Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  “But is there sustainable, growable profit in selling only classics?”

  “Ohhh, Mr. Gábor, do not think me a sentimentalist. You are correct: Something must pay for our mission. When we return to our rightful place, it will be the same as now, but in Hungarian: popular books and magazines, sports papers, a financial paper; Our Forint would renew a tradition of my family.” Without taking his eyes off the American, he waved vaguely at the middle assistant, who, grateful for the opportunity and with the same fire in his eye as had inflamed Krisztina’s and Balázs’s, drew Charles’s attention to an eclectic catalog that included, among other oddities, the fetishistic but wildly popular series of American “Mike Steele” detective novels translated into German (Killer in the Bath; A Long Hot Shower with Death; Suds, Bloody Suds; Lathered for Slaughter, and several others), the Viennese-pastry cookbooks, memoirs of German politicians and spymasters, the investment guides, diet books, pop psychology, inspirational soft-religion books, a soccer newspaper, and the puzzle magazine that had together accounted for 85 percent of the company’s revenues for the last several years, while the classics sold with respectable consistency. “We are all great fans of your Mike Steele,” Horváth said, raising an ironic eyebrow to the American private detective whose hygiene-obsessed German-language exploits supported the publication of English-language collections of Boldizsár Kis and French-language editions of Endre Horn’s plays. And in this comment Charles knew he was meant to hear Europe laughing at the United States, at its philistine tastes and at the clever European ability to use those tastes to pay for more elevated ventures. Charles knew he was being asked to laugh with them and, in so doing, declare himself European, one of their own by their own definition. He smiled, even bowed his head slightly, in acknowledgment of their cultural triumph over shallow America.

  All expertise sat in these three managers, Charles decided; the Toldy woman was a gofer, and the importance of the old man was purely symbolic, though, Charles reminded himself, that was not without value for investment and publicity, no matter how unappealing a type he found Imre Horváth. Charles used that very word at the Gerbeaud the following Monday: “He’s a type you see all the time. He’s exactly like a fat television addict who won’t shut up about his high school athletic accomplishments. How can someone live as a shell of their former self?”

  An assistant listed the ex-Horváth assets the Hungarian State Privatization Agency had on the block and detailed the likely process of bidding for them before Imre added, “The current Hungarian government, Mr. Gábor, with its former prisoners, its dissidents turned ministers, its poets and its thinkers: Many of them are in our catalog as well. We have published them and other forgotten Hungarians left behind since 1956. This, obviously, involved certain complications in procuring of manuscripts, but such things could be arranged with an Austrian passport and a willingness to, ohhh, extend oneself.” The press’s catalog of samizdat was patently unprofitable, comprising mostly journals and essays: brutal descriptions of life under Communism, philosophical treatises on living honestly amid dishonesty and betrayal, hopelessly fantastical and irrelevant then retrospectively amazing and prophetic imaginings of a future democratic Hungary’s structure and soul. All of it would have been obtained and removed from Hungary at enormous risk. Imre offered no details, merely swung his censer of mysteries and allowed the whiff of secrets to infiltrate the room and tickle the American’s nose.

  “It’s absolutely without commercial value. But good P.R., I’ll give the old liar that,” Charles said as cakes came. “I might need you, Johnny, to make this deal happen. You ever lobbied? Anyhow, we’ll get your little typewriter doing something useful for a change, maybe make you some money.” With a quizzical expression, John Price looked up from cracking the caramel top of his Dobos torte. “Yes, my little Hebrew friend,” said Charles. “Money.”

