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

Beautiful Poldi

Whatever became of that blind man who sold newspapers outside Masaryk Station? Where did he go? He’d stand there peddling his wares, and when a cold wind blew he’d rifle through his papers like a rotary press spilling out pages while pedestrians leaning into the blast would pass him by, averting their eyes from the sight of the blind man battling the wind for possession of his wares, the pages flipping over like leaves on a daily calendar. Whatever became of that blind man? Where did he go?

And what about that cripple on Wenceslas Square? Whatever became of him? He’d sell his mechanical toys on the sidewalk outside Čekans, winding up a little metallic beetle, releasing it into the air, and catching it again in his outstretched arms. Sometimes, when he’d have to chase the toy under the linden trees lining the square, he looked as though he were wading in cobblestones up to his waist, since both his legs had been amputated at the hip, leaving him nothing to fasten artificial limbs to. Where did that cripple go? Whatever became of him?

And what about the woman whose feet were amputated above the ankles? Whatever became of her? She’d walk around Prague as if on her knees and she wore men’s galoshes backwards. After a fresh snowfall, I’d see her approaching from St. Havel’s though trackless snow, and from her footprints, it looked as if she’d been walking beside me, though she was heading in the opposite direction. Wherever did that woman go?

Often these days I see a large star and think it must be the Evening Star, but it’s a tongue of flame from a welder’s torch, a wistful little blue flame, the Holy Spirit descending and flaring red when it touches iron. I open a window of the factory hall and watch the fellow on top of a heap of wartime scrap, holding the bright star tightly between his fingers as he pulls the rubber hoses behind him, the burning jet spewing Christmas-tree sparklers.

At the Poldi steelworks, hopeless people hold their muddied hopes aloft. Life, strangely enough, is constantly being reinvented, and loved, even though a tinfoil brain will bring forth crumpled images, and a trampled torso will ooze misery. And yet, it is still a beautiful thing when a man abandons his three square meals a day and his adding machine and his family and goes off to follow a beautiful star. Life is still magnificent as long as one maintains the illusion that an entire world can be conjured from a tiny patch of earth. When a volunteer laborer has a hundred days left in his stint, he buys a yellow folding ruler and snips off a centimeter a day. When the final piece slips from his fingers, he passes through the neck of a bottle on his way to somewhere else, to encounter another adventure.

But beautiful Poldi is also a volunteer laborer’s scream that tears to shreds all the signs and slogans, three crowns fifty per hundred grams, because you return to the depths of your brain to study the bill to see what you’ve bought and why you’ve paid so much, because the man who turns his hand to fruitful labor is saved forever. Life is fidelity to the beauty exploding all around us, even, at times, at the cost of our own lives. The newspapers, meanwhile, publish glowing accounts of the volunteer laborer who comes home from work and dances the Cossack Dance while sending mental telegrams of gratitude to the authorities, whereas in reality he coughs up black bile and collapses into his bed. Or a thirsty drop of molten steel swims through a roller’s eye, his wife’s image vanishes, and he tries, with ludicrous little steps, to dance away from his misfortune. Progress dines at times on roasted youth; a silver ambulance carries off someone with his feet against the glass doors; a crushed arm longs to return to the shape it once had; and what hurts most about a severed leg is the toe that has vanished with it.

The white-gowned doctor washes his hands. “Are you a believer, young lady?” he asks.

“Yes, but doctor…”

“Well, then, young lady, you must believe. Concentrate, pray, believe with all your might, because my science is no longer of any use.”

