Men in Space (34 page)

Back at her desk again, Helena writes all the words down.
Agapé, sympatheia, erémia, tes, eis. Love, understanding (legacy), solitude, of the (s, fem), towards
. She writes them in her notebook, laying them out the same way as they were
in the painting, in the same positions. Semantically, the terms could be linked together in a number of ways. If the
eis
is coupled with
erémia
, then it’s
towards solitude
. Only
eis
takes the accusative, so it’d have to be
erémian
. But then if you were lax about the grammar, given that the terms weren’t linked in any sequence and so don’t really have to decline perfectly, you’d get, progressing upwards and inserting the
tes
:
Love of understanding towards solitude
. You could get away with modifying that into
Love of understanding leading to solitude
. Or, really taking liberties here:
Love must understand solitude
. Then if the
tes
were reversed, it would be
Understanding of love
. But how would
erémia
fit in?
Solitary is he who understands love
? That sounds more like some Chinese proverb. Could it simply be a form of equation:
Love is equal to understanding, which is equal to solitude
? Not really, or the
tes
and the
eis
would be redundant. How about
overcoming
: Love overcoming solitude? Could as easily be
Solitude overcoming love
. And
understanding
, then? And
legacy
? Besides,
overcoming
is
nikan
, not
eis
. And
erémia
, in the painting, was the term placed highest up – right up above the mountain, beside the ascending saint: hardly being overcome …

Helena looks up from the figures in her notebook, gazes into space. Love, understanding, solitude. Of the three, only solitude is certain: each in our separate sphere, or bloc, or oval – partitioned, alone. Anton wasn’t back last night. Didn’t phone this morning either. Maybe solitude is the truth of love, of understanding – the basis for and legacy of them: an acceptance of solitude. The saint, floating upwards, merging with his solitude, with all solitude as he drifted further from the men and their ships, the town, the sad and fallen people on the mountain’s side. The slurping student’s gone now. All of them have: the whole library’s empty save for the young man behind the issue desk and a small old woman cleaner. She’s slowly moving up and down between the rows of tables
picking up books that have been left open, unreturned, or prodding with a worn-out broom at the discarded, scrumpled pages lying around the floor like knowledge’s debris, its butt ends.

* * * * *

They don’t have much time. Han’s offered to come round to help them move their stuff out of the building, but he’s got to be at the Stedelijk Bureau by five. He’s taking all Joost’s Eastern European artworks there, which is the reason he’s got transport in the first place: he’s hired a transit van from Ouke Baas, to whom it has to be returned by six. Sasha and Nick have hired a more simple wheeled contraption: a
touw en blok
pulley-and-rope kit they’re going to use to lower their possessions to the street. The staircases in Amsterdam are too narrow to carry large objects up and down: you have to attach the pulley to the hook that dangles from your building’s roof, then thread the rope around it and winch your stuff down from the windows, like Nick saw the workmen do with the sinks and bathtubs when he rode through the canals with Han. The sinks and bathtubs were being winched up, not down – but the method is the same.

“This is Holland for you,” Sasha snorts as they carry the kit from the MacBike rental shop on Waterlooplein back to the Nieuwmarkt. “They take away the sea with polders so the moon can’t make it rise and fall, and then they raise and lower things with a dumb bicycle wheel …”

The square on Nieuwmarkt’s been transformed over the last few days. Behind the bread, cheese and raw-herring stalls of the market there’s a fairground ride: a huge suspended swinging boat inside which people are strapped and rocked, gently at first, back and forth, each movement taking them slightly further than the last, until the boat’s surging up into a vertical position and, eventually, swinging right over,
carrying its passengers through three-sixty. The
Gemeente
’s had it installed there, to mark the round-the-world ship race. They’re setting off tonight, the real ships, being towed in grand procession from the harbour in a blaze of flares, fireworks and streamers. The build-up’s been going on all week. Han’s posters, the appropriated icon with its ships, mountain-cum-tenement building and plexi-helmet-wearing saint, are everywhere: in bars, cafés and restaurants, at tram stops, glued to walls. The young people from all over who are crewing the ships are spilling out of bars and coffee shops and stumbling drunk and stoned each night around the streets, riding the fairground boat into the small hours, their screams as it creaks through its apex edging Nick into vertiginous dreams in which voices cry out as they fall away through endless space. He’s kind of looking forward to the whole event being over.

