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11.9.05
"Otherwise, with half of my mortal coil still sitting in a bus depot in
Los Sueños begging spare change from vending machines, I'll applaud from
the distance."
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook four, page 113.
Different city, different street.
When you travel enough, spinning through a vortex of languages which have secretly imbedded their meanings in your subconscious there are times when you awake with a start in complete confusion about what it is you’re waking from.
I walk to a window overlooking a street viewed through a prism of rain, half-lit by street lamps, watching a man attempting to walk with a speedy nonchalance, newspaper folded over the top of his head, one arm up to hold the newspaper in place, the other swinging back and forth in desperate propulsion.
And only this morning I’d freed an insect of some sort from a spider’s web just under the bathroom sink wondering if I was doing the humane thing by rescuing it from it’s struggles and the slow, inevitable end to its existence or if I’d only been interfering like the spider’s little nosey neighbour, gobbing up the mechanisms of nature and the balance of the insect world.
I watched the man and his rain-spattered arm-swinging until he was gradually swallowed back up into the night further down the street.
Three days I’d been in this hotel in Bratislava on the mere rumour that Anastasia had been headed this way. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t have to hear an earful from Albert – the old, “haven’t you learned your lesson yet?” speech he brought out every time one of her postcards arrived. “She probably doesn’t even send them herself,” he’d mused back in our grim and smoky flat on Husitská.
Certain enough, I wouldn’t find her sitting in this hotel room with its drab curtains and filthy carpets. Three days I’d been here already and having left only once since I’d arrived, gathering the strength to face her again, chain-smoking and staring at stains in the wallpaper, I had a good idea the courage was never going to come from anywhere other than a half dozen pints in the nearest pub. Then again, that wouldn’t have been courage, that’d have been drunken bravado, devil-may-care, feigned nonchalance as in oh, fancy running into you here in Bratislava, Anastacia.
There wasn’t any postcard.” I dutifully informed Albert. The postcards came sporadically from different towns and cities, little clues and cryptic messages. At first, I’d drop everything and go looking for her, seized with some sudden and inexplicable desperation of knowing that if it wasn’t now, it wouldn’t ever be and how could I throw away that last chance without trying?
But the last chances never evolved, never materialised, never a trace of her. And a lot of these places were villages small enough that the locals would have immediately known who it was I was looking for if she’d been looking to be found or had in fact, been in the town at all to begin with. That’s why Albert had embraced his pet theory that it was all a colossal mind fuck of some kind, some sort of sadistic little game wherein she’d conspired with others, travellers perhaps who she knew would be going through that village or town who could write out these little postcards on her behalf, just to keep the game going.
It might have been a sound theory but for the fact that it was certainly her handwriting on those postcards and how does one after all, buy a tourist postcard from a village or town, write a message on it and post it all without ever having been there in the first place?
So that’s the way it had gone for the last six months, getting these postcards, rushing off to the village or town it came from, hanging around in public places, markets, squares, pubs, news agents, all in the vain hope of timing it just right. Maddening.
You get off the train with a burst of energy but after the first few hours turn up nothing the energy wears away and slowly it sinks in that the chance had been missed again. How could I be expected to stay one step ahead of her, to know instinctively where she would pop up next?
For a few weeks in August I thought I could detect a pattern in the postcards, or perhaps it was merely delusional, still, you have to try. Did the names of the villages and towns fall in alphabetical order, some geographic sequence, some cleverly disguised yet still breakable code? Not in any of the instances. One week it was Hungary, another it was Austria. The following month Slovenia, the month after that, Poland.
I was growing weary of the game, frustrated by my lack of success and then, when I’d overheard a conversation between two Czech Dixieland jazz musicians on the Charles Bridge talking about the little French girl with the beautiful voice having stopped by only a fortnight ago to sing with them, I crudely demanded to know what they were talking about.
After their initial huff at my intrusion they reluctantly shared a few tidbits with me about a little bird with a beautiful song in her voice stopping in for a few songs on her way to the train station for Bratislava.
Surely that couldn’t have been a plant. I never hung around the Charles Bridge any more, rarily even crossed it, so she’d not have left this clue for me here. No, it was certainly unintentional, coincidental, a twisting of fate I was meant to overhear and meant to act on.
But the moment I got off the train in Bratislava had come the crushing realisation that the situation was hopeless, the idea had been hare-brained. What if it hadn’t been her? Oh, certainly I grilled those two musicians on the Charles Bridge but good for details to try and ascertain with certainty that it was in fact her, but they didn’t know her name and who knew anyway, she might be using any name by then.
Even if it had been her, what was she doing in Prague at all anyway? And if she had been going to Bratislava in the first place, who’s to say she’d still be there at all. And if she was in Bratislava, where in the hell was I going to find her?
Nowhere, I thought to myself sitting on the edge of the creaking bed and rolling another cigarette. Not sat indoors never having left the hotel room paralysed by inertia or fear or the knowing futility of it all.
The only logical place to begin looking were music venues. Bars or cafes or pubs which had live music where she might be singing or might be looking for someone to sing with. A bird with a voice like hers had to sing, after all, craved the public attention, yearned for the recognition. It never should have been hard to begin with yet in all the little music venues he’d stormed into expectantly in all the little villages and towns, he had yet to overturn a single worm beneath the rock, had yet, not only to find her but to even find a trace of her having been there at all to begin with.
*****
In the pivnices I found no sign of her. After a few days, I sought out the music. It was interesting in a distracted sort of isolated and apathetic sort of way, oftentimes too much blurry rock, immortal blues in a haze of smoke and stumbling, too many locals swaying back and forth where they stood, tipping the pint to their lips over and over, almost maniacally.
So the evenings became a muddle of sour pubs alone. Everyone arrived in pairs or in foursomes, everyone laughing already, everyone knowing each other, everyone another inch of thickness in the plexiglass window in front of me.
After a few hours it's fashionally acceptable to meander unintentionally of course to Krokadil, stip glasses of Mesta or Pils, work up a few conversations in broken Czech gigglowphone. No one had seen Anastacia no one heard her sing no one knew her.
Bratislava became lonely and boring very quickly. The clouds are everywhere, dark in every passing minute, once in a while a few splashes of rain awake but overall, a bad forecast, a heavy system flying into my dreams.
Greyer, poorer, lower grade cobblestones in the streets than Prague.
*****
I walked around the same square seventeen times one afternoon.
At last, I honed in, like a hawk flying down into a field to snatch a mouse, walked down the winding, narrow staircase into some sort of place that served beer. Inside, it was throbbing with Rammstein, flower pots on top of speakers shaking to the beat, a young, blonde Slovak filing her nails with her feet on the bar top and an old man sitting alone with a chess board and a pint of beer sitting on the table in front of him.
The young, blonde Slovak slowly unraveled herself when I made it in. I got the requisite beer, walked over to the old man. I picked up a white pawn, a black pawn and put both behind my back before holding out two hands for him to choose.
*****
Seven matches later, the same Rammstein CD, which had played all the way through to the end during match one, was replayed during matches two through five and then replayed again from five through seven.
She got up seven times from behind the bar: three to replay the CD and four to bring us beers.
I left shortly therafter. Went home, had a bathe, read Dnes, ate a few handfuls of bread and a hot dog from the kiosk.
Later that night, back out in that same square again, I wondered to myself if that bar with the blonde Slovak with her Rammstein was still open.
Back down and immediately, within the first and second steps down the stairs, that same Rammstein CD was still playing, seven hours later.
*****
12:06 PM
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