Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  VIII.

  The second Károly, Imre’s son, was first introduced to his future legacy when he was fourteen, but he did not become head of the firm until twenty-one years later, at Imre’s death in 1913. His two decades of apprenticeship thoroughly taught him the workings of the press but also convinced him of his pompous father’s incompetence. As years passed and Károly remained a subordinate, it was each quarter clearer to the overdue heir that despite the press’s success, the business would have been far more flourishing had he been at the helm rather than his gutless, art-struck nineteenth-century father. Imre’s victories were irritatingly easy; Károly would have bettered them. Imre’s failures were glaring; Károly would never have been so careless, cautious, trusting, suspicious, reckless, cowardly. By the time Imre and the press began relying on Károly, press employees knew of the prince’s scorn for the king, and even Imre’s more obtuse friends in business circles would chuckle and counsel him to have someone taste his food. By 1898, one wag in the KB had taken to calling Károly Brutus when speaking to third parties. Imre himself referred instead to “the boy’s desire to participate in his family’s traditions,” to fulfill his destiny in national life. In private, though, he too wondered how he had won his son’s ridicule. For as a very young boy Károly had loved his father, revered him, imitated his speech and gestures, had told his mother at age six, “Papa and I are alike in every way. We are two men cut from the same fine cloth.”

  Part of the problem began at the KB. Károly was first granted the privilege of accompanying his father to the Gerbeaud one summer evening when he was twelve, and the boy noticed immediately that the other men dressed differently than his father. They spoke differently. And when they bothered (plainly unwillingly, Károly felt) to talk to the boy himself, he felt their laughter. That first evening, the painter Hanák performed some simple but practiced sleight of hand for the boy. The grubby artist borrowed a banknote from the senior Horváth, showed it to the child, then folded it small and hid it in his huge fist. “Which hand is the filthy lucre in, young Károly?” he asked, to the boy’s mounting distaste. Károly pointed at first one then the other of the artist’s hands, disliked their hairy knuckles and paint-stained fingers. One then the other of the fists creaked open to reveal nothing but smudges of color on palms of cut leather, textured like the pads on the paws of Károly’s beloved pumi dog. “A mystery, is it not, little boy?” asked the artist. The painter returned to drinking, chatting, and ignoring the boy, who asked Hanák, though his father did not hear it, “So will you keep Papa’s money then?” The artist laughed and raised his glass of beer to the youth: “You understand magic very well, little boy,” he said before again turning his back on the demonstratively unhappy child.

  Twelve-year-old Károly had taken the invitation to his father’s special evenings as a sign that he was now his father’s adviser and peer. He took his responsibility to heart. “I did not like these men,” Károly told his father very seriously as they walked home together past the endless construction of new homes around Deák Square and Andrássy út. “There is something wrong about them. The dirty one stole your money.” Károly was angry, not least because he had been used as an accomplice in the theft of his father’s (and his own) wealth.

  His father struck him quite hard on the mouth. “He did not steal it and he is not dirty,” Imre said quietly as the boy brought a hand up to his face. “He is a great artist. He needs the money more than I. Should I embarrass him and ask for it back? Would you like that, my little philistine? Should I shout that I am rich when he is poor? No. I allow this to happen as a favor to him. In return, he produces great things, which I admire—” The father, with an increasingly lighter tone, spoke at some length on the discretion required of patrons of the arts, how these men of the KB were his own superiors (in talent) as well as his equals (in taste) and his inferiors (in wealth and success). But after a while, after trying to understand how he could have been wrong in his actions and his words, the boy no longer listened, simply grew angrier and more confused. He settled at last, with the unshakable certainty of a twelve-year-old, on the concrete violation of objective principle: These men are criminals. And father is their victim, though he will not admit it, as he is ashamed of it.

  For the rest of the silent walk home, Károly looked forward to discussing the evening’s events with his twin sister, whose intelligence he respected above all others’. But when they arrived home, his mother told him Klára felt poorly and had gone to bed early. The pneumonia, which began its oozing assault that evening, ended her short life not long after, and to the end of his own life, Károly was never quite able to shake the irrational, gnawing feeling that the KB had somehow harmed Klára fatally, had stolen her too that night, making of him an accomplice in that evil as well.

  But Károly’s father did not release him from the gift of attending, from time to time, the meetings of the KB. After a period of banishment for his first reaction (which quickly became a period of mourning for the loss of Klára), the boy, now different in a way his father could not quite specify, was brought again. And though he sat mute every evening he was brought, his father believed him intimidated in the face of the brilliant company. Imre—more than ever addicted to these evenings of culture and gossip after death had rendered his home so dark and his wife so irritatingly distant—intended that his boy grow up in the company of intelligent men and artists. Such men, he told his son on the walk to the Gerbeaud not long after Klára’s funeral, were the only ones capable of providing a balm to the brutal wounds life inflicts. Károly pitied his father.

