Men in Space (14 page)

Roger nods yes, setting the camcorder down. Kristina passes the glasses back to Heidi, who slips them on again, beaming from ear to ear.

* * * * *

“You know Frieda Kahlo?” Klárá shouts.

“Who?”

“Frieda Kahlo. She was married to Diego Rivera.”

“The Mexican muralist. Yeah, I know her. She always painted herself surrounded by monkeys and things like that. And with nails in her skin.”

Ivan’s gone into the kitchen to make coffee, and he’s checking the instructions on a bag of whiting powder while he waits for the water to boil. He vaguely remembers the ratio as two to two-and-a-quarter measures whiting to one measure gelatin to seven measures water. There are several empty gelatin packets lying around, but they’re not all the same brand and have different ratio recommendations, and his mathematics isn’t up to working out the median for one factor of a three-factor equation and then segueing that one back in with the other two.

“You know why she painted herself like that?” Klárá’s voice drifts from the bedroom.

“No.”

Two at a ratio of seven-to-one, plus three at three-to-one is … He could say four and a half, but it’s not very scientific. And then that’ll change depending on what Nick and Heidi bring back. They’ve been gone four hours now, which he didn’t mind at first – timing worked perfectly with Klárá’s little visit – but now he’s kind of itching to get back to it …

“She was in an accident when she was maybe eighteen or nineteen. In Mexico City, on a tram. She was riding on this tram, and the tram collided with another tram, and this steel pole skewered her. It entered her through the vagina, and passed halfway …”

“What’s that?”

“Her vagina. I said the pole entered her through the vagina. It passed halfway up her body. Can you imagine that?”

“My God!”

“But the strangest thing is that the passenger behind her was carrying a bag of gold powder.”

“Gold powder? Like the …”

“Exactly. I suppose he must have been an artist too. An artist or an artisan. And in the accident this bag split open and the gold dust showered all over Frieda Kahlo. So when the firemen found her in the wreckage, she had a steel pole stuck up her and she was covered in gold. A ready-made work of art, just like your saint. That’s why she always showed herself with things sticking through her.”

Klárá’s lying on Ivan’s bed crumbling the pieces of gold leaf Ivan blew across her body as a prelude to their lovemaking. It’s not cold in his atelier: he’s fixed his heating since she was last here. She’s lying naked on his bed watching the specks settle in the small puddles of sweat across her stomach. They go back a long way, she and Ivan – back even before AVU, right to middle school. They’ve worked together several times. When Ivan picked up this odd commission he called her in straight away, and she got him the block-wood panels, pilfering these from the crypt of St Cajetan, where she’s working renovating altars. She dug up some old study notes from the MA she did on icon paintings, and on her way down here she passed by the Malířské art-supply shop and picked up, let’s see: lamp black, French ultramarine, cobalt blue, raw umber, emerald green, plus viridian, red ochre, carmine, cadmium red, cadmium orange, raw sienna … raw sienna … raw sienna … ah yes: cadmium lemon, titanium white, then ivory black, then cobalt violet deep, and azure-manganese blue, chrome green, terra verte, madder deep, plus rose madder genuine, caput-mortum violet, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow and zinc white, makes twenty-five. She’s still missing two out, which annoys her: she used to know the range by heart. Lamp black, French ultramarine, cobalt blue …

Crouching beside the fire, she pulls the jumper down across her knees and looks at the painting Ivan’s being paid
so handsomely to copy. This is sitting in an armchair which is backed against the wall that separates the main room from the bathroom. It isn’t huge: perhaps sixty/forty-five/three, about average for icons. She’d say it’s nineteenth-century, because the borders of the wood aren’t raised. The subject shows an ascension, but not Christ’s, or for that matter anyone she recognizes straight away. The Byzantine letters that should spell out the name of the ascending figure have either been corroded away or weren’t there in the first place. There is some text: three words painted at different levels above an ocean occupying the right side of the painting’s bottom section, plus two smaller words dotted between them – but they’re in a script she’s never come across before …

