My soothsayer explained that it was essential to find an enemy, some anonymous mass, to assure the domestic population they didn’t have it so bad under communism in the heart of Europe. That anonymous mass was communism in Asia. But the slogans of brotherhood came heavily loaded: the shrimpy Asian men and odd Asian women in their quilted jackets and work boots two sizes too big showed Central Europeans a different model human. Beneath their two red lids the communicating vessels exchanged a few bubbles. The organized migration of nations for labor’s sake reestablished the validity of the law of conservation of energy. It couldn’t be flushed away down the factory floors. Because, thank God, one unforeseen side effect of the gastarbeiter transfers was a change in the ethnic face of Bohemia, often remarkable blossoms of interpersonal relations sprang up from the treaties and figures and graphs. It’s quite likely I’m lying again, but that’s exactly how the ancient soothsayer put it.
They came by the hundreds of thousands. Feeding the factories and bolstering the native workers’ self-confidence, not just with their small builds and the ludicrous slop they ate instead of sausages and beer, the only legal and proper meal, but also stories of war, starvation, and killing in their own country, where it was still yesterday. Crossing these two human species was forbidden, and if it went on in spite of that, because love is insanity, then only when the authorities closed their eyes. Because the system for controlling people was highly perfected, I remember it. Only neurotics slipped through the cracks … just a few heroes fought their way out independently, tearing a flag down here and there, typing out copies of K …a, for instance, hijacking a plane, trashing a bulletin board of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement, learning languages, fighting for justice, praying, stealing melons, ecstatically assaulting a cop … even the slightest attempt to erect your own watchtower in that wired-in land possessed the drastic elements of Babylonian ruin, it’s in my memory. The frenzy of scattering through the world, whichever way the wind blows, stayed on the inside. There was only the frenzy of circling in a cage, frenzy turned against itself. I’ll kill myself, you, or somebody else, is the final slogan of frenzy, the last stop. And the victim of course is to blame.
The heroes (of which the versifying Jícha was one) occasionally found themselves coming to in a shattered store window at the point between plastered and hungover, right at that point where there’s no turning back, waking up to the pain of a body cut by broken glass, stirred to life by police sirens. One even managed to cut his ears off in his cell.
But these heroes, destroying their bodies by jumping through windows with frenzy’s proud feeling of self-satisfaction, were complicated personalities. Neurotics. Artists. Criminals. Masochists. With serious Promethean liver problems. And no eagle around to soar up from the horizon, ready to rend. No one gave a damn about them. They accepted the responsibility and paid their own way. I’d rather pay than say thank you, as Timpo put it. He went Buddhist. Shaved his head and got new teeth. Munches grains with em. Lives somewhere.
Yeah yeah, me and my colleagues would sit around at those gloomy conferences of ours. We guys had it somewhat easier, at least we had to show off for the girls … of our tribe … which made their lives less rich, since any woman with half a brain is naturally kind, gentle, and beautiful, they don’t have to try that hard. Yeah, if we look back at our history, said Čáp one day in conference … it’s no disgrace … to survive, is it? All that massacring … it never stops … the Picardians, the Waldensians, Hus, White Mountain, exterminations, imprisonments, a few executions here an there … censorship an exile … German camps, Soviet camps, Czechoslovak camps, some folks even managed all three … Kulakistan … light bombin, heavy bombin … buzz bombs every which way … nothin but wires all over … an German shepherds … the best people slaughtered, driven out, locked up nonstop … always someone gettin their ass kicked … an you wonder why folks on the street look so bad! There’s no spark, no flair … it’s a flop … Yeah yeah, we nodded our heads, spitting tobacco … an wait’ll the bolshevik goes down an they open up the archives an we get a look at how many spooks there really were … they won’t open em, don’t worry … they’ll just draw up a new social contract an everyone’ll button their lip, better to just forget, close your eyes an move on … Where to? … No way! I can’t forget anymore, I’m not lettin anyone rob me of myself, or my time, ever again … one of us shouted hysterically … come off it, the bolshevik’s not goin down in our lifetime, don’t worry … we won’t go, this is no Tobruk, or even Warsaw, we’ll just keep gettin beaten down over an over an over … here in the Sewer … history? What about the Hussites? Ick, pitooey! Those pigs killed priests. All right … the Battle of Britain!* Cool … but with a foreign army! Milan, King Vladislav!* Cool, cool, that’s ancient stuff … People might remember somethin or somebody … if they hadn’t all gone stupid … Absolutely, there was that one courageous old teacher that that actor played in that movie, one of those high-powered gothic bloodbaths they were always takin us to … Russians killing Germans and everyone else … and each other … me and my classmates sinking down into the darkness while some bestial red bolshevik blabfest or necrofilm unfolded up on screen, the only trick was taking out Bajza, outwitting Hála, and not tipping Glaser off … as I deftly and discreetly occupied the seat next to Věruška … often it worked and then I’d regret there weren’t two of me … to protect her from the other side … and as the body count grew … at first some kids got sick to their stomachs … girls puked … but then we got used to the bazookas and shredded bodies and crumbling buildings and flamethrowers … in retrospect I’d say it had the emotional charge of fireworks … they didn’t take the older kids, since it only provoked ridicule … and ridicule in the relative safety of a dark theater full of screams, giggles, and shouted advice: Kill im! Rat-tat-tat-tat! Fire, Russian scum! Shoot im, stupid! and so on and so forth, and our cowardly teachers, the ones that stopped being Mrs. and turned into Comrade, couldn’t handle us, and then bottles started passing around … we felt up the girls, just the ones that wanted us to, and kissed them too … Bajza handed out pills one time … he’d been on drugs since he was thirteen, picked it up from his bros … and the screening was heavily disrupted by visions, at least for me, Věruška squirmed and tossed uneasily … I didn’t move … but there was also a Moral principle to the whole whacked-out spectacle, and that was the fictitious courageous teacher played by the old actor … A higher moral principle, he told his assembled students after a few of their classmates had been coincidentally killed by Germans: Dear children, to murder a tyrant is not a crime! It was a movie about the Heydrichiad,* which some streets still dream about to this day, a few people killed a tyrant before themselves being killed for treason … in a church! … and we had good reason to wink, cough, and shuffle our feet guardedly, and blow our noses conspiratorially, because that was a good slogan … and the movie ended there, but we went on shuffling our feet and grinning, because we knew very well how it continues in reality, after the movie ends … that teacher said it in front of the whole class, no doubt afterwards someone told on him and they killed him too, it was obvious … but it didn’t matter, that’s the way it goes, and there were approximately as many brats in the class in the movie as there were of us … and I kept waiting for one of my teachers to stand up and say … something … but they all just said the invasion was great, a happy event all in all, and the Russians’re our Big Brothers … yep, that’s how it was back then … we nodded our heads and spat tobacco … someone here and there battled injustice … got high … and Hála learned Chinese and Glaser did time.