Jáchym Topol: City, Sister, Silver

It was buses. Dozens of buses lined up in rows, full of Germans. The people inside them were different from the herd in front of the embassy. I could make out individual faces, each with its own expression, not just faces in a crowd anymore. They were somewhere else now, they were in their own time, and it wasn’t sour, I lost interest in them.

Hey, said She-Dog, I spotted Šulc, so he made it!

You knew?

Yeah, he came over to my place all freaked out askin me to teach him how to say “They took my papers” in Deutsch. Then he had a faint planned.

So how do you say it?

I donno. I thought he was kiddin, musta had him repeat Ich bin der ausländer* like a hundred times.

As the buses drove off, one after the next, bystanders moved into the square. From adjacent streets, out of shops and pubs, filling the empty space left behind. Emerging from their homes to join the silent demonstration, abandoning the archways where they had stood, as if hidden, for hours now. Watching the Germans’ departure. The ones in the last buses no longer looked like fugitives, foreigners trapped in a foreign city, they were smiling, some even seemed to enjoy it, waving to the crowd. A hand reached out one of the bus windows holding a can of Coke, a German no longer squatting on the cold cobblestones, handing down from on high the shiny greeting of capitalism. All of a sudden three boys were hopping up and down on the spot, jostling for position, the biggest one snagged the can, stuck it under his jacket, and bolted. The two who came away empty-handed wandered along the buses until someone tossed them a pack of gum, then stood there divvying it up until the driver of one of the buses honked, wrenching them out of their trance. In the quiet of that historical moment it sounded out of place, like a fart during Mass. The Germans in the last bus smiled happily and wearily, some flashing the V-sign, now they looked like sightseers. And the Czechs in the streets, the ones blocking the route, the ones who took a few steps after the last departing bus, furtively filling in the space from which you could clear the iron hurdle with a turn of the key in the ignition, not that you’d want to, maybe not … but the possibility was there … to disappear, suddenly the border was just a few steps over the cobblestones, nothing out of the ordinary from an everyday pedestrian point of view … maybe they felt the wings of time, maybe now time was like an angel, or a dragon, here and there its feathers grazing a person or two in the crowd, knocking someone’s hat off maybe, shattering a window somewhere.

Down through the streets from the Castle, the cops closed in again.

This time they weren’t marching with the routine stride of extras in some movie about the Crusades; they were sprinting. I couldn’t make out their faces behind the plexiglas, but from the way they were moving it was obvious they were eager. Wild pigs get a whiff of the watering hole, a jungle scene came to me and I danced it out with my feet, grabbing hold of Little White She-Dog, but she was already crouching down, her sense of smell too was better than her sight. The first row of cops had their truncheons out. No more foreigners now, no more cameras to sully the dictatorship’s reputation. We don’t go throwin our dirty laundry around for everyone to see, an that includes your soiled shorts, you son of a bitch, an your stinky socks, it’s time to clean house, whenever the Monster’s in the mood.

Let’s go, I said, more forcefully than usual.

Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the crowd began to disperse, nobody bothered waiting for a head-on collision, where a threatening mass had stood before suddenly there were clusters, and then just individuals, and all at once everything was the same as before, here and there a pensioner passing by, a college student, a worker in his blue jumpsuit, a lady with a baby carriage, people in their old roles, pub doors creaking familiarly like at the beginning of the world. Once again trams rattled to a stop on the square. Suddenly Jícha materialized.

Ciao, Bára, ciao, Potok! You guys saw it! Pinch me if I’m dreamin!

It was a perfect time loop, said She-Dog. My love’s an expert when it comes to that stuff.

What a protest! That was great! Those cops were scared stiff, Jícha said gleefully.

Oh definitely, beside themselves with fear, said She-Dog.

Did you guys know Sinkule booked? An Glaser too, course he did time. I’m surprised bout the rest of em, though.

What’re you up to tonight? I asked out of curiosity.

Nothin, he said.

Come see the show, we can get you in, I said condescendingly.

What? You guys’re performing?

Uh-huh.

You know Jirmut’s back in jail, an so’s Pečorka. An they locked up those Slovaks. When they cracked down on Solidarity, every theater in Poland went on strike! An here?

Huh, never thought a that, said Bára.

I mean somebody’s gotta start here too, said Jícha.

That got my attention … start … that was a time thing. Half-assed activists like this guy, though …

But … I said.

Maybe you guys could be the ones, said Jícha.

But … I said.

We’re just a little troupe, said Bára.

