Jáchym Topol: City, Sister, Silver

Till today.

Yeah. Some cabs bring em here for free, others rip em off like crazy.

Some help em out like you, some break into their cars.

That’s the thing about the human tribe, like we used to say when we were little … She-Dog spread her red lips wide, flicking her tongue … when somethin’s goin on, that’s when people of a tribe find each other. As soon as there’s a threat, people divide.

Till then, though, people can be pretty awful.

Yep, anything goes, right up until there’s somethin at stake.

So what’s at stake now, She-Dog?

I donno, God I guess, or maybe everything.

The thing is, people bring on bad stuff by actin crazy.

You never know, there’s various paths an everyone’s gotta choose for themselves.

That’s our contract.

The contract’s valid.

Sinkule thinks they’re gonna lock everyone up.

The contract’s valid, even if we’re not scared anymore.

Of what, machine guns on the rooftops? Good luck puttin a halt to that.

Halt. It’s wild how many German words we use. I could go for a lager right now, how bout it?

Let’s duck into a building first.

Yeah yeah, said She-Dog, nudging open the door of a place with a lion on a shield, how bout here?

Here it smelled of wood, another place it was a septic tank, we searched out cellars because we longed for that hole in the ground where she had taught me, where for the first time the world had been real, where our bodies had grown up together, where we had come to know every centimeter of each other’s body and our own as they grew larger and coarser … there was also time preserved in those cellars, intact and compacted, in corners and under vaults, in every nook and cranny, even in the spiderwebs that served as the delicate dress for our wedding, our intercourse. Often it was damp with groundwater, sometimes old as time itself, time had a heavy fragrance, it slaked our thirst. I would hold Little White She-Dog on top of me, or she would sit down in an alcove, spreading apart her legs, and in that clench of male and female, in the motion, the screwing, slowly the rhythm would come and in it the red darkness, and in the darkness images. We set the time around us in motion, it swirled and spoke to me. Sometimes She-Dog would whisper into my ear, today she spoke of fear, and as she ran her nails down my sides, shredding my skin, it was like lightning flashing down through the red darkness under my eyelids. I couldn’t hear her voice, it was like the sounds were forming letters, but it was only the idea of them, just her speech echoing in my brain, now it was the speech of fear, fear of losing power, losing it as the city set against it the power of all the others’ fear, the fear of the crowd, it’s sour, I heard She-Dog’s mind echo. We knew that time also flowed up above, but we didn’t have the strength to reach up there anymore … up above the rooftops, where there might be machine guns … and might not … it wasn’t so much them, though, as the nests full of mutant pigeons born with the plague, chemical freaks, plunging to the pavement on their first try at flying, without any soft palm between them and the world, nests full of little birds peeping in terror, and it wasn’t a bird’s cry but the wheeze of a new sort of creature, nobody heard them except maybe Starry Bog, they were born into nothing but terror and hopelessness, and they didn’t know it, but I did, and that was why I couldn’t go that high.

We were also losing power because the reign of cruelty glowed in colors as bright as the sky when the twilight is aflame and filled with the demons that descend on the city at the first stroke of nightfall.

We aged in those twilights, by now every cell in our shared body was a combat veteran … and She-Dog’s power was turning against her because she wasn’t living just for herself anymore, she wanted to go farther … and take me with her. But I was afraid … to be in the world the way she wanted me to, to give it to her, to be inside someone else … I was losing my power by acting, feeling out the world in assorted costumes and characters because I was fearful of direct contact.

We screwed in cellars whenever we could, whenever we got the urge, we became absolute virtuosos at finding places where it was warm and dark and the old time murmured like a living thing. It would’ve meant death if either of us had pushed the other away, or let go. When lions mate, the male grips the nape of the female’s neck so tight with his teeth her neck would snap if she moved, that was the way we held on to each other, with every single pore. I opened my eyes and the red darkness was still there, She-Dog watched me, smiling, she knew that the red darkness came from inside us but also existed out in the world, a part of it, like an animal, say, or a desert, or the shit of the tenants in the flats above our heads. Firmly fastened down to the darkness around the edges, that cloud protected us, sometimes an electric light swang past when they came down for coal … but no one gifted with power had ever seen us, I thought … no one else came here for time.

We were moving in bliss, and then She-Dog’s brain sent me to an old woman shoveling coal into pails, suddenly I heard the clink of shovel on pail, clear as a bell, and then she sent me on a journey through the old woman. As my eyes sank into She-Dog’s, I saw myself as a little bead, then as a microscopic Gulliver, traveling through every fold of skin on the old woman’s shriveled face, feeling every wrinkle, feeling the chill of time in the tunnel of death, where it lay in wait.

In my eyes, fixed on the smiling eyes of She-Dog, I saw my horror as I traveled along the skin of the old woman’s belly, and then she sent me farther, now through time as well, I felt the moist cells of an embryo, and it wasn’t my body anymore, I had become one of the embryo’s tissues, I was inside it, time suddenly turned the other direction, and I was with them as they matured in the woman’s belly and went out into the world in blood and tears, I felt time come to a stop as the pain came, shaping reality, and then She-Dog sent me off again, into the old woman’s innards, and as they opened up I made my way out, and then I was in She-Dog, feeling the pressure build inside my cock. I spurted, hoping to get to the bottom and out, but She-Dog held me firmly … now I could feel the time of life, the old time we searched out in the cellars, beginning to carry us off, sweeping us out of the alcove, we went soaring through the air, She-Dog’s body growing heavy in my embrace, I saw her face sag, her hair turning gray. She had rough skin, I touched her belly, scarred from giving birth, but I won’t show you you! was the sentence she gave me.

Think it started already? said She-Dog. We stepped out of the building, back onto the set. There was a rumbling from the square, as if those permanently parked Trabants were all starting up at once. Could be personnel carriers, I thought. Maybe they sent in a few tanks after all. She-Dog adjusted her skirt.

Look, I’m not gonna wear em, I mean c’mon, they always get wet.

You shoulda left em back there.

Are you nuts, some pervert sorcerer finds em an we’re goners.

She was referring to the fact that I made her wear panties. There was a time when she hadn’t worn them out on our strolls, but then I discovered I preferred to fuck around them, running up the inside of her thigh and wedging my cock beneath the elastic, the feel of the fabric, the resistance, turned me on. Besides, She-Dog really was little, so the distance it added between me and her sex was negligible. Maybe also my member needed to feel something besides her, anything, in those days when I was losing it. Maybe her grip was getting weaker. Or, then again, maybe it was just that I wasn’t so young anymore and my cock demanded rougher treatment.