To the ocean’s left is land, on which the standard topographic motifs can be found: a squat building with blackened windows at the bottom, then a mountain rising up from this, studded with bending trees – only the mountain also has some kind of very oddly formed birds flapping around on it, on ledges at its sides. The birds, if that’s what they are, seem to be keeling over backwards. She must have studied hundreds, literally hundreds of these paintings, restored twenty, thirty of the things, and she’s never seen
these
before. They’re oversize, misshapen, almost human. Another unusual detail is a group of ships in the sea to the mountain’s right. Fishing boats crop up frequently in these paintings, in particular in those of Simon and Andrew, the fishermen – but there are no nets here. The boats seem to be stationary: their sails are down, and groups of men in smaller boats are drawn up beside them, doing something to them. Are they repairing them? Klárá shuffles forwards, keeping the jumper down over her knees. The men are carrying planks towards, or from, the ships. How very bizarre.
Building
them? They’d do that on dry land, surely. The men stare straight out from the painting. So do the strange birds. The floating saint too, come to that. Axonometric: there’s no variation in their distance from the
viewer. Besides which, there’s a general lack of continuity between the figures. Rather than collaborating with one another to provide visual cohesion, they’re discontiguous, each occupying a zone of his own, each wilfully oblivious to the presence of the others. But the strangest thing of all is this: God’s represented not by a circle but by an ellipse around the saint’s head. Very, very bizarre. The coding of these icons is rock-solid: God’s
always
substituted by either a Christ figure or a perfect circle in ascensions. But an
ellipse
, a kind of oval which itself seems to retreat as though its top edge were being dragged back by some magnetic force? It’s simply, well, just
wrong
 …

Ivan walks in carrying two cups of coffee. He hands one to her and smiles; he even bends down and kisses her forehead. He’s not usually like this. She’s done favours for him plenty of times before, and all he usually does to thank her is get her drunk and climb inside her knickers. He’s climbed inside her knickers this time too, of course – but he did it with a tenderness he’s never had before, apart from one freak time when she was so massively oversensitized by hallucinogens that he didn’t even need to touch her for her to go off, so that doesn’t really count. And showering her in gold was something else! And even afterwards, when every other time he’s made no effort to disguise post-coital boredom, his need for someone else or something new to entertain him, now he’s being so kind. Kissing her forehead: what next? …

“Where on earth is this painting coming from, Ivan?” She shuffles round and turns to him.

“It’s strange, huh?”

“It’s not
right
. Look: it’s got the four standard perspectives. There’s your …”

“Four: that’s right. I remember that from Ondříček’s class.”

“He’s dead, you know.”

“I heard.”

“It’s got all four perspectives. There’s your linear one, from
the mountain’s edge up away and vanishing towards the oval zone. And then the trees all being the same size – and all the secondary figures too – is, you know, flat, axonometric. That’s the dominant one here. And the arms of the – what, disciples? bystanders? these guys here – are converging out towards the viewer. That’s its one concession to perspective. More a nod in its direction, really. And the mountain’s surface is all curved, bending up towards the holy figure. But then see here, there’s this fourth one: how the top zone bends away into a totally different dimension. This slanting ellipse. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It totally disrupts the sacred geometric scheme.”

“You mean the three-four-one …”

“Right: triangle, square, circle. An
ellipse
? What on earth was the painter thinking? Who did this?”

“Don’t know.”

Klárá leans forwards, picks the painting up and turns it over. There’s a stamped mark on the back, some modern Cyrillic figures, but no signature. She sets it down again.

“Who asked you to copy it?”

“This Bulgarian called Anton Markov. He used to live next door to Nick.”

“That’s your new English flatmate?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he an art dealer?”

“Who, Nick?”

“No, Anton.”

“No. I don’t know what he does.”

“Why does he want it copied?”

“He didn’t say.”

“That’s really weird.”

“Who do you think the saint is?” Ivan’s crouched down beside her and is stroking her hair as he asks this: miraculous …

“I was asking myself that just now. I can’t make out the letters. But it’s certainly not Christ.”

“Simon?”

“Because of the ships, right?”

“Right.”

“I was thinking that – but look: the men here aren’t fishermen. There are no nets. And they seem to be dismantling the ships.”

“Why would they do that? What’s the symbolism?”

