Karel Čapek — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

Rain on the window. Steam off the coffee. A laptop, half-open, its cursor blinking in an empty document like something breathing badly.

Reinhold had come to the city for the internet, mostly, and for the low rent, and because nobody there required anything of him beyond invoices sent on time. He worked for a firm four time zones away, translating manuals nobody read into a language fewer people spoke. He ate breakfast at eleven, lunch never, and by four he was always at the Café Diana because the Diana had wifi and a mirror on the east wall that was, the waiter assured him, older than the republic.

The mirror had a crack in it. Hairline, ceiling to floor almost, silvering gone milky along its edge like a vein under skin gone old. Nobody at the Diana remembered when it happened. The frame was gilt, chipped at one corner, the glass itself the color of weak tea.

"You are staring at my mirror," said a voice.

The voice belonged to a man at the next table, elderly, tweed going green at the elbows, a stack of index cards before him weighted down with a demitasse spoon. He had introduced himself, days before, as Professor Emeritus of something no one asked him to repeat.

"It has a crack in it," Reinhold said.

"It has had a crack in it since before either of us existed to complain." The professor did not look up from his cards. "Fractures of that kind are load-bearing. Remove the crack and the mirror falls apart. This is true of mirrors. It may be true of other things."

"Such as?"

"Empires. Marriages. Certain kinds of silence." He said this the way a man reads a bus timetable, without inflection, and went back to his cards.

Reinhold's document blinked at him. He had not typed a sentence in forty minutes. Nobody in the office four time zones away had noticed; nobody would notice until Thursday. This was the arrangement, and it suited him, in the way that a coat too large still keeps out the cold.

The rogue arrived at half past four, as he did most days, smelling of tobacco and cheap cologne and something underneath both that might have been ambition. His name, when he offered it, changed slightly each time — Marek, or Marec, or once, memorably, Marx, at which he had laughed alone. He sold things. Nobody at the Diana had established what, exactly, though watches had changed hands, and once a small icon wrapped in newspaper, and once, briefly, a dog.

"That mirror," he said, dropping into the chair between them without invitation, "is worth eleven thousand. I have a buyer. German. Serious money, serious man."

"It belongs to the café," Reinhold said.

"Everything belongs to somebody until it doesn't." Marek — this week Marek — tapped the table twice, a gesture Reinhold would come to recognize as punctuation. "The crack, that's the value. Provenance. A Biedermeier mirror with honest damage, that's a story, that's a price. A perfect mirror is a mirror. A broken one is a history."

The professor set down his pen. "The crack," he said, "is not honest. It is only old."

"Same thing, professor, where money's concerned."

Reinhold looked at the mirror again, at his own face split by the fracture into two overlapping halves, jaw here, eye socket a half-inch over there, neither half quite his. He thought, with the specific dullness of four in the afternoon in a country not his own, that he had not spoken to anyone in the flesh in eleven days before Tuesday, and that the two men at this table constituted, this week, the whole of his society.

"Nobody's selling anything," said the waiter, passing with a tray, not stopping. "The mirror stays."

"Everything stays," Marek said, "until the day it doesn't."

Outside the rain had stopped without anyone noticing when. The professor gathered his cards into a rubber band, squared them, tucked them into a breast pocket already swollen with other such packets, of other such afternoons.

"I have catalogued," he said, to no one in particular, "eleven similar fractures in mirrors of this district. Cafés, barbershops, one confessional. In every case the glass was original, the damage of separate and undiscovered origin, and in every case," he stood, buttoning his coat with the slowness of a man who has nowhere further to be, "the mirror eventually changed hands."

"There," said Marek, brightening, "you see."

"I did not say it changed hands well," the professor said, and went out into the wet street, and did not look back, and Reinhold sat with his cold coffee and his blinking cursor and the two broken halves of his own face, waiting, without knowing for what, the way a man waits for a letter he has not yet thought to write.

The rain the professor had walked into did not stop, or stopped and started again so many times that Reinhold could not have said which; and in this way three days passed, the way three days pass for a man whose calendar is other people's deadlines: Tuesday looked like Wednesday looked like the same document, unfinished, patient, its cursor still blinking as if nothing at all had happened.

