by Pavel Mandys
Waiting for the train, he amused himself by watching the moon and stars, as the sky was exceptionally clear that evening. He knew his constellations pretty well. He checked whether all the stars were in their rightful spots, and when he assured himself that indeed they were, he couldn’t help but succumb to a moment of anxious regret stemming from the simple fact that he would never lay his eyes on this beautiful and majestic spectacle ever again.
At the turn, a train appeared. It was approaching fast and surprisingly quietly. His heart started to beat wildly and he couldn’t catch his breath, but he hoped that this would serve him well for his last few steps. Something hit him hard in his chest, and suddenly he merged with the single and singular, Beautiful Nothing . . .
* * *
He was woken up by a subdued, blinking light. It took awhile for his absentminded consciousness to calm down, and then such a wave of bitter sadness and despair washed over him that he almost choked, because he realized that the first entry from his column ADVANTAGES did not apply. His body still had the old earthly weight. There was nothing on this earth that could possibly get close to the disappointment he was experiencing. No eternally long and blissful void existed. That absolute nothing that was his last hope now appeared to be just another reality in which he was lying helplessly on his back, breathing with difficulty. In addition, he was horribly cold. He tried to move his hands. He shifted his head to one side and discovered that if he remained in that position, the light became a bit more bearable. Drool leaked out of his mouth, slowly moving down the left side of his chin. He wanted to sit up but something was preventing him from doing so. As if he were tied up. Perhaps this is how it is in hell, it occurred to him. From somewhere nearby came an entire sequence of short, sharp hissing sounds, similar to the sounds rubber soles make on linoleum.
And then, right beside him, he heard something very much like the old noisy alarm clock, and somebody yelled: “One moment! I have no signal here! Hold on! I’ll step out for a second!”
So this probably isn’t hell, he thought. Because surely in hell nobody discusses signals. Everybody knows that hell has walls forty thousand kilometers deep.
For God’s sake—I’m alive! he realized in horror.
While he was helplessly fighting with the fabric in which he was entangled as if he were a mummy, he could hear that male voice talking to somebody: “Dude, don’t even say that—I’ve just brought in a guy after a heart attack—the same age as me! Well, buddy, our peers are starting to kick the bucket, there’s nothing we can do about it!” It sounded like the guy was almost laughing. He was good at guessing voices. More precisely, he had a talent for imagining quite accurately the owner of a voice based on what he heard on the phone or radio. Most of the time, he got the weight, height, and the overall look of the person he had never seen before quite right. This voice belonged to somebody who loved boiled pork, a large unshaven man nearing fifty.
Finally, he freed himself from the fabric. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. There were two other bodies lying here under sheets. Startled, he watched them for a while and then quietly jumped down to the floor. His head fizzed a bit but he didn’t fall. It took a little while to catch his breath and then he wrapped himself in the crumpled sheet. Under the monotonous buzzing of a fluorescent light, he dragged himself toward an open door. Carefully, he looked out. He heard the man again but he didn’t see him. He tiptoed to the other side of the hall. He came to swinging doors with opaque, grainy glass fitted in the upper half. He thought something moved behind them. He had barely pushed himself against the wall when the doors flew open in front of him and something wedged through—something that slowly grew and acquired volume, and after a while there was no doubt that he was gawking at a woman’s behind. And what a very nice behind it was. As he found in the following seconds, it belonged to a young and very pretty cleaning woman who was now standing in front of him as if on display.
Without moving, she watched him, flabbergasted. It almost looked like she was going to say something, but then a frightening shriek sounded behind him, accompanied by a strange rattle. She came out of her swoon, slammed a bucket with a broom on the floor, and in a cute feminine way started running toward the morgue. He opened the swinging doors in front of him, peered in, and then, tiptoeing, started through the freshly washed hall. Moving like a wading bird so that he would make the fewest steps, he proceeded along the wall toward where he supposed an exit should be. Some ten meters farther, after a few turns, he found himself in front of a wide staircase. With relief, but also worries, he looked at a sign on the wall. Exit, it said curtly. As curtly as the doctor who announces, Exitus, after he takes his very old stethoscope out of his ears.
He smiled bitterly, and then started walking up step by step, shivering as he held the icy sheet close to his body.
Above, he looked around quickly. On the left, he noticed the reception desk where two people talked quietly. He approached them cautiously and in a way that would not alarm them. A gloomy doctor and an infinitely kind priest were blocking the narrow corridor with their bodies in such a way that it was impossible to pass around or between them.
“Excuse me,” he whispered with embarrassment as he shuffled near the two men.
“You excuse us!” they called after him almost in unison, yielding to him sideways. And when he disappeared out the door they continued, uninterrupted, in what was assuredly a very learned debate on the topic of what exists in the space between heaven and earth.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Chaim Cigan is the former chief rabbi of Prague and currently the chief rabbi of the Czech Republic. He began his career in the late sixties as a screenwriter and playwright. In 1977, he signed the dissident declaration Charter 77, converted to Judaism, and shortly thereafter moved to West Germany where he furthered his Jewish education. He returned to writing in 2014 when he published the first book in his series Where the Foxes Wish Goodnight: Altschul’s Method. He followed up with Piano Live in 2015, Puzzle in 2016, Outsider in 2017, and has also written a collection of children’s stories, The Small Mister Talisman.
