The first time round he gets put through to Klárá’s neighbour. Fucking party lines. The next try gets him through to her. She has a croaky, tired voice: Ivan can almost smell the sleep on her, the moistness of her skin, her crumpled off-blond hair …
“Klárá?”
“Who’s that? Ivan?”
“Klárá. Yes, it’s me.”
“What are you calling for this early? What time is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
There’s a soft sound as the phone’s laid down, must be her duvet; then a rustling and her voice is there again: “Six-forty. Why are you …”
“Klárá, I just …” What’s he meant to say? “What’s new? I was just thinking about you.”
“I was asleep. Nothing’s new. Where are you?”
“In Nové Město. In a phone box.”
“Has something happened? Are you OK?”
“I suppose so. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I’ve got to go to work.”
“What are you doing?”
“Renovating altars. St Cajetan, in Hradčany.”
“I saw Sláva Kinček tonight.”
“And you called to tell me that?”
“Did I wake you?”
“Yes. And now …”
“And could you tell me … I’m not being rude: I really want to know …”
“What?”
“Klárá, were you dreaming anything erotic?”
There’s a pause, then a click, then a long, deep, black noise. Ivan replaces the receiver. It was three years ago. Before leaving the cabin, he fishes a tissue from his back pocket, cleans himself up. Then he pulls out Hájek’s wrap, taps a little power onto the back of his left hand and snorts it up. Fuel.
He rides trams round the city: hopping on, off, walking for a while, cutting back, looping round. After some time, he finds himself on the brim of the hill at Letná, outside the closed front doors of Pod Stalinem, the club where Milan Hájek came from earlier to meet him and Jan, where someone was saying they were going to do something, sometime … He used to come here in the days when Radio Stalin operated from inside here, decks and wires slinking haphazardly among the rubble left from when they’d blown up the giant Stalin Monument that loomed over the whole city. One of his earliest memories, that: seeing the scaffolding explode, the giant bronze head topple … Did he watch it for real or on TV? He can’t have been more than four: perhaps he’s remembering it from films, people’s accounts … Now a huge metronome rises up where Stalin stood. It’s supposed to sway in great arcs from one side to another, north to south and back again — but it’s broken, jammed, its needle sitting inert in the cold at fifty-odd degrees. His mother was ambivalent about the statue’s destruction: Iosif Vissarionovich wasn’t all bad, you know … History needs force to move it forwards; things need to be done … She went into shock when the USSR disintegrated. Looking across the city, Ivan pictures Hájek’s cosmonaut gazing down from his spaceship onto familiar land masses he no longer recognizes: whole blocks wrenching apart, accelerated continental drift, a jigsaw in reverse … And in two weeks Bohemia and Slovakia will split …
He’s about to tap some more speed out onto his hand when a man appears beside him and says hello. Must be a little older than him: mid-to-late thirties. His face reminds Ivan of someone. The man’s smiling at him.
“Do you have the time?” he asks Ivan.
“The time?” He goes through the motions of fumbling in his pockets although he knows he doesn’t have a watch, then looks up at the metronome and gives a disappointed shrug. “I’m afraid not.”
“That’s a shame,” the man says, still smiling strongly as he fixes him with his gaze. Ivan looks back at him and realizes who his face reminds him of: a monk in a monastery where he once spent two weeks restoring a fresco. Brother Fran-something. Francisco? Franz? In the still space of the hilltop, the two weeks Ivan stayed at the monastery jostle for admission. It was a month or so before the revolution: a mild, calm autumn just before that intense winter. Sloping Moravian vineyards, Gypsies harvesting the grapes as he worked in the chapel … those cloisters outside, the way sound echoed round them … dinners with the monks … and Brother Fran … Fran … He promised as he left to get in touch, but never did … The man is staring at him, friendly as anything.
“Are you sure you don’t have time?”
Now Ivan gets it. “No,” embarrassed. “I’m not here for … I’ve got to go.”
He heads down the steps towards the river and crosses Švermův Most: same route he took down from Letná after being released that day in eighty-nine, his day. There’d been swathes of people flowing in the same direction. There are a few people around now, but there’s no purpose to their movements, no coherence. The odd businessman goes one way, the odd street-cleaner another. At Náměstí Republiky he enters the metro. It must be mid-morning now; the carriage is half full. The travellers sit silently, faces washed grey by routine and fatigue: secretaries, workers, eyelids drooping. He starts crashing, dozing off. Pre-recorded messages caress his brain, lullabying him: Finish your entrances and exits; the doors are about to close. Next station Mústek. Morpheus. Maňásek …
He manages to wake up at Anděl, leave the carriage and ride the long, slow escalator to street level. The station’s eponymous plaster angel stands in the lobby, next to a new photo booth. Was there an angel earlier? Folds in a skirt. What was the monk’s name? Fran-something. Ivan steps out onto Nádražní. The sun’s chased the cloud away now. Tram wires, a wedding-dress shop, a langoš stand. He walks down Lidická, past second-hand shops, toy shops, textile and ceramic shops, a butcher’s from whose open door music is spilling. Further down, on the corner of Zborovská, people are queuing by a plastic tank that’s full of carp. Ivan pauses beside them and peers in. There’s a wooden table next to the tank; behind the table, two stout men with moustaches wearing rubber boots and aprons dip nets into the water and scoop fish out, one at a time. They place each fish, flapping, in a weighing scale: if it’s too heavy, or too light, they throw it back and scoop another out — but mostly they’re the right size. Some people want to carry their fish off alive, in bags half-filled with water; most, though, want theirs killed. The men hold the fish across the surface of the table, place a small axe to their neck, then slam a mallet down onto the axe, severing the fish’s heads. It usually takes two or three blows to fully sever them. The fish’s mouths widen and contract as the axe goes through their flesh and tendons, like the mouths of operatic singers or of ancient oracles and seers whispering deathbed visions. When they’re dead, the men gut them, scrape scales from their sides, hand them to the customers, then start the whole process again.
Ivan watches them weigh, kill and clean three or four carp, then turns to leave — but as he does, a truck pulls up beside the tank. The two men in boots and aprons greet the driver, who climbs from his cabin, pulls a slide from the truck’s side and snaps one end of this into a catch below a sluice-gate on the truck. The men in boots and aprons lay the other end across the rim of their tank, then stand back, one on each of the slide’s sides, like ceremonial soldiers waiting for visiting dignitaries to descend from an aeroplane.
“Ready?” the driver shouts.
They nod. The driver pulls a lever; the sluice-gate opens and releases from the truck a rush of water in which scores of carp cascade down the slide towards the tank — on their sides, one eye up, scales flashing silver under a thin film of liquid as they shoot by. After a few seconds the tank’s filled up to the brim; there’s water gushing out onto the pavement. Carp too: the driver’s trying to close the sluice-gate, but the lever’s stuck, got wedged. He’s swearing, jerking at it while carp hurtle down the slide: more and more of them. They’re bouncing off the writhing block of tails and fins and landing on the pavement, thrashing around the kerb gasping for breath, hitting their heads on people’s feet, the wheels of pushchairs … One of them’s come to rest in front of Ivan. Its mouth is working itself open again and again, each time finding it harder, as though struggling against the unbearably heavy atmosphere of some alien planet it’s pitched up on. Its eyes bulge outwards from its head. Ivan shudders, closes his eyes, turns away again and walks home.