Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

The Roman took his demitasse, sat on a barstool two seats away, and glanced at her in the mirror behind the bar. Then he turned and looked at her directly. He looked at her legs, her bare arms, her bare feet. He judged her bustline and approved wholeheartedly. He deeply and sincerely admired the intimate contact of her hips with the barstool. It was a gaze of direct and total male sexual interest. A look that could not have cared less that her mind was a shredded mess of anguish. A warm and scratchy look that wrapped around her flesh like a Mediterranean sun.

He shot two inches of cream-colored tailored cuff and put his elbow on the bar and propped his sleek dark head on his hand. Then he smiled.

“Ciao,” she said.

“Ciao bella. ”

“You speak English?”

He shook his head mournfully and made a little moue of disappointment.

“Never mind then,” she said, and beckoned with one finger. “This is your lucky night, handsome.”

Novak found her a place in Praha. She got a job cat-sitting. There wasn’t any money in it, but the cats were lonely.

The place belonged to a former actress named Olga Jeskova. Miss Jeskova had appeared in several of Novak’s early virtualities, among other thespian efforts. She had salted her money away in Czech real estate speculation, and now, seventy years later, she was quite well-to-do. Miss Jeskova usually spent Praha’s foggy winters somewhere in the chic and sunny Sinai, doing unlikely medical spa things.

Miss Jeskova’s Praha flat was on the fifteenth floor of a seventy-story high-rise in the edge-city ring. It was a twenty-minute tube ride to the Old Town, but that was a small price to pay for the space and the luxury. The actress’s cats were two white furry Persians. The cats seemed to have been integrated in some biocybernetic fashion into the texture of the flat. The predominant note in the flat was white fur: white fur bed, white fur toilet, white fur massage lounger, white fur hassock, white fur net terminal. At night two very odd devices like walking nutcrackers came out and groomed everything with their teeth.

On April 20, Maya took her equipment and went to Emil’s flat. Emil was up and working. He answered the door in his mud-smeared apron.

“Ciao Emil,” Maya said.

“Ciao,” Emil said, and smiled guardedly.

“I’m the photographer,” she told him.

“Oh. How nice.” Emil opened his door.

There was a girl in the apartment. She had waist-length hair and a black cowboy hat and a fur-trimmed coat and slacks. She was eating a goulash. She was Nipponese. She was lovely.

“I’m the photographer,” Maya said. “I’m here to document Emil’s latest work.”

The girl nodded. “I am Hitomi.”

“Ciao Hitomi, jmenuji se Maya.”

“He is forgetful,” said Hitomi, apologetically. “We weren’t expecting. You want some goulash?”

“No thank you,” Maya said. “Hitomi, do you photograph?”

“Oh no,” said Hitomi emphatically, “I do wanderjahr from Nippon, we hate cameras.”

Maya cleared the worktable, set out a rippling sheet of chameleon photoplastic, and set up her tripod. White against white would work best for the china. Diagonal lighting to reveal the hollowed shape of cups and saucers. The pots and urns were all about shape and tactility. She had been thinking about this project every day. She had mapped it all out in her head.

She was beginning to appreciate the lovely qualities of optic fibercord. You could do almost anything with optic fibercord, tune it to any color in the spectrum, bend it into any shape, and it would glow in any brightness along any section of its length. Soft, even shadows. Or strong, sculptural shadows. The deep shadows of backlighting. Or you could kick it way up and get very contrasty.

Novak said that if you exposed for the shadows the rest would come by itself. Novak said that all mystery was in the shadows. Novak said that he had truly never mastered shadows in ninety years. Novak said a great many things and she listened as she’d never listened to anyone before. She went home at night and took notes and fed the actress’s cats and thought and dreamed photography for days and days.

“It’s good you know your job so well,” said Emil cordially. “I haven’t looked at some of these pieces in … oh, such a long time.”

“Don’t let me take you from your work, Emil.”

“Oh no my dear, it’s a pleasure.” Emil fetched equipment and moved the pots a bit and was very helpful.

She would have liked to take the raw shots back to the cats’ apartment and touch them up with her wand, but the wand was terribly addictive. Once you got down to pixel level there was no end to all that gripping and blurring and twisting and mixing.… Knowing when to stop, what to omit, was every bit as important as any postproduction craftwork. Elegance was restraint. So she printed the photos out on the spot on Novak’s borrowed scroller. Then she blew a bit of dust from the photo album and slipped the photos neatly into place.

“These are fine,” Emil said sincerely. “I’d never seen such justice done to my work. I think you should sign these.”

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“It was so good of you to come. What do I owe you?”

“No charge, Emil, it’s just apprentice work. I was glad to have the experience.”

“No one so determined should be called a mere apprentice,” said Emil gallantly. “I hope you’ll come again. Have we worked together before? It seems to me that I know you.”

“It does? You do?”

Hitomi sidled over rhythmically and slipped her slender arm over Emil’s shoulders.

“It wasn’t you,” Emil said, leafing through his album. “Your photos are much better than these others.”

“We might have met at the Tête du Noyé,” Maya suggested, unable to resist. “I go there rather often. Are you going there later? There’s a meeting soon.”

Emil looked up at Hitomi adoringly, and caught her slender hand. “Oh, no,” he said, “we’ve given up that little place.”

“[It will be good to see my old friend Klaus,]” said Novak in Czestina as they walked together down Mikulandska Street. “[Klaus used to come to my Tuesdays.]”

“ Opravdu? ” said Maya.

“[They were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”

“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”

“Oh, yes … [Good old Klaus was quite hairless in those days.… He was a microbiologist at Charles University. Klaus and I, we did a series of experimental landscapes, using photoabsorbent bacteria.… The light shone on his gel plate of inoculant. The exposure would last many days. Germs grew only where the light fed them. Those images had the quality of an organic daguerreotype. Then, over the weeks that followed, we would watch those plates slowly rot. Sometimes … quite often, really … that rot produced fantastic beauty.]”

“I’m so glad you’re coming with me to meet my friends tonight, Josef. It means so much to me, truly.”

Novak smiled briefly. “[These little émigré communities in Praha, they may love the local architecture, but they never pay proper attention to us Czechs. Perhaps if we catch the children young enough, we can teach them better habits.]”

Novak spoke lightly, but he had combed his hair, he had dressed, he had taken the trouble to wear his artificial arm. He was coming with her because she had earned a little measure of his respect.

She had come to know her teacher a little. There were veins of deceit and venality and temper in him, like the bluish veins in an old cheese. But it was not wickedness. It was stubbornness, the measure of a crabbed, perverse integrity. Josef Novak was entirely his own man. He had lived for decades, openly and flagrantly, in a way that she had dared to live only deep inside. Though he never seemed happy, and he had probably never been a happy man, he was in some deep sense entirely imperturbable. He was utterly and entirely Josef Novak. He would be Josef Novak until the day he died.