by Steve Weiner
You killed Dzidka
The only one you ever loved
If you had not touched the pole
You would not be a murderer
But Wicek, Wicek Szczesny
You touched the pole
The Ukrainian slid off the French woman’s wet belly. She took her finger out of a fold in a red carpet. Her eyes misted.
“It had no Form …”
The French woman got up. She was still nude. She filled black cups.
“There is veronal for suicide,” she said. “Luminal, also for suicide.”
The aristocrats drank. They stumbled after Wicek who hauled Dzidka’s coffin into a blizzard. The Russian prince tried to masturbate. He laughed.
“I’m …. tooooooo … tired ….”
Sun burst at midnight.
“Niepamiec!” the Ukrainian said. “Oblivion!”
Ectoplasm shimmered in black bushes.
“Come on, Dzidka,” Wicek said. “Or we’ll never be sane.”
The nude French women stood in the chalet doorway. A snow-halo glistened on her hair.
“Quel sale pays que la Pologne cette triste patrie,” she said. “What a dirty country is Poland, this sad country.”
Wicek hauled Dzidka up the Tatras. They slid down broken shale. It was Czechoslovakia.
Wicek carried Dzidka to a spa at Nowy Smokowycz. Czechs held towels for Germans. He followed rail tracks to Poprad. It was afternoon, overcast. Landsturm officers took cognac and ham out of the Hotel National. A locomotive chugged to Prague in a foggy valley far below.
“We hallucinated, didn’t we, Dzidka?” he said. “But love is stronger than opium.”
Wicek wedged Dzidka in a tree.
“Nobody survives it, either.”
Wicek re-crossed the Tatras and joined the Polish paramilitary.
HARD TRAVELING
NICHOLAS GOT a job as a traveling salesman with a metallurgical company, Firma Braunschweig AG, Munich.
“Vigor, Herr Bremml!”
Nicholas stood.
“Vigor!”
Nicholas celebrated at Munich’s Hofbrauhaus. Old rifles hung on walls. He ordered schnitzel, buttered potatoes with dill, and beer. He went out. Munich smoked. Gray-coated police rode chestnut mares. He shadow-punched.
Nicholas went to a bordello.
Hilda Kobzda brought eggnog through a beaded curtain. She wore a leopard-skin robe. Her hair was dyed blond, piled high in a leopard-skin kerchief. A cold breeze came into the flesh-warm room. On a dresser, ceramic faggot bearers trudged to Calvary. Nicholas drank.
“Tell me your story, Hilda.”
“I was a private woman,” she said, “in Frankfurt am Main, to a military man. I cleaned his boots. I cooked his meals. I escaped to Bremen and worked for Venus there. I called myself ‘a widow of a young man,’ or ‘the wife of a sea captain far away.’ But, of course, everybody knew what I was. The police took turns screwing me.”
“Were you infected?”
“No.”
“Were you pregnant?”
“No.”
“Go on.”
“I was a street girl, a night bird. I was arrested by Paragraph Thirteen. Welfare parasite. I became salopp—drunkard—”
“Many do.”
“In Aachen I worked on Steinstrasse. I did handwork in fairground booths. In Hamburg I worked old and new Jungfernsteig, on the Esplanade, at the wall between Lombardsbrücke and Steintor and on Schwiegerstrasse.”
“Did you know Agatha?”
“No.”
“She created a furore.”
“You thought so.”
“Go on.”
“I was sentenced to six weeks in prison, where I learned embroidery.”
Nicholas turned the lamp shade. Painted scenes turned. Alps turned to meadows. Snow turned to rain. Love turned to hate.
“Go on.”
“I worked between hanging blankets on the Elbe dikes,” Hilda said.
“Where else?”
“In carriages, in bakeries.”
“Bakeries …”
“Covered in white dust.”
“Dust …”
“On a wood table.”
“Wood …”
Hilda washed her hands with lilac soap. Nicholas got up. He washed and dressed.
“A spasm,” he said. “Who understands these things?”
