by Louis Armand
Arm in arm we wind the narrow backstreets to Pařížská, past the la-di-dah restaurants, the hotels and boutiques. We run pell-mell along the crowded sidewalks, leaving chaos in our wake. Over the river, towards the broken metronome on the hill where Stalin’s colossus used to be. A monument to how little times change.
Halfway across the bridge, we stop to gaze at the seagulls brooding on the water. At the blue and white boats moored along the quays. The bronze, peasant-thighed angels atop their pillars, gazing blankly down at us. A tram thuds by in the direction we’ve come, steam rising from the tracks in its wake. We move on, climbing the steep stairway to the dead metronome, with its red needle lying on its side. Built to fail. The mist has risen under grey-black clouds. Denuded suburbs lie with haunches spread. A faint drizzle makes everything faintly glisten.
8. ACE OF SPADES
Old man Aristotle once said that children are incapable of noble acts and so can’t be truly happy. The first time Regen ran away she was fifteen and pregnant. I didn’t know it then. She simply disappeared. One Thursday in April she wasn’t waiting at the bus stop and so I went looking for her. At the farmhouse I found her parents in front of their idiot box, listening to God. I waited. Her room was full of unreturned library books. Clothes in the cupboard. An old porcelain doll on the bed. I couldn’t connect the room with Regen at all, except for the books. I realised I didn’t know anything about her, only her body and what she talked about while I lay beside her dreaming.
On the way back to town I questioned the bus driver. He knew her, said maybe she’d got off at the train station in Božice that morning. That’s when I knew. It was a small station on the edge of the woods, there was only one directions to go. I hitched the six o’clock train west without thinking twice. I had my week’s pay from the meatworks in my pocket. My old man could go hang himself.
After the capitalist revolution, the border became a Mecca for cheap sex, with Znojmo at the centre of it. I guessed straightaway why Regen might’ve gone there. If you wanted to disappear, it was as good a place as any. Without money and underage, there weren’t too many options anyway.
That first night I walked all over Znojmo looking for her in vain. I put out the word the way only dumb kids in movies do. A bum at the train station said he’d seen her in the guise of a virgin with angels’ wings and for fifty crowns would show me where. Taxi drivers snickered. Barmen swore they’d spotted her with a negro, a Russian gangster, a German with a moustache. A real comedy act.
I got wise and copped to the routine, the faces on the street, the pick-up zones, the places to find the low-down on fresh meat. The first day, I slept under a bridge and woke up smelling like a drain. After that, I stayed in stairwells and doorways until one morning a couple of skinheads kicked me awake and one of them pissed on me. I grabbed the one with his cock sticking out and hit him in the face. I didn’t punch him hard but I felt bone crunch. Teeth sprayed on the pavement. The cunt just stared down at them and cried, face all jelly. His boyfriend sprinted, screaming his head off. I expected dozens of skinheads to come barrelling in any second. But none did. I ran anyway. When I got to the corner I looked back and saw the skin who’d pissed on me kneeling on the pavement, picking his teeth out of a pool of blood. I almost felt sorry for him. But didn’t.
I’d been doing it rough for a week and was just about skint, and my bright idea of finding Regen wasn’t getting me anywhere but down. I didn’t know what else to do, though I’d already decided I wasn’t going back, not for anything. While I was figuring out my next step, a waitress I’d got friendly with suggested I ask up at the brewery for work. I didn’t have any better ideas. The Hostan Brewery was on a hill above the town. I went and waited there for the foreman to show until mid-afternoon, standing in the courtyard like an idiot in the spring rain, getting a free wash.
The first thing the foreman told me was to bugger off. But I just grinned my dumbest grin and stayed put. It must have got the better of him because the next thing I knew I was riding in the back of a truck delivering kegs. I went there again the next day and did the same thing, dawn till dusk, with plenty of thinking time in-between. We drove everywhere. After a week, I reckoned I knew every table dancing joint, every cabaret, strip show and claphouse on the border. And it was only then that I heard about the Ace of Spades.
