Men in Space (22 page)

He pauses and lets this sink in. It’s not him they want. The dark-haired man’s still leaning forwards, looking straight into his eyes. After several seconds he repeats the words even more slowly, almost in a whisper:

“
It’s … not you … they want
.”

And he sits back now: right back, slumped into his chair. Anton waits, hypnotized. The dark-haired man pulls himself up straight:

“They’ll take you,” he says, back at normal speed now, the tone higher, “they’ll take you if they can’t get anything better. That really depends on you. Whether you want to work with me or not. Whether or not you want to get out, and I mean right out – possession, forgery, murder, everything – before the process starts.”

“And how …” But he’s already sensing where this thing is going, sensing that he’s moving with it, moving through the corridors, being shown doors he didn’t know about before,
doors leading outwards, away from the central cell. The pattern has a certain regularity to it, and that in turn makes each new layer he’s led through seem familiar; he can even anticipate the next one’s rhythm of door opening, corridor being crossed, new door opening … The dark-haired man’s smiling again, his eyes slitted once more.

“You know who they want, don’t you, Anton?”

“I …”

The dark-haired man’s right hand is beckoning him, a traffic cop’s hand, summoning him forwards. Now the left one comes out too, and both hands wait, wide open; they become parent’s hands, and Anton the baby taking his first steps towards them.

“You do know, don’t you? Don’t you?”

Of course he does. “Ilievski.”

The hands go up now and gently bounce at head height beside the eyes that, like the hands, are turned up towards heaven. The Italianate look again:
Thank you for sending me the right answer
. Then they’re lowered to the table top to rest there, palms down. “Ilievski! Exactly, Anton! They want your uncle Constantine. Not just for the painting: they want him for everything he does. And you, Anton, can give him to them on a plate.”

Betrayal. The enormity of it. The garden at Gethsemane: that kiss. He’s seen it painted on churches’ walls. Even the soldiers, the Romans, seemed to recoil in horror at what Judas was doing. And now he’s got to decide whether … His turn to speak. He’s not being hurried into answering. The thin, dark-haired man knows as well as he does that there’s only one way out, the way he’s just mapped for him to the door, the final door, the only one that exits from the labyrinth he’s come and found Anton locked right at the centre of – the door he’s now holding ajar, letting Anton’s darkness glimpse its chink of light. This is what Anton sees superimposing itself over this room: a dark labyrinth, and light spilling
through a slightly open door. The light illuminates the walls, the floors, everything. If Anton doesn’t run straight away towards the door it’s because he wants to relish this amazing clarity. He’s never in his life seen things like this before. The light is flooding in, turning the walls to pure, transparent crystal …

If he turns back and looks inwards, he can see not just his present situation laid out with perfect visibility, but also his whole past: his childhood, adolescence, adulthood. He can see everyone he knows, each living their lives in one or another of the bright, clear rooms. He can see Uncle Stoyann in Philadelphia, checking candles in his church’s vestry, restocking shelves in cupboards behind purple curtains, placing lumps of incense in box drawers, the green gauze rubbing off and crumbling; he can see his mother pottering around the garden of the little dacha outside Dragalevtsi, turning the brown earth over with her long, thin pitchfork, wrenching out
kohlrabi
every autumn, one more year, another tiny harvest; he can see his father sleeping in the same brown earth nearby; and Toitov, older, greyer, still waving his pointer at the blackboard in the room where he met Helena; and all the other students who took Physics 7, their lives now, some of them qualified engineers like him, others working in white coats in state laboratories or themselves waving pointers in front of adolescents in high schools; and every player in each game he’s refereed, their names, numbers and positions …

He can see the lines and vectors linking all these people to one another, the trajectories along which they’ve travelled to get where they are. And he can see something else as well – two things which, although small, are somehow even brighter than the bright structure around them. They’re two things he thought were somewhere else, buried away in some other labyrinth entirely. The lines from every other part of the structure are converging on these two: strands as thin and silky as those spiders’ threads that float above
the frosted grass of pitches on cold winter mornings, but as strong and tenacious as suspension bridges’ cables. The strands converge on these two and then lead out again, separating, splitting, each heading their own way. The two are at a node, a point of high intensity – a point that Toitov, tugging at the strand that leads from him to Anton and to them, is telling him is
pivotal
. And Anton can see that if he can just get to that point, feel out its axis, pull the strands in a particular direction, in particular
directions
around it, then a turning force will be produced, a moment, and the leverage will spread a change through the entire network: everything will move together in a way he wouldn’t ever have thought possible, until now …

He’s going to do it. He’s
got
to do it; he’s driven by a compulsion stronger than self-preservation, fear, shame – anything. It doesn’t matter if he’s showered with coffee, screamed at, hit: this is so much bigger. His whole body trembles as he looks up and dares himself to say it, his voice barely audible:

“I’ll do it if we get the children back.”

