Men in Space (8 page)
Authors: Tom McCarthy
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Literary, #Post-Communism - Europe; Eastern, #Art Thefts
The officer from Interpol informed us that this painting had been stolen recently, and that it was highly probable that it was headed west – and, moreover, highly possible that it would pass through Prague. He had called Novotný, Rosický and myself into the office because we were engaged in monitoring known Bulgarian criminals such as Subject and Associates. He urged us to increase our scrutiny of these criminals and their networks over the following days and weeks, and informed us that resources would be made available for us to do so with immediate effect.
While I considered which new surveillance equipment to install in view of this directive, where to install it, and how many auxiliary people I would need to co-opt to work with me to do so, I continued examining the reproduction of the painting. Although, being old, it was certainly not intended to represent such things, what its action (if one can apply that term to such a static scene) most suggested to my mind was the transmission and reception of signals. The blocks to which the small men tended took on the character, even more strongly than they had on my first viewing of the image, of transmitters; the rough silver of the sky suggested a transmission medium, the bright gold around the floating figure’s head a zone of reception; the text, perhaps, depicted
the transmissions’ content – content which was, as so often in our field of work, encrypted. The mountains were dotted with angular objects which protruded from them: these, to my mind, suggested aerials or antennae. This made sense: hills, mountains, outcroppings of rock and other such bodies adversely affect a signal, causing multi-path interference. Aerials, such as depicted (so it seemed to me) by the angular objects, would help rectify this problem, aiding the passage of messages from the boxes set in the blue surface upwards to the floating figure, or perhaps vice versa, in the contrary direction. I am aware that my interpretation was highly subjective, and doubtless coloured by the surveillance considerations I was simultaneously entertaining, but this is how the painting presented itself to my mind, and I trust I am not misguided in deeming this fact worthy of inclusion in these notes.
My deliberations were interrupted by Novotný, who asked the officer from Interpol why this particular artwork was considered of such importance as to have three departments of the Prague Central Criminal Police assigned to its recovery. There were, after all, he argued, valuable artworks passing through Prague every week of the year; his office, he continued, was full of files on these, or at least had been until recently, when the bulk of his files had been moved to another office which he had not yet been allowed to occupy. The officer from Interpol replied that it was beyond Novotný’s, Rosický’s or my remit to be informed of the reason, or reasons, for the value placed on the painting, just as it was beyond our remit to know the nature of the bodies for whom it held such value. Some information is to be shared with the likes of us, some not: we can only expect to be told so much. The meeting ended at 11:07 [eleven zero seven], after which …
* * * * *
The presence of the subterranean practice room on Ječná is announced by these words, scrawled in chalk on the building’s outside wall:
Roger! This is the practice room
. Below them, an arrow points down uneven stone steps. Lying at the bottom of the staircase, moulding and rotting, the strings, plate and soundboard of a disembowelled piano hint at the musical enterprise to which the basement has been consecrated. The practice room itself is shaped like a wine cellar: a stone ceiling that curves down into walls which are offset with alcoves that house instruments, leads, amplifiers, wah-wahs …
Right now, these very objects should be stacked up in the middle of the room ready for carrying up the staircase, but somehow it’s just not happening. Roger Baltham has set up a small projector which is throwing images up onto the flat section of wall that’s furthest from the door, behind the drum kit. The drum kit is intercepting the bottom of the images before they reach the wall, but this isn’t a problem as the effect of these images distorting around curved metal and taut hide seems to please the assembled company, who purr and chuckle as they watch. A joint is being passed round. The Velvet Underground’s ‘Stephanie Says’ is playing on Radio Jedná. Roger’s standing behind the projector, the index finger of his left hand laced round the thin strip of celluloid so as better to facilitate its passage from the projector’s lower spools into the upper mechanism’s slit. From time to time, his right hand takes the joint, feeds it up to his lips and passes it on while he exhales the smoke into the cylinder of light in front of him, watching it uncoil and disappear …
The images show the moon landing – the first one, 1969. Or rather, they show a television screen on which the landing is being shown. Roger found the film among old boxes full of cast-off clothes in the attic of his parents’ house in Palo Alto. He plays a cameo role in it himself, crawling nappy-clad towards the screen and touching it before being whisked away by adult arms. At this precise moment Armstrong, or
perhaps Aldrin, is bouncing on the surface of the moon, and Roger’s older sister Laura is copying him on the surface of the coffee table, oblivious to the hands that appear from the edge of the shot to wave her aside. The company assembled in the practice room all laugh. Armstrong or Aldrin bounces again. The camera swings round to show a hair-bunned aunt performing Monroe pouts at it, then zooms in on her breasts. The assembled company laugh some more: they’re in a laughing mood.
