Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  When she returned on Sunday, Amanda was pale, visibly distraught, and uncharacteristically incoherent. The funeral had gone well—a lovely commemorative service, she said. But outside the immediate family only Amanda knew the circumstances of her godfather’s death.

  There was no space in the sick room for the oxygen machine and its arsenal of canisters, so that was installed in a guest room with a tube conveying the oxygen through two doorways and down a hallway to the invalid. There had never been a problem with the arrangement.

  When the eldest child, Peter, arrived with his American wife, his mother immediately suggested a change to his long shaggy hair, which set the tone for the rest of the visit. When Linda, the middle child, arrived she was too busy arranging her third marriage to think much about her dying father, and everyone reminded her that she had not formally terminated her second marriage yet. When baby Theo arrived it was immediately evident that he could not handle his family without getting stoned first, and whole bottles of wine went missing after everyone had gone to bed. The mother and the eldest son made futile efforts to direct the attention of the younger siblings toward the suffering and imminent demise of their father. The four of them did pass at least one tranquil hour in the living room together without Bob watching a rerun of Father Ted.

  Amanda was closest to Peter, the eldest, who was constantly popping pills designed for people who experience panic attacks on airplanes, procured for him by his wife. Even so he whimpered in his sleep, said the wife to Amanda. She had taken him driving and giggled appreciatively at silly place names, did not count his beers, and massaged his shoulders, which she said was like kneading sheetrock. Nothing could assuage his anger, exasperation, and despair. Linda could not shut up about the new bloke and his encyclopedic knowledge of classical music. Theo passed out in the garden repeatedly. The American wife tried to help the mother in the kitchen. Peter thundered at his mother, “Every sentence out of your mouth begins with What I do…”

  He slammed the hallway door on his way out, pinching the oxygen tube. Everyone’s nerves were shot. Bob didn’t ring his bell.

  HERO

  Whole districts of Prague doubled from week to week as Occupied Paris or Victorian London. Movie stars’ stunt doubles could sometimes be spotted hard at work on set, while the stars themselves were rumored to be relaxing lavishly at the Four Seasons. It was said that the cost of filming in Britain or America had become horrifying even for Hollywood money.

  The film sets always struck me as distillations of Prague—a place that sells fantasies to foreigners. One of the buildings in Mission Impossible had been SS headquarters. Fancy and reality were inextricably interwoven, and there was no real Prague where films were not made. Yet watching a given movie is like seeing Žižkov without its butterflies, and wandering Prague encountering film sets induces a burning desire to know what really happened on the spot in question. Per square yard more people may have been shot, stabbed, burned, decapitated, hanged, maimed, disemboweled, or mildly injured there than in any other European capital city.

  Books set in Prague, like movies, seemed to sanitize places and misrepresent events, at least in comparison to conversations I had with Czech people. We weren’t really invaded, Vlasta told me. We were betrayed by Britain and France, and a few months later there were German officers doling out chocolate to Czech children in Prague streets. Her mother thought they were very dashing. But Bohemia had probably been doomed to Western misunderstanding ever since Shakespeare gave it a coastline.

  I turned a corner on my walk to work one morning and encountered, twenty feet away, a pair of uniformed SS men beneath two enormous red flags with white circles bearing swastikas draped over the façade of a beautiful baroque building of the kind too common in Prague to elicit much interest on any other day. For a fraction of a second I didn’t see the film crew. I thought, conventionally enough, of Amanda, and hoped she was safe.

  On another occasion the two of us had walked past a line of black cars from the ’40s on a cobbled street leading to the Old Town Square, presumably there for some blockbuster I was never able to identify. A Czech police officer in contemporary uniform materialized in front of us, cocking his drawn firearm and issuing orders I didn’t understand. I thought he must be an actor in a film at first, until I noticed several women bystanders moving behind their male companions as if to shield themselves if lead began flying. I turned to look for Amanda, but she had disappeared. The other bystanders began dispersing behind the police officer, who glared at me fiercely and pointed with his free hand toward an open doorway behind me. “Shut it behind you,” he said in English. I found Amanda inside, halfway down a flight of stone steps leading to a cellar bar.

  She said it was frightening to encounter a man with a gun and wondered what perpetrator of which crime was at loose overhead, but I was already cross with her. All the other women in the street had seemed to grab a man instinctively and all the men accepted this as their right and proper role. Amanda dived into a rabbit hole without a word. Had I been shot, I pointed out, I would have died in vain.

  “It would never have occurred to me,” she said. “I see no value in either of us getting shot.”

  “In theory,” I said, “we’re a unit.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I’ll let you perform your role next time. Although it’s not like you to be useful.”

  “I just question your instincts,” I said.

  “Instincts,” she said with a face like she was eating a wasp.

  “You know, like most women in couples sleep furthest from the door.”

  “That’s not instinct. It’s manipulation. It’s about who makes the coffee in the morning. Where did you hear that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Women’s magazine.”

  “Logically,” she said, “the person nearest the door should be the person who pees most often.”

  “That’s not very romantic,” I said. “And neither is your letting me get shot like a dog.”

