Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  In the morning after Milan had brewed coffee and made breakfast, Uncle Jiří beckoned him outside. He reached into a wooden chest on the front porch and came up with a large, well-used, but well-cared-for ax.

  Milan told me that, whatever the truth, he preferred to remember his uncle as a gruff woodcutter, and that he thought Uncle Jiří probably preferred to see himself in this light, too.

  “Your mother,” said Uncle Jiří, bouncing the haft on his palm, “is a lunatic. I should have drowned your father when I had a chance. Your name is Milan.”

  Just outside the cabin stood the remains of an apple orchard—a dozen neglected trees, evenly spaced. Jiří led Milan to the nearest tree and handed the ax to him.

  “This,” he said, pointing at the tree, “is not your brother. It’s not your mother or your father or your grumpy uncle Jiří, either. It’s a fucking tree. Now kill it.”

  Milan had never tackled a tree before, but Jiří was patient and helpful. “Let your long arms do the work,” he said. “It’s more technique than muscle. Aim is more important than strength. Take your time.” Halfway through the first tree Milan had developed a respectable stroke.

  “I think you can do two trees a day,” said Jiří. “This includes chopping them into firewood. I will show you how to use the wedge. I will be in the cabin or on the porch. I want to hear you shout your name with every stroke.”

  For the next six days Milan felled trees while shouting his name, and he felt that he had experienced some method of extracting confessions perfected by the KGB. They rarely spoke except when Uncle Jiří gave orders. Milan thought that instead of shouting his own name he should be shouting the names of his neighbors, or instead of maiming trees he should be maiming humans to prove his commitment to the cause or, perhaps, to simplify things, he should be attacking his neighbors while denouncing them. At one point Milan shouted his name and an elderly man walking past on the road stopped and turned to say, “Yes?”

  But at the end of the week, Milan was emphatically Milan. Uncle Jiří gave him the keys to the cottage and told him to use it as he pleased. At first Milan made only tentative overnight visits, afraid that Uncle Jiří would appear. By the time he turned sixteen, he had essentially moved in. Winter was harsh, but he was creative, and initially well stocked with firewood—if you bang two pieces together and they thud, they’re not ready. When they knock, you can burn them. Train delays could mean missing school. Uncle Jiří did check in now and then, and told him never to have guests except women, and even then to hide the prohibited books. He never again intervened.

  One morning when he was seventeen Milan took his father a bottle of brandy but demanded to see his brother’s grave before handing it over. With such an inducement, his father had little choice. The headstone, said Milan, was a simple granite slab with LUDVIK JEZDEC engraved and painted with fresh gold leaf.

  ALLEGRO, LARGHETTO

  During a grey wet miserable weekend Amanda spotted a chastity belt in a shop window and suggested we go to an exhibition of torture devices. I had some trouble following her logic. She had stopped explaining things and simply expected compliance instead. She was tired of the cinema and I was tired of art galleries and both of us had found the afternoon recitals of Charles University graduate music students disappointing. That left us with more clothes shopping at the British chain stores colonizing the city center and turning it into a slick and soulless High Street. We had acquired since moving into Graceland six months previously a comfortable futon, some optimal reading cushions, and filled most of a shelf with good books from the English-language bookshop. It should have been an ideal redoubt for lazy weekends. Yet something in the city or the building or the courtyard itself emanated misery. Sorrowful stories like airborne diseases made their way through the windows and under the doorframe, bubbled up through the bathtub drain. It was possible to fill Graceland with light and color and music and the smell of good food, and yet the flat was like a patient with some untreatable condition, and we got tired of palliative care.

  The exhibition was in a cylindrical cannon tower called Daliborka on the eastern flank of Prague Castle. The legend of the tower was disputed—its original prisoner was named Dalibor, and one account held that he passed the time awaiting his execution by playing the violin, and all the medieval townsfolk were treated daily to sweet melancholy music. The other account held that the “violin” was a medieval torture device.

  Rain in Prague dispenses double meanings; other places sport reflections but every spire in a puddle in Prague or headlight diffused on wet pavement suggests some place equally beautiful where things work correctly, probably in Bavaria. When a car in the rain leaves pavement for cobblestone the light it casts stages its own silent revolution, and the shadows scurry like rats.

  Admission was a hundred Czech crowns each. I had casually remarked a week earlier to Amanda that what stuff costs was my least favorite genre of conversation, and she had needled me with it five or six times daily ever since, usually by pointing out how many beers I could buy with any amount in question. I surrendered eight beers for the two of us and we filed in.

