Men in Space (17 page)

Dry ice is billowing across the stage now as the rocket starts to rise. Images of an old shipyard are being superimposed over this, then sketches of the icon painting’s ships. Mladen spent hours looking at the painting yesterday. The ships were being dismantled. He thought of the Adriatic off the Istrian Coast as he watched Ivan painting ripples on the blue sea. Why were those men taking the ships apart? How would they be able to get back to land if they did that? Ivan said he didn’t understand the text. Some of the stripped ship parts the men held looked like cannons, pointing up towards the bird-men on the side of the mountain, shooting at them. LIFT OFF. Beginnings – of journeys, nations, lives – are always violent, always involve death. Best characterized not by this serene moonwalk Tyrone is performing on stage now, but by the ball of fire beneath the rocket, a perpetual explosion, endlessly destructive – then the mess that’s left behind: the scorched ground, fallen scaffolding …

Mladen turns away from the stage and its screen. Behind him there’s a photo shoot going on. The model, a friend of Nick’s he’s vaguely met once or twice, wears a blue-white-and-red slip, the colours of the new Czech flag; around her neck she wears a handkerchief-like strip of the same colours, same material. She’s holding a mocked-up new Czech passport in one hand, an A4-size piece of white card in the other. Various people swarm around her, touching up her make-up, taking light readings, repositioning a leg or adjusting the way the slip is hanging, while a guy in a red baseball jacket who was also at the French guy’s party tries to shout instructions at them.

Behind these people, perched at tables, groups of American collegiate types. They’re talking politics, shouting above the music and each other. They’re discussing the splitting of Czechoslovakia that’s to take place in – what, less than one hour from now, the
reconfiguration
of Central Europe it’ll bring about. The phrase
transitional geographies
keeps coming
up: one guy keeps saying it and another jumps up each time and shouts
Fuck your transitional geographies!
East Coast, probably: Yale or Princeton. Mladen’s seen the films: woollen sweaters and striped scarves, clean young boys running after girls in pleated skirts who look like Heidi, only slightly prettier, and clutch books to their chests. Frat parties. Weird rites.

A little further down the bar is some Czech kid whose face is vaguely familiar: classical, high-cheekboned, blond locks swept across the forehead. Mladen knows that face, from a gig maybe, only then it belonged to a girl. Or to a girl
and
a – yes, that’s right, it’s David, one of those twins Roger, at that party, just before he got his eyebrow cut, said came straight off the one-hundred-crown note: the peasants. David’s standing at the bar alone, looking down into a beer, morose. Mladen walks over and nudges him. The boy looks blank, then clicks:

“Mladen, right? Friend of Kuba.”

“Yeah. You’re David. Where’s your sister?”

“We had an argument. Our parents …” He moves his two hands apart as though swimming the breaststroke …

“Separated? Got divorced?”

“That’s right. The tribunal decided we should remain with our father, which is what I’d prefer. But Jana’s refusing. She says he doesn’t respect her. She wants to live with our mother. Which means we get separated too.”

“
Yuuu!
So difficult. I’m sorry. Are you identical twins?”

“No,” says David, chuckling. “That way we couldn’t be one boy, one girl. Identical’s very unusual: perhaps one in a thousand times. We’re dizygotic: two eggs in the mother.”

Mladen buys David a beer and David perks up. He says he’s finishing school next year and is already apprenticing as a telecoms mechanic. He tells Mladen that a telephone box at Jiřího z Poděbrad is broken in such a way that you can make international phone calls for as long as you want for a single crown coin, and suggests Mladen call his family in
Yugoslavia. He tells Mladen that he likes the Dead Kennedys, the Pixies, Ministry. He must be sixteen tops. Mladen can see his sister’s face in his, identical or not.
Dizygotic
. There were eggshells littering the floor at Ivan Maňásek’s. That humans start the same way, then get smashed up the same way … There was a set of twins in Cres, back in
Materska Skola
, who’d never leave one another’s side, got distraught if apart even for a few minutes. You read of twins separated at birth and reunited decades later, who turn out to have married in the same year, had near-fatal accidents or illnesses within weeks of one another, things like that. David laughs when Mladen tells him what Roger said about him and Jana looking like the one-hundred-crown peasants. Turns out Roger wasn’t the first: David’s school friends, apparently, still call him
Stovečko
, Little Hundred …

