Men in Space (7 page)

And yes, he feels her presence as he unzips, knows she’s covering the worn and spongy stone like moss or dew, running in a sub-electric current round the angel’s waist, her neck, her head. He points up at her, way up, pointing through her to heaven, to whatever’s highest … Segments of leaf and woods and stars flash through his mind, a half-bare thigh, bandannas … An ambulance shoots down the hill, its siren blaring, growing louder as it heads towards him, maybe it’s the police but it’s too late now, can’t stop: here it is, the love shooting out of him and hanging in the cold air, gravity-defying, for half a second … But it hasn’t even made it one tenth of the distance up towards the statue let alone to
her
before, as the siren eases off, slows down and flattens out, its arc falls back towards the ground – and there’s a shuffling behind him, someone coming up the steps, better get zipped up quickly …

Walking on down Vyšehradská, past the medical faculty, Ivan Maňásek feels exhausted, empty. More ambulances trundle by. Men and women walk past him in white coats, chatting together. They ignore him: he’s out of their loop – out of his own loop too, her loop. It didn’t work, didn’t make it up to her; the jet he shot out will be lying on concrete, grey and dead. On Na Slupi, he enters a phone box, roots around his pocket, finds some loose change at the bottom of it, feeds a one-crown piece into the slot: six-oh-four-three, no, six-four-oh-three …

The first time round he gets put through to Klárá’s neighbour. Fucking party lines. The next try gets him through to her. She has a croaky, tired voice: Ivan can almost smell the sleep on her, the moistness of her skin, her crumpled off-blond hair …

“Klárá?”

“Who’s that? Ivan?”

“Klárá. Yes, it’s me.”

“What are you calling for this early? What time is it?”

“I’m not sure.”

There’s a soft sound as the phone’s laid down, must be her duvet; then a rustling and her voice is there again: “Six-forty. Why are you …”

“Klárá, I just …” What’s he meant to say? “What’s new? I was just thinking about you.”

“I was asleep. Nothing’s new. Where are you?”

“In Nové Město. In a phone box.”

“Has something happened? Are you OK?”

“I suppose so. How are you?”

“I’m fine. I’ve got to go to work.”

“What are you doing?”

“Renovating altars. St Cajetan, in Hradčany.”

“I saw Sláva Kinček tonight.”

“And you called to tell me that?”

“Did I wake you?”

“Yes. And now …”

“And could you tell me … I’m not being rude: I really want to know …”

“What?”

“Klárá, were you dreaming anything erotic?”

There’s a pause, then a click, then a long, deep, black noise. Ivan replaces the receiver. It was three years ago. Before leaving the cabin, he fishes a tissue from his back pocket, cleans himself up. Then he pulls out Hájek’s wrap, taps a little power onto the back of his left hand and snorts it up. Fuel.

He rides trams round the city: hopping on, off, walking for a while, cutting back, looping round. After some time, he finds himself on the brim of the hill at Letná, outside the closed front doors of Pod Stalinem, the club where Milan
Hájek came from earlier to meet him and Jan, where someone was saying they were going to do something, sometime … He used to come here in the days when Radio Stalin operated from inside here, decks and wires slinking haphazardly among the rubble left from when they’d blown up the giant Stalin Monument that loomed over the whole city. One of his earliest memories, that: seeing the scaffolding explode, the giant bronze head topple … Did he watch it for real or on TV? He can’t have been more than four: perhaps he’s remembering it from films, people’s accounts … Now a huge metronome rises up where Stalin stood. It’s supposed to sway in great arcs from one side to another, north to south and back again – but it’s broken, jammed, its needle sitting inert in the cold at fifty-odd degrees. His mother was ambivalent about the statue’s destruction:
Iosif Vissarionovich wasn’t all bad, you know … History needs force to move it forwards; things need to be done …
She went into shock when the USSR disintegrated. Looking across the city, Ivan pictures Hájek’s cosmonaut gazing down from his spaceship onto familiar land masses he no longer recognizes: whole blocks wrenching apart, accelerated continental drift, a jigsaw in reverse … And in two weeks Bohemia and Slovakia will split …

He’s about to tap some more speed out onto his hand when a man appears beside him and says hello. Must be a little older than him: mid-to-late thirties. His face reminds Ivan of someone. The man’s smiling at him.

“Do you have the time?” he asks Ivan.

“The time?” He goes through the motions of fumbling in his pockets although he knows he doesn’t have a watch, then looks up at the metronome and gives a disappointed shrug. “I’m afraid not.”