  “Fine then,” she said. “My romantic instincts are lacking. I have none.”

  “Well, can you pretend occasionally?”

  “Would you like the wedding photos in sepia?”

  “We’re getting married?” I said.

  “Could help with visas,” she said. “And I could use a new surname.” She had always felt cursed as a Smith.

  NIL NISI RECTUM

  The motto of the House of Schwarzenberg is NIL NISI RECTUM, which sadly does not translate from the Latin into Nothing but ass. Sixty miles east of Prague stands a structure universally known to English speakers as the Bone Church or the Church of Bones, in which the Schwarzenberg coat of arms with its motto hangs on one wall, crafted from tibias and fibulas and skulls. Nearly everything else in the church is also fashioned from human remains. An enormous chandelier featuring at least one of every bone in the human body hangs from the ceiling, and there are four immense bell-shaped mounds of skulls. The origins of the Bone Church according to Ivan were that, first, someone brought back some dirt from the Holy Land, and wealthy locals demanded to be buried in it. Later it was discovered to be profitable to disinter the wealthy bones and sell the burial dirt to even wealthier subsequent generations. Genteel bones began to accumulate in a corner of the church. Whereon the Black Death struck in 1348, and bones of all manner of lifestyle, profession, and socioeconomic strata joined in. It became the world’s most ecumenical congregation. In 1860 an artist named František Rint—his name is spelled in phalanges and metacarpals on the south wall, with vertebrae for punctuation—strapped, perhaps, for cash to buy paint or other orthodox art supplies, got to work creating a magnificent and macabre work of bricolage. Peering through a grate in the back of the Bone Church you could see the contributions of recent delinquents: beer cans, candy wrappers, and spent Marlboros on a sprawling bed of pelvises, coccyges, patellae, and skulls.

 
I had a new gig. I was sent once a week to teach tobacco executives at a sparkling new factory fifty steps away from the ossuary. By comparison to the factory, the Bone Church was quite normal. The factory’s administration was housed in a seventeenth-century Cistercian monastery complex, and all the purveyors of lung cancer, emphysema, and so on rubbed shoulders beneath beautifully preserved frescoes of various saints being decapitated or disemboweled. The centerpiece in the former mess hall was a bishop wandering over hill and down dale with his mitered severed head clutched to his belly. Cigarette production was handled by a small army of ghosts—a hypothesis I could test, my students told me, by looking for live humans doing actual work.

  The Cistercians, they said, were ultimately banned from Czech lands for cruelty surpassing that of the Jesuits. Legend held that once a month a local virgin was required to deliver provisions to the monastery. Recent archaeological excavations had uncovered the remains of several young women.

  I taught the director of Corporate Social Responsibility, a voluptuous redhead in her early forties whom I found very distracting. She was nearly as tall as I, which suggested both a personal challenge and a conspiracy between us against the lesser people. She was also very smart and very impatient. She already knew how to say that a twelve-year-old who takes up smoking a pack a day is worth $75,000 to the company over the course of a lifetime. She and the global corporation broadly were under enormous pressure to provide something else to the twelve-year-old beyond occasional moments of inner peace and a lifetime of health complications. The conservation of the monastery was just a starting point.

  “It is common,” said Director Šarka, “in Kutná Hora for someone to go to the basement for potatoes only to find that the basement has fallen fifty yards into a medieval silver mine, and all the potatoes with it. Last week I ordered eight million dollars’ worth of cement. We want to keep the houses aboveground.”

  Eighteen international geologists—called the UNESCO Working Group on Land Subsidence—had studied and considered the ways that monuments, heritage buildings, storied dungeons, and whole cities like Kutná Hora could collapse into a bubble of subterranean air without some timely intervention. Accordingly the Swiss cheese earth beneath Kutná Hora was stabilized by pouring concrete into holes. Since the extent of underground perforation was not known the volume of concrete required was also unclear, and the plan evidently was to keep pouring until the concrete was level with the open-air surface.

  I became very nervous just walking around in Kutná Hora. Mostly I tried to teach Šarka how to read UNESCO guidelines, demoralizing for both of us because impossible. Kutná Hora once rivaled Prague for wealth and splendor, and is a World Heritage site. Therefore concrete can be poured into holes only in specific and highly restricted ways.

  In Kutná Hora there was a fourteenth-century cathedral resembling a spaceship, a whole district of homes with gables and turrets and oriels dating from the Renaissance, and a very pleasant town square for people watching. Kutná Hora is also the source of all evil. The first thalers were minted there, and in time came to be called dollars.

  Šarka belonged to a strange internal corporate entity called the Smoking Board, people from various tobacco companies around the world who could take two puffs of a given tobacco and identify it as Turkish, 1997, then argue amongst themselves whether it was coastal or Anatolian highland in origin. A few times a year this group convened around a mound of palate-cleansing parsley to try new products and deliberate over multimillion-dollar questions like whether to market the new product to women or children.

  “You belong to the illuminati,” I said.

