by Louis Armand
I tried to remember what’d happened the night before. Faces leering through brain fog. Blake, sitting there in that bar in the Marais exactly as if it’d been arranged. Perhaps he’d never left. Perhaps he’d been with me all along. Like a shadow. At one moment there ahead of me, at the next silently stalking me. Invisible. Anticipating me with every step. Mephistopheles-like.
“Don’t know what’s good for ‘em,” the barman grunted.
“You said it. Nothing like a boot in the arse to give a kid an education.”
He looked at me trying to catch on if I meant something by it. Figured I didn’t and wiped a dirty rag along the counter.
“Boot in the arse is too good for some. Want it handed on a platter. You know,” he hung the rag over his shoulder, “when I was a kid, people did like they were told.”
I knocked back the drink and pushed myself away from the counter.
“Yeah? What were you told?”
He grinned sideways, sliding the empty glass towards the slops in the sink.
“Travail, Famille, Patrie!” his right hand thumping his chest. “Nowadays,” he croaked, “nothing’s worth a damn. You’ll wake up one day with your throat slit.” Casually he popped his glass eye and started polishing it with the rag, moving his jaw side-to-side as he did. A couple more drunks stumbled in from the street. Workers in grease-smeared blue overalls. “Mark my word,” the barman hissed. One of the drunks slapped the bar and called for a drink. “What’s the rush,” the barman called back, thumbing his glass eye into its socket. “Mark my words,” he said again, slapping the dirty rag against the counter.
“Ricard!” the drunk shouted, holding up two fingers. Like it was the barman’s name, and he should go stuff himself. I shouldered my bag and hit the street. Travail, Famille, Patrie. Work, family, fatherland. The Hail Mary of fascist scum everywhere. If it meant anything more than a license to beat a population into submission, I didn’t know what it was. As far as I could see, the price of minding your own business is a kick in the crotch. It’s that kind of world.
*
The place I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. The orchards cut down, vines uprooted, the fields overgrown. The vineyard with the old bathtub where I made love to Regen for the first time. The tree my mother hanged herself from. I might just as well have dreamed it all. Those figments out of which grow the landscapes of childhood, standing out like a ruin in bas-relief. It was as if a part of reality had disappeared.
How long had I been away? Things happen in ten years. Things build, things dissolve. It was October the last time I went back there, searching for the house Regen used to live in. The train station at Božice looking the way it always had. The name painted on the sign above the awning of the station house. It looked ridiculous there, after all this time. God’s backwater. God the non-existent.
I took the same groaning old blue and white bus out past the meatworks. The meatworks outlined against the sky like the crenellated rubble of a toppled fortress, jutting out from some remote place and time. Where Regen’s house had been there was nothing but foundation blocks. The farm buildings, abandoned. Windows smashed, floorboards torn up, all weeds and nettles. The matted remains of dead pigeons lay strewn about the ground.
The bus driver said they’d sold up. The house had been knocked down for a bypass that ran out ten miles before it ever got there. A pair of concrete bridges stood in the middle of the fields, like bits of ancient aqueduct. A smashed winepress stuck up above the grass. I stood there, rooted, staring at it. Ants covered my shoes. A hot wind rustling the tall grass. The sound of bees mourning their lost hives.
I don’t know what I’d expected to find. The world at a standstill and everything the way it once seemed it’d always been. I’d hitchhiked back to Prague from Porte d’Orléans, exhausted and sick. I slept on a mattress in the back of a truck all the way to Strasbourg. Then crossed Germany on the E50. It took two days to get to Prague, dozing on the roadside for an hour at a time.
In Prague I waited, looking for signs. People who might’ve remembered me, people who wouldn’t. I found a gig babysitting a scrapheap on the river. It suited me. No-one asked questions. I could keep an eye on things. Fill in the blanks. I watched people come and go from St Pauli’s. I staked out the old dives. Some of the places weren’t there anymore. The names changed. Buildings stripped out for redevelopment. I went through the phonebook. Nothing. Registry offices. Missing persons. I spent hour after hour standing on Libeňský bridge, watching the greybrown waters churn. The last place I’d seen Regen, standing in the rain on a late August night. Trying to summon her ghost.