  Glass cases on trestle tables ringed a circular hall of stone floors, walls, and ceiling. In the center was an oubliette beneath an ancient, heavy iron grate, but it was unlit below, so there was no indication of how deep or cramped it was. Inside the glass cases were various contraptions with placards explaining them. Some were straightforward: the “Ear Chopper” was a metal helmet with pivoting razor blades probably used more as a threat than a mutilator. It might have been helpful to a hairdresser who specialized in children. Several of the worst items were blamed on the Spanish—Spanish boots for crippling, a Spanish tickler for flaying, a Spanish spider for lifting victims into the air by the buttocks, belly, or breasts, or in some cases the eyes and ears. Most innocent in appearance yet perhaps most heinous was the Pear of Anguish, a pretty metal bulb, pear-like closed but umbrella-like open, which could be placed into any orifice deemed sinful (including the mouth, for heretics) and slowly expanded.

  “I fancy a fruit salad,” said Amanda.

  A stone staircase led to an upper floor devoted to eight empty doorless prison cells; I thought it could make a good office plan with a meeting room upstairs. As we ascended to the upper floors the cells got roomier and fewer, and the top floor, for landowning political prisoners, was a single room with views through the machicolations over the city. It was lunacy not renting it out for ten thousand beers a month. In a glass case on a spindly table lay a violin clearly manufactured by Yamaha sometime within the past twenty years. A placard referred to Smetana’s opera about Dalibor and suggested that this colorful legend clearly captured the true spirit of the Czech people.

  Amanda suggested finding a concert somewhere, and I reminded her that the Don Giovanni we had seen might as well have been mounted by toddlers. There was music in Prague but much of it seemed commensurate with the sophistication of its captive tourist audience. You would need local advice to find the good stuff. Amanda accused me of cynicism.

  She found the fluffiest of Mozart recitals in the listings of a free expat magazine. Outside, the clouds were in tatters and the sidewalks steaming, the city refreshed, and the gilded spires gleamed. We walked down a cobbled hillside road lined with embassies, through a tranche of sidewalk cafés like a field hospital for exhausted pedestrians, where all the waiters were wiping tables and chairs dry with tea towels, and into a small unremarkable chapel where the Stadler Quintet, among other things, was to be played.

  From the first note it seemed to me that the clarinetist was extracting a confession from his instrument while the string players gently sawed at their stylized representations of human bodies, each with an expression as if to say, This won’t hurt a bit. Gradually the clarinet confessed to higher and lower crimes, while the string players sliced and scraped with increasing appetite. The clarinet began spinnin
g tales no rational observer could believe while the strings encouraged him to embellish further still. The strings fell into ominous unison like the chanting of a crowd, but when the clarinetist tried to plead his humble origins they erupted in renewed violence. He invented new misdeeds and transgressions and they approved vigorously. Spit trickled from the bell of the clarinet. An emboldened violinist soloed her own awesome treachery and the second violinist threatened her with retribution.

  The second movement (the Larghetto) sounded as if the revolutionary spirit of the first had been encoded in a vast sluggish bureaucracy in which each instrument was required to ask permission of the others, and consequently nothing really got done. The rights to travel and free expression had been restricted. Alternatively, the victims were so spent there was no yield in torturing them more. I wondered why classical musicians almost always wear black. The cello sank an octave to demonstrate his authority over the others.

  The third movement illustrated the virtues of compliance, and I wished I were at home washing dishes. The fourth movement began as soulless propaganda before returning to the harmonious shrieks and eviscerations of the first, every performer a martyr for the cause, the suffering of the instruments a lamentable necessity. The applause was deafening.

  Afterward Amanda and I got into a fight. She had found the concert uplifting. She accused me of a morbid obsession with the past, particularly the pasts of people I’d never met and the pasts of people I simply made up, and she felt that this tendency interfered with my ability to spend time meaningfully in the present with her. I pointed out that we were walking along Revolution Street toward the Jewish Quarter. The past in Prague has a way of getting in your face.

  “It is impossible,” she said, “to live like that; otherwise Prague would have become a heap of rubble long ago.”

  “That’s what it is,” I said, “artfully stacked rubble full of mindless creatures who sleep and eat in the sheltered bits.”

  “You’re viewing it from Mars,” she said, “and that’s what I mean. It’s like you’re not really here.”

  I pointed out that where I came from people described themselves as fourth-generation Irish because it was somehow embarrassing to admit that you came from Peoria or Phoenix.

  “Pasts matter,” I said. “Pasts matter, because they make us who we are.”

  “No, actually,” said Amanda, “we do that.”

  CARROT CLARINET

  Mr. Cimarron returned from an exhibition in Vienna looking vaguely disgusted that he had sold anything. Over a drink at his suggestion he demanded that I explain why anyone would part with good money for an assemblage of car tires and telephones. I asked why anyone would make such a thing but he considered this question beneath answering. I asked how the items had been arranged or combined, and he said tastefully, of course. I asked who had purchased it and he said someone who considered it an investment likely to appreciate.

  He asked what I had been up to since he discovered me. Magically he knew of a pub that served peanuts gratis. Both of us munched and smoked and sipped beer. There were risqué cartoons on the walls. He explained that under communism it was safe to portray people in and out of their underwear—there was no need to indicate profession or class or relationship to the state. Cartoons were important in an era when you could be imprisoned for photographing things in a subversive light. Moreover, not even Stalin could take away the right to make filthy jokes.

