Men in Space (32 page)

“We’re meeting him in here?”

“Who?” Janachkov asks, still looking away.

“This Greek guy.”

“Of course!” Koulin starts bouncing as he walks. “By Hvězda. The hunting lodge.”

“Hvězda? Doesn’t that mean star?”

No answer. It does, though. He remembers learning it:
hvězda
, fem. noun, type 1;
hvězda, hvězdu, hvězdě, hvězdy …
Star. Are they that high up? They’ve reached the wall now, and are about to pass through a small door in it when Milachkov stops,
tssks
and announces:

“I’ve forgotten the thing in the car!”

Koulin and Janachkov nod gravely. Anton asks:

“What thing?”

“Oh, the … thing. The, you know, the records of our past dealings with this Greek guy. I’ll just … I’ll catch you up.” He turns round and heads back beneath the circling toy plane towards the car. Anton, flanked by Koulin and Janachkov, passes through the door in the white wall.

Inside, a long, broad avenue cuts through the woods. It has a really classical perspective: evenly spaced benches punctuate his eye’s passage down the avenue’s sides, shrinking as the two lines converge towards their own resolution at infinity, their vanishing point – a point not quite reached due to the presence, in a circular clearing perhaps half a kilometre away, of a large white building.

“Oh! What’s that?” Anton’s never been here before.

“Hvězda. The hunting lodge,” Jana informs him, his eyes scouring the woods on either side.

“Is that where we’re …”

“Near there. In the woods.”

Small footpaths lead into these woods, splitting and criss-crossing as they cut through a web of birch trees, sycamore trees and giant evergreens. Some of the trees have markings on them, little red or white lines: must be for guiding walkers around – although it seems to Anton that the trees are so thickly packed you’d need a ball of string to find your way back out again, like Helena’s guy in his Greek labyrinth. Or was it Minoan? Greek guy in a Minoan …

“Hey, what’s this man’s name?”

“Well, it’s Jerémiah.”

“Jerémiah? What sort of a Greek name is that?”

Janachkov shrugs. “He’s sort of Greek, but not completely. He’s Greek originally, but he’s from all over the place.”

Two more kids run out of the woods, shooting at each other with cap guns, and race past them, heading for where they’ve come from, to the door in the wall. Anton bought Kristof a gun like theirs once, but Helena disapproved and took it away again. They’re perhaps two hundred, two hundred and fifty metres from the white building now. It’s strangely shaped, neither round nor square but kind of jutty: its walls head in, then out, then in again. Beneath a grey slate roof that seems to fold and crumple, irregularly positioned windows peep from between red-and-white shutters, as though monitoring their approach. Ten metres further, and the building’s surfaces fall into place. The walls jut in and out to form a kind of pentagon, a star shape. Of course.
Hvězda
: star. The hunting lodge is star-shaped: named after one, built like one. Anton stops walking, turns round and lets his gaze run back along the avenue they’ve been shuffling up like worshippers up an aisle towards an altar. It’s a surveyor’s dream, straight and orthogonal – as though the building, like
a real star, exercised such an intense and overpowering force that all space around it fell into shape in concordance with the lines and vectors of its field, its pull. Even the tiny footpaths through the woods, for all their splitting and gyrating, lead to the building: he’s sure of this, sure that the red and white marks on the trees are daubed on in the same phosphorous mixture as the shutters’ red and white and are orbiting the latter, like a belt of tiny asteroids. Mila’s being drawn back towards the building too: Anton can see his diminutive figure re-entering the area enclosed by the white wall, through the doorway that looks like the doorway to some kind of mausoleum, heading up the avenue towards them, towards it. He’s carrying a large object: looks a bit like a surveyor’s pole although Anton knows he’s only thinking this because of the perspective and the straightness, the converging … He turns back towards the star and starts walking again.

“Wait!”

Janachkov here. He’s still peering into the woods – looking, presumably, for this oddly named Greek, Jerémiah. Eventually he points to the left and says:

“This way.”

