“The address is in it. I should have done it but I never … you know — I had all this stuff to do and getting my ticket and packing, and Gábina had her as a teacher back in primary school and would be all embarrassed. Just say you can’t stay when you go there. Make up some appointment or something, or she’ll force you to stay for hours and hours and cook for you and believe me,” he leans towards her now and tries to fix her with his gaze, only his eyes are kind of wonky, “you don’t want to eat what this dame cooks.” And he’s off laughing again, so much that his head drops down into his hands, like he was weeping. She asks him:
“Do you have my glasses?” and Nick says:
“Oh yes! Of course. They’re right here. Somewhere.” He fiddles around in all his bags, eventually finds them and gives them back to her. She takes off her prescription shades and puts them on and for the first time in a month is able to see things that aren’t fucking purple. Gábina picks the shades up from the table top and tries them on: Heidi can see the whole café swim in oily purple on both sides of this beautiful girl’s nose: all the other beautiful women on the walls and the people at other tables and herself and Nick and Mladen, visually fascinating, yeah right. Roger never did film her like he said he would when they went up that staircase. Fucker. Mladen’s saying:
“Nick, you must go now. You’ll miss your train,” and Nick brings his head up and says:
“Oh yeah, train. Fuck the train. I’ll fly there. Let’s all go to the airport. We can have a drink there too,” and Mladen says:
“Sasha is meeting you from this train,” and Nick says:
“I forgot that. But answer me this, Mladen, if you’re so clever: how am I going to recognize him?”
Mladen’s unfazed by this: he just smiles, reaches into his jacket and pulls out his wallet, flips it open on the table and pulls out a photograph:
“Sasha Danilovich.”
Nick, Gábina and Heidi all crane forwards to scope the photo out. This Sasha’s sitting on a lawn in front of a concrete building and oh boy is he cute: what is it with these Yugoslavians? Why’s it them all killing one another when they’re so damn gorgeous? It should be some ugly fuckers like the Germans or the Poles wiping themselves out of the gene pool. He’s quite talclass="underline" although he’s sitting you can tell that — not because of his legs, which are foreshortened, but by his chest and shoulders which rise up all proud and masculine, and he’s got an angular, well-defined face and dark-brown hair. Heidi finds herself wishing that it was her going to Amsterdam and not Nick right now although she’s not really in the mood for travelling. She’s been feeling kind of queasy, hasn’t touched her vodka; just looking at it makes her feel more queasy since it reminds her of that party where she passed out on the stuff and then threw up. Mladen’s telling Nick he spoke to Sasha yesterday and Sasha’s all cool for him to stay but that the situation where he’s living is precarious:
“They’ve squatted the building and they live there for free, and Sasha told me that it’s really lux: they have telephones and computers and hot showers and everything, not like me here. But the owner tries to make them leave, which he must do all legally, through processes and papers, so it takes some time, but still …” And Nick says:
“Suits me to the ground. Let’s pay the penguin. Hey! You! Fuckface!”
And they get the cheque and pay, right to the haler with no tip and all in tiny coins that Nick and Gábina have brought with them: she’s been collecting them in a jar in her kitchen for two years, she says. They go back down the mosaicked corridor and down the stairs to beside the párek stands where the announcement board is. There are trains going to Moscow and to Paris and to Rome and to — wow, Beijing: must take a week, all trans-Siberian. Nick’s one is listed there: Amsterdam CS; he’s got about three minutes to get on it with all his shit. So they run down the tunnel and come out onto platform number seven and throw Nick’s stuff through the door and then he hugs them each. She says she’ll get his address in Amsterdam off Mladen although even as she says it she knows she might not, that she’ll very likely never see or correspond with Nick again. A guard comes round and closes the doors; she’s feeling really queasy after all that running; then a whistle goes and the train starts pulling off. Nick appears at a window further down his carriage waving to them. They wave back, but before he’s even gone Heidi’s attention’s wandered over to a kid on the next platform, this toddler of maybe eighteen months who’s sitting in a pushchair playing with a rubber rocket as his mother holds the hand of a man who’s in this other train with Russian letters on the side, talking to him through the train’s window and crying.
* * * * *
Tallinn, Estonia
20th January 1993
My dear Han,
Greetings from Tallinn! It’s beautiful, a kind of miniature Prague: same colours, alleys, squares and parks, the same old red and yellow trams — only it’s more archaic, and much less touristy. And the people here sing all the time! They sing like Czech people drink: constantly, everywhere. There seems to be a music school or choir rehearsal room on every second street. Even waiters, tram drivers and builders sing as they go about their business. Just walking round the town you have the feeling you’re being regaled from all sides by angelic hosts.
Oh, and it’s flat. There’s one old medieval castle hill but, apart from that, the town rests at sea level, just like Amsterdam. Only, unlike ours, their harbour’s not enclosed: it opens to the sea — it is the sea. And the sea, too, is flat. I know it sounds ridiculous to say this since all seas are flat — but this sea’s flat in the most amazing way. Picture a frozen bay extending in pure white out from the quayside. Picture skaters endlessly circling, pirouetting, gliding around it, passing the odd ship held firmly in position by the ice. And don’t picture some chocolate-box Bruegel vignette: this frozen landscape isn’t social like his — it’s otherworldly, shapes and movement all becoming abstract as they open out to white infinity. The land segues seamlessly into the sea, the sea into the sky, which is white too. I’ve just spent the best part of two hours sitting on a bench looking for a hinge: a line to the horizon, some kind of limit. But I couldn’t find one. There’s just space, and then it kind of disappears into itself. I keep thinking of the ellipse into which Maňásek’s saint gravitated — anti-gravitated, rather. Has the case arrived in Windtunnelkade yet by the way? Can’t wait to see what you make of it all.
I’m in my hotel, getting ready to go out again. I’m hooked on this horizonless horizon. When I was staring at it earlier, beside the harbour walls, a group of young men had etched out, by scraping hockey sticks against the ice, a large rectangle, twenty by ten metres, and then subdivided the rectangle into half blocks and semicircles, reclaiming from the tabula rasa of ice a hockey court across whose surface their sticks fired a round puck towards goals that had no nets. I watched them for a while, then left my bench, stepped down onto the frozen bay and walked a little way out. The skaters’ blades had inscribed coruscating gyres, spirals and intersecting circles on the ice: concentric, eccentric, irregular, you name it. As I walked out further, slipping a little but soon finding my feet, the markings grew less frequent. Still no hinge. How far out do you have to go to find one? I’m obsessed by this question. Basic visual laws require there to be some kind of edge, somewhere. I want to go and find out where it is. I’ve come back to my room to fetch a warmer jumper — and, of course, to write you this quick letter which I’ll post from a cute little mailbox on the quayside. Then it’s out again, into the white …