They’re still talking when Nick shows up. He’s with a girl he introduces to them both as Karolina, from AVU. The guy in the red baseball jacket, the photo-shoot man, comes over to Nick and asks him where Ivan Maňásek is. Photo Shoot Man’s eyes are glazed and luminous. Nick tells him he doesn’t know where Ivan is. An older, taller guy, the American adman Michael who’s lent Roger all this state-of-the-art equipment he’s using to cast his images up onto the stage, joins them and whispers something into Photo Shoot Man’s ear; Photo Shoot Man pulls an envelope from the pocket of his jacket, opens it, shakes out something that looks like an aspirin and hands this to Michael. Michael pats Photo Shoot Man on the back, slides to the bar and orders, in English, some sparkling water. Back on the stage a strobe’s been switched on; the rocket and the city are ascending through the smoke and flashing light. It looks as though the stage is ascending too, and Tyrone and his harem, all being launched together with the new republic. How long to go now? Nick’s friend Karolina’s wearing a watch; Mladen asks her what the time is. Karolina tells him:

“Half-past eleven. Let’s go down to the square.”

“Sure,” Nick says. “Why not?”

Mladen and David go with them. They make their way out of the club, walk down the steps and across Švermův Most towards Staroměstské Náměstí. The square’s full of smoke just like the club was. It feels as though they’d wandered into Roger’s film, and found themselves on a huge launch pad during take-off. People are stumbling around coughing, clutching bottles of champagne or sparkling wine, shouting out to each other in Czech, in French and in Italian. Young men are lighting fireworks, hurling rockets up into the air. Some explode above the statue of Jan Hus or beside the interlocking spheres on the face of the old astronomical clock, illuminating zodiacal and terrestrial rings, sun and moon discs, figures showing death and the Apostles; others, badly launched, snake along the floor biting and spitting sparks at feet and ankles, or hurtle along at head height, leaving tracer-bullet trails. They must hit people, some of them, burn their faces; they could even take an eye out. Sirens, two or three of them, are wailing somewhere off the far side of the square: there’s a peaking-troughing one, then another that rises and falls in a single continuous movement, their sounds weaving together in the air heavy with sulphur, weft and warp. There’s a loud
bang!
nearby, and people spill back outwards as though a mine were throwing them through the air. Someone falls against him, grabs his coat.

“Mladen!”

It’s Angelika. Nick, noticing her, slips off into the crowd, pulling Karolina with him. Angelika’s got some kind of name tag hanging from her jumper. Mladen takes it in his fingers and reads it.

“Spiegelova, huh? Your last name?”

“Mirror, yeah. Is Nick with you?”

“He was just here now. He should be … 
Look out!
” He pulls her down as one more rocket wobbles past their heads.
It makes a vicious sound: thousands of fricative
phht
s pretending to be music, like when you rub a glass’s rim.

“I’ve just come from the hospital,” says Angelika, peeping up above his shoulder’s parapet again, then straightening. “The accidents were coming in: all burnt. But I had something to show Nick.” She digs her hand into the pocket of her leopard-skin coat and pulls out a small plastic bag. “It’s an ear,” she tells him, stroking back the plastic.

She’s not joking: it’s an ear. Its flesh has turned slightly yellow. Whirls of cartilage spiral down towards a pit that must once have led into a brain.

“Put it away!” he tells her.

“Wimp.” She wraps the ear up again and slips it back into her pocket.

“If I wanted to see that I could just stay at home,” he says.

“Your flat?” she asks. “What’s on TV?”

“No: Yugoslavia.”

“Oh yes. Of course. Poor you. But I have just the thing for that. Look, I took something else: a New Year’s present from the State to me.”

She slips her hand into her pocket again, slips out a bottle and holds it up for him to read.

“What’s that?” The label means nothing to him.

“Codeine. For stopping pain. It makes you … dreamy. You want some?”

He shrugs and holds his hand out. Angelika presses down on the bottle’s top, cranks the lid past the anti-child catch, screws it off. David’s ambled up to them. She peers at him.

“Who’s this?”

“David. He was at that party at Jean-Luc’s.”

Angelika puts her hand on David’s forehead, as though to feel his temperature.

“He’s so young! Does he want some as well?”

David, coy, takes a pill from the small palm she holds out to him. Angelika
tssk
s and places three in his hand.

“I’m a doctor! Will be soon, in any case. I know how many you should take.”

Mladen takes six. She doesn’t count hers out, just throws a whole pile back into her mouth.

“Water. To swallow …”

She ducks into the crowd and comes back with a bottle of white bubbles and an anxious-looking man in tow. She tilts her head back, swills, then passes the bottle on to Mladen. The man says something in Italian, then, tentatively, reaching out, in English:

“Not all …”

She sweeps his hand away. “You’ll get it back. And I’ll give you a kiss. Old Czech tradition at New Year, you understand?”

