Complication Read online

REZNÍCKOVÁ: And yes, I carried an accordion case up Petřín Hill. There, I’ve said it. And yes, I left it in the child’s castle, in the mirror maze. I’m sure you already have Vokov in custody anyway. And what was he expecting me to do? Rot in prison for him? I was carrying the accordion case for a man named Vokov. Inside the case were fifty copies of The Defenestrator. An underground newspaper. A samizdat. That’s all I know, and it has nothing to do with some desk-drawer novel. Please, let me sleep. Two hours and I will tell you everything, I promise.

  [Silence—duration 2 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: There will be plenty of time for rest when we’re finished. Tell us about this Vokov. What is his first name?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I don’t know.

  AGENT #3553: Where did you meet him?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: At the White Rabbit.

  AGENT #3553: Meaning the rock and roll song or the character from the Lewis Carroll novel?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: The Black Rabbit. I meant the Black Rabbit. You’re confusing me. Please just let me rest.

  AGENT #3553: When did you first meet this man?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It was on Saturday night. At closing time. Every night it’s the same. Customers wince and grumble and rise wobbling on puppet legs. They don heavy coats and pull hats crooked over their heads and stagger up the stairs. When everyone is finally gone, I lock the door and put on “One O’Clock Jump” while I’m sweeping. A scratchy recording of the Count Basie version I found in an old crate in the basement. Did you know Count Basie was once banned by the government? They thought he was a member of the aristocracy. Because of his name. Same is true of Duke Ellington.

  AGENT #3553: Is that a joke, Comrade Reznícková?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You can never be sure, can you? Saturday we had closed, and I was just about to put the needle to the record when suddenly a chair squeaked across the floor. At a corner table barely visible in the shadows, a large man sat slumped in his chair, arms crossed. I couldn’t tell if the man’s eyes were opened or not.

  AGENT #3553: Please describe this man.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: A thick beard covered his neck. His ears were buried beneath locks of wavy hair that fell nearly to his shoulders. Nested at the center was a face like a roughly chiseled sculpture. Solid brow, great lump of a nose. Cheekbones wide, flat, uneven. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, though it was difficult to tell. His shirt was buttoned to the collar and his shoes were large, comically so. A glass of beer sat untouched on the table in front of him. I made my way over to the man and was just about to give his shoulder a gentle shake when he jerked his head upward. When his eyes opened they were the hard, mottled gray of old statues. I was momentarily unable to speak or look away. “We’re closed,” I told him.

  AGENT #3553: This man then was not a regular customer?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I’d never seen him before. It was then I saw the accordion case resting under the table. Its corners dented, its surface scuffed and marred. He told me his name was Vokov. I repeated that we were closed and that he must leave. “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” he asks. “Do you know what will happen starting now and ending where such things end?”

  AGENT #3553: What do you suppose he meant?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I have no idea. I told him I imagined the future would be much like the present, only longer. This seemed to amuse him. He took a sip of beer, wet lips glistening in his beard. “A man followed me here,” he tells me. “I’ve seen this man before. He thinks I haven’t, but I have. He’s out there now waiting. And so I know exactly what is going to happen next.” I look reflexively in the direction of the street, which is pointless as I’m standing in a subterranean room with no windows. “He’s waiting for other men like himself to arrive,” the man resumes. “When I leave the Black Rabbit, a car will pull up to the curb. They’ll make me get inside this car. They’ll take away my accordion case. They’ll scrutinize the contents of this case with the rigor of Talmudic scholars. There will be questions, many, many questions. There will be talk of Paragraph 98 of the Criminal Code. Subversion of the Republic. There will be threats, perhaps beatings. These men are patient men. They will wait for answers. They’ll take me down the rabbit hole and they’ll wait. This is what will happen to me. What will happen to all of us.”

  AGENT #3553: And how did you respond to this?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I told him he was drunk. But I could see he wasn’t drunk. “What happens is we die in jail,” he says. Talking like a radio announcer reading an official report about grain production. “In Ruzyně, in Mirov. Or maybe they don’t let us die right away. Time itself can be used as an instrument of torture. Maybe we’re sentenced to reeducation labor. We work in the mines. We develop bent frames and aversions to the sun.”

  AGENT #3553: You knew by this point he was deranged.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Who is to say? There was something about his voice, wise and unreachable and sad. “Coughs blossom into respiratory illnesses,” he says. “Our lungs fill with fluid. Blood colors our sputum, our hair falls out in clumps, our voices subside into watery rattles. We drown of our own bodies. This is what happens. To me, to my friends. Because I’ve been careless. Because I’ve made a mistake.”

  He gives the accordion case a sudden kick. It rings metallic, and the sound brings me part way to my senses. Now is the time to make a run for it. But then if he wanted to attack me, why the big speech? Besides, I am standing closer to the door, and once I get to the street, if police really are there waiting, then I will only have to scream. But then I know none of these things will happen because the question is already escaping my lips even as my teeth clench to hold it back.