He washes his hands and avoids her eye, for why get upset? Does the doctor know that at this very moment, or an hour from now, certainly by this evening at the latest, a trap somewhere will snap shut and an ambulance will arrive to gather the prey? There will always be a trusting newbie who fails to get a proper grip on the red-hot wire with his pliers, or the tongs fly apart and kick him, or he bungles the extrusion of hot wire and sixteen meters of fiery filament spins into the air and the rollers leap out of the way or take shelter under the rolling bench, but sometimes a loop of it touches the newbie’s neck and forces him to dance a dance for his buddies in the finishing room, his dance a variation on the statuary of Laocoön and his sons, in which minimal contact elicits maximum pain, and if the thirsty filament doesn’t sear his jaw, it will char his cheek bones; if it doesn’t burn through his clavicle, it will scorch the fingers that try to remove this cup from his lips and in the end, the newbie’s head drops, his lips are fused together in an eternally malodorous kiss, and through the seared collarbone the spirit unlocks its torture chamber and beautiful Poldi grows fatter. Young men in the fiery furnace. And yet when the wounds heal and they go back to work, these volunteer laborers are bettering everything on life.

“Hey, Annie, if I had a guy like that at home? I’d grease the stairs, kick his butt, and send him flying, I swear by the blessed Virgin, I would.”

“So the Captain says, ‘Everyone get out of the boat and push!’”

“Who’s he telling that to? Who’s he talking to? Did anyone on this bus ask him? No one. Aha! Hector’s licking his ice-cream bar. But we’re doing him wrong. He’s not stupid, he’s just a little thick.”

“So what? Either you get run over in Prague, or here.”

“See that? Hear that? He’s talking to himself. He’s got his wires crossed. When it comes to thinking, he’s walking on his hands.”

“Miss, hold that pose. It’s as if you were alive.”

“My grandmother? She could still piss without her glasses on right into her nineties.”

“Driver, step on it, or they’ll declare you missing in action. I want to get back in time to go to the movies tomorrow.”

“Ooo, careful, here comes a crossroads! Better get a notarized certificate that nothing’s coming the other way!”

“If the driver went for cherries, he’d come back with plums.”

“I had chicken soup at Hunecks, but there were teeth marks in the thigh from the previous customer. The goddamned chicken probably played soccer all her life for the local eleven and then died of old age.”

“I’m going to sit beside you.” “Please don’t, I’m not insured.”

“When the old gal wouldn’t fit in the coffin, we broke her legs.”

“It’s all a matter of contingencies. If elephant grass started growing ten meters high, we’d have the dinosaurs back in three days.”

“For God’s sake, Blazka, get your ass out of my face!”

“Ever since their place got burgled, they’ve been fond of each other.”

“But I want to know who’s guilty! Just don’t blame it on the Bible.”

“It was enemas that brought me and my wife together. We have some splendid secrets.”

“Today, when they tell me to jump in the lake, I jump in the water.”

“Of course she’s not a woman! She’s an out-and-out cow.”

“In the name of decency, comrades, would you please speak politely on this bus?”

“František, you’re completely out to lunch! Wine has to mature in the barrel. It will never ripen in bottles.”

“Okay, say you cut off a girl’s pigtail as a prank. That’s not an insult to her dignity, it’s a crime. It’s an invasion of her personal space.”

“Merciful heavens, I wish you actuaries would actually finish at least one game of mariáš.”

“Poldi Recreation Centre! Koněv Spa! Everyone off the bus!”

Among other things, beautiful Poldi is tar pits and slag heaps and barracks and dormitories. Barbed wire separates the steel works from fields of undulating grain and vegetable gardens. The smell of stale urine wafts through the open windows of the dormitory, where sleepers sleep in layers on makeshift bunks, exactly as they’d fallen asleep after their night shifts, their forearms exposed to receive injections of light. Hirsute men with broken spines and crippled hands play cards, lending a frenzied authority to their loud banter. It’s as though the entire camp were on the alert, waiting for something fundamental to happen: a knock on the door, the sound of a voice, something that would instantly render everyone good and beautiful. From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers’ table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.

