Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  Todd listened politely but now answered with some heat. “That’s not his point of view, the English kid. That’s yours and you’ve got no right to it. You sat at the pizza place and you acted like my guys should make decisions based on what people like you will think of them in seventy-five years. That’s how people should think? You don’t know what those English guys fought for; they were individual people. It’s way too easy for you to say World War One was a joke. You’re not Belgian. Your farm wasn’t overrun by Germans. Your sister wasn’t raped by them. Name any war you want. Every single war—somebody had a damn good reason at the time, and they don’t owe you an explanation for it. Here’s what I know, John, and you can print this and you can write one of your smart-ass columns around it, okay? You ready? Here goes: There is no ‘grand scheme of things.’ That’s just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future’s approval. They’re both irrelevant when an enemy’s at the door. That’s why I’m a marine. Whoa, how about that one? Do you think she’s Hungarian? Hold on a sec.” The marine trotted toward a young blonde smoking a cigarette and leaning against the railing, one leg crossed behind an ankle bare under black capri pants. John watched their conversation, too distant to be audible, saw the girl nod, blow smoke away from Todd, and shift the cigarette to shake his hand. Minutes passed before the marine returned to John, and she waited.

  “Good talking to you, man. Check this out: That girl is Belgian. How about that? I do enjoy fraternizing with the unlisted.” He shook John’s hand and returned to his Flemish milkmaid, offered her his arm, rescued her from the invading Krauts, guided her along the riverside, and disappeared into the protective cover of tourists, caricaturists, street performers.

  V.

  She extended an ancient hand, then kissed Emily on each cheek. “The famous Miss Oliver! I have heard so very much of your charms.” Nádja’s raspy voice carried an archness that bothered John.

  He had invited Emily here so she would see the sophisticated (more relevant, more authentic, more European, more engaged, more whatever) life he led when away from their mutual friends. He had invited Emily here so that Nádja could judge her for him and either cure him of his affliction or tell him how to win her. He wanted Emily to sit next to him while Nádja lifted them both high in the air, and they would sit together in the old woman’s palm and let their heads brush, side by side, against the ceiling, and from the same high vantage point she would see what he had seen and all manner of things would be clear.

  Instead, after a few minutes of sterile, sputtering small talk, John despaired: The decrepit old pianist was not strong enough to hoist them both; she was too feeble tonight to lift even him alone. He grew grouchy to find himself in a rotten jazz bar between a tiresome old woman and a girl who tolerated his presence only out of some Midwestern politeness. Waiting for Nádja to find Emily ideal, waiting for Emily to find Nádja significant, he found them both insufferable. He offered to go for drinks and, as he emptied his first two Unicums standing out of sight at the bar, he was slow in returning.

  When he did, the two women were discussing his recent column about Nádja herself. “Dear John Price,” she said, and patted his hand in exchange for her Rob Roy. “You made me sound rather too intriguing, I think, but that is a very petty complaint, isn’t it? Far better to be too grand than too dull, yes?” She smiled at Emily. “Your friend was just claiming that she is some sort of servant to your ambassador.”

  “Well, not a servant precisely.”

  “Then what, precisely?” Nádja clinked Emily’s glass with her own and her lips turned up so sharply, she seemed about to burst out laughing.

  “Well, I manage his schedules, and I do run a few errands, of course.”

  “My dear, why would they have a lovely girl like you do such things?”

  “I’m a very detail-orientated person . . . I—”

  “Oh, let me just speculate for an instant: You meet all sorts of fascinating people, and they are amazed that the ambassador’s servant is such a charming and well-informed girl. And these fascinating people open their hearts to you all the time.”

  “I think I am a good listener. I really do. And I do meet some interesting people, but really it’s more like arranging luncheon place-settings.”

  “Are you hearing this, John Price?” And Nádja did begin to laugh, leaning in to touch his hand as if they were in on the same joke. “This is too delicious.” John didn’t recognize any of this dialogue from his visions for the evening, suspected Nádja might already be drunk.