Janachkov trudges in first; Anton follows him; Koulin brings up the rear. They have to walk in single file because the footpath’s narrow. Beside it, little white flowers are pushing through the wood’s floor, a whole army of them. Ilievski’s exit from the car was so bizarre. Right by the flower shop, too. Perhaps he’d had bad news from Sofia, some family death that he was keeping to himself. Chrysanthemums are funeral flowers: when Anton’s father died, his aunts and uncles all sent chrysanthemums, white ones. Stoyann even managed to phone in an order from Philadelphia – a feat his sister, Anton’s mother, never got her head round, enquiring, even after Anton had explained it to her several times, whether Stoyann could have grown them in his garden: she’d heard that the climate in America was agreeable, much milder
than Sofia … They pass some plastic bottles strung up from the lower branches of a tree to hold water for birds. There’s birdsong all around them, really loud. Robins, thrushes, finches, magpies maybe. He can’t see them: must be hiding in the mesh of trunks and branches with this Jerémiah. Half a million, Koulin said. What’s that in Greek?
Miso hil
 … no,
hiliariko
is a thousand; half a million’s
miso ekatomirio
.
Miso ekatomirio
. Janachkov’s stopped and turned to face him; he’s ushering him off to the track’s right, waiting for him to go first, like a well-trained footman …

“We’re meeting him right in the
middle
of the woods?”

Janachkov nods.

“Jesus! What’s wrong with cafés these days?”

Janachkov shrugs. Anton steps past him and negotiates his way around twigs and stumps. It’s really dense here: the trees’ trunks all rise straight up, the tall birches and the sycamores and then the taller fir trees, their main branches falling across one another and smaller, higher branches and their even smaller offshoots madly networking against the clouds’ white. Anton’s feet crunch twigs and leaves as he walks. He’s trying not to step on the white flowers, but it’s difficult: they’re everywhere, just like the birdsong was until a moment ago when this plane, this real plane, started flying by, eclipsing bit by bit all other noises. It must be low: the whole wood’s moaning, singing with the sound of metal flight and speed and distance. A twig’s prodding him from behind, digging into his ribs: makes him think of Ilievski for some reason. Anton drops onto his knees and inspects the ground more closely. There are so many layers: first ferns, then leaves – large sepia-toned leaves whose skeletons loom through their decomposing flesh, and then those straight leaves he used to throw up in the air and watch helicoptering down towards the pavement when he was a child; then, below these, pieces of dead wood with insects crawling over them. Then, even lower down, moss, more twigs, earth. Looking at
it from this close is like being in a plane or helicopter flying over a landscape: tiny sprouts of fern become tall trees, green canopies erupting high above a forest roof …

Somehow the twig’s got into him. Ilievski’s finger, Jerémiah’s twig. Anton, still kneeling, turns round. Behind Janachkov, who’s holding some kind of black thing, a calculator on which he’s working out figures, exchange rates – or perhaps a toy, some kind of toy like kids were playing with somewhere, his and Helena’s kids or the ones she’s got already or perhaps himself when he was small, Anton can see the star’s face, winking one of its eyes at him, then winking another, red and white eyes on a white face, closing.

* * * * *

It’s an hour from Prague to Amsterdam, then eight hours from Amsterdam to JFK, then four more hours from there to San Francisco. The first leg’s on one of those cute little propeller numbers. Roger and Barbara walk out of the terminal, past the row of Soviet helicopters rotting in the long grass by the runway, then climb up a wheel-around staircase. It must have been like this to fly in the Sixties, or even the Fifties. Each time the plane hits a cloud it’s buffeted sideways, and both their Bloody Marys get all worked up in their glasses. Air pockets swallow and regurgitate them, as though deeming their tiny metal dragonfly too small to merit digesting. It’s overcast, but when they clear cloud level Roger’s amazed at how many other aeroplanes they can see. You never see any when you fly over the US. European airspace must be tightly regulated, carved up into invisible corridors to avoid collisions. Not so invisible, at that: vapour trails sparkle above and around them. When the cloud clears he can see markings cutting up the earth, too: motorways, rivers, fire breaks in forests, walls of cemeteries, the crossed loops of sewage works. They land among a coruscating
whirl of yellow, white and red lines that split from and then rejoin one another as they lead them to the terminal: feels like they’re moving over a huge basketball court …

