*
Zorka. She had eyebrows like her name.
*
Aeque pars ligni curvi ac recti valet igni. Crooked logs make straight fires.
Like I said, I knew your friend
Jana held her purse to her pelvis as she waited outside the International Meetings Lounge.
*
“You must be Ms K—” the man in the grey suit said.
Jana extended her hand, he wrapped his around hers and shook it, while opening up a mindful smile.
“Mr Doubek,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Roman Doubek.”
*
Roman Doubek looked too small for his suit somehow – his shoulders were inordinately narrow, or else his head, balding and shiny on top, was too wide at his jaw, or else his potbelly was too apologetic, like a stolen grocery store item tucked into a coat. On top of his bulbous nose was a pair of light, silver-rimmed glasses.
*
“Here I was on my way to Paris and here you were living in Paris. Here I was seeking an interpreter, and here you are working as one,” Mr Doubek said. “Like I said, I knew your friend – the Little Narcissus.”
“How so?” Jana enquired, maintaining her disinterest.
“I had considered it a nightmare, and then – I went online, Ms K—. I’m delighted you were available, in the end, for this meeting,” he replied. His face formulated back into a smile and he said no more.
*
Jana was burning to say her name, Zorka, you knew Zorka, is that it? But to say her name now, out loud, after so many years of it remaining purposefully unsaid, would be as freakish as this man’s nightmare claim.
Besides, Jana had no patience for riddling when it came to men. There was always a condition to the suspense, and the anticipation was as finely nauseating as a string of saliva being drawn out slowly from the mouth, and the reveal usually revealed nothing more than men’s inherent privilege to withhold information. Even if he did know Zorka, it no longer concerned her – this knowledge, her existence, the man’s betting chips clattering in the palm of his wording. Did he think he’d make a little girl out of her by mentioning the Malá Narcis? She wanted to tell him that she had never been a little girl in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now.
Jana cleared her throat and informed Mr Doubek that she would be using the toilet before the meeting.
In her cubicle, Jana closed the door and pulled up her skirt. She wasn’t sure if she actually had to urinate. She pulled down her underwear, and ran her palm over her pubic hair, incrementally against the grain. Zorka, she whispered out loud, and the stream came all on its own.
*
“As I’m sure you’ve observed,” Mr Doubek sat beside Jana, across from the two French clients, “Linet has been dynamically developing. Since our beginning in 1990 in Želevčice u Slaného, we have expanded our production to reach hospitals, retirement homes and long-term care facilities worldwide, exporting to over 100 countries and growing.”
He spoke assuredly and evenly, sliding rehearsed coins that Jana flipped routinely into French for the clients.
“Our main plant in Želevčice manufactures 40,000 beds a year.”
The shorter client with a mole on his cheek asked, “Tell me more about the Eleganza 3 bed?”
“The Eleganza 3 bed is for intensive care units,” Jana translated.
“. . . sold greatly in the United Arab Emirates after being exhibited at the Dubai convention.”
“Very innovative,” the second client added, nodding his dark head full of brushed hair, his cleft chin pointing at the table.
“Anti-pressure ulcer mattresses . . .”
“Can we just go back to the CliniCare 20+ mattress?”
“. . . made of cold polyurethane foam, which is also covered with a layer of thermoelastic foam . . . with transport handles on the side, of course, for easy transfer.”
“Oh no, the EffectaCare 20+ has a greater foam density.”
“. . . in collaboration with top healthcare professionals and experts in the scientific fields!”
“Listen, we’re not only on top of the newest equipment in the area of medical care, we set the trend. So, let’s get to why we are really here, gentlemen.”
“Yes, let’s,” the man with the mole agreed.
Mr Doubek pulled out a glossy brochure from his folder and slid it across the table to his clients.
The Virtuoso Mattress, the front page read, when care is critical, each fibre counts.
“There is no mattress system for high-risk patients like this in the world.”
