Men in Space (5 page)

A Gypsy, walking in behind him, nudges Nick back into the present. The Gypsy’s heading towards a group of his own people camped around the central tables swilling beer from glass mugs. The old ones are charred and wrinkled, peg-toothed; the young ones are missing teeth too, gummy spaces between chipped enamel glistening pink and brown. Their children chase each other around tables, sit and lie on bags. Ash-grey Czech men carry bowls of
guláš
and
polévka
towards other tables, tracing an exclusion zone around the Romanies. Nick joins the queue at the cake counter, buys a crumpled
věneček
, then queues at the drinks counter for
mud-bedded
káva
and a glass of
limonáda
. He sips the
limonáda
as soon as it’s handed to him, then, realizing how thirsty he is, knocks the whole glass off in one go before setting it back down on the counter.

“You can’t do that,” the man serving says.

“Do what?”

“This isn’t where you leave your glass. You have to drink it at the tables. Those are the rules.”

“The rules have no interest … I don’t interest myself towards … For me, the rules …” This is infuriating: his Czech grammar’s not up to the exchange. Nick shrugs exaggeratedly and walks away. His glass is unretracted: that’s a victory. Behind his back the old man snarls,
American cunt …
Nick half-turns round again and thinks of going back to put him right on the point of his nationality, but decides not to: quit while you’re ahead …

There’s a space at the shelf-like counter that runs the length of the window. No chairs, you have to stand, but you’re right up against the glass and can look out on the street. Nick likes doing this: looking, wide-eyed, like a child. That’s why he likes art, why he studied it, why he applied for a job writing about it – there’s no other reason. He breaks the
věneček
; pus-like custard oozes out onto the saucer. He dunks the severed segment in his coffee, tucks it into his mouth and watches the street. Trams, cars, people, pigeons. The trams ring their bells and shave sparks that drop like cherry blossom from the wires overhead, their undercarriages jolting as they clank round the corners branching off from Anděl and disappear down streets lined with ornate but dilapidated tenements, past shops, babies in pushchairs, dogs,
babičky
. People stream by, heading to and from the metro. Nick dips his hand into his pocket, pulls out a piece of paper and reads:

“
Dear sir or madam, your help is what I’m sicking for. Because my children have been taken from me …
”

Seeking, sicking. Looking up at the window’s glass, Nick recalls his dream:
A gaping symphony … Urania, Estania
 … Sounds like a place the boats were all heading towards. Or a planet. There were those shapes around the figure on the playing card, blocks of dark matter. It vexes him that he can’t remember the exact phrase: it seemed to hold some kind of key, words that would have made it all seem clear if only he had understood them. They came from speakers, mounted like the speakers that they’re slowly taking down from every street in Prague. He can see a row of them right now, strung up beside the tramlines: must have been for warning of impending nuclear war, announcing news of increased import-export surpluses, national sporting victories … Sliding along the street towards his window, growing larger, is the twelve: his tram, goes right up to the Exhibition Park and AVU. Nick sinks the tail end of his
věneček
in coffee and leaves the automat.

He boards the second carriage and heads straight for the back. It’s the worst place to be, because his pass is out of date and the plain-clothes inspectors, when they come, move from the back of the tram to the front – but he loves riding the wake, leaning on the rail against the window watching the tracks appear from underneath as though the tram itself were ploughing them, churning them up while the box on its roof trailed cable like a spider spinning thread above: making the world by moving through it. At Strossmayerovo Náměstí he sees Mladen, a Yugoslavian ex-flatmate of his, crossing the tracks. Mladen sees him too; they wave at one another. After Mladen’s dwindled away Nick slips the paper from his pocket again and reads:

“
 … since then I have liaise with ISS, United Nations Highs Commission Refugees, International Organization for Migrations, but these bodies don’t agree to help. Therefore …
”

Výstaviště here: Nick jumps off. In front of the Exhibition Park’s tall wrought-iron gates a giant King Kong stands
frozen, fibreglass fur coated in a dustlike sheen of frost. His lips, curled back to show his fangs, seem to have stuck, as though caught by a wind change; his arms are raised, claws pointed at the small twin-seated aeroplanes suspended in a circle round his head. Nick stood on this spot in the summer with his neighbour Anton, watching kids ride these planes as they looped around the gorilla, moving up and down in a kind of elastic orbit. The planes are all still now. No kids: too cold. Poor woman. Nick walks to the edge of Stromovka and turns right, down the path that leads to the front door of AVU.