The bottle is passed on to David. It’s almost empty when it comes back round to the Italian.

“Is not my …”

“That kiss,” Angelika turns to him, lifting up her face, lips pouted out. “No tongue. I know what you people are like.”

By the time he’s faded back into the crowd it’s virtually midnight. People are looking at their watches or at the old clock, the hands marching across its astrolabe through borders of planetary hours, sidereal time and ecliptics. The crowd start counting seconds down, shouting the numbers out, a multilingual ground control:
Osm! Sedm! Šest! Cinque! Quatre! Trois! Two! One!
– and then all cheer and turn and kiss each other, circulate and kiss more people, grabbing hold of strangers amidst
bang
s and shrieks and cackles, bells booming deep and hollow, acrid smoke. Angelika, David and Mladen go and sit on the steps beneath Jan Hus, looking on in silence Time passes; people drift away. A middle-aged man lingers beside them, swaying as he waves a cocktail-stick-sized new Czech flag and shouts
Youpee! Youpee!
on and on and on,
Youpee!
Then he’s gone
without ever really going; the
Youpee
s must have slowly faded out. The square is almost empty now, but they’re still on the steps watching it: the odd drunk staggerer veering left or right, a figure hugging arches as he pukes, or chorus lines of three or four or five, arms linked, singing some song that Mladen doesn’t know, whose words he doesn’t understand, taking the odd swipe with their feet at empty bottles of fake champagne or shells of burnt-out fireworks that litter the floor like the disintegrated fuselage of something that was once beautiful, fallen back to Earth after an aborted flight.

* * * * *

 … until the arrival, shortly before midnight, of Associate Markov, whom I saw entering Maňásek’s building. This was the first time I had visually observed either Associate Markov or Maňásek. Associate Markov was a shortish, well-dressed man, Maňásek a taller man with sleek, meticulously groomed black hair with streaks of grey in it. He wore some kind of robe, which, when he stepped into an elongated, oval-shaped zone of light cast on the pavement by a nearby street lamp, I could see was red. He stepped into the street just briefly. With the aid of my directional microphone, I was able to hear him ask Associate Markov where his car was parked. Associate Markov answered that he’d parked it some 20 [twenty] metres from the house door of Lidická number 5 [five], the spaces nearer by being taken – not least by my own car and by those of the visual surveillance team whose presence I had discerned over the last few days but with whom I had refrained from making contact. That our positions determined the one Associate Markov would take, and hence the need for Maňásek to step out of his flat – a whole set of displacements – raises for me a question that has been in my mind for some time: is it in fact possible,
truly
possible, to do what we do, viz. to observe events, without
influencing them? Don’t we, to some extent, shape the very situations on which we report, and in so doing help to form the guilt or innocence of our quarries? I don’t know what importance these deliberations have, but I feel for some reason that I should record them.

The 2 [two] men disappeared inside the building. Shortly afterwards, resuming surveillance via the drop transmitters, I heard them enter Maňásek’s studio. Associate Markov asked which of the 2 [two] artworks was the original and which the copy; Maňásek informed him that he had made a tiny red mark on the side of the original so that it could be identified. Associate Markov expressed admiration at the degree of likeness Maňásek had achieved in his reproduction. Maňásek asked him whether he would be transporting the 2 [two] artworks far; Associate Markov answered that he was taking them to his apartment in Vinohrady; Maňásek told him he would lightly wrap both paintings to protect them.

Further conversation followed, but its content was obscured by crackling which I took to be the rustle of the paper with which Maňásek was covering the artworks, but which could equally have come from another source. The quality of audio I was receiving from the flat had been deteriorating for some time: radio and other signals had started breaking in more frequently, and this, coupled with the ever-increasing volume of the ringing in my ears, was putting a great strain on the operation. When Associate Markov re-emerged from the house door of Lidická number 5 [five], he carried the wrapped-up paintings to his car and drove away. The visual-surveillance team’s car pulled out shortly after him, and followed. I, for my part, radioed my own team stationed outside Associate Markov’s apartment, but was unable to establish contact with them. I then attempted to make radio contact with Headquarters, but with no more success. Reasoning that demand on the
airwaves was probably high due to it being New Year’s Eve, I decided to make my own way to Associate Markov’s, switched off the holding signal on the drop transmitters in Maňásek’s studio and drove off – a course of action that I now regret. Had I remained, I might have been able to shed light on the dark events that were to transpire at that location later that night.