The clients opened the brochure to the second page and Mr Doubek reached over and pointed to the diagram of the multi-layered mattress with information bubbles around the design.
“The three-cell technology holds the body of the patient in ‘zero pressure’. Allow me to further explain what this means, gentlemen. Zero pressure, let’s just say these patients, on the verge of complete organ failure, for example, on the precipice of expiration, in addition to the stellar care that the best medical facility can provide, they require a sort of organic reunion with their own gravity, a homecoming to the distribution of their mass, a realignment comparable with the original state of symbiosis within their mother’s womb – so to speak.”
“But let’s discuss more concretely. Here,” Mr Doubek turned the page for the clients as Jana spoke, “the system of connected air cells between the two-layered mattresses creates the therapeutic effect that has been proven to accelerate wound healing.”
“And as you can see,” the page was turned again and Mr Doubek’s finger pointed to a photo of a nozzle-like apparatus adjoined to the side of the beige bed-frame, “the Virtuoso mattress system is also equipped with a one-hand-operated CPR system.”
The French clients began nodding in sync, then flipped backwards in the brochure.
“Very impressive,” the cleft-chin client said, “but it is also quite an investment, you would agree.”
“The investment is on a par with the service, gentlemen,” Jana said calmly. “This is state-of-the-art medical care. This one-of-a-kind mattress, this complete bed system,” Jana continued as Mr Doubek held down the brochure with the fleshy side of his fingertip, “this is the human sleep wherein science can reach its hand the farthest it has ever reached to intervene.”
*
Mr Doubek gestured, letting the clients leave first. After they’d left the meeting room, Jana stood up, and Mr Doubek followed suit. She took a couple of steps towards the door, but Mr Doubek slid around her into the doorway and turned to face her.
“The meeting went very well,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Jana replied and waited for Mr Doubek to step out of her way. But he just stood there, looking at Jana.
“Can I get you a coffee . . . and a pastry . . . ?” Mr Doubek asked.
“No, thank you,” Jana replied, looking beyond his shoulder.
Mr Doubek maintained his gaze on Jana, continuing to speak in a weighted tone.
“I know I am intruding, Ms K—. I was under the impression you might want to hear more about your friend . . .”
Mr Doubek reached his left hand inside his jacket pocket and pulled out an inky-coloured business card and gave it to Jana. On the card, the letters were embossed.
She angled it towards the light and read:
THE BLUE ANGEL
Underneath, Bar à vin.
Then the address. A street named “Prague”, in the 12th arrondissement.
“We could get a drink there,” Mr Doubek said. “At 9pm . . .”
Jana’s eyes were going over the contours of the card, dropping into the grooves of each letter.
“I hope you like sad music, Ms K—. . .”
Zorka
The other kids were mush. Except her, she was solid, I knew that from the courtyard when I looked up.
Sure I get what the gossip was, even back then, Slavek’s big brother with his big mouth was spreading i
t, saying me and my mamka and my papka had been kicked out of our last apartment for our “dynamics” and we were on our best behaviour in the new building and that truth-be-told, I was the nutjob of the family.
*
Yeah, I had a pee trick when I first moved in, six going on seven, but for the record, I did behave most of the time cause Papka said we can’t get kicked out any more, but then Mamka would scream, clang a dish, take a hard footstep, how she did, close the window abruptly, and I knew she was coming for me. So I stood in the middle of the carpet, and pulled down my tights and my underwear and let it stream.
“Stop it stop it stop it,” Mamka would run in, trying to pick me up, getting pee all down her stockings, cursing, kicking me with her pee-stained leg, screaming “Malá Narcis!!” when I fell to the floor, then me standing back up, the stream starting again between my legs, Mamka slapping me across my face, me falling back down on the wet carpet, Mamka getting on top of me, Mamka whacking me on the shoulder, on the temple, the cheek, the wrists, the arms, the mouth, whatever, it was all the same to Mamka’s hands. She’d slap herself tired, then get off me and stand up, take a moment of solitude like I knew her to take. She’d place her face into her still-hot palms and hold her head up like that, eyes closed. And I’d get up, careful, checking things out, my face stinging, my lip bleeding. I’d give her dress a little tug. I’d say, “Mamka?” in my not-so-nasty voice.
