City Sister Silver Page 2

  I look into the mirror, a gift from the Chinese, on back is an inscription, letters to the wall. I take a slug of the Fiery, still a long way to the bottom.

  Whenever I feel time losing its power, whenever it stops sucking me in and the swirl of chaos and noise in the tunnel falls still, the Fiery always helps. And the next day that rigor mortis is proof that time is dead for me again. Like the way the Chippewas gripped their paddles after they drank the Fiery, seated stiffly in their canoes, heads shattered from inside. They needed it too: rifles and steel knives and smallpox were what smashed time for them. They maybe wanted a circle; I longed for a straight line.

  Reaching up to the shelf for the Firewater, I touch a hand groping for it from the other side, a bracelet, fingers chewed like mine, but his hand’s dusky, smells of smoke, it’s calloused and scraped, mine doesn’t have callouses, not anymore. We clutch the bottle, each from one side, but it doesn’t want war: this demon wants us both. The bottle splits in two, each of us tugging the cold glass onto our side of the darkness, and on the spot where my hand and the Chippewa’s touched, a new bottle stands now, there will always be a new one, as long as we die.

  Not anymore, we said. Together. That time with her. I don’t know anymore which one of us said it.

  As the hangover recedes, everything picks up again, you come to life, feeling that time and motion are back again, you know that it’s false but only at the base of your mind, up above the lights are beginning to come back on, falling flatly over the everyday scenery, but you toy with the illusion for a little while longer. You drink because of the hangover, it’s an edge, like twilight, not quite day, not quite night. Every instant still sharply fractured. This time still has an end, too far off for me to see, this time can still be reckoned from the moment the first crack in the concrete showed.

  The concrete block, stifling anything that tried to move on its own, is gone, you know very well how everything was rotting, gasping for freedom, mutating in the stench, in the bush, in the bushes, the roly-polies under the rock. The bushes: the especially robust runners found chinks in the slowly cracking concrete and squeezed their way out, twisting, creeping, it was doable. That’s me too of course, I’m one of the bushes, and for a long time I expected the blow, the command, the deafening whistle, the pounding on the door.

  I don’t get it, I don’t know why it didn’t happen to me. Why me, how come you didn’t get eight years, an iron bar in the head, a one-way plane ticket out of the country? But it’s gone now.

  Or is it? And now do we live like this or like that? I saw an old woman and a German shepherd in the morning haze by the train station. Everyone else had just cleared out. A fire blazed in a trash can. The woman was feeding it. Burning old grass, ma’am? I asked. No, these’re my files, my documents. The dog growled, a beetle crept along the sidewalk, the wind rolled softly over the windowpanes.

  Aha, so that’s how we’re going do it now, people thought to themselves. That before was nothing, that we had to do. After all, on the outside you’re one thing and at your underlying source you’re something else, everybody knows that, it’s like ABC. So open up your sources, now, the whole world is theirs. Aha, so what’s reality? And what’s just scenery? What do we do? And what am I gonna do now? I asked myself in unison with the rest.

  Our friendship was the dawning of the firm, the company to be, that was the foundation. I lived with Little White She-Dog back in the days when I knew nothing and had nothing to lose. She made me so in turn I could make someone else, so there would be a tribe. She knew we needed a tribe if we wanted to survive without giving away all our time, and she also knew how to save at least a piece of time for ourselves.

  It also works with objects, she taught me. Back then I kept time tucked away in shards of broken glass in the pockets of my shorts. Sitting at home or in class, I’d unwrap a shard from my handkerchief and watch as time began to unwind, gently at first, like a feather floating to the ground (later on she taught me that for gentleness it works best to put time into feathers), and then the time in the shard would accelerate and I’d be inside it with Little White She-Dog, with the grass and the trees, in our hole in the hillside, with her touches, in reality.

  She also saw the green eyes of the woman I was to meet in the future, which gifted females can see into. You’ll probly end up with some wrestler, she said, examining her bruises in bed one day. I won’t toss an turn anymore, I said, yeah you will, she told me back.

