Holy Fire (21 page)

“
Est-il Québecois?
” said Bouboule, with interest.

“Toronto’s not in Quebec,” Maya said.

“
C’est triste
.… Oh, ciao Paul.”

“You’ve stolen the party, Benedetta,” said Paul, smiling. “This is Emil, from Praha. He’s a ceramicist. Emil, this is Maya, a model, and Benedetta, a programmer. And this is Bouboule. She’s our industry patroness.”

Emil bowed to Bouboule. “I’m told that we have met.”

“In a way,” said Bouboule, her face clouding. She rose, kissed Emil’s cheek briefly, and walked away. The marmoset ran after her and bounded onto her shoulder.

“They were lovers once,” Benedetta explained, wrinkling her nose.

Emil sat down mournfully. “Was I really that woman’s lover?”

“Don’t talk scandal, Benedetta,” Paul chided. “Let me see the furoshiki.” He set his notebook down. “Emil, this
device is fascinating, you should watch this closely” He rolled up his sleeves.

Emil glanced at Maya. He had lovely dark eyes. “Were
we
once lovers?”

“Why do you ask?” Maya said.

Emil sighed bitterly. “Paul is so persuasive,” he muttered. “He always convinces me to attend these parties of his, and then I commit some terrible faux pas.”

Paul glanced up from his screen. “Stop whining, Emil. You’re doing fine tonight. Come look at this device, this will cheer you up. It’s marvelous.”

“I’m not a digital person, Paul. I like clay. Clay! The least digital substance on earth.”

“You have really good English,” Maya said, moving closer.

“Thank you, my dear. You’re certain we’ve never met?”

“Never. I’ve never been to Praha.”

“Then you should let me show you the city.”

Maya glanced at Paul and Benedetta. They had launched into furious Italiano, enraptured by the fabric machine. “That might be very nice,” she said slowly. “What are you doing after this party?”

“What am I doing at this moment?” countered Emil. “Embarrassing myself and everyone, that is what. Let’s go for a walk. I need fresh air.”

Maya gazed slowly around the subterranean bar. No one was watching them. No one cared what she did. She was perfectly free. She could do whatever she pleased. “All right,” she said. “If you like.”

She found her red jacket. Emil found a long dirty coat and a slouch hat. There was no sign of Klaudia. “I have a friend here at the Tête,” she told Emil. “We’ll have to come back for her. Just a little walk around the block, all right?”

Emil nodded absently. They left the Tête. Emil stuffed
his large bony hands in his coat pockets. The night was clear and still, and growing colder steadily. He began walking up Opatovicka Street.

“Are you hungry?” Emil asked.

“No.”

Emil walked on silently, staring at the pavement. They passed streets with utterly impossible names: Kremencova, Vjircharich, Ostrovni.

“Shouldn’t we be going back?” Maya said.

“I’m having a crisis,” Emil confessed wearily.

“What kind of crisis?”

“I shouldn’t tell you. It’s a complicated story.”

Emil had a Czech British accent. She could scarcely believe she was walking through such a lovely city, on a cold clear night, hearing such a touchingly exotic version of her own language. “I don’t mind. Everyone has troubles.”

“I’m forty-five years old.”

“Why is that a crisis?”

“It’s not my age,” said Emil, “it’s the steps I took to evade my other difficulties. You see, I was a potter. I was a potter for twenty-five years.”

“Yes?”

“I was a bad potter. A wheel kicker, a mud dauber. Technically adept, but lacking the holy fire. I couldn’t commit myself wholly to the craft, and the better I became at technique, the less inspiration I felt. I was sickened by my own inadequacies.”

“That sounds very serious.”

“It’s all right to be a happy amateur. And it’s all right to be truly gifted. But to be competent and middling bad at an artifice that you care about—that’s a nightmare.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Maya said.

This remark seemed to crush Emil completely. He pulled the slouch hat down over his eyes and trudged.

“Emil,” she said at last, “would it help you to talk in
Czestina? I happen to have a Czech translation unit with me.”

“Maybe you can’t understand, but my life was untenable,” Emil said. “I decided I had gone too far. I had to erase my mistakes, and try to start again. So, I talked to some friends. Tincture people. Very hard-case tincture people. I got them to give me a very strong broad-spectrum amnesiac.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I injected it. When I woke up next morning, I couldn’t even talk. I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or even what I was. I didn’t know what a potter’s wheel was. All I saw was that I was in a studio and there was a wheel and a lump of damp mud in a bag. And broken pots. Of course I’d broken all my worthless ugly pots the night before, before,” he smacked his skull with the flat of his hand, “before I broke my own head.”

