Zorka understood that phrase, “I love you,” from the rest of the mumbling, and would snuff “bullshit” under her breath whenever she’d hear it, because she had never in her life, ever, seen a man and a woman say “I love you” to each other, where it wasn’t a threat or something you do in the hallway to show your neighbours you are reliable tenants.
Still, the films played with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, with Nicolas Cage who won the lottery and gave half to the waitress and then they fell in love, Tom Cruise, Renée Zellweger, single mums who get saved by do-good attractive bachelors, Hugh Grant rambling in a British accent, scene changes with tinkling piano music, Richard Gere pensive, concerned, Julia Roberts a sex worker who charmingly shocks the upper classes. Then everyone laughing, even all the old people, who are clean, their grey hair well brushed, rings on their spotted wrinkled fingers, pearls in their ears, lipstick to the ridges of their lips, perfect rows of prosthetic teeth, looking around at each other, smiling and patting each other’s thighs.
Do you like sad music?
Zorka snuck out regularly in the evenings and walked up to the tall thin electric poles around the railroad tracks where there were foresty patches, just beyond where the road turned. She waded into the branches until she was submerged and hidden. She sat down in the dirt and put her arms around her knees, and her hands into the two holes of her jeans, stared and listened. There was the sound of tyres over the road, a car making a slow turn around the corner, its headlights brushing through the branches. The wind rustled through and the sky, like a pool of dark ink, trembled above as if having to hold up its own liquid. Another car passed, with its windows down, the music pulsing with the fussy voice of Britney Spears singing against the reverb.
Then the car turned, taking the song with it.
Zorka sunk her head between her knees and closed her eyes. She thought it was still that same pop song stringing through her head, but the rhythm pulled and stretched with every round, the voice seemed unsteadily full again. It was her mother’s voice, singing that old Czech song about love she used to sing as if telling mercy where to find her…
Ach, není, není tu
She used to sing it to Zorka like a lullaby, and even though the song was more for her, she still held little Zorka against her chest, her legs noodling as she tried to stand up, Marja kissing her little girl just above the ear, baby Zorka giggling toothless with a full heart, and Marja singing:
“…What is ploughing without a plough…
…Loving without kisses…
…They are always giving me what I do not love…
Ach, není, není tu…”
When Zorka came home from the forest, she grabbed the remote and pressed power. Missy Elliott was pumping her knuckles at the screen, just above the MTV logo, then opening up her hands, one long white fingernail at a time.
I told you not to be weird
Yeah, the last time someone called me loony, he got a quick one in the eye socket – Ludek. It was my last month in Prague before it all went to shit, Ludek was right outside our school and he whispered it at me, so I just balled up my fist, punched him in the eye and kept on walking. He lost his sight in that eye for the day, and his head puffed up, and of course his ass-kissing mama freaked out, and marched right into school, and my papka was dead already so my mamka was code red beneath her quiet and respectful widowhood. While Ludek’s mama was lamenting about her baby boy’s eyesight, my mamka completely stole the show, curling in, weeping, then springing out her hand slapping and scratching me like a wild cat, screaming, “I told you not to be weird!”
The principal and Ludek’s mama got her off me and I shrugged and told her in my good-girl voice, “Sorry Mamka.”
Then there was our geography teacher, Mr Bolshakov, who was always bringing the topic of Jews into lessons that didn’t concern them, and kept calling up Isaac for oral reports on the Transnistrian territories, that little Romanian boy with his dark curly locks and round caramel cheeks like a gypsy-cherub. I told Janka he probably wants to fuck Isaac and she said, “No way, he hates Jews,” and I said, “Duh, Janka, hate’s like a globe that spins all the way around, that’s why men go exploring islands full of dark-skinned peoples, and why they all wanna take naps on women’s soft boobs and then smack them, they fuck what they hate.” Janka took her time with her thoughts. She said I got a perspective on life that’s looking for trouble so it comes around for me and proves me right.
Mr Bolshakov himself was an implant from the Soviet bloc, and now that the Soviet tanks were gone and we were all proud Czechs, we didn’t like him much anyway. But, somehow, he served as one of the commissioners for the oral exams of the maturia, the final exam at the end of high school to get into university.
Mr Bolshakov had a Czech wife and a nice house and he was untouchable. He continued things in the old way – bribes, cash and gold preferably – he didn’t care much for promises or favouritism, he just wanted to get it in the real and wrap it up in his yellowing newspaper from the 1980s when this was still his country, and stuff it in his old army boots.
I knew cause I broke in and had a little peek for myself. I was curious about that top-dog Ruský, what can I say. I found where he kept those old army boots (in the closet, below his trousers and shirts, predictable dumb-ass), I pulled out his stash, but then he came home unexpectedly, had to think quick, so I slid myself under the bed.
I was pressed like a chicken breast, between the floor and the low metal springs, waiting for him to leave, except that he kept muttering around his bedroom, then he sat on the edge of the bed, and the springs almost collapsed my gut, and whether it was the powers above having a go at me or just his afternoon routine, Mr Bolshakov started rubbing himself off, emitting ointments of moans, all the while the springs pushing in and out of my gut, till I thought I’d wet myself or shit myself or split my spleen. But he finished off and stood up and finally left the room.
I slid out of that space, then felt it coming, so I pulled the bed cover down and vomited onto the sheet, then closed the comforter over that spot, ha ha.
Then I went back to those army boots and reached into my pocket and got out the matches.
Before the police or the school got whiff of it, I ran back to our building and pulled Janka into the bathroom with me and locked the door. She knew I’d done something irreversible. I said hush for a minute. We were squeezed in against the toilet and we waited in silence, to hear if there were any footsteps in the hallway. There weren’t any, so I unzipped my jeans and plunged my hand in and fished about in my cunt and pulled it out for show. Ta-da, I showed Jana the tight wad of money wrapped in plastic.