The company are, in order of appearance on the CD jacket: Tomáš Stein (bass, lyrics), Kristina Limová (vocals), Jiří Vacek (guitar) and Jakub (“Kuba”) Masák (drums). When the reel they’re now watching was shot, Roger’s friend Nick was two or three days old, but none of these people had been born. Not one of them had yet been conceived – not quite. After the joint has passed him for the third time, Roger starts wondering if their parents were still virgins when the landing module made its tentative descent on the moon’s surface. A serendipitous apprehension of synchronicity starts forming in his mind: if, as is entirely possible, their parents-to-be were meeting for the first time at that very moment, exchanging their first shy words, or for the second time, going out on a proper date, or even – and this too is possible – indulging in their first moments of prenuptial sexual congress
at that very moment
, then these acts are theoretically in shot right now, contained within the sphere of the earth which is just coming up on screen, the camera having abandoned the aunt’s cleavage to swing back towards the television set. Providing that Europe happens to be facing up towards the moon, of course, and not America, Australia or China. He can’t quite discern a land mass. If Europe’s in view, though, then that makes their watching these events right now, here in the practice room … which makes this afternoon’s experience – hang on … no,
pop!
it’s gone, sequences of logic uncoiling with the smoke in the
light’s column, losing shape, their verbal bridges replaced by the song’s lyrics:
She’s not afraid to die
People all call her Alaska
Between worlds so the people ask her
It’s all in her eyes …
On the Baltham family’s television screen, Armstrong or Aldrin stands on the moon’s surface with the US flag. Kuba points, red-eyed:
“Look! It’s an American flag!”
“What did you expect it to be?” Jiří turns his head towards him, red-eyed too. Oh boy. “A Czech one?”
“I always thought the flag said
MTV
.”
The company all hoot and throw cushions at Kuba. He uses these to build himself a backrest, then, reclining into this, picks up a drum machine that’s lying on the floor beside him, rests it across his knees and switches it on. A syncopated high-hat beat comes from it. As the astronaut launches off once more into long, floating strides, Kuba turns a knob to slow the beat right down; each time he lands, Kuba speeds the beat up again, which makes the company laugh still more. The song’s chorus comes round and they all join in, surprisingly out of tune for musicians, it seems to Roger, wailing:
It’s so cold in Alaska
It’s so cold in Alaska …
It’s not hot in Prague. Two hours ago he was out filming rows of cars around Palmovka, then an old shipyard he’d noticed earlier beside the bridge: might want to use it in some montage … His fingers couldn’t grasp the camera properly after a while. Get gloves tomorrow. And new film,
soon. He’ll wait till he goes back to Poland for that: great stock there, really cheap. He must have shot all around Central Europe now: Warsaw, Tallinn, Budapest … showed a cut-and-paste film at a festival in Vilnius … in a Romanian village he got peasants to act out
Beverly Hills 90210
: an entire episode, reading the dialogue which he’d transcribed from video before leaving San Francisco, then paid a professor at the Bucharest Film School to translate, tractors and pig troughs standing in for sports cars and swimming pools … Ostploitation: a new genre, one that he’s invented.
