Men in Space by Tom McCarthy Read Free Book Online

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