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

Ingots

At the very edge of town the door of the public house flew open and the publican dragged out a girl with long fair hair and tried to shove her down the steps, but she grabbed the banister with both hands and yelled into the night: “Let me live! Let me live!”

The publican wrapped an arm around the girl’s waist and, with his free hand, took out a bunch of keys and struck her over the knuckles, and when she released her grip he kneed her in the back and she stumbled down the steps, her arms flailing. She collapsed in a heap on the empty roadway, her hair splayed like a peacock’s tail or an ostrich-feather fan.

“Hey, there,” shouted the Prince, “how do you know that’s not my girlfriend?”

“Some girlfriend, you piece of shit!” said the pub keeper, turning in the doorway to face him. “She put away nine rums and five beers, and she can’t pay the tab.” And he slammed the door behind him, locking it angrily.

“Let me live!” cried the girl.

A fire truck in full cry roared past the railway tracks that ran through the scrap-metal division of the steel works. Some firemen were sitting on jump seats, others stood on the running boards, their helmets glistening in the morning sun. One of them had a gleaming white set of teeth and stood with a boot propped on the front mudguard. He was hanging on with one hand and saluting with the other, gazing around him with a celebratory air, acknowledging the accolades he imagined coming his way and announcing to no one in particular: “The cooling pipes in the blast furnaces are clogged. We’ve got to douse them with water.”

“Things are getting much better, doctor,” said Bárta, the loader. “Christian Europe is consolidating.”

“Which Europe?” asked the doctor of philosophy derisively. “And what d’you mean ‘Christian’? It’s more Jewish than ever before.”

They were pulling scrap out of the railway wagons and loading it into hoppers: cylinders and pistons, a glass disc, the crushed remains of Leyden jars, twisted compasses, metal hoists with weights and counterweights, a bundle of iron rods and electromagnetic coils, an upright galvanoscope, a spectroscope, and a sextant with mirrors. Bárta, a former merchant, removed brass components from the scrap and put then into a box so when the shift was over, he could take the brass away and sell it for cash.

“It is Christian,” the merchant said.

“That’s crap,” said the doctor of philosophy, raising his hand. “At one end of the spectrum you’ve got one brilliant Jew, Christ, and at the other end you’ve got another genius, Marx. Two specialists in macrocosms, in big pictures. All the rest of it is Mother Goose territory.”

He took a jimmy and pried loose the latch on the next wagon; then he and Bárta lifted the door off its hinges and gently let it slide down to the tracks. They climbed inside and started rummaging around. They brought out a sump pump, an old blower, pieces of a threshing machine, a farm gate that had been dismantled with a cutting torch, a paper cutter, a seed drill, a field mower, an old weigh scale, and parts of a plough. They tossed it all into the hopper.

The Prince knelt over that lovely head of hair, but as he bent down, he fell over on his hands. For a moment he remained on all fours, then sank in a heap on the road and rolled onto his back, gazing at the sky, while the stars spun around like a tree in full blossom. He rolled over on his side, righted himself unsteadily, and felt burning alcoholic bile seep from his stomach into his mouth.

“I’ve got nowhere to sleep,” the girl wailed.

“We can put you up,” said the Prince. He crawled toward the prone figure, pushed her hair aside, then sat up and fumbled in his pocket for matches. He found them, but each time he struck one it went out. Finally he managed to ignite a sheaf of four together, and he could see her face in the flare. Her eyes were open, and when she turned toward him he could see a long scar running across her forehead, jumping her eyebrow, continuing down her cheek, and ending at her mouth.

“When I was little I had a pony,” she said, “but no one believed it was mine.”

“I believe you,” said the Prince, and he stood up, quickly planting his legs apart to keep from falling over again.

The girl sat up, got to her knees and then to her feet, wavering unsteadily.

“They don’t know what to do with me… my endocrine system… it’s like I’ve got a chest full of jelly… they keep giving me injections,” she said, struggling out of her coat.

The Prince took a step, lurched forward a few paces, then stopped, his legs apart.

“First we got these b-b-bubbly little sores on our skin,” she said and started walking after the Prince, dragging her coat in the dust by one sleeve. “See, I’m working with really toxic stuff now. .. I package iodine salts. I’m covered in it.” She pushed her hair back with her hand, looking up at the sky and making a circle above her head with her arm. “I’m covered in sores, like the sky.”

