I heard the door behind me open.
I turned and looked. Two large men came into the room. The younger one looked like Sylvester Stallone would look if he were Arnold Schwarzenegger. The older one looked like his father—the same but thicker, going gray, and not so nice. Thor and Odin with short hair on a bad day.
“I hope,” I said, “that she isn’t your girlfriend. Or wife. Or sister.”
They advanced. She retreated. The two musclemen grabbed me. One on each side. They picked me up. Quite easily. They carried me across the room. Then they defenestrated me.
DISLOCATION
I LANDED ON A LAWYER.
He had been very happy, drunk, wending his way along the streets of Prague. It’s astonishing how much detail it’s possible to notice even during a short flight. He froze when he heard the glass breaking. He looked up when he heard me shriek. They tossed me out headfirst. With my arms out in front as if I could catch myself or protect myself, I must have looked like an audition for Superman VI.
A tree branch went by. I tried to snatch it. I missed.
There is a blank spot around the actual point of contact. When the blank spot was over, I was lying on the sidewalk. He was sitting there, staring at his foot.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Ah, you Englisher?” he said.
“No, American,” I said.
“Very good. I like American. I am called Jaroslav. I am attorney.”
I couldn’t remember whether I was Cochrane, the Irish priest, or Applebaum, the Canadian contractor, or Cassella, the American PI. “Call me Tony,” I said. I tried to stand up. And made it. But I wasn’t standing right. My left side was around toward my front and I was twisted as if I were attempting an imitation of the Hunchfront of Notre Dame.
“I am betrunken,” he said.
“Sprechan ze deutsch?” I said, because his English sounded very Czech.
“Ja, bah,” he said.
I wanted very much to be understood. “I need to get to the hospital, I think,” I said in German, slowly.
“Talk to me in English,” he said. “German is for barbarians. America is a great country. I think so. My English is terrible. I must practice. It is so small, my English.”
“Sure,” I said. “Hos-pi-tal. Where is hos-pi-tal?”
“Never before has a man flow to me out of sky. Flow to me at my foots. Come we are pub, going. Going or gone?” He started pulling himself up.
“No pub going,” I said. “Hos-pi-tal. Go to hospital.”
“Ohhhhh,” he moaned, and turned pale under his beard. “My foots.”
“Hospital?” I said.
“Come,” he said.
He hobbled out into the street, favoring one foot. I shuffled, favoring one shoulder. Jaroslav was handling it much better than I was. He was sloshed to the point of anesthesia. I was going into shock, shaking and sweating. He hailed a cab. It was a Skoda. We helped each other to it. It took us to the hospital. A Lincoln Continental or a Rolls-Royce is designed to insulate passengers from the rough and tumble of the world around them. A Skoda is to automobiles what Socialist Realism is to art. Every bump shot up my body into my misplaced shoulder. The two of us clung to each other and moaned over every cobblestone and pothole in Prague. I was begging the driver to go slowly, Jaroslav was screaming for him to go faster.
Jaroslav knew the doctors. He knew the nurses. He spoke to everyone with a drunk’s expansive style and injured man’s plaintive need. We were seen far faster than I would have been seen in an emergency room in New York and almost as fast as they would have got to me in Austria.
The doctor spotted what was wrong with me from across the room. He spoke only Czech and Russian, but Jaroslav translated. “Good news. First the injection, before you even have to move.”
A nurse and the doctor and Jaroslav all helped drag my shirt off me. Every move did violence to my system. When it was off I could see that my arm was hanging in front of my chest instead of from my side.
“Is this your first dislocation?” the doctor asked through Jaroslav.
It was. In a dislocation a bone comes out of its socket. All the muscles, tendons, and ligaments attached to it are stretched out of place, sometimes torn. They try, with all their might, to pull the bone back. But they can’t because another bone, in this case a shoulder, is in the way. If pain were a puddle, the puddle had now risen and engulfed me from my feet to mideyeball.
I sat folded over at the middle, letting my arm hang as limp as I could make it. They gave me a shot. A muscle relaxant. I watched my hand as it rested against the floor. I twisted my head sideways, toward Jaroslav. They’d taken his shoe and sock off. His foot was swelling and changing colors.
“The house I came out of …” I said to him.
“Yes, where you flow to me,” he said.
“Do you know who it belongs to?”
“To the people,” he said. He thought that was funny. “Soon private property we are having. All day, new laws. Any day?”
“Every day,” I said.
“New laws every day. Will need lawyers, American companies. Yes?”
“Yes, American companies need lawyers.”
“To X ray we are gone,” he said.
The doctor and nurse were back. I could see their feet. They had a crutch for Jaroslav. The doctor spoke from above in Czech. Jaroslav translated.
“Follow him.”
I couldn’t straighten up. I slid forward from the chair. I walked like a duck. I was bent double, my arm hanging from the center of my chest, my neck twisted so I could peer forward.
“He wants to know if you can see where you are going,” Jaroslav translated.