The mirror sold on a Thursday. This seemed to Reinhold, afterward, exactly correct, since Thursday was the day the office four time zones away expected something from him and he had, as usual, produced it on time, in full, competently, and felt nothing about it at all.

The German arrived at two. Not the buyer himself — an assistant, young, damp umbrella folded into a neat black stick, a folder under one arm.

"Herr Bruckner sends his regards," the assistant said to the café owner, a heavy woman named Habrová who kept the till and had, evidently, kept the debts too, longer than anyone at the Diana had troubled to ask about. "The valuation stands. Eleven and a half, transport included, insured to the door."

"The crack," said Habrová, "was assessed?"

"The crack is the valuation," the assistant said, and smiled the smile of a man reading numbers off a spreadsheet he has not written and does not need to understand.

Marek — today he was Marek again, consistency being, apparently, a professional courtesy owed to serious money — stood by the till rubbing his hands together as though washing them of something pleasant. "I told you," he said, to nobody, to everybody, to the mirror itself. "Eleven thousand. History has a price and I found the price."

The professor came in at his usual hour and sat without his usual cards. He watched the two men in overalls lift the mirror from its bracket, gently, the gilt frame trailing a little plaster dust like the residue of a small demolition. He said nothing. He had, Reinhold thought, the face of a man watching a friend's coffin carried down stairs too narrow for dignity.

"You'll get a new mirror," Marek said to Habrová, not unkindly. "A better one. No crack. Everybody's happy."

"Nobody said anybody was unhappy," Habrová said, and went to fetch the invoice book, and wrote in it, and the pen scratched, and outside a delivery van idled with its hazards on, and this was the whole of the transaction: pen, paper, hazards blinking, rain starting again lightly on the glass roof of the passage.

"It travelled sixty kilometres," the professor said later, to Reinhold, apropos of nothing, the way old men announce facts they have privately decided are the only facts that matter. "Sixty kilometres, wrapped in packing blanket, in a van with the heater broken, and it arrived at Bruckner's house with a second crack, parallel to the first, four centimetres, top left."

"They dropped it?"

"They said a pothole." The professor folded his hands. "It does not matter. The provenance is stronger now. Two fractures. Marek will tell you it is worth more."

"Two fractures," Marek said, arriving in time to catch the tail of it, uninvited, sitting, "is not more valuable. Two fractures is a different mirror. I have to renegotiate." He said this without grief, a man adjusting a delivery schedule, and ordered coffee, and the waiter brought it without comment, and somewhere in the exchange the whole small catastrophe was absorbed into the afternoon the way a spoon of sugar is absorbed into a cup: stirred, dissolved, gone.

Reinhold looked at the wall where the mirror had been. A rectangle of paler wallpaper, gilt-shaped, waited there like a held breath. He found he could not stop glancing at it, the way a tongue returns to a missing tooth.

"You are staring at where my mirror was," the professor said.

"There's nothing there."

"There is a great deal there. An absence is not nothing. It is only unglazed." He said this and then, unexpectedly, laughed, a short dry sound, the first Reinhold had heard from him. "I am too old to mean anything by that. Forgive me."

"Everything stays," Marek said, stirring, not looking up, "until the day it doesn't."

Nobody answered him. The rain went on being rain.

Reinhold walked home that evening a different way than usual, past the shop windows with their yellow interior light, and in one of them, dark glass, unlit inside, he caught his own reflection whole for a moment, not split, not doubled, ordinary, a man in a wet coat with a laptop bag, tired around the eyes, entirely himself. It startled him more than the crack ever had.

At the flat he opened the laptop. The cursor blinked in the same document, patient as ever, waiting for the paragraph about torque specifications that nobody would read in a language fewer people spoke. He did not write it.

Instead he wrote, to a person he had not written to in eleven days before Tuesday, three lines, nothing large — the weather, the coffee, a mirror that had left a pale rectangle on a wall — and sent it before he could reconsider the smallness of it, and sat afterward in the lamp's ordinary light, hands loose on the desk, feeling, without any word for it, something like the plaster dust settling: a small thing, arrived, undramatic, his.