The dark-haired man’s hands are still there, palms down, on the table, but the poise is going out of them, out of his shoulders, his whole body. None of him knows where to go next.

“You mean your wife’s children? The ones who …”

“The children. Yes, I mean the children. You know about them. You know everything.”

The dark-haired man’s eyes look away down to his left. He’s not denying it; there’s no point. His torso twists around, following the eyes. He pushes his chair back, stands up, walks to the room’s far corner and faces into it. After a few seconds he turns back and says hesitantly:

“Anton, I’m not really in a position to …”

“You are. You know you are.” He’s not going to stop now. “It’s a system, you see. Like with weights and pulleys and … 
and levers. It all balances out perfectly. Your people have the painting …”

“It’s with Interpol, I told you.”

“It’s in your jurisdiction.” This point’s not contested. Anton continues: “You’ve got this national treasure which Bulgaria wants back. And you want Ilievski, who I’ll give you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’ll testify about everything he’s ever done: the painting, passports, cars, protection, the whole lot. I’ll stab him in the back before your eyes if that’s what you want. Me, what I want …”

“What we’re giving you is freedom, Anton …”

“Fuck your freedom!” He can see the dark-haired man’s shoulders flinch as
his
muscles contract now. “I’ll go to prison for ten lifetimes if I have to! You can institute the death penalty and I’ll check the wiring on the chair for you myself. I don’t care! You won’t get Ilievski without my cooperation, and I won’t cooperate unless you get the children back for us. You know Bulgaria will let them go. What do the authorities there care? They’re just two children. Tell them if they want their painting back they have to give us back the children. Don’t you see? A triangulated system. It’s built this way; it won’t work any other.”

Of course the dark-haired man sees. He’s right there with him. It was he who let the light in through the door, and now Anton’s seen more than he intended, more than he even knew was there: he’s seen everything. The dark-haired man sighs, then looks at the lieutenant. The lieutenant brings his eyes up from his notes, then slowly, as though he were dozing off, slides their lids down. They stay closed for several seconds, then creak open again. The dark-haired man’s lips slowly move apart as though they were about to whisper something. Anton can see moisture inside, a strand glistening just in front of the teeth. The tongue slides out, moves across the slit and wipes the strand away. He turns to Anton, holds the index finger of his right hand up, about to point out something to
him, his mouth opening again, words promised as the finger lightly bounces in the air … But no words come out. Instead, the dark-haired man, taking his cue from the lieutenant who’s now walking through the doorway, turns and leaves the room.

They’re gone for a long time. It could be eight hours, or twelve, or twenty-four, or more. On two or three occasions uniforms, or perhaps the same uniform twice, come in and offer to bring Anton something to eat or to escort him to the toilet. He doesn’t even look at them, doesn’t move his eyes one millimetre from the middle-distance spot they’re focused on – just slowly and minutely shakes his head, and the uniforms go out again, closing the door behind them gently, almost reverently, as though anxious not to trespass on the landscape of his trance. Electric strip lights softly hum. Sometimes they flicker and fall silent for a fraction of a second and then start again, as though they wanted to insert some kind of rhythm, albeit an irregular one, through which time’s passing could be, if not measured, then at least acknowledged. It’s not that Anton’s lost his sense of time: rather, that time has become subsumed by something else. For him now, there’s only one dimension, one mode in which all things exist, in which they can be understood, and that’s the space, expanding outwards from this room, through which his irretractable demand is being carried: down the corridor and up the staircase to the room from which his two interrogators will relay it to their superiors; on to the offices in which the superiors’ superiors will consider it; on further to an office in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Bulgarian embassy on Sněmovní; then Sofia, the O.V.I.R … All other space is void. If he even moves, this void will come in and upset the delicate equilibrium of the dimension he’s created, cancel the delivery from the depths of itself which it’s now considering whether or not to make. One of the strip lights is flickering more rapidly now than it was earlier, impatient,
trying to force his space’s hand one way or the other, but Anton knows it can’t be forced: he just has to keep it there in front of him, look into it, stare it out …

When the thin, dark-haired man and the lieutenant do, finally, return, he senses straight away that a delivery of sorts has been made, that that’s what they’ve come back here to tell him. They look fresher. Must be a new day. The younger man’s step has a slight bounce to it. He moves towards the table with a businesslike air, sits down and smiles at Anton.

