Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

They used to call me Ilya, all the nuns, all our foster-mothers back in Siřem, because as a baby I would call out iya, iya to people, and since this is Czech for ‘donkey’, they called me Ilya.

I would call out whenever the faces of the nuns at the Home from Home began to break into my dreams of Shadowland.

Shadowland was my earliest childhood. I would sometimes find myself going there. Before the nuns arrived, I lived in the kitchen.

I matured rapidly in the Home from Home’s prayer-filled, god-fearing atmosphere, and spoke Czech well. Monkeyface didn’t speak at all.

The nuns called me Ilya long before their nerves began to shatter.

When I was very little they would even call me ‘Ilya, our long-suffering little donkey’. They liked the way I fussed over my baby brother and ‘wouldn’t have a word said against him’, as they put it.

After the kitchen, Monkeyface and I grew up at the Home from Home, because our parents didn’t give a damn, not a shit, not one sodding shit about us. That’s quite common here.

Apparently, our parents left us on a bus when they fled the country.

I’m not surprised they didn’t want Monkeyface, but I’ve no idea why they didn’t want to keep me.

The children at the Home from Home had all sorts of ideas about their real parents.

The only certain fact about them was that they had disappeared.

In Siřem, at the boys’ home (as sisters Leontina, Alberta, Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores and Emiliana called it), or ‘this colony of louts’ (as Commander Vyžlata called it), we all lived lumped together, boys of every imaginable nationality, including some Czechs, such as Dýha or Karel.

To keep us free from scabies and lice the nuns would scrub us with coal-tar soap.

The tar water, grey with the grime of us boys, splashed all over the black gowns and white caps of the sisters. The suds, whipped up by the washing process and constantly in motion, looked like the delicate lace trim on Sister Dolores’s underwear, for often it was she who bent over us with the scrubbing brush. She would scrub us so vigorously that her gown was soaked right through. It was hot from the steam of the wash-tub and tiny beads of sweat would break out on Sister Dolores’s forehead, then drip into our tub. Sometimes she found the heat so oppressive that she would loosen her gown and bare her shoulders. We used to sit in the tub in twos or threes. Sister Dolores didn’t know that we could see her lace. She didn’t know that inside her lace we could see her breasts. The nuns were not allowed to wear lace, just like we were not allowed to smoke.

The nuns had lots and lots of coal-tar soap. Sister Alberta had crates of it piled up in her closet. The coal-tar soapsuds killed our head lice.

We boys had a plentiful supply of lice. In return for a handful of lice — caught and killed or squeezed out of our bitten skin — we would be given a piece of fudge. It melted in our mouths with all the sweetness of the world. That sweetness stayed for a while, even after the fudge had slipped down.

We collected our dead lice in matchboxes. Sometimes we joined forces and put them in the same box. Then we would share them out. Sister Alberta would hack at the fudge on the kitchen table with the sharpest of the bread knives — chop, chop!

Sister Alberta was a nun like all the others, although she wasn’t quite like the others. I’m pretty sure she loved both the Virgin and Czechia.

Even the smallest longshirts who had caught just one louse would get a lick of fudge. Some tried sucking up to us, offering us flies, spiders, midges, anything they could grab, anything that was too slow to get away. Sometimes we let them have a lick.

We used to steal full matchboxes from each other. Anyone caught thieving would get their knuckles rapped with a ruler. It hurt, but it was a mild punishment.

If anyone lied that they hadn’t stolen a matchbox, they had to gargle soapy tar-water. It made great bubbles, but it was better not to get caught.

We had to gargle tar for other lies as well. It burnt and it got worse as the bubbles travelled down your throat or up your nose. Even a tiny bubble grew into a gigantic, scratchy bubble that hurt a lot. Even just thinking of telling a lie made you feel that burning sensation in your throat. Everyone wondered whether the pain was worth it.

In the dining room-cum-classroom of the Home from Home there was a painting of Jesus. When I was tiny, I thought it was the long-haired St Czech and his virgin mother. Then I thought about it more and decided that it was a portrait of my parents, but that was clearly nonsense. The idea had come to me during the Lord’s Prayer! It was nonsense.

That rubbish stuck in my head, though, because sisters Leontina, Alberta, Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores and Emiliana taught us all that we were the children of God. We weren’t, of course, and the nuns paid dearly for lying to us. We weren’t the children of God. We were vermin, bastards, psychopaths, sons-of-bitches and foreign scum. Later, Jesus would be replaced by Private Fedotkin from Stalin’s Flying Brigade.

I was fine. Once we got to the Home from Home, I grew up fast. I learned to talk and get about.

Me and Monkeyface, we were from the same litter.

I used to find the idea terrible, but the truth is we had the same parents. That was one of the reasons why the nuns kept on stressing that the world was a vale of thorns and that life was full of tears. You can say that again!

Monkeyface would lie around in his cot and — if the walking exercises that sisters Leontina and Alberta, or perhaps Eulalia and Zdislava, and sometimes Dolores and Emiliana did with him bore fruit — he would shuffle through the corridors of the home, provided the nuns held him up. Best of all Monkeyface liked being with Hanka. Me too.

But most of the time Monkeyface just lay around.

Sometimes I lay down with him. He would immediately start squealing with joy, smiling all over his face. I would laugh back at him, as if into a mirror. But he never spoke.

Hanka was allowed to come and visit me and Monkeyface. Her hair bounced as she skipped up and down the stairs of the home. The nuns were glad to see her looking after Monkeyface. They had their hands full with the healthy boys. Hanka’s mother, Mrs Kropek, did the cleaning at the Home from Home. She had Hanka to help out. Later, Commander Vyžlata put a stop to this. Hanka’s hair smelt nice, she didn’t smell of the Home from Home. She and I grew close. Cuddling in bed, how could it be otherwise? Hanka wasn’t at all put off by Monkeyface. I sometimes wondered whether maybe she had brothers like him to look after at home as well. I fell in love with her, but it came to nothing.

Siřem was our home. There were two floors full of boys: the snotty-nosed ‘longshirts’ on one floor, and the older boys in shorts, we called them ‘shortpants’, on the other. What we required was a firm hand, plenty of food and warmth, and to learn Czech, or so the six nuns used to say.

We were rabble and needed a rod of iron to make strong men of us, Commander Vyžlata used to say.

We came from all over the place.

Whenever a new boy arrived, especially to join the longshirts, the older ones would look him over and weigh him up. A darkie stuck with the darkies, a Chink with the Chinks. Czechs would join Dýha, and when they brought someone in who was from nowhere and couldn’t speak Czech, but just some gibberish, he’d sit in a corner for a while and blub, until the nuns took him in hand and taught him Czech and he became a child of God and started to get clothes donated by Czech children, and went to church with us, ate with us, stole lice and grew in size.