Chapter 17 Ashes

The news travelled the only way news travelled that winter, folded inside Thursday's delivery of window glass and written into the invoice's margins by a clerk who had never mastered discretion but had perfected implication. There had been a fire in Liboc. The frame shop was gone down to its joists; the brigade had attended with full ceremony and departed with full water tanks; the cause had been established by lunchtime as faulty wiring, pronounced with a straight face that the margins reproduced faithfully; and nobody, the clerk noted with three underlinings which meant precisely the opposite, had been harmed in any way at all. Viktor read it twice at the bench with the loupe still pushed up on his forehead. Around him the studio's north light went on shining exactly as before, indifferent, professional, and suddenly useless as an alibi for standing still. He weighed the journey against its risk for two days and then went anyway, dressed as a tradesman calling on the ironmonger across the way, armed with a genuine order for stove bolts so the disguise would be load-bearing. Ruin had a grammar he knew from photographs of other cities' bad nights: the sweetish stink of scorched glue and burnt size, shelves sagging like waiters near the end of a double shift, the great shop window gone milky and crazed, and sixty years of shavings consumed inside a single hour by a fire that had chosen the one night the street stood empty of every witness except the one it was employed by. Somebody official had chalked a large X on the scorched door post, which struck Viktor as the season's cruellest piece of theatre: the enemy's own grammar borrowed to annotate arithmetic so simple. Of Tomas there was word by Friday, relayed through the same margin-writing clerk with all the economy the old fence demanded even in absentia. Questioned three days; released with apologies of the kind that are never committed to paper; pronounced boring by two separate officials and therefore, briefly, safe. Then gone east of the city to ground, a cousin's attic where a man of his talents could practise being uninteresting among goose feathers and jam jars until the season turned. His message ran four words long and covered strategy completely: sell nothing, sign nothing, remember addresses better than the police do. Viktor stored it where he stored everything now that mattered, in the memory the state could not yet confiscate, and understood that the last civilian door in his life had been kicked in chiefly to demonstrate how few doors he had left. One crate had survived beneath the stair, singed at the lid and otherwise whole, and the ironmonger surrendered it with the neutrality of a man anxious to own no history larger than stove bolts. Inside lay a dozen sheets of water-white glass, Tomas's ledger of outstanding debts with its corners charred to lace, and a stub of soft white chalk, the very grade that had measured frames and messages alike for forty years. Viktor carried one pane home upright on the tram, balanced against his shoulder the way processional objects are carried through narrow streets, and strangers yielded room to it without being asked, possessing some older knowledge about men who transport fragile things through crowds. He set the pane on end above the rack where the wall sections slept. Glass, Tomas used to claim, remembers every hand that ever wiped it, which is why glaziers as a profession die honest. The analysis took place on the towpath below Smíchov in a wind sharp enough to make signs economical. His handler laid it out with two hands and one stretch of frozen canal between them: the fire came eleven days after a certain portrait went on public display, which by the bureaucracy's calendar was practically a receipt stapled to the deed. The purpose was not punishment but amputation, severing the civilian anchors one after another until the swimmer had no bottom left to stand on anywhere except the deep water where professionals did business. Herding, said the flat palm, travelling in an arc that ended aimed at the studio's district across the river. Not hunting you yet, added the same palm, closing like a book. Tidying around you. Viktor watched the canal ice go grey downstream toward the locks and found he could not quarrel with the housekeeping metaphor, having spent the week watching exactly that much tidiness arrive in his own affairs. The charred ledger he kept anyway, against every instinct of sense, propped upright on the bench like an icon. Debts owed to a burned shop remained debts; the names in its columns were men who still owed Tomas money for cornices that nobody would ever mill again, and the list itself had become the only surviving inventory of the trade's accumulated goodwill. Somewhere among those scorched pages, moreover, sat three client entries flagged with a private mark whose meaning even the fire had failed to interrogate, commissions that had never had anything to do with cornices and everything to do with the corridor's future bookkeeping. He copied nothing, photographed nothing, and committed the relevant page numbers to memory instead, which cost him one quiet evening and would cost any court considerably longer. Then he wrapped the ledger in waxed cloth and posted it into the cavity behind the lock-keeper's wall, there being exactly one strongroom in Prague whose rent was collected in silence, and it was already accustomed to sheltering objects with a history of burning. The countermeasure he executed alone, at dawn, before the bakery's ovens were lit for the day's first batch. Into the cold oven went everything from the Liboc era worth a warrant's excitement: trial transparencies annotated in a younger hand, densitometer schedules disguised as varnish recipes, the chalk arithmetic of early experiments, two decades of accumulated caution curl by curl in a biscuit tin. He used one match and no accelerant and stood watching paper perform its entire biography, white to amber to a black that collapsed into grey finer than anything he ever milled, ash being the one substance in his professional life improved by forgetting absolutely everything. When the ovens below roared awake the flue draft lifted the last of it into the city's ordinary morning smoke, indistinguishable from bread or winter, which happened to be the entire art. Better your own fire, small and punctual and swept out afterward, he concluded, warming his palms on the range door, than the large complimentary ones that arrive with their own witnesses attached. ---