Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

“I’ve just phoned Nick,” he tells her, sniffing the air, hungry. “Nick who lived next door. I’ve got to go out later to meet him.”

“Has he …”

“He told me he’s corrected your UNRC letter and he’ll give it to me.”

“UNHCR. Tell him to come here. I’ll make more meatballs for him.”

“No, that doesn’t work. I’ve got to meet him and his flatmate. This artist. Ilievski wants me to ask him for something. But he’ll bring the corrected letter to the party where we’re meeting and give it to me.” He puts his arms around her from behind and kisses her neck. “Can I do something to help? I could clear the table if …”

“No!” That was too aggressive — but he was moving towards the other room already: he’d have messed the letters up. She’s got them arranged chronologically, clockwise from the first one she wrote one week after the kidnap, through to the first draft of this latest. She softens her tone and tells him: “No. No, it’s fine. Thank you, Anton.”

He stands facing her for a second, then turns and goes back into the main room. Plates. She reaches two down from the cupboard. Two, not four. And two knives and two forks. It’s been nine months now: the same time it took each of them to grow inside her. The sheer arrogance of it: the flower seller who’d seen the snatch outside the school told them that the Policie , in uniform, had led the children by the hands into a marked car. And then the spinelessness: Members of Parliament, ministers who paraded their past membership of O.F. as though this made them a priori diligent, unswayable, fearless, to a man cold-shouldered her as soon as they got word from higher up. The sight of Havel on TV, righteous, triumphant, trumpeting the ancien régime ’s demise, makes her want to … And Anton’s boss, Ilievski: so well meaning but just not getting it. We’ll have them kidnapped back , he said, and smuggled across the frontier — as though they were goods, chattel, just like currency or stolen cars or artwork or whatever else he dealt in; as though being snatched away by strangers one time wasn’t traumatic enough. Besides, she’d read a book once in which a child hides in a sack of cauliflowers and a soldier sticks his bayonet inside — and misses, but still … Car seats, Helena, not vegetables , Anton told her when she mentioned this to him, or maybe even on an aeroplane with false papers: Ilievski can easily arrange … and she let him know by looking at him in a certain way that this proposal was never to be mooted again.

The letter, then: the thirty-second she’ll have sent … And then there are the Bulgarian elections coming up: if the Communists were to lose … She turns the meatballs again, shakes the chips. Five minutes. She sweeps an onion scalp onto the cutting board and throws it into the bin. She really doesn’t want to cry. As though the onion … Glasses. Pepper, salt. Wait till the water’s gone back in. She walks back over to the window, opens it some more and sticks her head out. The night air is sharp and cold. She tries to push her sadness out of her, expel it visibly as breath, a small cloud forming high up in the courtyard. She looks again at the windows on the far side. Behind one of them a girl is bouncing on a bed. A woman sticks her head into the room and says something to the girl. The girl runs out of the room and the woman switches off the light.

* * * * *

Jean-Luc’s flat, like the one belonging to the Czech guy who Nick lives with, is on the top floor. It must be for the natural light, Heidi thinks: probably got skylights too. She wishes she could live in one of those skylit pads and fill it with Czech people — Bohemians , not her students — and invite the other English teachers round so they could see how she was Bohemian too, and not just an English teacher like all of them. And then she’d kick them out, the English teachers, and never have anything to do with them again — which she didn’t mean to in the first place, and swore somewhere over maybe Luxemburg or Belgium ( Colloquial Czech lying open on her lap as she tried to memorize a phrase that translated as “While it is true that, of a morning, I have little appetite, nonetheless I do not breakfast eagerly, so for me this poses no great problem”, and wondering how you slip that information into casual banter) to eschew all contact with fellow US graduates and meet only Czech people — but, you know …

Nick explained to her earlier today: Jean-Luc’s bell doesn’t work, and so you have to call from this phone cabin on the end of V.P. Čkalova — a cabin that, like most in Prague, doesn’t work either, i.e. it takes your money and then cuts you off as soon as you connect. But don’t worry, Nick told her, because Jean-Luc is intimately acquainted with the disconnecting sound that this particular cabin makes as opposed to the disconnecting sounds of other malfunctioning telephones, so will know there’s someone just around the corner trying to get in: she should just trot over to the front door as soon as she’s made the call. Like, right. She’s done this three fucking times already, and the fucking door has remained firmly fucking closed. And so she’s standing out here in the cold cursing this Nick and this Jean-Luc and that Alexander Graham Bell and V.P. Čkalova too, whoever the fuck he was …

Now a young guy’s appearing from around the corner carrying a crate of beer towards the door. So Heidi perks up and addresses him in Czech, and he responds by asking her if she’s trying to get up to Jean-Luc’s — a question she understands, and replies yes to. He says he has a key and opens up the door, then jams open the lock with a match stick so no one else will have to go through what she just has, he explains — which she also sort of understands, though more from the context than the language. But all the same, she’s getting quite excited, hardly ever having spoken Czech this much before and wondering if she might even be able to get the breakfast line in somehow when this guy switches to English and asks her, in an American accent which is totally native, how she knows Jean-Luc. Fucking typical.

It turns out this guy is Roger, whom she’s heard about from Nick and his real Yugoslavian friend Mladen. He tells her he’s heard about her too, from ditto sources. As they turn the banister into the third flight he tells her he knows her father makes the glue that weapons manufacturers use to stick guidance cameras onto the main body of long-range missiles, which really doesn’t make her happy, and in fact she wishes she’d never let that slip to Nick in the first place, and wonders why he’s so damn fascinated by it. Roger’s a West Coaster and, she being from Vermont, Heidi assumes that the old US intercoastal enmity will make itself felt before they reach the top flight — but he turns out to be quite gracious, complimenting her on her Czech which is no great humble-pie fest on his part since his is ten times better but still — and he gives her to understand without actually saying as much that don’t worry, he’s not getting on her case politically or anything about the smart-bomb glue, his father worked at Lockheed for ten years. By the fifth banister bend he’s asked her if she’ll let him film her talking about whatever she wants, because he’s collecting short episodes of people talking about themselves, wants to create a picture of what’s generally going down here — and at this point he uses words like “barometer” and “epoch” and “Zeitgeisty”, which she finds a little grandiose but lets slide. He says she wouldn’t even have to mention the glue on camera, although it would be nice if she did but, really, anything will do, he finds her “visually fascinating” — which he says in a way that implies she’s pretty-photogenic rather than, like, Elephant-Man-photogenic. And so by the time they swing into the final stretch and Roger kicks open Jean-Luc’s door she’s on an up.