  Long before I tossed and turned and ground my teeth in my dreams, I was a gimp, in the autumn of my childhood, and my being lame only before her and for her was the beginning of our games, our exploration of human power, it was the origin of the perversion. I would sit motionless while Little White She-Dog set the nerves in my body to tingling, sitting still as long as possible so that she could learn my body, so she could teach my body to feel. My role model was a cripple from an engraving. A medieval engraving peopled with knights and cripples. It was the time of St. George the dragon slayer, and I was a child cripple with a twisted soul and a studiously acquired schizophrenia because what was permitted and required inside was undesirable and dangerous outside. Family pride was a weight around my neck. I was to be the future that would pay back the humiliation, in this I was just like thousands of others.

  Just like them, something drove me to bury deceased pigeons and sparrows, making crosses for their little graves and reeling off the words, but She-Dog brought me back to myself, through herself, through her movements and voice and touches, just like a little wife.

  Elsewhere I had to pull off the role of the cheerful, inquisitive little boy, bringing home top grades to honor my obligations. The Communists mopped up the floor with families like ours, but that was precisely why fathers and mothers forced their children to study Latin. Fathers waged long-winded debates on whether it was best to teach Latin or English, and always concluded that both were essential. Latin, church, languages; dual geography, dual history, and religion: it was a pretty shabby arsenal for battling the world around us. George at least had a lance. And the dragon wasn’t even trying to take away his time, it only wanted to kill him.

  With Little White She-Dog I was no one again, a shape born of vapor, wind, moisture. She stroked nerves I didn’t know I had, my face took on a new appearance, I started to feel my body. I started to dance. For a cripple, just stretching your hand is a dance. She drew me in, forming me, and that in turn shaped her nature.

  As the well-mannered little girl walked to her lesson in classical languages with the former priest, at the time a stock clerk because he hadn’t signed out of fear of the Devil, or to the church of the priest who had signed because only the Church is eternal and every regime eventually topples, ending up on the bottom like grains of sand in the infinite ocean of grace … in her mouth she could still taste the seed of the little man of her tribe, because not even the Church is older than the tribe, and we were closer to each other than to those broken-backed families of ours. The present, which our families felt was a world built on falsehood, and the period prior to the invasion, which they clung to, were both the same gobbledygook to us. We weren’t afraid of anything. We didn’t care about blood and lineage, just like Romeo and Juliet.

  With death whizzing by on all sides, we had to duck down and send out feelers, picking up and transmitting the tribal signal. In our hole in the hillside, eyes shut: What do you see? Darkness. Is it far away? No, it’s right here. What do you see? You. Other people, small, they’ve all got the same face. My darkness is red now. Mine too.

  Our petting, culminating in orgasm for me and then, much later, for her as well, was more than just the giving and receiving of bliss, it was the ritual of an encircled tribe. Like all my loves, Little White She-Dog was brunette, I called her white because of her skin. I still call her that in my thoughts, even now that everything I’m trying to capture here is gone and I found my sister and Little White She-Dog turned into a ghost, a good she-demon with inscrutable intentions. r />
  He put a wafer on my tongue, the sign of God, she said, and I still had semen in there with your kids, they might not all’ve been dead yet, I ran the whole way.

  Later she wiped off the taste, no longer needing that mosquito net in the jungle, that coating on the tongue we lied with so often, to our families, teachers, priests, to everyone outside the community, and instead she ate an apple, or took a sip of water, using other, more elaborate masks and disguises. Don’t move, she’d say, I’m not, I’d lie, reaching for her, the tip of her deceitful tongue vibrating in my ear, still ringing opidda opiddum, puera pulchrum, ghetto ghettum as excitement would transform me from a gimp in an engraving where time stood still into a hunk of live flesh gorged with blood, starving and prepared to devour. She was older and liked to toy with me, leaving me inside her, teaching me to sense the powers one eventually prefers to sharpen oneself so as not to burden psychiatrists: the little boy learned when and how to use girl power, the childlike power of the word no, and when to be a warrior. As the little boy got older, he didn’t just dance the way she wanted. And only then did she really begin to glow, becoming Beautiful She-Dog, with breasts. Until then they had the hole in the ground, curled up in there like embryos, sensing the earth’s motion. Afterwards they would go home to their families, living their lives in the wings.