“Don’t worry. I can see all the way up to his ankles,” I said.
I followed the doctors’ feet down the hall. The treatment for a dislocation is simple. Once an X ray is taken to make sure nothing else is wrong, someone takes hold of the dislocated part and pulls it. They pull it far enough away from the body that it can make its way around the lip of the socket and slip back in. Your muscles are stupid. They don’t understand they have to let go in order to get where they want to be. So they fight it all the way. That’s what the injection is for and I suppose it would have been even worse without it. Though that is difficult to imagine.
I screamed. Without shame or self-consciousness.
When it goes in, it’s over. Someone pulls the plug on the puddle of pain. I don’t mean that it didn’t hurt. It did. But it was merely hurt. Like a cracked rib or a kick in the head. It wasn’t something that enveloped my entire existence and made me walk like a duck.
They gave me a sling. They gave Jaroslav a cast and crutch.
“I am sorry about your foot,” I said.
“All about America you will be telling me,” he said. “Pub I know—pub still open.”
I was already pretty stoned from the muscle relaxant. I am not quite sure why or how, but we ended up back at Jaroslav’s socialist workers’ paradise apartment. His wife seemed very nice. A tolerant person. I fell asleep on the couch.
When I got up I called Marie Laure directly. I had to hear her voice. Either because I thought it would heal me or because my breakability spoke to me of their fragility and I needed to be reassured.
“I’m alive and virtuous,” I said when she answered the phone.
“Anna Geneviève rolled over,” she said. “Then she did it again.”
“All by herself?” I asked. “You didn’t help her?” She swore she hadn’t. “And I missed it,” I said. Then I asked what happened when Hayakawa found out I was gone.
“ ’E throw a fit,” Marie Laure said.
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “ ’E throw it in Japanese.”
“Is he all right now?”
“Your mother spoke sharply to ’im and made ’im get control of ’imself. Then I showed ’im the electric bug in the car and told ’im ’e ’ad one also. Then we told ’im it was not to trick
’im, but to trick the people following. Then ’e changed ’is anger into admiration for you as a detective. It was all very quick. Quick explosion, quick control. You are right about ’im. Like spring snow. The wrong noise, the wrong freeze, something, and voilà—avalanche.”
“What about Chip Sheen?”
“You mean Peaches?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is okay,” she said.
“It doesn’t sound okay,” I said.
“ ’E was worse. ’E made the threats.”
“What did he say?”
“ ’E say I ’ave to tell where you are gone or ’e will take the baby.”
“I’ll kill him,” I said, flush with righteous anger, the best kind.
There are certain things that we imagine would give us full permission to act out our aggression, to lash out with all the resentment and pain we’ve swallowed in our daily subservience to life. The most popular movies in the world cater specifically to this fantasy—Bronson, Rambo, Schwarzenegger, and the A Team all stomp the villains, survive unharmed, are not indicted, don’t even serve thirty days per corpse, and feel no guilt. But in real life the only people who normally reach this state of homicidal grace are soldiers, psychopaths, and the deeply religious.
“Your mother,” Marie Laure said, “is very smart. She begins to scream. ’Elp! ’Elp! So my mother, she begins to scream, ‘Au secours! L’assassin!’ And all the people, they do not comprehend English and Français, but they comprehend. They turn and look at ’im,’e runs away. It was very good.”
“What about now?”
“I ’ave spoken with Franz, the gendarme. Also, I am never alone—always with the mothers. St. Anton is not New York. If we yell, people will come. You are not to ’ave worries. We are very fine.”
“Be careful, please be careful,” I said.
“You too,” she said.
“I got hurt,” I said. “But I’m okay. Nothing that wouldn’t happen skiing.”
“What has happened to you?”
“Nothing serious,” I said. “Promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“When I come home, you’ll let me buy you something—something for you, sexy.”
“Like from Palmer’s?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s so much money,” she said. But it wasn’t the money.
“Please,” I said, “I need to tell you how beautiful you are.”
“Thank you. We’ll see,” she said coolly. It wasn’t the money—it was sex that she wanted to say no to.
So Jaroslav and I went to his pub. He wanted to know about America. He wanted to know how much they paid lawyers in America. I tried to explain that they paid lawyers an obscene amount of money in America, but that strange things happened along with it. That they worked obsessively long hours and that they had forgotten to love the children of the world. That lawyers married other lawyers and then they couldn’t remember to love their own children and hired Dominicans and Jamaicans to do it for them. I asked if he knew who owned the house where I had been defenestrated. He promised he would find out. I asked if he knew the girl. He said, “Perhaps.” And the two strongmen. He said, “Oh, you mean the Bulgarians.”
“What do you mean, Bulgarians?” I said.
“Come,” he said to a middle-aged man and younger woman who had just walked in, “I want you to meet my friend from America. He flowed to my foots.”
