Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult

The Angel

The young guard stood outside the room where they stored fire-clay piping. His thumbs hooked into the Sam Browne belt supporting a holstered revolver, while he watched the female prisoners unload the large fire-clay conduits. Beside him a willow tree — its pussy willows stripped by human hands each spring — was struggling to recover. The guard gazed at the mountain of wartime scrap; at the piles of fire-blackened metal hospital beds, gutted x-ray machines, cardiographs, and other medical devices; at a stack of disabled typewriters, the consequence, he assumed, of a direct hit on a typewriter factory, their keys grinning in the sunlight like teeth in a dead man’s skull. Scattered among the mangled letters were tiny beads of greenish glass, the remnants of windows melted in a fire-bombing that had consumed everything, even the cobblestones and the very air itself. A child’s crib sat on top of the pile of typewriters, and fixed to the metal headboard was a colored tinplate print depicting a little girl in a white dress walking across a chasm on a narrow footbridge. Hovering above the girl, almost touching her back with its hands, was a guardian angel, also in white, with two large wings, like twin brides. The young man’s complexion was pale, and he had deep creases, like knife scars, on each side of his mouth. He stared at the picture, took out a pocket watch, paused a moment, guessed it was one o’clock, then looked at the dial, but as usual he was half-an-hour off. Two workers in aprons pushed a dolly into the storeroom and began to stack it with the fire-clay conduits the female prisoners had unloaded.

“Sir,” said one of the prisoners, whose name was Lenka, “these guys have got to lug that stuff a long way. Couldn’t I give them a hand? We’re done here.”

“Nice little angel,” said the guard, pocketing his watch and pointing at the cot.

“My nice little guard,” Lenka said, pointing at the guard. “Have we ever tattled on you?” she whispered, touching the sleeve of his uniform.

“Go ahead then,” he shouted. “And the rest of you! Sweep out those empty wagons!” He was yelling at them, but the women knew he felt badly about it.

“Thank you,” said Lenka, and she walked into the shade of the storeroom, her raw linen trousers and white blouse moving through the shadows. Four alluring convicts hopped into the wagon and began singing quietly: “A single day without you in my sight, is like a year of everlasting night. ..”

The guard turned back to immerse himself in the colored tinplate on the cot sitting atop the pile of leering typewriters, and when he tugged at his Sam Browne belt, it was as if he could feel the strap tightening over a pair of wings and crushing the feathers, and he realized that his comrades in the unit had nicknamed him “the guardian angel” for a reason.

“Need a hand?” asked Lenka.

“If the Angel okayed it,” said the Atom Prince.

“Let’s set up a human chain,” said Mr. Hulikán.

“A good-luck chain. But please, take off your gloves,” said Lenka under her breath.

“Flesh to flesh,” laughed the Prince.

He took the conduits from the pile and handed them to the girl. As she took the sharp-edged objects from him, she lightly brushed her finger against his palm, and when she passed them on to Mr. Hulikán, she caressed the back of his hand as she let go.

“It’s awful!” said Mr. Hulikán. “These days, when I get paid, I don’t know if I should just chuck the money straight into the stove or blow it all on booze.”

“Save it up,” said Lenka, “and when I’ve done my time, you and I will go on a little spree.”

“By the time you’re out of here,” said Mr. Hulikán, “who knows where the hell I’ll be? But explain this to me. For fifteen years I delivered ice around the pubs, and in every pub they gave me all I could eat and drink. Not only that, on a good summer I managed to stash away enough cash to buy six pairs of shoes and six cartons of cigarettes.” Mr. Hulikán said this angrily, and as he bent over the dolly, Lenka kissed the top of his head, right where the part ran through his thick hair.

“At least you’re getting paid,” she said.

“You’re still just a filly,” said Mr. Hulikán, his voice rising. “But I’m the wrong side of fifty.” He hitched his trousers with his elbow, although they weren’t slipping down. “When I worked at the Orion candy factory, for lunch I’d put almond chocolate and cream into my lunch bucket, then I’d blow some steam into it and whip it into a froth. Add in a cookie and voila! And the parties we had! We had a skeleton key to the storeroom where they kept the liqueurs. When they changed the locks, we’d take an empty liqueur barrel, pour hot water into it, swish it around, and the hot toddies had us crawling on our hands and knees. Today? Look where I’ve ended up! I only make enough for food and booze. Where’s the room for my family in all this?”

