Tom Mccarthy: Men in Space

After the movie ends he falls asleep too. When he wakes up they’re somewhere around the Canada/US border. It’s more than dusk now: they’ve given up chasing the sun and are heading south. Roger can vaguely make out coastline, but not much else. Barbara wakes up for Boston, a sprawl of yellow and green lights. There are refreshments, neither supper nor breakfast, then the descent over Long Island, touch down. From the terminal they can just see Manhattan, the top of the Empire State lit up green and red. While they’re waiting for their bags somebody taps him on the shoulder.

“Oh my God! What are you …” It’s Heidi, that girl he met at that party, same night he met Barbara, and …

“Welcome to America!” She’s beaming, and looks fuller than she did when he last saw her, in December. Not fatter, just less thin. “I take it you two have just arrived as well.”

“You’ve flown via Amsterdam?” he asks her.

“Paris. You live in New York?”

“No, San Francisco.”

“Oh, that’s right: you told me. I’d forgotten.”

“Yeah, we’ve got to do another four hours. How about you?”

“Vermont. I’ve got to go into Manhattan and catch a bus.”

“Let’s have a drink.”

“OK,” says Heidi. Roger has to wait for Barbara to clear immigration, so it takes them half an hour to get to the bar. Heidi’s on a stool drinking a coke. She’s taken her coat and jumper off and has a small bulge in her lower stomach.

“She’s pregnant,” Barbara whispers as they walk up to her.

“Hi again. You know what? I’ve got to go already. The last bus leaves Port Authority at ten.” Heidi stoops to pick up her bags and clothes. Barbara reaches down and gets them for her.

“Shall we carry these for you?”

“No thanks. I’m not that far gone. Only four months. I don’t feel weak, just sick sometimes. While it is true,” she switches to Czech, “that, of a morning, I have little appetite, nonetheless I do not breakfast eagerly, so for me this poses no great problem.” She’s smiling so much it seems she could just float to Vermont. She takes Barbara by the shoulders, plants a big, lippy kiss on each cheek, then does the same to him — then, without saying another word, turns round and walks away.

* * * * *

The Klementinum has an outer wall around it, running from Karlova to Mariánské Náměstí, then back down Platnéřská to Křižovnická. Inside this, a cobbled courtyard leads towards the library’s small entrance door. It’s got strange acoustics: Helena has small feet that never clump or stamp and rarely produce any sound at all — but here they send a kind of hushed rustle to the walls, and the walls send the rustle back, as though they and the feet were whispering to one another. Beyond the door, a smoking room with notices dotted around it. The reading room itself is down a corridor, past this guard leaning against the wall, pushing himself off it, stepping across to block her route now as she …

“Do you have a card, miss?”

They’ve popped up everywhere, these awful Pinkertons. Some big Canadian company: started out as strike-breakers in the last century, Anton told her. They’re not regulated at all: any thug could join up and be issued on the spot with a revolver. Guarding a library, of all places … Helena opens her handbag, fishes around and pulls her passport out.

“No, miss, I mean a library card.”

“Oh. No. No, I don’t, but …”

“You need one of those to come in here.”

“How do I get one?”

“Students at Charles University are eligible. So are ones from other universities, but they need some kind of letter. Proof of … You need one to use the library.” It would surprise her if this guy could even read. She tells him:

“I’m from Bulgaria. I live here. I’m doing independent research. I have a PhD from Sofia University. I have it with me.”

“You need some kind of letter …”

“Yes, I have that. Can I …” She tries to look beyond him, but she’s much too small. He takes her passport and flips through it, probably something he saw real cops doing once, then points towards a window to the right.

“You can ask there.”

The woman in the window’s friendly, young: must be a student earning a bit of money. She asks for proof of address; doesn’t need to see the PhD certificate. She writes a card out, slips it into a plastic pouch and hands it to her, smiling.

“Down the corridor to the right.”

