Jaroslav Rudiš: Reading at the Prague Writers' Festival

Bomber's American Dream

In November the week-long comic-book festival Graphic Novels from Europe took place in New York, put on by the cultural institutions of several European countries, including the Czech Centre. At a number of events there, writer Jaroslav Rudiš, illustrator Jaromír 99 and their publisher Joachim Dvořák presented Alois Nebel, their trilogy of graphic novels about the Czech-German railwayman from the Sudetes. And Jaroslav Rudiš wrote about what they found there.

The Subway

The train hurtles out of the tunnel like a flashing silver bullet. We get on. Apparently there are two and a half thousand people living in the New York metro at any given time. In the tunnels. In the stations. Somewhere under them or between them. The subway here is much more stripped-down, much louder and darker than any I've ever seen. When the computer breaks down the drivers rap out the names of the lines and stations in a fast mix. Homeless dudes walk through the cars singing loudly. With no headphones in their ears. Riffing rap, blues, rock, country, everything. Going through the crowds and singing. And then silently smiling they stick out a tin can, rattling a couple of coins inside. They're fighting with the city. They don't want to fade away.

"Jarin, don't look at him man, he'll mess you up," Jaromír 99 advises me. But I can't not do it. I see the subway car as the stage of a great musical. All of a sudden everyone is singing. English. Spanish. Chinese. And we're throwing Czech into the mix. Jaromír 99 & The Bombers, the comic-book band from Bohemia on their way to the New York festival of European comics. Everyone's singing, the train is rocking along the bumpy tracks and on the ceiling there's an ad for a big winter ski resort in Utah. I sing and think about what the capital of Utah is.

At the French cultural institute where the show is starting it's packed. We say hi to David B and Nicolas De Crécy from France, Max from Spain and Igort from Italy, who we're going to spend the week in New York with. There is chatter, at first polite, then scattered, and in the end quite friendly, about what, who, where, how, and with whom. A petite and charming French girl in tall high-heeled boots introduces us, and pronounces Czech Republic more like Chechnya. "Žaroslav, Žaromír 99 and Žoachim," she adds. We play four songs. The sound reverberates uncertainly against the walls. We go for a glass of wine instead. Then for another. And then one more. My shoe is kind of pinching me.

7 : 1

We're staying in Manhattan, really high up, past 90th Street, on the twenty-second floor of the Normandie Court complex. Its logo is the figure of a French knight. He's lying in the elevator broken and sewn into the threadbare carpet.

Outside our windows more skyscrapers are hanging from the sky like elongated puppets without arms. Somewhere far below little cars are moving about. People are chasing the cold out of their sleeves on the sidewalks and opening the door to the Pakistani restaurant where I bought an overly sweet cup of coffee yesterday. Our building, just like every big residential building, is guarded by a bunch of mostly black doormen in uniforms. They open the doors; wish a good morning, good evening. I wish them the same. And then we both thank each other.

In the elevator every morning I only meet women between twenty-five and forty. They're elegant, with expensive purses and high heels, and they check their cell phones three times on the way to the ground floor. There's a psychologist that says this is the newest big neurosis – lots of people fall into a panic when no one has called them or written them for a long time, or when they don't have a signal or god forbid when their battery is dead. The young ladies smile and look off somewhere behind me. Behind themselves. And in the evening I meet them again. They disappear into their miniapartments, still elegant, still smiling and checking their cell phones and looking somewhere behind me. Somewhere in front of themselves. Or behind themselves.

On the roof of the building there's a big swimming pool and two fitness centres with machines and a beefy trainer. Some girls are here torturing themselves in vain until midnight on the treadmills with a little television. Johanka says that in New York it's incredibly difficult to find a man: for seven girls that want a relationship, a family, and all the rest, there's just one decent guy that also wants a relationship, a family, and all the rest. Maybe one of them is the swarthy trainer in sweatpants with a cross around his neck. Right now he's looking through the glass wall down on the resting city.

Boats

On the sidewalk two homeless men are passing each other with full shopping carts. For a moment they are riding next to each other, but one is just a slight bit faster. Then they ride one after the other. They are silent and their faces aren't visible, hunched over and wrapped up in winter coats. They stop at each dumpster. They take turns and their shopping carts are boats full of treasure. They have an air of Christopher Columbus about them, who officially discovered this continent. They slowly move along, maybe it's more like standing; they are and they aren't, letting everything whizz by – the managers with their cups of coffee, their assistants in chic coats, the wind and the city. Thanks to them the world is in balance. I watch them. When they disappear around the corner I realise that my shoe is still pinching.

Black hole

Every New York high-rise has its black hole. You can find it in the middle of the hall, most often across from the elevator. You'll know it by the smell. One set of doors open, kind of like a cupboard, and then another set of smaller metal ones that remind me of the doors on the little stove my aunt in the country has, where she bakes meatloaf (and once almost baked the cat, whose scorched fur she then had to cut off and rub him with dog lard). Behind those doors is a deep blackness and stench. Here things change their substance. Everything real disappears. It sublimates or whatever it's called.

"That's how cockroaches usually get in the building," says Michal, who's lived here a year now with his wife, a Czech diplomat. I throw a coke can in. We listen. It bounces off the walls and rattles out. For quite a long time.