There were dashes on my cheek from Mamka’s wedding ring.
I’d give the dress a tug and say, in my quiet, not-weird voice, “I’m all out of pee now, Mamka,” to let her know.
Then she’d take her hands away from her face and look down at me and say, “When you call me your mother, it makes me want to die.”
*
It was the anniversary of the Soviet invasion, and the adult talk was: “Twenty years now of this Warsaw Pact crap”; the Czechoslovaks were a slow-boiling people, they were a cautious people, but now, even they had had enough of this shit. I’d been collecting my saliva in a cup I hid under my bed. “Everything you don’t say,” I told Jana, “becomes liquid.” I didn’t want my words, said or not, to go to shit. Jana played it quiet, like she did. She was good at that. But then she whispered to me that she was already full of wasted words, so maybe she shouldn’t speak at all. I snuffed at her then, “Yeah right, Janka, never! You gotta keep speaking, and if it don’t sound right in one language, just learn another.”
Jana knew what I meant, and everyone could see it. She was sharper than sharp. Her mamka was always bragging about her brain. She got her big books, dictionaries, Russian and French and German, and Jana started learning words that looked confident.
*
Maybe I’m not telling it right. Or when I hear myself describing Jana, I get sorta pissed off about it, like that’s not right. I don’t know how to make it sound like how it was, for us.
She was solid, Janka. She was my best friend.
*
We were eight when the first cracks began to appear in the cemented communism we had grown up with. In November, the news came that the Berlin Wall was coming down and refugees were trying to sneak through Czechoslovakia; the Vltava shifted beneath its icy skin like life heckling a corpse. The adults were asking each other in private, “Well, what do you think, what about us?”
Janka and I, we sat under the kitchen table daring each other to swallow the pebbles we had collected that autumn. Big pieces, little pieces, country by country, communism started crumbling everywhere.
*
“Janka . . .”
“Huh?”
“Guess what?”
“Huh.”
“Guess though.”
“Um . . .”
“You’ll never guess.”
“What?”
“Know how I’m supposed to be like . . . greater . . . than this.”
“Yeah.”
“Like . . . my eyes the size of the planets out there.”
“Yeah.”
“And like, my heart beating, splitting land masses into islands . . .”
“Yeah.”
“And like, big tits. In everyone’s face.”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . I’m getting outta here.”
“Outta here where?”
*
The first time I ran away from the new building, Mamka smoothed things over with the neighbours so we wouldn’t look too weird as a family. Sure, her eight-year-old girl went missing for a couple days, she sang her tune, but she probably reminded everyone that I’m a Little Narcissus, and assured them one by one in the hallway that I’d been pulling these stunts since I could walk, and please, did they want to help themselves to a portion of her poppy-seed cake, freshly baked?
I came back a couple of days later, and Jana asked me where I’d gone and I told her I was hanging out in the forest and then we both looked at the curtains in the kitchen and I could feel her feeling it cause I was feeling it too, the nothingness of time, as thin and stretchy as your eyelid if you pull it up with her fingertips. If we had known how to cry about those feelings, we sure would have. But we were kids, we only knew how to cry about the stuff that didn’t really hurt, we cried to show everyone we were still kids, in case they started worrying we were up to some adult shit. But I remember those curtains and how much I wanted to cry about my destiny and I’m sure Janka did too, and so I just reached out my hand and Janka took it, and that was enough, and actually, it was incredible, to hold on to something instead of wetting myself.
*
I don’t know what to do with History, the big one that belongs to all of us and my small one, like a keychain.
