“Jesus!” says Jan, looking over towards the waiter, who’s facing the other way. Tyrone has gone so pale he’s almost white.
“You like it?” asks Hájek, still grinning morosely. “It’s a replica. A fake. But pretty realistic.”
“That’s a goddam piece!” Tyrone has pressed himself right back against his seat. Jan explains to him in English what Hájek’s just told them. Tyrone sighs, bows his head, laughs in a theatrical, exaggerated way, then holds his hand out towards Hájek. “Let me see it.”
Hájek hands the pistol to him. Ivan picks up his wrap and slips off to the toilet. There’s only one cubicle. He locks the door, kneels on the floor and unfolds Hájek’s paper. The dry white flakes inside it have a crystalline sheen. With his identity card he scoops some of them out onto the toilet bowl’s lid, chops them up into fine grains and shunts the grains into a line. He takes a hundred-crown note from his pocket, rolls it up and, pinching it between his thumb and second finger, hoovers the line up into his nose. It burns across his septum, sharp and pure. He tips his head back, sniffs until his lungs are full, then empties them through puckered lips in one long whistle. He dabs at the toilet bowl’s lid, slides the card between his thumb and forefinger, flattens the note and strokes the embossed faces of its earnest peasants, furrowing again the fields that lie behind them, fingering the last white grains onto his gums. Then he refolds the paper, pockets it and leaves the cubicle.
Hájek and Sláva are still arguing across the room about whether the cosmonaut’s still up in space. Tyrone is playing with the pistol. Karel’s dozing off again. As Ivan sits down, he feels a kind of elevation. He closes his eyes and for a moment it seems that he’s back in his own spaceship, his apartment, with the wooden angel floating just beneath the skylight. Would the Soviet see angels? However many months on powdered grain … The sense of elevation’s growing stronger: stars closing around him, gravity slipping away … His right hand rises from the table — and he feels, again, a tingling in his fingertips, that labial outline forming … Yes … it’s back, that sense he had in Šárka … Which means she’s there, somewhere nearby: that disembodied nymph who briefly inhabited the space in front of Klárá back in eighty-nine. She’s back, he wants her: wants to have her now, tonight …
Ivan Maňásek rises from his chair and, without saying goodbye to the others, glides through the bar and out into the street. It’s not even night any more: the overcast sky’s beginning to glow an electric grey, its clouds absorbing and intensifying light, bouncing it back onto the bare trees in the park at Karlovo Náměstí, the grass below them, the grey concrete of the path and pavements and the orange clay walls of St Ignatius’s. She’ll be here, somewhere among this luminous murk, bathing in it: she’ll be hovering, like succubi in paintings, over some corporeal woman who’s at this very minute showering or eating breakfast or leaving her flat for work … He’ll find her, track her down: it’s just a case of following the energy. His finger tingles more intensely than before. He walks down Na Moráni, towards Palackého Most. His flat’s just on the far side, on Lidická. Two, three nights ago, walking across this bridge, Ivan paused at a spot where the stone balustrade curves out to form a rounded platform, and noticed hundreds of seagulls sleeping on the Vltava. He looked down at them for a while, then clapped his hands as loudly as he could and watched the oily surface of the river erupt into white whirls that expanded upwards around his head — expanded outwards too, above the river’s surface halfway to the next bridge along as more birds, woken by the flapping of the birds he’d woken, took off: a chain reaction. He liked it so much that he went home and dragged his flatmate Nick out to show him. Now the air’s empty of birds, full of grey brightness. On the hillside above Malá Strana he can see the Poor Wall rising up Petřín towards the Strahov Tower and, to its right, the Castle, this endless stretch of green and yellow architecture poised above the city; below it, closer, the white towers of Mánes, the gold roof of the National Theatre; to the left, grey latticework of the Smíchov Railway Bridge, skeletal spires of St Peter and Paul’s. She’ll be in here somewhere, hiding in some … fold … yes, in some fold between these points strung out along contours of hill, valley and river …
A number eighteen’s snaking its way round the corner into Palackého Náměstí, pulling up now beside him, unoiled brake pads screeching, doors accordioning open. Inside its second carriage, through a trellis of anonymous arms and necks and torsos, he can see a young woman sitting. He can’t see her face, but he just feels, he knows, the air itself is shouting out to him that she’s some kind of conduit. Ivan jumps in and slides into a seat a man has just vacated three rows behind her. She’s dressed and coiffured like your typical secretary, bank clerk, shop assistant: artificially waved hair, burgundy felt coat covering back and shoulders, imitation leather Maj or Kotva handbag lying on her lap. Ivan’s fingers gently stroke the air; three rows in front of him, the woman’s body tenses: must be her … She rises from her seat, walks to the door; he slides out from his seat too, follows her …
The tram stops back at Karlovo Náměstí. They both get out. The tingling’s unbearably intense now: Ivan’s excitement’s straining out towards her, pushing at the fabric of his trousers. They cross the park, past two globed climbing frames, a faded hopscotch court drawn on the ground in chalk, a slide … The path curves round some bushes, then — where’s she gone? She can’t have been more than eight metres in front of him, and now she’s vanished … But the tingling’s still there. The girl in the red coat — the guide, the message-bearer — may have disappeared but she’s still here, somewhere very close by … The park’s ended now; the pavement’s dropping sharply, as it carries him down Vyšehradská, from a balustrade on which a worn stone angel stands holding a staff. The angel’s breasts swell in her undulating shirt. From down here, Ivan can see up between her skirt’s folds, up her legs. If he climbs these steps towards her, ducks behind this wall — away from the trams hurtling down the hill, the medical students going to work on Betonska and Apolinářská — he’ll be able to …
And yes, he feels her presence as he unzips, knows she’s covering the worn and spongy stone like moss or dew, running in a sub-electric current round the angel’s waist, her neck, her head. He points up at her, way up, pointing through her to heaven, to whatever’s highest … Segments of leaf and woods and stars flash through his mind, a half-bare thigh, bandannas … An ambulance shoots down the hill, its siren blaring, growing louder as it heads towards him, maybe it’s the police but it’s too late now, can’t stop: here it is, the love shooting out of him and hanging in the cold air, gravity-defying, for half a second … But it hasn’t even made it one tenth of the distance up towards the statue let alone to her before, as the siren eases off, slows down and flattens out, its arc falls back towards the ground — and there’s a shuffling behind him, someone coming up the steps, better get zipped up quickly …
Walking on down Vyšehradská, past the medical faculty, Ivan Maňásek feels exhausted, empty. More ambulances trundle by. Men and women walk past him in white coats, chatting together. They ignore him: he’s out of their loop — out of his own loop too, her loop. It didn’t work, didn’t make it up to her; the jet he shot out will be lying on concrete, grey and dead. On Na Slupi, he enters a phone box, roots around his pocket, finds some loose change at the bottom of it, feeds a one-crown piece into the slot: six-oh-four-three, no, six-four-oh-three …