Overhead in a Balloon Read Free Page A

firmer in the second room. See his cities; watch how the streets turn into mazes, nets, prison corridors. Dark palette. Opaqueness, the whole canvas covered, immensities of indigo and black. “Look, 1929; he was doing it before What’s-His-Name.” Upstairs, form breaking out of shadow: bread, cheese, wine, wheat, ripe apples, grapes.
    Hold it, Speck told himself. Hold the ripeness. This isn’t social realism.
    He gathered up the pencils, the snuffbox, and the pad, and put them back in the briefcase. He placed seventy francs, tip included, in a saucer. Still he sat, his mind moving along to the second loggia room, the end room, the important one. Here on the neutral walls would be the final assurance, the serenity, the satire, the power, and the vision for which, at last, the time had come. For that was the one thing Speck was sure of: the bell had rung, the hour had struck, the moment was at hand.
    Whose time? Which hour? Yes – whose, which, what? That was where he was stuck.
    T he street was now empty except for the policemen in their streaming capes. The bookstore had put up its shutter. Speck observed the walls of the three Marxist embassies. Shutters and curtains that once had shielded the particular privacy of the aristocracy – privacy open to servants but not to the street – now concealed the receptions and merry dinner parties of people’s democracies. Sometimes at this hour gleaming motorcars rolled past the mysterious gates, delivering passengers Speck’s fancy continued to see as the Duchesse de Guermantes and anyone she did not happen to despise. He knew that the chauffeurs were armed and that half the guests were spies; still, there was nothing to stop a foreign agent from having patrician tastes, or from admiring Speck’s window as he drove by.
    “This gallery will be an oasis of peace and culture,” Walter had predicted as they were hanging the first show, “Little-Known Aspects of Post-Decorator Style.” “An oasis of peace and culture in the international desert.”
    Speck breathed germ-laden night air. Boulevard theatres and music halls were deserted, their managers at home writing letters to the mayor of Paris deploring the decline of popular entertainment and suggesting remedies in the form of large cash subsidies. The sluggish river of autumn life congealed and stagnated around millions of television sets as Parisians swallowed aspirin and drank the boiling-hot Scotch believed to be a sovereign defense against Warsaw flu.
    A few determined intellectuals slunk, wet, into the Métro on their way to cultural centres where, in vivid translations from the German, actors would address the occasional surly remark to the audience – that loyal, anxious, humourless audience in its costly fake working-class clothes. Another contingent, dressed in Burberry trench-coats, had already fought its way into the Geographical Institute, where a lecture with coloured slides, “Ramblings in Secret Greenland,” would begin, after a delay owing to trouble with the projection machine, at about nine-twenty. The advantage of slides over films was that they were not forever jumping about and confusing one, and the voice describing them belonged to a real speaker. When the lights went up, one could see him, talk to him, challenge him over the thing he had said about shamanism on Disko Island. What had drawn the crowd was not Greenland but the word “secret.” In no other capital city does the population wait more trustfully for the mystery to be solved, the conspiracy laid bare, the explanation of every sort of vexation to be supplied: why money slumps, why prices climb, why it rains in August, why children are ungrateful. The answers might easily come from a man with a box of slides.
    In each of the city’s twenty administrative districts, Communists, distinguished by the cleanliness of their no-iron shirts,the sobriety of their washable neckties, and the modesty of their bearing, moved serenely towards their