Tom Mccarthy: Men in Space

* * * * *

They don’t have much time. Han’s offered to come round to help them move their stuff out of the building, but he’s got to be at the Stedelijk Bureau by five. He’s taking all Joost’s Eastern European artworks there, which is the reason he’s got transport in the first place: he’s hired a transit van from Ouke Baas, to whom it has to be returned by six. Sasha and Nick have hired a more simple wheeled contraption: a touw en blok pulley-and-rope kit they’re going to use to lower their possessions to the street. The staircases in Amsterdam are too narrow to carry large objects up and down: you have to attach the pulley to the hook that dangles from your building’s roof, then thread the rope around it and winch your stuff down from the windows, like Nick saw the workmen do with the sinks and bathtubs when he rode through the canals with Han. The sinks and bathtubs were being winched up, not down — but the method is the same.

“This is Holland for you,” Sasha snorts as they carry the kit from the MacBike rental shop on Waterlooplein back to the Nieuwmarkt. “They take away the sea with polders so the moon can’t make it rise and fall, and then they raise and lower things with a dumb bicycle wheel …”

The square on Nieuwmarkt’s been transformed over the last few days. Behind the bread, cheese and raw-herring stalls of the market there’s a fairground ride: a huge suspended swinging boat inside which people are strapped and rocked, gently at first, back and forth, each movement taking them slightly further than the last, until the boat’s surging up into a vertical position and, eventually, swinging right over, carrying its passengers through three-sixty. The Gemeente ’s had it installed there, to mark the round-the-world ship race. They’re setting off tonight, the real ships, being towed in grand procession from the harbour in a blaze of flares, fireworks and streamers. The build-up’s been going on all week. Han’s posters, the appropriated icon with its ships, mountain-cum-tenement building and plexi-helmet-wearing saint, are everywhere: in bars, cafés and restaurants, at tram stops, glued to walls. The young people from all over who are crewing the ships are spilling out of bars and coffee shops and stumbling drunk and stoned each night around the streets, riding the fairground boat into the small hours, their screams as it creaks through its apex edging Nick into vertiginous dreams in which voices cry out as they fall away through endless space. He’s kind of looking forward to the whole event being over.

Han turns up just as Nick and Sasha are arriving back outside their building with the touw en blok . He backs his transit van up beside the Loosje, the café next to their house, edging as close as he can towards the bollards separating the pavement from the road. It’s a fine day, quite warm. People are sitting out on the Loosje’s terrace. As Han steps from the van, one of them complains that the vehicle’s blocking his view of the square. Han snaps something back at him, gesticulating, before shaking Nick’s hand.

“Do you want to start winching the stuff down straight away?” Nick asks him. “This is Sasha.”

“Hi. Let’s have a drink first, huh?” Han’s jumpy, unsettled: his eyes are darting around from Nick to Sasha to the building to the man who complained. Nick says to him:

“Don’t worry about that guy. You can park where you …”

“It’s not that. My workshop’s been vandalized.”

“Vandalized? When?”

“Last night,” Hans says, sitting down. “They throw everything upside down. They don’t take anything, though — just over turned it. No graffiti, no smashing machines — just throw everything over.”

“Ransacked.” Nick sits down too. Sasha pulls a chair up from the next table.

“Sorry?” Han asks.

“Ransacked. Not vandalized. It sounds like they were looking for something.”

“Yes. Exactly my feeling. I have many things that are valuable: the computers, the printer, all the light boxes and photograph equipment. But they don’t touch these. Only throw them over to see what’s behind them.”

“Were the paintings OK?”

“They weren’t there. I removed them to my place several weeks ago. My home, I mean. The crate took up too much room about the workshop. I have them, all Joost’s paintings, here, now, in the transit van — why I can help you in the first place. You have the touw en blok ?”

“Right here,” says Sasha, holding up the bag. It’s an old post sack tied at the top with a short rope. The way it sags down at the bottom makes it look quite sinister, as though Sasha were about to drown a litter of kittens, or dispose of a severed head. On its side, letters spell out Eigendom PTT. Eigendom sounds like it should mean selfhood , a mix of Eigenheit and freedom, fiefdom, kingdom or whatever, but it’s probably just the name of a town. The Loosje’s waitress turns up and they order: coffees, two Spa Roods, a genever for Han. She turns and walks away. Han says:

“I get phone calls.”

“Sorry?”

“Two. One yesterday, at Windtunnelkade; one today, at home, before I left to come here.”

“From who? Whom, I mean,” as though Han’s going to care about his grammar. Bad as Heidi.

“They don’t say.”

“What kind of calls? Obscene?”

“No, not obscene. Not anything. No conversation at all. Only to ask my name, two times. I mean they ask two times my name each time they call. Then they hang up again.”

“That’s really odd. That happened to me as well.” It’s true — not just the once, in Art in Europe ’s office, but yesterday as well, at home, ex-home now: a foreign voice, with the same accent as the one Lucy put through to him that other day — sounded like Anton Markov but wasn’t him. A question, just to confirm his name — twice, pronouncing it Nikola again — then that deep, flatulent sound of someone hanging up.

“They only ask you …”

“Yes. Exactly. Just like you described.”

“Why both of us? All that connects us is we both know Joost.”

Knew. This isn’t faulty grammar on Han’s part, though. It strikes Nick that for him the calls might be extensions of the dreams he told him about when they first met — as though Joost had switched to a medium more tangible than the circuits of the sleeping mind and was now using real wires, cables and exchanges to make himself heard through the ice-window separating the living from the dead, the drowned. The waitress turns up with their drinks. The Spa Roods each have a slice of lemon resting on their surface, bubbles trapped against the translucent cells’ undersides. Nick lifts his slice out and lets the bubbles rise and pop into the air as he slips it into his mouth. He tells Han:

“And we’re both involved with the show. Maybe the calls are from someone Joost wanted to include. From Tallinn, or Warsaw, or Budapest. I’ve started the catalogue text, by the way.”

“Yes. Good. You are an artist too?” — to Sasha, this question. While Sasha answers, Nick watches the Verkeerspolitie hoist a clamped vehicle parked on the square’s far side — at the top of the Kloveniersburgwal, just outside the Chinese fish shop — onto the back of their truck and drive it away. A new car rolls into the space and three men with jackets on get out and stand beside it, facing in their direction. Twenty yards to the left of these men, just by the entrance to the metro, two other men are also facing their way; one of them’s talking into a dictaphone or radio. Sasha’s explaining where they have to drive their stuff to, somewhere in the Pijp. Han throws back his genever:

“Let’s do it, then.”