“I have a meeting here with Han.”
“He’s in the back room.” That rising intonation again. Nick steps in off the street. It’s a long rectangular space cluttered with tins of ink and stacks of paper and thin metallic plates. On the walls, wooden shelves covered in bottles of white spirit, jars of emulsion, battered tubes that ooze some kind of resin. There are photos scattered all across the floor and pegged up to dry above a sink from beside which a red bulb is effusing all this crimson light which coats the whole room. In the middle of the floor is the room’s centrepiece: a huge printing press. It’s this that’s making the electric whining noise, pulling at large sheets of white paper which are stacked up on a tray at one end, swallowing them, then squeezing them out onto a kind of footrest at the far end, face down. There are three or four more boys in this room, all about the same age as the one who opened the door to Nick; they move around carrying filters, guillotines and light boxes, or handing more stacks of white paper forwards to another boy who’s squatting down beside the printing press, reloading it. At the far end of the room’s a door. Nick walks through it into a smaller office.
Han turns out to be in his mid-forties. He has grey hair, a wrinkled but handsome face and pince-nez glasses. He’s sitting at a desk with a computer when Nick comes in; he gets up and shakes his hand.
“You’re Nick, I think.”
“Yes. I’m pleased to … That’s Gábina!”
“Sorry?”
“That photo, there: she’s a …” There she is: right on the desktop, on the cover of a magazine, with a blue-white-and-red dress and scarf on, holding a large pretend passport and a smaller copy of the same magazine on which the same photo, of her holding the magazine again, is reproduced, and so on inwards, infinite regress. Chopsticks. Nick’s seen her wearing these clothes, in person, on New Year’s Eve in Pod Stalinem: the Lift Off party. Maňásek’s friend Sláva, plus Michael the American who took a shine to Roger and had offered him a job last time Nick heard, were doing the shoot. The magazine’s called Paris/Praha. Beside Gábina’s head white letters announce Nova Praha/Prague Nouvelle. Han’s looking perplexed.
“I know her! This girl on the cover: she’s a friend!”
“This magazine? So! A fine coincidence. The issue is about Prague. This is why I bought it, because Joost was there. You want some genever?”
“Well … sure.” Nick hates the stuff but doesn’t want to seem rude. Han opens up a cabinet in the office’s corner and takes a bottle and two glasses out. The photo shoot must have been taking place right as Maňásek died. Perhaps this photo was taken just minutes before, or minutes or even seconds after, or even at the precise moment when he hit the pavement. František, his mother said to him — to him and, of course, Joost: as though death operated by association …
“I’m very sorry to hear about Joost.”
Han passes a glass of genever to him, then:
“He liked you. He wrote about a white bar …”
“Yes — by this girl’s house.”
“This girl again?” Han picks the magazine up off his desk and scrutinizes the grainy image.
“We were there together,” Nick says, “the three of us.”
“With the piano and …”
“The piano, the white piano, yes. Joost described all this?”
“He was writing often to me. I feel I know Prague well, the people he met there. We should … drink mud to his eye? Is that what …” He’s holding up his glass.
“Toast him. Yes. To Joost.”
“Joost.”
They clink. Han knocks his glass back in one go. Nick sips at his. The stuff is sour and chemical, like gin gone bad. He looks around the room. The walls are hung with posters which all have the same distinctive character: part collage, part photography, part painting. One of these, a large wall calendar, has photos of boys who look like the ones he’s just seen working in the other room.
“Did you make these?”
“All mine. That’s what I do. Commercial artist. Publicity, design …” Then, without warning: “I have strange dreams.”
“About what?” Nick tries not to sound anxious as he asks this.
“Him. Joost.”
“I understand that.” He gets them as well, about his grandfather: turning up to explain that, although he’s dead, he and Nick can still hang out as long as …
“The other night,” Han says, “I met him in the street, and it was raining. There were people with umbrellas, and their faces in the windows of the shops, reflected. It was water, watery: the windows all had droplets running down them …” He fills his glass again. Droplets. “Because he drowned, I think. But in my dream, like I said, there were reflected faces, blurred by rain; and I was looking in these, and I saw his own. We talked, but only through the window. I knew if I turned to face the real Joost he would go.”
“I’ve had that too!” says Nick.
“With Joost?”
“No, with …”
“OK. But Joost explained to me he’s still in the ice, travelling north: away from the shore, past Finland, to Lapland and on to Greenland. Even to the far north, the North Pole. I asked him how, in what way this is possible — if he is walking, or just floats, or swims, or if he’s turned into a fish, or penguin, or I don’t know what; but the other people with the black umbrellas crowded in closer until his face was gone. What do you think?”
“I …” What’s he supposed to say? “Was his body found?”
“By an ice-breaker, yes. Do you know what an ellipsus is?”
“I … Sure, but …”
“Come with me: I’ll show you.”
Han leads him back into the other room and says something in Dutch to one of the young men, who answers with a phrase Nick takes to mean You can see for yourself. Han bends down and picks a sheet of paper from the footrest-like platform onto which the press is still sliding the large printed sheets, its windscreen-wiper whining uninterrupted. Fifty or so have collected there, face down; other piles of fifty or so each are stacked around the floor. Han turns the paper over and shows it to Nick.
“That’s the … My God!”
“You know it already?”
He knows it alright: it’s the icon painting Maňásek copied for Anton. Or rather … It’s the same painting, only modernized. There’s that squat building at the bottom, but it has … are those television aerials? satellite dishes? The birdlike creatures that were floundering around the mountain have become city dwellers leaning out of windows, and the mountain itself has become a tenement building. The ships have been slightly enlarged, become more prominent — but they still occupy the same position, on the ocean above which the saint figure’s ascending, floating upwards. The golden, eggy oval around his head has become a kind of helmet, a Plexiglas bubble, elongated like the bubbles Nick was blowing from the ladder at that party at Jean-Luc’s. Bublifuk. And those strange letters have become graffiti scrawled across a wall on the pavement, beside which a pistol is lying — graffiti, or perhaps a shop sign, written in a foreign, non-European alphabet. Western text is laid on top, Dutch words:
Reis om de Wereld
Amsterdam
20 tot 23 maart 1993
“Rice on the World?”
“No. Journey. Race. A round-the-world race.”
“What in?”
“Ships. Canvas ships. Wind, not motor.”
“Sailing ships.”
“Right. Old ones. Large ones. The ships will start from here. From the harbour. I am commissioned to make posters for publicity.”
Ships — lots of them, and a harbour. Was it a film he saw? Or an old photograph, a painting? That icon, sure — but there was something else too, something that’s etched in deeper. Which artist he knows painted ships? Turner, of course — but which modern artist? Han’s looking at him.