Chapter 11 Safe House

They left at three in the morning by routes that had clearly been walked many times before being needed once. The rolled sections traveled in a fishmonger's panel van between trays that had carried herring all their working lives, and Viktor lay on the metal floor beside his own painting while the city slid past a slit of window, baroque domes surfacing and sinking in the dark like whales. The driver was the landlady's grandson grown tall and silent, the handler rode up front navigating without a map, and twice they stopped in blind alleys for intervals whose length taught Viktor more about discipline than any lecture. At a crossing near the river a patrol car idled through its own boredom, and the handler's hand came down over the boy's gear lever, holding everything in neutral until the tail-lights dissolved, a whole doctrine transmitted through one gesture on one gearstick. The refuge turned out to be a former district schoolhouse in Liboc, decommissioned and half emptied, its classrooms given over to a scenery warehouse serving the state theaters. Viktor climbed into the fourth floor under a glazed roof lantern and found himself domiciled inside a forest of rolled horizons: painted ballrooms leaning in racks, cardboard mountain ranges stacked against radiators, a proscenium moon face down on trestles, entire weather systems rolled in newsprint against the damp. His handler watched him take it in with something adjacent to amusement. Fitting quarters, the man signed. You have spent your life charging audiences for false perspectives, and now you will live rent-free among ours. Two rooms had been kept furnished above the scenery, a stove, a bed, a workbench under the lantern's north light, and by four o'clock the wall hung unrolled along a improvised rack, breathing in the warm air like a creature returned to its element. Routine assembled itself around craft. He worked the daylight hours under the lantern on the middle section, splices and lime islands advancing westward across the linen millimeter by millimeter, and spent evenings learning the other curriculum. His teacher proved as systematic with shadows as any master with grounds: how to vary a walking pace so that mirrors behind shop glass never held you long enough to be described; which tram stops let a man board twice from opposite platforms; why a watcher's greatest ally is predictability of appetite, so that on instruction Viktor varied his bread, his tobacco, even the hours of his Sunday boredom. In exchange Viktor taught what the hands were curious to learn, why lead white poisoned generations yet forgave every correction, how a craquelure is aged honestly by dishonest means, and the visitor absorbed it all with the notebook he did not keep, filing pigment theory beside escape doctrine in whatever archive he carried behind the winter-colored eyes. The weeks passed and the wall grew, and with it grew an ease between the two men that neither advertised. On evenings when the lantern burned late they shared the beaker ritual, tokaji or slivovitz according to supply, and conversation crossed borders neither had declared. The handler spoke once, obliquely, of a training establishment where winters were longer and the motto concerned silence, and of three services he had passed through like stations, loyalty being, in his account, a railway ticket valid only until the next junction. What he kept from all of it, he said, examining his scarred thumb webbing, was the habit of leaving small coins on windowsills, first footing for a household he could not describe, a superstition he recommended to Viktor without explanation. Once, hearing Leningrad mentioned, he asked what the Neva did in spring, and listened to the ice-breaking described with his whole attention, as though rivers were intelligence he had been denied. Viktor understood he was watching loneliness operate at professional depth, and said nothing, because the trade of both men was noticing. Surveillance found them in the third week, or believed it had. From the schoolhouse landing Viktor noticed, across two days, the same heavy man pretending the same newspaper at the tram shelter diagonal to the gate, pages turning at metronome intervals regardless of wind. Report brought the handler to the window within the hour, and the professional verdict was delivered with unsettling calm: too fat, too visible, too punctual, either a decoy meant to frighten or an amateur meant to reassure his masters, and both possibilities argued identical conduct. They stayed. Lights burned at painter's hours rather than fugitive's hours, laundry appeared on the line with domestic regularity, and the grandson's fish van made deliveries of herring nobody ate. On the fourth day the newspaper man transferred his patronage to a different district forever, and the handler signed a lesson Viktor filed permanently. Fear is information only when it arrives on schedule, the hands said. Off-schedule fear is just weather. Letters from the outer world arrived as rumors, distorted by the distances rules imposed. Tomas had received more theatrical designers, this batch curious about eight-meter stretchers and asking after the health of his suppliers; the old fence had answered with a deaf man's patience and sold them picture-frame glass at insulting prices, a form of testimony Viktor recognized as courage wearing accounting. The Vinohrady photographer sent word through the leather trade that a stranger had collected every print order ever filled for a certain studio address, paying scrupulously and copying registers verbatim. Each item reached him secondhand, deniable, delayed, and each tightened rather than loosened the isolation, until Malá Strana felt like a coastline remembered from a voyage already underway. Near the month's end the middle section stood finished, and the handler, inspecting it by lantern light with cotton and calipers borrowed from nowhere, performed the closest approach to wonder his repertoire contained. Then the institution reasserted itself through him. Instructions had come down, typed as ever, moving the final inspection forward by three weeks and requiring the completed sections consolidated onto stretchers at a location still to be named. Acceleration of that kind, he told Viktor quietly, meant the readership had stopped being patient, and impatience at that altitude historically preceded housecleaning. Yet the same message, relayed through channels his employer did not officially observe, carried a private postscript that he delivered in signs, slowly, twice. When the last brushstroke dries, the hands said, there exists a corridor south for you, prepared and paid for, and I will be standing where it begins. He offered no country, no timetable, and no reassurance beyond the offer itself, and Viktor, looking at the man who had taught him fear's arithmetic, understood that the promise constituted either rescue or recruitment into whatever came after institutions, and that for the first time in a year of Thursdays he could not determine which, and cared less than he expected. ---