We drank the coffee — accompanied by more vodka of course (“to facilitate its peregrination through our bodies”) — and, between sticking more objects to his canvas, he showed me his other paintings. Very good. I told him so. He wanted me to come with him to a party that a French painter was throwing, but I was already feeling so drunk I had to decline. He asked me if I liked the girl he’d left me with and I spilt the beans, told him she was delightful but entirely the wrong gender — at which point he all but insisted on taking me up to some hillside cruising spot he knew about. You’ll be reassured to learn that I scotched this plan, singing instead the praises of a brilliant Amsterdam printmaker and commercial artist, perfectly equipped, I assured him, to satisfy my every desire. I only hope you’re showing the same fidelity in my absence, surrounded as you are by all these pouting Adonises you keep hiring as assistants. I told him I’d be delighted to include him in the Stedelijk Bureau exhibition, made an appointment to visit to discuss terms several days hence and left. I managed to refrain from vomiting until I made it back to Martin’s. Poor bastard: first I vomit on his artists, then his floor.
I’ll be here until Christmas. Tallinn in the first week of next year. Then Cracow, Warsaw. Contact addresses as and when, but Martin’s is a safe bet for the time being. Have the catalogues for the Jim Harris exhibition gone to press yet? Deadline soon. Oh, and could you, would you pay my phone bill? I’ll recompense you in kind, or at least kindness …
Thinking of you,
Joost xxx
* * * * *
Early evening. Outside, the sky’s gone dark-blue above the rows of chimney pots and television aerials. The rattle and whine of passing trams carries to the kitchen with more intimacy than it does during the daytime, as though darkness had removed walls separating rooms, apartments, buildings and the street, run all these into one new, large, unbroken space enclosed within a dome whose ceiling is ten or fifteen metres above the rooftops …
Helena’s making meatballs. She’s at the messy mixing stage. Fingers, not fork: it gives it more consistency. Besides, she likes to feel the general mêlée happening: the knotting one into the other of egg, mince, onion, herbs, breadcrumbs and pine nuts. The pliancy of flesh. The mixture’s still a little too dry: she dips her right hand into the bag of flour and rubs her thumb against her fingers to roll off some of the gunk, then picks another egg up, cracks it on the bowl’s edge, gently pours the yolk back and forth between the two shell-cups till it’s separated from the white, then lets it drop and break on the pink-and-white mountain, ooze across its ridges and valleys. She scoops another handful of pine nuts out of their jar and airdrops them in too …
The recipe’s her father’s: her Greek, Leninist father’s. She’s accepted lamb’s unavailability and uses beef — but to leave out the pine nuts would be sacrilegious: an insult to the Greece she’s never seen. If he managed to procure them in first Moscow, then Sofia, she can find and pay for them in Prague — and not skimp on the quantity, at that. When he oversaw her cooking meatballs as a child he always used to intone Add more … add more … add more … sitting on his stool beside the cooker, right leg permanently stiff from Metaxa’s shrapnel, smiling reassuringly as though to say money’s nothing: these flavours are what matter most in life. As she grew older and he grew more demoralized after the fall from Party favour brought on by his uncompromising idealism (though Helena’s Russian mother had another word for it, and screamed it at him nightly: Upryamstvo! Obstinacy! Stupid, naive obstinacy! You want your daughter to grow up an orphan for the sake of an ideal?), after the show trial and humiliating pardon for a crime he’d not committed, the refused applications to emigrate West and the eventual relocation, begrudged by him as much as by the O.V.I.R., to the backwater of Bulgaria … during his last years, Helena came to see that smile as embittered and nostalgic. A packaged taste, dried and transported across a continent — this is all I have left …
The oil has stopped crackling. She can pick out currents circulating round the chip pan, silky threaded cumuli billowing within the outwardly still mass. She turns the gas down, wipes her hand on a dish towel and leaves the kitchen. In the main room, on the round table, piles of paper are arranged around her typewriter in a large circle, like clock-patience cards. Anton’s taken the table’s chair away but left the papers untouched. He’s pulled the chair up to face him where he’s sitting on the sofa and covered its surface with today’s Lidové noviny, onto which he’s letting drop the skin of the potatoes he’s peeling.
“I haven’t read it yet!”
He looks up:
“It’s just the sports pages. You don’t read those.”
“The water will have seeped through to the others.”
“No it won’t. Look.”
He scrumples the top double-page up into a peel-filled ball. The double-page below is wet. He takes this out as well and scrumples it into a smaller ball. The rest is dry. He looks at her and smiles:
“I have a question. If this,” he says, holding the larger ball, the one with the peelings inside, up in his left hand, “is the earth, and say the lamp here is the sun, so, hang on, it’s tilted this way right now because it’s winter, the equator’s here, and here’s us, Praha, right where this guy in the photograph is standing. And this,” he continues, picking up the smaller ball, “is the moon, and it’s going around us once every twenty-four hours and, hang on, we’re spinning too, like this, you follow …”
“Do you remember what my first degree’s in?” She smiles faintly. Behind Anton all the filing cabinet’s doors are open. She should try not to look at it, try to give him all of her attention. She forces a stronger smile out, but it seems fake so she quickly lets the muscles round her mouth relax again.
“No,” Anton says, laughing. If he noticed the twitch he’s overlooking it like the good referee he is, allowing minor infringements go unchecked so as to let the game flow smoothly. “I mean do you follow my demonstration?”
“Yes, I follow …” Now her nose is twitching, but her hands are still covered in gunk. It always twitches when your hands are out of action, carrying something or dirty …
“So. My question is: can you only see the moon during the daytime when it’s winter?”
“During the daytime? Of course not. You see it at night mostly.”
“No, I mean when the moon’s up but it’s still light. Does this phenomenon occur exclusively in wintertime?”
“Oh, right … No.” She rubs her forearm against her nose, a little too hard; it sends a stabbing sensation up into her eyes. They must be tired. She was reading the carbon copies of her letters from the moment she came back from work at three-thirty to when Anton came in half an hour ago. That’s more than three hours. “The moon vacillates round the horizon line a lot. This is what Eudoxus of Cyzicus grappled with. He had to add a third concentric sphere to his geometrical model to explain variations in its altitude — and a fourth one for retrograde motions.”
“Are those epicycles?”
“No, that’s Apollonius. Or Ptolemy. Epicycles, deferents, I forget them all … But basically, you can see the moon in daytime whenever the sun shines from low on the horizon and hits it. So, yes, it will happen a lot in winter. But on summer mornings too. And evenings. So, no: not just in winter.”