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

Steam. A spoon against porcelain. Rain on the window, going nowhere — a foreign language outside, a foreign language on the screen inside.

Beneš had lived in the city eleven months and could still not order coffee without the waiter switching, out of mercy, into English. He worked from a laptop that connected him, twice daily, to an office four hundred kilometers away, to colleagues who were voices, names in small rectangles, a company that existed for him mostly as a login screen. He came to the Café Elektra at nine each morning because the apartment had begun, in the last weeks, to produce a silence he did not like the taste of.

The Elektra was old, mirrored on three walls, the fourth given to a window. In the mirror behind the pastry case there ran, from the frame down through the silvering, a single crack — hairline, no wider than a hair, forking once near the bottom like a river reaching a delta.

He had catalogued it without meaning to. Nine-eleven, most mornings, his eye would find it before his coffee arrived. A fracture keeps its shape; a man does not always keep his.

—You're looking at the mirror again, said a voice. Everyone looks at the mirror.

The man had sat down without invitation, at the small table's second chair, a cup already in his hand though Beneš had not seen him order.

—It's an old habit, Beneš said. I count on it. Like other men count sheep.

—Zoubek, said the man, offering nothing else — no trade, no floor, no reason. He had the kind of face that is easy to describe and impossible to remember: average nose, average brow, eyes that moved fast and settled slow. Ninety years old, that glass. Older than the café. Older than the street, maybe, in its present shape.

—And the crack?

—Nobody knows how it got there. There are four stories. A soldier's rifle butt in 'forty-five. A woman who threw a shoe at her own reflection, over some man, naturally. A hailstorm nobody else remembers. Or it was cracked when they hung it, and the owner was too proud to say so, and too poor to replace it.

—Which do you believe?

—All of them, said Zoubek, and none. That's the interesting part of a fracture, my friend — it doesn't announce which blow made it. It only shows you that a blow was struck.

Beneš turned his cup a quarter turn, out of habit, though there was no design on it to align. Outside the window the rain kept on, indifferent, a clerk finishing its shift.

—You work from that machine, said Zoubek, nodding toward the laptop. Every day. Nine to what — six? Alone with people who are elsewhere.

—More or less.

—And the company. Is it a good company?

—It pays.

—That's not what I asked.

Beneš said nothing. It was, in its way, the truest answer he had given anyone in eleven months.

—I ask, said Zoubek, because I deal in mirrors. Not this one — I don't own this one, nobody owns this one, it belongs to the café the way the ceiling belongs to the café — but mirrors of a kind. Old glass, old silver, old frames. There's a demand you would not credit. Hotels wanting a history they did not earn. Collectors of atmosphere. Men who buy a fracture the way another man buys a first edition — for the flaw, you understand, not despite it.

—You're a dealer.

—I'm a finder. There's a difference, though the tax office has never seen it. I find; someone else sells; a third man pays. Everyone in between sleeps well.

—And this mirror?

—This mirror is not for sale. I only sit near it, some mornings, the way you do. I like to watch a man watch a crack and not know he's doing it.

The waiter passed, cleared a saucer, said something about the rain that neither of them answered.

—There's a mirror very like this one, Zoubek went on, in a house two streets from here. Same age, same silvering gone soft at the edges, no crack at all — perfect, if you like perfection, though I never have. The owner is old, alone, wants to sell the whole apartment and go to his daughter in the south. Furniture, glass, the mirror, all of it, cheap, because he wants it gone before he goes. A man in your position — steady wage, foreign city, nothing much to spend it on — could buy the lot for less than four months of that salary you don't want to name.

—Why would I want a stranger's furniture?

—Why does anyone want anything they didn't ask for, said Zoubek, and smiled with exactly half his mouth. It arrives, and then it's yours, and then you find out.

He rose, left no money, and said he would be at the Elektra tomorrow, should Beneš wish to see the apartment, the mirror, the whole quiet inheritance of somebody else's life.

Beneš looked again into the glass behind the pastry case. The crack ran where it had always run, patient, exact, dividing his reflected face very slightly, so that one eye sat a fraction higher than the other, as if some part of him had already agreed to something the rest had not yet heard.