She set off at a trot, got ahead of the Prince, then stopped and turned to face him.

“Where do they get all this stuff?” complained the merchant. “So long after the war and still so much scrap.”

“Just so there’s no doubt about it,” the doctor continued, “the Jews nailed it down: Freud in quackery and art, Einstein in physics. Two more specialists, but masters of detail this time, microcosms. A foursome of brilliant Jews, and the entire world stands on their shoulders. The rest is all just warming up the soup and watering down the vodka.”

He took a pitch fork and began heaving things straight from the wagon into the hoppers next to it: chains, rusty ploughshares, yokes, sugar beet hoes, seed boxes, and tubes from planting machines.

“What about America, eh?” yelled the merchant.

“Oh, right, America,” said the doctor. “They’re sitting pretty now that Morgenthau and Baruch are on the Atomic Commission, and all they did was dither until the Russians got the bomb too, thank God.”

“But the Americans have more bombs,” said the merchant.

“That’s for sure, they do have more,” the doctor nodded, “but that cow, Peroutková, really got up my nose when she said that the Americans bombing Prague at the end of the war was just a teensy little foretaste, and that this time around it would be a different kettle of fish. Listen here, Peroutková, you silly cow, fuck your Radio Free Europe, because what kind of a life will I have if you blow it to smithereens?”

He raised a finger and just where he was pointing — beyond the piles of old war material, where the domes of the blast furnaces towered over the landscape — he could see four silver streams of water shooting into the air, showering the furnaces as if they were taking part in a fire drill or a training exercise at the firefighting academy. A cloud of blue and pink steam poured off the furnace walls, then quickly dissipated and was lost against the blue summer sky.

“Any chance of a smoke?” she asked.

The Prince staggered to his feet and steadied himself while he patted and poked about in his pockets; then he sullenly handed her a pack of cigarettes. When he struck a match, the girl leaned over the flame and her hair fell around it as though she were inhaling it. She smoked hungrily and the ember glowed in the dark, illuminating her face through her hair. She broke into a stumbling run, as if driven forward by the alcohol, then she had to slow down while the Prince trudged after her, fighting an urge to run backwards, as though someone were dragging him to a place he didn’t want to go. They climbed a narrow pathway beside a ditch carrying wastewater from the mine. On the hilltop, they were dumping slag that cast a red glow and blue shadows over the landscape. The girl’s hair shone like pink cotton candy. The Prince lit her another cigarette.

“That’s quite a scar you’ve got on your kisser,” he said, walking along the edge of the ditch.

“There was this craaaazy family back home,” she said, and ran several yards ahead of him, then she turned and went on. “They called themselves the Colorados and claimed they were nobility, but all they had was this little shop. .. When they’d go to the district fair they’d ask the railway to add on a saloon car, just for them. .. One of them was truly in-in-insane and when I was a little girl I’d ride my pony and tease him by calling him Count Colorado!”

The girl was shouting, but the landscape was silent now. A baby carriage was approaching down the path with a small, bright blanket inside it. As it passed them, the Prince saw that the woman pushing it was in tears. Wrapped inside the blanket was a whimpering little dog.

“What’s up, Mum… what… what happened?” he asked, steadying himself again.

“My little Haryk got hit by a car, poor dear,” the woman said as she passed by. “I’m taking him to the doctor’s.”

“Count Colorado!” the girl shouted, waving her crumpled overcoat. “He was a madman. Once he came after me with a scythe and whacked the p-pony’s hind legs with it, and I fell off into a patch of nettles, and as he was backing away, he didn’t see me and ran the tip of his scythe across my face.” The girl yawned and started running again, stumbling over her coat.

The professor of philosophy climbed into the wagon, handing the merchant the scorched components of a grain hopper, a drum separator, sifting machines, a grain sorter, and a device for whipping cream.

“Looks like a mill must have burned down somewhere, eh?” Bárta said, tossing the items into the hopper.

“All our good old golden days are being smelted down, and you don’t even know it’s happening,” said the doctor. “This age we live in has stunned you like a calf in a slaughter house, and what are you doing? You’re tossing into the furnace the very things, the very means of production, that created your class in the first place… and you’re completely unaware of it.”