“
Zdravei
.”

Anton smiles back. “
Zdravei
.”

The lieutenant’s tapping his pen on the clipboard’s paper again, getting ready to make more notes. The dark-haired man’s still smiling at Anton, as though the two of them were co-conspirators in some student prank. After a long, slow silence he starts speaking suddenly:

“I tell you, Anton: what you give us on Ilievski’d better be really …”

Anton’s up, falling across the table as he hugs him.

“Get off me! Crazy Bulgarian!” He’s pushing him back into his seat, but with a kind of playful tenderness. As he lands back in it, Anton feels faint. Maybe it was jumping up so quickly, maybe it’s not sleeping or eating for however long he’s been here … The room’s blotching: brightening and blotching at the same time, the strip light flickering so fast now he can hardly make out …

“Don’t pass out on me, either! I’m not going to carry you back to your cell.” The dark-haired man gets up, walks over to the door, pushes it open and calls something down the hallway. A uniform comes in with a cup full of water, which the dark-haired man hands to Anton. The cold liquid on the inside of his throat revives him. “Dab some on your forehead too,” the dark-haired man says. Anton does this and the blotches disappear, but he feels suddenly very tired. The thin,
dark-haired man lifts the cup out of his hands and sets it on the table.

“I shouldn’t be this nice to you. You’ve put us through the mill with your conditions. If you knew what we’ve just …”

“When will they be back?”

“A few days. The cogs are in motion. Someone in Sofia is on holiday who has to … I won’t bore you with the details; you don’t need to know them anyway. We’ll have to get your wife moved somewhere safe before they come. We won’t do it just yet; there’s no immediate danger until we’ve rearrested Ilievski. You’ll stay here, of course. You can start giving depositions after …”

“When they’re here.”

“Of course, Anton. That’s the deal.”

“Will it be you who takes it from me?”

“What? The deposition?”

Anton nods.

“It might be. I can’t say. In the meantime we’ll move you to a better cell. I’ll tell them to do that when I go upstairs. Bear with me. We need to get you rested. You’ll be answering questions for several days on end. For you to sleep is what we all need most just now.”

He goes back to the door again and calls the uniforms in. They lead Anton back up the corridor, then up the flight of stairs, then down the other corridor back to his cell. The faintness is gone: he feels light-headed, but not faint.
Floaty
, more like. It’s an extremely pleasant feeling. He doesn’t notice the door shut: one second the uniforms are in there with him and the next they’re not, it’s closed.

He stands in the room’s centre and turns round on the spot, very slowly. The bed, the wall, the toilet and the ceiling have been transformed. It’s a pure space now: betrayal’s made him pure. He steps over to the bed and lies down on his back, arms crossed behind his head so that his cupped hands form a pillow. He’s clean, washed through inside and out,
the chambers of his mind as clear as those rooms that were illuminated for him earlier. It’s there below him, that crystal structure: as he half-closes his eyes he sees it from above. The people are still in there, the child and adolescent Antons too, all still intricately linked to one another. Helena’s children are being disentangled from the point, the node where he first found them, and led to the door he came through earlier. The other people stop what they’re doing for a moment and look up: Stoyann from his incense box and Toitov from his blackboard, Anton’s mother from her garden, footballers and students – everybody looks at them being led to freedom, then looks up towards where Anton floats in his bed, floating over Prague and Europe, over the Atlantic. Helena’s being lifted towards him, buoyed up by love. Phone wires buzz and hum as orders are zapped over to Sofia, as new orders are issued, typed up, zapped onwards again, as cars are dispatched to Dimitar’s home – all spaces merging now together, wishing Anton well as he floats high above them: they love him too. The people the cars pass by in the Sofia streets look up and love him; the thin, dark-haired man waves to him from below …