“Would you like another drink?”
“No.”
“Is it raining?” Nicholas said.
“No.”
Nicholas signed a contract with IG Farben, which provided chemicals for rubber at Monowitz, Upper Silesia. He went to factories in the German-speaking Erzgebirge Mountains. He ate Karlsbad wafers at a café and drank Zichoriengebrau, which Czechs called hanacka.
Nicholas picked up Czech girls.
“Ahoj!”
“Ahoj!”
Nicholas went to a spa, guest of Firma Braunschweig. Women ladled sulfurous water into mugs with drinking holes in the handles. Children sang in an arcade painted with seamen and soldiers.
In Old German script:
Zum Wohle kommt die leidenden Menschheit.
To health comes suffering mankind.
Nicholas went to the baths. Flesh of sedentary men bulged from white towels. He stepped into the shower. Pressing or utilizing the knobs is requested. He pressed a knob. Steam clouded the skylight.
“There’s a lot of iron in the water,” a Czech said, in German. “One goes in Czech and comes out German.”
“I am German,” Nicholas said.
“Pardon.”
“I was not offended.”
“Are you a baleonologist?”
“No,” Nicholas said. “But I like to go to spas after I’ve been with women.”
“Is that often?”
“Very often.”
“Why go through life blind?”
“Exactly.”
A fat man came in.
“Podebrady, on the Elbe, is also a good spa.”
“I recommend Tarnowic,” a Polish shipyard worker said. “The girls there have a strain of dark. Turkish, maybe, or Jew, or Hungarian.”
“You excite yourself,” Nicholas said.
“Because he mentioned Podebrady.”
“But be careful,” Nicholas said.
“Why?”
“Women confuse men,” Nicholas said.
“True.”
“Soul becomes phantasmagoria.”
“And soul—”
“Is our only possession,” Nicholas said.
Men in bathing caps nodded.
“Basta,” Nicholas said. “Enough of women. We’re here to bathe and form friendships.”
Nicholas went to a nap cottage. Sunlight moved on a parquet floor. There was a fragrance of pine resin. Two pitchers, one empty, stood by a basin. A Czech woman came in. She had brown eyes, brown hair, and wide hips. She carried linen. She smiled and plumped a pillow.
“Sladké samotiny,” she said. “Sweet solitude …”
“Jo.”
“Were you dreaming?”
“I was,” Nicholas said.
“Of what?”
“Love.”
“What kind?”
“Love that ended with the universe.”
She smiled again.
“Taková láska,” she said. “Such a love.”
“Jo.”
“Jako v lazni surchnice,” she said. “As though bathed in it.”
“Yes. It was like that.”
Mountain breezes stirred strands of hair at the back of her neck.
“You are a beautiful woman.”
She raised a forefinger.
“Zakásano,” she said. “Forbidden.”
“What?”
“To touch.”
“I didn’t touch you,” Nicholas said.
“But you wanted to.”
She left. Nicholas woke at night: fireworks. Mountains were cold. Stars were bright. Fountains moved in time to mus
ic. Nicholas went to the casino.
He took a bus to Gablonz. Factories made deluxe glass, buttons for India. He stopped at the Liberec fair and drank with German nationals. They wandered Church Street. A rounded mountain was covered in snow.
A German pointed.
“Schneekoppe!”
Nicholas raised his arms.
“Source of our Elbe!”
Firma Braunschweig AG Munich fired Nicholas.
“You’re not paid to drink, Herr Bremml.”
“No.”
“Even with Germans.”
“No, but—”
“Dismissed!”
Nicholas looked for work at Skoda Armaments in Plzeň Flat cars carried military goods under tarpaulin but there was no work. He applied at the distilleries. Czechs had all the workers they needed. Nicholas hung around athletic fields. Sokol, sport training for young people, practiced mass gymnastics. Nicholas watched.
“—perfect bodies—”
Nicholas rented a room in Beroun.