By morning it had rained on that agreement too, thinner now, more like breath than weather. Zoubek was already at the small table when Beneš came in, the second chair pulled out as if it had been waiting since yesterday.

—You slept on it, said Zoubek. Good. A man who doesn't sleep on it isn't serious.

—I have an hour before the ten o'clock call.

—An hour is what it takes to look at a life. Come.

The apartment was two streets away, third floor, no lift, a smell of camphor and boiled cabbage on the landing. The old man who opened the door was smaller than his voice, which came out of him thick and slow, the vowels worn round the way a stair-tread wears round.

—Fiala, he said, and shook hands like a man passing something fragile across a counter. My daughter is in Split. There is a room for me there, with a balcony. I don't need the balcony. I need to stop climbing these stairs before God does it for me.

The rooms went back one behind another, dim, curtained, every surface holding something. Zoubek walked ahead of them both, hand trailing along the furniture the way a man runs a hand along a fence he owns.

—Sideboards, said Zoubek, wardrobes, a piano nobody has played since the war, a set of chessmen missing one knight, a clock stopped at ten past four and proud of it, forty years of tablecloths folded by a woman who is no longer here to unfold them, a mirror without a single flaw in the glass, and all of it going for less, my friend, than four months of the wage you don't like to name.

Beneš did not answer. He had stopped at the mirror.

It stood in the front room, taller than the one at the Elektra, the frame darker, the silvering gone soft at the corners in the same way, the same age written into it — but whole. No crack anywhere. His reflection came back to him entire, both eyes level, nothing dividing his face from itself.

He found he did not like it.

—My wife bought that mirror, said Fiala, from the doorway. Nineteen fifty-one. She stood in front of it every morning for thirty years and never once, that I saw, was satisfied with what it gave her back. Now I stand in front of it and it gives me back an old man, and I am satisfied, because at my age that is already generous.

—It's perfect, Beneš said. No mark on it.

—Should there be?

—I don't know. I've grown used to one that isn't.

Fiala looked at him the way old men look at younger ones who have just said something true without meaning to.

—Take it if you want it, he said. Take the whole flat if you want it, I have no more use for chairs than a dead man has for shoes. Only be quick, because the daughter has bought the tickets, and tickets, unlike furniture, cannot be sold back.

Zoubek produced, from somewhere, a paper already half filled in, and a pen, and stood holding both with the patience of a man who has done this in a hundred rooms and expects to do it in a hundred more. The sum was named. It was smaller than Beneš had feared and larger than Fiala seemed to want, and between the two amounts the paper was signed, and the pen recapped, and nobody in the room believed himself to have done anything but a kindness to somebody else.

—The mirror only, Beneš said. Not the sideboard. Not the piano.

—A man builds his inheritance one piece at a time, said Zoubek, and did not argue further, because the sum for one piece is smaller and a smaller sum, agreed to quickly, is worth more to a finder than a larger one debated. Fiala signed. The mirror changed hands the way such things do — two men lifting, a third holding the door, nobody looking at anybody else's face, the glass throwing the ceiling light around the stairwell in a long unsteady arc as it went down.

He set it against the wall of his own apartment, where the laptop's blue glow had lived alone for eleven months, and for a week did not connect to it what he had connected, without knowing, to the one at the Elektra. He worked; the voices in the small rectangles spoke to him of quarters and deliverables; the rain came and went; the mirror stood, whole, giving him back a face undivided, and he found this less restful than he had expected a whole face to be.

On the ninth day, moving the frame an inch to catch better light, his hand slipped on the wet floor and the corner struck the radiator, not hard, a small sound, more felt through the fingers than heard.

He did not notice until evening. Then, making coffee, he saw it — a hairline, no wider than a hair, running from the upper frame down through the silvering, forking once, near the bottom, like a river finding its delta.

He stood a long while with the spoon still in his hand, not stirring, watching his own face come back to him very slightly divided, one eye a fraction higher than the other. Then he finished the coffee, and went to bed, and slept, for the first time in eleven months, the whole night through.