Nearing the End

by Jiří Klobouk

SOMETIMES IN TROUBLING MENTAL MOMENTS my inner voice takes over my outer voice with calming and uplifting encouragement. It enhances my good deeds I somehow no longer consider important. The soothing inner voice addresses me directly: you have had a fulfilling life journey, man. You’ve published books (so far mostly overlooked — sorry, man) but despite setbacks you’ve always believed your future is bright. Someday your yellowing manuscripts will be studied by literary academia and your great-great grandchildren will think you were an awesome scribbler and more. During your lifetime, the inner voice says, you managed to play boogie-woogie on piano like Pete Johnson, escaped from Commie paradise to a country where the Rocky Mountains dominate the horizon, and you’ve been to (mostly with your 2nd wife Evelyn) Machu Picchu, Rio de Janeiro, Ulan Bator — there she claimed, when you mounted her from behind on a smelly bison skin, that you were the most skillful lover she ever had — Grand Canyon, Washington DC, cruised the Mediterranean with stops in Naples, Venice, Monaco and Malta. You were blown away with the Palace Istana Nurul Iman in Brunei and then, after Evelyn ended up in a Moroccan lockup and you spent years writing My Life with Blondie at the Sunshine farm up North, won an American immigration lottery, became a green card holder and finally, a U.S. citizen. You’ve resided in New York City ever since, at 172 East End Avenue, New York, apartment 4H, with an enchanting wife (Amaya is your third or fourth, it depends, come on, wrinkly). Here I must shut off my inner voice, and use the outer one to comment that my marital endeavors could be quite confusing for any reader who happens to turn the pages of my personal account about what kind of life I lived before I met Amaya. So here I volunteer to untangle the web with an official list of my spouses as they appeared from present to past:

1. Amaya Kaishimawa, Japan

2. Nordbjorg Bergesen, (scam Skype marriage, annulled), Norway

3. Evelyn Levesque, Quebec, Canada

4. Magda, my first wife (Czech origin)

I begin with Magda. We married in 1957, had two children and left Prague for Canada after the 1968 Russian invasion. Our marriage spanned thirty-eight years of empathy and of misery. The last ten years were ghastly. After we split Magda spent three years in a mental institution in British Columbia. When they let her go, she changed her name to O’Malloney, claiming to be Irish, and married an Argentinean she met in a Vancouver Walmart eatery. He claimed to be a dentist and good friend of the son of General Jorge Mindela, who was apparently a lover of Eva Peron before she died in 1952. Once they reached Buenos Aires, the dentist turned out to be a mortician and stripped Magda of her already negligible possessions. He put her on a decayed steamboat to sail away, and as quickly, as possible. Magda returned to Prague and died in 2004. She died alone in her bed in a city she loved. She lost her battle because she neglected to have colonoscopy as advised by her doctor. Maybe she neglected to have the colonoscopy done on purpose, because she was sick and tired of colonoscopies and being alone. I’ll never know exactly. According to our children, who kept contact with her until there was no contact anymore, she wasted from inside the same way a weakened animal in a forest finds a hole and is devoured by worms and ants. I met her the same day I quit my medical studies. That morning, I was sawing open the skull of a deceased person lying stiff on an aluminum table—all 300 pounds of him. Out of nowhere an opening clarinet glissando of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue began to resonate in my head. I dropped the sawing tool on the floor and exited onto the polluted Prague street. I was in a celebratory mood and a wretched one at the same time. I had no place to call home: young man, age 24, no one to talk to, but myself. I had one pair of trousers. One plaid shirt. Two pairs of gray socks. In the back pocket of my trousers I had timeworn photographs of Duke Ellington and the blind Art Tatum. I could hum Tea for Two, but who was the other of the two, I had no clue. To quit my studies was a piece of cake. No regrets. But to stay in Prague was a catch-22 situation. In line with the restrictive rules of the authorities, no individual could reside in the Capital unless that individual has a permanent address in the Capital.