*
It was a nurse at the abortion clinic who’d offered to help Regen find a job and a place to stay. Quid pro quo. No questions asked. The job was at The Ace, a strip club off the main drag heading south out of town. It was a white two-storey joint with blacked-out windows and a big red neon playing card stuck over the door. The first couple of nights I went there, Regen didn’t show. Each night I waited through half-a-dozen routines, shelling out for drinks I didn’t want. I stayed until morning. The third time around I slipped the stooge at the bar a large note and asked about a redhead with green eyes. He looked me over and shook his head. “Redheads are trouble, kid.” He pocketed the note I’d given him anyway. Said maybe to come back the day after. I was nearly out the door when he called over. “It’s not a redhead you’re looking for, kid. It’s a blonde.”
I couldn’t sleep and the next day I worked both shifts. I was on edge, adrenaline keeping me awake. If I didn’t find her now, I was lost. All I could think about was Regen, her face, her body under my hands. And her mouth. Her lips against my ear, whispering into me.
It was long after midnight when I made it back to the Ace, hitching from the town square. The barman was right – her hair was blonde now, straight out of an old Lana Turner film. Sitting alone at the back of the room, reading a book. She put the book away before I could see what it was. Staring up at me with depthless eyes. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We had a couple of expensive drinks and she did the talking for both of us. Told me she’d been doing tables, learning the ropes. She’d ended her shift. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.
After some more drinks that tasted of nothing, Regen suggested we go upstairs. I paid the man at the door, like anyone else. The room was dark and small. The windows blacked-out. It looked wrong, like it didn’t belong anywhere. A room outside the world.
In the dull glow of a table lamp, I watched as she lay back across the bed and stretched out her legs so that her skirt slipped up to the top of her stockings, jaw tense with desire. I wondered how the ritual unfolded normally. She read my thoughts.
“I’m not a whore,” she said, matter of fact.
I stood over her, with a dumb ugly look on my face, wanting her. She pulled me down, her boots over my shoulders, wet nylon parting her sex. Scent of patchouli. I pulled the strip of nylon aside. She moaned as I tongued her. My thumb worked into her arse as my hand cradled her. Boots cold against the back of my neck. Tongue tipping her clitoris the way it tipped the letter t in Baťa.
I fell asleep inside her. It was a sleep like I’d never experienced before. Ten years passed in ten minutes. A river floating under the world. An endless passageway filled with vines, strange roots, undead things. I saw Regen in the dim light and held out my arms to clasp her, but she slipped back into the darkness. And then she was shaking me awake. A suitcase by the bed. Downstairs she took me straight past the bouncer at the door. I’d expected some type of stand-off. It didn’t happen.
We stood out in the car park, looking at the road. Intermittent traffic flowed by, heading south on the E59. The Austrian border was only a minute away. Thousands of Sudeten Germans had been marched there at the end of the war. Der Brünner Todesmarsch. Beaten and raped by Pokorný’s revolutionary guards. Regen’s grandmother, I knew, had been among them. Some sort of atavism seemed at work. The unconscious return to the scene of a barely remembered crime. Justice or amnesia. And what good’s a crime that goes unremembered?
I realised, standing in the car park of the Ace of Spades, that the myth of our childhood was ending. We began to walk in silence along the motorway north, away from the border zone. A pair of unlikely fugitives.
Regen with her boots and her black coat trailing behind, me with her suitcase. Her bleached blonde hair caught the headlights like a halo. It reminded me of a picture I’d seen once. Over-exposed.
We walked all the way into town. Never once did anyone slow down to give us a ride. At the train station we waited. A bench on the platform, our bodies folded into each other beneath that fake fur coat of hers. The smell of her perfume and the smell of effluent on the tracks. As dawn broke, the sky above was green with thunder clouds. They hung there like horrible grapes about to burst.