Ten years of wanting to believe that everything which ends begins again. That nothing’s ever final. That what’s taken can be taken back. Night after night listening in my mind to the low regular sound of Regen breathing beside me. Brown light through a window. Her clenched fists as she slept. And somewhere, in a dark place the eye can’t see, the shape of my vengeance. A warm voluptuous shape, swollen with hatred.
I wanted the story to complete itself. I’d spent months, years, looking for all the connections. The loose threads. The contradictions. I held the image of Regen in my mind and the more I held her the more remote she seemed. I searched my memory. Struggled to keep the delusions at bay. The nightmare faces. Jungle paranoias. I charted maps of her secret existence. Consulted spirits. Read many books. Bided my time.
*
It was less than a month after I’d returned to Prague that Blake tracked me down. It wasn’t hard. He knew enough of my story to know I wouldn’t be far from the scene of the crime. I was sitting on a green plastic beach chair, on the foredeck of the Greek’s barge, with a fishing line cast out in the river, waiting for something to bite. It’s a way of passing the time. The fish are no good for eating. The river’s toxic – full of dioxins and heavy metals – but not quite enough to kill the bottom-feeders that suck on the river mud. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to take a swim, though plenty have.
The sun was just showing over the tree-tops when Blake rode out of the grey morning on his motorcycle. Face like a kabuki mask, eyes drawn-in, unreal. A black leather jacket with a bulge under the left shoulder. Silver hair standing on end. I looked up from my tackle and found myself staring into a camera lens. Shutter click and whir. He climbed up onto the deck and stood beside me, camera slung around his neck, and took in the scenery.
“Dobré,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a packet of Gitanes and lighting it. “Tout va bien, uh?” He picked a shred of tobacco from his teeth. “View could definitely be worse.”
The autumn trees had already begun shedding along the riverbanks, but there was still plenty of yellow and red to make the scene into a picture. The barge lay in a brown inlet, with a slipway at one end and a used car lot behind it surrounded by razor wire. The view in the other direction took in the river and a plateau where the Bohnice madhouse was. High-rise communist-era tenements made a grey barricade against the sky.
Something tugged at one of the lines, but it was only a tease. We stared at the water for a while to see what might materialise then gave up and went inside. The gloom below decks immediately enveloped us. Boots on steel rungs. Blake coughed. Flashback to a ship far out at sea. Fog on the water. The low throbbing of the ship’s engine. Sound of a ghost crew moving about the companionways. Flashforward to the galley, grey light through portholes illuminating a cut-out menagerie of faces pasted onto the walls.
Blake stubbed out his cigarette, uninterested. I found a half-empty bottle of slivovice on a shelf and some glasses.
“Keeping busy.” It didn’t sound like a question.
Blake took a chair and sat with his feet crossed on the table, face in the shadows. I poured the brandy. We drank.
“You alone here?”
I shrugged. It was obvious enough. Blake lit another cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. We drank some more.
“It’s like a submarine,” he said all of a sudden, waving his c
igarette at the walls. “You know what Freud would’ve said.”
“Do I care?”
“Anyone ever tell you that Freud was a Moravák, like you?”
“Freud was an Austrian Jew is what the books say.”
“It’s true,” he said, rubbing his bottom lip. “He was born in Příbor. His father was a locksmith. Fancy that.”
“What’s that prove?”
“He committed suicide in London.”
“Some people commit suicide, some people just die. Marx died in London.”
“Marx was a fraud.”
“Freud was a junky. So what?”
“You’ve got no sophistication, my friend.” Blake grinned. His teeth yellow-grey in the half-light. “Do you know what your problem is?”
“No,” I said, pouring out more slivovice. “But I bet you didn’t come all this way to tell me.”
“Your Freud, you know what he said – that every man harbours a secret desire to murder his father and rape his mother.”
