Men in Space (28 page)

“You want to start a revolution here, like they had in Prague?” boomed Sasha a few days ago, overflowing with contempt for the Dutch system. “Then you have to go to the relevant offices, fill in a form, and they’ll give you a small grant to sit around like you had no balls, doing nothing. You know how artists here make their living?”

“No,” replied Nick. They were drinking coffee in the Italian place two doors down from their building.

“They get a
Basis Stipendium
when they leave art school: same salary as a civil servant’s. They get this whether or not they make any art.”

“So where’s the incentive to …”

“Exactly!” he banged the counter by the window as he said this. The other customers turned round – to look, Nick presumed, at this loud Yugoslavian – until he saw ten or so uniformed officers burst out of the police station that floated like a houseboat in front of the café. Five peeled left, passed the strange blue-and-red mushroom benches on the Nieuwmarkt’s edge and raced down the Kloveniersburgwal’s far side; the other five ran to the right, crossed the bridge by De Hoogte, then cut back left so they, too, were running down the far bank of the Kloveniersburgwal, straight towards their pals. Between the two bunches of cops a small South American man was pulling himself out of the canal: no sooner had he stood up than they were on him, wrestling him to the ground.

“Did you hear the splash?” asked Sasha, all excited.

“I heard something.”

“That man has jump out of the police station.”
Has jump
: Nick was back with Mladen for an instant. He and Sasha went to school together: must have had the same English teacher. “He has jump out of the window into the canal, and swum to the far side. The police have captured him again, but I take my hat off to this man. He’s won a moral victory.”

Sasha’s in his second year as an art student. He’s got refugee status, like Mladen. He’s very with it: listens to Laibach, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine. Over the last six months he’s been working on a performance piece involving windows: he and two collaborators bang and scrape on windows, producing sounds. He’s played a tape of one of his concerts to Nick and invited him to come to the next one, maybe even write it up for
Art in Europe
. On his first night in Amsterdam Nick froze because Sasha had removed, just prior to his last concert, the glass pane from one of the windows in the attic room which he’d persuaded the others in the house to let Nick live in. The next day he took Nick out to get a new one from a glazier on De Clerqstraat. When they stepped onto a tram to carry the pane home, the driver refused to leave the stop until they got off. Neither of them understood at first: the tram just stood there and a message came over the tannoy which didn’t seem prerecorded like in Prague, and all the other passengers were looking at them angrily. Eventually one of them said something to them; they told him they didn’t understand him so he said in English:

“You may not travel with the glass.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous to other passengers. If there’s an accident, the glass might injure us.”

Us. As they walked the whole way back to Nieuwmarkt, taking it in turns to carry the pane, Nick remembered how Ivan had acquired this sudden interest in Frieda Kahlo around
the time he was painting that odd icon painting, just before he died. He’d told everyone who came to the atelier about her accident: the tram’s pole that skewered her, the gold bag. Nick told Sasha the story, which as it turned out Sasha knew already:

“This is my point absolutely!” He spat in disgust as the tram disappeared towards the Marnixstraat. “No risk; no beauty. Holland will never have a Frieda Kahlo.”

Art in Europe
has its offices on the Leidsegracht, above the centre of the Euthanasia Society. Even death is regulated here. The fourth floor’s corridor is full of stacked-up back issues of the magazine – which, it struck Nick on his first day here, can’t be a good sign, because if they’re there it means they didn’t sell. The office itself is a long room with five desks in it. There’s Julia’s, then Lucy’s, then Johanna’s, then Nick’s, then a fifth one no one uses but is still all decked out with in- and out-trays and a computer. Elijah’s, Nick called it on his first day here, which no one got.

Julia Emerson’s strange: cold and engaging at the same time. She’s from Woolwich, working class and on the rise. She’s edited other magazines before and probably won’t be with this one for too long. Lucy’s the one Nick spoke to on New Year’s Day. She must be about two years older than him: twenty-four, twenty-five. His picture of her in the broken phone box wasn’t that far off: she’s well organized and smart. She has dark, shoulder-length hair and wears velvet skirts and thick black tights that Nick would kind of like to get inside but probably won’t: she’ll end up with a gallerist, all jackets and sports cars and weekends in the country, maybe the odd sniff of coke. Johanna’s in her thirties, same as Julia. Dutch-American, a mid-Atlantic accent. She dresses even more smartly than Lucy, in shoulder pads and high-heeled boots: a professional woman. Her interest in art is social: she knows all about relations between galleries, who’s feuding with whom, what Paris thought about the way Fuchs hung
the Picasso paintings lent him by the Pompidou, why So-and-So in Brooklyn won’t lend Golubs to Berlin. Lucy has a debutantish enthusiasm for art, and gushes about colour and movement from time to time. Julia’s got no interest in art at all.

