“And where were you rushing to, you scarecrow, where?” “I was hurrying after him,” said the pink one, and she crawled across to me on all fours, pulled out a little round mirror and held it up for me to see the blood dripping from the gash on my forehead. As the level crossing lady left, she couldn’t resist calling back out of the darkness: “You’d be better off investing in a rosary, old man!”
I was infuriated and would have given her a tongue-lashing.
But the maid of honour calmed me down: “Leave her be, Venoušek, you don’t have much time. You must try and be nice to people, or they won’t come to your funeral.”
And she took her tiny round mirror and looked at her own forehead, which was trickling with blood, and by the light of the street lamps I read, on the back of the mirror: “Savour the flavour of EGO chocolate.” Then the pink maid of honour wiped my forehead, breathed into my face and I turned away and weighed up how it was that I, the only drunk I can put up with, how it was that only now I grasped why my wife would turn away whenever I breathed beer-sodden sentences at her at night, and that if I really loved her as much as my own EGO, I’d better drink wine instead, or stop drinking altogether. And I took the little promotional mirror and my own vile breath bounced back off it at me and I felt thoroughly disgusted. And at once I kissed the maid of honour’s pink cheeks in gratitude for the discovery, but she snuggled up close and a current of affection ran through her entire body, our foreheads were all tacky with drying blood and she mouthed hotly: “Jerry, my dearest love, let me taste your saliva, go on…”
And suddenly her breath was sweet and she whispered how nice I smelled, and I whispered back how nice she smelled, and so we became each other’s pink nosegay and we kissed and tasted each other’s saliva and breath and the more we kissed, the nicer our breaths smelled and the more we created the glorious sensation of swimming in a 3000-gallon barrel of export lager, bathing in a tank of beer with the balmy smell of hops and malt.
“Marylou,” says I, “you’re beautiful.”
“I know,” says she with all the authority of an expert.
“And what else do you know, Evie?” I babbled.
“Everything, Georgie-boy,” she exhaled.
We stopped outside a building about three streets from where I lived, a gaslamp guttered, spewing vitriol onto the pavement. The black, cast-iron, Art Nouveau balcony embellishing the entire tenement was like the paper trimming round a coffin. The maid of honour handed me a key.
“Open it quietly, Frank,” she said, “daddy’s such a light sleeper, see?”
“I do see, my Marylou,” says I, but my hands were shaking.
“Wait, Freddy,” she decided, taking the key from me, she braced her knee against the door, opening it and letting out a whiff of the hallway, which bulged out at us like a flag soggy with beer. The yellow light of the gaslamp alighted on the first step. I held up the little mirror and cast an unblinking eye of reflected light on the greenish wall.
“Jack,” she said tenderly, “you can keep this mirror to remember me by, it quite suits you, do you know that?”
“I do,” said I.
“You don’t know anything,” she whispered, “this mirror was the last thing my mum looked at before she died, see?”
“I do see,” I nodded.
She closed the door, but before she trapped the reflection from the little mirror on the wall in it, I had an apparition of Charles Baudelaire at the same spot: having missed his footing on a kerbstone, he was raising a hand to grab his halo, which, as he stumbled, was heading down into the mud. And the draught from the hallway was wafted by a pinion of imbecility.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
18 ADAGIO LAMENTOSO
In Memoriam Franz Kafka
I gaze at your lovely figure and and there is no need to call upon the imagination in order to trace a return to the beginnings, your morning attire is of a fine, oyster-coloured linen and you are a voucher for a peat spa, your blue eye stares at me with a lacteal tinkle, with a stiff forefinger you part the yellow branches of a weeping willow and you are fully aware that you can expect from me all the very worst.
At the finish emotive flashes of lightning and a golden one-0-eight open the way to a sewer, a sorry weekend in the life I’m now starting to live.
The clothes I dream of are woven from the laughter of Siberian cellulose, eight hundred girls’ green hands are the foundation of a sweet confession, contours of laughter solidify in a mask of politeness and the mini-crisps of your tiny porcelain ears are perfectly concealed in the eavesdropping thickets of your fine peroxide-infused hair.
The hands of timed things and events wind counter to the flow of clock hands back to zero hour, though a single day spent with a girl you love on a Norwegian glacier is the stock exchange of love of all good people. The friendship of a woman is pain for two, yesterday the foxes moved away and rewarded a brass band by clapping.
How I’d like to summon up the strength to rip off your face, with a single yank, how I’d like to lay bear all your thoughts with a single thwack, with a single brutal yank, like whipping off a bra, like whipping off undies!
Along a belt of pathways I return to the beginning of going, the revealing magnificence of animal experience wants thirsty cities to have lidos filled with children. Your forget-me-not eye, damaged by a fragment of Modra majolica, now understands my cool gaze, it is right that you watch the knife of my imagination carving its way back to the sources of things.
The last brook is sucked into a stream down to its last drop, the last river into the sea and the ocean evaporates up into the azure sky down to its last little bright cloud.
I can see you watching with me that rising fall, I can see that not one stage in this striptease has escaped you. I’m apparently pursuing the memory of your white silk, gold-embroidered dress, the sleeve furnished at the wrist with little slits for my desire, two hollow folds of cream-yellow cashmire, but I watch all the more closely as a pure spring and divine Ago go forward to meet the Spring, and you smile at me seeing me scoop up whole handfuls of creative clay, and I, sniffing the earth, am also sniffing you.
Thus enriched with a bowl of curly cuttings, I sip the hope of an hourglass and for a healthy diet I prefer sorrow, a bit of copper wire found near a petrol station links me to eternity, the cage-rearing of lake trout is my disrupted honeymoon.
Now I’m sitting on the bottom of a little inn at Krč, the window panes are the walls of a great aquarium, you are floating in slow motion up by the ceiling, like a bee that has fallen into the honeycomb of my brain, fluttering curtains are an incessant process of hope and my destiny’s dues are stored in a freezer.
The last flame of evening in the colour of orange tulips licks at the last beams and rafters, but I prefer to read in the papers about lions gnawing an upright piano for twelve minutes and how the lion cubs captivated some sports journalists, how via the swing-doors of coffin lids people are sucked through static architraves of clay into the earth, but the aura of humanity is best honoured by a striking picture and the future of mankind is a bookshop.
Meanwhile inside my brain I can hear the rustling of your sweet limbs, your skin is embellished with delicate crevices, you are buoyed up by contours of cigarette smoke, you rise upwards like bubbles in soda water, trees and flowers describe circles, an apple falls from an apple tree with an apple already in its core, the last ruins of evening slide silently into the soft dust, though for now I enjoy the extremes and eccentricities of the textual songs of newspaper poetry. And for now this is your youthful bodice and this is your skirt drawn into delicate bulges at the waist and this is your ivory-coloured silk robe and it is in Empire style and this is a girls confirmation outfit kept as a memento and this is your back dappled with beer mats and this is your unloosed hair and musical staves stream from your head. I see you floating naked now beneath the dark-brown beams, I see your arms moving in rhythm lit fiercely by the spatter from a yellow chandelier, I see hot springs spurt from your beating feet, droplets rise from all the pores of your body, you’re immersed in a phosphorescent bath and streams of seltzer gush from your flickering ankles, fizzing fins, carbonated pinions, the little wings of flying fish, the flights attached to the ankles of the handsome young god Mercury.