Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

When the thin, dark-haired man and the lieutenant do, finally, return, he senses straight away that a delivery of sorts has been made, that that’s what they’ve come back here to tell him. They look fresher. Must be a new day. The younger man’s step has a slight bounce to it. He moves towards the table with a businesslike air, sits down and smiles at Anton.

“ Zdravei .”

Anton smiles back. “ Zdravei .”

The lieutenant’s tapping his pen on the clipboard’s paper again, getting ready to make more notes. The dark-haired man’s still smiling at Anton, as though the two of them were co-conspirators in some student prank. After a long, slow silence he starts speaking suddenly:

“I tell you, Anton: what you give us on Ilievski’d better be really …”

Anton’s up, falling across the table as he hugs him.

“Get off me! Crazy Bulgarian!” He’s pushing him back into his seat, but with a kind of playful tenderness. As he lands back in it, Anton feels faint. Maybe it was jumping up so quickly, maybe it’s not sleeping or eating for however long he’s been here … The room’s blotching: brightening and blotching at the same time, the strip light flickering so fast now he can hardly make out …

“Don’t pass out on me, either! I’m not going to carry you back to your cell.” The dark-haired man gets up, walks over to the door, pushes it open and calls something down the hallway. A uniform comes in with a cup full of water, which the dark-haired man hands to Anton. The cold liquid on the inside of his throat revives him. “Dab some on your forehead too,” the dark-haired man says. Anton does this and the blotches disappear, but he feels suddenly very tired. The thin, dark-haired man lifts the cup out of his hands and sets it on the table.

“I shouldn’t be this nice to you. You’ve put us through the mill with your conditions. If you knew what we’ve just …”

“When will they be back?”

“A few days. The cogs are in motion. Someone in Sofia is on holiday who has to … I won’t bore you with the details; you don’t need to know them anyway. We’ll have to get your wife moved somewhere safe before they come. We won’t do it just yet; there’s no immediate danger until we’ve rearrested Ilievski. You’ll stay here, of course. You can start giving depositions after …”

“When they’re here.”

“Of course, Anton. That’s the deal.”

“Will it be you who takes it from me?”

“What? The deposition?”

Anton nods.

“It might be. I can’t say. In the meantime we’ll move you to a better cell. I’ll tell them to do that when I go upstairs. Bear with me. We need to get you rested. You’ll be answering questions for several days on end. For you to sleep is what we all need most just now.”

He goes back to the door again and calls the uniforms in. They lead Anton back up the corridor, then up the flight of stairs, then down the other corridor back to his cell. The faintness is gone: he feels light-headed, but not faint. Floaty , more like. It’s an extremely pleasant feeling. He doesn’t notice the door shut: one second the uniforms are in there with him and the next they’re not, it’s closed.

He stands in the room’s centre and turns round on the spot, very slowly. The bed, the wall, the toilet and the ceiling have been transformed. It’s a pure space now: betrayal’s made him pure. He steps over to the bed and lies down on his back, arms crossed behind his head so that his cupped hands form a pillow. He’s clean, washed through inside and out, the chambers of his mind as clear as those rooms that were illuminated for him earlier. It’s there below him, that crystal structure: as he half-closes his eyes he sees it from above. The people are still in there, the child and adolescent Antons too, all still intricately linked to one another. Helena’s children are being disentangled from the point, the node where he first found them, and led to the door he came through earlier. The other people stop what they’re doing for a moment and look up: Stoyann from his incense box and Toitov from his blackboard, Anton’s mother from her garden, footballers and students — everybody looks at them being led to freedom, then looks up towards where Anton floats in his bed, floating over Prague and Europe, over the Atlantic. Helena’s being lifted towards him, buoyed up by love. Phone wires buzz and hum as orders are zapped over to Sofia, as new orders are issued, typed up, zapped onwards again, as cars are dispatched to Dimitar’s home — all spaces merging now together, wishing Anton well as he floats high above them: they love him too. The people the cars pass by in the Sofia streets look up and love him; the thin, dark-haired man waves to him from below …

He’s woken up suddenly from deep sleep. It could be eighteen hours, ten hours or twenty minutes later. A new day, at any rate: the uniform who’s nudging him awake is freshly shaven and has toothpaste on his breath — although he could have risen around midnight to begin the night shift. They’re taking Anton by the arm, raising him to his feet. Must be to escort him to his new cell. They could be a little gentler; maybe they don’t know he’s been reclassified, needs kid-glove treatment — in a bureaucracy like this information probably takes a while to filter down. The uniforms lead him along the corridor and down the staircase again to … Strange: he’s being taken back to the interview room. Has he slept through two, three days? Will he be told that the children are already here, waiting for him now with Helena somewhere? Or even find them right here, here in this … No. The lieutenant’s sitting back from the table, to the right of the door, smoking, resting his clipboard on his knees as before. The dark-haired man’s wearing the same shirt as last time but has taken the tie off. His face is red, with bags beneath the eyes. He’s standing in front of the table all excited.

“Close the door and get out,” he says to the uniforms. He’s cranked up with something, but it doesn’t look like joy. Anton’s own smile fades from his face. He walks to his side of the desk. The dark-haired man doesn’t wait for him to sit down before starting:

“What the fuck are you playing at?”

A jolt surges through Anton. There’s some thing very dangerous coming at him and he doesn’t know how to ward it off, because he doesn’t know what it is.

“Hey?” the dark-haired man’s shouting now. “What the fuck did you take us for?” The chair goes flying across the room and slams into the wall. The dark-haired man’s turning his head round as though loosening his neck muscles, a manic circular move ment. He looks up and fixes Anton with a bitter smile.

“Did you think we wouldn’t find out? That … I know what you thought: that in the time before the art people realized what you’d done you’d have walked out of here laughing. That’s it, isn’t it? Is that what you thought? That you and your … your brood would be in America before we found out?”

Anton can see the vein in his left temple bulging, grey, forking its way down from his dark hair like a streak of lightning.

“I really …”

“Fuck you! Fuck you, Anton! I did — we all did so much for you. We moved heaven and earth. You would have had them back within the week! You greedy shit! You fucking greedy Jew!” He pauses and rolls his head again. “Well, you’ve blown the whole thing. We’re back to zero. Are you happy?”

“I don’t …”

“Is this what you wanted? Because this is where you’ve got us!”

“I don’t understand.”

“No!” His eyelids are screwed up tight. Both hands are trembling beside his head, but it’s not Italianate now. “You don’t say anything until I tell you to! OK? Now, let’s start the whole thing again. Sit down.”