Klárá sighs, shakes her head, sips her coffee. “Not one I’ve ever seen before. The obvious answer would be the soul leaving the body. It
is
an ascension, after all. Abandonment of the old vessel, its decay …”

“And the building? The mountain?”

“Same thing. Icons are cosmic maps. They conceive space metaphorically, as a series of levels leading into the world of the spirit. They narrate transcendence.”

“So …”

“So the building represents the
urbs
, the
polis
: civilization, society, cities. Everything that’s being left behind. Its windows are dark to represent the fact that the world’s lacking knowledge, awaiting revelation. The mountain is the passage upwards – a passage literalized by the floating upwards of the figure of the saint. The top circle round his head is – should be – pure spirit, God. Only it’s not a circle; it’s an …”

“But
is
he floating upwards?” Ivan’s peering forwards now, almost sniffing the painting. “Everything else seems to be going downwards. The trees point down. And these bird-men: they seem to be falling.”

“That could be to emphasize the saint’s ascendance.”

“Or to complement his fall. You must admit he doesn’t look too happy.”

“They never do. His look
is
unusual, though, I’ll grant you. His mouth is more widely open than you’d expect. He looks as though he were disappointed. As though there
were
no transcendence – and no pure spirit either, no God: he gets
up into the sky, and all there is is this ellipse, this void, this slanting nothingness …”

“To me he just looks neutral. Deadpan. Disconnected. Maybe he’s stoned. You want to smoke one?”

“Sure.” She sits back, sips her coffee again. Ivan starts rooting around in a box behind the tins of paint. Klárá wipes a fleck of gold leaf from her cheek, then says: “You know, strictly speaking, your copy won’t be a copy.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she shifts her weight as she turns to face him, “copying has always been part of the culture of the icon. These zographs travelled …”

“Zoo graphs?”

“Zographs: icon painters. Vitan, Nedelko, Chevinodola, the Zaharievs, and hundreds of minor ones whose names I can’t remember … They travelled around carrying little more than their tools and the
Hermeneia
, and they …”

“Carrying the what? The Ermenia?”

“The
Hermeneia
, with an
H
: the zographs’ rule book. It supposedly originated on Mount Athos, in Greece. They’d travel around, redoing already existing subjects: literally copying older paintings. So you get the same images repeating down centuries, mutating slightly with each iteration.”

“So Anton’s one’s a copy too?”

“Well, yes – but beyond that, for zographs, copies aren’t secondary pieces. They’re iterations of the same sacred event. Each time you iterate you partake of the event: belong to it, as much as the last iterator did. But …”

“Where are my cigarette papers?” asks Ivan.

She picks these off the floor beside her and throws them to him, then continues:

“But Anton’s asked you to distress the painting, right?”

“Distress it?”

“Make it look old.”

“Oh, yes. He wants an exact copy, not a new one.”

“Why would he want …” she begins, but Ivan holds up his hand to cut her off. Footsteps are coming up the final flight of stairs to the atelier: several pairs of footsteps. And there are two, three voices, one female and at least two male, speaking English. The footsteps stop and a key turns in the lock.

“That’ll be Nick now. And …” Ivan looks anxious. “You’d better dress.”

Klárá darts back into Ivan’s bedroom and pulls on her underpants and trousers just as the door opens. She hears Ivan say, in English:

“You didn’t precipitate,” and someone she assumes is Nick reply:

“The jelly was a bastard to find.”

“But you were successful notwithstanding?”
Notwithstanding
. She’d forgotten that word …

“We’ve got everything on your list. Only, two eggs broke in my pocket on the way back. My God, it’s warm in here!”

“The council sent some people round to fix the heating,” she hears Ivan tell him. There’s a clunk and wrinkle as a bag is set down on the coffee table. Klárá pulls her socks on and walks into the atelier’s main room. There are three men, all in their early twenties. One’s got short brown hair; one is tall, with wiry, darker hair; the third’s blond. The girl they’ve got with them is the same age, and wears a headband and a stripy jumper. She’s looking at Klárá in a less than friendly way. Ivan’s sifting through the shopping bags they’ve brought back with them. He pulls out a packet of gelatin and reads the instructions on the back.