They’ve only got two hours in Amsterdam: can’t even leave the airport. Barbara would have had to buy a visa, thirty dollars for two hours, and if they’d wanted to stay any longer they’d have had to pay a stopover excess, which fuck it. Mladen’s given him a number for Nick; he calls it, gets an answering machine, leaves a message. Then it’s up towards the stratosphere again, this time on a proper KLM jumbo with the works:
Top Cat
eye-covers and toothbrushes, headphones, rugs, slippers. When they’ve finished their meal and coffee and the lights are dimmed, two hours or so into the flight, they slip their rugs on and Barbara leads his hand into her lap, sends it past undone buttons and elastic to where it’s warm and damp, then turns her head away and presses it against the window, mouth opening to the dark blue of the early evening sky …

They’re flying with the sun: behind it, so it seems time’s standing still. It was dusk when they left Schiphol and it’s still dusk as they’re clearing Greenland. Roger can see huge white cliffs of ice that drop straight into the sea. He knows it’s Greenland because there’s a screen at the front of the section they’re in which has a map on it showing their position, speed and altitude. The image alternates between the area they’re over right now, with a large plane nudging its way across it, and the whole stretch of northern hemisphere between Europe and America, with a much smaller plane. Zooms and pull-backs, just like in cinema: they contextualize – is what he was taught back at Berkeley. The short dashes trailed behind the plane-symbol confer narrative progress. Bread-and-butter techniques: he should brush up on them when he gets home. Going to need them. Michael, the adman who he met at Jean-Luc’s party last December, has set him up with his agency’s San Francisco branch, a job in
the creative dept: filming, editing, stuff like that. It’s perfect, just perfect. Maybe he can even come in Sundays and edit all the European rushes, the peasant
90210
, get them shown at indie festivals. There’s time for everything; he’s just got to use it right, not get bogged down. Up here in the sky Roger feels good, confident,
invigorated
, that’s the word, ready to hit the ground running, eight hundred twenty kilometres/five hundred ten miles per hour …

Barbara’s fallen asleep. The screen gives over to promotional footage of a KLM jet in mid-flight: revolving angle, must have been shot from a fighter plane flying around it. There’s sunlight flashing from behind its fin – although the near side’s not in shadow, so the sun must have been edited in afterwards. The sunlight becomes a column beaming out from a projector, then the angle spins round to reveal the KLM in-flight entertainment logo blazing on a screen. They’re going to be shown
Dances with Wolves
. Whoopee. Roger slips his headphones on and finds the right channel. Kevin Costner is cruising the Wild West befriending animals and Indians alike, discovering among the latter group a squawed-up Mary McDonnell, with whom he sets about getting all jiggy. Trouble brews. Et cetera. After the first half hour Roger takes the headphones off and watches without sound. He finds he can infer the entire dialogue. Besides, watching it mute gives it a quality it never had originally – a rich, alien feel, as though the characters were living in some kind of outer space through which sound doesn’t travel …

After the movie ends he falls asleep too. When he wakes up they’re somewhere around the Canada/US border. It’s more than dusk now: they’ve given up chasing the sun and are heading south. Roger can vaguely make out coastline, but not much else. Barbara wakes up for Boston, a sprawl of yellow and green lights. There are refreshments, neither supper nor breakfast, then the descent over Long Island, touch down. From the terminal they can just see Manhattan, the top of
the Empire State lit up green and red. While they’re waiting for their bags somebody taps him on the shoulder.

“Oh my God! What are you …” It’s Heidi, that girl he met at that party, same night he met Barbara, and …

“Welcome to America!” She’s beaming, and looks fuller than she did when he last saw her, in December. Not fatter, just less thin. “I take it you two have just arrived as well.”

“You’ve flown via Amsterdam?” he asks her.

“Paris. You live in New York?”

“No, San Francisco.”

“Oh, that’s right: you told me. I’d forgotten.”

“Yeah, we’ve got to do another four hours. How about you?”

“Vermont. I’ve got to go into Manhattan and catch a bus.”

“Let’s have a drink.”

“OK,” says Heidi. Roger has to wait for Barbara to clear immigration, so it takes them half an hour to get to the bar. Heidi’s on a stool drinking a coke. She’s taken her coat and jumper off and has a small bulge in her lower stomach.

“She’s pregnant,” Barbara whispers as they walk up to her.

“Hi again. You know what? I’ve got to go already. The last bus leaves Port Authority at ten.” Heidi stoops to pick up her bags and clothes. Barbara reaches down and gets them for her.