Beroun was filled with Deutschböhmen—German Bohemians. They stood at kiosks eating wursts and speaking German but the country was not German anymore.
Nicholas wandered Beroun. The Czech Heavy Athletics Union trained. Wrestlers with handlebar mustaches lifted weights. Workers from the East hacked beef. There were old scribblings: Down with the monarchy! Long live the Republic! Out with kings and emperors! It got gusty. Rudé Právo blew into eské Slovo.
A pretty woman walked with her sweetheart. She wore a pink garnet.
Nicholas went to a restaurant with a vaulted roof. Grilled duck, paprika and potatoes, chicken Kiev, steamed.
A waiter came.
“Is beer desired?”
“Jo.”
Nicholas drank the beers of Bohemia: Budjovické, Pražsky Prasdroj, Prague Urquelle.
A veteran of the Czech Legion came in.
“Is the gentleman German?”
“Yes.”
“However, may I sit?”
“Of course.”
He sat.
“German is a difficult language,” the Czech veteran said.
“Polish is worse.”
“You speak Polish?”
“A bit.”
“How did you learn?”
“The hard way.”
“You know,” the Czech veteran said, “this language business causes trouble.”
“It does.”
“A Czech says strom. A German says baum.”
“Though I,” Nicholas said, “being from Hamburg, say Boom.”
“But it’s still a tree.”
“Exactly.”
“A Czech says šaty,” the Czech veteran said. “A German says Damenkleid.”
“Though I, being from Hamburg, say kleed.”
“But it’s still women’s clothes.”
“Precisely.”
Nicholas and the Czech got drunk.
“Let us invent a mutual language,” Nicholas said. “Drembich will mean ‘hungry.’ Bardzillo will mean ‘thirsty.’”
“Agreed!”
“Though, in fact, they don’t mean anything at all.”
“And krange.”
“Yes?”
“Will mean whatever you want. Like a wild card.”
They clinked glasses.
“There’s not much to language, really,” Nicholas said, “once you analyze it.”
Nicholas left. A Czech boy cartwheeled,
“Negative days are over!”
Nicholas bought Das Buch des Liebeskünstlers, The Book of the Love Artist. He read it in his room. Affections of youth could be recaptured. The man-type of splendid manliness knew the art. Such a man crossed emotional barriers. Such a man knew how a woman hurts, where she hurts, when she hurts.
Nicholas went onto the balcony. The Berounka River was deep green under purple cliffs. River lights flickered. Silhouettes—soldiers—rode a barge.
In the morning, Herr Zwiegler, hotel proprietor, knocked.
“Nazdar!” he said “Heil!”
He gave Nicholas a newspaper: Polední list.
“What’s that?”
Herr Zwiegler winked and touched his nose.
“Oculus paroculus, ein Schnabel ist kein Ziegenfuss,” he said. “A big nose is not a sheep’s foot.”
“Eh?”
“Negation to its logical conclusions.”
“Eh?”
“Destruction and disintegration!”
“What?”
Herr Zwiegler whispered.
“Our little Czech anti-Semitism!”
“Oh!”
Nicholas got a job as a traveling buyer of Czech folklore.
“You must be quick, Herr Bremml,” the dealer said.
“Jo!”
“English collectors are everywhere.”
“A devious race.”
Nicholas traveled an old military road, the Kulmer Weg, and bought embroidered coats and feathered hats from Germans at Nollendorfer Pass. He hiked to the Chods, Slavs who spoke their own dialect. He bought a dog’s-head banner and a Chod fighting ax.
Nicholas rested at Theresienstadt. He strolled by the commandant’s house, arsenal, weapons room, mortuary. Women flattened sheets with boxes full of stones. Nicholas carried his folklore back to Beroun.
“Excellent, Herr Bremml!”
“Danke.”
“And a little extra commission. We are pleased.”
“Danke!”
Nicholas went to the Riesengebirge Mountains. Storms blew snow sideways from peaks on the Polish border. He climbed Schneekoppe. Snowbells, daffodils, goosefoots poked through snow. He sloshed into Elbe Meadow. He waved his shirt at Germany.