Han turns up just as Nick and Sasha are arriving back outside their building with the
touw en blok
. He backs his transit van up beside the Loosje, the café next to their house, edging as close as he can towards the bollards separating the pavement from the road. It’s a fine day, quite warm. People are sitting out on the Loosje’s terrace. As Han steps from the van, one of them complains that the vehicle’s blocking his view of the square. Han snaps something back at him, gesticulating, before shaking Nick’s hand.

“Do you want to start winching the stuff down straight away?” Nick asks him. “This is Sasha.”

“Hi. Let’s have a drink first, huh?” Han’s jumpy, unsettled: his eyes are darting around from Nick to Sasha to the building to the man who complained. Nick says to him:

“Don’t worry about that guy. You can park where you …”

“It’s not that. My workshop’s been vandalized.”

“Vandalized? When?”

“Last night,” Hans says, sitting down. “They throw everything upside down. They don’t take anything, though
– just over turned it. No graffiti, no smashing machines – just throw everything over.”

“Ransacked.” Nick sits down too. Sasha pulls a chair up from the next table.

“Sorry?” Han asks.

“Ransacked. Not vandalized. It sounds like they were looking for something.”

“Yes. Exactly my feeling. I have many things that are valuable: the computers, the printer, all the light boxes and photograph equipment. But they don’t touch these. Only throw them over to see what’s behind them.”

“Were the paintings OK?”

“They weren’t there. I removed them to my place several weeks ago. My home, I mean. The crate took up too much room about the workshop. I have them, all Joost’s paintings, here, now, in the transit van – why I can help you in the first place. You have the
touw en blok
?”

“Right here,” says Sasha, holding up the bag. It’s an old post sack tied at the top with a short rope. The way it sags down at the bottom makes it look quite sinister, as though Sasha were about to drown a litter of kittens, or dispose of a severed head. On its side, letters spell out
Eigendom PTT
.
Eigendom
sounds like it should mean
selfhood
, a mix of
Eigenheit
and
freedom
,
fiefdom
,
kingdom
or whatever, but it’s probably just the name of a town. The Loosje’s waitress turns up and they order: coffees, two Spa Roods, a genever for Han. She turns and walks away. Han says:

“I get phone calls.”

“Sorry?”

“Two. One yesterday, at Windtunnelkade; one today, at home, before I left to come here.”

“From who? Whom, I mean,” as though Han’s going to care about his grammar. Bad as Heidi.

“They don’t say.”

“What kind of calls? Obscene?”

“No, not obscene. Not anything. No conversation at all. Only to ask my name, two times. I mean they ask two times my name each time they call. Then they hang up again.”

“That’s really odd. That happened to me as well.” It’s true – not just the once, in
Art in Europe
’s office, but yesterday as well, at home, ex-home now: a foreign voice, with the same accent as the one Lucy put through to him that other day – sounded like Anton Markov but wasn’t him. A question, just to confirm his name – twice, pronouncing it
Nikola
again – then that deep, flatulent sound of someone hanging up.

“They only ask you …”

“Yes. Exactly. Just like you described.”

“Why both of us? All that connects us is we both know Joost.”

Knew. This isn’t faulty grammar on Han’s part, though. It strikes Nick that for him the calls might be extensions of the dreams he told him about when they first met – as though Joost had switched to a medium more tangible than the circuits of the sleeping mind and was now using real wires, cables and exchanges to make himself heard through the ice-window separating the living from the dead, the drowned. The waitress turns up with their drinks. The Spa Roods each have a slice of lemon resting on their surface, bubbles trapped against the translucent cells’ undersides. Nick lifts his slice out and lets the bubbles rise and pop into the air as he slips it into his mouth. He tells Han:

“And we’re both involved with the show. Maybe the calls are from someone Joost wanted to include. From Tallinn, or Warsaw, or Budapest. I’ve started the catalogue text, by the way.”

