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Another of the overlapping shards of glass, a snapshot: Čáp, white with rage, reads a statement from our fathers and grandfathers calling on us to abandon our protest because it might lead to shooting.

Look, this is crazy, says Čáp, they all left town for their cottages! Yeah, so, if they stayed they’d just get locked up, I said knowingly. Yeah but that’s the point! It’s all right for people to be dancin around the truncheons if they know those guys’re in the slammer. But out at their cottages!

So Čáp took up the responsibility that was lying out in the street and put together his own band of juveniles. I was first in line to sign his declaration, because his vision was the wackiest one around. Hey … nothin works, but a guy’s gotta try … our Polish brothers’ve got the Church, all ours’re destroyed … hey! Oh yeah, sure, I nodded, yeah right … it’s like Blake said, either create your own system or be enslaved to someone else’s. Bohler reappears in the shards of mirror: Take that watch from Tokštajn, we’ll hawk it to the Poles, toss in some ideological diversionism. The bazaar of course was illegal … stupid Czechs, they really piss me off, Bohler would say, smiling at the Polish bandits, the Bohos just don’t get it, I mean at least these guys’re men, if they didn’t trade their families could starve to death, what else’re they sposta do, they don’t go for the disgusting sin of whimpering … they steal … the Poles’re always bleedin an fightin, Bohler said dreamily, the Polish nation is the Christ of crazy Eastern Europe, he blasphemed … as the Polish bandits unloaded their cars full of smuggled Kazaks, one strode into the setting sun with a rug thrown over his shoulders, hence the vision … and who could that gentleman hanging there be … the one with his arms spread wide like an airplane?

The older and wiser ones who said, don’t go, they might shoot, were forfeiting us, and if things hadn’t gone so fast they would’ve also lost Čáp’s juveniles … he was getting skinnier every day, curly hair flapping, eyes shining … we’ll hand it out, but not till after the prayer! I told him inside the church … out of the question! Čáp protested, so what if we interrupt, dammit! … half of em can’t make out the words anyway … he had a point, we passed out our flyers with the picture of the Czech lion tugging at his chains, the Christians snatched them up and gaped in terror, stuffing them under their coats, into their bags and purses … one fellow told me “thank you” and in his eyes he had a smile, a smile of joy, he knew there was a time for war and a time for prayer and that the two of them merge together … a single sister shook my hand … she smiled too … let’s hit Ignatius, said Čáp, and off we flew, through passageways and carriageways, swift and agile, glancing left and right, with eyes in the back of our heads, fast and silent, with that good old Katholik joie de vivre … Čáp’s teachings were more and more appealing every day, because he knew the war against communism must lead also to the liberation of ants and every other living creature, that no one must harm the helpless and the young, and that whosoever does must accept the punishment … only his kingdom was a kingdom not of this world. And Čáp’s juveniles amazed me too … the most jaded bunch I ever had the honor to meet … hardcore cynics, extraordinarily reckless at times … at the age when we’d been struggling through school, they skipped out, didn’t give a damn … at the age when we’d torn down a flag here and there and on the sly, they learned to dance under the truncheons … some of them were really young … practically kids … we took our experience from insane asylums and prison cells, first from the ones ten years older than us and then our own … and passed it on to them, only they were tougher … at the age when we’d collected stamps, they collected tear gas cartridges off the cobblestones and had a blast doing it … the Poles were their model too … and their tongue accelerated with their motion along the cobblestones … our eyes sometimes glowed with fire … the machines of the enemy rumbled through the air and underground, but we had a vision.

I mean everyone knows … back in today’s central woman, Europe, there’s nothing but dogs, they wiped out the wolves, on this reservation the only thing left to do was devote yourself to illegal shamanship and just here and there and occasionally, for a fleeting moment, dance and possess the strength of a warrior, a mortal prepared to die.

There was beating in the streets, ready and waiting, but the people with vision went back for it again and again because it was the realest thing they had left.

Čáp hurling cobblestones at a personnel carrier on Železná Street, giving his juveniles a thrill … because the kingdom won’t happen all by itself, that’s just common sense. It was motion, it was new. It didn’t matter how many people accepted the motion, all it takes is one rotten tooth in a loyal healthy smile to give the Monster a headache …

And none of our citizens, whose stupid heads contained a shrewdly manipulated image of Poles as the hungry, wretched enemy, had a clue … and no one over in Poland had a clue about those rowdy Czechs … no one had a clue how crazy we were … no one eavesdropping from a satellite or dangling in an airshaft listening in on the scarred speech of our cooperatives, that accelerated city-speak … sitting in their cottages or squatting in the slammer, no one had a clue what the conspiracy was really about … all those scattered gangs of the city underground preparing for the important assignment, hastening toward a final solution for the soul’s design … auguring from their own dread-filled intestines, tensely watching the quivering skies … secretly going for the future’s throat in a conspiracy to nothing less than murder … namely, the brutal and conclusive assassination of Josef Vissarionovich Švejk.*

3

DAVID LEARNS. THE BYZNYS PATH. THE LAOTIANS. WHAT WAS WORN. THE WELL.

And then I stood in the street, it was freedom, half past six, weather roughly March. Clouds above, asphalt below, people with shopping bags walking the street, children and dogs in tow, it was freedom and time out of joint was going mad. I let it drag me in, it was a different dance than with She-Dog, different than the dance of the rose, different than with the truncheons, there was no end to it, it seemed endless. Human time had accelerated, I was disguised as a young man with a tiger-stripe tie, files under my arm, walking to an appointment with my associates. Walking at just the right pace to be there on time, fifteen minutes early, that was part of the social contract, our own little entente. I could’ve afforded a car if I’d wanted one, I was just afraid to drive. Micka had changed too. Tiger stripes suited him. He wanted to make cash spin the way my She-Dog spun on electricity, but he didn’t know how to send out the signals. Micka handled the paperwork, forgetting all his past hospital treatments he’d finished school and become a lawyer, it was freedom and he began smoking cigars. For the signals there was David, strategist and head of our little entente, the only one of us from the countryside, he’d climbed trees till the age of eighteen, which also made him the only one of us in sound health. All he needed to learn was the basics.

Hey, last time we went to see Mošna, he looked at his watch three times, Micka tutored him. What about it, David said studiously. Next time Mošna peeks at his watch, we get up an go, said Micka, it’s an unmistakable sign. How’s that? our boss wanted to know. Every textbook for future psychiatrists strictly forbids lookin at your watch, it gives sensitive patients the feelin they’re takin up too much time, an rightfully so, said Micka. End of doctor’s story, I added.

Micka was the first to enlighten David about the Secret. But it wasn’t totally necessary, because David was born a man of the contract, all he lacked was the terminology. Together then we taught him how to eat with silverware, have eyes in the back of his head, talk with women, hand out bribes, be in three places at once, ride the subway without holding on, smear invoices and puff on them, creep through the fax, and use the phone. Which is better to eat with in a Vietnamese restaurant, David, chopsticks or silverware? Chopsticks I guess, right? With chopsticks you’ve got one hand free, with silverware you’re at least holdin a blade, think about it now, think hard. David nodded and Micka gave me a look of pride. I tried too: Okay, David, what’s heavier, a kilo of feathers or a kilo of garnets? Dummy. C’mon now, what’s lighter, a liter from the head or a wheel? He hesitated, but he knew.