  “It is remarkable, but true, Mr. Gábor: The Communists never changed the name of the Horváth Kiadó. It was the name of class enemies, those wicked Horváths, oppressors of the proletariat, but they also knew the Horváth name was—as I think you would understand—a respected brand. And what did they do with that brand from 1949 until 1989? They told lies with it. Under my name. Under my family’s stolen name, for forty years, Mr. Gábor, foolish and wicked men have produced nonsense and lies. Except for thirteen days in 1956 when I was again in charge. Forty years of lies, thirteen days of truth. A bad score, I think.” On cue, without looking away from Charles, Horváth accepted a book from his assistant and tapped the spine: A Horváth Kiadó. He tapped the cover, the Hungarian words The U.S. Terrorist Campaigns Against the People of Hungary, by Gyula Hajdú. He opened the book, still facing Charles, to the back page, with its distinctive colophon: a little drawing of a muscular factory worker holding a stylized shield, and on the shield, surrounded by a cloud of steam or smoke, the letters MN. “A Magyar Népköztársaság.” Imre spoke, at last, three words of Hungarian. “The People’s Republic of Hungary,” he whispered. “But MK,” Imre said, and tapped the spine of another book (conjured from a different assistant), where the traditional pistol fired away. “My great-uncle Viktor’s design. MK. A Magyar Köztársaság. The Republic of Hungary. Since 1808, we have published for a free, independent, democratic Hungary. My ancestor died at Kápolna for this freedom. And now there is such a thing, a real place at last, not a fairy tale or a madman’s vision, a true Republic of Hungary, and what do I have? My name and my business, very much one and the same thing, stolen from me to tell forty years of lies. Mr. Gábor, I want your help in restoring truth. This”—he looked straight at the impenetrable boy—“would be a triumph for a young Magyar hero. Not only financial but moral, historical, philosophical. We do need your firm’s money, Mr. Gábor. This is obvious. But we can get that, I think, from other sources. We also need men and women of culture who understand the importance of what we represent. We need Hungarians of character, ready to reclaim their heritage. Please tell this to your firm.” Horváth rose and four others rose in unison a heartbeat after. “I am needed elsewhere now, unfortunately, Mr. Gábor.” He examined the seated Charles. “I am very curious to know what you will do in this situation that faces you, young Károly.” He squinted slightly at Charles and spoke in English, low and slow and grave. “You and I shall perhaps tell this story together. This Hungarian story. Your return to Hungary makes our return to Hungary possible. The truth restored by two Hungarians who wish to come home, one young and one old. Are you prepared, Károly, to grapple with such a labor for your people?” He stood over Charles, his arms crossed, his powerful hands hidden in the folds of his Italian suit, his thin oval reading glasses holding back the wash of his silver mane, his blue eyes unblinking under thick lines of forehead, eyes angled sharply down at the American. His voice slowed and deepened further still. “Your Hungarian story. Think on this first, Károly, and on balance sheets second. It is my best advice to you.”

  The door closed behind him and Imre Horváth stepped slowly and unsteadily down the carpeted hall that led to his office. With great effort, he walked along the corridor and directly to one of the guest chairs facing his desk. He sat heavily under a framed photograph: the current finance minister of the new democratic Hungary, age four, sitting astride the shoulders of Imre Horváth, age twenty-four—a picture used in Békében. The two of them squinted into the sunlight on the Danube riverfront on the Buda side, right in front of the bombed and sunken Chain Bridge, its broken connecting cables dipping into and rising out of the river, its main pediments supporting no road at all. The little boy perched high on the young man’s shoulders waved and smiled; he had just crossed the river on one of the temporary ferries with his friend Imre, who took care of him from time to time. Imre held the soft dangling ankles in his fists, and pictured sleeping with the photographer, the little boy’s oldest sister.

  Charles’s afternoon ended with a tour of the Horváth Verlag offices, warehouses, and printing equipment, under the leadership of Béla, the shor
test of the three assistants, a young man nearly without hair, just a monastic fringe that ran from ear to ear, and a twice-broken nose that resembled one of the lesser-known pastas. Charles again investigated Imre’s chain of succession, and Béla replied: “He has only a cousin, I believe in Toronto, but he has no children. By not having the family he was able to go to Hungary and come a little more free, could resist their certain pressures. It was often through family they made you to collaborate, you know, to bend you. He never collaborated, you see. Never. He never bended. But with a family, well—”

  “It might have been his Achilles’ heel.” Charles finished the intolerably slow sentence.

