Men in Space (9 page)

Early evening. Outside, the sky’s gone dark-blue above the rows of chimney pots and television aerials. The rattle and whine of passing trams carries to the kitchen with more intimacy than it does during the daytime, as though darkness had removed walls separating rooms, apartments, buildings and the street, run all these into one new, large, unbroken space enclosed within a dome whose ceiling is ten or fifteen metres above the rooftops …

Helena’s making meatballs. She’s at the messy mixing stage. Fingers, not fork: it gives it more consistency. Besides, she likes to feel the general mêlée happening: the knotting one into the other of egg, mince, onion, herbs, breadcrumbs and pine nuts. The pliancy of flesh. The mixture’s still a little too dry: she dips her right hand into the bag of flour and rubs her thumb against her fingers to roll off some of the gunk, then picks another egg up, cracks it on the bowl’s edge, gently pours the yolk back and forth between the two shell-cups till it’s separated from the white, then lets it drop
and break on the pink-and-white mountain, ooze across its ridges and valleys. She scoops another handful of pine nuts out of their jar and airdrops them in too …

The recipe’s her father’s: her Greek, Leninist father’s. She’s accepted lamb’s unavailability and uses beef – but to leave out the pine nuts would be sacrilegious: an insult to the Greece she’s never seen. If
he
managed to procure them in first Moscow, then Sofia, she can find and pay for them in Prague – and not skimp on the quantity, at that. When he oversaw her cooking meatballs as a child he always used to intone
Add more … add more … add more …
sitting on his stool beside the cooker, right leg permanently stiff from Metaxa’s shrapnel, smiling reassuringly as though to say
money’s nothing: these flavours are what matter most in life
. As she grew older and he grew more demoralized after the fall from Party favour brought on by his uncompromising idealism (though Helena’s Russian mother had another word for it, and screamed it at him nightly:
Upryamstvo! Obstinacy! Stupid, naive obstinacy! You want your daughter to grow up an orphan for the sake of an ideal?
), after the show trial and humiliating pardon for a crime he’d not committed, the refused applications to emigrate West and the eventual relocation, begrudged by him as much as by the O.V.I.R., to the backwater of Bulgaria … during his last years, Helena came to see that smile as embittered and nostalgic.
A packaged taste, dried and transported across a continent – this is all I have left …

The oil has stopped crackling. She can pick out currents circulating round the chip pan, silky threaded cumuli billowing within the outwardly still mass. She turns the gas down, wipes her hand on a dish towel and leaves the kitchen. In the main room, on the round table, piles of paper are arranged around her typewriter in a large circle, like clock-patience cards. Anton’s taken the table’s chair away but left the papers untouched. He’s pulled the chair up to face him
where he’s sitting on the sofa and covered its surface with today’s
Lidové noviny
, onto which he’s letting drop the skin of the potatoes he’s peeling.

“I haven’t read it yet!”

He looks up:

“It’s just the sports pages. You don’t read those.”

“The water will have seeped through to the others.”

“No it won’t. Look.”

He scrumples the top double-page up into a peel-filled ball. The double-page below is wet. He takes this out as well and scrumples it into a smaller ball. The rest is dry. He looks at her and smiles:

“I have a question. If this,” he says, holding the larger ball, the one with the peelings inside, up in his left hand, “is the earth, and say the lamp here is the sun, so, hang on, it’s tilted this way right now because it’s winter, the equator’s here, and here’s us,
Praha
, right where this guy in the photograph is standing. And this,” he continues, picking up the smaller ball, “is the moon, and it’s going around us once every twenty-four hours and, hang on, we’re spinning too, like this, you follow …”

“Do you remember what my first degree’s in?” She smiles faintly. Behind Anton all the filing cabinet’s doors are open. She should try not to look at it, try to give him all of her attention. She forces a stronger smile out, but it seems fake so she quickly lets the muscles round her mouth relax again.

“No,” Anton says, laughing. If he noticed the twitch he’s overlooking it like the good referee he is, allowing minor infringements go unchecked so as to let the game flow smoothly. “I mean do you follow my demonstration?”

“Yes, I follow …” Now her nose is twitching, but her hands are still covered in gunk. It always twitches when your hands are out of action, carrying something or dirty …

“So. My question is: can you only see the moon during the daytime when it’s winter?”

“During the daytime? Of course not. You see it at night mostly.”

