Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  “My newest treasure!” Mark explained. He carried two sweating glasses of iced tea in his fat, damp hands. “I knew you’d love it, especially. I had you in mind when I bought it, actually: ‘This, John will appreciate.’ ” He had purchased the functioning wind-up antique the day before from a small electrical shop in his neighborhood. It was accompanied by eight thick black discs, strange sounds from a time decades before Mark’s birth: coy, archaically smutty lyrics extolling archaic modes of flirtation and sex, flapper dances as ancient and foreign as Etruscan funeral rituals or Aztec virgin sacrifices. Mark’s unexplained swollen face left John wondering if he had interrupted a scene with some vanished stranger now hiding in the tub or sneaking out the back or if a tear-stained letter now waited, stuffed half written or half read in a drawer.

  But Mark smiled and sweated, complained of no interruption, gave John his drink, and talked rapturously of the records. “I really like that one.” He pointed to After-Breakfast Girl. “I played it, played it a few times since I got it yesterday, but, ah, listen to this one.” Despite John’s protests, Mark reverently changed the record, his palms flat against the disc’s thick edges. His eyelid tic kicking as he laughed, he cranked the device then delicately placed the tonearm. As the scratches congealed into a voice and a jangling piano, Mark began to dance a slapdash Charleston.

  That’s the kinda dance that a fella can do

  That a fella can do

  That a fella can do

  That’s the sorta dance that a fella can do

  With a gal who knows the rules!

  The damn toy seemed to have just one volume setting, “because, you know, the past has to scream to be noticed,” Mark said in a professorial tone. John peeked through the curtains to see if the neighbors were mounting a lynch mob against the foreign maniacs. When he turned away from the window, Mark was still flapping his fleshy arms like an elephantine competitor in the late hours of a dance marathon, and he was also crying.

  Or possibly not. The sweat that flowed and jumped from his hairline and eyebrows could have explained the watery, stung look of his eyes, and his panting and laughter seemed sufficient to justify the red nose and slobber. Unless he was crying.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry I came. Please, in the name of God, stop. Take a shower. We’re supposed to have lunch. This is horrifying.”

  “I love this song! Listen to it! This is music! Why couldn’t I?”

  John refused to answer the nonsensical question even on its first and second repetitions, which is when he decided (relieved) that Mark was joking in some obscure, historiographical way—“why couldn’t I” most likely being the last words of some nineteenth-century parliamentarian or circus performer. The dancing ended, the noise melted into the consonance of the gramophone’s whooping repetitive scratch and Mark’s wheezy breathing. John closed the device’s lid. “Watch it with this thing. Your neighbors want to kill you.”

  Mark flopped down onto the couch and chewed ice cubes. He nodded and spoke very quickly (John thought briefly of Karen’s patter): “I know and they, they would, because, the thing is, I had a pretty serious breakthrough today in my work. You know, I’m going to have this appendix, a daisy chain of nostalgia. Basically, you start with this year or whenever and you find the cultural wave of collective nostalgia that’s happening right now, like, say, a thing for the fifties, which we are definitely entering now. I’ll have to pinpoint it and back it up with the usual evidence—crew cuts, Chet Baker record sales, capri pants—but then I’ll go backwards to the longed-for time in question and I’ll find—and I know it’s there—that there was actually a nostalgia wave then for some even earlier time, right, and I’ll pinpoint it and go back to its source, and sure enough there’ll be another one and on and on, all the way back to Charlemagne. The good old days, you know.”

  “Are you going to shower before lunch?”

  “I will, absolutely. But the problem is, it’s too broad. Why forty-year chunks, right? What about a decade at a time? Someone in the eighties longed for the seventies, whether that’s the 1970s or the 1470s, you know, so I could daisy chain in decades. But then I realized I could actually document it even tighter. What about annually?”

  “We could go for paprikás and goulash. I think I found one place that might serve them.”

  “Exactly. This is my breakthrough. So of course the music makes them mad, that always happens like that, actually. Why not monthly? I could do that. I could prove monthly. I could. It’s easy-easy if you know how to research, if you know what you’re looking for. I could take you back every month to William the Conqueror. But then maybe that’s not close enough, is it? To really matter to people. To cure them, I mean.”

