“You may live,” Hanuš said weakly. “Why do you resist?”
“I’m tired, Hanuš.”
At last I looked at the oxygen gauge, which showed three minutes of remaining oxygen. The ship’s claw was no longer erect. It had bent into position, ready to pick me up, or perhaps to penetrate me—what was the difference? They would save me in time unless I removed my helmet. I did not want to be saved. By anyone, but especially not by Them. Those who had engineered my father, had given him the power that transformed him into what they needed him to be. This was the one thing my grandfather and I had never agreed on. He insisted that the blame should be placed on the person, not the circumstances. My father, he felt, was bound to make the same kinds of mistakes under any regime. I couldn’t accept this. I couldn’t accept that without the arrival of the Rus, without Moscow’s puppets in Czechoslovakia waving rewards and promises in front of my father’s desire for a better life, he would still be capable of inflicting the same pain. We do not live outside history. Not ever. And here I was, another Procházka forced to capitulate to the occupier.
As I checked the oxygen gauge again, I recounted the number of people who owed me explanations, who owed me looks and kindness and life. There was Lenka. Somewhere out there she existed, outside the picture sent to me as consolation, and the simple temptation that her hands might once again touch my sore back seemed reason enough to consider breathing the expiring O2.
What kind of carpet did Emil Hácha feel underneath his feet inside Hitler’s office as he pondered whether the Czechs would fight against invasion and be slaughtered, or concede and lose dignity? After making the old man wait until the morning hours while he watched movies with his posse, Hitler spit in Hácha’s face as he recounted the various ways in which a country could be raped, in which children and women could be bled, in which the king towers of Prague could be bombarded, shot, burned, stomped into a fine powder, and soaked in the piss of the Gestapo. How close was Hácha to exercising stupid heroism, to asking Hitler to go fuck a herring, thereby earning himself a bullet in the cheek and slaughter for his nation? He too was a bastard in a basket, an old man of ill health who had replaced the president in exile after Hitler’s machinations picked the republic apart. The country had been sold to the highest bidder at the Munich Betrayal, where, without our presence, Chamberlain/Daladier/Mussolini/Der Führer shook hands, ate tea sandwiches, and agreed that a wee Czechoslovakia was a small price to pay for world peace. How close was Hácha to unleashing the Great Genocide of the Czechs and Slovaks? How much easier might it have been simply to die at the Führer’s hand and allow for someone else to deal with the greater questions? Hácha chose life, and shame. His reward was seeing the nation survive, witnessing the capital emerge from the war unscathed, unlike the beautiful towers of Warsaw and Berlin. After Hitler’s abuse, Hácha fainted. The Nazi royalty helped him to his feet shortly before he signed the country over into protective occupation by Germany. This coward who saved the nation by giving it up along with his pride.
Two minutes of life remained and I held on to my friend. When I gripped one of his legs more tightly it fell from his body like a leech, trailing bubbles of gray juice. His lips and belly fur were sticky with chocolate and hazelnut. And then I saw them: Hanuš’s Gorompeds, those little ovum parasites that lived in his blisters, crawling onto my suit and finding their way underneath it. They swarmed between my armpit hairs. I kicked, pulled both Hanuš and me away from the Russian ship to buy just a bit more time before the rescue. The Claw was so near my legs I felt goose bumps at the anticipation of its touch.
I saw what would have happened if Hácha had decided to die for principle. He would have gotten his bullet to the head, and the Aryans thirsty to claim their Slav slaves would have overrun the fighters of our nation, whose Bohemian bodies would have turned the Vltava red as they floated West, small gifts to Chamberlain and his naïveté. I saw Prague burning; the castle that had served the most magnificent of European kings pillaged by the greedy hands of hate-filled German boys; beautiful village girls with freckles hiding under their beds from the entitled hands of sour-breathed captains; the Moravian grapevines flattened under tank belts; the pure creeks and hills of Šumava soiled by guts and deforested by hand grenades. Hácha had made his decision. Death was too easy.
The Claw caught my ankle, as gently as a mother tugging on a newborn. It pulled.