“Then what?”

“I put the mud on the wheel, I spun it, and I could work clay. It was a miracle. I could do clay without any thought, without any doubt. I knew nothing about clay and yet the skill came out of my hands. Clay was all I had—all that I was. Clay was all that was left of me. I was an animal that made pots.”

Emil laughed. “I made pots for a year. They were very good pots. Everyone said so. I sold all of them. To big collectors. For big money. I had the gift now, you see. At last I was good.”

“That’s quite a story. What did you do then?”

“Oh, I took my money and learned again how to read and write. Also, I took English lessons. I never could learn English properly before, but, in the state I was in, English was easy. Bit by bit, some of my old memories came back. Most of my personality is gone forever. No great loss. I was never happy.”

She thought this over. She felt glad she had come to
Praha. Here of all places she’d somehow found someone who was truly her kind of guy.

“Let’s go back to the party now.”

“No, I can’t bear to go back. My studio is just up this street.” Emil shrugged. “He’s a nice man, Paul, he means well. Some of his friends are all right. But they shouldn’t admire people like me. I made a few good pots, but I’m not Paul’s case study in the liberation of the holy fire. I’m a desperate man who destroyed himself for the sake of mud. Paul’s people should admit this to themselves. I’m a monstrous fool. They should stop romanticizing posthuman extremities.”

“You can’t go home and brood, Emil. You said you’d show me the city.”

“Did I tell you that?” said Emil politely. “I’m very sorry, my dear. You see, if I promise something early in the morning, then I can almost always fulfill it. But if it’s late at night … well, it’s something to do with my biorhythms. I grow forgetful.”

“Well, then, at least show me your studio. Since we’re so near.”

Emil locked eyes with her. A very knowing look. “You’re welcome to see where I live,” he said, meaning nothing of the kind. “If you feel you must.”

The building was dark and impossibly old. Emil’s studio was on the second floor, up a creaking set of stairs. He unlocked the door with a metal pocket key. The floors were uneven wooden boards and the walls were lined in ancient flowered paper.

Most of the floor space was taken up with tall wooden racks of earthenware. There were two big mud-stained sinks, one of them dripping steadily. A white kiln, and stained pegboards hung with tools of wire and wood. A potter’s wheel, a crowded worktable. Dusty sacks of glazing compound. A primitive kitchen full of handmade crockery in finger-grimed white cupboards. Old windows warped with damp, with lovely flowerpots sprouting the
skeletal remains of houseplants. Crumpled sheets of canvas and paper everywhere. Sponges. Gloves. The sharp smell of clay. No shower, no toilet; the bath was down the hall. A sagging wooden bed with grime-smeared sheets.

“At least you have electricity. But no computer of any kind? No netlink? No screens?”

“I once had a notebook here,” Emil said. “A very clever machine. My notebook had my schedules written in it, addresses, numbers, appointments. Many helpful hints for living from my former self. One morning I woke up with a bad headache. The notebook began to tell me what to do that day. So, I opened that window there”—he pointed—“and I dropped that machine onto the street. Now my life is simpler.”

“Emil, why are you so sad? These pots are beautiful. You took a medically irrevocable step. So what? A lot of people have bad luck with their upgrades. There’s nothing to be gained by fussing about that, once it happens. You just have to find a way to live on the far side of that event.”

“If you must know,” Emil grumbled. “Look at this.” He put an urn into her hands. It was squat and round with a glaze in ocher, cream white, and jet black. The pattern was crazily energetic, like a chessboard struck by lightning, and yet there was enormous clarity and stillness to the piece. It was dense and heavy and sleek, like a fossil egg for some timeless state of mind.

“My latest work,” he said bitterly.

“But Emil, this thing is wonderful. It’s so beautiful I wish I could be buried in it.”

He took the urn off her hands and shelved it. “Now look at this. A catalog of all my works since the change.” He sighed. “How I wish I’d had the good sense to burn this stupid catalog.… ”

Maya sat on Emil’s workstool and leafed through the album. Print after print of Emil’s ceramics, lit and recorded with loving care. “Who took these photographs?”