“That’s a shame,” the man says, still smiling strongly as he fixes him with his gaze. Ivan looks back at him and realizes who his face reminds him of: a monk in a monastery where he once spent two weeks restoring a fresco. Brother
Fran-something. Francisco? Franz? In the still space of the hilltop, the two weeks Ivan stayed at the monastery jostle for admission. It was a month or so before the revolution: a mild, calm autumn just before that intense winter. Sloping Moravian vineyards, Gypsies harvesting the grapes as he worked in the chapel … those cloisters outside, the way sound echoed round them … dinners with the monks … and Brother Fran … Fran … He promised as he left to get in touch, but never did … The man is staring at him, friendly as anything.

“Are you sure you don’t have time?”

Now Ivan gets it. “No,” embarrassed. “I’m not here for … I’ve got to go.”

He heads down the steps towards the river and crosses Švermův Most: same route he took down from Letná after being released that day in eighty-nine, his day. There’d been swathes of people flowing in the same direction. There are a few people around now, but there’s no purpose to their movements, no coherence. The odd businessman goes one way, the odd street-cleaner another. At Náměstí Republiky he enters the metro. It must be mid-morning now; the carriage is half full. The travellers sit silently, faces washed grey by routine and fatigue: secretaries, workers, eyelids drooping. He starts crashing, dozing off. Pre-recorded messages caress his brain, lullabying him:
Finish your entrances and exits; the doors are about to close. Next station Mústek. Morpheus. Maňásek
 …

He manages to wake up at Anděl, leave the carriage and ride the long, slow escalator to street level. The station’s eponymous plaster angel stands in the lobby, next to a new photo booth. Was there an angel earlier? Folds in a skirt. What was the monk’s name? Fran-something. Ivan steps out onto Nádražní. The sun’s chased the cloud away now. Tram wires, a wedding-dress shop, a
langoš
stand. He walks down Lidická, past second-hand shops, toy shops, textile and ceramic shops, a butcher’s from whose open door music is
spilling. Further down, on the corner of Zborovská, people are queuing by a plastic tank that’s full of carp. Ivan pauses beside them and peers in. There’s a wooden table next to the tank; behind the table, two stout men with moustaches wearing rubber boots and aprons dip nets into the water and scoop fish out, one at a time. They place each fish, flapping, in a weighing scale: if it’s too heavy, or too light, they throw it back and scoop another out – but mostly they’re the right size. Some people want to carry their fish off alive, in bags half-filled with water; most, though, want theirs killed. The men hold the fish across the surface of the table, place a small axe to their neck, then slam a mallet down onto the axe, severing the fish’s heads. It usually takes two or three blows to fully sever them. The fish’s mouths widen and contract as the axe goes through their flesh and tendons, like the mouths of operatic singers or of ancient oracles and seers whispering deathbed visions. When they’re dead, the men gut them, scrape scales from their sides, hand them to the customers, then start the whole process again.

Ivan watches them weigh, kill and clean three or four carp, then turns to leave – but as he does, a truck pulls up beside the tank. The two men in boots and aprons greet the driver, who climbs from his cabin, pulls a slide from the truck’s side and snaps one end of this into a catch below a sluice-gate on the truck. The men in boots and aprons lay the other end across the rim of their tank, then stand back, one on each of the slide’s sides, like ceremonial soldiers waiting for visiting dignitaries to descend from an aeroplane.

“Ready?” the driver shouts.

They nod. The driver pulls a lever; the sluice-gate opens and releases from the truck a rush of water in which scores of carp cascade down the slide towards the tank – on their sides, one eye up, scales flashing silver under a thin film of liquid as they shoot by. After a few seconds the tank’s filled up to the brim; there’s water gushing out onto the pavement.
Carp too: the driver’s trying to close the sluice-gate, but the lever’s stuck, got wedged. He’s swearing, jerking at it while carp hurtle down the slide: more and more of them. They’re bouncing off the writhing block of tails and fins and landing on the pavement, thrashing around the kerb gasping for breath, hitting their heads on people’s feet, the wheels of pushchairs … One of them’s come to rest in front of Ivan. Its mouth is working itself open again and again, each time finding it harder, as though struggling against the unbearably heavy atmosphere of some alien planet it’s pitched up on. Its eyes bulge outwards from its head. Ivan shudders, closes his eyes, turns away again and walks home.

