Father Bohler prays for you, I said, for alla you that’ve taken on the responsibility. If it helps any.
Prayers always help.
Hey Lexa, ever get the feelin that all you guys that went into politics feel guilty about not havin a normal life?
Hey Potok, ever think maybe you guys that aren’t involved in politics feel guilty about leavin it to somebody else?
Well now, that’s a serious argument.
So let’s drop it. What do you need? The only time old friends ever come around here is when they need a favor.
I need asylum for six Laotians.
Got any IDs?
I laid the six exotic passports featuring a picture of an elephant, hammer and sickle circling above its tall forehead, on his desk, near the paperweight.
Come by tomorrow. An wanna know when we’ll stop feelin guilty?
When?
When we all get used to it. Some to the fact that they got power, an some to the fact that they don’t.
But I mean it must take a heavy toll on you, it must be a problem, I mean power over people, that’s heavy stuff.
Power’s only a problem for those that don’t have it.
Aha.
Yep.
Aright, ciao, an thanks.
Bye now.
Hey Lexa, I turned around in the doorway.
Yeah?
She’s a real beauty.
Don’t I know it.
I went around babbling and acting, David sat in his leather armchair, pondering and combining and sending out signals and directing the tentacles, and Micka was everywhere, handling the paperwork.
We were the Organization, and Micka worked magic with so many papers at once that we were all things in all shapes, and if a black wind blew our way we could roll right up and cease to exist.
The occasional explanations he gave us went in one ear and out the other, so eventually he gave up. This was in years 1, 2, 3, etc., when he started to speak in the bewitching tongue of economics … and sometimes he would talk to himself: So you’ll sail through the new tax, we’re a cooperative, only bound by the old contract, which is registered with Rycký, but he’s okay, he’s one of ours … look, s.r.o.’s Czech for gMBh, but it’s the same as politics, right is left an left is wrong … take cartels, we’re talkin 19th century, man … as for the gadgets, anybody that’s not with us we persuade, an anybody we can’t persuade we flatten … What’s this? They got us hangin on the hangars still, so we deduct the rent, that gives us … movable debts at Commercial an Early Bird, hah hah … an invoice here, an invoice there, just keep it comin’s all I care … hey, Micka, I told him, I don’t like this, Community Organization, Manufacturing Cooperative, sounds like shit, how bout a Syndicate? Can the romance, you hack, wait’ll after the elections. If those half-assed eggheads from SOP pick up a decent percentage in the fourth an the sixth an good old Bfevnov, we’ll get it goin there, that’ll be Švejcar an Špála … hey how bout this Rybka guy, do we know him? … He was in the slammer with Křenek in ’79, David mumbled as if hypnotized. An Bohler knows Křenek from the Expressway, they worked on the chain gang there in ’82, he fished from his memory bank.
David carried the whole matrix around in his magical head, into which in regular sessions we deposited every thread: former classmates, pseudodroogs from the Sewer, coworkers from boiler rooms and warehouses, ugly mugs from loony bins, tennis courts, and prisons, two-bit artists from cellars, attics, and the Academy, ess-tee-bee agents, Charter 77* signatories, journalists and train engineers, officials, friends, enemies, men and mice, gals, guys, and dogs, civil servants and their secretaries, Poles, Ruthenians, Jews, and Kanaks, every face we ever glimpsed through the windows of our fast-moving vehicle, model 1, 2, 3, etc. … after the explosion … but also from long before … contacts, connections, situations … who did time with who, who slept with who, who hated who, all the gossip, facts, and information, when dusted off and combined by David, formed the silver net that was to snag the golden fish with platinum eyes and scales of precious stone, the financier’s dream, the Al Capone Cooperative’s nightmare.
No shit? They did? Micka said gleefully. Go an find me that priest, Potok!
Most of Bohler’s friends in those days were heathens. He’d kept his old racket from the era prior to the Organization, before we had David. He would drive around the countryside in a big black beat-up delivery truck, then head back to the city with hundreds of liters of stupefying red wine. He called his truck Maria. He li’e tha’ truck li’e coffin an’ wi’e li’e bloo’, like blood, I corrected Lady Laos on the subway home from an office where she’d played the role of Madame Hoi-Tsu, a big-shot Japaneez industrialist.
I was the interpreter and they swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. We didn’t actually want to buy anything; we just wanted to keep the firm in question out of the hands of another outfit that we needed to squelch. Before the officials could think to call the embassy and check on us, we were gone at the speed of the setting sun.
Bohler’s wine shops turned a pretty good profit, though he didn’t need the cash now that he’d become helper. He taught the Laosters to love the red stuff. It was a pleasure to see that crew coming home in the evening from one of their trips. Bohler enthroned at the wheel, all in black, with that happy, perverted smile of his. In the back, six sloshed Laotians, sitting or reclining in various states of bliss, eyes shining joyfully. Through the glass of the old funeral wagon they looked like life-size statues of Buddha … except for the belly … they were agile, nimble fellows … sometimes, when drunk, they sang songs … dark, wild songs, about their dark, wild women, I guess … or the water boofalos … no longer waiting … out in the jungle, there were times it sounded like two bamboo stalks scraping against each other, and the only one who could stand it then was Bohler, with the divine patience he’d learned in seminary … but occasionally it got on his nerves too, so he taught them a few Czech tunes … the one they liked best was “Re’ ke’chief, re’ ke’chief, roun’ an’ roun’ you whi’l, my swee’hear’ is angry, I don’ un’erstan’ the gir’.”
The Laotians managed to sell off all the junk that came in on the lost-and-found-again airplane, we gave it back to them in return for a percentage. Through the Organization they hooked up with Hadraba, a Northerner with a company called Fab Rocker a.s., and soon those bizarre caps and hats and fans and pipes and stimulants were all the rage at the clubs, which Hadraba had his dirty paws all over. Teenage boys flocked to his stores, buying heavy leather jackets and T-shirts with skulls, some even went for the boofalo spears. And girls began carrying fans around, to refresh themselves and their pet lab rats.
Sacred Buddhist incense burned on every dance floor, it was hip and the metal flowed and Bohler just grinned pervertedly. It dawned on me that the reason why he was unleashing those heavy fragrances into the face of his Katholik Bog was in order to spite Him, he had a beef with Him, he’d betrayed Him, or been betrayed by Him, when as a boy in the slammer he’d been raped and kicked, or the other way round, and now Bohler had hardened, waging war on Bog from the doomed position of the lone warrior, like all of us in fact.
And when the Laosters opened the last few boxes, which we’d overlooked, there were masks inside … magnificent, terrifying masks … and Czechs were stunned when they saw those ghastly masks from Laos, yellow and green and red and wooden, boarding the trams in years 1, 2, and 3 … after the explosion of time. They were slaving masks, Bohler’s Laotian lady told me. Not too long ago in her country, she said, warlike tribes had come down from the mountains, slaughtering the French and hunting for slaves, and the cruel demons of the mountains and forests must’ve been laughing now … to know that people in the Pearl were wearing the masks of mountain jungle killers. Even the skillful Javanese who ran the tattoo parlors in Hadraba’s clubs got a little unnerved, and there was nothing for them to do except burn the new, mystical tattoos off the masks and prick them into the skin of people’s arms and thighs and backs … our Laotians rode and sold and piled up the metal, which came to life in their nimble hands, changing into other metal, more metal.