to launder some cash? Just get yourself some artist type, give a little to him, a little somewhere else, it’s all in the interest of the common good, an the wheel keeps spinnin an the tanker sails through the taxes, flag hoisted high … Kulchur figured we’d scoop up the cash, which we got the first day, an bolt … like everyone else there did … that’s why the floors, that’s why the windows, that’s why the heating. An that carnival of ghouls in town. It was obvious why the artists from the desirable states used the cottages only in summer. We were idiots. Idiots. East bloc idiots. Toss in a bone! the singer croaked. An a pig an some dynamite, the young authors said. We went our separate ways to create.

And the days went by. And several days, O brothers and chiefs, I was touched by death. I knew I couldn’t look over my left shoulder. It was there and it had time. I fought for my time and had visions. I lay in bed, only getting up to go to the bathroom, and sometimes not even then. The days rolled over me, sometimes fast, others extremely slow, and I forgot myself. But often I wrote. There were times it didn’t work. My tongue slithered up from the pages and coiled around my neck. I was losing strength and that’s what I wrote about. But death was out to get me. I would’ve put on my paint, leapt on my horse, and gone to meet death like a man, but I didn’t have the strength. And besides, there was no horse, I made that up, or we would’ve devoured it ages ago. And after one distraught message from my wife, it struck me she was no doubt out there somewhere this very moment full of tenderness savagely fucking … striding along, hopeful of dark and dirty intercourse, of several in succession, or maybe coldbloodedly coupling. I had no charged objects there, nothing to help. My nerves were inflamed and my eyes kept tearing. All I could do was write, so that as the letters added up I’d know I was alive. My wife sent me anxious inquiries, and stayed home alone, playing computer games all night long. At least I knew she always prayed afterwards. I wrote:

My wife plays computer games all night long

She’s alone

and I want to die

then she prays

and nothing else came to me, but I didn’t put a period. I opened another bottle and wrote something different. And what I wrote, O hunters and chieftains, was a book, I wrote it in nothing but my own words, I was in a trap so I didn’t give a damn if that book was hygienic … what came out of me, sisters and girlfriends, was blather, babel, and babylon, what it was, dear good she-demons and cuddly soothsayers, was a sort of lesser pornography with a humanist spin, and Pragocentric to boot, what it was, kind potential she-reader and nosy Nelly, was cheap trade, on the trashy side, but in my own slave tongue … so I’d no longer be a slave … but it was so powerful I coulda not even been … I hacked my tongue, and stroked it, and it gave it right back, my tongue was alive! And it’s a secret and open tongue. And the days went by, and there were tough days and tougher days, and they mixed with the night, which could now set in at any time, because it was the night of my mind. And I began to seek out those black holes, something happened … I didn’t want to write anymore … I was scared … but there was no stopping it, the book began to live its own life, feeding on me, and as it grew it squeezed me out of my room into the freezing cold, where even my breath couldn’t warm me up. And I couldn’t destroy the book either, because by then its tongue had devoured so much of me it was stronger, someone else would have to destroy it. But there wasn’t anyone there.

I dragged myself outside one day to find no sign of my pseudodroog or — droogina. I was the last one. I said: Why me? And the answer came back: Why not? I was on the threshold, I was on my way … and the snow fell like it was nothing. Why wouldn’t it? I thought, and went on writing my tongue, no longer a gift but a curse. Sometimes I told myself, as long as I’m here … just then Jícha raised his head from the typewriter and cried: But I’m still here! Jesus an Mary! And feeling a prick of dread he burrowed into his comforters and quick began writing again … so if anyone back in the little mother says anything about a castle … I’ll kick their ass on the spot! And things began to happen … letters assaulted me, sentences wept … and all of a sudden I hear peep! peep! One of the letters was peeping at me. No big deal, a pretty trivial matter, the kind of thing that belongs in the Gwinness Book of Records. But then the letter sputtered and spat. It wouldn’t stop acting up. I told it, knock it off an get back in line, move it! Took a look up close, eyes still watering … it was the ř! The little hook slightly quivering … an I was happy again for a while because I realized it was my treasure, I mean nobody else has that letter but Czechs, it’s our national property, a rare an sacred gem! Anyone who doesn’t work with f is a furriner an a chauvinist! An their writing is nonsense … Then I heard footsteps, it was the Hungarian and the Bulgarian, they’d just gone off to try and rustle up a little something but were forced to turn back by the snowdrifts. Out in the woods they’d found one of the Romanians almost frozen solid, rattling on about highrise hotels … giant Ducks … Pepsi light and Pepsi heavy … gargantuan billboard people … he’d been living at some train station till all at once it hit him and he started trying to find his way back to the colony … he was a musician, but he never did find those pipes of his, the Hungarian and I gave him a few words of advice: dynamite, bone, sow … Langwidge! said the Bulgarian, and before he started writing we all sat down together and munched a few beechnuts he’d stolen from some tame wild pigs in the woods … he’d been surprised they didn’t put up a fight. And the rest of the artists began coming back too … the Poles with sacks full of goods … the other Hungarians with goulash … the Vietnamese with old fish … the Russian, now cured, with caviar … and I sat and wrote. And then it came to me and I typed:

My wife plays computer games all night long

she’s alone

I want to die

then she prays

and I’m still living

I pecked the period and out came the sun. My eyes stopped watering. It was obvious. Unmistakable. I opened the window and shouted to the others. The Bulgarian was tanning herself, singing some mountain cantilena. The Kanaks were waving scalps in the air, wasn’t much hair on em. The Hungarians and the Slovaks had occupied the sandbox and were building a dam. The Lithuanians were playing chess and checkers with the Russians, the Serbs were hugging the Croats, the Chinese were playing water polo with the Vietnamese, the Armenian was doing a handstand and the Azeri a cartwheel, that’s what it looked like, a regular spring of nations. I stood proudly in the window, hair aflutter, I had a book! I screamed something at the Slovak, because I was the best, it was obvious, in a word … Czech! An I told that band of nationalist chauvinists, too. Which was funny, since you helmsmen and smugglers know very well what a loyal Czech I am, hah. Well, eventually it broke down into various scuffles an frictions. Skirmishes. A Russian and a Ukrainian locked themselves in the barn. But the pitchfork’d been stolen by some Bosnian ages ago. The Slovak swiped my clothespins, so I took an axe to bed with me. The Kazakhs brashly complained to the management about the food. Wanted more of those fuzzy dirty dumplings of theirs, bosnians, they call em.