“Where are you, Alois? Do you still love me?”
He twirled the shirt.
“Karl! Have you killed anybody yet?”
He grew still.
“Agatha …”
He slumped.
“Agatha,” Nicholas said. “What happened to us?”
Nicholas caught a fever. He slept two days in a sheep herder’s hut. He went back to Beroun.
“You’re not paid to climb mountains,” the dealer said. “You’re paid to buy folklore.”
“But as Germans—”
“You’re fired.”
“—we are people of sentiment—”
Nicholas became an independent buyer of folklore. He carried his suitcase to the Tatra Mountains.
The Tatra Mountains were also on the Polish border but taller. High Tatra peaks were permanently snow-covered. Nicholas walked paths to old German resorts: Altschmecks and Neuschmecks. He bought vests from Picards who held women as common property. He went to a Bavarian-style restaurant. He rapped the red tablecloth.
“Hey! I’m starving! Is anybody serving?”
A waiter came.
“Where are you from?”
“Hamburg.”
“When did you leave?”
“I was nineteen.”
“Did you leave a sweetheart?”
“How did you know?”
The waiter squeezed Nicholas’s shoulder.
“What does anyone remember from the eyes and mind of age nineteen?” he said. “None of us is fully formed. We may catch glimpses of possibilities as we listen and observe and even then we haven’t the wisdom to really understand.”
“No.”
“And it hurts the rest of our lives.”
Nicholas bought needlework, puppets, and rugs from Gorals, mountain Poles. Romanies camped on a lake by Mount Gerlachovka. A Romany twirled a bamboo cane,
“Nankny rackly?” he said.
“What?”
“Pretty girl?”
A twelve-year-old girl, black hair, black eyes, came onto the steps of a red wagon.
“I wait in the woods.”
Afterward Nicholas went to Moravia. He sold folklore at Moravian markets.
“Puppets! Handmade by Gorals!”
He stayed in German-language islands in Moravia
, then tramped into Slovakia. He stopped in a Jewish village. Linen shirts were sold, microscopes, whistles, boiling machines, railroad pillows. There was a puppet play: Jánošik and His Happy Bandits.
Nicholas set up outside the stalls.
“Embroidered vests!”
Jews bought nothing. Nicholas went to a café. A bearded mutton griller wiped a steel spit.
“Cheer up,”
“Business is bad,” Nicholas said.
“Životní cyklus,” the mutton-griller said. “The cycle of life.”
“I suppose.”
“Birds that flew don’t fly anymore.”
“No. They sure don’t.”
Nicholas drank beer.
“Sing me a love song, Jew.”
The mutton griller cleared his throat.
Red, red rose
Red, red wine
Two pretty lips
Pressed to mine
Nicholas drank more.
Like a bird in the night
What came over me?
Two blue eyes
And eternity
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “That’s what it was like.”
A Jewish woman came to Nicholas. She had black hair and heavy-lidded eyes.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Bremml. What’s yours?”
“Routenberg.”
“Routenberg?”
“It’s a military name.”
Nicholas laughed.
“The Jewish army!”
“Are you married?” she said.
“I’m not married.”
“I know.”
“I almost was, though. I think.”
She touched his face, fingers curved.
“Do you like my touch?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like my hair?”
“Racially black,” Nicholas said.
“My lips?”
“You’re not fooling me.”
“What?”
“Just because I don’t speak your language,” Nicholas said, “doesn’t mean I don’t know what is going on.”
“Come. Share my good hours.”
She led him up a white external stairway. It was twilight. Field workers trooped to a wheat field, hoes on their shoulders. They sang.
Holy … holy …
Routenberg opened a door. They went in. There was a bed and a patchwork quilt, blue walls and a carpet. Nicholas ate Jewish cakes: honey, sesame, banana, and date.
“Tell me something about Jews,” he said.
“What?”
“Do they fly at night?”