“Yes?”

He gets this every day, as soon as he steps into the tiled hallway: the old
vrátná
, creeping in her slippers and her plastic apron from her alcove to intercept him. Nick stops and turns to face her:

“I work here.” Like she doesn’t know.

She wrinkles her nose, turns and retreats towards a table on which coffee and an open magazine are sitting. Troll. Nick strides into the main lobby, where he finds most of the students lounging around tables. Some of them are smoking Spartas; some of them are breakfasting on slices of
tlačenka –
Braque-like montages of pig in which fragments of flesh, hoof, brain and tail are held together by a frame of jelly. Some of them are doing both, eating and smoking simultaneously, stubbing the Spartas on their plates. Jirka’s the first to notice him; he looks up for a second blankly from his book, then looks down again. Marek sees him next; he throws him arms out.

“
Nicku
.”

Nee-koo
: the vocative, no less. All nouns decline here, bifurcate within each case according to whether they’re animate or inanimate, bifurcate again depending on their final syllable (hard or soft), then trifurcate from there along lines of gender, m/f/n. That’s six times two, equals twelve, times
two, equals twenty-four times … Impossible to remember is what it is, all these inflections. He’s got his own name down, though. In the ablative it becomes
Nickem
– a thieves’ credo; in the dative it’s
Nickovi
, which always makes him think of the V shape of girls’ knickers. Can’t think of that now, though, not before … Marek’s holding his finger up, preparing to say something.

“ ‘Papa won’t leave you Henry!’ ”

Nick joins him; they reel off the second line in sync:

“ ‘Papa won’t leave you boy!’ ”

“
Yes!
” That’s about the extent of Marek’s English – that and other Nick Cave lyrics. He’s got a Cave obsession: he’s grown his hair down to his shoulders and dyed it black, wears white shirts beneath black jackets every day – same shirt, same jacket, judging by the way they’re always creased and ruffled. Eighteen, and the best student in Kolář’s class by miles. Kolář doesn’t seem to be here right now; neither does Dana. Nick sits down, knocks a Marlboro from the packet in his pocket and sticks it in his mouth. Marek, purring, vowels extended into chants, begs him for one. Karolina, sitting next to him, hesitantly follows suit. Marek flips a silver lighter open, sparks all three up, then leans back and draws on his one, moulds his lips into an O and works his lower jaw up and down like a fish so that his mouth expels three perfect smoke rings. Nick and Karolina watch them float over plates and cups and break on the spine of Jirka’s book. Jirka waves the smoke off with his hand and carries on reading: a textbook on figure drawing. No chance: if he looked up, watched the way the smoke is rushing round the cover, spilling up away from it, gathering shape so it can lose it all again, he might learn something …

“Hey Nicku!” Here’s Gábina, carrying her portfolio round the corner from the main hall. Tights, grey skirt, red headband. She was wearing the headband when they first met: the height of summer, August or July, a retrospective of
situationism at the Mánes Gallery – or outside it, rather, as you couldn’t get near the door for all the crowds. Staropramen, who were sponsoring the show, had dispatched from their brewery not half a mile away a tanker truck of beer which was standing ruminating, head down, in the middle of the street outside the gallery while servers filled glass after glass from faucets dotted round its underbelly and handed these out, free, to anyone who wanted them – hence the crowds. The whole area had come to a standstill: pyramids of foam-capped glasses rose above the cobblestones, seven or eight feet tall; people stumbled, danced and swayed around these. On the gallery’s roof a jazz band was playing. After they’d done two or three numbers a helicopter appeared from over Smíchov and hovered low above them; the band, for their part, carried on, unfazed. A rope was lowered from the helicopter’s side; the bassist clipped this to his chair and, still holding his instrument, was lifted up and flown dangling away towards the castle: a pre-planned stunt. It was while he fiddled with his harness prior to lift-off and the chopper hovered, wind from its propellers toppling the pyramids and whipping up a storm of dust and broken glass and beer, that Gábina was blown into Nick.

“
Providence!
” he shouted to her.

“
What?
” The noise was deafening.