  Béla stopped in front of one of the clattering machines, held up his hand with the palm facing his guest and the fingers curving slightly inward, a favorite gesture of medieval saints in flat paintings. “He has no Achilles’ heel, Mr. Gábor. He is one of the great men, the real rare men. This you will learn; you will be very lucky to work with him.” And Charles saw that this was not a rehearsed part of the day’s grand plan to impress the money man, not even really that smart a thing to say to a potential investor—just the absolute truth as far as Béla was concerned. Charles exerted himself to the utmost and did not laugh.

  A

  TEMPORARY

  DIGESTIVE

  DISORDER

  PART THREE

  I.

  John Price smoked a slow cigarette on his balcony, kissed the photos of his antique wife and child good night, then lay on his folded bed’s covers, unable to file the events of the day, the head injury and fratultery. His brother deserved nothing better. He should apologize to his brother immediately. He was every day better able to appreciate Emily. He was every minute less worthy of Emily. He was a bastard. He was a genius of living.

  He was nearly asleep when a mathematical equation glowed behind his closed eyes. In the quick-pulsed, sweaty state between wakefulness and sleep, he watched a well-manicured, graceful female hand move chalk across a blackboard. The equation appeared in clicks and squeaks, the disarmed hand pushing the telltale chalk: Seriously = not seriously. As her hand came to the end, the letters began to fade progressively, in the order they had been written, like vapor trails or motorboat wakes. He watched the equation write itself over and over in the same space, at the same pace, fading, reappearing, again and again. Seriously = not seriously. Seriously = not seriously. When the word seriously began to look misspelled, imaginary, John was escorted into sleep.

  The next morning, this equation—unlike great presleep revelations of the past, vast social engineering solutions, mathematical insights, philosophical breakthroughs—had not vanished but sat perched on his shoulder and demanded his immediate and undiluted attention when he opened his eyes: Seriously = not seriously. He rose and returned to his balcony, watched the traffic and the foreshortened pedestrians, who, directly beneath him, shrank to mere circles with four telescoping attachments. The equation paraded around, and he couldn’t quite think of anything else for several minutes.

  On and off during the morning, as he struggled to make sense of the bloodied notes from his interview with Harvey, he would lean back in his chair and chew his lip, considering serious and nonserious until, just before noon, Karen Whitley asked him if he was in the mood for “a special lunch.” The equation finally revealed its secret meaning to him as Karen’s closed eyes and open mouth swung metronomically in and out of John’s range of vision. With each pendulum swing, her torso and head obscured and revealed in rhythmic alternation the ceiling rose, the plaster grapes and garlands encircling her bedroom’s light fixture. John tried to see this carving in his mind’s eye even when it was blocked by Karen. He tried to make the girl transparent on behalf of Emily, who sat obligingly nude next to him, placed one hand on his forehead, and demanded ferociously, like a martinet drill instructor, that he count the grapes, that he silently describe the garlands and the tiny cupids in complete detail to her. And, as he was following her orders, his equation returned—Seriously = not seriously—and John began to smile, and Karen, her eyes open now (vaporizing Emily), smiled back at him, and John smiled more broadly, and Karen, too, smiled more broadly, and John slowly began to understand the vision that had come to him with sleep the night before. After a while, Karen stopped moving and her head fell against John’s chest, and the sound of her talking slowed and lowered and became the sound of her breath and then the sound of her sleeping. By then, John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.

  He left Karen asleep and returned to the office to finish his Harvey profile, which now typed itself with nonserious facility: Harvey was not serious; Harvey was amusing. Nothing could possibly be less serious than brother Scott and his Magyar mistress. John tapped at his computer keyboard with a dramatic rising and falling of the hands, like a concert pianist.

  II.

  “And your father said to me, ‘But that’s why we’re here. I’d do this again in a minute.’ Think about that. Even in that kind of danger, under fire, with me giving off very unhelpful doubt and fear, he was entirely clear about himself and his purpose. Extraordinary. They don’t make a lot of men like Ken Oliver.”

  “No, that’s certainly true.”