Mr. Hulikán quickly took two fire-clay conduits from Lenka and set them down on the dolly.

The guard leaned against the broken willow, staring at the cot on the pile of typewriters. The angel drew him into the picture, pinned wings on him as big as twin brides, and gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he too had taken someone under his wing, a female prisoner who had gotten pregnant on the night shift through the barbed wire during last year’s cold snap — not by him, but by a certain man on the other side of the fence. The barbed wire had damaged the tendons in her knee and cut her buttocks, but through her tears her eyes were glowing. Then last fall, a gypsy girl had scraped a hollow in the earth on her side of the fence, and a man who may have been a gypsy as well, but in any case was very determined, hollowed out the earth on his side, and got her pregnant. It had been raining hard, and the only remaining evidence was a cavity under the fence and finger marks scratched into the wet clay. He had seen the gypsy girl afterward, still covered in mud, but with radiant eyes.

“Prince,” Lenka said under her breath, “pretend you’ve got something in your eye.” She raised a bleeding ring finger and daubed the young man’s index finger with blood.

“I’ve got nothing in my eye,” said the bewildered Prince.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Lenka, stomping her foot. She was trembling. “So tell me,” she asked, “what’s new in the world?”

The Prince continued taking conduits from the pile and passing them on, and each time, the prisoner caressed both pairs of the men’s hands, while three pairs of work gloves lay discarded on a nearby plank. A copy of the Daily Worker was sticking out of the Atom Prince’s coveralls, and he patted the pocket, saying, “Nothing special, except a little girl named Bessie Smith went to show her doll to the black welterweight world champ, Sugar, who lived in the Central Hotel, and the little girl never made it home.”

“Did anything happen to her?” asked Lenka.

“Matter of fact it did. Her guardian angel walked out on her,” the Prince continued. “It says here they found little Bessie in the bushes not far from the Central Hotel, strangled with a silk scarf, but the welterweight world champ couldn’t remember a little girl by that name among his admirers. Scotland Yard launched an investigation, but — oh, I’ve got something in my eye!” the Prince yelled. He dropped the fire-clay cylinder and began rubbing his eye.

“He’s got a sliver of metal in his eye,” Lenka said, coming out of the storeroom. “May I help him get it out? May I?”

“Do it!” yelled the guard. He watched her walk away and saw himself following her, holding his hands close to her back, and he felt a surge of angelic energy flowing between his protecting hands and her protected back, like the picture on the cot, and he saw himself, when the shift was over, shepherding the female prisoners across the wooden footbridge over the classification yard, and he could already hear the feathers dropping from his wings, as large as twin brides but tightly bound by the Sam Browne belt that held his revolver.

Mr. Hulikán, smoking a cigarette and looking sour, sat on the dolly that was neatly stacked with fire-clay conduits. Lenka cradled the Prince’s curly head in her arms, lifted his eyelid with her thumb, and held him close.

“You have beautiful eyes,” she murmured.

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

“Be nice to me, just a little. Jesus Christ, I need a man, merciful God, I need a man,” she whispered, her breath hot. .. “Tell me what else is new in the world,” she said out loud. .. “Now look up — that’s it.”

“The Americans have landed in Korea,” he said, “but they fired MacArthur, which is too bad, because he wanted to drop the atom bomb.”

“Now look down,” she said, pushing her knee between the Atom Prince’s thighs. “Dropping the bomb would make you feel good?”

“You’re not kidding,” said the Atom Prince.

“What about the people down below?” she asked, pushing her knee higher.

“The more the merrier.”

“But people are people, aren’t they?” she murmured, and a tiny bead of sweat broke free, rolling down her forehead. “Now look to the right — that’s it. The girls wanted to know how Zátopek did in the race yesterday.”