“But the world won’t just leave it at that,” laughed the merchant. “Look at Iran — they’re fighting back tooth and nail.”

“Iran?” asked the doctor.

“Yeah, Iran.”

“You’re mistaken,” said the doctor. “You mean Iraq.”

“No, I listen to Radio Free Europe — Iran.”

“Look here,” said the doctor, “they’re all pricks and pissants but there’s still a huge goddamn difference between Iran and Iraq. However, my friend, the Russians are here, and that’s what matters. They’ve always had good chess masters, bass players, weight lifters, wrestlers, speed skaters and foreign policy.”

And the doctor set an ice-cream maker and a meat grinder on his apron-covered knee. With gloved hands, he picked up a meat chopper, some ladles, a cylinder head from a compressor, a slaughter-house stun gun, some bone splitters and turning hooks, and he carried them to the edge of the wagon, where Bárta took them and tossed them into the waiting hoppers.

They were standing by the fence around the barracks. The Prince yanked out two boards and they slipped into the compound, the girl bending forward, her hair over her face, yawning. He held out his arm to indicate she should go ahead, but as he did so he staggered backwards, hit the dormitory wall, and slumped to the ground.

Inside, Karel the fireman was looking into the mirror, baring his gleaming set of teeth and brandishing his axe. He had his helmet on and gazed at himself through half-closed eyes. He wore tight-fitting calf-high boots, and from the moment he’d first pulled them on, he felt utterly sure of himself, decisive, the same way he felt when he wore his big belt.

The door to the room swung open and he spun round, alarmed to see no one there. The volunteer workers were all asleep in their bunks, except for Jarda Jezula, who lay on his back, fiddling with a bunch of artificial roses wired to a slat in the bunk above him.

A drunken worker with deep circles under his eyes sat backward on a chair, toying with a glass of wine and watching its reflection flicker across the table top. “Concentrate,” he mumbled. “Think of it, say it at once, and you’ve got it. What am I afraid of, Marion?”

The fireman braced himself, walked over to the doorway and shouted into the dark corridor, “Don’t play games with me! You’d better watch out! My case officer’ll tell you what a dog I was in reform school!”

The Prince stepped through the doorway, turned around, and held out his hands to draw the girl in from the dark. She stumbled into the room, bent over at the waist, her hair dishevelled. She tossed her coat aside, and the fireman jumped up on a chair; the reflection from the wine glass on the table top came to rest. Her arms outstretched, the girl collapsed facedown on one of the bunks and her hair spread out like spilt milk.

“But there’s humanity here,” said the merchant. “There are ideas here.”

“Humanity, my friend? We saw that in the slammer; that’s where humanity is now. Nothing but rat finks, maniacs, bottom-feeders, and big mouths with raging paranoia! All we ever heard inside was, ‘I’ll show the fuckers the minute Zenkl shows up from Cheb on a white charger!’” The doctor of philosophy was shouting, his eyelids hooding his eyes. “Humanity will forgive you if you’re a horse’s ass, but if you speak five languages, they’ll never let you live it down, especially not in the slammer. There was one particular swine who was doing time for politics, like me, but he liked to play the coachman, get on his high horse, and he’d grill everyone who came in, even though it was none of his damned business. He pointed his whip at me and asked, ‘So what are you in for?’ and I said, ‘I’m ashamed to tell you,’ and he gave me a taste of his whip, so I said, ‘I fucked a goat,’ and he ate it up. ‘Out with the details,’ he said, and I said, ‘It was a goat, but she was pregnant, and I ripped her open, so they threw the book at me.’ After that the son of a bitch left me alone, but I had to stay sharp, because one day he was about to let a wagon roll over my foot, but luckily it stopped when the tongue got caught in a crack in the stairs. I was ready to punch him in the face, a real whopper, right on the nose, but then common sense got the better of me — you know how it is — all the ones doing real time were absolute masters of mayhem. But some day, I’m going to let someone have it, that’s for damned sure, and they won’t know what hit them.” And he went on, dragging the scrap out of the wagon with a bent pitchfork: rusty saws, bandsaws, chopsaws, crosscuts, Swede saws, rip saws, keyhole saws, cog-wheels, spindles, bobbins, needle holders, a set of rusty drills, some axes, hammers, grinding wheels, compasses, charred carpenters’ adzes.

