Read Online Men in Space by Tom McCarthy - Free Book Online

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 MilanHájek 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. BrotherFran-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,