“No kidding? Any schoolboy could tell you that.”
“But not every schoolboy does it,” he said.
“Amen.”
I stared through the cigarette smoke at Blake’s face, barely seeing him at all. Only a shape. An accident of contrasting light.
“The point is, muchacho, that we’re all just machines,” he said, taking the bottle and pouring himself another glass. “All instinct and sex and unconsciousness. It’s everything humanity is and does. And everything it doesn’t do, also.” He tipped the glass back. Sat it down on the scratched table top beside the unlabelled bottle. “All of so-called western civilisation’s a fucking machine. It began with the evolution of protozoa. In the beginning was the machine, dividing and multiplying. Replicating, mutating, feeding the slime from which our forebears crawled forth, cast off their gills to reinvent themselves as that eating, shitting, killing and fucking machine called humanity. And we act like we invented the idea.”
“Since when did you care about civilisation?”
“Do you know what I’ve found out?” He took in a lungful of smoke and blew it in my face. I waved the smoke away. Stood up and went over to the sink. “God’s a machine, too.” I wasn’t really interested in Blake’s philosophy, but that’d never held him back in the past. “A fucking machine, muchacho. A fucking machine.”
I found old coffee grounds and poured lukewarm water from the kettle over them. The result was what you’d expect, but I drank it anyway. The slivovice was beginning to send me to sleep. Or perhaps it was Blake who was sending me to sleep. God and philosophy. Martians. UFOs. What did it matter? We act as we believe, and contradict that also. The world goes on. Nothing pays us any mind.
“When I use this,” he said, fingering his camera, “it’s all there, inside. The ghost in the machine. The divine spirit. God, evolution, the cosmos.” He laughed too quietly for me to tell the shape of his laughter. “Just like you’re a ghost,” he went on, still laughing, “inside this boat. Look at you,” he said, though I couldn’t see his face.
There was a clinking of glass as Blake helped himself to another refill. I stared into the bottom of my empty coffee cup, but there was no-one down there to stare back at me.
14. PROVIDENCE
It feels like a long time since it got dark. Time, like a train whose doors are locked, coursing through the night without ever stopping, without ever reaching a destination. Outside, the world’s a shapeless blur sinking into shadow. A thing that can’t ever be grasped.
Being alone was never hard for me. I’m what other people call an only child. We both were. I never knew why. My mother said I’d been an accident, as though I should’ve been grateful for it. But that’s what I was, the sum total of my reason for being – an accident. When it comes down to it, you could say everything in the world’s an accident. My mother, however, believed in creation, the divine mystery, providence. Had the world not been what it is, she’d never have chosen to have me at all. I think of what Regen chose in Znojmo. A dead foetus in a toilet. Could’ve ended up like that myself. If I keep the image in my mind too long, I see it come alive. Its face animates into expression. Its eyes slit open. And it knows who I am.
But what’s there to know? I look at my own reflection and all I experience is a mixture of fear, hate, disgust. Jungle instincts. I know that it doesn’t have to be like that, but it is. Something lurking beneath the surface of the night. I used to watch my mother pray to her God, the God of little children, of sacrificial lambs. The God of Abraham. Down on her knees in the dark, hands together, supplicant. Had she but eyes to see the Beast she coupled with. Or did I have the picture wrong? It wasn’t like that? It wasn’t her?
“Religion,” Blake once said, “is for sinners, as morality is for hypocrites.”
Well it’s easy to act wise. Time, they say, still has a habit of making fools of us. That face in the mirror, distorted out of recognition. After all these years, I’ve even come to look like him. The father in the son. Should I have mercy on him? Or should I murder him again while I still have the chance?
*
Had his eyes been knives he would’ve slashed me to pieces. Rooted in the doorway of the room above St Pauli’s, hands leaden at my sides. I stood there, cretinised and staring, trapped inside a reflex that wouldn’t release me. Regen, lying on the couch, legs spread, watching now with a kind of detached curiosity. They both looked like they were waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened. The gloom deepened. Street sounds filtered through the window. Drunken voices from the brothel below. And then the sound of my father unlooping his belt, in a calm, continuous motion.