“Boys,” said the Prince, struggling to get his boots off, “I brought you a sweet little piece of ass.”

“You’re the man,” said the fireman, climbing off the chair, “I’ll go first.”

“Jarda, are you having a go too?” asked the Prince.

Jarda merely smiled beatifically.

“Forget about him! Haven’t you heard?” asked the fireman, and he knelt beside the sleeping girl and flipped up her skirt. “Jarda’s fell hard for an ex-pavement pounder. Today was her name day and he carries a bouquet for her across the whole damn steel works… and she burst into tears.” In a single motion, the fireman ripped off the girl’s panties and tossed them at the wall.

The Prince walked unsteadily to the table, opened a drawer, took out a pair of scissors, then went to the bunk.

“Getting their clothes off is always a pain in the ass,” he said, then he cut through the hem of her skirt and with a sudden jerk, ripped it in two. “That’s hard work,” he said, stumbling back to the table. He sat down on a bunk. “Jarda,” he said, “you used to be a bit of a hound. Don’t you want a little taste?”

He pointed at the helmet, which appeared to be resting on the girl’s head, at the fireman’s uniform now blanketing her body, at the axe shaking rhythmically on the fireman’s back.

“Think your girl is any different?” the Prince asked.

“I’ll say she’s different,” said Jarda, and he went on fiddling with the plastic roses, “but she used to be like that… and anyway, do we know who that is under Karel? Maybe she’s somebody’s sister. Somebody’s daughter for sure. Maybe she’s your future old lady. Your wife, the woman you maybe have kids with.”

“You slimy scumbag!” the Prince shouted.

“But the intelligentsia’s still around, they’ll put an end to all this,” said the merchant.

“That’ll be the day,” said the doctor. “Yesterday, when I was getting a pedicure in Jas, I ran into a sculptor friend of mine, who happens to be an old classmate, and he says to me: ‘They just gave us a beautiful exhibition space in the old Riding School up at the Castle!’ And I say, ‘Well, la-de-fuckin’-da! The aristos used to hump their nags around that place, and now you’re going to use it to flaunt your art? Couldn’t you have put up something different? I’d leave it as a riding school, and if one of those minotaurs drop in to the Castle for a state visit, let him go riding. .. Or how about this? Once a week, put a sign up in the Riding School that says, Free Humping Today!’ That’s what I told my sculptor friend, and he just walked away. I’m telling you, you can smell the shit in the intelligentsia’s trousers from thirty feet away these days.”

The doctor stood up in the wagon, then jumped down. The two of them took the other door off its hinges and carried the scrap to the hoppers: a metal worker’s anvil, a bundle of wagon axles bound with wire, ball joints and sockets, metal-bending machines, blacksmiths’ hammers and tongs, a fireplace screen, lock-makers’ drills, portable spinning wheels, a base for portable gas-furnaces, polishing wheels, a set of pipe threaders, gun drills, hole-punching pliers, ratchet wrenches, cutters, belt pulleys, manual air pumps, a jack, and the remains of a gantry crane.

The two laborers woke up. First they stuck their bare feet out from under the covers; then they sat up and looked down at the bunk where the fireman was moving up and down, the girl’s bright hair surrounding his helmet like a aureola, while her two white arms and legs stuck out from underneath him like a cross.

“Marion, what is this gentleman making love to?” the old worker said, looking at the reflection from his wine glass as it flitted around the tabletop. He brought the glass down on the table with a bang, stood up, pointed to the girl, and said, “She’s contemptible!”

“And what about the armies of whores you had when you were younger, eh?” asked the Prince, still struggling to pull his boot off.

“They were merely pitiable,” said the old worker. “They all had jobs somewhere in Teta or Ara that never paid enough, so they had to earn extra. .. As long as they had their youth, they got by, more or less.” He turned around, sitting on the bunk next to the fireman’s helmet and the girl’s white arms. “We saw those miserable old hags offering themselves for five-crown notes by the Těsnov station, in the park by the Deniska, or that little park at Invalidova, or outside the hospital Na Františku, or in the street outside Kučera’s or at the Old Lady… and there were columns of desperate, lonely people, dragging themselves back at night to their hostels in Kobylis, or at Krejčar’s, or at the Jewish hospice, or to the brickworks in Vysočany, and my sister would yell: ‘Something must be done for these people!’ But we did nothing. We were rich, and watched those parades from the window. And today? Today, she denies everything to my face.”