Nick’s already written up two shows. There was the Kiefer installation at the Stedelijk, this giant aeroplane with old encyclopedias nestling in dried bracken behind glass panels mounted in its wings and a stuffed snake lying in its cockpit. Nick mentioned in his piece the Soviet cosmonaut stuck up in space, which Julia liked, and called the work “an allegory of the Western
epistème
”, which she told him was pretentious bollocks and excised. The other show was at the Praktijk: a US artist called Daniel Todd, whose paintings had vaguely human figures looming out of muddy, neutral backgrounds. Nick worked a quote from T.S. Eliot into his review, a line from
The Waste Land
about dry banks and arid plains, which Julia sneered at but let stand. Today, though, he’s doing listings, which is boring as fuck. Julia found out he spoke French, German and Czech and gave him a list of galleries in those three countries, plus Austria and Switzerland, to phone up for their programmes over the next three months. The MXM is on there: that gallery in Kampa Park, by Maňásek’s mother’s place. He hasn’t phoned them yet – but he’s phoned Gábina, who wasn’t in. He’s waiting for a callback from a gallery in Cologne called Schröder.

Julia has the radio playing all day long, always the same Dutch pop station. The DJ’s voice between each track reminds Nick of Joost van Straten’s: it has the same upturn in it, as though each utterance were a question. In the white bar by Gábina’s after they’d left Maňásek’s mother’s place, Joost gave Nick his number and told him to call when he came to Amsterdam. He’s been here almost a month now; he wanted to look him up when he was at the Stedelijk but didn’t have the number on him. He’s got it here, in the black-and-red
notebook he bought in London just before he left for Prague, scrawled somewhere towards the end or the middle, in some margin … He should be organized like Lucy or Johanna. Loose papers fall to the floor as he flips through the pages. He finds the number, bends to pick the papers up and is just about to call when Lucy, receiver hooked across her shoulder, tells him that she’s got a call for him and is sending it across. His own phone rings and he picks up:

“Nicholas Boardaman.”

“Hello?” It’s a man’s voice: foreign, not Dutch.

“Yes, hello.”

“That’s Nikola Boardaman?”

“Yes. Who’s that?”

“Nikola Boardaman?”

“Is that the Galerie Schröder? … Hello?” But the guy’s gone. “Who the fuck was that?” he asks Lucy. She smiles at him and shrugs.

“Swearing!” warns Julia, with her trademark air of detached irony.

“Didn’t he say?” he asks Lucy again, ignoring her.

“No. He sounded Russian.”

“To me he sounded like this Bulgarian guy I know.” He never went round and said goodbye to Anton, or found out if Helena got a reply from the UNHCR to that letter he cleaned up for her. The phones ring again. Julia picks up first:

“
Art in Europe
. What? Yes, hang on.” She cradles her receiver like Lucy did a moment ago – a kind of office knack they like to show off here – turns to Nick and says: “Another Russian-sounding bloke for you. You’re popular with the KGB this afternoon.” She presses a button and the phone on his desk rings.

“Maybe it’s him again,” Nick murmurs, picking up. “Hello?”

“Nick?” It’s a different person, someone he knows.

“Yes?”

“Sasha here.”

“Sasha! Hello.” What’s he calling here for? Nick’ll be back in a couple of hours. “What’s new?”

“Listen: we have receive a letter from the lawyer of the man who owns this building.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yes, oh shit. He’s got the necessary documents to make us leave.”

“Can’t we contest it?”

“A judge already has made his decision. A copy of the judgement’s arrived with the letter.”

“Can’t we appeal?”

“Frankie says this kind of paper means the decision is final.”

“When must we move out?”

“Five weeks from today maximum. If we stay longer he can send police round to break the door down … You hear me?”

“Yes. So what do we … Where will you go?”

“I’ve been with Jessica this afternoon to the
Herhuisvesting
place. They’ve given me a form. Because I’m an official refugee, I should have priority for a new place. They said they will certainly give me one. If you don’t find somewhere before we leave, you can stay with me until you do.”