  We slept together and played together, actually we lived together, but there was such a flood of filth and futility to fight, the magic stayed somewhere down below, glowing inside her like coals, and in me too, only cooler, kind of like amber, and sometimes when we were alone a long time the magic would show itself, and the day we went to look at the Germans I saw the red darkness again.

  Here I am handin out cookies like some pensioner when we oughta be flailin those guys over there, said Sinkule.

  The cops were removing a haggard man in a suit from the wall above the embassy entrance, he wanted to take the shortcut, resisted, they pummeled him with their truncheons. He picked himself up off the ground and obediently joined the procession of Germans patiently marking time in front of the embassy. There were thousands of them. The rows wound down the crooked lanes all the way to the square, where traffic had been stopped for days now.

  Hey, here they come again, Sinkule slugged my shoulder. A row of white helmets with long truncheons began setting up barricades in the crowd. The Germans who were cut off from the embassy got nervous, tensing up, horrified that this was the end, that after everything had gone so smoothly, like a miracle, like a dream, it was finished, now came the clampdown, the ones who’d gone in could leave, but for the ones they hadn’t gotten to yet, it was too late … this was the selection, you in, you out, you yes and you no, the crowd let out a howl and leaned into the cordon, mothers passing children over the cops’ helmets to the people on the other side, probly relatives, I figured.

  Once the kid’s inside, I guess they let the mother in too. That must be why they’re doin it. Yeah, but it’s not like the kids’ve got ID. How do the mothers prove they’re theirs?

  Let’s get lost, c’mon.

  What if some other lady snatches the kid so she can get out. How do they decide? Like back in the days of King Sollie?

  Let’s take off, c’mon.

  Nah, said Sinkule, it’ll calm down again. The cops don’t care about the Germans. I been watchin. They’ll hassle folks a while an then pull out. They just wanna show us they’re here.

  I’d rather not stick around. Wouldn’t wanna get nailed.

  They won’t come down this far, take it easy.

  Sinkule had been at the embassy every day, he was one of those people the exodus fascinated.

  He glanced at me. Anyway, you look German, they won’t mess with you. Do you speak it?

  Nah, just stuff like Hände hoch, Los schweine, Achtung minen, Arbeit macht frei, that crap from the movies. An Meine liebe kommen ficken,* never used that one though.

  Sinkule was right, the cops pulled out, and an eerie silence settled back over the crowd.

  How bout me, think I look German?

  You? I almost cracked up. Sure, an Goebbels was German too.

  I speak it though, my mom was German.

  They’re back again.

  The cops, surrounded by the crowd in the space between the West German and U.S. embassies with the cameras of every TV station on earth humming monotonously, were evidently uncomfortable. These four characters looked like reinforcements from the countryside. Normally the cops didn’t take the narrow passageway down from the Rychta beer hall. And if they did, then only in larger groups. The Germans in front moved slowly, working their way up the slope, the rest of them tread in place. Ordinarily a crowd murmurs, the individual utterances intertwining, it’s a little like water, you can lap up the words. But these people were silent, as if they’d decided not to talk until they made it through the gate. Suddenly someone in the crowd broke into loud laughter. Then a child burst into tears. Then another. All at once the square was full of weeping children, it struck me that maybe it was like dogs: once one starts, the rest join in. But these kids weren’t crying on account of a few silly Czech policemen. Some had been traveling for days now, on overcrowded trains, in Trabants and Wartburgs piled high with junk, on their way out of the cage, on the road to Paradise. Some of them must’ve been hungry, sleepy, and sensed the anxiety of their parents, wearily lugging them on their shoulders, tugging them by the hand uphill toward the embassy. The laughter didn’t let up, it was a high-pitched nervous female laugh, like the wailing of some faraway bird, in an interrupted dream, in the country, in the woods, at night.