“No, I mean when the moon’s up but it’s still light. Does this phenomenon occur exclusively in wintertime?”

“Oh, right … No.” She rubs her forearm against her nose, a little too hard; it sends a stabbing sensation up into her eyes. They must be tired. She was reading the carbon copies of her letters from the moment she came back from work at three-thirty to when Anton came in half an hour ago. That’s more than three hours. “The moon vacillates round the horizon line a lot. This is what Eudoxus of Cyzicus grappled with. He had to add a third concentric sphere to his geometrical model to explain variations in its altitude – and a fourth one for retrograde motions.”

“Are those epicycles?”

“No, that’s Apollonius. Or Ptolemy. Epicycles, deferents, I forget them all … But basically, you can see the moon in daytime whenever the sun shines from low on the horizon and hits it. So, yes, it will happen a lot in winter. But on summer mornings too. And evenings. So, no: not just in winter.”

“And can it happen in both hemispheres?”

“Why not?”

“OK … Oh, one other thing. If this,” he continues, grabbing a peeled potato from the bowl of water, “is the morning star, Mars … Is Mars the morning star?”

“No. Venus is the morning star …”

The Sophia Planetarium: is he thinking about this too? It was the first time they’d gone anywhere alone together – not that it seemed like a date. It hadn’t occurred to her that this boy in Toitov’s class, the short boy with the clownish face, might be attractive. And she was married at the time – unhappily. Maybe that’s what swung it: the contrast between Dimitar’s sharp but humourless good looks, his glazed, opportunistic eyes, and Anton’s strangely luminous brown eyes, the fat lips
beneath them that seemed to be perpetually smiling. Toitov had been lecturing excitedly about the discovery by sponge divers off Antikythera, among amphorae and statues of nude women, of thirty small, corroded bronze plates and gear wheels, dating back to 77 BC, with the symbols and notches of an astronomical calendar inscribed on them – effectively a shoebox-sized planetarium. Anton had jokingly complimented her on her national achievements as they left and wandered up Boulevard Tsar Osvoboditel towards the Largo – she thinking that she’d catch the trolley bus on Narodno Sabranie, and then, when they’d wandered past there, that she’d walk on to Knyaginya Maria-Luiza and catch one there – until they found themselves, coincidentally, in front of the domed building on Positano. Or had he slyly led them there? She never asked. He said
Have you ever been in here before?
and she said
No
; he said
Me neither
, so in they went. There was no contact to speak of: maybe he took her coat for her, brushed against her as they moved into the main hall – nothing more than that. No: it was when the planets, then the stars and then whole galaxies started sliding around them that she got the frisson, felt him tense up with awe beside her, both of them exhilarated by this immersion in pure movement. A mechanical illusion, doubly misleading: what her ancestors had never realized (an error tacitly repeated in the gears and plates of the projector) is that stars don’t move, and here in the planetarium, despite semblances, neither did she and Anton – but when they emerged back into the daylight an itinerant complicity had already taken hold of them. That they should end up fleeing Bulgaria to marry seemed right; and it seemed right that they should leave Europe entirely, emigrate to America, where Anton had an uncle.
They’re hosting the World Cup in ninety-four
, he’d say excitedly.
They’ll need good referees. All the kids play football there: our children will play it as well. Kristof and Larissa too …

Kristof and Larissa were their one point of susceptibility. Dimitar knew it, and knew, with his political connections, what to do about it. So now they’re halted, slowed down by this weight she drags behind her like the moon drags all the oceans. She worries that that’s how Anton sees it, anyway. He’s said he doesn’t mind: he’ll wait until they can all go to America together, there’s no immediate hurry, he can probably get an extension on the visa … Which is all true; she can rationalize it all. But it’s the betrayal she feels bad about. Their whole liaison, since that first afternoon, has been predicated on free, unencumbered transit, movement massing to escape velocity, to warp speed. What she’s done is to go and get herself encumbered.

“But does the evening star show …”

“It’ll have to wait, Anton. The oil’s ready. Give me the potatoes.”