The first blow caught me across the throat. I raised my hands, but too late. The blows came one after another, in a dark fury. I staggered as he kicked me. Sunk down into a huddle, arms crossed over my head. He whipped me until my whole back burned and kept whipping me.
I went numb, detached from everything, like an eye floating in the corner of the room. I watched my father bring his knee down between my shoulders and pull my head back by the hair. I felt the belt-leather make a noose. And then he was dragging me down the stairs by the neck. An old woman’s shrill voice shouted obscenities from the level above. At the bottom landing the belt loosened. I felt my father’s breath against my ear:
“You tragic little cunt.”
His footsteps receded back up the stairway. Laughter. The sound of the apartment door closing.
I lay there breathing hard. The minutes passed. It seemed like hours. I pulled myself up from the tiles and sat in the half-dark, my back to the wall. There were noises from above. Remote, indistinct noises.
I’d been drinking before, but now I was sober. I stared at my hands. They seemed wrong, like hands of rubber. I tried to clench my fists, but it didn’t work. Thoughts struggled and failed to cohere. The tiles made lopsided patterns on the floor.
Eventually a light came on in the stairwell and then footsteps again. I sat there, unmoving, hands palm-up on my knees like a beggar’s. The footsteps came to a halt in front of me. I could see the patterning of the leather workman’s boots. Boots I’d known all my life. I waited for the blow, but there was none. Only the jangling of coins spilling across my hands onto the floor and a voice weighted with sarcasm:
“The pleasure was all mine.”
*
The door of the room was open. Regen sat on the edge of the couch with her feet tucked under her. I could read the contempt in her face. She barely looked at me, but when she did it was like sticking long fine needles into my eyes. It seemed like everything should’ve ended then, but it didn’t. Our tale had still some way to go. Little Hans and little Greta – lost in the woods – wolves howling in the night all around us.
There was no choice now but to leave – to find somewhere new where my father couldn’t track us down. I suspected Regen’s aunt of informing. There were ugly scenes. Regen said nothing. Eventually it occurred to me to go to the one place he’d never suspect
. There was an old cottage by the lake near Božice that Regen had often told me about. Someone from her parent’s congregation owned it. They used to have picnics out there and go swimming. But the owner had moved to Canada and the place hadn’t been visited in years. It was a good bet no-one would be living there. We’d be right in my father’s shadow and he’d never know it.
I began plotting my revenge in earnest. Regen watched impassively as I packed our belongings, the little we had, never leaving the couch. How many fuckings had it witnessed in its long career, I wondered, as I stuffed our lives into bags. Saying over and over in my head that the story wasn’t meant to end this way and maybe it was up to me after all to rewrite this bit, only I knew good and well there aren’t any happy endings in this world. Hänsel and Gretel don’t just find their way out of the woods by magic, bearing the dead witch’s treasure straight into the arms of their axeman father who really loved them all along. Tears in their eyes. Sound up on violins. Roll credits. And now for a preview of next week’s show.
It was night already when I crossed the bridge into Libeň and found an old Škoda unlocked outside a bookie joint. Hot-wiring it was easy. Back at St Pauli’s I crammed everything we owned in the back seat. At first Regen wouldn’t leave. Her aunt swore at me. Accused me of pimping Regen on the sly. I thought that was rich coming from her, but she shut up when I shoved a fistful of notes in her face. I could easily have broken the sour bitch’s neck, but I’d had enough of my own heroics for one day.
“It’s time to go,” I told Regen. But she still wouldn’t move. I reached down to take her by the hand and she cringed. I said it again and she stood up, keeping a distance. Her movements were jarred, as though she’d frozen up somewhere inside. A mechanism that’d broken. Voicelessly she walked downstairs to the car. I closed the door behind her when she got in, eyes gone dead, staring straight off into nothing. Everything had come to this.
