Men in Space by Tom McCarthy Page A

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 righthand 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, thisendless 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,