In the kitchen she slices them and slides the slices from the board into the pan. The oil jumps and hisses. Helena dips her fingers in the flour again, then scoops handfuls of mixture from the bowl and pats these into balls, which she arranges in a Teflon-coated frying pan. Earth, Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars, plus one more to make three each: Mercury. Or maybe America. She goes over to the window and opens it slightly. The windows of the other buildings backing onto their courtyard are flickering different colours. It’s the television sets. She can’t see the sets themselves but she can tell who’s watching which channel because the lights in whole clusters and rows of windows change from one colour to another at the same time. It seems that everyone is watching one of two channels: a quickly alternating blue-green-red one and a constant purple one. Anton’s making a phone call in the next room, speaking in English. She can’t quite hear what he’s saying; he’s put on his Santana record. She goes over to the cooker, flips the meatballs, fishes a loose pine nut out onto the counter, picks it up and throws it into her mouth before
it burns her fingers. She hears Anton put the phone down. A few seconds later he comes into the kitchen.

“I’ve just phoned Nick,” he tells her, sniffing the air, hungry. “Nick who lived next door. I’ve got to go out later to meet him.”

“Has he …”

“He told me he’s corrected your UNRC letter and he’ll give it to me.”

“UNHCR. Tell him to come here. I’ll make more meatballs for him.”

“No, that doesn’t work. I’ve got to meet him and his flatmate. This artist. Ilievski wants me to ask him for something. But he’ll bring the corrected letter to the party where we’re meeting and give it to me.” He puts his arms around her from behind and kisses her neck. “Can I do something to help? I could clear the table if …”

“No!” That was too aggressive – but he was moving towards the other room already: he’d have messed the letters up. She’s got them arranged chronologically, clockwise from the first one she wrote one week after the kidnap, through to the first draft of this latest. She softens her tone and tells him: “No. No, it’s fine. Thank you, Anton.”

He stands facing her for a second, then turns and goes back into the main room. Plates. She reaches two down from the cupboard. Two, not four. And two knives and two forks. It’s been nine months now: the same time it took each of them to grow inside her. The sheer arrogance of it: the flower seller who’d seen the snatch outside the school told them that the
Policie
, in uniform, had led the children by the hands into a marked car. And then the spinelessness: Members of Parliament, ministers who paraded their past membership of O.F. as though this made them a priori diligent, unswayable, fearless, to a man cold-shouldered her as soon as they got word from higher up. The sight of Havel on TV, righteous, triumphant, trumpeting the
ancien régime
’s demise, makes
her want to … And Anton’s boss, Ilievski: so well meaning but just not
getting
it.
We’ll have them kidnapped back
, he said,
and smuggled across the frontier
– as though they were goods, chattel, just like currency or stolen cars or artwork or whatever else he dealt in; as though being snatched away by strangers one time wasn’t traumatic enough. Besides, she’d read a book once in which a child hides in a sack of cauliflowers and a soldier sticks his bayonet inside – and misses, but still … 
Car seats, Helena, not vegetables
, Anton told her when she mentioned this to him,
or maybe even on an aeroplane with false papers: Ilievski can easily arrange …
and she let him know by looking at him in a certain way that this proposal was never to be mooted again.

The letter, then: the thirty-second she’ll have sent … And then there are the Bulgarian elections coming up: if the Communists were to lose … She turns the meatballs again, shakes the chips. Five minutes. She sweeps an onion scalp onto the cutting board and throws it into the bin. She really doesn’t want to cry. As though the onion … Glasses. Pepper, salt. Wait till the water’s gone back in. She walks back over to the window, opens it some more and sticks her head out. The night air is sharp and cold. She tries to push her sadness out of her, expel it visibly as breath, a small cloud forming high up in the courtyard. She looks again at the windows on the far side. Behind one of them a girl is bouncing on a bed. A woman sticks her head into the room and says something to the girl. The girl runs out of the room and the woman switches off the light.

* * * * *

Jean-Luc’s flat, like the one belonging to the Czech guy who Nick lives with, is on the top floor. It must be for the natural light, Heidi thinks: probably got skylights too. She wishes she could live in one of those skylit pads and fill it with
Czech people –
Bohemians
, not her students – and invite the other English teachers round so they could see how she was Bohemian too, and not just an English teacher like all of them. And then she’d kick them out, the English teachers, and never have anything to do with them again – which she didn’t mean to in the first place, and swore somewhere over maybe Luxemburg or Belgium (
Colloquial Czech
lying open on her lap as she tried to memorize a phrase that translated as “While it is true that, of a morning, I have little appetite, nonetheless I do not breakfast eagerly, so for me this poses no great problem”, and wondering how you slip
that
information into casual banter) to eschew all contact with fellow US graduates and meet only Czech people – but, you know …