  “What’s inside the case?” I ask him.

  AGENT #3553: And he tells you?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Vokov lifts the accordion case and lays it on the table. Neither of us speak, both studying the dull metal box as if some complicated chess problem is posed upon its surface. He takes from his inner coat pocket a curled sheaf of papers several pages in number and unrolls them atop the case.

  “This,” he says, “is The Defenestrator.”

  AGENT #3553: A samizdat5.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I guessed as much, though he didn’t say so, and I’d never actually seen one before. It was just a handful of plain, typewritten sheets. He flips through the pages, explaining how all previous issues had been hand typed, page by monotonous page, copy by mind-numbing copy, on cheap onionskin. Quality paper is a tightly controlled commodity, he says, difficult to acquire without drawing attention. Every printing press and photocopier in the country is state owned and as closely monitored as materials at the Semtex plastic explosive factory. But Vokov says his friends have recently gained use of a cyclostyle stencil printer from an old parish school in Podolí.

  AGENT #3553: Did he give you the name of this school?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: He did not. “Now we can crank issues out in no time,” he said. “Which means we can include news, real news transcribed from the radio broadcasts that sneak through unjammed. BBC, Radio Free Europe, Deutschewelt.” But news, he explains, is not their primary focus. The Defenestrator publishes short stories, serialized novel excerpts, feuilletons, poems, even an essay written by a famous exiled novelist living in London that had been smuggled across the Austrian border by members of the French Human Rights League. The people behind their publication know the Parallel Polis contributors, who know the Revolver Revue writers, who help distribute Edice Petlice, who have connections with Vokno’s6 people. Among their number included half the signers of Charter 77. Or so he told me.

  “Fifty copies are inside the accordion case,” he says. “Tomorrow I was to take them to the top of Petřín Hill and deliver them to a man unknown to me. You know the rest.”

  AGENT #3553: And did you know the rest?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Each copy would be passed hand-to-hand in secret, I suppose. One trusted friend to another. I’ve heard there is or was a special pew in St. James Cathedral under which you could find such materials. Though if I know it, so
must you. In perhaps six months time, I figured, each copy of The Defenestrator would have been read by some fifty or one hundred people. With fifty copies, that meant nearly five thousand individuals.

  AGENT #3553: You really think so many would be interested in unsubstantiated [unintelligible] printed on cheap onionskin?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: What I wondered was why Vokov would share all these incriminating details, why he would trust someone he’d never met. But then he’s got nothing to lose, I thought. And by telling me of this operation, he is also implicating me. If I choose not to go to the police with what I know, I become an accomplice.

  AGENT #3553: Pity you did not immediately act upon this thought. Didn’t you resent him using you?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: No. I knew I should. But no, I didn’t.

  “Fifty copies,” he resumes. “Each a prison sentence as soon as I walk out that door. So now, I ask of you a favor.” Vokov glances over his shoulder, nods toward the fireplace in the corner. “Burn these,” he says. “Each and every copy.” Which shocked me.

  AGENT #3553: Why should it shock you that he wanted to destroy evidence of his wrongdoing?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Think of all the work involved. All they’d been through to make this thing. “It’s already too late for me,” he insists. “One way or another, I’m finished. But the others still have a chance. The choice is simple. Preserve the work or destroy its authors.”

  AGENT #3553: Remarkable. So he not only presented himself as a martyr willing to sacrifice himself for a greater good, but also placed any blame for what might happen to his co-conspirators onto your shoulders? You must have been struck by the arrogance of such a tactic.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I don’t know how to explain my reaction except to say the man was very convincing. I said I could take them. I could deliver the case to his contact. The man on Petřín Hill.

  AGENT #3553: But why? Such actions are irrational.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I have my reasons.

  AGENT #3553: Did it not occur to you that even if Vokov really was being followed, and the police knew or suspected what was in the accordion case, that it would make much more sense for the police to not arrest him right away, but to instead wait and see who he gave the case to, in order that this member of the conspiracy might also be brought to justice?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I don’t think like a policeman. Or like a criminal. I had my reasons and I don’t care to dwell on them. Isn’t it enough that I’m cooperating?

  AGENT #3553: Are you? It’s of tremendous importance that you make us understand why you did what you did.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Alright, fine. I had an idea that maybe one day The Defenestrator might consider publishing my work. No one else is going to, let’s face it. Not in this lifetime. And if they couldn’t publish it themselves, then maybe they could find a place for it outside the country.

  AGENT #3553: And you calculated this action would put you in their good graces. Make you a member of the club.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Something like that.

  AGENT #3553: We must tell you that this answer is unsatisfactory on a number of levels. You would do well to drop this whole samizdat charade and tell us what really happened.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I am telling you.