From where I’m standing in the dormitory doorway, the corridor is so long I can barely see to the door at the other end. When I’ve walked the length of it and turned around, the doorway I’ve come from is no bigger than a tiny window. A barracks like this is a rattrap sprung shut by a perspective constantly narrowing at either end. The old attendant who brought me here grows smaller and smaller as he walks down the corridor, until he’s tiny: a figurine standing in that apparently miniature window at the end of the hall. When I opened the door to the dormitory, the air was alive with rings and golden squares, as though someone had been playing carelessly with shrapnel. The only unbroken things in the room were two mustard jars. The padlocks on the lockers were as twisted as arthritic fingers. Then, a volunteer laborer came up to me and said his name was Jarda Jezule, a furrier. In one hand he held a small suitcase, and in the other the Collected Works of Karl Marx. Beside him was a broken stove with the stovepipe sticking out of the wall like a huge piece of excrement oozing from a music-hall giant. Jarda Jezule sat down on an upper bunk, and I lay on the bed beneath. He took off a boot and a sock, and his feet were tiny, red from scarlet fever, withered and wrinkled like the soles of a Chinese girl’s foot or the inside of a bulldog’s mouth. He massaged his toes to get the blood moving again, then he stuffed newspapers in the toes of his boots and as he did so, he dangled his feet in my face. I lay on the bunk below as if in a river where the furrier was dipping his feet. Meanwhile, the camp echoed with voices calling out to each other. The aroma of the washroom and the toilets seeped through the wall. The languid sounds of a music box drifted in from a playground, and through the window you could see, across the way, another dormitory, just as big, the buildings laid out like a military hospital.

Beautiful Poldi, however, is also the path that leads away from the dormitories, past a black pond where an electric pump spews out a stream of water. In the pond, a gypsy woman stands on a stone next to a rusty stove and a half-submerged bicycle, washing her ragged clothes. Jarda Jezule and I walk this way to the Black Horse to play the piano and drink rum. The Collected Works are under the bed, but we’re in no state to read. After all, during a single shift at the blast furnace we drank twenty beers and peed scarcely a cupful. With the last of our money, we shoot for plastic roses at the shooting gallery. Then we walk back. The female convicts are already in their dorms, housed in barracks separated from ours by a board fence topped with barbed wire. Only today I noticed, through a knothole in the fence, that these female prisoners live in a tidy place with clean tablecloths and bouquets of meadow flowers, while we who are free live in a pigsty. One of the prisoners is a stunning beauty who threw her mother down a well, and when the mother clawed her way back up to the light, that gorgeous young woman split her head open with an axe. Two of the volunteer laborers tried to reach the murderess by climbing over the fence, but the guards caught them just as they were trying to touch her, and they got slapped around and were given three months each in jail. At the rolling mill I handed her a flower. It was as though the murder and the punishment had purified her, and today she could be leading a proper life, with tablecloths, flowers, and kind words. When she took a bath each evening, every knothole in the fence was occupied by a laborer’s eye. She was covered in soft, fine hair, a light golden down, as if her entire body were wrapped in a halo. When she soaped herself, she would pause to daydream and stand in odd poses. We tried in vain to make telescopes of our eyes, while the stronger men pushed the weaker ones away from the knotholes. I could see that she knew every eye in every knothole and that she’d come to expect them and that she bathed naked for the sake for those longing male gazes, which, for her, took the place of a stroll along the boulevard in the evening. But what devastated the laborers most of all was not her naked body, but the shadow play she put on in the dormitory by her bed. She would hang a sheet in the window and position a lightbulb to cast the shadow of her lascivious movement against the sheet. It was like watching a movie. We’d all jump up and down on the other side of the fence, crawl up to the barbed wire, fall back down again, pick ourselves up, but as soon as we fixed our eyes to the knot holes again and saw the shadow play, we were climbing up the fence again, trying to get over it and into that bird cage, because that beautiful, naked prisoner would reach out to us with her shadowy arms and there was so much desire in her movements that each man thought she was reaching out just for him, to each of us, one by one. Then, when she reckoned she’d toyed with us enough, she’d put on a sweatsuit, take down the sheet, make her bed, and lie down on her bunk like the others, light a cigarette, put her arms behind her damp head, and read a cheap romance novel. We’d go back to our barracks, leaving behind the still-illuminated women’s dorm with its female prisoners, who put bouquets of cornflowers and wild poppies on every table. But at a barred washroom window, a half-mad female prisoner rested her head on the windowsill, listening to the sounds of “The Harlequin’s Millions” coming from the music box in the shooting gallery. A teardrop glittered like a diamond in the ring of her eye. When they’re at the bottom, people fill their eyes with beautiful things. The world is full of art, it’s just a matter of knowing how to look around you and then surrendering to inexhaustible whisperings, to small details, to longing and desire.