“I wish you could come with me,” I told Hanuš.
I felt him shrink. Another leg left us.
“Not much longer now,” he said.
“You have saved me,” I said.
“Would you feel better if I wasn’t real?”
“No.”
“What are your regrets?” Hanuš said.
“Now that I know I’ll live, I have millions.”
“Odd.”
“I don’t know if I want to go back. To divide life into mornings and nights. To walk upright, attached at the foot.”
“Do not leave, then, skinny human.”
The grip of the Claw tightened. Did the Russians see the friend in my embrace?
“I want to die within you,” Hanuš said. “Take me to a good place. I too will show you where I come from. Home.”
A Goromped crawled across my cheek, evoking the sensation of a sticker that Lenka had once attached to it. I remembered the pain then as I had pulled the sticker from my beard, removing a small patch of hair in the process.
This would be my final gift to Hanuš. I did not cower from his invasion. For the first time I felt the heaviness and despair of death that he had learned from me, a dull pain in my abdomen. My dry tongue encountered a new sore on my gums and my head was battered by the pressure building at the back of my skull. In these last moments, Hanuš was welcome to every last bit of my lifetime. I craved to see his home.
What came to me was an afternoon in May. A beautiful month. Lenka and I used to read Karel Hynek Mácha together. He wrote a famous romantic poem about May, and all of us had to learn it in school, rolling our eyes at its sentiments, not yet understanding how easily pleasures led to poetry. There is a section I can hear Lenka read as if she were here now, as she was back then inside our tent in the forest, lying naked with her hair tucked behind her ears, sweat glistening on the white fuzz of her belly button:
In shadowy woods the burnished lake
Darkly complained a secret pain,
By circling shores embraced again;
And heaven’s clear sun leaned down to take
A road astray in azure deeps,
Like burning tears the lover weeps.
This is what I wanted Hanuš to hear now.
Together we traveled to that May morning. Hanuš of the cosmos, an alien but overpoweringly human friend. Jakub Procházka of Earth, the first Spaceman of Bohemia. I choked. The oxygen had run out, all soaked up by the greedy sponges inside my chest. Despite the hold the Claw had on me, the ship seemed far away. Death was near.
May
LENKA AND I WALK along the edges of the Karlův Bridge, across the untamed width of the Vltava, the river vein of Bohemia that divides our city. We have just visited my grandmother at the hospital, finding her in great spirits as she happily slurped on the hospital cabbage soup even though we had brought her sandwiches, and asked whether we were planning to give her a grandchild. With my grandmother’s warmth and seamless recovery from the stroke putting us at ease, we wander. Around us, the languages of the world mix into the usual hum of spring. A notorious bridge artist draws crude caricatures of clueless tourists. He picks at the fleas in his beard and drinks wine out of a leather jug as he grins at the platinum faces of the Swedish couple shifting on his stool, then adds a goat udder below the man’s chin and gives the woman a Victorian mustache. I’ve seen his shenanigans a thousand times—often the tourists simply get up and walk away, and he yells at them in his own invented language. But once in a while, their visitors’ guilt overpowers them, and they pay for his nonsense. He is a comforting s
ight against the backdrop of the statues of patron saints guarding the bridge, with a rather grim portrayal of crucified Jesus leading the entourage. Without the painters, pickpockets, and strolling couples, the bridge would be a cold, terrifying reminder of Gothic overindulgence. But here we are, the winos and leather-clad Eurotourists and Prague lovebirds eager for a Sunday beer buzz and a stroll along the water, providing the bridge with the humor and gentleness it needs. In exchange, the bridge makes us feel like our history goes back beyond the day we signed up for a bank account.
We leave the bridge and walk through one of the many Vietnamese markets, where children chase each other with laser guns, adults gloomily smoke Petras, and their knockoff Adidas and Nike merchandise flutters in the wind like a nation’s flag. Frowning men scoop a mixture of eggplant and chicken into foam containers. Muscular white men in baseball hats—likely policemen staking out illegal sales—lurk about clumsily. Child scouts let their parents know with elaborate whistles whenever a fashionable customer is coming, so they can quickly display their fake designer dresses before hiding them again from the poorly dressed policemen. The inner workings of the market.