  “I met a woman you’d really like last week, this old piano player.”

  “This is where I make my name, John. You’re going to be very proud of me, and that’s the whole point. And this is why the neighbors are a little cranky. Daily. I can prove daily. Today, somebody longs for yesterday and they are leaving steaming evidence of their sadness and I can prove it, but yesterday there was somebody who was sure happiness ended the day before. I can go all the way to Jesus Christ and keep going. It’s going to take research, I admit that, but this is there. And I will help people, despite themselves. So, you know, my neighbors had better get used to that and, and stop coming at me about the music or the rest of it.”

  Inevitably, John was laughing now. “Please, I’m begging you to go shower.”

  Mark toweled off while John read a Herald Tribune in the kitchen, at the small table, underneath a poster promoting Sarah Bernhardt’s upcoming tour of America. “I’m glad you came when you came,” Mark admitted in a tone the shower had softened, slowed. “The music was actually starting to get to me, I think.” He toweled his head and disappeared into the bedroom. “I bought you something.” He returned to the kitchen, the towel around his waist now, and placed on John’s head a fedora with a laminated press card in the band. He left John, amused, experimenting with jaunty angles.

  In the international paper John read an article about “The New Hungary” by a renowned foreign correspondent. It described a nation psychically damaged by years of tyranny, hoping for change, but stifled by economic hardship and entrepreneurial inexperience. The writer detailed a clear Hungarian national character, the shared traits that would have an unavoidable effect on the nation’s growth into democracy and free markets, compared their prospects to those of the more promising Czechs. The journalist peppered the piece with anecdotes of ordinary Zsolts, their travails, hopes, fears. John shouted excerpts of the article down the hall to Mark, but disguised the nation in question, as in “Blank is a country that has known more than its fair share of hardship, and if the Blanks are wary of strangers, it is for good reason; if they have a reputation for charming slipperiness and an endearing pessimism, it is hard to blame them. The Blank people look to the future with understandable trepidation.” Mark was dressed now and John asked him to identify the Blanks, whom he admired and envied in this context.

  After three wrong guesses (Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina), Mark lost interest and admitted he didn’t read current newspapers (“Besides, everybody looks to the future with understandable trepidation”). He had only bought this particular copy because something was odd about it, right on the front page. The Canadian tapped significantly at the date at the top, smiled, and awaited his friend’s dawning realization, but dawn did not arrive. It was the correct date, John pointed out. “Obviously” was the sarcastic retort. “Oh, come on! Look at it! You know how in the first couple days or weeks of January the dates on newspapers look strange,” Mark explained patiently, as if to a child. “Like they’re from science fiction, where someone travels into the future and is stunned to see a paper because the year at the top of the paper is so weird and far into the future? That happens the first few days of every year, right? Like, 1990? Not 1989 anymore? Or you know how for the first few checks you write after New Year’s, you have to think
about what year to write, and you might even put down the old year by mistake? Well, look at the date on the paper again!” Mark tapped it loudly and whistled. “This is the latest in the year this has ever happened. I mean, it’s July, but the date has that science-fictiony feel today. When I saw the paper I was amazed, because dates have been mostly fine since, like, the second or third week of January, but then today—it was just before the gramophone called me from the shop window—I saw this paper and I was, like, July 14, 1990? That looks bizarre. So I bought it as a souvenir. This is a record: It’s July, after all. You should buy a copy. Something to show your grandkids.”

  Over lunch on Castle Hill, the historian talked again of eras and the significance of dates in a way John could almost swear was a joke. He didn’t find it at all funny, but it felt like a social duty to laugh at Mark’s words, as if Mark were pretending to lose his mind, aggressively demanding from his audience at least a polite laugh of appreciation for the effort.

