Men in Space (33 page)

“Shall we carry these for you?”

“No thanks. I’m not that far gone. Only four months. I don’t feel weak, just sick sometimes. While it is true,” she switches to Czech, “that, of a morning, I have little appetite, nonetheless I do not breakfast eagerly, so for me this poses no great problem.” She’s smiling so much it seems she could just float to Vermont. She takes Barbara by the shoulders, plants a big, lippy kiss on each cheek, then does the same to him – then, without saying another word, turns round and walks away.

* * * * *

The Klementinum has an outer wall around it, running from Karlova to Mariánské Náměstí, then back down Platnéřská to Křižovnická. Inside this, a cobbled courtyard leads towards the library’s small entrance door. It’s got strange acoustics: Helena has small feet that never clump or stamp and rarely produce any sound at all – but here they send a kind of hushed rustle to the walls, and the walls send the rustle back, as though they and the feet were whispering to one another. Beyond the door, a smoking room with notices dotted around it. The reading room itself is down a corridor, past this guard leaning against the wall, pushing himself off it, stepping across to block her route now as she …

“Do you have a card, miss?”

They’ve popped up everywhere, these awful Pinkertons. Some big Canadian company: started out as strike-breakers in the last century, Anton told her. They’re not regulated at all: any thug could join up and be issued on the spot with a revolver. Guarding a library, of all places … Helena opens her handbag, fishes around and pulls her passport out.

“No, miss, I mean a library card.”

“Oh. No. No, I don’t, but …”

“You need one of those to come in here.”

“How do I get one?”

“Students at Charles University are eligible. So are ones from other universities, but they need some kind of letter. Proof of … You need one to use the library.” It would surprise her if this guy could even read. She tells him:

“I’m from Bulgaria. I live here. I’m doing independent research. I have a PhD from Sofia University. I have it with me.”

“You need some kind of letter …”

“Yes, I have that. Can I …” She tries to look beyond him, but she’s much too small. He takes her passport and flips
through it, probably something he saw real cops doing once, then points towards a window to the right.

“You can ask there.”

The woman in the window’s friendly, young: must be a student earning a bit of money. She asks for proof of address; doesn’t need to see the PhD certificate. She writes a card out, slips it into a plastic pouch and hands it to her, smiling.

“Down the corridor to the right.”

The Pinkerton asks her to check her coat. A scowling older woman grabs it and slams a plastic marker down onto a counter.

“Fifty crowns if you lose it.”

The reading room’s long and high-ceilinged. Rather than individual desks there are rows: long tables running from beside the issue desk right to the windows on the room’s far side, with each space semi-partitioned from its neighbours. Just over half the spaces are taken. They’re all students, ten years younger than her, perhaps even more, slouched back in their seats or slumped right forwards, napping, or munching on
chlebíčk
y and slurping pop through straws. You couldn’t do that in Sofia, in the big library off Shipka. Helena chooses a space down in the far-left corner where it seems quietest, takes her pen and notepad from her bag, then walks over to the catalogue drawers and finds the non-author-listed, general-reference index.

B:
Byzantine
. Just after
Bulgarian
, as chance would have it.
Byzantine Civilization
,
Guide to Byzantine Culture
,
Byzantine Art
 … She’s getting close here, just flip through a few more and – yes, here:
Dictionary of Byzantine Inscriptions
. Perfect. She clicks her pen’s point out, copies the shelf mark into her notebook, then goes over to the issue desk, fills in a request form and hands this to another student who’s working behind the desk.

“How long do you think it’ll …”

“Not long,” he says. “Fifteen to twenty minutes.”

She’ll go outside and get some pop herself. There’s a stall on Karlova that all the tourists stroll past as they come off Karlův Most. It’s probably expensive, but at least the drink will be cold. It’s a nice day, bright and warm. Perhaps one of those early springs is starting. There’s no point retrieving her coat just for five minutes. Helena whispers her way past the walls again, then turns into Karlova. As she walks up to the stall, she hears that the man behind it is talking in Bulgarian to his neighbour, who’s selling army surplus hats. She catches just a snatch of what he’s saying:

“… really should have known not to do that …” then, in Czech to her: “Yes, madam.”

“Orangeade, please.”

“Not bad, eh?” he says to the hat seller, switching back to Bulgarian, as he pulls the bottle from his fridge.

“I prefer them big. Big tits, round arse,” the other man says, in Bulgarian also, looking her up and down.

“Me, I like them petite. Fragile.” He hands her the bottle, then, in Czech again: “Ten, dear.”

“Here. Thank you,” she says, passing him the blue note. She could have said it in Bulgarian and embarrassed them both, but doesn’t want to let them know she understood them. This way’s better: gives her a secret space from which to listen and to think …

The book’s already waiting for her when she gets back. She carries it over to her desk and flips through it till she finds a list of alphabetic figures. Interesting: lots of the letters are the same as in ancient Greek. So why didn’t she recognize … She slips from her notebook the strip of paper onto which she transcribed the text on Anton’s icon painting. It must have been about 2 a.m. on the first of January – just ten or twelve hours before the door burst open and the police rushed in. She couldn’t sleep: Anton was snoring, and then special dates – birthdays, name days, Christmas was the worse – press home the fact of Kristof and Larissa’s
absence. The paintings – both of them, the real one which turned out not to be the real one and the fake one which at least was a real fake – were leaning against the filing cabinet, the gold-leaf ovals round the figures’ heads strangely luminous among the dark shapes of chair legs and plant pots and magazines. After rereading the last two months’ correspondence between her and the IRC, the IOM, the UNHCR, the ISS, the UNHCR again, Helena paused and stared for perhaps half an hour at these two paintings; then, slipping her correspondence back into its cabinet, she went and knelt beside the paintings and scrutinized again the text above the ocean and the ships. Maybe it was the exegetic curiosity that a classics PhD had instilled in her that made her copy out the texts’ letters; maybe the curiosity came from the physics degree, its endless diagnostics. Either way, she copied them – then, in the whirlwind of the swoop and Anton’s protracted detention, forgot all about it until just yesterday, when the paper slipped onto the floor as she went through the cabinet’s correspondence for the hundredth, the two hundredth time …

Helena holds the strip up to the book’s list. This is strange: none of the letters match. There were three main clusters, then smaller ones dotted between them: little points strung out across the sky, like stars and constellations. She just assumed they were some obscure form of Byzantine, because that’s the alphabet these zographs used, even in this and the last century. If they’re not Byzantine, then … They’re not Cyrillic, obviously. Or Attic Greek. Did the Phoenicians have an alphabet? Yes, but it was lost completely after Carthage fell. She runs through her head the timeline that she used to have pinned to her wall: Aeolians wiped out Lydians; then Dorian, Aeolian and Ionian Greek were all synthesized into Hellenic, with its Koiné, after Alexander’s conquests … All these invasions, sackings, slaughters, lost children … And for what? So that an alphabet could be formed, and people could
communicate? Nothing’s being communicated by the texts she’s got in front of her. It’s infuriating: the painter and his viewers must have understood it. The saint too: as he floated away from the town and then the mountain, floated towards whatever resolution it was that awaited him, he seemed to have taken the message on board, to have surrendered himself to its truth’s sad ineluctability. The men busying about beside their ships beneath the writing seemed, in their own casual, disinterested way, unperplexed by it – seemed, if not to understand it, at least not to care. Ilievski and the others won’t have lost any sleep over what the letters might have been spelling out. But Helena does care, wants to know. She
tssk
s quite audibly; the student in the space next to hers turns round and looks at her, still slurping at his straw, which makes her blush …

She gets up, patters her way down the reading room towards the corridor again, then crosses this and goes to the ladies’ toilet. The orangeade’s not ready to come out yet. She stands by the mirror on the wall and looks at herself.
Petite
.
Fragile
. Her face is thin and pale. There’s a mole just above her lip, to the right. Only, in the mirror, it’s the left – or would be, if her reflected image were an actual replica of herself. A real fake. Do photos do that too, switch sides like that? She pulls her passport from her bag again, opens it to the photo page and holds it up beside her image in the mirror so that there are two Helenas – one life-size, trapped in glass, one shrunk and stuck to paper – staring at her. No, photos don’t switch sides: the mole’s back on the right side in her passport, to the left of the photographic paper’s square, beside the letters that, both in Cyrillic and in Roman, announce her name and nationality and place of birth. Presumably, then, if she held the photo up beside her face, her real face, facing back into the mirror, then the mirror would transform it so that it matched the larger image of herself that … She tries this. It works. Applied physics: Toitov would be proud. The
mirror’s screwed the letters up, of course, thrown them back inverted: the μ becomes a u, the ε a 3, Pq. Funny how they rearrange themselves, some chancing their way into new, functional roles while others become meaningless, non-signifying shapes, pure code. As if they, too, were conspiring to confuse her, just like the strange, non-Byzantine letters in the painting – as if, if she were to … then they too would …

The reflected Helena’s mouth has fallen open, silently – the gasp came from outside the image, from the mouth of the real one. She crashes from the toilet, almost runs back to her desk. People must think her mad, but she doesn’t care about that now: she’s too excited. The student slurps again in her direction, his way of flirting maybe, as she whips the strip of paper from the alphabet page of the useless
Dictionary
, then races back towards the toilet and – Yes, it works! As she holds the strip to the mirror the letters jump round to become standard Attic script, forming words – ancient Greek words – she recognizes. There’s
,
agapé
: that’s
love
. Then
,
sympatheia
. She knows that word too:
understanding –
or, in later phases of the language,
legacy
. Then there’s the third one, that was written to the left of the other two, and slightly higher up, above the mountain, by the saint:
.
Erémia
. What’s that word? She knows it, but just can’t … It’s in the same family as
eremos
; must be the noun. And
eremos
is – that’s right:
solitary
. So
erémia
is
solitude
. Not
loneliness
, just
solitude –
emotionally uncharged, a factual, contingent state.
Love. Understanding (or legacy). Solitude
. The smaller words that in the painting circled round these three like satellites are
tes
, the feminine plural – no, singular – form of the genitive, and
eis, towards
. So …