A little boy knocks a little girl on the nose with his laser gun and disappears between the windswept tents. The little girl sobs until Lenka, my sweet Lenka, takes her by the hand.
“Boys play rough,” Lenka says. “You have to play rough too. Next time you see him, knock him over his own melon.”
The girl stares at us, tight-lipped, her own laser gun still in hand. She pulls Lenka forward and leads us three tents down, where a woman snoozes in a lawn chair. The girl extends a yellow T-shirt toward Lenka and nods with a devious smile.
“You want me to have this?” Lenka asks.
“Sixty. Discount,” the girl says.
“Sixty crowns?”
The girl nods, a savvy saleswoman. It is obvious that she means to keep the money to herself, and not to share with her mother—if she is even related to the sleeping woman at all.
There is no turning back. Lenka’s compassion flagged us as weak, and she hands the money over and pats the girl on the head.
“You told her to play rough,” I say, “so she’s playing rough.”
“Good. Let her be an entrepreneur.”
Lenka unrolls the shirt. Over the yellow background of the cotton, a cartoon sun holds a pint of beer in one hand and a bottle of sunblock in the other. It squints its right eye in a drunken stupor, while its left eye studies the obscene curves of nude men and women tanning on the beach below (nudity beyond nudity, with a double line for every crevice, thick pubic hair, massive breasts and erections). The sun grins creepily as it squeezes liters of creamy sunblock onto these unsuspecting bodies.
The girl smirks as we explore the cartoon. “Nice for summer,” she says.
“You are naughty,” Lenka tells her.
“Sixty crowns!” she squeals as she disappears between the tents just as quickly as the boy who hurt her, clutching the hard-earned bills. The snoozing woman wakes up and looks at the T-shirt.
“Eighty crowns,” she says, hand outstretched.
Lenka and I cannot contain our laughter as we give her more of our cash.
“You realize you have to wear this now, right?” I ask Lenka.
“Are you mental?”
“Law of the universe. You rolled over and exposed your neck as the enemy bared her teeth. You were presented with a simple Darwinian challenge, and you failed.”
“You sound like a hopeless academic.”
I point at the shirt and frown with insistence. She sighs, but the half smile she betrays does not escape me. This is what we need. Teasing. Humor. Something unexpected. After months and months of me sweating on top of her without pleasure, praying to reinforce my sperm as she sends positive vibes toward her aureus ovarii; after piles of pregnancy test boxes crowding the bathroom trash can; after failure upon failure, and my retreat between the halls of the university, where I stay late to “grade papers” and “attend committee meetings” while really just snacking in my office and playing Snake on my phone, this day could be our chance at finding a new way forward, at once again fusing our emotional and neurological chemistry instead of seeing each other merely as the owner of a potentially defunct baby-making orifice or appendage.
Lenka pulls the T-shirt on over her shoulders, and I nod with approval. She kisses me and presses the large round S sticker from the shirt against my beard.
“Now we both look like idiots,” she says.
Witness my most joyous moments, skinny human. I will show you where I come from. Hanuš interrupts the memory of Prague, takes me elsewhere. I see his world, once upon a time.
Millions of eggs circumvent a small green planet. Above the ovum ring hover members of Hanuš’s tribe, a collective hum of their speech announcing that the time is right. The eggs begin to crack, tips of thin arachnid tarsi pushing through membrane and shell. Among the thousands of newborns I see Hanuš, I recognize his hum as slightly different from the others. He studies his own legs as they poke at the smooth, furless skin of his body. The shell fragments float around, create an entire dust cloud of their own, and the young and old members of the tribe circle one another. At last the Elders, a council of twenty, their legs short and contorted like the roots of trees, order the tribe to cease motion. The tribe’s laws are passed on to the children:
The body must not be violated.
Truths must not be feared.
