A few days later I set out to say thank you to Ionic Man once again, but they told me he’d died the day before, all of a sudden he’d died, out of the blue, suddenly, within three hours, he was dead. I asked: “And where’s his hat, that white felt hat, the hat he used to sleep with, where’s the hat?” They told me: “Oh he lost it, well not lost, but having finished loading a truck with cauliflowers, he briefly hung his hat on the lamp-hook of the truck at the end of the train, and it would be the end one, wouldn’t it? And the train started to move and his hat departed on the lamp-hook of the end truck and when Ionic Man went back to his horses, the train was gone, and with it his hat. And so without his hat Ionic Man lost his strength, and after he got home he took to his bed, and in three hours, all of a sudden, he was dead. Where did that end truck take Ionic Man’s halo?
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16 HAIR LIKE PIVARNÍK’S
I SAW HER ONLY ONCE, but having seen her, I took to her, and she took to me, and so we took to each other and we rode our bikes one behind the other in the night-time, and it was not just nice, but glorious, because where does it come from inside you, seeing things that aren’t there? And I saw that her bike had a glass frame, and the frame was pumped full of neon light, a kind of blue, luminescent core, as if the bike were constructed out of Geissler tubes. And I know this, I know full well how everything starts to metamorphose before my eyes as if by magic, so I tell myself, watch it, lad, go easy, you’re already paying one lot of alimony, but I know myself, the more I avoid a thing, the more I’m likely to bite the dust chasing it. And when all’s said and done, that’s how it should be, who wouldn’t want to go for a ride at night with a strange girl who I’d bewitched at zero cost, merely by having pageboy hair, just like the Slovak footballer Ján Pivarník’s. So I rode along with this brunette with chocolate calves, and I had this nice vision of whatever I looked at spouting tiny little sparks, everything fizzing, so that tiny little lights spouted even from her pedals like fake diamonds. Into the quiet of the night she said: “You know, I’m really glad it’s all over, that uncle of mine would have driven anyone crazy, see, he had a decent enough farm, but he sold up and bought a miserable little house, and he lived there with his sheep, he gave the money left over to my dad, who squandered the lot, see, uncle used to sleep with his sheep, and after ten years he smelled like the sheep and he even stopped talking, he just bleated when I took him some cake and a box of chocs for Christmas, see? And it was awful, it was snowing and uncle had a hole in his roof and a fire on the floor and the sheep were bent over round his head, and uncle had a long beard, even his whiskers reeked of manure, and wherever he went the sheep went too, well, I’ve never seen such love before, see, and when he went to bed, he lay down in the hay, the main room and the kitchen were up to the window ledge in manure, and the sheep nestled round him and the ram lay at his head like a fur coat, and uncle breathed sweetly and the sheep followed suit, and I backed off from my uncle in disgust, shuddering and screwing my face up, because he stank horribly of manure, see?” “Sure,” says I, “just what I needed to hear,” says I quietly to myself, meaning this twaddle about her uncle, but I looked about me and saw that I was actually seeing something in our woods for the first time, and that was that I was pedalling along behind this girl, whose pedals were spouting tiny lights, and through the girl I was seeing our entire forest range as from a helicopter, that it resembled the trunk of a skeleton, we were riding up its spine and the side avenues were exactly like ribs and ribbing, and as I looked about me I saw that the shadows of our bikes were purple with Marian blue edging, that the six sodium lamps, which were set four hundred metres apart, these lights created a kind of long bridge with six piers and a green river of dark leaves running beneath them. Wow, that’s quite something, it had never struck me before, except when the lads and I’d got hammered, but honest, I’d never have seen it, not even if I were on a high, I watched as we rode under one of those sodium lamps and what did I see? — I saw me toss my own shadow behind me, like when a decent footballer does a scissor kick over his head as he aims for the goal, or when Mr Pivarník kicks the ball away, and I looked behind me and what did I see? Nothing short of a purple rudder growing out of my back along the surface of the road, as if I was a purple sailing barge… And as I revelled in my vision, the girl prattled on and on… “…see, and this uncle used to graze his sheep at the edge of Kersko Forest, and one of his rams ran across the road, but a bus ran over it and my uncle collapsed on the spot, and the bus driver tried stopping cars in case there was a doctor in one, so he wouldn’t be to blame not only for running a ram down, but also for injuring a man, and in one car there was a lady doctor, but the young rams and ewes stood all round uncle, so first they had to shoo the rams away, and when the doctor knelt down with her listening thingy, the ewes surrounded her, but the doctor got up in disgust and there was no one