9. ST PAULI
There’s a picture I used to carry around with me, a print from an old disposable camera. It showed Regen, standing behind my father, framing his face with her hands. Like a trophy. I found it among the things she left behind. In the background there was a wall with magazine cut-outs. A room in the last place we were together – a place someone named the Snake House. It was an old cottage on a farm near Božice, right by a lake near where we grew up. I found the photograph in the same room it was taken in. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was kneeling behind him. She’d put the camera on the dressing table and set the timer. But the flash hadn’t gone off. The picture was underexposed, the faces slightly blurred. You could still make out the remote look in his eyes. And the faintly mocking look in hers.
On the train from Znojmo, Regen told me everything. In one way or another. About the abortion. About how my father had forced himself on her. From when she was thirteen. How her parents had ignored it. How she’d wanted to kill herself. How she’d always been too afraid to tell me. Afraid I’d blame her for it, too. The look in her eyes when she said it. Everything else dissolved into blackness. The train compartment, the scenery through the compartment window, the voices outside in the passageway. If I close my eyes now, it might all cease to have existed. The world falls away. There were only words, none of them real.
In my mind’s eye I saw her strapped into a machine and him mounting her like a pig, his snout grovelling in her sex, violently rooting out her innocence. I recalled my mother’s words – how she used to call Regen a slut. And now I understood, it hadn’t been on my account. All that crap about Hänsel and Gretel! She’d known the truth. And that terrible knowledge had driven her to suicide?
Everything came together in a single, horrible revelation. I knew then that it’d been him that first night at Regen’s house, standing in the headlights. I was sure of it. He’d warned me never to go back there after my mother’s death, after we’d moved away. But it hadn’t been me he’d come for that night. It was her, Regen, knowing her parents would be away. He’d raped her, she said, right there in the house, in the bedroom I’d never seen until the day she ran. But in that photograph, of the two of them together, at the very end, I couldn’t see any of that. The fear, the hate. Only a man and a girl, who could almost have been his daughter. It gave me a funny feeling.
I swore on the train to Prague that I’d kill him. That I’d butcher him a thousand times over. Obliterate every particle of him so that nothing at all would remain. I let my fury sweep over me. And still that look in Regen’s eyes. I couldn’t tell what she saw, but I felt she pitied me. I wondered how she’d looked at him and if she recognised him in me. My very blood was poison. The stranger who’d coupled with my mother to make me. What idea could he have had of my existence? He who created and despised me. His own flesh and blood. Did he know me before he made me? Did he think of me as he was making me? The way he thought of his machines. Obsessing over them, caressing them with his mind, in that secret part of himself that might even have been human.
But my anger overwhelmed me and made me weak. Like a boy in a fairytale who pretends to take destiny by the horns and finds himself gored by his own fear. I thought of the child Regen had killed. My brother or sister inside her. My helpless double. My doppelganger. I didn’t know what to feel. My first thought was that the child should’ve been mine. It was only later that I asked myself how she could’ve been so sure – who the father was.
*
The train journey seemed as though it’d never end. Žerůtky, Moravské Budějovice, Lukov, Bohušice, Popovice, Lesůňky, Horní Újezd, Kojetice, Čechočovice, Hvězdoňovice, Okříšky, Přibyslavice, Číchov, Bransouze, Dolní Smrčné, Přímělkov, Bítovčice, Přeboř, Petrovice, Bradlo, Malý Beranov, Hruškové Dvory, Jihlava. Then north, to Havlíčkův Brod, Sázava, Čerčany. The place names multiplied. They flashed past like time itself made visible in a blur of syllables. I began to lose track of where we were and where we were going.
All of a sudden we were in the eastern suburbs of Kafkaville. Říčany. Kolovraty. Strašnice. Malešice. The factories of Karlín. The monument to one-eyed Žižka. And then the grey dingy ironwork of the Woodrow Wilson train station – Hlavní Nádraží – aswarm with hawkers, hustlers, money-changers, pushers, pimps, pickpockets and pan-handlers. Gateway to the Golden City.
I waited in front of the station on a park bench while Regen went to find a place to stay. She said she had an aunt. She made some phone calls. I sat on the bench with Regen’s suitcase and watched the junkies shooting up behind the hedges. There was a blue sky. It hurt my eyes. I must have been crying. An impotent, exhausted rage. It was dark by the time Regen came back. The streetlights had come on. I heard her calling my name across the park. I’d almost forgotten what I was doing there. In the lamplight she was like an apparition. A fallen angel. She kissed me.