  The boy was a few years older when he understood they were laughing at his father, though the men of the KB hid that laughter in ways he could not explain. After more evenings spent in silence, he also felt they were trying to corrupt him against his father, to teach him to laugh at him in their private fashion, just as Hanák had drawn him into theft. “Shall we hear out your old man’s views?” the composer János Bálint whispered to him one evening in the middle of a long and mysterious debate when tempers had flared and several voices were trying to drown Imre’s quiet, unyielding lecturing. “Or shall we take this opportunity to sneak outside for some much-needed air?” Bálint stood, favoring his good leg, and took the boy’s hand, but Károly pulled it back sharply.

  “I wish to hear my father,” he said clearly and calmly. “He is very smart, and if you cannot see that, then you are very stupid.” This retort, hissed out and bitten off with a snap of the head, amused the composer as well as the journalist who sat at Károly’s other side. That evening, the walk home began with a blow, but that did not suffice to compel Károly’s respect for the exalted membership of the KB, and now after several silent evenings the boy would not be quieted. “He tried to take my hand, Father. There was something wrong with this.”

  “The man is married with children, you—” Imre began to say, but Károly’s insinuation nauseated him. “He is a great composer—” he began again in an effort to compose himself. Finally, he had nothing to say but “Stand up” when the child did not immediately rise from the sidewalk after another light slap. “Get up,” he spat, “for God’s sake. These men are your country.”

  The next banishment lasted nearly two years. Károly was left in the gray, unhappy home in the company of his mute, daughterless mother until his rarely seen father, assuming the boy had matured, allowed him to return to cultured company. Now Károly laughed with them, not because he agreed with their unspoken, hidden condemnation of his father as unintelligent or underread or out of his element. Károly laughed with the KB at his father because his father could not see that his heroes despised him, and Károly could, and that was bitterly funny. If one refused to see the truth, then one could hardly expect to be loved for one’s blindness.

  “It would appear you had rather a better time this evening now that you are older. Am I right, my boy?” came the satisfied question on the peaceful walk home.

  “I think they laugh
at real men, Father. I think they are rotted. They are hateful. They are not my country.” The father thought at first Károly was making an obscure joke in dubious taste. He stopped walking, considered his son, and realized the boy was now too large to strike. “Come along, Father,” the son said with just the same smile he had seen on Horn’s lips when Imre praised a current play written by a talentless rival.

  Károly refused all future invitations to the KB, and his father had no further tools to improve the boy’s behavior now that corporal punishment was unfeasible. The matter was never discussed, and when members of the KB came to the press to discuss work, Károly was either noticeably absent from his post or instead displayed a form of impeccable, quasi-military politeness that puzzled his father and “made my flesh crawl,” in the words of the historian Balázs Fekete.

  The press was superficially successful, Károly would admit to a temporary confidant (usually a low-level employee, starstruck to be warmed by the rising son), but it was fundamentally unhealthy, out of balance. His father, and the health of the firm, relied too heavily on the continued so-called inspiration of these so-called Hungarian so-called geniuses. Besides which, if the Horváth Press was in fact the memory of the Hungarian people, it should print Hungarian writers, and one need not know much to know that the members of KB were no such thing. For those who cared to look, he told his agreeable if quiet companion, there was a simple, obvious reason they made a profession of laughing at real Hungarians: They were not real Hungarians. “Their works are foreign, un-Magyar. They do not address what concerns the Magyar. They tinker with entertainment. They ignore their duty to educate, because they cannot help it: No non-Magyar can express a Magyar soul. This is a question of hard principle,” Károly explained as his listener drank, “not fickle opinion or fleeting popularity. Hard principle.”

  The heir knew, however, that he was not a debater, and could not prove to his father his knowledge, and so he went to great trouble to find the voices that could. Though never well liked at the press, Károly did cultivate some employees who helped him find the newspapers and books that made sense to him. Much to Károly’s shame, these newspapers and books were usually printed by other houses. He was ashamed to work for a press that seemed to avoid true Hungarian writers, writers of hard, scientific truth, simply and plainly expressed, men like Bartha and Egán, concerned with the nation’s health rather than its cheap titillation, men willing to state and prove the obvious to ostriches: Jews were not Magyars. Liberal liars were not Magyars. Much of corrupt, cosmopolitan Budapest was not Magyar. And all the while the foolish chattering voices of liberals, Jews, and self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals created an intolerable cacophony in the house that was once the memory of the Hungarian people. For business reasons alone, for the family’s fortune if not for the sake of the nation, Károly’s father had to be made to see reason. He would stress hard numbers; only profits remained to guide his errant father back to rectitude.

  One morning, when Károly was just twenty-one, Imre was late coming in to breakfast due to a long evening at the Gerbeaud the night previous. Károly awaited him at the cluttered table. His father settled slowly into his chair and looked with disappointment into an empty coffee pot.

  “Exciting evening, old man?” asked his son with unnecessary volume.

  “Exciting, no, I wouldn’t say. Illuminating.”

  “Illuminating? With those Jews and scribblers? To each his own, I suppose.”

  “Jews and scribblers?” Imre responded groggily. “What is this now?”