Baltham: Ostploitation. Balthamesque …
Coming out here’s been good for Roger: helped him grow creatively, expand … In January there’s Berlin’s festival of avant-garde film – must try to get on the bill there … Tonight, a Factory-style party at this French guy’s. He’ll show the spliced found-footage Fifties-housewife-with-lions film, this moon one, plus maybe an old porno flick as well – a sure-fire crowd pleaser … In any case, the band will be playing in front of the screen (what’ll they use for a screen? Perhaps this Jean-Luc has a big white wall) and everybody will be drunk …
The moon reel finishes and the loose end of the film starts flapping against the edge of the projector. Kuba adjusts the drum machine’s rhythm to coincide with its clicks. Roger switches the projector off, unloads the film, selects another reel to show. He’s dug a can out from the pile when brisk footsteps on the staircase announce the arrival of Honza Pokorný, manager of The Martyrdom of St Sebastian and owner of one behemoth of a blue truck in which the band and their equipment are to be transported to Hradčany.
“What the fuck?” says Honza, switching the light on and waving away the smoke in front of him. “I told this painter guy we’d be there half an hour ago. Where’s the stuff?”
“Later, Honza, later,” several voices call out soothingly.
“No,” he snaps. “We have to do it now. I’m parked two streets away and I’m going to drive over here right now.
By the time I get here I want to see every amp and guitar and whatever on the street outside and ready to be loaded. OK?”
“Fine,” they tell him. Honza turns and leaves the practice room. They wait until his footsteps die away, then start giggling. Kuba switches the light off. Roger switches the projector back on and threads the new reel through its spools.
* * * * *
Joost van Straten
c/o Martin Blažek
Galleria MXM
Nebovidská 7
Praha 1
16th December 1992
My Dear Han
,
I have an awful hangover. People in Prague drink non-stop, perhaps obeying some deep-rooted need to compensate for their country’s landlocked status. Bars open at five in the morning so the lumpenproletariat can get properly pissed up before they start operating cranes or whatever it is they do. The art crowd start later and drink wine, not beer, and vodka, not this diabolical drink called
slivovice
you see builders knocking back at kiosks – but the end result’s the same. All roads to Rome
.
The art crowd are running the country. When Havel came to power he filled parliament with his friends. I went to a gig the other night, with Martin, at the invitation of the Minister of Culture – not the opera, you understand, but some club in a former nuclear shelter which the Minister, I found out later, runs. I’d met him earlier the
same day, at the Castle. You go in past all these soldiers wearing brightly coloured uniforms and marching around ceremonially, like they do
chez nous
in Holland – only it turns out that these uniforms and marching patterns are the consequence of Havel deciding that the old outfits and routines were boring and commissioning a choreographer chum to devise new ones. After two thousand years, Plato’s philosopher king becomes a reality – and the first thing he does is get some fag to spruce up his goons and make them march around more aesthetically. Sometimes I despair of our profession
.
I certainly despaired of it in Budapest. The painters there are stuck in socialist realism mode. Here in Prague it’s the other way round: they worship postmodernism without really understanding it. Most of Martin’s stable at MXM slavishly copy Andy Warhol circa nineteen sixty-eight. Martin wants me to include half of them in the Eastern European show: I have to feign excitement as I flip through portfolio after portfolio of tawdry plastic haut-kitsch. I’ll take none of his artists – though I’ll have to wait until I’m not staying at his place before I tell him this. I’ll take Brázda, who’s represented by his half-American niece, and another artist I’d never come across before named Ivan Maňásek
.
I met Maňásek yesterday. Martin despises him and did everything he could to try to talk me out of looking at his work, but I invited him round all the same. He’s in his middling thirties but seems older, doubtless due to the degenerate life he leads. He stumbled into the gallery looking like an aristocratic tramp: bearded, his hair all dishevelled, but wearing a deep-blue blazer. Martin grudgingly introduced us. I noticed that he wasn’t carrying a portfolio, and commented on this. “Oh no,” he said, “if you would deign” (we were speaking English; I promise you he actually used this word
, deign
) “to come to my
atelier, I’m sure we can accommodate your desire to assess my work.”