But beautiful Poldi is also the moment when a grinder suddenly tears off his safety glasses, flees his work, and goes outside as far away as he can; he looks into the sky, then at the mountain of rusting scrap metal, at the birds who come to drink from the boiling pools by mistake; he watches as a tiny scalded body hops into the rusty pipes and thinks how everything has its own torture chamber, but also its own paradise. And the grinder goes back to his post, dons his safety goggles, presses the button, and starts working again, feeding the yard engine shuttling back and forth to the furnaces. Everyone is possessed, at times, with the desire to rebel. Man has refused to live in a primitive state of nature, which is why angels drive ambulances and gather up other angels who have been broken in half.

I love going to the works canteen beside the sleeping warehouse, where the slabs and billets and blooms are stacked in neat layers like oaken logs. Outside, I look at the sky, where a woman’s head suddenly appears, as large as the night sky itself, a head of curly hair singed by stars, her countenance filled with never-before-perceived detail. Steel with an admixture of wolfram and cobalt will, when sliced into, show colors like those of an Asiatic butterfly’s wings. Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.

I approach the electrolytic furnace, a tablet of blue glass before my eyes, and the molten metal gurgles violently. This is the magnificent work of magnificent people. The roar of the blast furnaces echoes through the hall like a symphony orchestra, and a single glance carries me through the furnace’s hearth, back to that staircase where you and I carried a lamp to the pawn shop, when my hand first touched yours; melodic rollers milled my heart, dusty mannequins suddenly froze, sharp-eyed and conventional; your rocking-chair walk galvanized my brain and the lightning bolt of my feeling electrified your hair. After that, for the sake of love, one could plunge into the molten metal: make steel with an admixture of myself and your image within me, an image that calls to mind a small, childlike face flushed with gentle, silly laughter, because a Jewish girl spat out razor blades and I slashed my wrists. Beautiful blueberry nights fill my liver with morning and the nozzle of my heart spews forth an amalgam of blood. The sun rides the elevator up from the darkness, and the silken, waving wheat sways like a woman’s raw cotton skirt. The wheels of the pit-head elevator turn backward, and columns of cherry-tree trunks girdled with white lime reveal the hidden location of military burial grounds. Watchmen guard the female convicts in their wire enclosure, and swallows deliver the message of violins in their beaks. The women prisoners form lines, and I look for my beauty, but she’s not there yet. Some of the girls comb their hair like high-toned ladies. They roll up the sleeves and legs of their cotton blouses and trousers like millionaire heiresses sunning themselves on the beaches of Miami. The world is sustained by these girlish shapes, by lipstick, toothbrushes, face cream, and by male eyes. They are bandages and sticky plaster that will stay in place for ten, fifteen, twenty years at a stretch. Even a lifetime. A siskin sings in a cage at the entrance to the women’s camp, its eyes put out to make it sing more melodically. Sweetness fills my chest: I smell nail polish, vats of chocolate, and slaughterhouse stun guns. I think of empty cigarette cases, miniature lightbulbs, graveyard candle chimneys, a gold-leaf press, crowns of thorns, and organtine. Lilies of the Valley flow from my eyes. Beautiful Poldi, an impression in copper, tiny head on a fragrant medallion, the aroma of hair singed by stars, I will garland you with the most beautiful things I have ever seen, I will speak with you through dead objects, I will address you when enamel jugs fall from the sky, when the mad moon mirrors the reflections of your reflection. The air itself is anointed with you. I need only dial the number, and an amethyst telephone will be answered at the other end, and from your mouth, air will flow transmitted by tiny electromagnetic waves, frozen words, constellations, human tissue, laboratory ovens, bridges going nowhere, and a vibrator. Oh, if only I could lend you my eyes! It is so marvelous to be in love, to carry one’s own tiny electric motor around with one. Why, even the touch of a razor can last for twenty years and more. There is always more of me when I think of you, Poldi. As if through you, I’ve conquered a diamond universe.