We just wanna bring joy to the people, I said.

Jícha stood tight-lipped. He’s gonna remember this, I thought.

We’re just a little troupe of perverts, She-Dog came to the rescue.

No thanks, I got somethin tonight, aright ciao, said Jícha.

Aright ciao, we said.

Let’s go for a coffee, Bára, I’m feelin kina battered an beat.

Not me. You’re gettin old.

We’re gettin old as monkeys. Maybe when the Communists bite the dust, we’ll get capitalism.

Could be, maybe, said Bára, they’re both just words.

Everything’ll be private, belong to somebody, I mused, even the trams, even that cup of coffee that I’m gonna have by myself.

An the owners’ll lock up their buildings.

Oh yeah, I said, hate to have that happen.

Forget it, when things get normal here, we’re gonna make so much cash we won’t even care.

You think?

I donno. I’m goin.

How bout that drink?

I’d better be goin.

You’re goin? Yeah? Aright then, later.

Aright, later.

But I set out after her, watching the street, and when we passed the place with the sign, it seemed suited, I spoke again. We were there. And you, She-Dog, on your way, made a move, arched your back, turned the corner, that’s how I’ll put it: she turned the corner and I guess kept going, I guess, or maybe she did soar off into time, maybe she used that trick with power she taught me once at some boring party: you stick your fingers in a socket, reversing the current with your power, an go with it, seeing the streaks in your brain, the colorful streaks of electricity as they travel through the building, an you go, through every outlet, every wall, and when you stop the current with your fingers the streaks come circling back, weaving together, an you go, racing in the closed circuit as long as your breath does not give out. As long as you don’t want it to. It’s a colorful game. I’m going to say it, let it be so: you grabbed me in the cellar and held on tight … and maybe you were playing now too, with a socket, say, with air, a stone, some male, somebody’s you met, because we put on the show without you that night and I didn’t see you for years, if I’m to refer to time in conventional terms.

I missed her during the performance because it was my piece, a piece I’d written for her, or for someone else from the community. I played the part of a human rose, budding, blossoming, flowering, withering, and wilting, all in an hour. The best part of the show was a string of short scenes, witty skits, got the audience rolling in the aisles usually, I went on acting off to the side … slowly croaking … here and there we mixed in some porno as our part in the struggle against the regime, having the gardener tickle the elves, for instance … a child walking across the stage now and then to make it obvious the emperor was naked … I played the rose and tried to get into its time, into its life … seeing as I had to kill it in the end … Little White She-Dog played a swarm of flies, voracious aphids, we had some pretty good scuffles up on stage, her biting me full of holes, I was the rose, not too manly a role, I admit, and by the time I shed my petals, there wasn’t much light left on me. And since She-Dog wasn’t there that night, Cepková, a blonde, had to fill in for her, and as she was sawing off my thorns I saw She-Dog’s face beneath her makeup, sending me a message, I heard her brain from inside the rose’s red darkness and I knew she wanted to free me of fear, but I didn’t want to be free of it because without fear I couldn’t act … without fear I could do anything except create … because the only way I can make up human characters and play around with them is if I know the wicked old horror of life and the horror of its ending … I chose fear … so She-Dog cast me out of the community, cut me off from herself … she promised to send me a sister, though … to fulfill my future … and two green spots like magnets flared in Cepková’s face, like a blaze of heat … but then the fire died out and the female features beneath the makeup settled back into clown face as called for in the script, and She-Dog was gone … my tears flowed onto the rose … the people in the front row saw it and thought, Potok the dancer, stoned again … but I didn’t give a shit … after all, even that old sadist Nero needed a sizable cast of extras for his poem about the fire … and my colleague pranced around me, acting out scissors and a greedy hand and a cloudburst with falling branches, all things with a negative sign in the life of a rose, and then she brought my drooping time to a stop, playing water and a sunbeam … the audience went wild … and She-Dog wasn’t there … so after consulting with the stage manager, I acted out the watering of the rose, inserting a tube in my mouth and coiling it around my body and into a demijohn of red wine, I drank liters of it that night as I thought about my girlfriend, because it was obvious to me if she hadn’t come it had to be serious, and then it was dark, Firewater-dark, with shards in my head. And in the morning I looked at my colleague Cepková, a blonde in my bed, that’s pretty sick, I said to myself, and tried to wake her so she’d take off. I thought maybe She-Dog had kept her promise and sent me my sister, so soon? But when I touched those blonde tresses, it turned my stomach.