Accommodate
. Those that do speak English here – or those of Maňásek’s generation that do – speak it very formally, their grammar perfectly correct but utterly awkward. I’d love to see the textbook they all used
.
So we went round to his studio. Wandering there through a park, we bumped into two young ladies with whom Maňásek was apparently acquainted. Maňásek suggested they accompany us to his place, winking to me, evidently unaware of which side of the street I do my shopping on. He made us stop off to buy several bottles of vodka on the way – borrowing, in the most caddish fashion, money from the girls to do so
.
He lives on the top floor of a glorious but decrepit apartment block. Pays peanuts for rent. That won’t last long. The point is, though, that his work was quite intriguing. He paints and makes collages by assembling objects that have the misfortune to cross his path, gluing these to canvases. He does this without any apparent programme, doctrine, logic of assembly or whatever you might call it in mind – yet they look rather good. There’s something fundamentally
honest
about them. He’ll find a tie lying on the floor, pick it up and paste it on so it half covers a photograph of a family picnic, then paint round a plastic toy that’s stuck to it, then reproduce the outline of the toy elsewhere, and so on. An innate aesthetic sense prevents the experiment from becoming a mere hotchpotch of marks and interventions. He assembled, glued and painted even as we talked – well, not at first: etiquette demanded that we immediately fall upon the vodka. We must have polished off the first bottle within ten minutes. When I admitted to feeling the effects, Maňásek proposed that I should snort some speed and, true to his word, lifted a cigar box from a mirror lying on his coffee table to reveal a line of white flakes marshalled into formation by a razor blade that now was resting
,
sergeant-major-like, in front of them. I vigorously declined his offer, and expressed a preference for coffee
.
So he disappeared into his kitchen to make some, dragging giggler number one with him and leaving me alone with giggler number two. Did she speak English? I enquired
. Ne
, she demurred. German? French? Spanish?
Ne, ne, ne: Český
. Right. There’s only so much polite smiling one can do – especially when one’s already feeling nauseous from drink. After five minutes I could hear the water boiling. After ten minutes it was still boiling. No other sound was coming from the kitchen. I went through to find out what the delay was – and found giggler number one leaning back against the cooker, quite oblivious to the state of the water, while Maňásek knelt before her with his head shoved up her skirt. Seeing me, she shrieked and pushed him away, but Maňásek, ejected from his tent, just grinned up at me and declared: “An aperitif!”
We drank the coffee – accompanied by more vodka of course (“to facilitate its peregrination through our bodies”) – and, between sticking more objects to his canvas, he showed me his other paintings. Very good. I told him so. He wanted me to come with him to a party that a French painter was throwing, but I was already feeling so drunk I had to decline. He asked me if I liked the girl he’d left me with and I spilt the beans, told him she was delightful but entirely the wrong gender – at which point he all but insisted on taking me up to some hillside cruising spot he knew about. You’ll be reassured to learn that I scotched this plan, singing instead the praises of a brilliant Amsterdam printmaker and commercial artist, perfectly equipped, I assured him, to satisfy my every desire. I only hope you’re showing the same fidelity in my absence, surrounded as you are by all these pouting Adonises you keep hiring as assistants. I told him I’d be delighted to include him in the Stedelijk Bureau exhibition, made an appointment to visit
to discuss terms several days hence and left. I managed to refrain from vomiting until I made it back to Martin’s. Poor bastard: first I vomit on his artists, then his floor
.
I’ll be here until Christmas. Tallinn in the first week of next year. Then Cracow, Warsaw. Contact addresses as and when, but Martin’s is a safe bet for the time being. Have the catalogues for the Jim Harris exhibition gone to press yet? Deadline soon. Oh, and could you, would you pay my phone bill? I’ll recompense you in kind, or at least kindness …
Thinking of you
,
Joost xxx
* * * * *