I recline on my bunk, but first I use a match to immolate the bedbugs in the cracks. The sun knits a gem-studded stocking. I write your name in chalk on the boards of the bunk above me, where Jarda Jezule twists and turns angrily in his sheets and bits of straw from his mattress float into my eyes. Someone has driven a knife into the broken cupboard. Jarda Jezule sits up and lets his small red foot dangle down; the toes like a set of teeth.

“Hey, Jezule,” I say, “where do you keep your reading matter — those Collected Works?”

“What Collected Works?”

“The ones you brought with you,” I say, and I draw Poldi’s head on the board, her hair singed by a star.

“Would you lay off!” Jarda replies, poking his head down. “I’ve lost five kilos. What about these bed bugs? What about that shithouse right next door?”

“There were poets in concentration camps, too,” I say, and carry on with my drawing. “Jezule, a little romanticism never…”

“But this isn’t a concentration camp!” Jarda shouts, the blood rushing to his face.

“That’s right,” I say. “It’s not, but nothing lasts forever. There’s not an ounce of the romantic in you, Jezule, not a single ounce.”

Jarda, volunteer laborer and former furrier, grasps the side of the bunk, leaning down, his face spouting hostility, a cathedral gargoyle. He jumps down, his red feet slapping the floor hard, then he hobbles over and brandishes his finger in my face like a knife, holding my eyes in check for a whole minute, as though he wanted to tell me something terribly important. Then he waves his hand, dismissing the terribly important thing and me along with it. He spits, then begins stuffing newspaper into the toes of his boots.

“Hey, Kafka,” he says calmly, “Does that lice ointment help? Does it help?”

“It helps,” I say. “It helps.”

“So Kafka, my buddy, go to bed. You’re just off the nightshift, get some sleep,” Jarda Jezule says, picking up his boot and peering into it with scientific curiosity. As I’m drifting off I can hear him rummaging under the bed and dusting some books off on his knee.

