Men in Space Read Online Free PDF Page B

OK?” The caller’s male, and speaks in English with an accent that’s foreign but not Czech.
    “I can hear you, yes.”
    “Is it possible to speak with Ivan Maňásek?”
    Ivan Patrik Maňásek, an artist, lives here: the principal, and only other, tenant. It was he who, after they met at some opening at which Nick talked about being evicted, proposed that Nick, in exchange for a monthly rent of roughly the price of a pack of cigarettes in London, move into the spare room of his atelier – or, as Ivan and his constant stream of visitors call it, The Spaceship:
Kosmická Lod’
. Nick last saw Ivan last night, in a club called Újezd. He’s probably still sleeping. Nick tells the caller.
    “I’ll see if he’s here.” He sets down the receiver and goes to look in Ivan’s room. Negative: the bed is empty, its duvet slipped right off onto the floor. As Nick moves back through the main room towards the phone, another tram passes in the street five floors below, sending tremors through the floor, furniture and walls, shaking the metal bars that run beneath the skylight and a wooden angel who hangs from the bars by the stump of her left arm. Nick flinches. If she falls it’ll be onto him. Imagine a freak accident like that concluding your entry in the directory of human lives:
Crushed by an angel …
    “Hello?” Nick says, picking the receiver up again.
    “Yes, hello? That is Ivan Maňásek?”
    “No, it’s me again. I’m afraid Ivan’s not here right now. Maybe in two or three hours …”
    “Here is Joost van Straten. Of the Stedelijk Bureau in Amsterdam.”
    Amsterdam. Just before leaving London for Prague last summer, Nick was interviewed in a swish office just off Tottenham Court Road by a woman called Julia Emerson, editor of the Amsterdam-based journal
Art in Europe
. It was for a staffer job. Fresh out of college, Nick fidgeted and talked non-stop, name-checking furiously: Beuys, Basquiat, Koons, Twombly, Nitsch … Julia Emerson smiled wryly, made the odd note, then told him she’d be in touch towards the end of the year. That’s now. Nick really wants the job. There’d be administrative work – but he’d get to review shows too, see his name in print with (who knows?) maybe even a photograph of him, smiling or studious or … This Joost van Straten’s calling from here in Prague, and is saying that he’s supposed to meet Ivan later today to talk about an exhibition, but they haven’t fixed a time or place. Nick asks him:
    “Do you know what time it is now?”
    “It’s too early?” Joost van Straten sounds worried.
    “Sorry?”
    “Do I call too early?”
    “No! No, not at all. It’s just that I don’t have a watch.”
    “So I understand. It’s quarter-past nine. Nine fifteen.”
    That’s fine: quarter-past nine is fine. They won’t even be there yet. Or they’ll just be trickling in: Jirka and Karolina first, always those two. Joost van Straten asks:
    “Will you see him?”
    “See him? No, I’ve got to go out.” He’ll stop at Anděl, have a
věneček
.
    “Can you write for him a message?”
    There’s no pen on the coffee table – just some of Ivan’s porno magazines. The floor beneath’s a sea of paint-stainedclothes and oil rags that swirl around an archipelago of chair legs and free-standing shelves. The remains of a half-eaten potato salad cling to a plate; children’s toys spill from a capsized freight carton. Two of these, the engine carriage of a train and a rifle-bearing soldier with a hammer-and-sickle emblem on his plastic cap, have found their way onto a canvas hanging on the wall. So has some of the potato salad – plus a silk tie, a used condom and a photograph, an old one showing a family picnicking beside a lake. Below the canvas, a work table with a pen on it: a biro, lying in a pool of black paint. He can’t reach it from here, has to set the phone down again …
    “Just a second.” The paint’s still wet; it gets on his fingers.