  Emily asked Nádja about her piano training.

  “We can talk about me if you want, my dear, but it won’t help. Fine: I am mostly self-taught, from records, from listening to others. But”—John leaned imperceptibly closer, hoped that but was the sound of Nádja gaining strength—“but I did have one teacher when I was a girl here in Budapest, and he was an interesting man . . .” John breathed deeply, recognized the majestic opening of an ancient gate, the slow revelation of great gardens within. He looked expectantly from Nádja to Emily and back again, somehow feeling that he was the indirect subject of conversation and was about to be vindicated in everyone’s estimation. “He was a remarkable man, Konrád. I was ten and he was perhaps thirty-three when he began to teach to me my scales and positions and how to read the notes. He was an elegant man who came into difficult money time in the years following the First War. This would be about, I suppose, 1925. He was a spy, you see, in the First War.” She smiled at Emily, paused for interruptions, but none came. “As a young piano student, he was living in France when the war began. He offered his services as a teacher of children, described himself to their parents as a refugee of the wicked Hapsburgs, dreamed up some story of confiscated family land, mistreatment at the hands of jealous rivals, refused to return until his family’s holdings are released, and such forth. And by the sheerest coincidence, as you can imagine, Miss Oliver, these children’s papas did tend to be French military and government men. A dapper young Hungarian, slightly bohemian, a Chopin type, but still, it would seem, of good breeding and money. They took to him quickly, the parents. And, of course, one does tend to recommend good servants to friends, also military and government, of course.”

  Emily sipped her spritzer and listened with her charming and flattering intensity. John heard other noise in the room yield and dissipate into a faint rumble far below him.

  “Konrád would keep his eyes and ears open. He peeked into desks and rubbish bins when opportunity presented. And he was able to shape allies of his little students, of course. Oh yes, the children hear things, too, and think nothing of sharing it with their friend the piano teacher. Secrets have different qualities to different people, as I’m sure you know.” John was glad Nádja was making such an effort to impress Emily, felt she was granting him her approval and pulling out all her best stuff to deliver the girl’s heart to him. “And so revealing a secret has different qualities, too. Two people might reveal the same secret: For one, the revelation is a betrayal; for the other, a game. A child’s game. Of course, when a child has someone else’s secret, well, that is merely the currency of conversation, a few guineas to buy her some attention and respect. Konrád knew this, and he was very generous and serious in granting of attention and respect. That was his greatest gift, really, not piano playing or teaching. He was the perfect spy of children, could take the dullest child seriously, delicately. Do you know the type?” She sipped her Rob Roy and flushed a cigarette from its pack. John moved quickly to light it for her.

  “Oh, I think we all know that type,” John replied to the absurd question, and he was pleased that Emily laughed with him. Nádja breathed out smoke, and John watched it curl and weave itself into a net of blue-gray wisps around his circle, watched it filter and softly blur every other person in the club until they became mere color and background.

  “He made the child feel important, all grown up. When little Sophie or Gen
eviève told Konrád that Papa—who was, say, a colonel in a particular regiment—was going to take a trip to Marseilles in a week, Konrád told her he was duly impressed at the maturity of her conversation. And the wives! Oh yes, of course, the wives. They too found something in the handsome young artiste, the amateur of music, the disinherited and dashing nobleman. Here, again, secrecy is a variable quality. To these wives the piano instructor was a figure of great glamour, but more important, their nearly final opportunity to enjoy life in the open. For these women, married to secretive men, the idea of carrying on a secret affair was an act of candor, not secrecy. With Konrád in their beds, they could speak of anything they wished; he was just the piano teacher, what difference could it make? They did not have to maintain the boring, boring caution and discretion that made up their daily lives and drove them nearly mad with tedium and isolation, you see. These women ached to be whimsical, spontaneous, and, as I am quite sure you know, this is not at all possible if you must watch your every word, screen your every thought.” She paused and tasted her Rob Roy. “Dear girl, I hope I am not boring you with things you already know?”

