Jáchym Topol: City, Sister, Silver

Hey, Sinkule, you notice they’re startin to lock up the passageways?

Yeah an that’s what did it for me. I’ve been sneakin through these things like a rat all my life an now those fuckers’re lockin em up. You’re the only one I’m tellin: I’m goin too. I’m tellin you so you can watch, so I got some backup, so I don’t disappear down some hole.

You’re goin? With the Germans?

Yeah, so what? I mean it’s a farce an you’re an actor, right?

You’re gonna split with the Germans, huh?

Yeah, Šulc already made it. Went yesterday an he’s in there.

Are you guys crazy? I mean this is the end!

Nobody knows that. The Germans’re goin over to the Germans, but our guys aren’t gonna let go that easy. I donno, but I mean we could all be dead. I mean they got the concentration camps ready. Or they might, an everyone knows it. I mean we’re on the list. I mean anyone that does anything’s scared these days. Maybe it’ll turn out okay an we’ll forget it ever happened, but I’m gettin sick an tired. I’m just scared they’ll start shootin. You’re the one that told me about the tanks.

Hey, I’m gonna stick it out here.

Hey, it could easily go Chinese-style.

C’mon, this is Europe!

Yeah, says who?

So you’re goin, huh?

I got it all worked out, me an Majsner’re goin together, I mean half of us here’re German anyway. Nobody’s checkin, an if they do I’ll just say they took my papers away at the border, it’s such a mess in there at the embassy they’re just shovin em on the buses an shippin em out.

So the Bohos’ve finally got what they wanted, Germans crowdin onto buses an settin out into the great unknown, motherfuckers!

Don’t get hysterical. I’ll be with Majsner, so if one of us gets into trouble the other one’ll clear right out, alles is gut, don’t get hysterical, I’ll send you back some chocolate an come ridin in on a white tank. Just keep an eye out that we get in.

So the Christ Child was where it began. We walked back to the square and up to the embassy. They waited a long time. I saw them going in.

Glaser got in too, he’d done a year in jail, got caught under the wires in Šumava after lying buried in the sand all day, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, but he picked the wrong time to crawl out, got hog-tied and left for hours … in a cell full of shit … now he passed through the gate and just for good measure spat on a cop, the Germans picked up on it and started doing it too, after a while the cop looked like he was covered in cum or something, his truncheon hung impotently from his belt, he was scared … Glaser went over to watch … but then I had to stop, he told me later, it was weird all of a sudden, like somethin outta the war, Germans spitting on a Czech, even if he was a Commie mercenary, an I started it … it was weird, my first step in freedom, an instead of breathing it in I spat … there were others who went too, most of them had some German ancestry … but even that idiot Novák got in, got in and then came back out again to go for a beer at U Schnellů, just did it because he liked being able to go back and forth.

And it was then, while that clown was hollering all over the pub, that I realized it had begun … the motion … there was something of a carnival feel to the Germans’ exodus that lingers on to this day, from the moment time exploded, bursting out of that locked-up city, time with its own taste and color that you don’t know about until you taste it, until you’re there inside the color. Exploding time can not only crush you, you can swim in it, or hold it in your hand, like a piece of fabric or a coin. It can be like a gas, or like earth, sometimes you can feel it like wind.

Little White She-Dog and I walked through the streets, sometimes holding hands.

The exodus continued, here and there panic seized the incoming Germans that the Czechs had put a stop to their departure … that there were machine guns on the rooftops … that the Stasi were roaming the streets of Prague along with the StB,* dragging off Germans and Czechs … that the StB was fomenting hatred among the Czech people against the traitors to communism the same way the Gestapo had fomented hatred among the German people against the vermin of the Reich … the Germans, stretching through the streets and across the square, and the Czechs, observing them from windows and balconies, surrounding them down on the sidewalks, silently watching the flight from communism with nowhere to go themselves because this was their only country … all of them well aware that the whole thing could still be stopped, aware of the force that could cut them off from one another, from that silent contact … when the Germans filled the streets they dragged, slow and sluggish, crews of long-haired boys and girls, holding hands, sometimes, like me and She-Dog, only going somewhere else … old ladies with purses, parents with little children clutching teddy bears and dolls … but when the crowd thinned out into smaller groups, alarming reports caught up to them from behind, from all over the city, maybe it was strange vibrations from the Prague train stations, from their homes back there in Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Gera, Zwickau, from border towns and villages … where they were hastily packing their last things, jewelry … food and clothing, and for the last time nervously examining their passports and taking flight, fleeing Big Brother, who seemed to have nodded off for a spell, probably after downing a large bloody nightcap as they picked off another, shot him dead, left him lying there … by the Wall … Die Unbekannten. * But the Monster could awake at any time, refreshed and ready, to dole out punishment … here and there reports spread that it was over, that they were too late, that they were going in vain, into a trap … and the clusters of Germans began to move faster, some even sprinting the last hundred, twenty, ten meters, and then it was triumph, a game … leaving behind in the streets of Mala Strana their heavy bags and suitcases, blankets they’d huddled in at night when the embassy was too full, inflatable pillows, propane-butane tanks, all the things they wouldn’t need in the West of their dreams … forgotten toys lay strewn about the street, a teddy bear with its head twisted off and rubber duckies flung out of the bolshevik pond of the gee-dee-ar onto the cobblestones of Prague, lost in the rush and confusion, no doubt since replaced by that silky-haired slut Barbie … I saw a skillet and a schoolbag, the square was full of cars, a Trabant with a comforter on the roof lay on its side …

stride after stride

pots and pans knocking at their side

children with comforters in wagons ride

flaming crosses up in the sky

days with salty anguish undone

and no one here can tell them why

where to go or what will come,

she said.

Well, I dunno if it’s all that dramatic.

Hanuš Bonn wrote that, said Little White She-Dog. Only these gee-dee-ar porkers aren’t goin into any flaming ovens.

Hey, they’re goin into the unknown, they’re fugitives, just take a look at those two old women holdin each other up.

Yeah, exactly.

What, like she’s some Ilse Koch? An I spose that granddaddy there is Mengele?

I know it’s stupid, said She-Dog. But Germans just piss me off. I was helpin em out at the train station this morning, but still they piss me off. German pisses me off. When my grandpa got back, he weighed 40 kilos. Not for long. Plus Hanuš Bonn was a family friend. We’ve got a copy of Distant Voice* with a dedication from him. Anyway it’s the Communists’ fault for fuckin us up with those movies, I’ve never even talked to a German actually.