David Szalay: All That Man Is

She looks at her friend, who shrugs. ‘Where is it?’

‘It’s here!’ He points to the stone edifice that looms over them. ‘In there. It’s Mozart or something. Mozart, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Simon says, without enthusiasm.

‘Simon’s really into that shit,’ Ferdinand explains.

The girls look at each other again — something unspoken passes between them.

Their excuse is they don’t have much money.

Ferdinand says, ‘Well, why don’t we meet afterwards?’ He is still smiling. ‘It won’t be that long, I don’t think. How long will it be?’ he asks Simon, as if he were his secretary.

‘I don’t know,’ Simon says. ‘Not more than an hour, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘We could just meet here when it’s over,’ Ferdinand suggests. ‘In an hour or so?’

They agree to this, and Ferdinand and Simon set off.

‘She’s really quite nice, the one in the hat, isn’t she?’ Ferdinand says.

‘She’s okay.’

‘She’s more than okay — she’s hot. What about her friend?’

‘What about her?’

Ferdinand laughs delightedly. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ he says.

He is humming happily to himself as they take their seats in a pew.

‘So what is this again?’ he asks.

‘Mozart’s Mass,’ Simon says without looking at him, ‘in C Minor.’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And as if wanting to extract everything he can from the experience, Ferdinand folds his hands in his lap and shuts his eyes.

The music starts.

The music.

Later, when they return to the pub terrace, swamped by the cathedral’s shadow now, they find that the girls have gone. Simon still seems to be hearing the music while his upset friend asks the waiter whether anyone has left a message for him, still seems to be hearing the voice of the unseen soprano, somewhere far up at the front, filling the high stone space. And while they wait on the terrace in case the girls come back, while his friend stands at the edge of the terrace peering into the tourist-filled dusk, Simon sits there smoking and hearing it still, that voice. Something holy about it.

Ferdinand, turning from the edge of the terrace, looks distraught.

Something holy about it.

‘Fuck it,’ Ferdinand says.

Summoned holiness into the high stone space, that luminous music.

‘They’re not coming back.’

That luminous music, the voice of the unseen soprano.

Filling the high stone space.

‘No,’ Simon says.

His friend sits down and takes, without asking, one of his Philip Morrises. He tries to seem okay. ‘What shoul’ we do?’ he says.

They leave the terrace and look for somewhere to eat.

Lost, they wander through little streets.

Ferdinand stops at a stall selling magazines to ask for directions.

While his friend is trying to make himself understood, Simon notices that some of the magazines are pornographic — his eyes find enormous nipples, naked skin, open mouths. The entire stall in fact is devoted to porn. The stallholder, a tired-looking little man, speaks no English and, indicating that Ferdinand should wait there, disappears into a shop with an empty window display.

He emerges a few moments later with a middle-aged woman in a simple blue dress. Simon feels sorry for her, that she has to put up with a stall of filth in front of her shop. ‘Yes?’ she says, smiling shyly as she approaches them.

Ferdinand explains that they are lost and looking for somewhere to eat.

She tells him how to find their way back to the places they know, and says, apologetically, that she does not know of anywhere to eat nearby that would be open. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘No, no, don’t be silly,’ Ferdinand tells her. ‘Thank you so much for your help…’

‘And you buy magazines?’ she asks.

The question seems to be mainly for Simon, who is still standing near the stall, smoking a cigarette. He looks at her as if he does not understand it.

‘Sex,’ she says, indicating the stall.

She starts to smile and her face, when she does, suddenly seems hideous to him — like some evil little animal’s, with tiny yellow teeth.

‘No,’ he says quickly.

‘You have a look,’ she says, still smiling, and, freeing one of the magazines from the string that holds it, she offers it to him in its plastic sleeve. ‘Have a look.’

‘We’re not interested, thank you,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Why not?’ she asks with a little laugh.

‘We’re just not,’ Ferdinand says, following his friend who is already halfway down the street. ‘Thank you.’

They eat at Pizza Hut, and then take the metro all the way out to its suburban terminus.

—

Spread out on the foam mattress on the floor of the room where they are staying, under an orange-and-khaki floral-pattern sheet, Simon struggles to focus on his diary. Ferdinand is showering. Simon is able to hear the hiss of the shower, and while it goes on he knows that his friend will not return. He is also able to hear the shouts from the kitchen as their landlady and her husband argue. He has time — it would not take long. It has been nearly a week since he last…That was in the noisy, swaying train toilet as it made its way from Warsaw to Kraków. His fingers have just taken hold of the thrilling solidity under the sheet when he hears the shower stop with a squeaky jolt of the pipework and, pulling up his shorts, he starts to write again, or seem to, is holding only his pen when Ferdinand enters wrapped in a small towel.

‘They still at it?’ Ferdinand says, of the shouting.

Something smashes, they hear, in the kitchen.

Simon, holding only his pen, says nothing.

‘Not a happy bunny,’ Ferdinand says. Standing near a small mirror, he is trying to look over his own shoulder at his seething, scarified back. ‘It’s worse,’ he says. ‘Have a look. It’s worse, isn’t it?’

Simon looks up momentarily from his diary and says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s worse,’ Ferdinand says.

He sighs and takes his place on the bed with his heavily annotated volume of Yeats. After only a few lines –

The young

In one another’s arms

— he sighs again and stares for a minute or more at the whitish ceiling.

The young

In one another’s arms

He puts the volume of Yeats on the shiny yellow parquet. He pulls the thin quilt over him, and turns to the wall.

Having written nothing, Simon sets aside his diary and switches off the light, a table lamp on the floor next to the mattress on which he is lying.

‘My husband,’ she says the next morning, taking things from the fridge and putting them on the table where they are sitting, ‘is in Brno. Football. He will be in Brno three days.’

‘Some sort of tournament?’ Ferdinand asks.

‘What?’

‘Is he in Brno for a tournament?’ She doesn’t seem to understand. ‘A match?’

‘Match, yes. Important match. Football.’

There is no slivovice . There is coffee and cigarettes. Stale bread if anyone wants it. She is cheerfully hungover. She asks Simon, sitting down next to him in her knee-length yellow dressing gown, ‘You find some girls?’

He looks embarrassed, unsure what to say. ‘Uh…’

‘No?’ she asks, in a tone of surprise. ‘It should be easy for you, I think.’

‘Well, we did meet some,’ Ferdinand says.

‘You like girls?’

Though the question was addressed to Simon, it is Ferdinand who answers. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘very much so.’

She is still looking at Simon, smiling. ‘And you?’

He takes a worried pull on his cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he says.

She studies him, his long frowning profile, as he in turn seems to study the table, as if trying to memorise all the objects that are on it — a carton of milk — mléko — of very simple design