He picks it up. It’s too hard not to: could be Heidi, asking where Jean-Luc’s party is tonight, or leopard-skin-wearing Angelika, from whom he’s been getting certain signals ever since he helped her get a job — or, thinking along the same lines, that Hungarian girl into whose hand he pressed his number two nights ago in Futurum … Cradling the receiver on his neck, he tells the mouthpiece:
“Nicholas Boardaman.”
“Hello?”
“Hello, yes?”
“Do you hear me OK?” The caller’s male, and speaks in English with an accent that’s foreign but not Czech.
“I can hear you, yes.”
“Is it possible to speak with Ivan Maňásek?”
Ivan Patrik Maňásek, an artist, lives here: the principal, and only other, tenant. It was he who, after they met at some opening at which Nick talked about being evicted, proposed that Nick, in exchange for a monthly rent of roughly the price of a pack of cigarettes in London, move into the spare room of his atelier — or, as Ivan and his constant stream of visitors call it, The Spaceship: Kosmická Lod’. Nick last saw Ivan last night, in a club called Újezd. He’s probably still sleeping. Nick tells the caller.
“I’ll see if he’s here.” He sets down the receiver and goes to look in Ivan’s room. Negative: the bed is empty, its duvet slipped right off onto the floor. As Nick moves back through the main room towards the phone, another tram passes in the street five floors below, sending tremors through the floor, furniture and walls, shaking the metal bars that run beneath the skylight and a wooden angel who hangs from the bars by the stump of her left arm. Nick flinches. If she falls it’ll be onto him. Imagine a freak accident like that concluding your entry in the directory of human lives: Crushed by an angel …
“Hello?” Nick says, picking the receiver up again.
“Yes, hello? That is Ivan Maňásek?”
“No, it’s me again. I’m afraid Ivan’s not here right now. Maybe in two or three hours …”
“Here is Joost van Straten. Of the Stedelijk Bureau in Amsterdam.”
Amsterdam. Just before leaving London for Prague last summer, Nick was interviewed in a swish office just off Tottenham Court Road by a woman called Julia Emerson, editor of the Amsterdam-based journal Art in Europe. It was for a staffer job. Fresh out of college, Nick fidgeted and talked non-stop, name-checking furiously: Beuys, Basquiat, Koons, Twombly, Nitsch … Julia Emerson smiled wryly, made the odd note, then told him she’d be in touch towards the end of the year. That’s now. Nick really wants the job. There’d be administrative work — but he’d get to review shows too, see his name in print with (who knows?) maybe even a photograph of him, smiling or studious or … This Joost van Straten’s calling from here in Prague, and is saying that he’s supposed to meet Ivan later today to talk about an exhibition, but they haven’t fixed a time or place. Nick asks him:
“Do you know what time it is now?”
“It’s too early?” Joost van Straten sounds worried.
“Sorry?”
“Do I call too early?”
“No! No, not at all. It’s just that I don’t have a watch.”
“So I understand. It’s quarter-past nine. Nine fifteen.”
That’s fine: quarter-past nine is fine. They won’t even be there yet. Or they’ll just be trickling in: Jirka and Karolina first, always those two. Joost van Straten asks:
“Will you see him?”
“See him? No, I’ve got to go out.” He’ll stop at Anděl, have a věneček.
“Can you write for him a message?”
There’s no pen on the coffee table — just some of Ivan’s porno magazines. The floor beneath’s a sea of paint-stained clothes and oil rags that swirl around an archipelago of chair legs and free-standing shelves. The remains of a half-eaten potato salad cling to a plate; children’s toys spill from a capsized freight carton. Two of these, the engine carriage of a train and a rifle-bearing soldier with a hammer-and-sickle emblem on his plastic cap, have found their way onto a canvas hanging on the wall. So has some of the potato salad — plus a silk tie, a used condom and a photograph, an old one showing a family picnicking beside a lake. Below the canvas, a work table with a pen on it: a biro, lying in a pool of black paint. He can’t reach it from here, has to set the phone down again …
“Just a second.” The paint’s still wet; it gets on his fingers. “OK …”
“Are you Czech or English?”
“English. Czech too. My grandfather’s Czech.” Was. His mother’s father: died two months ago now — not quite two. Nick flew back for the funeraclass="underline" a cemetery off some motorway near Leicester. Holding the biro, he remembers sunlight wedging crisp across the chapel, sees his mother read There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies beside a wreath from the Royal Air Force Foreign Pilots’ Association … Then the scene fades and he’s telling Joost van Straten: “I can write your message now.”
“You are ready?”
“Yes.”
“So. I’ll be at the Gallery MXM. It’s in the park behind Karlův Most, Charles Bridge …”
“Kampa Park. Yes, I know it. Ivan knows it too.”
“I’ll be there all day today. Until five.”
“How do you …”
“Joost: J-o-o-s-t. Van Straten: S-t-r-a-t-e-n.” Nick’s ripped a page out of one of the magazines and is writing the note on it. That way Ivan’s bound to see it. MXM: right where this girl’s bending over, on her arse …
In the street outside it’s cold and icy, grey. Lidická: People’s Street. On the opposite pavement people are queuing at a tram stop. On this side another queue’s formed by a tank from which two men are selling carp. Always queuing, these people. Nick walks two blocks and steps into the Anděl Automat. The smell of broth and gravy hits him as the door closes behind him. Warm, moist air intensifies the odour, giving it a pungent edge. Clinks of cutlery and dishes rise from the high metal tables, echo off the plaster walls and blend beneath the ceiling boards with the scrapes of stools being pulled back, the squeaks of shoes rubbing the worn fake marble floor. Steam hisses behind the metal counters in the kitchen area and mingles with the sound of ladles plunging into swampy cauldrons, splattering thick liquid onto porcelain. Slurps, splashes, the odd cough. It reminds Nick of the baths in Greenwich where he learnt to swim: that mixture of closeness and distance; sounds of strangers echoing and dying across a cherubless, unfrescoed dome; and then the brothy smell of oxtail trickling from the drinks machine afterwards. His mother would have soup and he and his brother and sister would have Chopsticks, with their infinite regress packets, a boy playing a piano while holding a packet of Chopsticks on which a boy was playing a piano while …
A Gypsy, walking in behind him, nudges Nick back into the present. The Gypsy’s heading towards a group of his own people camped around the central tables swilling beer from glass mugs. The old ones are charred and wrinkled, peg-toothed; the young ones are missing teeth too, gummy spaces between chipped enamel glistening pink and brown. Their children chase each other around tables, sit and lie on bags. Ash-grey Czech men carry bowls of guláš and polévka towards other tables, tracing an exclusion zone around the Romanies. Nick joins the queue at the cake counter, buys a crumpled věneček, then queues at the drinks counter for mud-bedded káva and a glass of limonáda. He sips the limonáda as soon as it’s handed to him, then, realizing how thirsty he is, knocks the whole glass off in one go before setting it back down on the counter.