“Fine,” said Bárta, the merchant, “but some ideals are still alive, and the aristocracy still subscribes to them. They still know about getting back to the natural order of things.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said the doctor of philosophy. “They’re the only ones who still know how to get back to the natural order of things. An English lord can get plastered and do swinish things as easily as a farmhand, but he does it among his own people, in the club. That’s why there are so many clubs in England, and why on the outside everyone’s a gentleman…”

“I meant the Czech aristocracy,” cried the merchant.

“Oh, them? As a young boy I remember Prince Šternberk would hold a hunt, and afterward, there’d be an alfresco orgy of eating and drinking. Oh God, I remember the Contessa Šternberková — how old could she have been? Twenty-two and gorgeous. But in the middle of the banquet, when the aristos were already plastered, the Contessa plants her riding boot, which she was still wearing, on the tablecloth, points her foot at one of the old degenerates, lifts her leg, and farts like an old mother bear. The barons and princes howled with laughter. Their monocles clinked, they guffawed. .. Oh, sapristi! Comme charmante! Éblouissante! And why not? The Contessa was among her own kind, and she too reverted to the natural order of things. The next day, when she went to church in her coach, she was the perfect Contessa again, with her little nose in the air, which to this day still gives me a vision of the infinite… and I knelt by her carriage, and she acknowledged my presence with a slight wave of her handkerchief.”

As he was speaking, they went on unloading rusty pipe clamps, glass-cutting shears, boxes of soldering flux, carbon brushes for electric motors, a small metal-shaping anvil, a pewter soldering iron, and then, together, they lifted out heavy iron wheels, lateral-toothed cog wheels, camshafts, roller bearings, connecting rods, clutch plates and driveshafts.

“All right then, what’s left? What?” asked the merchant, shaking both hands over his head.

Karel, the fireman, rolled over on his side, caught his breath, and stood up. He straightened his collar in the mirror and cocked his helmet at a rakish angle. It shone like a monstrance.

“Not that great,” he said, nodding toward the bunk. “She’s like a dead fish. I should have set fire to her hair. It would have gone up like straw.”

“But what about the shop girls these days working in the Pearl or the White Swan and those other places? Don’t they have to earn extra?… Are they making enough?” asked the Prince. His boot finally popped free, and he fell backward like a rocking chair, his boot in his hand. “Go to the Curio Bar, or the Baroque… office girls go there to earn a little extra, maybe help their friends pay the rent — isn’t that so?”

“That’s a fact,” said the old worker with deep circles under his eyes, “but believe me, those girls are to be pitied. This one here is contemptible. If they find her here tomorrow, Prince, you’ll have the cops all over you and they’ll pop you back inside, no more suspended sentence… but Marion, what do the stars say?” The old worker walked back to the table, poured himself another glass of cheap wine, and resumed his observation of the red reflection scampering around the tabletop like a piglet on the run.

“What’s left?” asked the doctor, and he paused thoughtfully, looking at the four streams of cold water drenching the blast furnace wall. He looked at the workers high up on the furnace, dismantling the elbow joint of one of the cooling pipes that encircled the furnace walls and conveyed cold water that was gravity-fed from the cement cistern high above the steel works to the pipes around the blast furnaces. As the streams of water from the fire hoses doused the furnace, two workers suspended in slings finished taking apart the joint.

“I’ll tell you what. I believe in people who are capable of wrestling with their fate,” the doctor of philosophy said bitterly. “For me, there’s nothing greater than that because ignorance — not knowing — reigns in my field too. The moment a philosopher comes up with a rational explanation of the universe, or of himself, he turns his back on it… Lao Tzu: the art of not knowing; Socrates: I know that I know nothing; Erasmus of Rotterdam: In praise of folly. Nicolas of Cusa: Docta ignorantia, learned ignorance. And what has our precious twentieth century given us? The revolt of the masses! And in art? We’re happily regressing to the time of the Flood.”