“Well, thank you. I’ll try to find somewhere by then, though.”

“Bring some toilet paper when you come here.”

“Right. Yeah. Bye.” He hangs up, then, for Lucy’s benefit who’s already been half-listening, adds: “Shit.”

“You’re fired,” sneers Julia across her shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” asks Lucy.

Nick tells her. She listens, then says:

“Well, you can use my sofa for a week if you have nowhere.”

Does she like him after all? Maybe her sofa’s in the same room as her bed: it will be if her flat’s a studio. Nick pictures
black tights hanging over radiators … He tries not to sound overenthusiastic as he answers:

“Well, thanks, that’s really kind. I don’t think it’ll come to that. I mean, I can stay with my friend Sasha.”

“Well, the offer’s there.” She turns back to her work. Is she blushing? Johanna’s noticed him looking at Lucy; he buries his eyes in his list, picks a random gallery in Hamburg and phones them up. Warhol, Bourgeois. Cindy Sherman in April. He writes the dates down, then decides to call Joost like he meant to twenty minutes ago. Some guy, not Joost, answers:

“
Met
Han.” Like
mit
, as in
You’re speaking with
.

“Hello. May I speak to Joost van Straten?”

There’s a silence on the far end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Who calls?” The voice sounds cautious, suspicious.

“My name’s Nicholas Boardaman. I know Joost from Prague.”

“Yes. He wrote about you in one letter.”

“Oh! Right … Is he not back yet from …” Where did he say that he was going? Lithuania? There’s a Lithuanian painter called Vaitkunas showing at the Stedelijk; maybe Joost’ll know him. This guy Han’s being very slow in answering. “He told me he was going to collect paintings for a show, or …”

“He is dead.”

Nick holds the phone and looks at the empty desk.

“Hello?” the man on the far end says. “Are you there still?”

“Yes,” he answers. “When did he …” Lucy’s looking at him again: she can sense from his tone that something’s wrong. Julia and Johanna too. Han speaks slowly, in a voice that still has that upswing at the end of every sentence even though it’s deep and pained:

“In Tallinn. In Estonia. He died there, walking on ice. In the bay the water was frozen, and he walked out far across it. He didn’t come back.”

“Jesus Christ! I …”

“Nicholas?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to meet? Joost wanted to see you here. He said you might write a catalogue piece for the exhibition he was planning. We will make this show, as a memorial.”

“Well, yes. Of course. I’d …”

“When is good for you? Next Friday?”

“Sure.”

They arrange to meet at Han’s workplace. Han gives him directions, which he writes down. When he hangs up Lucy tells him he’s gone white.

“Someone’s … I’ve just got to …” He goes to the toilet, slaps some water on his face, then looks up at the mirror. It is white, with pink pools growing in the cheeks where the cold water hit it. He tries to imagine what it’s like falling through ice: you might just slip off peacefully as cold closes down your body slowly, without pain. Or maybe you’d panic and, trapped, claw at the ice’s underside like Sasha banging and scraping on his windows, but without an audience: just sky and the odd seagull. Even if there were people on the other side who you could see, above the surface, they wouldn’t know you were there if they hadn’t seen you fall …

Nick feels claustrophobic. He opens the toilet’s window. From this height, the layout of canals below looks like a spider’s web. The buildings and the sky blur into a continuous grey for a few seconds and then separate out again and grow distinct. The creak of a bicycle’s wheels comes to him from the street, and mingles with Julia’s voice, which is calling to him that she’s got the Galerie Schröder on the phone.

* * * * *

 … to the car market by Palmovka. Above it was a fenced-off compound in which 3 [three] shafts rose from the earth. They looked to me like pens, like the pen with which I am
writing now: 3 [three] pens with their caps fitted to their tail ends, the clips with which pens can be made to remain stable in their users’ pockets forming slight protrusions, the nibs buried deep down in the earth below. They also looked like periscopes, although the slatted surface of the clips’ outer sides made me think of microphones more than of viewing eyes. There were also large cylinders, or tubes, piled up in pyramid formation. They were rusty. I think it likely, although not certain, that these were previously sections of a gas or sewage pipe. They were intended to be placed beneath the ground and yet were placed above, in full view of passers-by while, conversely, the shafts were plunged far down, as though to ventilate a world of people who had chosen to conduct subterranean existences in a burrow-like network of rooms and tunnels. Some things should be hidden, some things not. Why do I write this? I do not know, and yet I feel that I should, for the record.