  The young man tapped the newspaper article lying open on the table, slid it toward his father. “Nothing I haven’t thought myself, but it’s nice to see it in print. Nice to know there is still time enough to save our fortunes. My inheritance, don’t forget. Time to consider whether our fortune isn’t founded on the wrong stones. The memory of whose people, I wonder,” the boy concluded with an ironic grin that would hardly have been out of place at the Gerbeaud.

  Imre, hungover and permanently unsure what to make of his moody offspring, picked up the newspaper and after a few moments began to laugh. He reached over the table and pinched his son’s cheek, a gesture he had almost never performed even when Károly’s age would have been appropriate. “You almost fooled me,” he said.

  Károly had prepared himself for a necessary, cleansing dispute on principles, and now found his father’s condescension almost mystifying enough to erase the practiced grin from his face. “Did I?”

  “I think this is Horn’s best effort so far,” his father mused.

  It seems to me, began the column that so moved Károly Horváth in 1899, that the Jews and scribblers who pollute our stages with their little plays, and pollute the city with their little cafés, and turn Budapest into an absolute Sodom and Gomorrah with their unnatural habits are putting us real Magyars at a terrible risk. I for one do not wish to be sitting at the table next to them when God decides to send a bolt of lightning down to destroy this plague once and for all. I for one do not wish to be in the theater watching a sordid little play written by moneylenders when the nation finally rises up in disgust and tears the actors and writers limb from limb, after tolerating yet another display of what feebler minds than my own insist on reviewing as “flashing wit” and “high comedy” and “perhaps Endre Horn’s finest work to date.” I ask you, good Magyar brethren, how much longer must we wait before some relief will come to us? I suppose we cannot hope that God will strike down these deviants prior to the play’s closing on the 18th of next month, since the full houses that it plays to must contain at least some decent, if misguided people. However, if the rapidly approaching century’s end is not a good time for the judgment day which will separate the wheat from the filth, then I do not know when a better day would be. Far be it from me to tell God His responsibilities; surely that’s the Pope’s job, but I for one am looking forward to January 1, 1900. I shall be hiding under my bed and when the flood is passed and the streets are clean and God in His wisdom is ready to receive the worthy up the golden ladder which He will drop down to us, then I will emerge with all my friends and family from under that bed and we will step lightly over the twisting, screaming forms of these so-called playwrights, and rise to heaven where surely there will be better entertainment than Endre Horn’s Brutus and Julius, now playing at the Castle Theater on Színház utca, and better reading than Mihály Antall’s latest collection of doggerel and so-called love songs, Season of Lights, recently published to extensive foolish acclaim by the Horváth Press, and true celestial music rather than the awful experiments of János Bálint, whose music leaves good people gagging while the so-called taste makers pronounce him a genius of the first order and a credit to Hungarian culture. I, for one, do not intend to read or listen to such works when I am sitting at the left hand of our Lord, after God tells me it is safe to come out from under my bed, where I will soon go in preparation for the gathering storm.

  It demanded all of Károly’s patience to understand why his father found this tremendous, blistering (and artistically metaphorical) attack on his squalid, treacherous circle (and even our press, by God) to be funny rather than revelatory and alarming. In this writer, Pál Magyar, Károly had finally found someone who put into words all the disgust he felt for his father’s false friends, all the shame of tying the family’s fortunes to this un-Magyar filth, and now his father was laughing, and congratulating Károly for having nearly fooled him. The explanation came agonizingly slowly.

  The vitriolic column condemning the KB as “Jews and scribblers” that had so captured Károly’s attention and distilled his own feelings that morning was written by none other than Endre Horn, the same leading light of the KB who had lampooned the senior Horváth in Under Cold Stars. Writing under an assumed name, Horn was at this time contributing (with great and comically unnecessary subterfuge) columns to the small, struggling, nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper Awakening Nation (Károly’s favorite, introduced to him by a press employe
e since fired for drunkenness). In these pieces, under the name Pál Magyar, Horn espoused extreme nationalist views, but in staggeringly bad prose. The essays had to be credible enough to slide past the well-blinkered but purity-mad editors of Awakening Nation but still bizarre enough not to be taken seriously by the average reader, and, most important, serve as self-promotion for Horn himself, hidden though he was behind his nom de mockery.

  Károly remained quiet, was forced by circumstance to be Horn’s admirer, found himself at his own breakfast table gagged and bound at a distance by the Jew scribbler. He could say nothing. And so Károly laughed. The betrayal of the press by his own father (Károly later told a colleague) brought hot tears of shame to his eyes, the ruination of a once great man. “A man can be destroyed, of course, but a national institution cannot.”

  But he went himself that day to the offices of Awakening Nation and assured himself the editors would not repeat their error. There were still some men of principle in this world, though his father could no longer be counted among them.

  “Oh, here’s a pity. Horn’s game’s been discovered by the clowns at Awakening Nation,” his father reported one hungover morning.

  “Has it really? What a remarkable turn of events.”