  Ed held her eye until she looked away. “Everything else good for you?” He leaned forward and his chair creaked under the weight. “You liking the work?”

  “I love it. I’m honored to do it.”

  The two sides of her supervisor’s personality alternated dominance according to strict scheduling. Outside of secure areas, in the vast surveillable outside world, his ear constantly but discreetly to the ground, Edmund Marshall did not simply appear to be but truly was a round and shaggy-bearded bon vivant, a wheezy jokester, often nearly drunk, loving life and the occasional off-color story, frequently and loudly thanking heaven and his evening’s hosts for his diplomatic career, since it kept him near great foreign food. He also kept himself surrounded by a mist of artificial but very credible rumors that his job was in danger, that he had recently been disciplined again for some overindulgence or another. During office hours, however, behind lead doors, he was the most humorless, unsmiling co-worker conceivable, obsessive about the accuracy of paperwork, untiring in constructive self-criticism, with an insatiable appetite for discussing the ambivalences, layers, motivations, and countermotivations of sources and potential sources. He was universally admired by his staff for his sincere, rare, and impassioned vocation for identifying human weakness, doubt, and corruptible ideals. Neither of his two personalities was put on, only perfectly segregated for maximum usefulness, and Emily knew that this ability to put one’s entire personality to work was an accomplishment one should aspire to.

  “Are you happy here?” he asked her.

  She looked up. The question astounded her. “Of course.” She left her supervisor’s windowless office—swallowing with difficulty the mild rebuke that had then segued into the vaguely illustrative (and self-critical) story of her father in a very different Berlin—and considered the implications of his odd question. No one had ever asked her such a thing before, because no one had ever had to; she had certainly been brought up never to consider such a selfish question, or to put anyone in the position of having to ask her. She didn’t know what could have prompted such a question or what conceivable difference the answer could make.

  On the other hand, she hadn’t heard that story before and couldn’t help but feel another flush of admiration for her father, followed closely by an uncharacteristic rage at Ed’s probing and prodding, and at his baffling and really completely unfair comment that her Analyses of Human Motivation in the contact reports she filled out after every interaction with any foreign national were still displaying—despite his previous complaints, corrections, and frustrated tutoring—“a callow lack of nuan
ce, tone color, and depth measurement.” And so it was with some relief when the marine called from downstairs to say that a John Price was in the lobby to see her. John and Mark lived in some relaxed and rootless parallel universe, where no one inquired after you to make sure you were appropriately happy, holding you up against some mysterious standard of behavior. She wondered how it must feel to float like John must float, all day.

  They walked around the block, then sat on one of the old green benches in the middle of Liberty Square, watched the line for visas wind around the side of the embassy. “How did you decide not to join the military?” she asked him after talking about nothing. “What? Why is that funny?”

  “Decide? Well, how did you decide not to become a sumo wrestler?”

  “Really? It wasn’t like a statement or something? You just never thought about serving?” She sat quietly. John’s presence confused her just now, his untetheredness, his belief in nothing in particular. He was so unfocused, she felt fuzzy simply being near him. Things she was certain of a few minutes before now seemed questionable. “I’ve never asked my brother Robert if he’s, you know, well, happy in the Corps. Do you think that I should have? Is that strange? Cripes, what time is it? I gotta go back in.”

  John had come to the embassy with an invitation meant to reveal something of himself to her, to open a private space in which they could be alone together. “There’s someone I really want you to meet,” he finally managed to say as they stood in the lobby under the eyes of two marine guards and several cameras, visible and invisible. “She’s amazing. You’ll love her.”

  She agreed to meet him at the Blue Jazz, better than a night catching up on contact reports while wondering if she looked sufficiently happy to pass mysterious muster, better than wasting valuable time with the pointless Julies. She fingered the plastic I.D. card clipped to her lapel, examined John: She wondered if he was happy in a way she was not, wondered if there were some dangerous telltale betrayal of her father or of her principles that showed on her face but not in a mirror. And she retreated through the self-locking double glass doors to do her shy ambassador’s bidding.