*
Yeah, we were ten I think, and yeah I just hit Janka on the sternum and yelled at her. Asked her where her revolution was, for fuck’s sake. The sun was out. Jana was clogged up beneath her thin auburn fringe, the rest of her hair long and flat. She had that good-girl look down. Even when I brushed my hair, I still looked like I’d mess something up for somebody.
They were announcing the withdrawal of the Soviet forces, those last T-72 tanks and armoured vehicles rolling through the streets with their artillery snouts and gouged-eye stares. Jana got real good at fingering her hair quickly into two straight plaits. I was testing out my middle finger at cloud formations, sunsets, horizons . . .
I told Janka, listen, we’ve been pooing and peeing on each other for too long in this country and it’s about time someone built a modern toilet.
By that time, my mamka had sloped from her flirty mania back into a subdued and self-conscious stare, stirred up by that early case of electroshock therapy she had. Those days, she was too depressed to be political. And my papka was just getting really sick then, before we knew it was a terminal disease.
“Janka, you gotta be your own person!” I yelled at her. (That’s why I was hitting her in the sternum. Cause she wouldn’t say nothing in response, I mean . . .)
Then finally she said, “I want a nice, modern toilet too, you know.”
*
Politics got full of wonder, miraculous even, not knowing what would happen. Other things, we did know. Like my papka who was sick. We bought a grave ahead of time. Still the world kept on folding and unfolding, creasing itself this way or that, borders, agreements, yeah I was showing off the scars on my body to Janka, like guarded checkpoints I snuck myself past.
*
She told me she wanted to cut off her hair, I said good idea, it’s weighing you down. She asked her mamka and her mamka said no, absolutely not, your hair looks nice the way it is, so I stole the big pair of sewing scissors from our neighbour Ms Květa and Janka pointed where, and I chopped it off straight at the chin. Her mamka freaked, what have you done, then of course, turned on me, got my mamka involved (bad idea). My mamka showed her how to freak out properly, she got my papka’s belt and started lashing it in the air like a horsewhip, so of course I took a run for it, and she went after me, and got a couple of lashes in, but I also
gave her the tongue twice and a solid two-finger salute, so we were even.
Jana asked to see my welts so I showed her, shoulder-blade, neck, forearm, but said it was definitely worth it. She looked out of this world with her new hair. I wore jumpers for a while, sweat it out in Spring, till the welts healed.
*
Fuck, we were teens and it was tough. We’d go up and down Dvořákovo Street and stand outside of the Prague Conservatory, that yellow building like a huge plastic stick of butter. One July it got so hot, I thought it smelled salty and oily. I was wearing long trousers because I was trying to hide three fat bruises on my right thigh.
In school, people thought my papka was a military man and he was strict, so I just let them think that, and Jana added a comment or two to keep the rumours going on my behalf. Yeah, her mamka was mush, and her daddy was out of it, but the thing is, she didn’t know about getting a beating, really. The thing is, it’s kinda embarrassing when it’s your mamka that does it. Janka said her mamka never slapped her or her brother Vilèm around. They only got spanked by their daddy’s hand, and Vilèm got the belt a couple of times because he liked to have the last word, but he grew out of that, and Janka was attentive by nature.
I churned a bit of spit in my mouth and shot it as far as I could.
“What if my spit was made of fire?” I asked Janka.
*
We’d go by the Vltava river, kicking pebbles with our shoes. We’d walk by that old Jewish cemetery, past the Staroměstská metro, to the astronomical clock tower, the biggie tourist trap, now that tourists were flocking in. Near the bottom of the clock tower was a series of layered astronomical dials – the sun, the moon and the zodiac – just below two windows out of which would appear a rotating circle of apostles. Placed around the astronomical dials, there were small statues representing the evils of life: Vanity, a man admiring himself in a small mirror; Greed, a man holding a bag of gold – you get the picture – and lastly (my favourite) Death, a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and the clock’s bell-ringing rope in the other.
Virtuoso Page 3