  “Not at all,” said Emily with great and surprised enthusiasm. “This is amazingly interesting. Go on, please.”

  Nádja laughed. “These women lived under this terrible burden of their silly husbands’ state secrets, and secret burdens, you know, of course, make you old very quickly. These women were reaching that terrible point where youth is harder and harder to see in the mirror. It requires special lights and long coaxing to draw it out from its ever more numerous hiding places. Those are very bad years. You will not like them, Miss Oliver. You know the French words Un secret, c’est une ride? Every secret is a wrinkle. With Konrád, they would cast them all off and they would feel young again. They wished to hold the attention of this young man who could have his choice of women. And they think to themselves, Why should he bother with me, an aging wife of a bureaucrat in the naval ministry? Because she could interest him with funny stories about her husband’s colleagues or cynical stories about their incompetent projects and stubborn superiors or disgusted stories of how badly certain elements of the fleet were equipped. Of course, these women were not really disgusted with such things; they merely repeated their husbands’ talk. Husbands’ secrets became wives’ coin for conversation became secrets again for Konrád to dispatch to Vienna, to become coin for him.”

  Nádja apologized for not doing so earlier and offered Emily a cigarette. The girl shook her head and asked, “So Konrád”—her Midwestern accent produced a decidedly un-Magyar Conrad—“told you all this sexy psychology when you were ten?”

  “No, no, my dear. I learned all of this over quite a spell. We were friends for many years, and more than friends for a brief and very happy period.”

  “Of course, of course,” murmured John, happy to have returned to Nádja’s world, where things happened. Nothing (at least nothing serious) happened in his world. He listened to Nádja’s past and wished he could reach Emily’s hand from where he sat. The lightest touch of her fingers in this air, at this altitude, would burn him and leave a mark forever.

  “Did he help the war effort?”

  “Your question is a good one, my girl, but only if, as I suspect, you already know the answer: He was of very little use, I would think. Not much accomplished. He always felt his information should have been put to better use, but the empire that paid him was already crumbling, even before the war. His little tidbits snatched from talentless children and unhappy wives could not begin to change that. He certainly didn’t change the outcome of the war, did he? I don’t know if his carefully coded messages ever saved a Hungarian life, or won a battle, or even improved those ghastly terms of surrender. That is always the plight of the spy: How clever they can be, but how little they can do,” she added with a sharp gust of laughter. “They are always surrounded by lovers, though, interestingly. It is only natural, but a terrible cock-up of nature. They are like some infertile animal with beautiful coloring. They attract only because they seem to have a purpose, but they are really the most useless species. It is a terribly silly way to waste one’s good years.”

  John watched Emily’s eyes fill with sympathy. “That’s kind of terrible. Was he sad when you knew him? Not to have helped more with the war?”

  “Sad?” Nádja granted the question a moment’s silent attention. “For being a failed spy? No, I shouldn’t think so. Dear, the smartest of them grow to realize it is hardly worth bothering with, and he was rather smart. He was sad, I suppose, for some things. He was always unhappy about money. I know he feared growing old. He feared losing piano dexterity and his good looks, which I must say he never did do. He hated the French to the end of his days. People used to call Pest the Paris of the East, you know, and whenever he heard this, he would scowl and bellow, ‘Paris should be so lucky!’ But to be sad because he did not save his world from destruction by sleeping with middle-aged women and digging in the trash and giving candy to children? Really, Miss Oliver, do you find this sad?”

  “Oh, please call me Emily.”