  “Think about the year 2000. That’s only ten years away, but the number is ridiculous. It’s not a real year, like 1943 or 1862 or, or 1900, if you must have zeroes. Two thousand is nonsense, from movies. Honestly, I—” Mark flipped leaves of lettuce around on his plate. They sat on the patio behind the Hilton Hotel, luxury built around the ruins of a medieval monastery. John listened to his friend speak and wondered what made a man like Mark Payton worry about the things he worried about, wondered if it wasn’t all affectation. But to what end? Surely there must be an unaffected first cause, a sincere reason that prods the affected to act that way. Perhaps Mark had cobbled together this strange persona for mating purposes, perhaps a plump but plain Canadian, one of nature’s bachelors, would naturally seek a way to differentiate himself from the buffer, sleeker competition, and the Man Obsessed by the Past must have some lurid, offbeat appeal in whatever dark grounds of sexual hunting his type was compelled to stalk in post-Communist Central Europe. Or, maybe Mark was entirely scrubbed free of affectation. Maybe his research work and his natural inclinations had just gotten the better of him and he really couldn’t get out the door anymore without thinking how the date didn’t feel right or the architecture was criminally violating him. Maybe he had lost the skill (if he had ever had it) of carrying on conversations about anything but lost time; perhaps he subsisted solely on a diet of linden tea and madeleines.

  “Honestly, I find it frightening. It’s too futuristic a number—it’s not for men like me. And you. It’s for spacemen or conglomerates.” Mark was gripping his silverware until his fingers turned white, but John was staring at two young tourists—a man and a woman—arguing in front of one of the fairy-tale bastions along the promenade. They were out of earshot. The man poked the tip of the woman’s nose with a firm index jab, an oddly clear symbolic punch. She turned her back and stomped off.

  Mark noticed at last that he was talking only to himself. “I’m really growing tiresome, aren’t I? Me and my ‘issues.’ ” He held up four fingers around issues, looked for a companionable laugh, which didn’t come, and returned to his food. “You met a woman piano player, you said, a piano player?” he said, remembering a scrap of conversation from an hour before. “What about you and Emily?”

  “Different sort of relationship.” John wondered when and how his nonromance had become public knowledge.

  “No great mystery,” Mark said, answering the unvoiced question. “If you know how to watch. And before you interrogate me, no, I can’t tell you a thing about her. By the way, what’s up with you and Scott? What did you do to that guy?”

  John declined to answer, spoke instead of the nightly visits he had been paying to Nádja at the Blue Jazz. As he recounted the old woman’s adventures—her escape from Budapest, her bohemian life in the United States, her affair with a world-renowned concert pianist, her outrageous dealings with lesser European royalty—he kept his tone skeptical, amused, reflexively suspecting that the scholarly Mark would find her implausible, even as he hoped that the nostalgic Mark would find her elegantly incontrovertible. In this tone, he imagined himself in the stories he was retelling. Sometimes he was the supporting character—young Nádja’s cultivated and heroic husband or the concert pianist making slow Chopin-accompanied love to a vaguely Emilyesque woman. In other stories, he was the leading character herself: He sprinted—frightened, alone, and literally listless—across the Austrian border; he dined with the seedy viscount in the dark and freezing dining room there was not money enough to heat; he sailed the world and grew slowly bored on a billionaire’s yacht.

  “A lot of that stuff could be verified. You’ve got to know most of it’s improbable to the point of—” Mark professionally and calmly began explaining research techniques John could use to check Nádja’s stories. The topic relaxed him. “Every story has aspects that can be checked.” He spouted a catalog of scholar’s tricks: address records for given years, boat registries, refugee rosters, the tour schedules of world-renowned musicians.

  “Check her? Why? Do you think she’s a liar?” John regained his tone of mild noninterest. “I hadn’t really taken her too seriously myself. I just thought you’d find her entertaining.”

  “Hey sure, I’d love that. Bring me to meet her, hey? What about tonight, the two of us?”

  They passed from the patio to the Hilton lobby, then back outside, through the revolving doors and into Szentháromság Square. “I gotta do this interview. I’ll catch up with you at the Gerbeaud.” John turned to the right.

