Complication (6 page)

AUDIO RECORDING #3113b

Date: September 26, 1984 [Time unspecified]

Subject: Eliška Reznícková

Case: #1331—Incident at Zrcadlové Bludiště

Interview session #5

Location: Unknown

Investigator: Agent #3553

 

AGENT #3553: You then took the funicular up the hill?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: It was broken.

 

AGENT #3553: So you walked up the hill? Comrade Reznícková? Please pay attention. You took the tram to the base of Petřín. You went up the hill. You were carrying the accordion case.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I never said that.

 

AGENT #3553: We have witnesses. Where were you going?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Ask your witnesses.

 

AGENT #3553: Where did you go after exiting the funicular? You said you rode it up Petřín Hill, correct?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I said the funicular was broken.

 

AGENT #3553: Who were you planning to meet atop Petřín? What were you planning to do? Where were you going?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Matthew twenty-five thirty-one.

 

AGENT #3553: Good, an address. Where is this Matthew Street, exactly?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: It's not a street. It's from the Bible. Matthew 25:31. “When the Son of Man shall come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, then he shall sit upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on the left.”

 

AGENT #3553: Why the left?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You'd have to ask Matthew.

 

AGENT #3553: A political allegory?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I'm not that clever.

 

AGENT #3553: Do you consider yourself a religious person?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I avoid considering myself when possible.

 

AGENT #3553: How is it you know the Bible so well? This passage clearly has special meaning for you. Why?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: It doesn't. I'm tired. I need sleep. I can't be of any use to you when I don't know what I'm saying.

 

AGENT #3553: Allow us to read you something.

 

[Papers being shuffled—duration 4 seconds]

 

AGENT #3553:
“ . . . and Prague below a sleeping city where time passed like so many snakes through a bramble, each era leaving behind its molten skin cast in stone. But this Sunday morning as he stands on the Letná Plain, no time passes and the city looks not so much sleeping as abandoned. The Butcher once read that the Americans had invented a new weapon which could obliterate entire populations in a flash but leave buildings and bridges and highways completely intact. The neutron bomb, they called it. The Butcher envisions a Prague devoid of people and life, the city a silent, sprawling monument to the end of itself. But then a bird twitters, a little goat girl skips into view on the other side of the empty plain, and the city is resurrected.”

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Please stop.

 

AGENT #3553:
“Snow slips from a rooftop in the distance and lands with a muffled thump in a drift below and The Butcher blinks and blinks and tries to retrieve the thought he was thinking but finds his thoughts are gone and will not be summoned. The little girl in the brown dress appears at the far end of the empty Letná Plain, and when she walks by him he snatches her up and hoists her upside down by her naked rear ankle hooves and drives her goat head into the concrete. She cries and brays and her arms flail and then she doesn't cry and
her arms stop moving and her goat blood spills over everything. He stretches her right arm limp upon the pavement and withdraws his knife and rolls his eyes to the blue heavens. The blade comes down and her five-fingered hoof is no longer part of her body. The Butcher slips the appendage in his pocket. His fingers intertwine with hers in a secret embrace as he walks down the hill, the old city vibrating and shimmering before him.

 

[Silence—duration 5 seconds]

 

AGENT #3553: Do you recognize this passage?

 

[Silence—duration 2 seconds]

 

AGENT #3553: This is your writing, correct? You didn't tell us you were a writer.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Your evidence I am may be evidence I'm not. But yes, it's mine. It's a project I'm working on. For my own amusement. It has nothing to do with anything.

 

AGENT #3553: It's demoralizing.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: I can assure you no one has been demoralized but myself.

 

AGENT #3553: Still, there are a number of elements we find interesting. Particularly your evident obsession with this Right Hand of God figure.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: It's hardly an obsession. Just an interest. Really it's you people who should be interested. Don't you think?

 

AGENT #3553: Let's talk about your protagonist. You mention in passing that his proper name is Martin Vlasák, but he self-identifies according to his vocation, referring to himself as “The Butcher.” We find this interesting, as your own surname, Reznícková, is a feminization of one Czech word for “butcher.” Furthermore, the entire piece is in the first person, written in the form of diary entries, and set in the present.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: If you're insinuating that I'm playing some kind of literary shell game—

 

AGENT #3553: When did you author the passage I just read to you? Before or after you went up Petřín?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Before. Long before, months ago.

 

AGENT #3553: Your neighbors in the Kosmonautů complex reported excessive toilet flushing the night before you were arrested.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Really? And just what is considered excessive? Is there a limit recommended by the Ministry of Toilets?

 

AGENT #3553: We know you were trying to dispose of your writing. Why didn't you flush this document, too? Did you really think we wouldn't find it? Let's read another passage, where your hero goes to a tavern called the White Rabbit. Familiar ring to it, no?

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: It's nothing to do with the Black Rabbit, before you start down that path. The name refers to a Jefferson Airplane song, which is itself a reference to
Alice in Wonderland
.

 

AGENT #3553: Let's listen to what you wrote.
“Ten to midnight inside the White Rabbit and smoke crawls thick along the ceiling. The Butcher doesn't need to look at the clock. He knows it's nearly closing time by the number of condensation marks from emptied glasses forming disjointed ringlets on the tabletops, by the way conversations have slurred into blinkered repetitions rife with sloppy hand gestures and emphatic nods that threaten to send their nodders headlong to the floor. President Husák was on TV yesterday, asking the hardworking people of Czechoslovakia not to drink so much. Maybe this is their way of protesting, of living in truth.”

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: A fictional character is saying these things.

 

AGENT #3553: Indifference is an obstacle to progress that even fictional entities must work to overcome.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Oh my. Well, I'll keep that in mind in the future. Do I get to sleep now?

 

AGENT #3553: Let me continue.
“Among these men are many thrust from their former lives, exiled from their truer selves. Unproduced playwrights, cameraless filmmakers, tenure-stripped professors, decommissioned architects. They now work as street sweepers, coal shovelers, and drill press operators. They wash windows; they scrub corpses. They pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay them. The Butcher sometimes thinks of his fellow drinkers as old bears in hibernation sleeping through a winter that just won't end. Other times he envisions the White Rabbit as some kind of spiritual bomb shelter where irradiated souls could for a few hours and imagine they'd remained untainted by the psychic fallout
occurring all around them, where they could dream of some velvet morning when they would emerge from the darkness triumphant and whole, blinking into a bright, sunlit future. But none of them are whole anymore, and the future doesn't even know they exist.”

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: Alright, stop. We both know this conversation isn't really about anything I've written. Can we quit pretending this is about some manuscript you found at my apartment?

 

AGENT #3553: So you are at last willing to concede that you have some understanding of why we asked for your assistance.

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: His name is Vokov
⁴
.

 

[Silence—duration 3 seconds]

 

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.”