Back in his flat, he pulls his shoes off, fetches his shaving mirror and spare razor blade from the bathroom and chops what’s left of the speed into a line. He takes his hundred-crown note out and rolls it up, but then decides to save the line for later and covers the mirror with an upturned cigar box. By the telephone a page, torn from one of his magazines, has had a message scrawled on it:
Meet Joost van Straten in MXM any time today until five. And kiss my butt
. Van Straten: that’s the Dutch gallerist. He’ll sleep for a couple of hours, then go. He sits back in his armchair and looks around him. Toys have spilt across the floor from the freight carton he plundered yesterday for objects to add to his collage. The collage itself is hanging on the wall above his chair. There’s that old photograph glued to the canvas: his parents sitting on a rug beside the river near Radotín and, behind them, Petr and himself, aged maybe eight. Nineteen sixty-six or -seven. Just before his father’s death. Petr must be four. He
has
got Hájek’s morose grin. Comes from the time Ivan dropped a big radio onto his head, flattened it like Giacometti’s sculptures of his own brother … his own brother … ask Nick. What was the monk’s name? Ivan looks away from the collage, towards the ceiling. The wooden angel’s hanging there. No aura about her: she’s just a wooden block, hasn’t even got legs – just long,
rusty nails snaking out from the wood where her genitalia should be: must’ve been joined to the altar at the hip. She dangles from the bar beneath the skylight, her head slightly twisted to one side and tilted back, her eyes focused on some point beyond, or perhaps within, the skylight’s dirty glass. It’s not up there, whatever she was meant to be looking for – not any more, at least: more likely lying on some stretch of pavement. Everything falls back, eventually …

It must be pushing noon now. Three hours’, four hours’ sleep, then he’ll go over to MXM and see this Joost van Straten. Ivan moves into his bedroom and lies down, staring, like the wooden angel, at the skylight. Just before he drifts off into sleep, the jagged and curved smudges on its surface morph into the half-familiar shapes of a broken metronome, a suffocating fish.

* * * * *

 … to be informed, upon reporting back for work shortly after 9 [nine] a.m., that my presence was requested at the National Central Bureau of Interpol. I was informed that I’d require a security card in order to enter the building in which the meeting was to take place, and was issued with one. I was, further, informed that the office of the Interpol NCB had recently been moved, as part of the general overhaul we were experiencing, to the very building which housed my own department and in which I was already, as on most days, standing, but that since the requirement to be issued with security cards when visiting Interpol buildings had not yet been rescinded in the light of this fact, I would need one nonetheless. These facts, these glitches, are not important: what is important is that the austere office of the NCB has called me, that I have been called.

Passing through the floors above my own en route to the meeting, I was able to observe the extent to which the
entire organization of the Central Criminal Police is being reconfigured. I saw stacked-up files from Organized Crime being transferred onto Criminal Intelligence shelves, Photo-Fit Department boxes merged with Modus Operandi ones, Fingerprinting slides inserted into Scene of Crime Department records. In one corridor I saw rows of cabinets containing pre-lustration STB files waiting to be accommodated somewhere within the new structure. The Slovak section was being disbanded; a whole storey had been designated as a dumping ground for files relating to that portion of our country soon to become independent Slovakia; yet records from the Slovak regions of Košice and Bratislava were still coming in by fax, telex and computer, to be filed, copied and indexed. New sections were being created to liaise with Western European institutions such as TREVI, Europol and the PJCC. The thin plywood partitions separating various offices were being torn down and repositioned. This is the price of realignment: old attachments must be severed, new ones formed. Everything must have its place.

Upon arrival at the office of the NCB, I was led into a room in which I found my colleagues Rosický, from the Financial Intelligence Department, and Novotný, from the Photo-Fit Department, seated. A few moments later, Lieutenant Forman entered with an officer from Interpol to whom, showing great deference, he introduced the three of us. This officer explained to us that we had been assembled here because the activities in which each of us was currently engaged pertained, or might pertain, to a stolen artwork which Interpol were particularly eager to recover. The artwork in question, he informed us, had recently been stolen from a museum in Bulgaria. He passed round a copy of it, taken, as the Cyrillic small print at the base of the page made clear, from a Bulgarian catalogue or textbook. It depicted a male figure floating above a landscape. Below him were mountains, below these houses and, to the right
of these, a large blue area across which square objects were being shunted or shuffled into position by small men. The men were either repositioning these objects or else tending to them, as though they were fine-tuning listening devices. None of them looked up towards the main figure, who floated above them in a sky of silver. He wore a red robe on his body, and around his head had a large halo of bright gold. To the right of his feet, above the small men’s square objects, was a line of text written in an archaic form of Cyrillic – or so I assumed, as, being vaguely familiar with modern Bulgarian Cyrillic, I would have been able to read the words had they been written in this script.