Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  The second picture in her portfolio, smaller, also black-and-white: A young couple sits on a mound of rubble, the dusty bricks and broken furniture from some exploded building. They nuzzle side by side, facing front but turned toward each other for a kiss. His legs dangle in corduroys under a simple white shirt, his feet in untied work boots and a bandanna around his neck. She wears a long dress and black shoes, her ankles crossing. They look very much in love. Their eyes are closed. Just to their left, two soldiers of indistinct nationality fight. The soldier on the right has just plunged his bayonet into the belly of his enemy. His expression is ferocious and convincing, sweat and grime whipped with fear and hatred. The victim is fumbling at the blade burrowing into his stomach. His eyes are open wide in pleading.

  “So that’s my real life.” She had returned unheard.

  “I like it. I really like these.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” She seemed absolutely, sincerely pleased to receive this encouragement, which had gurgled out of his lips as thoughtfully as drool. “That’s so great to hear. God, it really is.” John couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say about her work, but her happiness was contagious and he enjoyed the effect of his praise. She opened the other, her newspaper portfolio, now five pictures lighter, and laid it on his desk. She stood behind him, leaning over his chair, one hand on his shoulder, and she slowly turned the pictures over for him. His hand floated up and onto hers, and he watched the photos pass.

  More conventional journalistic shots: leaders orating on this or that fungible topic; storefronts of glitzy new shops; Soviet tanks trundling out of Hungary four decades after arriving, with the top halves of Russians smiling and waving good-bye from open hatches; the members of a popular Hungarian techno-rock band, sweating and screaming under strobes. Artistic soft-news or human-interest photos: a stylized nighttime shot of the animated neon billboards that lit up one of Budapest’s boulevards with steaming cups of neon coffee and slowly winking smokers, brands with mere months to live; the dirty faces of Gypsy children stranded in squalor, their tired eyes seemingly aware that they were both the descendants and the forebears of infinite generations of impoverished children who posed, or were still to pose, for infinite generations of compassionate, powerless photojournalists; ironic juxtapositions of Western businessmen and Hungarian peasant women caught in the same frame, standing in line to enter McDonald’s.

  John tossed more compliments over his shoulder, just to savor her happiness at catching them, a happiness that was so appealing, he started to wonder if it weren’t a trick she performed on demand. “If you really like them, I do have more in my studio,” she said. “How tall did we decide you were? Five-ten? Five-ten and a half?”

  Charles spent the afternoon typing and redrafting his notes into investor briefings and Horváth Holdings business plans. He kept his door closed and told Zsuzsa not to disturb him. Toward five, he wandered past the expectedly sleepy Presiding Vice’s office and allowed himself to be invited in for inane conversation.

  “Five-day weekend for me, Charlie, starting in eighteen minutes. I’ll be out of pocket until Tuesday. Vienna. Viennese chickies. The only perk of working in this backwater.”

  “That and your salary.”

  “And the press attention,” conceded his chief.

  The playful sun jumped from cloud to cloud, momentarily illuminating the brass fixtures and glass dome of the man’s prized antique, a 1928 ticker tape machine. “Oh, I just remembered I wanted to ask you something,” Charles mentioned as he was turning to leave. The vaguer the words now, the more broadly and durably his ass would be covered later if everything went awry: “That publishing deal, do you remember? The Austrian guy? Since we don’t want it, I thought I’d suggest some other finance possibilities, maybe introduce him to a few people I know. I sort of like the guy and want to give him a hand, you know. Any objections?”

  “Whatever,” said his boss, rising sixteen minutes earlier than projected to gather at random a few work papers and folders destined to make a five-day trip to and from Vienna unexamined. “You want to join me in V-town, Big Chuck? We’ll bring nylons for the fräuleins.”

  In the long, unbroken rectangular room, half a dozen unfinished canvases on easels gestated under tarps while others leaned their foreheads shyly against the walls—punished, contrite, expected to contemplate their errors of composition or color. She turned one or two around for his inspection and bathed in his puzzled praise. She opened another portfolio of photographs. She showed him a darkroom behind curtains, and a clothesline of drying recent developments. She said little except to provide titles. “Biblical Extrapolation Series,” she said in front of three small painted panels laid side by side on an old, splintering, paint-flecked table. She walked parallel to him, across from him, and she watched his face respond to each painting in turn, her work reflected and refracted off his face for her re-evaluation.

  “John 19:38 and 1⁄2.” On Mount Golgotha, moonlit and uncanny in chiaroscuro, distant crucifixes dot the silver hills of the sin-stained landscape. A ladder leans against the nearest crucifix, which is empty; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, lit by a sourceless underglow, are removing the body of Jesus. Joseph’s hands and lifted knee struggle to control and clutch one clumsy end of the linen-shrouded corpse. The other end already slumps heavily in the dirt, and Nicodemus, his hands outstretched, caught at the exact moment of having let his burden fall to the earth, bunches his shoulders, opens his eyes wide, and winces in shame. Joseph looks over his shoulder, almost directly at the viewer, to see if any prospective Gospelists have witnessed this unholy accident.