The Pinkerton asks her to check her coat. A scowling older woman grabs it and slams a plastic marker down onto a counter.

“Fifty crowns if you lose it.”

The reading room’s long and high-ceilinged. Rather than individual desks there are rows: long tables running from beside the issue desk right to the windows on the room’s far side, with each space semi-partitioned from its neighbours. Just over half the spaces are taken. They’re all students, ten years younger than her, perhaps even more, slouched back in their seats or slumped right forwards, napping, or munching on chlebíčk y and slurping pop through straws. You couldn’t do that in Sofia, in the big library off Shipka. Helena chooses a space down in the far-left corner where it seems quietest, takes her pen and notepad from her bag, then walks over to the catalogue drawers and finds the non-author-listed, general-reference index.

B: Byzantine . Just after Bulgarian , as chance would have it. Byzantine Civilization, Guide to Byzantine Culture, Byzantine Art … She’s getting close here, just flip through a few more and — yes, here: Dictionary of Byzantine Inscriptions . Perfect. She clicks her pen’s point out, copies the shelf mark into her notebook, then goes over to the issue desk, fills in a request form and hands this to another student who’s working behind the desk.

“How long do you think it’ll …”

“Not long,” he says. “Fifteen to twenty minutes.”

She’ll go outside and get some pop herself. There’s a stall on Karlova that all the tourists stroll past as they come off Karlův Most. It’s probably expensive, but at least the drink will be cold. It’s a nice day, bright and warm. Perhaps one of those early springs is starting. There’s no point retrieving her coat just for five minutes. Helena whispers her way past the walls again, then turns into Karlova. As she walks up to the stall, she hears that the man behind it is talking in Bulgarian to his neighbour, who’s selling army surplus hats. She catches just a snatch of what he’s saying:

“… really should have known not to do that …” then, in Czech to her: “Yes, madam.”

“Orangeade, please.”

“Not bad, eh?” he says to the hat seller, switching back to Bulgarian, as he pulls the bottle from his fridge.

“I prefer them big. Big tits, round arse,” the other man says, in Bulgarian also, looking her up and down.

“Me, I like them petite. Fragile.” He hands her the bottle, then, in Czech again: “Ten, dear.”

“Here. Thank you,” she says, passing him the blue note. She could have said it in Bulgarian and embarrassed them both, but doesn’t want to let them know she understood them. This way’s better: gives her a secret space from which to listen and to think …

The book’s already waiting for her when she gets back. She carries it over to her desk and flips through it till she finds a list of alphabetic figures. Interesting: lots of the letters are the same as in ancient Greek. So why didn’t she recognize … She slips from her notebook the strip of paper onto which she transcribed the text on Anton’s icon painting. It must have been about 2 a.m. on the first of January — just ten or twelve hours before the door burst open and the police rushed in. She couldn’t sleep: Anton was snoring, and then special dates — birthdays, name days, Christmas was the worse — press home the fact of Kristof and Larissa’s absence. The paintings — both of them, the real one which turned out not to be the real one and the fake one which at least was a real fake — were leaning against the filing cabinet, the gold-leaf ovals round the figures’ heads strangely luminous among the dark shapes of chair legs and plant pots and magazines. After rereading the last two months’ correspondence between her and the IRC, the IOM, the UNHCR, the ISS, the UNHCR again, Helena paused and stared for perhaps half an hour at these two paintings; then, slipping her correspondence back into its cabinet, she went and knelt beside the paintings and scrutinized again the text above the ocean and the ships. Maybe it was the exegetic curiosity that a classics PhD had instilled in her that made her copy out the texts’ letters; maybe the curiosity came from the physics degree, its endless diagnostics. Either way, she copied them — then, in the whirlwind of the swoop and Anton’s protracted detention, forgot all about it until just yesterday, when the paper slipped onto the floor as she went through the cabinet’s correspondence for the hundredth, the two hundredth time …