So said the doctor and, with disgust, he flung the objects he’d removed from the wagon into the hopper: farmers’ shears, a small hammer, sewing clamps, leather-working tools, a baking oven, a hot water tank from a woodstove, stove plates, a hemp comb…

“I don’t want nothing to do with it,” said the fireman, “and if something comes of it, I’m certifiably crazy and I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

The Prince held his head and rubbed his temples. “Well, let’s toss her out,” he said, and he stood up and shook the sleeping figure, rolling her over on her back.

“Let’s hope she don’t croak on us,” the fireman added, but then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and was thrilled to see how marvelously his uniform suited him.

“Young lady, the fun’s over,” said the Prince, and he shook the sleeping girl again.

She slumped headfirst off the bunk: first her torso, her beautiful hair sweeping the floor, followed by her two naked legs, like two white fish.

“Then can we at least discuss prostitutes?” the merchant asked desperately.

“Now you’re talking!” the doctor of philosophy said, holding up his gloves. “If only there were any left. Go into any nightclub these days, my friend, and you’ll feel like weeping. You have to drink some watered-down concoction with a feeble-minded bimbo who doesn’t know her assets from her deficits. She can’t play the piano, doesn’t know what conversation or good fun is. Ah, but when we were part of Austria? The whores at Goldschmidt’s, now they were real ladies! I had an assignation with one of them in Stromovka Park, at the Rosebush, and she showed up in a carriage like a countess. Or take the whores at the Napoleon, or, Christ Jesus! at Šuhů’s, where three florins would get you a decent look at those buxom pieces of ass — but just a look, no alcohol — three florins, and then the Schwantzmutter would say: ‘Goodbye, young man, we’d love to have you back again, anytime.’ But that we were part of Austria then. After the war, of course, prostitution was beneath a woman’s dignity. It was all because of that suffragette bitch Plamínková and Masaryk’s sainted daughter, Alice; her most of all. Some army major gave her a bad fuck, or maybe he spurned her, so now the whole world can go without. And from then on, it’s been the twilight of humanity. .. Jesus!” The doctor of philosophy stood up. He watched as the yard engine approached to take away the loaded hoppers, and he saw the jets of water that had been dousing the blast furnace subside. “One of the whores at Šuhů’s,” he went on. “Sweet Jesus! When she’d go for a stroll along the Ferdinand Allee, she was something to see, a regular freak of nature, statuesque, relaxed, a kind of Ur-woman she was, and no one could help turning and looking. What was manly in the men would stick out like a bicycle pump… a woman like that was the absolute spirit of the earth, to put it in Hegelian terms.”

“I used to study medicine,” she babbled.

“A douchebag is what you are,” said the Prince, opening the window. Stars were twinkling overhead. The sky had reached the point where the night was beginning to wane but the morning hadn’t yet come.

“Now be a good girl and get lost,” said the Prince, pointing to the window.

“I used to work for an information service,” said the girl. Her hair was wrapped around her head.

The Prince lifted her up, and then fell down. When he found his matchbox, he took a bunch at once and held them against the striking surface.

“If you don’t get out, I’ll light your hair on fire,” he said.

She sat down, then struggled to her feet, supporting herself on the bunk with her hands, then she tottered to the window and said, pointing innocently, “Through here?”

“Through there,” said the Prince. He remained on all fours a moment longer, then slowly rose to his feet.

“Fourteen months in Pankrac prison,” the girl said, lifting one leg over the sill and into the cool air. She leaned back into the room and added, “I was supposed to start my sentence yesterday.”

The Prince stumbled to the window and pushed her through it with his elbow. Her fall was odd, as though she had been skewered by the windowsill. Her hair flew loose and, as if turning on a spit, she rolled on her own axis: first her head, then her torso, then her legs flew up in the air like a pair of white weasels… and when her hair and torso had disappeared, her legs followed them into the darkness the way a high diver is swallowed up by water, and the window frame was left empty except for the tense and tingling stars.

“It’s all going to work out,” said Bárta, the merchant, hopefully. “Just as soon as we get our property back.”

“You’ll get shit back,” said the doctor of philosophy. “Don’t you get it yet?” He pointed at the yard engine pulling the hoppers heaped with scrap metal off to the blast furnaces. “Don’t you understand that you’ve been loading all that stuff, the very tools of your trade, into those furnaces, and the ingots that pour out of those furnaces are meant for a different era? A year from now, where will all those small businesses, those crappy little companies, and their machinery be? Gone! And what’ll become of you? The same as all this scrap, the tools of your trade… you’ll be ingots too. This new age is melting you all down, because it’s not the measles you’ve come down with, it’s the epoch. And what about me? I hope I live to see the rentiers in Paris sweeping the streets, and the communists booting them in the ass. I hope I live to see the blacks in America fucking millionaires’ daughters! My only regret is I won’t be able to take part in that fuckfest myself, because I’m already advertising a house I no longer want to live in. Farewell, old world!”