Martin Goffa is a former police officer who has published seven critically acclaimed crime novels (The Man with Exhausted Eyes, Christmas Confession, Without Body, Between Two Fires, The Swimmer, The Child in the Fog, and The Hunting), and one short story collection (Living Dead Man), in the last five years. Thanks to his police career, he empathizes with both the detectives and the criminals in his hard-boiled thrillers.
Irena Hejdová, a screenwriter, has received several awards for her work, including a special mention at ScripTeast at the Cannes Film Festival for best adapted screenplay (from Petra Hůlová’s 2010 novel All Things Belongs to Me), the Sazka prize for her screenplay Children of the Night, and the RWE/Barrrandov Studios prize for the screenplay Legs Up (not yet filmed). She has also published numerous short stories.
Michaela Klevisová is a highly acclaimed crime-fiction writer who has published five novels, and won the Jiří Marek Award for best Czech crime fiction for both Steps of the Murderer and The Solitary House. Her stories often involve middle-class characters who become embroiled in comprising situations, with a focus on their relationships rather than traditional police investigations and narratives.
Štěpán Kopřiva is an author and screenwriter who combines hard-boiled action with science fiction and fantasy elements, as well as a large helping of dark humor. After publishing the successful novels The Killing (2004), The Asphalt (2009), and The Black Frost (2010), he turned to noir with his latest novel, Rapid Fire (2015), which was well received by both critics and readers.
Pavel Mandys is a Czech journalist, book critic, and organizer of the annual Magnesia Litera book award. He has written numerous book reviews as an editor of the online literary magazine iLiteratura.cz. In 2012, he published the book Prague: The City of Literature (in Czech and English) to support the city’s successful bid to become a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. In 2013, he published the en
cyclopedia 2x101 Books for Kids and Young Adults. He currently lives in the Prague neighborhood of Smichov.
Miriam Margala earned a dual doctoral degree in linguistics and English literature. She has been translating literature and other texts for the past twenty-five years and teaching in the field for the past ten years. Margala’s translations (poetry and prose) have been published in Europe and North America; one of the poems she translated was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has also published interviews she has conducted with literary/intellectual figures in the United States and Europe.
Ondřej Neff is a living legend among Czech sci-fi writers and incorporates elements of hard-boiled noir into his novels and short stories. His most lauded work is The Darkness (1998), and his short stories have been included in numerous collections, such as An Egg Inside Out (1985), A Zeppelin on the Moon (1990), and God, Ltd. (1997). His novel A Glimpse of a Dirty Trick (2007) has elements of both science fiction and conspiracy theories.
Markéta Pilátová writes stories set in the Czech Republic and Latin America. Born in 1973, she has published four novels, one book of poetry, and five books for children. Her book Tsunami Blues (2014) was inspired by Graham Greene’s novels: set partly in Cuba with elements of a spy thriller, her characters struggle with the past of Czech and Cuban communist secret services. Her work has been translated into six languages, including Spanish and German.
Jiří W. Procházka is an inventive sci-fi writer and was a Czech pioneer of the cyberpunk genre with his popular short story collection Time Creators (1991) and the novel Star Cowboys (1996). Later he moved to the action-fantasy genre with the Agent JFK series, but his latest novel is the crime story The Dead Beast (2015).
Petr Šabach is one of the most popular contemporary Czech writers and has published thirteen books, mostly humorous novels, novellas, and short stories, usually set in the Prague district of Dejvice. Some of them (How to Sink Australia, Jackal Years, Shit Burns, and ID Card) have served as inspirations for movies. His latest novel, Rothschild Flask (2015), is a variation on the classic “sting” genre.
Petra Soukupová has published five novels and two children’s books which have been translated into several languages, and she also writes screenplays for TV and film (a feature film she is working on will premiere in 2018). Her best-selling collection of three novellas, To Disappear, was a national best seller. She primarily writes about complex family relationships, incorporating elements of mystery.
Petr Stančík is one of the most imaginative contemporary Czech writers. He began in 1992 with his baroque fantasy The Both Spring, and continues writing playful, humorous, and slightly weird stories for adults and children. His novel The Mummy Mill (2014), a tragi-grotesque noir fiction set in Prague in 1866, won the Magnesia Litera prize for prose and was popular with both critics and readers.
Michal Sýkora is a literary theorist at Palacký University in Olomouc who is acclaimed for his crime fiction as well as his books on Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth. His novels A Case for an Exorcist (2012), Blue Shadows (2013), and Not the End Yet (2016) were inspired by contemporary British procedural crime novels. All three have been or will be adapted into TV miniseries.
Kateřina Tučková is a best-selling author whose last two novels, Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch (2009) and Godesses of Žítková (2012), benefit from well-constructed plots based on modern Czech history. Searching is the key idea: for the life story of a lonely, young, single German mother after World War II, or for the secret traditions of the pagan woman healers in the mountain villages persecuted by the Communist police. Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages, including English, Italian, and Arabic.
Miloš Urban is a writer and translator who rose to international fame through the Spanish edition of his Gothic novel The Seven Churches (1999). He has written several thrillers and short stories set in both contemporary and historical Prague (The Shadow of the Cathedral, Dead Girls, and Lord Mord). His ecological thriller The Waterman (2001) won the Magnesia Litera prize for prose. His suspense novel She Comes from the Sea (2014) is set in England and was inspired by Hitchcock movies and the novels of Patricia Highsmith. His books have been translated into thirteen languages, including English, German, and French.
BONUS MATERIAL
Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Also available in the Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.
From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.
My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.
Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.
Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.
The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.
In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest boroug
h in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.
He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.
Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)
Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.