Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

“Jelly?”

“Sorry: jell-o ,” he says, mimicking an American accent.

“What’s that for?”

“Apparently,” Heidi says, “it has to go on underneath this stuff called Gesso.”

“You want more?” Nick asks, turning his list over. “There’s wire wool, sandpaper, carbon paper, purified water, garlic …”

“Garlic?”

“Mordant for the gold leaf,” Heidi explains again. “Weird, huh? It’s a kind of icon painting. There’s all this gold around the saint’s head. Like a massive halo.”

“And he’s using real gold leaf?”

“Not just any gold leaf,” Nick says. “It must be twenty-three and a quarter carat. He’s got that already. He’s got so much of it that he’s blowing it around the atelier for kicks. You should see the place. There’s so much stuff laid around the floor that you’d think he was making, I don’t know, a monster or a bomb or something. Or some high-tech glue …” Heidi swipes at him with open palm. Nick laughs and ducks, then goes on: “Agape, I mean agate …”

“For burnishing the gold,” Heidi’s still annotating. “We’re learning so much …”

“… suede, natural sponge, eggs — although I’m worried that these ones are too white.” Nick delves into his shopping bag and pulls a smaller paper bag out; then, cupping this in his hand, he lifts an egg from it and hands the egg to Roger. It is very white, but all eggs are like that here: the hens must be anaemic. Roger throws it up into the air six or so inches above his open palm, catches it, throws it up again …

“What does he want eggs for?”

“They’re for making tempera.” Heidi’s eyes are covered by the purple shades, but Roger can see her eyebrows moving up and down, following the egg. “That’s what makes these icon paintings kind of shiny. That and the gold.”

“… dental plaster, two ice-cube trays, bottle of vodka …”

“Vodka!”

“Maybe it has thinning qualities. Or cleaning ones. It worked on your eye.” She’s not that hazy, then, if she remembers that part. Nick folds the list and slips it back into his pocket, sits down with them and says:

“There’s more. We’ve been out for three hours already. Ivan’s obsessed. He’s been at it for a couple of days. He’s got boards of wood, and all these tins of powder, and saucepans. He’s totally into it. He’s smoking dope all day and working on this thing. Sketching it again and again and again. And doing all these diagrams. It’s like some kind of mathematics: really methodical — exactly the opposite from how he does his own art.”

Dope, huh? Actually, Roger wouldn’t mind a little weed. And Honza’s out of action for the afternoon, going to take his band ice-skating on some river out of town, and Barbara’s visiting her parents …

“Are you going there now?”

“Oh yes,” Nick says. “We’ll have a beer or two, then hop on the twelve.”

“Can I come with you? I could film him working or something.”

“Sure. You’ll love it. It’s really interesting.”

“What’s he copying an icon painting for anyway?”

“Who knows? I suppose whoever owns it needs a second one for, you know, a museum. Or they want to give a copy to a friend. Or maybe it’s some guy with two children, and he’s old and is going to pop his clogs quite soon, and he’s got two sons, right, and they both want the painting when he’s gone, and so he’s getting it made again, but properly, so no one’ll know which is the original and which the copy …”

Heidi’s made her right hand into a glove-puppet snake without the glove, moving its fingers up and down against the thumb, mimicking the movement of Nick’s jaw. Roger and Honza laugh. Nick says:

“Well how am I supposed to know what it’s for? I tell you what, though: I saw my friend Anton in the street with one of his dodgy Bulgarian pals just now, when you’d already come in here, Heidi — just as I came out of the potraviny with the eggs. They were off up to Strahov for some football game. And I told him that you and I’d been out gathering all this weird shit for this painting he’s asked Maňásek to do, and he just blanked me.”

“You mean he didn’t even say hello?” Heidi asks.

“No, he said hello OK, but when I talked about the painting he just didn’t answer. Twice. And then he went off to this game.”

“So maybe it’s a present for this other guy he was with,” Heidi says. “A surprise.”

“Heidi, they’re thugs. Not Anton — he just works with them. But they steal cars and sell fake passports and launder money and who knows what. People like that don’t give each other church paintings for Christmas. Like they’re meant to say, ‘Oh yippee! It’s my favourite saint! Thanks ever so much!’ ”

The waiter comes round, slams down four beers and draws four more lines across their table’s docket. The door opens again and Karel, Kristina, Jiří and Kuba walk in. They’ve got Mladen with them. Kuba’s got three pairs of ice skates hanging across his shoulders. Honza taps his finger on the back of his wrist as they all walk over: You’re late .

“We had to wait until my parents were at their flat,” Kuba says in Czech as he sits down. “That’s where the skates were. I didn’t have a key.”

“I thought you had to be naked up at AVU,” Mladen says, in English, to Nick.

“School’s out.”

“Strange. For us architecture students, no. I must be there in two hours to talk to my professor about essay I have write.”

“Written,” says Heidi.

“What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry … Nothing.”

“I like your sunglasses,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” she says. “They’re proper glasses. I lost my usual pair in that French guy’s atelier. If any of you see him, could you ask him if he found them?”

“I’ll ask him,” Nick says.

“May I try them?” Kristina asks Heidi.

“Sure, but they won’t work unless you’re short-sighted just like me.”

Kristina puts them on and turns her head round, whistling. She’s sitting across from Roger, right beside the window, and the shades reflect the street outside, the part of street he can’t see, that’s behind his back. There’s wooden scaffolding running along the bar’s façade and on along the façades of the whole block. As people pass beneath this scaffolding it looks as though they’re walking down a tunnel into and out of her skull. Some construction workers who were standing at the bar knocking off small shots of slivovice a few minutes ago are reflected in the lenses: they’re holding gas blowtorches to the buildings’ plasterwork, stripping off old names. It’s happening all over Prague: as the state signs on plastic boards that must have covered the tops of shopfronts for more than forty years come down, the names of pre-war traders are emerging from beneath them, only to be burned off again. When Kristina moves her head, the torches’ flames come right into the middle of the lenses, where they blaze like fiery pupils. Got to get this. Roger delves into his bag and pulls out Michael’s camcorder.

“Can I film you? It’s just that the effect your — don’t move! — yeah, like that, the effect of the street inside your shades, it’s really visually fascinating.”

Heidi says:

“We should haul ass over to Ivan’s soon. You want to come too, Mladen?”

“OK.”

Kristina moves her head towards him; he moves his head back, dragging the camcorder with it so she’ll stay in focus — there it is, right there, this is …

“ Jesus Christ!”

He’s knocked his head against the wall, and the camcorder’s jabbed into his gash — right over the stitches, really fucking painful …