“A national disaster,” said the Atom Prince. “It was a crowded race, I’ll say that. At first Schade, Pirie, and Chataway led the pack, while the ace runner, Gaston Rieff, kept moving up. But after the eighth lap, nerves began to fray. Zátopek sprinted for the lead, the way he always does, but then Mimoun pulled ahead, worse luck!”

“Did Zátopek lose? We were all rooting for him!” Lenka said. She pulled out her hankie and ran the corner of it around the inside of his lid.

“Zátopek’s a cunning devil,” the Prince said wearily. “He shot ahead at the last minute and set an Olympic record.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Lenka whispered, her body shaking as though she were working the treadle of a sewing machine. “That’s so good.”

“You know, the Americans tested a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific that’s a thousand times stronger than the one they dropped on Hiroshima,” the Prince said.

“Enough about the Americans,” she said. “I’ve had it with them. All their talk about how we had to stand up to the communists got me into prison, and last week they brought in a trainload of Swedish ore that we had to shovel out of wagons marked ‘American Zone of Occupation’…” She sighed and shuddered. She didn’t even notice that Mr. Hulikán had flicked his fourth spent matchstick past her head. He’d lit another cigarette and was still sitting on the edge of the dolly looking at the ground, as though he were butting heads with destiny. Then he tossed away his cigarette and jumped down.

“My guardian angel’s abandoned me,” Mr. Hulikán said. He walked out of the storeroom, repeating to the guard: “My guardian angel’s abandoned me! Used to be I either got paid in kind, or I stole what I needed. But here? I was better off doing piece work in the Šumava forests. At least we had enough to drink. The Rusíns taught me how to pour a few gallons of denatured alcohol into a shallow well and light it on fire, and then, at just the right moment, smother the flames with blankets. .. It turned the well into a source of drinkable hooch. But the final straw that got me into all this shemozzle was when I killed the dray horse that I used to deliver the ice with my fist. They fired me. And that’s when my guardian angel left me high and dry,” Mr. Hulikán said, speaking directly to the guard.

“It’s out,” cried Lenka, and she exited the storeroom bearing the nonexistent mote from the Prince’s eye in the corner of her hankie; she gave a deep sigh that rose from her very toenails, while the other female prisoners went on sweeping out the wagons. But the guard heard nothing; he was leaning against the warm boards that covered the outside of the storeroom, pondering his sins of omission. As he stared at the colored illustration on the child’s bed, he imagined himself on bitterly cold days, a white angel, leading the female prisoners at the end of their shift downstairs to the men’s shower room; there he would let them warm themselves by the radiators while they stared at the walls, casting sidelong glances into the corridor as the naked steel workers emerged from the changing room carrying soap and towels, and the women stared at the naked male bodies, following them round the corner with their eyes, and those eyes became showerheads showering the bodies perfumed by dust with their desires. As the guard wrote his daily report he felt the prisoners’ blushes become his own and he knew that what he allowed to happen was against regulations, but he felt it was more important to show the people in his care, at least once a day, something like a Christmas tree…

“Keep moving!” shouted the guard. “Rinse out those soup buckets, and then wait for me!” But the prisoners knew from his tone of voice that he regretted having to say it.

When the prisoners were leaving and the workers began pushing the dolly loaded with fire-clay conduits out of the storeroom, the guard climbed up the pile of typewriters, pulled down the cot, and with a pair of metal snippers he’d borrowed from the welder, he cut the colored illustration from the headboard. He took the picture with him into the storage room, looked around, and behind a pile of fire-clay piping, he unbuckled his Sam Browne belt, took off his tunic, and slipped the guardian angel under the back of his shirt, its wings against his shoulder blades. Then he put his tunic back on and pulled the belt tightly over it so he could smuggle the picture out through the factory gate. When he emerged into the sun and ran to catch up to the women, walking behind them as their guardian, he felt the wings in the tinplate picture merging with his body, and he knew that neither his Sam Browne belt nor anything else in the world could prevent him from having wings of his own as big as twin brides, that nothing could prevent him from continuing — inadequately and against regulations — to protect the women in his care. And that, in his own mind, was his salvation.