Her aunt lived on the south side of the river, in a shared apartment overlooking the docks. There was a bar downstairs, a small-time claphouse called St Pauli. Like the district in Hamburg. I didn’t think about it at the time – maybe it was a coincidence. I suppose you could say everything that happens is some sort of coincidence – only some things are more coincidental than others. You get to thinking there’s a demon in the works, stacking the odds. Keeping everything on the downslide.
The tiny room we stayed in had a crucifix on the wall and a green couch stuffed with horse hair for a bed. There was a window above the couch, grimed with coal dust, facing the river. I’d watch the freight being unloaded on the docks in the afternoon and then head-out at night to work shifts wherever I could find them. Most times I hung around the bars killing time until morning, when it was clear to go back. Our room – the room we thought of quaintly as ours – was for rent nightly by the hour. Regen worked tables, paid our board. She kept the place clean. It could’ve been worse.
We didn’t talk about Znojmo again. I plotted in silence, knowing the only way was to go back and meet my father on his own ground, face to face. But I couldn’t. Weeks dragged by into routine. April became May. The old communists marching in the streets. Star-crossed lovers making poetry on Petřín hill. Not everything changes with the seasons. The women with Walpurgisnacht eyes haunting street corners. White line paranoia for sale in doorways. Boy hustlers and soup kitchens reminding that abyss is only ever a step away. Some nights I worked straight through for no more than a couple of hundred crowns. Behind St Pauli’s, at the Měšťan brewery, they sold bottles at four crowns from a hole in the wall. We’d get drunk sitting in the gutter, sweating into our shirts. Day-labourers. Construction workers. Dockers. Bums. Cripples. No-hopers.
One morning I came back to the room to find my old man there with his belt undone, bare-chest, and Regen on her back, on that stinking horse hair couch, skirt hiked-up and legs apart, a blank faraway look on her face. She stared at me when I came through the door like she’d never seen me before. It was dawn outside, but the room was choked with shadows. A broken-up TV soundtrack wafted from the apartment next door. In the dim light it was like a scene from Rembrandt. The legs of a hung carcass, the yellowed gash of meat streaked with black. Faces starting out of the gloom.
*
I don’t know when it started to dawn on me that nothing was going to work out the way I’d wanted it to. All those hours wrestling dead meat at the abattoir and I still believed there was somewhere more real I had a
ticket to. Day in, day out. When did I wake up and know I existed? I used to have this recurring dream, about struggling to cross a river. In the dream there was a long line of men ahead of me trudging up an endless muddy slope, their heads and torsos invisible beneath the bodies of the fathers they carried on their shoulders. Like carcasses on a slaughterhouse line. Each man hoisting his dead weight ever onwards.
When I was a kid, I promised myself that when I grew up I’d be different from everyone else. I’d go through life without regrets. Not end up like my mother did, hanging myself because life was just a dead-end godless nothing. Or like my father, full of bile and hate. I’d have an idea of who I was and stay true to it through thick and thin. Like a marriage vow. It never seemed wrong to think that way. Unsuspecting, that life has a habit of turning everything you believe around, until the simplest thing in the world becomes an Everest.
Regen knew better. She had ideas of her own and her ideas confused me, upsetting my illusions. Through her I began to see how people looked at me. The thoughts going on behind their eyes sizing me up. How they reckoned they could always put one over.
After mum died I’d get angry for no reason. I’d hide in the cool room and hit out at whatever was in reach. The walls, the pig carcasses, making a mess of myself. The cold would eat down into me and I’d feel more powerless than ever. Like a cog in one of my old man’s death machines. I started wishing the bastard would fall down drunk into the teeth of one of them, spewed back out in worms of thick, bloodied mince. But I knew it would never happen. He’d die in his sleep one night, an older man than I’d ever be, his conscience at peace with itself.