The Prince picked up the girl’s panties and tossed them out the window, and for an instant the undergarment spread its wings like a purple bat. Then he threw her coat and her torn skirt out as well.

“When I was a little girl, I had a pony…” she wailed.

Karel, the fireman, adjusted his helmet at a jaunty angle, shut the medicine cabinet with the mirror inside, locked it with a padlock, tested it several times to see if it held, and then, still holding the key, he turned around.

“I was quite a dog in my day, and my case officer can tell you a thing or two, but Prince, you are a dog among dogs.”

The Prince took a shiny, handworn whip from the corner and cracked it in the air. Then he picked up a small purse that had fallen out of the girl’s coat pocket. He opened it and removed a piece of paper, unfolded it, and suddenly he became sober.

“Well, I guess it’s true,” said the Prince. “Karel, stop by the police station and tell them you and me and Jarda want to report a girl who was supposed to sign in at Pankrac yesterday to start doing her time. Tell them we’re turning her in, because we’re all on probation. Everyone’ll see we’re just covering our butts.”

The fireman set off to work, full of the vanity that radiated from his narrow boots, his tightly cinched belt, and the helmet tilted rakishly over his eyes.

The doctor nodded toward the departing yard engine and saw the other workers leaving the scrap metal yard, heading toward the little shack they had erected with advertising panels taken from closed businesses. “Fafejta’s Condoms, Guaranteed To Save You From A Life of Need.” “Give Your Tastebuds A Boost With An Ego Chocolate Bar.” “We’ll Buy Your Gold. Best Prices!” “Famira Bras Give Shape To Your Secret Charms.” “Suzi The Seer Sees It All In Her Magic Crystal Ball!” “A Housecoat From Eusner’s Will Win Her Heart. Silk, Padded, Double-Stitched. Jindřišská 20.” “Kosetek’s Permanent Wave: You Look Good, You Also Save!” “Massages, 8 Nekázanka Street: Expertise, Elegance, Discretion.” “Please Don’t Pick Or Step On The Flowers. They Have Feelings Too.” “Get Potential! Sensational Relief For Men Who Need A Pick-Me-Up To Do The Deed!” “Romany Rose Will Read Your Future. Palms, Tea-Leaves, Tarots.”

The fire truck roared past the scrap metal division. Firemen in drenched uniforms were sitting on jump seats; some stood on the running boards, their black helmets glistening with water. The fireman with the gleaming white teeth, his boot propped on the mudguard, hung on with one hand and saluted with the other, acknowledging accolades that no one was sending his way and shouting out to the workers: “Know what was blocking the cooling tubes? A little boy, cooked to death! A bunch of brats went swimming in the cistern up there, and the kid got sucked into the intake! They promised us bonuses, and now they’re dragging their feet! Can you believe it? An extra crown per hour they promised us and they reneged!”

The doctor of philosophy ducked his head and entered the low structure cobbled together from old billboards and plate-metal signs, with the slogans and ads from nationalized and closed businesses. He sat down among the workers, all of them former businessmen, craftsmen, and professionals. “Greetings, Ingots!” he said.

A former miller, a former owner of a carpentry shop, a former butcher and a former locksmith nudged and winked at each other, and the miller said: “Sit down, old man, and tell us some of your dirty stories.”

At that moment, a load of molten slag was dumped onto the slag heap and the sky glowed pink. In the distance, the sleeping town lay steeped in its pre-dawn atmosphere, with its green roofs and bare slate spires. The blast-furnace chimneys loomed in the background, and atop the middle chimney, a gentle blue flame flickered with an amber glow around the edges. The slopes of the slag heap darkened, leaving only a meandering scar of red-hot slag, the landscape’s gaping sex.

The stars faded, the tiny ones already gone out, leaving only a few large dying stars shimmering in the firmament.

A voice below the window whispered, “Let me live, let me live!”