With their immaculately forged papers, the Laotians were just getting going, the only ones that still lived with us were the original six-member crew, plus a few wives and kids now as well. And then Vasil showed his stuff, teaching the Laosters how to make samurai swords … he’d picked it up in Kiev from the Vietnamese … with the help of various tricks in the metal shop, tricks with the temperature of air and metal, soaking them in water and burying them in sand at the right point in an appropriate place, soon Vasil and the Laotians were making antique samurai swords. Production soared as Japanese, American, German, and other tourists began bringing home not only imitation Czech glass, rubbery Czech dumplings, and shooting-gallery-prize Czech Švejks but gleaming Ukrainian-Vietnamese-Laotian-Czech samurai swords … Bohler authorized the construction of a forge in one of the courtyards, and Micka went shopping for a few thousand dull rusty surplus bolshevik officers’ sabers to use as raw material. Vasil’s value climbed, and if not for his howling Chernobyl nightmares we probably could’ve arranged for him to move in normally instead of sleeping on a shaggy cloth down in the cellar.
It was a bit surprising when, at one of our parties, Vasil began to speak Czech … a twisted Czech traveling a roundabout route through the roughly two centuries since his family had left for the land with the dark rich soil called chernozem … entirely without warning and out of nowhere and in a blink it seized him, right under the picture of the Mother of God: kottige, kow, feeldz, gorse, plou, fyer, sojers, he spewed out what was evidently his family history in a nutshell, and collapsed in an ecstatic fit … Bohler daubed his temples with acid and Vasil came to and began to tell his story, and he has yet to finish to this day, because the Great Mother’s people got him when she decided that bad good old Prague was a good place for her and the People of the Faith … I’m getting ahead of myself. But it was chiefly his good fortune that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil and his family stumbled into our path. Because he gave Vasil a blood transfusion that cured his epilepsy, for the short remainder of his life, anyway.
It was like this: one day our little group was playing and singing in Micka’s mobile on our way back home from the Rock when we saw the Doctor’s family pack. A dappled old nag towed the caravan, and walking at its side, into our life, was a slightly battered example of our generation, a scarf with a red cross wrapped around his neck. Various children, big and little, peered out the caravan windows. It was the Miraculous Doctor Hradil with his sons, daughters, and wife. Just to be safe, we pulled over and jumped out. Seeing this, the Doctor got nervous and reached for a small silver scalpel hanging around his neck. But then he noticed Bohler’s cassock, our crosses and amulets and altogether friendly armaments and accoutrements, and gave us a slight nod. We stood leaning into the hill a little, waiting to see what power he had, and he spoke: All right, all right, okay, if anyone should ever need an examination … a minor operation or two … or even something more … all it takes is a few dumb moves at some inappropriate moment.
It was obvious right from the start that this was our man in medicine. One word led to another, and around the fire that night we learned that thanks to restitution, in those magical, adventurous Klondike yesteryears of today, the Doctor had been able to reclaim his predecessors’ good old autopsy lab, located, coincidentally, right in the capital’s center. The Miraculous Doctor Hradil worked mainly with blood, and after dinner, once the littlest children had gone to sleep, he showed us some of his cupping glasses, and he was also the proud inventor of a new medicinal trick: the laying on of people to leeches and vice versa. It works, fellas, like a charm, he wound up his lecture, rubbing out with a metal-tipped boot the graphs he’d drawn in the sand. We learned that the U.S., especially the army, had shown interest in his discovery, and that the Miraculous Doctor Hradil had lived some time in Canada, illegally, on their tab. He and some of his sons had spent a few years as hostages of the Mohawks, and in fact it was the old medicine men there that had given him the basic ingredients for Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir. He was from the old school. Taught the Mohawk shamans Latin. Understood aeronautics even. I see I can trust you fellas, but do you trust me, Priest? said the Doctor, clutching a flask in his calloused palm. Yeah sure, said Bohler politely, and the Doctor stabbed him in the face with his scalpel, slicing open his cheek. Then, quieting our crazed war whoops with a reassuring nod, he splashed Bohler’s face with a jellyfishish liquid. The priest gasped for breath, sorta tingles, right? the Doctor said proudly. Yeah. The wound was practically gone. All you’ll have left is a minor manly scar, actually I concocted it for those little rascals a mine, they’re always pretendin to be Mohawks an slashin each other up cause they think scars’re cool. A couple of his growing sons smirked. What else can it do? Micka asked. I could sense his financial timepiece ticking into action. David nodded approvingly: it was obvious. You name it, said Hradil, M.D. The Elixir can fix anything, but there’s still a few kinks in it. Sometimes it acts organically, sometimes inorganically, sometimes as an acid, sometimes as a base. Depends on the patient. Bohler blanched. We soon realized one important thing: Doctor Hradil was indisputably an excellent physician, but human life was of absolutely no interest to him. He preferred gutting corpses. The autopsy lab was his now and he was looking forward to hanging up health care. Micka took the Doctor over behind the trailer, and they sat down with a calculator on the grass. Occasionally we overheard: School in winter: 19 pairs of shoes. Or: per week: 7 kilos of flour and 6 pots of boiled beef. Or: we’re Katholiks, no big deal, the Lord’ll provide, man … Micka’s astutely persuasive voice. And then: Breakfast: 8 kilos of molasses, large melons, jelly doughnuts … it went on like that almost all night. Meanwhile we traded experiences with the Doctor’s growing sons, ever so slightly, properly, and over our shoulders sneaking peeks at his growing daughters. Doctor Hradil’s wife was the first normal human the Medicine Man had tested the Elixir on, and she was so kind and beautiful, and moved with such fawnish grace, we kept confusing her with her sixteen-year-old daughters. But we had Jesu in our hearts, and we hoped the Miraculous Doctor Hradil didn’t confuse them too. The next morning we learned that Doctor Hradil had been persuaded.
In return for a single monthly payment he would treat our mental problems, work up case histories, take urine samples, X-ray our livers, and photograph our blood. He kept us fit on the crazy merry-go-round of byznys, and soon he was raking in a decent percentage on the Elixir.
We’re takin the nationalist tack, men, Micka announced at our daily briefing. Alla that foreign crap — Taizé, Finnish drops, Wajza vodka — it’s all shit. Czechs can always cure Czechs best. Czechs know best what ails other Czechs. All through the Hitleriad an the bolshevik era, every Czech ate the same crap. Czechs’re all the same. Czechs’re buddies. Even that dead old Romany Gypsy poet Mácha* said so: “Who’s better than a Czech?” With ads like that running in every political weekly and cultural quarterly favorably inclined toward us, we soon broke through. The ancient Chinese selling technique also helped tremendously: Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir was far and away the cheapest health care product in the then crumbling republic. Nobody but total derelicts and lonely old crones bought the stuff, so when the wrong kind of patient took the Elixir there were never any dangerous what-have-we-heres and the coroners banged the stamp for the casket without a fuss. And that bestial Mohawk the Miraculous Doctor Hradil had himself another vagabond to strap onto his autopsy table. It was a perfect circle. Besides, by cleverly specializing in the stratum between the urban poor and the urban underclass, he usually gutted only the wrong kind of patients. And the sign on the door of his old downtown lab — MEDICINAL WORK FREE OF CHARGE — did its bit too … pulled the poor folks in like a magnet.