“Some woman. Two or three different women, I think … I’ve forgotten their names. Look at page seventy-four.”

“Oh, I see. This one is very like your latest work. It’s part of a series?”

“It’s not
very like
, it’s
identical
. But that piece was
spontaneous
. It came to me in a moment’s inspiration. You see what that means? I’ve begun to repeat myself. I’ve run dry. I have hit my creative limits. My so-called creative freedom is only a cheap fraud.”

“You’ve created the same pot twice?”

“Exactly! Exactly! Can you imagine the horror? When I saw that photograph—it was a knife in my heart.” He collapsed on the bed and put his head in his hands.

“I can see that you regard this as something very dreadful.”

Emil flinched and said nothing.

“You know, a lot of ceramics people create work with molds. They make hundreds of identical copies of a work. Why is this so much worse than that?”

Emil opened his eyes, hurt and bitter. “You’ve been discussing my case with Paul!”

“No, no, I haven’t! But … You know, I take photographs. There’s no such thing as an original digital photograph. Digital photography has always been an art without originals.”

“I’m not a camera. I’m a human being.”

“Well, then that must be the flaw in your thinking, Emil. Instead of torturing yourself about originality, maybe you’d be happier if you just accepted the fact that you’re posthuman. I mean, people don’t remain human nowadays, do they? Everyone has to come to terms with that sooner or later.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Emil moaned. “Don’t talk that way. If you want to talk that way, go back to the party. You’re wasting your time with me. Talk to Paul, he’ll talk like that for as long as you like.”

Emil kicked a wadded bathrobe from the edge of the bed. “I’m not posthuman. I’m just a foolish, very damaged man who had no real talent and made a very bad mistake. I can no longer remember things very well, but I know very well who I am. All the clever theories in the world make no difference to me.”

“So? It seems like your mind’s already made up. What’s your solution for this so-called crisis?”

“What else?” said Emil. “What else is there to do? I can’t spend my existence going round and round in circles. I’m going to throw myself out the window.”

“Oh dear.”

“Taking the amnesiac was only a cowardly compromise. A half measure. I’m not what I wanted to become. I never will be that person. I can’t live being anything less.”

“Well,” Maya said, “of course I’m not one to talk against suicide. Suicide is very proper, it’s always a perfectly honorable option. But …”

Emil put his hands over his ears.

Maya sat next to him on the bed, and sighed. “Emil, it’s silly to die. You have such beautiful hands.”

He said nothing.

“What a shame that such beautiful strong hands should be turning into clay. Deep under the cold, hard earth. When you could be slipping those hands under my shirt.”

Emil sat up. His eyes gleamed. “Why do women do this to me?” he demanded at last. “Can’t you see that I’m a shattered emotional wreck? I have nothing to give to you. In the morning, I won’t even remember your name!”

“I know that you won’t,” Maya said. “Of course I realize that about you. I never met anyone quite like you before. It’s a very attractive quality. I don’t know quite why, but truly, it’s very tempting, it’s terribly hard to resist.” She kissed him. “I know that’s an awful thing to say to you. So let’s stop talking now.”

S
he woke in the middle of the night, in a strange bed in a strange city, to the soft rise and fall of another human breath. The structure of the universe had shifted again. She felt soft and sweetly wearied, deeply warmed by his sleeping presence. Having a lover was like having a second soul. She had enough spare souls for every man in the world.

I
n the morning she made them breakfast. Emil, just as he had promised, did not remember her name. He was cheerfully embarrassed about this fact. A quick bed-wrestling match knocked their affair into order. Emil ate his breakfast, grinned triumphantly, and started working. Maya, unable to bear the disorder, started cleaning the studio.

To judge by the state of his catalog, Emil had been living alone for two, maybe three months. The documentation of his work was out of order and out of date. She would have to see to putting the record straight. This was clearly the open-ended legacy of being with Emil. To judge from the varying competence of the photographs, she was the fourth in a series.

Giving the place a good cleaning job was even more revelatory. Women had blown through Emil’s studio like a series of storm fronts. Hairpins here. A single crumpled stocking there. Shoe liners. An empty lipstick. Pink feathers off some long-lost costume. Cheap sunglasses. Mismatched cooking utensils. Lubricants. Blood testers. And, of course, the photographs. The women doing the photographs had been the ones investing real effort.