I imagine that working away somewhere deep inside is the local Haňťa, hero of the New York too-loud-a-solitude, and pouring down on him from above are not tonnes of paper and old books that he has to crush, but tonnes of garbage that he has to sort through. That this Haňťa isn't educated against his will from books, but from the rotting mess, that he can read the city from it and that he knows how everything in New York, us included, will all end. I imagine that all the cats and dogs that whine plaintively from behind the doors while their elegant missus is at work also disappear into the black hole. And that their parrots and guinea pigs also disappear down there and in the end so do they themselves. I can see how some Puerto Rican in overalls is managing and sorting them down in the underground, how it doesn't even affect him because neither he nor New York nor even the heavens above are humane. Dead ones here, coke cans there, milk cartons on the other side, pizza scraps next to them, and newspapers and ads for Utah ski resorts in the corner. And in the end a big truck comes and takes it all off to the incinerator.

This city must have whole other city underneath it, unseen and enormous, just to process what the megalopolis on the surface disgorges and casts aside. It sorts through it, rinses it off, and returns it to the start once again.

Dancing with Linda

From Brooklyn, Manhattan looks like a bunch of randomly scattered match boxes. Right under the big bridge in a former factory an American, Barton, opened up a shop with Czech furniture and design from the pre-war years right up to the Brussels style. His gallery Prague Kolektiv is reminiscent of my grandmother's big living room. Apparently it does really well.

In the gallery we open our fake exhibition Alois Nebel – My Life and play a small concert. We spew out Poisons and Antidotes and other songs about love, death and the Sudetes. The audience is very obliging and having a pretty good time. After the concert we're hungry. We have to go for steaks and there's a restaurant right across the street. They're big, tender and juicy. For the obligatory post-meal drink we end up in a bar across the street again, in the first floor of a former factory. We're a little bit drunk and also a little bit happy, and so we're dancing. He have our shiny orange football jackets on. The locals are looking at us strangely but then all of a sudden it happens. A couple of girls join us. And then some more. And then some more. And all of a sudden the whole bar is dancing.

"Where'd you get those awful jackets?" asks a girl that introduces herself as Linda.

"Versace," one of us says. The truth is they're from H&M on Wenceslas Square.

"And why are you all wearing the same jacket?"

"We're a band. Jaromír 99 & The Bombers."

"What's thaaat?"

"The Bombers. Žaroslav, Žaromír, Žoachim."

"From New York?"

"From Prague. Europe."

The girl runs off to relay this to her friends. They giggle and all want to come take their picture with us. We're dancing, my shoe is really pinching now, but I don't care. Then the owner of the bar comes over and brings us a beer. He says that if we come here in our jackets to dance every Friday and Saturday we can drink for free, that he's been looking for someone like us. We drink to it and I start to understand what the American Dream is all about. Truly anyone can be successful here. You just need a good idea. Ours isn't the comic book about Alois Nebel, or even our band – no art, just sweat-soaked orange jackets from H&M that make us look like Cuban oranges. That's life.

Eventually Linda reveals that she's a tattoo artist. She's latched onto us and proposes that we go drink at her place and she'll tattoo a piece of New York on our shoulders for free. Each piece an original. Luckily we manage to slip away.

Germany

It's a month and a bit until Christmas, but it's as if it were just around the corner. One Christmas carol after another are piling up everywhere like snowballs, like an avalanche obliterating the city. There might be different songs, but all I hear is "Jingle Bells". It's even booming in the Chinese grocery store, where I buy gum, water, and for whatever reason also steak sauce. It's even blaring in the underground cool urban fashion store. I grab a couple of t-shirts for myself as well as a gift for Vanda and our little Nina, who's supposed to be born at the start of spring and in the meantime is quietly swimming around in her mommy's belly.

"Where you from?" the girl at the cash asks.

"Prague."

"What's thaaat?"

"Czech Republic."

"What's thaaat?"

"Germany."

"Aha. Okay."

"And you?"

"Utah."

I'm too shy to ask more. The girl is nice and pretty cute, and I keep trying to think of what the capital of Utah is.

Near St. Marks Place we wander into a diner where they claim to fry the best hamburgers in New York. Inside the television is blaring and the air is so saturated with oil that the room feels like a deep fryer. It's packed. A lady with a short blondish pony tail and a thick winter coat on is taking orders. We order a cheeseburger-medium-with-the-works, which includes a mound of French fries, salad, ketchup, and a litre of coke – and she asks if we want mayonnaise too.

"How'd you know?" Žoachim smiles.

"Ya don't look like yer from around here."

"And where do you think we're from."

"From o'er there."

Eating lunch around us are only workers and drivers. They have hands like shovels and the hamburgers disappear inside them in two bites. Johanka and the waitress are the only two women in the place. On the tube is the American version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The ten-thousand-dollar question.

"The capital of France is named: Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Rome?"

The girl doesn't know and calls a friend.

I'm trying to remember again what the capital of Utah is. When we pay I ask the waitress.

"Salt Lake City," she says.

"Of course, Mormons..." I try a joke.

"Mostly it's a good place to ski," she replies, smiles, and disappears behind the bar.

Read at Prague Tuesday 9 June, 2009.

Translated from the Czech by Mike Allen, unpublished