  AGENT #3553: We know what you’ve done. The enormity of your crimes. These lies you tell us about this imaginary figure Vokov—

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Imaginary? I assure you—

  [Loud banging sound consistent with fist hitting table]

  AGENT #3553: We will bring you to reality! We will bring you to reality!

  [Banging sound repeated 3 times]

  AGENT #3553: We will bring you to reality. All we need is time, comrade. And we have all the time we need.

  [Session terminated]

  CHAPTER 4

  The graying edifices near my hotel were graffiti riddled and timeworn, and in places I could still see the watermarks upon the walls five years after the flood, but in Old Town’s winding, cobblestoned lanes, the buildings wore fresh coats of paint and sunlight bounced off clean-scrubbed windows. Tourists squeezed down constricted passageways past storefronts bursting with Bohemian crystal, wooden puppets, garnet and amber jewelry. There were Franz Kafka T-shirts, Franz Kafka coffee mugs, Franz Kafka refrigerator magnets. Window after window of Russian nesting dolls, watercolors of the Charles Bridge, replica swords, Golem keychains, hand-carved wooden chess sets, plastic replica handguns, more puppets, more Kafka, more garnet, and more amber. Arched doorways proffered glimpses of courtyard beer gardens and outdoor cafés; ATMs and international currency exchange kiosks were everywhere. Prague was so thoroughly in the business of Prague it made you almost feel sorry for the old Communists. If history was a sport, capitalism would have drawn a penalty for excessive celebration.

  I found the Astronomical Clock housed in a large stone tower whose spires echoed the Týn Church opposite, a site where, Prague Unbound noted, “to this day a small bell rings in a tower in memory of a local servant girl killed by a wicked noblewoman for spending too much time in prayer.” The main clock face stood maybe sixteen feet off the ground, surrounded by a gothic canopy, stone arches, columns. A gold-breasted rooster perched above the clock; wooden statues depicting death, an angel, and some dude in a turban looked on while upon the clock face, discs turned within discs, Roman numerals and Arabic numbers shared space with esoteric mathematical symbols, and three or four hands of differing lengths pointed this direction or that. I had no idea what any of it meant.

  I took a place at the perimeter of the crowd and scanned for Vera. Tour guides stood before the gathering, holding aloft brightly colored umbrellas. The guide nearest me was speaking English through a miniature bullhorn. More people were arriving every second.

  “Work on the Astronomical Clock began in the year 1410,” the guide announced, “but the clock wasn’t perfected until the great Master Hanuš arrived at the end of the fifteenth century.” Adjacent guides were broadcasting the same narrative in German, Japanese, something that sounded like Russian.

  The clock soon became the envy of all Europe, the guide said, and its growing fame alarmed the town authorities. Worried that clockmaker Hanuš might be lured to another city and by large commission be spurred to even greater clock-building feats, the town councilors held a secret meeting. A few nights later, three men wearing black hoods paid a visit to Hanuš. Two of them bound the clockmaker while a third grabbed an iron poker from the fireplace and gouged out his eyes. Master Hanuš never built another clock, in Prague or anywhere else.

  The assembled tourists reacted with nervous chuckles, those near the German guide laughing hardest. Maybe it was funnier in German. They’d coined the term schadenfreude, after all.

  But the story didn’t end there. Hanuš learned of the council’s betrayal, but he did nothing. Years passed. Now a sickly old man and near death, he approached the councilors and was given permission to visit the clock house one final time, a chance to say goodbye to his life’s finest achievement. The Japanese and German tour guides stopped speaking and turned to gaze expectantly at the clock. The English guide glanced over her shoulder, and realizing time was running out, finished in a breathless rush, trumpeting through the bullhorn about how the blind Master Hanuš went inside the clock house and listened to the great gears clicking and meshing and waited for some tell-tale auditory sign, some precise moment of maximum mechanical vulnerability known only to its designer, and then threw himself bodily upon the clock and grabbed at the gears and wheels, ripping and tearing with the last of his strength. By the time the guards wrestled him from the clock, it was too late. The hands of the Astrological Clock had stopped turning. They were to remain idle for two hundred years.

  A murmur swept over the crowd as the new hour arrived. Cell phones and cameras were hoisted as a mechanical rooster cocka-doodledooed. Flashes went off as Death yanked a rope, the bell tolled above, and a procession of wooden apostles creaked past the opened windows above the clock face. Then the windows clapped shut,
Death clanged the bell again, and the show was all over. The tourists erupted in spontaneous applause. Despite their enthusiasm, the clock refused an encore, at least for another hour, and people began shuffling off after their guides toward the next medieval wonder.

  Still no sign of Vera. I imagined she was hanging back, watching from a distance. She’d waited five years to send a letter. She could wait a few more minutes to make sure that I really was alone, that I hadn’t brought the police or anyone else along with me.