They sat down with us. More excellent beer and indistinguishable food arrived. Then some more people sat down with us. Everyone made me welcome. Someone told me that Jaroslav was one of the best lawyers in Czechoslovakia. In his worn corduroy pants, graying white shirt, beard, and over-the-collar hair, he looked like an eternal graduate student from 1957, going from grant to grant, ever ready to recite vigorously unrhymed poetry. He got up to make a phone call.
“How much has he had to drink?” the youngish woman asked me.
“Four beers,” I said. “Maybe five.”
“Wait till he has six,” she said.
“What then?”
“Then,” she said, “he will ask you if America penises are bigger than Czechoslovakian ones.”
“What do you think?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “I’ve just been to Vienna and I bought a Japanese vibrator.”
“A Hitachi?” I asked.
“A Musashi. I liked the logo. The samurai sword.”
“Czechoslovakia is a very surreal place,” I said. “Kafka would feel at home here.”
“Oh, he did,” she said. “I like it now that we’re free. Perhaps now the man I love will stay.”
“Who is that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “In the past they all left too soon.”
“Are you sure that was a political problem, not a personal or sexual one?”
Jaroslav came back. He ordered another round.
“When can we find out about the house on the hill?” I asked him.
“After lunch,” he said.
“What do you think about artists running a government?” someone else said. “Is it a loss to art?”
“Is it a gain to government?” the youngish woman asked.
“Havel is right,” another voice said. A bearded man, but neater than Jaroslav. “What is missing is the moral dimension. The communists made us an immoral country.”
“An unmoral one,” someone else said.
The youngish woman leaned over to me and said, “You see, we learned very early, as little children in school, that everything they taught us was a lie and that we had to lie back to them. There was no truth. No honesty. It was not even possible. For many of us it is too late. We are corrupted in our brain. Trained to timidity. Broken to hopelessness. But we can save the next generation.”
“Cherish this,” I said. “Remember this moment. It is your moment. It is your gold. Because when you succeed—democracy, capitalism, department stores, cable TV—you’ll see ‘I Love Lucy’ dubbed into Czech, you’ll get Sports Channel so you can watch high school soccer from Romania, MTV, everything. Then there’s no more Art, no Truth, and you’ll look back and say, ‘Why don’t we talk anymore, like we did in nineteen ninety?’”
They were, all of them, attorneys and courthouse people. Eventually they rose to return to work. Jaroslav waved for more beer.
“How many have you had?” I asked him.
“Just five,” he said, as the waiter put down two more.
I put my hand over the mugs. “Wait. Before you drink it, tell me about the house on the hill.”
“Oh, let me drink it,” he said. “I’m thirsty.”
“No. Then you will start talking about penises and I don’t care about them.”
“Kvieta told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It would if yours was as short as mine.”
“Tell me about the house,” I said.
“All right,” he said, in German for fluency. “It belongs to Carel Kapek. Like the playwright. You have heard of him? This Kapek is perhaps number-three man in our secret police. He is very powerful—or was. The girl—she is only nineteen. She is his girlfriend. He has a wife. Somewhere. I don’t know where. The Bulgarians—they are his golems, his creatures. Sometimes bodyguards. Sometimes they just watch her to keep her in line. She is young. You understand. He is old. Sometimes they are what the movies would call his hit men.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Nadia,” he said.
“First name or last name?”
“Just Nadia. One name. She thinks very well of herself. Only people who think very well of themselves go by one name.”
“Like Madonna or Sting or Paulina,” I said.
“Like Stalin and Lenin,” he said.
“That’s the great thing about capitalism,” I said. “The heros are just celebrities and the celebrities are trivial. So they can’t do much harm. You’ll see. You guys are
gonna have fun.”
LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD
“IN AMERICA IS DISABILITY?” Jaroslav said. He said everything with great intensity and a lot of hair. He had the sort of beard that collects crumbs and drama.
“If you speak a language you don’t know,” I said, “then people don’t always understand you.” I was in enough pain to be irritable.
“I humbling apologize for the smallness of my English,” he said.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I am getting full disability for my foot.” He had switched to German, which he spoke in a clear and elegant, though stilted and schoolish, manner. “I don’t have to work and I still get money. Isn’t communism wonderful. Would I get disability in America?”
“No,” I said, swallowing some more aspirin and thinking about something stronger.
“Oh,” he said, sounding worried.
“But,” I said, “you could sue.”
“Sue who?”
“You would sue me.”
“Oh, but you are my friend. I would never sue you.”
“Yes, you would,” I said. “Trust me, you would sue me. You would also sue the goons who threw me out the window, you would sue their employer, and most important you would sue the homeowner.”
“Why is the homeowner so important?”
“Because he is the one who is required to have liability insurance. Goons never have liability.”
“Because they’re Bulgarians?”
“Because they don’t have property. What makes a person sueable is property. If it’s real estate and they have a mortgage, the mortgage company insists on insurance. That, of course, makes them more sueable. So the more you own, the more you’re insured—the more you’re insured, the more you get sued for. If you’re going to be a lawyer in the new Czechoslovakia you gotta know this stuff. You go after whoever has the most insurance.”
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 23