willing to unbutton uncle’s coat until a plumber got his metal shears and cut it open, and a layer of shirts, see, that’s because uncle, when it got warmer in spring, he would take off a whole layer of shirts, like a tortoise’s shell, and put a new one on, and when it got cooler in the autumn, he’d put on one shirt after another and by the spring he had seven on, so the plumber sliced through the shirts with his metal shears and they curled away like old lino, or sheet metal, and only then did the doctor put her listening thing on uncle’s chest and discovered no more than what the sheep had known at once, and that’s why they were shaking, that uncle was dead, of a stroke, because his favourite young ram had got run over, see? Then the cops arrived with their tape measure and drew a chalk circle round the ram in the roadway and uncle in the ditch, and then a hearse arrived and the men tossed uncle into a coffin with disgust, and when they put the lid down, they trapped uncle’s beard in it, his whiskers were sticking out like a tussock of flowering cactus poking out of a rock garden, and you know, when the hearse moved off, the sheep ran after the coffin until they collapsed exhausted in the ditch, and did you know that we put the dead ram inside the gate and that before nightfall someone stole it?” “Really?” says I, “Did they?” says I, but I was looking at her white dress, which threatened to split at the seams the way she was pounding at the pedals, like some kind of corset, it was, this beautiful girl’s dress, a girl who’d taken up with me all because of my beautiful, long and well-kept hair, exactly as worn by the blond footballer Pivarník, and me, as soon as I clapped eyes on the girl, my eyes melted then and there, and I know the signs, I know how once a year and all of a sudden my eyes go beautifully blue and doe-like, then I rise in my own estimation since I know I’m about to learn things about which I haven’t a clue, yet suddenly I know things I didn’t, I look up and down the forest road, I can see the odd chalet with its lights still on, and suddenly I can see inside the chalets, things there probably aren’t quite as I see them, but I feel that they are, I see people getting ready for bed, I see that for these weekenders it’s not enough to get on each other’s nerves at work, on the communal staircase or in the home, but that they have to pack their jealousies and bring them with them out here, to our cemetery in the forest, I could see how these outsiders so loathe each other’s guts that they’re on the go and up and down all day long, blasted by their hatred into a far corner of their plot, only when a cloudburst or night arrives do they withdraw into their shared chalet, their family tomb, where they deceive one another with sweet talk while actually checking them out to see how much longer they’re going to live. I saw these incomers laying themselves down in common coffins, a common pit, like freaks tidied off into crates after the last show, I can see sleepers tossing about in bed and getting the sheet in knots as they worry whether or not they’ve forgotten to put away their name-tagged picks and forks, spades and mattocks, whether or not they’ve forgotten to raise their ladder skywards and prop it against a pine tree and bind it with a chain through the rungs round the tree, and whether or not they’ve forgotten to padlock the chain… and so I rode on with ever more beautiful ideas, ever prettier images, streaming lightly from my eyes and brain, and I knew that what the girl, going on and on at the top of her voice about her uncle, it had suddenly dawned that what she was saying she wasn’t saying just to me, but to the entire forest, and not even just that, but to the entire world, so sure was she that her uncle was the oddball to end all oddballs. And she rode nice and slowly and I, like a faithful hound with my eyes sunk into her like her saddle, she rode as if riding through tar or honey or gum arabic, just sauntering along, and then she turned off into a side avenue and the way brightened through a birch grove, and this very birch grove is the one like when you’re reading Chekhov, all television stories are also shot here in this little wood, and the little meadow beyond the trees was bright, with a mist floating over it, and down at the whole thing gawped the moon, but a moon so stupid that it was as magnificent as some moron, a breeze gusting from New Leas rustled the reeds and I’d never noticed that rustling before, but now, on that leisurely ride, I heard it all and I was proud of myself and wished for nothing more than to be pedalling behind that girl on a bike, spurting thousands of little lights from the buckles of her black shoes adorned with fake diamonds. And I envied the bike its exquisite load, and the girl kept looking back and when she looked at my hair, her bike began to zigzag, she had to make a quick grab for her handlebars to counter an imminent fall, but all of this was due to me shampooing my hair every other day, spending ages with a comb in front of the mirror and constantly checking with my right hand that my hair had the proper hippie look, of that I’m sure, but if she wants to have a good time, so be it, I mused, because I could see myself and my tea-washed toupee riding through the dark woods, if she wants a good romp, okay, she’s the right age and