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.
Lemme sleep!
Cepková, get up, listen …
Leave me alone … what time is it?
Hey, there’s other worlds!
Aw baloney, there’s just this one.
Really? Yeah, for real?
Same difference.
Yeah, I guess so.
2
WHAT MADE MY HEART. CHARGED OBJECTS. BACK IN THE SEWER. THE CONSPIRACY.
And then one murky post-bolshevik day I stood in the street and I was alone and nothing can sear that day out of my memory. At the Tchibo coffee shop I had a memorable appointment with Micka where we laid the cornerstone of the Organization.
Nor can anything sear out the era of the Sewer, because that was what made my heart. You could zigzag through the streets and test the weight of the buildings on your back, and you can ask your mirror on the walclass="underline" Tell me, who’s the fairest of them all? and the mirror takes a while to answer and it’s scary, and you draw on that while for the tension in your motion, and then the mirror is just an object again and:
the shattered mirror is cut-up snapshots, I look around and it would be nice to write myself into third person, but no, says Potok: I lived in various flats and packs, and when one smiley streetwalking day they let me out of the wicked old city insane asylum, they gave me a social service key and a hole to crawl into. There wasn’t any family around I could stay with. I didn’t want to put up with any anger or affection for a while. So I lay my head down on Gasworks Street and filled my wardrobe with disguises. She-Dog was still in my dreams.
There were boyfriends and girlfriends and conspiracies, you could grin and say yep and nope, hah, and give a wink … there was Bohler and Micka and Čáp and Cepková and Elsa the Lion and others, each traveling in his or her own circles, which sometimes intersected under the pressure we all felt … and there were objects surviving with spirit stored inside them, objects generated in the war against death, shit, and fear, and these are often the material in which images, sounds, and speech originate, including written speech, so ferocious, so meek. And just by the way and like it was no big deal, there were people walking the streets who knew how to make these charged objects. Some of them were survival artists, even if self-destruction was the price they paid to survive. Some of them lived in the Pearl. I wanted to learn. I was hungry. Most of the other inhabitants were too slow for me, dangerous even, sour time’s grayness had gotten them, but I full-throatedly wished good luck to all, contempt is best left for oneself.
No charged object of mine ever stopped water cannons or tanks, brought my dearest girlfriend back, or staved off a single wicked wrinkle. All they did was lap up time; sometimes that’s enough. I ate em up like bread, putting them into my tongue.
Coincidentally the tongue I use is one of Czechs, of Slavs, of slaves, of onetime slaves to Germans and Russians, and it’s a dog’s tongue. A clever dog knows how to survive and what price to pay for survival. He knows when to crouch and when to dodge and when to bite, it’s in his tongue. It’s a tongue that was to have been destroyed, and its time has yet to come; now it never will. Invented by versifiers, spoken by coachmen and maids, and that’s in it too, it evolved its own loops and holes and the wildness of a serpent’s young. It’s a tongue that often had to be spoken only in whispers. It’s tender and cruel, and has some good old words of love, I think, it’s a swift and agile tongue, and it’s always happening. Not even the Avars* could get this tongue of mine, not tanks or burning borders or the most repulsive human species of alclass="underline" cowardly teachers. What will eventually get it is cash in a shrinking world. But I still have time, as Totilla the barbarian said back in that wicked time of his, before his battle began. Before they got him.
As soon as we’d served out our childhood, the theologian Bohler and I started wheeling and dealing with the Poles. There were times in my youth when I wanted to be Polish. Watching from under a rock. There wasn’t much time, I watched primitively. On account of the avalanches. What I liked best were the simple things; the trick was to make my mind up fast. The Indians were dead already. Poles clobbered cops. Prayed. Drank vodka. Romantics always and in everything, but standing up. Our hatred of the Monster was so great and our feeling of humiliation so strong, we sometimes dreamed about our own murder.