“I’m the photographer,” Maya said. “I’m here to document Emil’s latest work.”
The girl nodded. “I am Hitomi.”
“Ciao Hitomi,
“He is forgetful,” said Hitomi, apologetically. “We weren’t expecting. You want some goulash?”
“No thank you,” Maya said. “Hitomi, do you photograph?”
“Oh no,” said Hitomi emphatically, “I do wanderjahr from Nippon, we hate cameras.”
Maya cleared the worktable, set out a rippling sheet of chameleon photoplastic, and set up her tripod. White against white would work best for the china. Diagonal lighting to reveal the hollowed shape of cups and saucers. The pots and urns were all about shape and tactility. She had been thinking about this project every day. She had mapped it all out in her head.
She was beginning to appreciate the lovely qualities of optic fibercord. You could do almost anything with optic fibercord, tune it to any color in the spectrum, bend it into any shape, and it would glow in any brightness along any section of its length. Soft, even shadows. Or strong, sculptural shadows. The deep shadows of backlighting. Or you could kick it way up and get very contrasty.
Novak said that if you exposed for the shadows the rest would come by itself. Novak said that all mystery was in the shadows. Novak said that he had truly never mastered shadows in ninety years. Novak said a great many things and she listened as she’d never listened to anyone before. She went home at night and took notes and fed the actress’s cats and thought and dreamed photography for days and days.
“It’s good you know your job so well,” said Emil cordially. “I haven’t looked at some of these pieces in … oh, such a long time.”
“Don’t let me take you from your work, Emil.”
“Oh no my dear, it’s a pleasure.” Emil fetched equipment and moved the pots a bit and was very helpful.
She would have liked to take the raw shots back to the cats’ apartment and touch them up with her wand, but the wand was terribly addictive. Once you got down to pixel level there was no end to all that gripping and blurring and twisting and mixing.… Knowing when to stop, what to omit, was every bit as important as any postproduction craftwork. Elegance was restraint. So she printed the photos out on the spot on Novak’s borrowed scroller. Then she blew a bit of dust from the photo album and slipped the photos neatly into place.
“These are fine,” Emil said sincerely. “I’d never seen such justice done to my work. I think you should sign these.”
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“It was so good of you to come. What do I owe you?”
“No charge, Emil, it’s just apprentice work. I was glad to have the experience.”
“No one so determined should be called a mere apprentice,” said Emil gallantly. “I hope you’ll come again. Have we worked together before? It seems to me that I know you.”
“It does? You do?”
Hitomi sidled over rhythmically and slipped her slender arm over Emil’s shoulders.
“It wasn’t you,” Emil said, leafing through his album. “Your photos are much better than these others.”
“We might have met at the Tete du Noye,” Maya suggested, unable to resist. “I go there rather often. Are you going there later? There’s a meeting soon.”
Emil looked up at Hitomi adoringly, and caught her slender hand. “Oh, no,” he said, “we’ve given up that little place.”
“[It will be good to see my old friend Klaus,]” said Novak in Czestina as they walked together down Mikulandska Street. “[Klaus used to come to my Tuesdays.]”
“
“[They were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”
“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”
“Oh, yes … [Good old Klaus was quite hairless in those days.… He was a microbiologist at Charles University. Klaus and I, we did a series of experimental landscapes, using photoabsorbent bacteria.… The light shone on his gel plate of inoculant. The exposure would last many days. Germs grew only where the light fed them. Those images had the quality of an organic daguerreotype. Then, over the weeks that followed, we would watch those plates slowly rot. Sometimes … quite often, really … that rot produced fantastic beauty.]”
“I’m so glad you’re coming with me to meet my friends tonight, Josef. It means so much to me, truly.”
Novak smiled briefly. “[These little emigre communities in Praha, they may love the local architecture, but they never pay proper attention to us Czechs. Perhaps if we catch the children young enough, we can teach them better habits.]”
Novak spoke lightly, but he had combed his hair, he had dressed, he had taken the trouble to wear his artificial arm. He was coming with her because she had earned a little measure of his respect.
She had come to know her teacher a little. There were veins of deceit and venality and temper in him, like the bluish veins in an old cheese. But it was not wickedness. It was stubbornness, the measure of a crabbed, perverse integrity. Josef Novak was entirely his own man. He had lived for decades, openly and flagrantly, in a way that she had dared to live only deep inside. Though he never seemed happy, and he had probably never been a happy man, he was in some deep sense entirely imperturbable. He was utterly and entirely Josef Novak. He would be Josef Novak until the day he died.
He would be dead within five years—or so she judged. He was frail, and had been very badly injured once. There were steps he might have taken toward increased longevity, but he seemed to consider this struggle to be vulgar. Josef Novak was one hundred twenty-one years old, far older than the people of his generation had ever expected to become. He was a relic, but Maya still felt a bitter sense of injustice at the thought of Novak’s mortality. Novak often spoke of his own death, and clearly felt no fear of passing, but it seemed to her that a just universe would have let a creature like Josef Novak live, somehow, forever. He was her teacher, and she had come to love him very much.
The Tete was lively tonight. The crowd was much larger than she had expected and there was a tension and a vibrancy she hadn’t sensed before. She and Novak logged in at the bar. Novak reached out about four meters and gently finger-tapped Klaus’s helmet. Klaus turned, startled, then grinned bearishly. The two old men began to chat in Czestina.
“Ciao Maya.”
“Ciao Marcel.” She had come to know Marcel on the net—to the extent that anybody knew Marcel. The red- haired and loquacious Marcel never stopped talking, but he was not a revelatory or confiding man. He was twenty- seven years old and had already circled the world, by his own estimation, some three hundred and fourteen times. Marcel had no fixed address. He had not had a fixed address since the age of two. Marcel basically lived in trains.
Benedetta, who loved to talk scandal, claimed that Marcel had Williams syndrome. In his case, it was a deliberate derangement, an abnormal enlargement of Heschl’s gyrus in the primary auditory cortex. Marcel had hyperacusis and absolute pitch; he was a musician, and a sonic artificer for virtualities. The syndrome had also drastically boosted Marcel’s verbal skills, which made him an endless source of anecdotes, speculation, brilliant chatter, unlikely linkages, and endless magnetic trains of thought that would hit a mental switch somewhere and simply …
Benedetta claimed that the pope also had Williams syndrome. Supposedly this was the secret of the pope’s brilliant sermonizing. Benedetta believed that she had the dirt on everybody.
“How chic you look, Maya. How lovely to physically witness you.” Marcel’s coat was a patchwork of urban mapping. Marcel lived in that coat, and slept in it, and used it as a navigation aid. Now that she knew that Marcel’s jacket was so plonkingly useful, it somehow seemed rather less vivid. Paul would have described that perception as a category error.
She kissed Marcel’s bearded cheek. “You, too.”
“Congratulations on your Italian venture. They say Vietti’s dying for another session.”
“Giancarlo’s not dying, darling, you mustn’t get your hopes up.”
“I see you brought your sponsor. Your photographer. He must be your man of the hour.”
“He’s my teacher, Marcel. Don’t be gauche.”
“I have my net set to read your posts in Francais,” said Marcel. “I wish you would post more often. In