Now the newborns separate from the herd and descend upon their green planet. Its surface is rock and crystal, its caves lead into underground tunnels. Shtoma worms—the size of a human child, fat and eyeless and pink as boiled pig skin—flee into these tunnels as the tribe’s children chase after them. A storm gathers within seconds above the planet, blue and red lightning bites into its rock, the surface cracks and reveals the worms slithering underground. Hanuš lands on a worm and plunges his legs into its back. He tears through the worm’s skin and the white insides, thick and pasty like lard, spill upwards. The storm cannot be heard, and yet the wind rages on the planet’s surface, sweeps away the emptied membranes that used to be Shtoma. The Elders hum the melody of a celebration song, the storm weakens, the overfed children slowly retreat into their caves to digest. Hanuš opens his memory without limit—I become him. In this moment, as hair begins to grow on his body and for the first time he knows the gift of food, he is absolutely certain. About the universe, all of its secrets, about his place within the tribe, about his laws. I am unable to comprehend the happiness that comes with his certainty. All is as it should be until the Gorompeds of Death arrive, whether tomorrow or in two million years.
Satiated and knowing, young Hanuš rests. Not yet aware of the last secret of the universe kept from his tribe: humans, their Earth, and the horror of their fears.
I wish I could’ve been there, Hanuš. To hunt with you in the storm, to know your siblings.
Lenka and I leave the bridge, pick up boiled chestnuts and grog from a vendor cart, and sit in Old Town Square, waiting for the Orloj clock to ring in the hour as awestruck tourists gather with digital cameras in hand. I feel drowsy in the warmth, and the sweet scent of chestnuts lingers around Lenka’s lips. I kiss her, tangle my fingers in her beautifully frizzed hair, pull. She bites down on my lip.
The Orloj rings, and the Procession of the Apostles begins—the wooden figurines appear one after another in the window above the clock: Paul with a sword and a book, Matthew with an ax, the rest of the gang holding either weapons or symbols of wisdom. Fixed statues that are not part of the processional permanently stare visitors down from around the clock: Death ringing a bell, a Turk shaking his head at the infidel apostles, a Miser holding his bag of gold, and Vanity looking at himself in a mirror. The clock itself shows the position of the moon and the sun, along with the rotations of the stars. Is it art, or a piece of magnificent engineering, or a tourist trap? It’s as if the Orloj can’t decide and thus takes on the identity of all.
Children squeak as the mechanical rooster crows, and the show ends with the Turk again shaking his head in disbelief at this Christian nonsense.
Lenka finishes her beer and stands up. She takes my hand and guides me through the background noise of the dispersing crowd. We approach the Orloj entrance, tug on the heavy wooden door. The attendant booth is empty, with a scribbled note stuck to the glass: Lunch break. We walk up the narrow stairwell, Lenka stumbling a bit, overpowered by warmth and alcohol. The last time I was inside the Orloj was on a school field trip, and elderly guards stood in corners to supervise the nation’s monument. Now the corners are empty—perhaps the dust and the musky smell of stale ocean so prevalent in any abandoned place swallowed them whole, or they simply died and no youths wanted to replace them, though government cuts are the likelier reason for their absence.
Lenka climbs the ladder leading to the restricted upper levels, tugs on my shirt collar when I hesitate. I follow, listening to the creak of gears, the genius design that Master Hanuš lost his eyesight for. This is the oldest working astronomical clock on the planet, yet who has need of its services? Satellites photograph the planets, the sun, the stars, the moons, Cosmic Depths Beyond Comprehension with drone-like precision; lone rovers scout the surfaces of other planets, performing alchemy within their bellies; any human can spend nights zooming above virtual continents with Google Earth. How much longer can the Orloj captivate the attention of tourists with its mystery and puppet show, how long can its entertainment value, its appeal to the retro-fetishism of the human mind, overshadow its tragic impracticality? Lenka and I reach the apostle room, where the wooden guardians rest, lined up in a circle and queued for their next show. She sits inside the window nook, dangerously close to Saint Andrew and his large wooden cross. She pulls on my chest hair and bites into my neck, and I collapse to my knees and bury my nose, eyes, chin in her underwear, rip them off and fling them across the room.
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 16