  “Call me, hey? We’ll visit the pianist.” Mark turned left toward the palace and the National Gallery, wondered when they’d catch up with each other, he could go and do his work at the Gerbeaud right now, be sure to be there when John turned up. He pushed through an immobile throng of pathetically indecisive tourists and was suddenly angry at the damage they were doing to the mood of Castle Hill. As he emerged at the herd’s far side, his anger quickly transformed into anxiety: He was bothered by the sense that despite his best efforts to hold it tight to himself, his hard-won peace had been stolen from him by conspiring, malignant forces during lunch. John was not an official delegate of the malignant forces, but he was more and more their unwitting instrument, as were all of these unpleasant tourists, as was the young waitress with the dragon-headed-lamb tattoo on her sinewy, starkly hairless forearm. It was a great relief to be away from company now. It was so much work to explain everything to everyone, even to John, whose obtuseness was often incredibly charming but also exasperating and possibly even willful. It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location. The palace courtyard shone in Mark’s memory with an almost palpable, almost edible promise, a promise with a color all its own: a sort of soft golden red. The palace courtyard would do the trick. He bore the five-minute walk through heat and tourists with the knowledge that soon his day would find soft golden-red comfort.

  He installed himself near the courtyard fountain and eagerly awaited the peace that should flow from the continually splashing water and the soothing, historic construction on all four sides, the permanently prancing stag, the flagstones and archways, the high windows and the square of eighteenth-century blue sky.

  Yet nothing.

  His eyes moved slowly, then quickly, from one of these pacifying sights to the next, faster and faster in frustration as he felt less and less at ease, more and more betrayed by the place, by the flagstones and archways in which he had put his faith. Even in the few short months since his arrival, there were fewer amenable places. He closed his eyes and tried to hear only the water fall from the mouth of the fountain with precisely the same noise it had made for centuries.

  Rudely imported from the imbecilic vendor just outside the palace and freshly stripped from their chocolate innards, bright yellow-and-blue candy wrappers, like a troupe of supernatural acrobats, tumbled, cartwheeled, took wing, and soared over the brown flagstones of the courtyard. Mark made an effort to look elsewhere but was greeted by fat German tourists in shorts two sizes to
o small and Americans with video cameras filming each other film each other and a squadron of Japanese photographers and a middle-aged British couple who wore matching plastic waist packs and sunhats topped with plastic-coated pictures of the queen mum. Mark leaned back to stare at the upper stories of the palace, the clouds that sponged the blue sky behind the oxidized eagle’s head. But it was too late. The palace felt like another dreary theme park, built to look not like the past, precisely, but the way the past was commonly accepted to look by the dimmest members of the present, a fantasyland with crummy rides, but workers dressed convincingly as sullen Hungarian tour guides.

  A day’s worth of reading awaited Mark faraway on his kitchen table. The music had prevented him from working last night and this morning, and lunch had dragged on for a heartbreaking eternity. The two piles of books under the poster of Sarah Bernhardt seemed to him forlorn and needy as they grew and teetered and beckoned to him to leave the palace. There was a towering stack of books on millenarian cults of the approaching year 2000. Next to it and in its shadow, there moped a sad, small bump of slim texts on millenarian beliefs around the year 1000. The promise of work did nothing for him, though. He had been working seven days a week for several months now, with breaks only to meet friends and sit at the Gerbeaud or to sit alone in this palace courtyard (now dead and off his list forever), sit on the benches in Kossuth Square near Parliament, sit on the Pest-side riverfront, sit near the opera, sit at the Gellért, swim at the Rácz Fürdő, walk slowly through Pest, avoid the construction sites, imagine old construction sites instead. He slowly stood, taking it on a cracked faith that it would feel good to work by the time he got home, if he could make it home safely. He wondered how John’s interview was going, hoped he understood the fedora and would wear it right. It was only two-thirty. He left the palace and, too hot to walk down Castle Hill’s winding path to the river, he bought a ticket for the minute-long funicular ride that carted shutterbug tourists up and down the slope. He stood at the little station at the top of the hill and watched the two counterbalancing cable cars, each with about eight passengers, as they glided up and down in opposite motion, passed each other mid-trip, and, in between runs, gazed sadly at each other from opposite ends.