“Hey Nicku!” Here’s Gábina, carrying her portfolio round the corner from the main hall. Tights, grey skirt, red headband. She was wearing the headband when they first met: the height of summer, August or July, a retrospective of situationism at the Mánes Gallery — or outside it, rather, as you couldn’t get near the door for all the crowds. Staropramen, who were sponsoring the show, had dispatched from their brewery not half a mile away a tanker truck of beer which was standing ruminating, head down, in the middle of the street outside the gallery while servers filled glass after glass from faucets dotted round its underbelly and handed these out, free, to anyone who wanted them — hence the crowds. The whole area had come to a standstilclass="underline" pyramids of foam-capped glasses rose above the cobblestones, seven or eight feet tall; people stumbled, danced and swayed around these. On the gallery’s roof a jazz band was playing. After they’d done two or three numbers a helicopter appeared from over Smíchov and hovered low above them; the band, for their part, carried on, unfazed. A rope was lowered from the helicopter’s side; the bassist clipped this to his chair and, still holding his instrument, was lifted up and flown dangling away towards the castle: a pre-planned stunt. It was while he fiddled with his harness prior to lift-off and the chopper hovered, wind from its propellers toppling the pyramids and whipping up a storm of dust and broken glass and beer, that Gábina was blown into Nick.
“Providence!” he shouted to her.
“What?” The noise was deafening.
“Providence! Fate!”
“Coincidence!” she shouted back. She took him to another art show that same afternoon, one in her dad’s gallery, the Prague House of Photography. Gábina took Nick to lots of shows that summer, introducing him to everyone as an art critic. Nick’s only twenty-two, and he’s with Art in Europe! she’d say. Not quite yet, he tried to tell them — but the label stuck, and he was asked to write the odd piece here and there reviewing such and such a show. He found the Czechs really like it if you call something postmodern, so he called everything he wrote about postmodern: These postmodern landscape paintings … This postmodern portraitist … In early autumn, Gábina landed him the job he’s about to clock back onto right now, Dana having lumbered in and clapped her hands, all stern and Rosa Klebs-like …
Nick trudges with the students into Kolář’s studio and takes his jacket off. A blow-heater’s humming at the base of a small podium. Easels and chairs are shuffled into position; Stanley knives zip through large rolls of paper; tape is peeled and cut. Jirka’s already drawing a grid across his paper, lining his space up, netting it. The tiling makes a grid across the floor. Nick pictures again the cross-wires in the skylight above his bed, the pigeons spread across coordinate points behind it. He pictures cages, box junctions and the starter grids of racing tracks as he removes the rest of his clothes, steps naked onto the podium and, bathed by the blow-heater’s stream of hot air, strikes up his usual posture: left leg slightly forwards, slightly bent, both hands on hips.
* * * * *
Yes, Ivan … yes, I’m … Klárá, writhing, hands pushing back leaves, grabbing at them, snapping them and grinding them together as her hips shudder upwards … the one bare thigh where the tights have come half off all pink and goose-pimpled from cold and from excitement … then her whole torso arching like a gymnast’s, rising to a final jolt as the palms open to release a trickle of brown flakes, all skein and membrane run together, flowing back from her towards the ground as yes I’m coming now, don’t … This is Ivan Maňásek’s abiding memory of the revolution.
There are others, of course. He remembers seeing the FILMU students spilling out from their faculty building above the Café Slavia and climbing stepladders, megaphones in hand, to direct people up Národní Třída. He remembers taxi drivers, wirelesses tuned constantly to Radio Stalin, refusing to take payment as they ferried him first to Havel’s apartment on Rašínovo Nábreží, and then — clasping the statement the O.F. movement had entrusted to him to deliver to the Soviet Embassy — to his mother’s so that she could check the Russian grammar in it … and finally, clasping the alarm clock he’d swiped from her kitchen (Havel had insisted the statement arrive at the same time, to the minute, as the one Eliška Šumová was carrying to the Americans), edging through the crowd of people holding candles as they flowed around the car towards the Lennon Wall, on up to Hradčany. He remembers being arrested the moment he left the embassy and held for two days before — without explanation — being suddenly released to find the crowds were everywhere, filling all of Letná with their banners as he made his way down to Václavské Náměstí, where Havel — now president in all but name — was installed on a balcony, his speeches drowned out by cheers and jingling keys, the whole square a mass of flags, bandannas, people dancing, crying, hugging one another, waiters running out of bars and restaurants to hand out cakes, sausages, hot wine …
But his strongest memory comes from just after all this. In the square, Milan Hájek pressed some mushrooms into his hand before disappearing back into the crowd; a few moments later he bumped into Klárá, and they rode up to the park at Šárka, eating Hájek’s mushrooms in the taxi. They came on strong and fast. As the two of them sat in the woods, in silence, facing one another a metre or so apart, the middle finger of Ivan’s right hand slightly twitched, as though coming into unexpected contact with some object. There was nothing solid there, but when Ivan pressed the finger gently forwards he felt an almost tangible pocket of energy forming around it, velveteen and warm. The shape and texture were unmistakable: these were labia. He slid his finger a little further in and felt a clitoris, which he started to stroke rhythmically. Almost instantly — and this was really weird — Klárá started moaning, rubbing her hands over her thighs and slipping her tights down. Ivan undid his belt and moved towards her — but she stopped him, told him that it was precisely his not touching her that was getting her off, and to please just carry right on stroking this displaced, disembodied pussy. In his state, it made sense to play along; he found not only that Klárá’s body would respond to the variation in his strokes despite the fact that her eyes were closed, opening only in brief snatches to look straight up at the sky, but also that her pleasure was infecting him. It was as though an invisible third person, some nymph drawn halfway into existence by the day’s events, were transferring energy between them. Their orgasms, like Havel’s statements, arrived simultaneously. His was without doubt the best of his whole life. It was the best feeling of his whole life. Even before his spasms had died down, he knew that that was what he had been fighting for all this time: not civic participation, freedom of expression or the right to make bad abstract films and paintings, but this feeling, this moment, this limitless and overwhelming potency.
To feel that way again, relive that instant … If what happened in the woods at Šárka was some cosmic, transcendental coitus, then the three years since November eighty-nine have been one drawn-out detumescence. Nothing’s exciting any more. Half the old underground set who he’d get drunk and stoned with week in and week out at Havel’s place were given government positions — not him. Havel won’t have Ivan near him any more. He wondered for a year or so why that might be, then heard from Sláva Kinček — who’s now ditched art to work in advertising (all new Converse All-Star T-shirts, Kickers, reservations at this French place behind Hellichova, they do lobster there Ivan …) — that there’d been hints from certain quarters that Havel had been let’s say surprised at Ivan’s willingness to take the statement to the Soviets — which, coupled with the fact that his mother was Russian … No one’s been accused of anything outright, you understand Ivan, but there are murmurs … He sank into a deep depression after learning this, one for which alcohol and narcotics have turned out to be his primary, if ineffective, treatment.