Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

The Denní bar has blacked-out windows. Its ceiling is studded with luminous stars, moons and comets. A single surly waiter slinks around beneath these. At one table sits a group of young Americans Ivan sometimes sees playing on Karlův Most. They’ve got guitars propped up against their seats and coins stacked on the table top in front of them. The one with the longest hair is tearing strips of paper foil from the inside of a cigarette pack and wrapping matches up in these. After resting five or six of the mini contraptions in a row against two matchboxes, so that the matchsticks face upwards at a forty-five degree-angle, he flicks a lighter open and holds it to each wrapper in turn, moving down the row. As the foil heats up, the unstruck matches inside combust and shoot like flares or rockets to the ceiling before dropping, burnt out, onto other tables. The pyrotechnician’s friends chuckle and hide behind each other when people turn around; some of them start building their own match stick mortars. At another table Sláva Kinček sits in Vuarnet shades, although it’s so dark you can hardly see your hand. He’s got an advertising colleague with him: American, mid-forties, big white teeth. They’re talking about visuals for some campaign. Every so often Sláva calls across to Ivan as he references some image or other:

“Rauschenberg, right, Ivan? The collage guy …”

As Ivan nods or shakes his head, correcting him, Sláva turns to his colleague, jerks his thumb back towards Ivan and announces:

“Best artist of his generation. Hero of the revolution too …”

“Hero?” repeats Tyrone. “I love heroes.” He’s brought Hájek’s blond-locked messenger from Újezd with him. “There’s a party on tomorrow night,” he says, “in the atelier of this French painter called Jean-Luc. He’s a hero.”

Ivan knows about the party already. Everyone does. That band he just saw in Futurum will be playing there. They had some song about spinning around: its melody replays across his mind as he watches Tyrone’s mouth move, watches his hand resting on the blond boy’s shoulders, then looks up at the luminous stars. He lay with Klárá for a long time that day up in Šárka, watching stars hanging in the sky and trying to work out how many revolutions they’d winked down on. They argued about the colour of the sky’s darkness, whether it was black or blue — strictly speaking, pigment-wise …

The Denní Bar’s door opens and Hájek strides in. He has long, messy hair and a morose grin which reminds Ivan of his brother’s. He clocks Jan and Ivan, stops the waiter and orders a drink, then comes over to sit with them.

“Hey people.”

No apology. He doesn’t need to proffer one: he’s got the goods.

“Where have you been tonight?” asks Jan.

“Up at Pod Stalinem.”

“That’s where you’re doing your performance,” Jan tells Tyrone, in English.

“What’s that?” Tyrone is busy stroking Karel’s sleeping head, crooked on his shoulder.

“Your theatre piece. In the club under the old Stalin Monument. Where the giant metronome is now.”

“Oh yes! And you know what? Karel here’s going to be in it! Karel! Wake up!” His shoulder pushes Karel’s head away; Karel jolts awake, sees Hájek and then looks round all of them, confused. Hájek tilts his own head back; he takes in the constellations on the ceiling, then brings his face down horizontal again and announces:

“A Soviet cosmonaut is stranded in his spaceship.”

There’s a pause; Jan, Ivan and Karel look up at the ceiling.

“No, not here!” scoffs Hájek. “I mean really. This guy went up as a Soviet, on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now, no one wants to bring him down.”

“Why not?” asks Jan.

“The Russians say he’s not their problem,” Hájek explains. “He set off from the Ukraine, so they say he should go back there.”

“Fair enough,” says Jan.

“The Ukrainians don’t think so,” Hájek tells him. “They’re saying, Fuck off! This was a Soviet space project, and Soviet means Russian .”

“This is true,” Jan concurs. “What nationality is the cosmonaut?”

“That’s the thing,” says Hájek. “He’s from Latvia or somewhere. So the Ukrainians and Russians are both turning to the Latvians saying, You can foot the bill for all this . Millions of dollars, you see.”

“What are they going to pay with?” Jan asks as the waiter sets a drink in front of Hájek. “Potatoes?”

“Right!” Hájek half-bounces in his seat. “They don’t even have a space programme! And while this shit is going on, all these negotiations, this poor fucker’s stuck up there.”

“That story’s old!” Sláva sneers across the room from his table. “I heard it months ago.”

“Of course you did!” says Hájek. “He’s still up there. He’s been there for months now!”

“What’s he living on?” asks Jan.

“Supplies,” says Hájek. “They have stuff, you know, all compressed, dehydrated …”

“You got stuff?” Ivan asks him. A burnt-out flare lands on his shoulder; he brushes it to the floor. Hájek throws two small wraps onto the table.

“Three hundred apiece.”

Before the revolution he wouldn’t have charged anything: drugs were something you shared, like books and films, among people you could trust — friends, colleagues in the underground, the happy few … Those evenings at Havel’s place, at Matoušek’s, at Brázda’s — safe houses — watching some blacklisted philosophy professor talk about Merleau-Ponty through a haze of weed smoke: Hájek was their Easter bunny all year round, bouncing across rooms grinning as he handed out tabs, pills and powdered this and that, byproducts of an abandoned chemistry degree … But now it’s business. Ivan and Jan pull money from their wallets and hand it to him. Hájek stuffs the notes into his jacket, then remembers something, fumbles around inside an inner pocket and pulls out a pistol.

“Jesus!” says Jan, looking over towards the waiter, who’s facing the other way. Tyrone has gone so pale he’s almost white.

“You like it?” asks Hájek, still grinning morosely. “It’s a replica. A fake. But pretty realistic.”

“That’s a goddam piece!” Tyrone has pressed himself right back against his seat. Jan explains to him in English what Hájek’s just told them. Tyrone sighs, bows his head, laughs in a theatrical, exaggerated way, then holds his hand out towards Hájek. “Let me see it.”

Hájek hands the pistol to him. Ivan picks up his wrap and slips off to the toilet. There’s only one cubicle. He locks the door, kneels on the floor and unfolds Hájek’s paper. The dry white flakes inside it have a crystalline sheen. With his identity card he scoops some of them out onto the toilet bowl’s lid, chops them up into fine grains and shunts the grains into a line. He takes a hundred-crown note from his pocket, rolls it up and, pinching it between his thumb and second finger, hoovers the line up into his nose. It burns across his septum, sharp and pure. He tips his head back, sniffs until his lungs are full, then empties them through puckered lips in one long whistle. He dabs at the toilet bowl’s lid, slides the card between his thumb and forefinger, flattens the note and strokes the embossed faces of its earnest peasants, furrowing again the fields that lie behind them, fingering the last white grains onto his gums. Then he refolds the paper, pockets it and leaves the cubicle.

Hájek and Sláva are still arguing across the room about whether the cosmonaut’s still up in space. Tyrone is playing with the pistol. Karel’s dozing off again. As Ivan sits down, he feels a kind of elevation. He closes his eyes and for a moment it seems that he’s back in his own spaceship, his apartment, with the wooden angel floating just beneath the skylight. Would the Soviet see angels? However many months on powdered grain … The sense of elevation’s growing stronger: stars closing around him, gravity slipping away … His right hand rises from the table — and he feels, again, a tingling in his fingertips, that labial outline forming … Yes … it’s back, that sense he had in Šárka … Which means she ’s there, somewhere nearby: that disembodied nymph who briefly inhabited the space in front of Klárá back in eighty-nine. She’s back, he wants her: wants to have her now, tonight …