figure for it. And suddenly I looked and there in front of us was a white gate, and the girl hopped off her bike, unlocked the gate and I was into the yard after her, she propped her bike against the fence and I put mine against hers, but the frames slipped with an almighty racket into the sand and the handlebars got hooked together and in that I saw a promising sign. She’d unlocked the gate, now locked it again, and next to the white fence with white laths stood a white-painted bench and the moon was reflected on the seat and the girl sat down on the moon, the bench was gloss-painted, and I sat next to her and she swapped her shoes for something lighter, handing me some white sandal things as well, and I took them, so light they were that they almost flew up and away like the wings of a bird, and they were like crêpe paper to the touch, but they fitted me like a glove, and as I looked round the plot I knew for definite that something was going to happen here, because the whole yard was marble sand and as meticulously raked as my own fair hair, like corduroy, and as the girl walked about the yard in those shoes, the sand crunched, and only now, by the full light of the moon, did I see this creation, saw that her body was like a spindle with threads unwinding from it that I rewound optically straight round my genitals, and what turned me on most was that as she walked, her thighs heaved fabulously and described such a beautiful curve that I knew that this girl had fallen from the fifth floor of Ottoman heaven. And I saw that the walls of the chalet had been whitewashed the day before, as it seemed, and I saw that the windows had been cleaned with glass cleaner that very morning and the curtains washed the day before and rehung that day, not that that was really the case, but everything was so neat and tidy that I, a young and messy old thing, couldn’t fail to notice until it hurt. After that I wasn’t in the least surprised by the white Octavia estate parked under an oak tree, its seats covered in white sheepskin, spare shoes on the floor, and the whole Octavia gleaming as if it had just driven out of a beauty parlour. And I told myself ‘Get a grip, lad, here we go,’ because she’d unlocked the front door and having gone inside, she stopped and suddenly turned and pressed herself against me, and I could feel her thigh touching the key in my pocket, and her hands went straight for my hair and I knew it made her feel good, my straw-coloured hair, and I held her by the waist, but she still had all ten fingers in my curls, so I had all my ten about her body, twenty fingers in all, and ten of them couldn’t get enough of my coiffure and my ten couldn’t get at her skin, and I thought this was the one thing on her mind, but then she went on with her family saga and full of her own mystique, she burbled tenderly on: “… see, darling, uncle’s funeral was just as sad as the rest of his life, he didn’t have a single friend left in the village, because for these bumpkins uncle was a lost cause, him letting his animals get too close, see, darling, in the country he put sheep above people, that’s a sin, see? So it was just me who buried uncle and even then I was on tenterhooks in case the sheep smashed the gates down, because all the way to the grave I could hear them bleating in the knowledge that uncle was in the cemetery, so the sexton quickly shovelled soil over the grave, because, dear, if the sheep did break through the gates, they’d have jumped in and trampled the coffin, see? — when a farmer doth die, his animals cry, so I sold the sheep on the hoof to some butchers, they got planks and trestles and rigged up a place of execution right there in the yard, and it was sad, one sheep after another, and they laid them on their backs in among the planks and cut their throats, and you know, dear, I understood why the sheep is a symbol of longsuffering and Christian humility, and you’d never believe, dear, how handsome those butchers were, beautiful as bulls, yet ox-eyed, like you were looking at statues of Greek demigods, see, if the sins of the world were wiped clean at abbatoirs, they’d be like the priests, the last ewe, dear, she jumped up on her own, all they did was lay her down, and trotting after her came a little lamb, which also jumped up and was still suckling… so first they snicked the ewe, then they watched lovingly for a moment at the suckling lamb, and then like this, one quick swish of the knife, and a trickle of blood started, mingling with the milk, but the butchers were so handsome, dear, with black forelocks, that if they’d been even a teeny bit handsomer, they’d be like part of the family, dear, almost as beautiful as your golden hair…,” the girl kept gushing at me, thinking it might make her feel better if she could transfer these images of the sheep onto me, but I was holding her with all ten fingers under the arms, and when I lifted her up, she ran all her ten fingers into my hair and I carried her over to the sofa under the window into the moonlight, so I had to look out into the yard, where one half of a white-painted shed door had opened, and the gloss paint shone back so like a floodlight that I put the girl down and stood up and looked, and out of the door came the white figure of a man in a long, white, knitted sweater, the kind of sweater, it was, last seen on St Wencesl