“Yes. Good. You are an artist too?” – to Sasha, this question. While Sasha answers, Nick watches the
Verkeerspolitie
hoist a clamped vehicle parked on the square’s far side – at the top of the Kloveniersburgwal, just outside the Chinese fish shop – onto the back of their truck and drive it away. A
new car rolls into the space and three men with jackets on get out and stand beside it, facing in their direction. Twenty yards to the left of these men, just by the entrance to the metro, two other men are also facing their way; one of them’s talking into a dictaphone or radio. Sasha’s explaining where they have to drive their stuff to, somewhere in the Pijp. Han throws back his genever:

“Let’s do it, then.”

Inside the bag there’s a wheel, a long, thick rope and a net. The wheel is small: probably came from a child’s bike. The tyre’s gone but, extending from four equidistant points on the wheel’s rim so that it runs across its whole diameter – twice, once on each side – a cross has been welded on, closing the wheel in. A hook rises from the cross’s uppermost point. Sasha disappears into the house with this squared circle, then, a minute later, reappears up on the roof and, lying flat on his stomach by the edge, reaches his arm out and couples the hook onto the hook already hanging from the wooden beam that juts out of the attic. Their housemates Frankie and Jessica, meanwhile, unclip the windows, glass and frame together, from the third floor’s front room. Still lying on his stomach reaching out, Sasha feeds the long rope round the wheel until one of its ends, the end that culminates in a third hook, reaches down to Nick and Han and coils up on the cobblestones beside them. Han takes hold of it, tells Nick to stand back and signals up to Sasha; Sasha throws the rope’s other end down. Han takes hold of this end too, then tugs at both to take the slack up. When the rope’s become taut he stands there for a moment holding one end in each hand, slightly and casually playing them up and down, as though he were winding an enormous cuckoo clock, or gently ringing two church bells.

The way it works is this: you need at least two people on the ground – enough people to outweigh the objects being lowered, or the objects would pull the people up instead –
plus two more in the window space, with the net. These two wrap the net around the objects before lifting it into the gap the window’s left and passing the hook through its mesh so that the people on the ground can winch it slowly down. The net holds anything: boxes, tables, stereos, computers. The objects’ own weight makes it close up on them. If the objects are heavy then the people on the ground need to step away from the plumb line, widening the angle at which the rope’s tangent joins the apex of the wheel. If it’s light, they can stand more or less directly underneath. For Sasha’s huge desk they conscript two passing sailors and stand way wide, right out in the street, the four of them all hissing as they pass the rope out to a beat that one of the sailors calls out to them. People on the terrace watch. People queuing for the swinging-boat ride watch. The men in jackets on the far side of the square watch too. So do the two men by the metro. An old man with a stooped back pauses to look for a moment, then shuffles on towards a dry-cleaners two doors down from the Loosje. After each of the net’s cargoes has been safely landed, Nick and Sasha slide them into the transit van beside Joost’s paintings, while Han jerks the pulling end of the rope, sending the hook end back up towards Frankie on the third floor. Frankie lets the rope run upwards through his palms, stopping it when the hook’s come to him; then he unhooks the net and takes it inside the room so that he and Jessica can charge it up with a new load.

It all runs smoothly until Nick takes over from Han, who’s decided he wants another genever, to “find my strength back”. Nick and Sasha have landed a cardboard box of books which Sasha’s sliding into the transit van. Nick jerks the rope like he saw Han do each time – then realizes, as the hook end rises, that he hasn’t let Frankie know it’s coming at him. Frankie’s still inside the room, getting the next load ready; the hook shoots up straight past the window space, gathering speed in direct proportion to the speed at which the pulling end’s
falling back down to the cobblestones. Instinctively, Nick tries to push it up again – before realizing that it’s no more possible to do this than it is to push a line of toothpaste back into its tube: the pulling end has to fall down for the simple reason that it now outweighs the hook end, whose yards of length are themselves fast becoming the pulling end as they hurtle up towards the wheel and shuttle round it then down again, the hook shooting up with them, right to the very top, where it’ll run around the wheel and …