And again, morning after morning, I arise and have no time to think about myself or to wonder: Am I happy? Am I unhappy? I am aware, before it happens, of that first mechanical motion of my hand, reaching for the alarm clock, I grope sleepily between its legs to stop the clanging of its nickel-plated testicles. Then, with the same groping motion, I fumble for the light switch on the wall and undertake the first shy self-examination of a man prematurely woken up, his hair in disarray, smelly, someone sitting up on his bed one more time, holding an alarm clock. Each morning I turn on the radio, tune in to Berlin and listen. .. There’s dead air at first but then, a few minutes before four a.m., “The Internationale” comes on, sung by a choir with an orchestra, then a sweet, familiar voice says: “Good morning, comrades! Moscow calling,” then thirty seconds of silence, followed by the sudden morning sounds of a busy Moscow street near the Kremlin, whistles, honking horns, sirens, and the bells of the Kremlin begin to peal… one, two, three, four, five, six times, then the pleasant voice comes on again: “Comrades, this is Moscow calling! Good morning, it’s six o’clock,” then “The Internationale” again, rendered by the choir and orchestra, which means it’s four a.m. here, which means I have three more minutes, making it worthwhile to slip back into bed and watch the second hand tick slowly forward, around once, twice, and again. Sometimes I even doze off for those three minutes, but then I must arise and surrender to the automatism, terrible, yet precise, especially in the morning, when there’s no choice but to come to life, get dressed quickly, brush the teeth of the doppelgänger in the mirror, and wonder why I shave every other day and wash and eat several times a day, and go around with a seating plan in my brain. Why worry constantly about missing out on something? You must be brave, I console myself, you must, you must, you must! I repeat the mantra every hour, but in the morning, I say it every minute, the better to brush aside nagging thoughts. I leave the house and it starts to rain, a thin drizzle shrouding the countryside and my garden, and I feel how much I need the rain. I feel the dark water pushing through to the roots, washing away the limestone dust. I feel my pores smacking their lips, I become a Golden Russet, a Winesap, a Topaz, a Melba Red and I begin to wonder what else I might need to be any happier. I crave potash, phosphorus, nitrogen. I open my eyes, and my automatic pilot has long since planted me in a seat on the bus, and I become aware of how I’m being sucked out by perspective, out into the streets that converge at a point in the distance, becoming so narrow a bicycle could scarcely squeeze through; and yet, when we reach that point, two buses can pass abreast and a new perspective mendaciously offers the prospect of miniature objects on the horizon. Vehicles approaching from a distance are as alike as two points of a colon, then growing until the headlights sweep by, and I see it’s another bus just like ours. For an instant, we mirror each other, and moments later I see a pair of red taillights grow smaller, until they vanish prematurely. I look around and I’m not alone. Some of the workers are asleep, still dreaming, or lost in thought. The small emerald light on the driver’s dashboard is beautiful and as large as any visible star. The driver keeps his eyes simultaneously on the road ahead, on both sides, and in the side and rearview mirrors, while monitoring the engine, accelerating or decelerating, working the clutch and the brake with his feet, controlling the steering wheel with his hands. In Vokovice, as he does every morning, he leans out and looks up at the same window and says, “She’s up!” If the window is dark, he honks the horn, stops the bus, and honks again, until a light goes on, then the bus continues contentedly on its way. I imagine that inside that window there’s a bed belonging to a post-office clerk, who has an arrangement with the bus driver, and I see her, sitting on the edge of her straw mattress, ready to put on her stockings, wondering if it’s worth getting up, and then, when she sees the tousle-haired girl in the mirror, she asks: why go on living? But the bus is already driving on down the road, past Ruzyně airport, its runway illuminated in anticipation of an arrival, lined with ruby lights that converge at the far end of the landing strip where anyone standing would see our bus passing by that point. .. The aircraft casts a cone of light on the runway, approaches the earth, grows smaller as it touches down, as tiny now as a child’s elastic-powered model plane, the wings swinging around, the navigation lights reversing, and once again it grows larger as it approaches the terminal, though it is still the same size. .. I close my eyes and see that everything is quite different from how it appears, from what it is. .. Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective, and life itself is illusion, deformation, perspective. .. I open my eyes, and we’ve arrived at the steelworks. The volunteer laborers rouse each other: Get up, they’ve brought you a load of coke. And like the others, I shuffle listlessly through the factory gate, show my I.D., and walk to the showers and the changing room. I see the yard engine chugging around the bend pulling a 4500-kilo load of red-hot steel slabs still glowing pink. Like young girls off to their first dance, the ingots seem able to conceal their true essence and appear instead to be made of crepe paper pumped full of warm air, prevented by a mere string from soaring into the air like balloons, airy and graceful and unreal. The locomotive spews clouds of steam, and almost, it seems, with its last ounce of strength, it drags its payload in pink past me, so close it singes my hair and clothes, and I am left in no doubt that these are tons and tons of steel, obelisks so long and so wide, and for a moment I see them more or less as they are, but then they immediately diminish and as I move away I accelerate their diminishment, while altering nothing in the reality of the yard engine and its slabs of steel. .. I quickly doff my streetclothes, and following my daily routine, I pull on a tank-top, then a shirt, then boxer shorts, then sweat pants, then trousers, then I put on my boots, then a cat-skin vest, then my overall pants and top, then an apron and gloves, and finish it off with a helmet, and finally, like the other workers, I walk quickly out into the night. The morning star — huge, but no bigger than the emerald light on the bus driver’s dashboard — glitters in the firmament, marking the beginning of all morning shifts and at the same time, the end of every night shift. I turn around and on the distant hillside, I can see the yard engine laboring up the slope with its 4500 kilos of pink ingots; the train is small and different now and yet the same one that not long ago singed my clothes and hair. Now it’s climbing Koněv and up there on the hillside it is tiny, no bigger than a child’s toy train on a string. .. Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective.