“We might have met at the Tête du Noyé,” Maya suggested, unable to resist. “I go there rather often. Are you going there later? There’s a meeting soon.”
Emil looked up at Hitomi adoringly, and caught her slender hand. “Oh, no,” he said, “we’ve given up that little place.”
“[It will be good to see my old friend Klaus,]” said Novak in Czestina as they walked together down Mikulandska Street. “[Klaus used to come to my Tuesdays.]”
“Opravdu?” said Maya.
“[They were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”
“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”
“Oh, yes … [Good old Klaus was quite hairless in those days.… He was a microbiologist at Charles University. Klaus and I, we did a series of experimental landscapes, using photoabsorbent bacteria.… The light shone on his gel plate of inoculant. The exposure would last many days. Germs grew only where the light fed them. Those images had the quality of an organic daguerreotype. Then, over the weeks that followed, we would watch those plates slowly rot. Sometimes … quite often, really … that rot produced fantastic beauty.]”
“I’m so glad you’re coming with me to meet my friends tonight, Josef. It means so much to me, truly.”
Novak smiled briefly. “[These little émigré communities in Praha, they may love the local architecture, but they never pay proper attention to us Czechs. Perhaps if we catch the children young enough, we can teach them better habits.]”
Novak spoke lightly, but he had combed his hair, he had dressed, he had taken the trouble to wear his artificial arm. He was coming with her because she had earned a little measure of his respect.
She had come to know her teacher a little. There were veins of deceit and venality and temper in him, like the bluish veins in an old cheese. But it was not wickedness. It was stubbornness, the measure of a crabbed, perverse integrity. Josef Novak was entirely his own man. He had lived for decades, openly and flagrantly, in a way that she had dared to live only deep inside. Though he never seemed happy, and he had probably never been a happy man, he was in some deep sense entirely imperturbable. He was utterly and entirely Josef Novak. He would be Josef Novak until the day he died.
He would be dead within five years—or so she judged. He was frail, and had been very badly injured once. There were steps he might have taken toward increased longevity, but he seemed to consider this struggle to be vulgar. Josef Novak was one hundred twenty-one years old, far older than the people of his generation had ever expected to become. He was a relic, but Maya still felt a bitter sense of injustice at the thought of Novak’s mortality. Novak often spoke of his own death, and clearly felt no fear of passing, but it seemed to her that a just universe would have let a creature like Josef Novak live, somehow, forever. He was her teacher, and she had come to love him very much.
The Tête was lively tonight. The crowd was much larger than she had expected and there was a tension and a vibrancy she hadn’t sensed before. She and Novak logged in at the bar. Novak reached out about four meters and gently finger-tapped Klaus’s helmet. Klaus turned, startled, then grinned bearishly. The two old men began to chat in Czestina.
“Ciao Maya.”
“Ciao Marcel.” She had come to know Marcel on the net—to the extent that anybody knew Marcel. The red-haired and loquacious Marcel never stopped talking, but he was not a revelatory or confiding man. He was twenty-seven years old and had already circled the world, by his own estimation, some three hundred and fourteen times. Marcel had no fixed address. He had not had a fixed address since the age of two. Marcel basically lived in trains.
Benedetta, who loved to talk scandal, claimed that Marcel had Williams syndrome. In his case, it was a deliberate derangement, an abnormal enlargement of Heschl’s gyrus in the primary auditory cortex. Marcel had hyperacusis and absolute pitch; he was a musician, and a sonic artificer for virtualities. The syndrome had also drastically boosted Marcel’s verbal skills, which made him an endless source of anecdotes, speculation, brilliant chatter, unlikely linkages, and endless magnetic trains of thought that would hit a mental switch somewhere and simply …
Benedetta claimed that the pope also had Williams syndrome. Supposedly this was the secret of the pope’s brilliant sermonizing. Benedetta believed that she had the dirt on everybody.
“How chic you look, Maya. How lovely to physically witness you.” Marcel’s coat was a patchwork of urban mapping. Marcel lived in that coat, and slept in it, and used it as a navigation aid. Now that she knew that Marcel’s jacket was so plonkingly useful, it somehow seemed rather less vivid. Paul would have described that perception as a category error.
She kissed Marcel’s bearded cheek. “You, too.”
“Congratulations on your Italian venture. They say Vietti’s dying for another session.”
“Giancarlo’s not dying, darling, you mustn’t get your hopes up.”
“I see you brought your sponsor. Your photographer. He must be your man of the hour.”
“He’s my teacher, Marcel. Don’t be gauche.”
“I have my net set to read your posts in Français,” said Marcel. “I wish you would post more often. In Français, your commentary is remarkable. Aspects of wit emerge that one simply can’t find in English anymore.”
“Well, there’s a quality in a good translation that you can never capture with the original.”
“There’s another one, that’s it exactly. How is it that you do that? Is it deliberate?”
“You’re very perceptive, darling. If you don’t get me a frappé I’m afraid I’ll kiss you.”
Marcel weighed these possibilities and got her the frappé. She sipped it and gazed about the bar, leaning on one elbow. “Why do things seem so très vivid tonight?”
“Do they? Paul has plans for a spring outing. A major immersion. I hope you’ll come.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss a major immersion for anything.” She had no idea what Marcel was talking about. “Where is Paul?”
Paul was sitting among a group of perhaps a dozen people. He had them spellbound.
Paul opened a small metal shipping canister and removed a life-size carving of a garden toad. The squat and polished toad appeared to be chiseled from a solid ruby.
“Is this one beautiful?” Paul said. “You tell me, Sergei.”
“Well,” said Sergei, “if it’s a product of the Fabergé workshop as you tell us it is, then of course it’s beautiful. Look at that exquisite workmanship.”
“It’s a toad, Sergei. Are toads beautiful?”
“Of course toads can be beautiful. Here is your proof.”
“If someone said you were as beautiful as a toad, would you be pleased?”
“You are changing the context,” Sergei said sulkily.
“But isn’t that what the piece itself is doing? The shock of disbelief is the core of its aesthetic. Imagine people in the year 1912, taking a rare jewel and spending months of dedicated hand labor turning it into a toad. Isn’t that perverse? It’s that very perversity which gives the piece its trophy meaning. This is a Fabergé original, designed for a Czarist aristocrat. Czarist society was a culture generating jeweled toads.”
Paul’s little crowd exchanged uneasy glances. They scarcely dared to interrupt him.
“Still—are we to imagine that Czarist aristocrats believed that toads are beautiful? Does anyone here imagine that some Czarist aristocrat asked the Fabergé atelier to make her a beautiful toad?” Paul gazed about the circle. “But don’t you imagine she was pleased with the result? Once she possessed it, she surely found it beautiful.”