  He asked if I was homesick.

  “God, no,” I said. “People where I’m from are damned ignorant and proud of it.”

  “You are the lone exception?” he said.

  “Of course not. I just come from a town that is sort of stranded.”

  “So instead you came to a place in decline since the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Perhaps it does not like you,” he said.

  “I haven’t experienced active hostility,” I said.

  “Because you are not important. Prague despises all her inhabitants equally. It’s why we all stay. We take comfort in being loathed.”

  “Yet she gives you beer,” I said.

  “You raise an excellent point as always,” said Mr. Cimarron. “She’ll never let anyone leave willingly. She takes comfort in spite. It’s what makes Prague so appealing. Other great cities are merely indifferent.”

  “Or they tend toward active persecution.”

  “Precisely. There’s hardly anywhere to sit down and smoke in New York and San Francisco.”

  “You travel a lot,” I said.

  “My installations must be installed,” he said. “Sometimes I think I might prefer designing amusements for children. There could be some value in postponing their encounters with the anguish, despair, and exasperation that will characterize the rest of their lives.”

  Directly over our table a bald man ogled a young blonde while a fat woman behind him brandished a rolling pin. I could not really imagine Mr. Cimarron cultivating a quiet domestic life. On a far wall a woman hitched up her dress and one leg to use a urinal next to a startled man. Elsewhere there were other cartoons of a similar stripe, and perhaps if I could have read and understood the captions I would have found them funny.

  Although he was cunning and disingenuous, there was an innocence to Cimarron I could not figure out. Despite his cynicism and caustic commentary about the art business, his clientele, politics, capitalism, declining standards of good manners in civil society, et cetera, these things were ultimately to him mere obstacles for a man or woman of spirit to overcome, and it was still possible to create or perceive one’s own meanings despite the ongoing degradation of everything. The conversion of meaning into money caused him genuine pain, and his wish for the world to leave him alone came across as an appealing childlike petulance.

  I fished for some sense of what his previous works had entailed but he wouldn’t be drawn—best to forge ahead, look ahead, rest on no laurel. Though he did reminisce occasionally about the clarinet he’d made from a carrot. After coring the thing vertically he had drilled finger holes, five top and one bottom, using an electric screwdriver, and attached it to a standard mouthpiece with a B♭ reed. He’d got it right on the sixth carrot, and it played beautifully until it began to rot on the third day. When I asked what he had done for a living before his works began to sell, he surprised me. He had been a carpenter, and before that a teacher of geography. I had not thought him old enough to have had three careers. I boggled that his country withstood so many incarnations as well.

  “Where are you from?” I said.

  “A small village that has been dropping apples for eight hundred years.”

  “Not very specific.”

  “Emperors visit. Armies maraud nearby. An enormous cliffside castle commands a view of twenty miles in every direction. The apples continue to drop indifferently.”

  “Karlštejn,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Amanda and I had visited. What both of us remembered was seeing, from the train, whole Czech families swimming and sunbathing in the river in their underwear, as though such Western fripperies as swimsuits had not yet reached the provinces, or at least that the wages that could procure them remained in Prague. The train crossed a gleaming new bridge built for tourists, not apple harvesters.

  “There is nothing in the countryside but honor, and nobody can live on that,” he said. “Prague as you know is the mother of cities. Shame she won’t divulge paternity.”

  * * *

  —

  I returned home slightly buzzed and Amanda told me her godfather in England had passed away. When I asked if they had been close, she replied that she had known him for twenty-four years. She decided to take time off and return for the funeral. She told one story before she went and another when she returned.

  It was an expected death, and a b
lessing, she said when she first got the news. He was only eighty-one but had suffered from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in which the lungs are gradually overwhelmed by scar tissue. For at least the last six months of his life he had been confined to a sofa in a back room of the family’s terraced cottage near Exeter, and hooked up to an escalating intake of oxygen. He had books he didn’t read and a television he didn’t watch and a bell on a string he could pull when he needed attention. He had been ready to go for months. Yet Amanda’s mother suggested that the only reason he hadn’t unplugged himself was the fear that his wife would have no idea how to carry on. He described his illness as a bloody nuisance.

  They had three grown children, each of them integral to Amanda’s childhood. Despite the sad occasion Amanda was eager to see them again. I went with her to the airport on the Friday morning, simply because I enjoyed the long straight tram ride out of Prague, even though the landscape, architecture, and weather turned progressively bleaker and more ominous. Somewhere past the airport, said Amanda, the Red Army is still hanging around sniffing glue. As we rode she chattered brightly about Bob, the deceased man, Melissa, his wife, and the children: Peter, Linda, and Theo. It dawned on me as she spoke that when she talked about her childhood she was really referring to a later period involving frequent raves and occasionally fleeing from law enforcement. I took the tram back home, too. I was startled to recognize the police station where Inspector Sokol had interviewed us: one ominous block among a dozen identical, innocent blocks.