  The band that evening was entirely Hungarian, older men, professors of the music academy. The trumpeter wore a long beard, like a Russian Orthodox monk; from the nose to the chest, he resembled a hand puppet. He murmured something Hungarian into the microphone, and some of the crowd laughed. John—feeling abnormally alert to every vibration around him, awake to every nuance in the room—swirled his Unicum; the twirled liqueur painted melting Romanesque arches on the inside of the glass. The bandleader counted off a tune. It was jazz, but distinctly Hungarian; its rhythm sparkled with shards of something foreign, kicks of Hungarian folk music, the sound of caped horsemen. The melody was in a minor key, with the strange intervals and mournful feel of Eastern European dances, but with the rapid swinging bursts and twisting lines of bebop jazz. John watched the obese pianist perspire to produce this strange new music. He felt that his connection to other people, even to objects, had become, if only temporarily, close but beautiful, not at all constricting. Even his understanding that this feeling was temporary felt like heightened clarity.

  “Oh, of course, yes, I’ve known several spies over the years. They don’t have to tell me, though some did. They are not usually difficult to spot, paradoxically. I have always found them—Konrád too—to be rather . . . well, it is difficult work, I suppose, but it is not for people who wish to live a full life, with closeness to others and to experience. I think they are all a little strange. A little sad, to use your word.”

  “I suppose so,” said Emily. “I suppose that must be true.”

  John, his eyes on the ceiling, blew a column of smoke directly upward and nodded: true, true, difficult work, strange and sad. Emily sipped her drink and listened to the band, then asked Nádja if she had ever visited the United States. “Oh yes. I lived for many years in San Francisco, playing piano and—very much like I am to believe you do for your ambassador—I was organizing the social calendar of a South Vietnamese general who was living there in a strangely giddy exile after your war. He threw so many, many parties. I remember once . . .” John grinned at Emily: Nádja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbable but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nádja’s must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.

  And so, having wished Nádja good night and complimented her interlude playing, accepted her thanks for the drinks and the column, having been enclosed by the thick and sticky July midnight, John was surprised and saddened to hear Emily express her amused disbelief. He was walking her home, crossing the Margaret Bridge toward Buda, and she thanked him warmly for introducing her to his friend. She had never met such a charming and entertaining “old woman.” The term—old woman—set John on edge. He said a little testily, “That’s not really a relevant description. The least rel
evant thing about her, don’t you see that?”

  “Okay, sorry. Jeez. How about amazing liar?” she offered with a laugh. “Come on, you’re better than me at Sincerity, so don’t tell me you don’t see through this woman. She’s a piano player who makes up stories. Good ones, okay. I can see why you like her. I liked her, too, she’s very fun. I meant it when I thanked you for introducing me. But really, I mean, she’s neat, but . . .” Emily stopped walking and looked John in the eye. “John, you cannot believe anything that woman tells you. Anything. She’d say anything to be good company. Or to test her skills or whatever. Anything.” She watched him. “That’s the thing with liars, I mean.” She turned away and continued walking, left John standing perplexed for a moment behind her, watching her march on without him to the bridge’s halfway point, where its gentle ascent subtly exhaled into a gentle descent.

  His pain was out of proportion; he knew that right away. It made no real difference what these women thought of each other. But that she hadn’t seen what John was in Nádja’s company, and what Emily herself could be, that she hadn’t been as he thought she had been just ten minutes earlier: This was a jabbing, breath-stealing pain. He ran, caught up with her, took her arm, turned her toward him. “Let me ask you something. Don’t you want her to be telling the truth?” The traffic went silent and brushed soft lights across half of Emily’s face, from cheek to nose, over and over again in irregular rhythm.

  “What does that have to do with any—?”

  “Everything. It has everything to do with everything. Don’t you want that to be the world?” He was proud to be agitated, in defense not of Nádja but of the whole world she had given him.

  Emily’s face changed, relaxed into a kind of sympathy. “Oh, sweetheart, I don’t want the world to be anything.” John felt himself fighting to remain himself, fighting to take the word sweetheart as a lover, not as a nephew. “The world is and grown-ups react to it as best they can. It isn’t made of funny stories.”