“
Providence! Fate!
”

“
Coincidence!
” she shouted back. She took him to another art show that same afternoon, one in her dad’s gallery, the Prague House of Photography. Gábina took Nick to lots of shows that summer, introducing him to everyone as an art critic.
Nick’s only twenty-two, and he’s with Art in Europe!
she’d say. Not quite yet, he tried to tell them – but the label stuck, and he was asked to write the odd piece here and there reviewing such and such a show. He found the Czechs really like it if you call something
postmodern
, so he called everything he wrote about postmodern:
These postmodern
landscape paintings … This postmodern portraitist …
In early autumn, Gábina landed him the job he’s about to clock back onto right now, Dana having lumbered in and clapped her hands, all stern and Rosa Klebs-like …

Nick trudges with the students into Kolář’s studio and takes his jacket off. A blow-heater’s humming at the base of a small podium. Easels and chairs are shuffled into position; Stanley knives zip through large rolls of paper; tape is peeled and cut. Jirka’s already drawing a grid across his paper, lining his space up, netting it. The tiling makes a grid across the floor. Nick pictures again the cross-wires in the skylight above his bed, the pigeons spread across coordinate points behind it. He pictures cages, box junctions and the starter grids of racing tracks as he removes the rest of his clothes, steps naked onto the podium and, bathed by the blow-heater’s stream of hot air, strikes up his usual posture: left leg slightly forwards, slightly bent, both hands on hips.

* * * * *

Yes, Ivan … yes, I’m …
Klárá, writhing, hands pushing back leaves, grabbing at them, snapping them and grinding them together as her hips shudder upwards … the one bare thigh where the tights have come half off all pink and goose-pimpled from cold and from excitement … then her whole torso arching like a gymnast’s, rising to a final jolt as the palms open to release a trickle of brown flakes, all skein and membrane run together, flowing back from her towards the ground as
yes I’m coming now, don’t …
This is Ivan Maňásek’s abiding memory of the revolution.

There are others, of course. He remembers seeing the FILMU students spilling out from their faculty building above the Café Slavia and climbing stepladders, megaphones in hand, to direct people up Národní Třída. He remembers taxi drivers, wirelesses tuned constantly to Radio Stalin,
refusing to take payment as they ferried him first to Havel’s apartment on Rašínovo Nábreží, and then – clasping the statement the O.F. movement had entrusted to him to deliver to the Soviet Embassy – to his mother’s so that she could check the Russian grammar in it … and finally, clasping the alarm clock he’d swiped from her kitchen (Havel had insisted the statement arrive at the same time, to the minute, as the one Eliška Šumová was carrying to the Americans), edging through the crowd of people holding candles as they flowed around the car towards the Lennon Wall, on up to Hradčany. He remembers being arrested the moment he left the embassy and held for two days before – without explanation – being suddenly released to find the crowds were everywhere, filling all of Letná with their banners as he made his way down to Václavské Náměstí, where Havel – now president in all but name – was installed on a balcony, his speeches drowned out by cheers and jingling keys, the whole square a mass of flags, bandannas, people dancing, crying, hugging one another, waiters running out of bars and restaurants to hand out cakes, sausages, hot wine …

But his strongest memory comes from just after all this. In the square, Milan Hájek pressed some mushrooms into his hand before disappearing back into the crowd; a few moments later he bumped into Klárá, and they rode up to the park at Šárka, eating Hájek’s mushrooms in the taxi. They came on strong and fast. As the two of them sat in the woods, in silence, facing one another a metre or so apart, the middle finger of Ivan’s right hand slightly twitched, as though coming into unexpected contact with some object. There was nothing solid there, but when Ivan pressed the finger gently forwards he felt an almost tangible pocket of energy forming around it, velveteen and warm. The shape and texture were unmistakable: these were labia. He slid his finger a little further in and felt a clitoris, which he started to stroke rhythmically. Almost instantly – and this was
really
weird – Klárá started moaning,
rubbing her hands over her thighs and slipping her tights down. Ivan undid his belt and moved towards her – but she stopped him, told him that it was precisely his
not
touching her that was getting her off, and to please just carry right on stroking this displaced, disembodied pussy. In his state, it made sense to play along; he found not only that Klárá’s body would respond to the variation in his strokes despite the fact that her eyes were closed, opening only in brief snatches to look straight up at the sky, but also that her pleasure was infecting him. It was as though an invisible third person, some nymph drawn halfway into existence by the day’s events, were transferring energy between them. Their orgasms, like Havel’s statements, arrived simultaneously. His was without doubt the best of his whole life. It was the best
feeling
of his whole life. Even before his spasms had died down, he knew that
that
was what he had been fighting for all this time: not civic participation, freedom of expression or the right to make bad abstract films and paintings, but this feeling, this moment, this limitless and overwhelming potency.