  Sluggishly the crowd shifted uphill, leaving the lower part of the square empty except for a group of young Germans sitting on the ground drinking tea. Some had spent the cold night on the square and didn’t look like they cared much about waiting another hour or two. One or two even looked like they didn’t have a care in the world. A pair of cops stopped next to them. The officer lost his patience, knocking the thermos out of the hand of an elderly Czech woman who was pouring tea for the Germans. Where’s your permit? he bellowed. A ripple went through the crowd again, and in a blink the old lady was standing alone. I admired her calm heroism in the face of the officer’s distasteful outburst.

  That’s old Vohryzková from our building, said Sinkule. At least now she’ll give up that Mother Teresa act, stupid cunt.

  Stick it to her, you savage! he roared at the cop, and we bolted.

  Thank the Lord they always send those hicks to Prague, we never would’ve made it through the passageways otherwise.

  Just to be safe, though, I crossed myself. We came out gasping for breath by the church with the Christ Child.*

  Hey, Sinkule, you notice they’re startin to lock up the passageways?

  Yeah an that’s what did it for me. I’ve been sneakin through these things like a rat all my life an now those fuckers’re lockin em up. You’re the only one I’m tellin: I’m goin too. I’m tellin you so you can watch, so I got some backup, so I don’t disappear down some hole.

  You’re goin? With the Germans?

  Yeah, so what? I mean it’s a farce an you’re an actor, right?

  You’re gonna split with the Germans, huh?

  Yeah, Šulc already made it. Went yesterday an he’s in there.

  Are you guys crazy? I mean this is the end!

  Nobody knows that. The Germans’re goin over to the Germans, but our guys aren’t gonna let go that easy. I donno, but I mean we could all be dead. I mean they got the concentration camps ready. Or they might, an everyone knows it. I mean we’re on the list. I mean anyone that does anything’s scared these days. Maybe it’ll turn out okay an we’ll forget it ever happened, but I’m gettin sick an tired. I’m just scared they’ll start shootin. You’re the one that told me about the tanks.

  Hey, I’m gonna stick it out here.

  Hey, it could easily go Chinese-style.

  C’mon, this is Europe!

  Yeah, says who?

  So
you’re goin, huh?

  I got it all worked out, me an Majsner’re goin together, I mean half of us here’re German anyway. Nobody’s checkin, an if they do I’ll just say they took my papers away at the border, it’s such a mess in there at the embassy they’re just shovin em on the buses an shippin em out.

  So the Bohos’ve finally got what they wanted, Germans crowdin onto buses an settin out into the great unknown, motherfuckers!

  Don’t get hysterical. I’ll be with Majsner, so if one of us gets into trouble the other one’ll clear right out, alles is gut, don’t get hysterical, I’ll send you back some chocolate an come ridin in on a white tank. Just keep an eye out that we get in.

  So the Christ Child was where it began. We walked back to the square and up to the embassy. They waited a long time. I saw them going in.

  Glaser got in too, he’d done a year in jail, got caught under the wires in Šumava after lying buried in the sand all day, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, but he picked the wrong time to crawl out, got hog-tied and left for hours … in a cell full of shit … now he passed through the gate and just for good measure spat on a cop, the Germans picked up on it and started doing it too, after a while the cop looked like he was covered in cum or something, his truncheon hung impotently from his belt, he was scared … Glaser went over to watch … but then I had to stop, he told me later, it was weird all of a sudden, like somethin outta the war, Germans spitting on a Czech, even if he was a Commie mercenary, an I started it … it was weird, my first step in freedom, an instead of breathing it in I spat … there were others who went too, most of them had some German ancestry … but even that idiot Novák got in, got in and then came back out again to go for a beer at U Schnellů, just did it because he liked being able to go back and forth.

  And it was then, while that clown was hollering all over the pub, that I realized it had begun … the motion … there was something of a carnival feel to the Germans’ exodus that lingers on to this day, from the moment time exploded, bursting out of that locked-up city, time with its own taste and color that you don’t know about until you taste it, until you’re there inside the color. Exploding time can not only crush you, you can swim in it, or hold it in your hand, like a piece of fabric or a coin. It can be like a gas, or like earth, sometimes you can feel it like wind.