  “Actually,” she said, “a lot of our input just gets ignored. Making better cigarettes is too expensive. Instead they change the size of the filter and sell the usual stuff in different packaging. Greek smokers won’t buy something that says Turkish on the label. American smokers like the word American. I think they are very insecure. We try to appeal to women and upper-class smokers everywhere with terms like domestic blend.”

  “Do you ever,” I said, “do anything normal for work? Like type a memo?”

  “Every day,” she said. “But you are in luck. The Board’s next meeting is here in Kutná Hora. Our meetings are confidential but our social hours are not.”

  * * *

  —

  Amanda looked fabulous in combat boots and paramilitary gear—Šarka told us to dress for mud. Amanda came for a change from her usual routine. In our teaching trajectories and our relationship we were like king and queen, and I could only falter one step in any direction while she surveyed the chessboard with scope and range and power. My role was to observe and be grateful and stick to a safe position.

  Šarka sported a fetching black beret. The other six board members were similarly tricked out in olive drab or black when we met in an orchard outside Kutná Hora at first light, like commandos behind the lines without insignia. There were two bulky Pavels, one Polish and one Russian. There was an amiable Canadian named Dave and an agile Mauritanian called Ismail. A towering Samoan called Iulio stood next to a short Italian woman named Delia who looked more like a hostage than a committed volunteer.

  Our mission was to find a waterwheel—a rare carnivorous plant—so that they could smoke it. There was no commercial value in the enterprise, but it was a ceremonial ritual for them to find something indigenous wherever they met and create cocktail cigarettes to commemorate the occasion. They were probably the only people in the world who could distinguish between a cigarette containing the waterwheel plant and any other. They were searching for that particular item because the rarer and more localized the plant, the better.

  As the name suggests, the waterwheel is aquatic. Our first objective was the stream at the bottom of the orchard. Šarka had a map in a laminated cover. There were numerous intersecting waterways nearby. Nobody had ever seen a waterwheel, but Šarka had a picture on a page ripped from a Czech encyclopedia, and photocopies for each of us. She also had water bottles and rain gear for me and Amanda, and she carried a portable hair dryer. You don’t get authorized to spend eight million bucks for nothing. She slung it from one hip like a sidearm.

  I asked Polish Pavel about previous expeditions. He told me that in New York one autumn they had smoked the leaves of American elms they gathered in Central Park. In Berlin they smoked linden leaves under some linden trees. Rome was more fun, because they infiltrated the Vatican City gardens with scissors and filched several roses. He had not been on any other missions because he was the junior recruit.

  It was usually best to smoke flowers—not for the taste, but for the symbolism. We were looking for the waterwheel’s small white blossoms, afloat in shallow but swift and clear water. If we spotted the plant, confirmation should be simple: the waterwheel is one of the fastest-moving plants in the world, closing its traps even quicker than a Venus flytrap despite the extra burden of running water. Essentially we planned to spend the day tickling vegetation to see if it attacked.

  “What do you suppose it eats?” I said to Polish Pavel as we walked. “Tadpoles?”

  “Maybe alligators.”

  “That explains why there are no alligators in Central Europe. They’ve been cleansed.”

  “Now the waterwheel needs a new food source,” he said.

  “Foreigners go missing in Czech countryside,” I said.

  “Rescue teams vanish,” he said.

  “NATO forces overwhelmed,” I said.

  “Evolution accelerates,” he said.

  “The speed of light decelerates,” I said.

  “Pots of gold are no longer attached to rainbows,” he said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Look,” he said, pointing. A bright orange and black salamander scurried away from us into the stream. It had not been devoured by a plant. We had lost the others, and no one else saw it.

  The bank o
pposite the orchard was on a slope layered in pine needles. Pavel thought the acid from the pine needles might discourage things from growing or living nearby or downstream. Upstream looked promising.

  We spun out still sillier apocalyptic scenarios as we walked. Y2K was around the corner. We talked about sports, and how extravagantly satisfying it had been to watch the Czechs humiliate Russia on ice for the hockey gold at the Nagano Olympics. Earlier that year France had hosted and won the World Cup with tremendous flair. Pavel suggested that more Czech and French babies had been conceived afterward than in any other year since 1945. We hardly noticed the rain as it transitioned from mist to drizzle, but downpour got our attention. We kept mostly under trees as we walked, still scanning the stream for white flowers, but the rain changed again into a malevolent entity, a grey regime interrogating every exposed surface and infiltrating my shoes. Thunder threatened us from somewhere nearby and Pavel pointed to the opening of a small cave.

  The putrefaction was overwhelming even before we entered and both of us pinched our noses. We had to stoop because the opening was just tall enough for—I guessed—a medieval silver miner. Lightning struck nearby—we were safer in than out. We moved forward crouching, Pavel in the lead. With a thin click of his Zippo we had a modicum of light.

  Ten feet in we came to a wall of new concrete, and against it a huge lump of decomposing fur beneath a cloud of flies. In the flickering light I could make out only powerful shoulders, short legs ending in plump toes, and a globe of a belly swarming with white or grey maggots. Pavel identified it as a wild boar. Stained blood on the wall and disturbed earth beneath it suggested he had given both a pretty hard time before he succumbed, attacking them as if something of value lay on the other side.