  “Genesis 2:25 and 1⁄2.” Adam, bulging and sinewy with mannerist musculature, leans against a tree. His fingernails grip and tear the bark, his arms locked, veins and tendons swollen, his sculptured legs wide apart, his head thrown back. His long, dark hair falls over his shoulders; his eyes roll up; his mouth is open wide; a filament of saliva connects his lips. Eve stands behind him, her hands invisible as they meet at the point hidden by his outside thigh. Her head turns sharply to one side, revealing her leer. She drags her fully extended tongue over the knobs of his spine.

  “The Gospel According to Matthew 12:50 and 1⁄2.” Off to the left, a clamoring, sycophantic crowd and all their gathered clouds of dust cluster around Jesus, who stands a head taller than his tallest follower. They are moving away, leaving behind a sun-bleached and savior-abandoned square, empty but for his mother, left alone in the heat (visible in distant rippled air). Mary stands uneasily; it seems she has been caught the instant before she can no longer continue. No one attends to her. Her child is walking away, one hand upon a follower’s head as he walks; he looks straight ahead in the opposite direction from his collapsing mother. He knows she is there, left behind.

  “His last statement was a politico-spiritual necessity. He is a revolutionary. Of the people. He cannot be tied to mere coincidental biology.”

  “You sure know your Bible.” The more her work confused him, the more she seemed to understand something, to have something unnameable that he wanted.

  “Lie down.” She pointed to the immobile white waves of the unmade single bed. John pressed his head against its pillow. He stretched and closed his eyes and for a delicious instant did not know who was with him; in the self-imposed darkness, he could feel the flaking surface of Scott’s T-shirt on Mária’s body, the impossibly soft smooth line of Emily’s jaw, the slight thousand-faceted scratch of stubble on Karen’s calf, the buzz of Nicky’s bald head. And he wondered why he had spent so many years worrying about the potentially demoralizing effects of this innocent pastime.

  Nicky sat beside the pillow, facing the foot of the bed, which wheezed her a two-note greeting. “I already get you,” she said, and brushed her upside-down lips over his. “I see right through you. I know all about what you want.” He opened his eyes at the menacing words spoken in erotic tones, and her inverted face floated above him, but she closed his lids again with fingertip
s he never saw.

  “Tell me what you think you know.” He imagined all the women who could own the fingertips skimming across his forehead.

  She slid the words into his ear: “I know you don’t really want me.” Her right hand hovered just over his belt and shot out crackling bolts of blue lightning.

  “Don’t I?” he whispered.

  “I know your dream girl. Hey, I told you to keep your eyes closed. Close them. Close them. Should I tell you about her?” The bed creaked, and he heard her walk across the room.

  He moved his head like a blind man who suddenly senses a new presence. “Okay, then tell me all about her.”

  The bed greeted her return. She sat facing him, kissed him on the mouth, and pressed her hands against his chest. “Keep your eyes closed and I will.”

  “Tell me who she is if she’s not you,” he said.

  “Don’t do that,” she frowned in unfeigned disapproval. “First house rule: Don’t do that. We both know she isn’t me. Close your eyes.” Nicky brushed the hair away from his forehead and ran her fingers over his scalp. “Her hair, let’s see, is like the woman in Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug.” John opened his eyes, started to say he didn’t know anything about paintings, maybe she could show him a pic—but Nicky put her finger on his lips. “Shhh. Just shut up and listen.” He nodded slowly, his eyes closed as his mouth opened slightly, as if they were on the same pulley system. She put her mouth on his forehead, then whispered, “Her face is just what you’ve always dreamed.” Her lips lightly tugged his eyelashes. “She has the eyes of Munch’s Madonna.” She bit his ear. “And the ears of La Gioconda.” He tried to speak again, but his mouth was stopped. He tried to imagine this face she described. He imagined faces he knew; he examined but then discarded in turn Karen, Mária, even Emily.

  Nicky began to unbutton his shirt. She brushed her knuckles over his lips. “Her mouth is better than mine, much better, like the girl in Doisneau’s Kiss or Christina’s World.” Her fingers walked behind his neck. “And her neck I see like the girl in Klimt’s Kiss. Or is she more like Bonnard’s Lazy Nude? Is she, John?” He nodded slowly. She unbuttoned his shirt and played her lips upon his chest. “Can you see her breasts, John?” She picked up his heavy arm and placed his hand to rest against her T-shirt, and he made a sort of sound. “Like Ingres’s Bather of Valpinçon?” He nodded, and she pressed his hand hard against her. “Her arms are made for you. To hold you. Like a certain Venus I know.”

  She pulled his arms from his sleeves, a mother deftly undressing a floppy-limbed infant, and her nails left pale wakes in the triangle of hair on his chest, then schussed over ribs and traversed down his sides. “Do you want to know more?” Again a sort of sound, his eyes tightly shut now. A woman appeared to John in the order Nicky painted her, as if mists were dissipating from in front of her, but slowly, painfully slowly, from the top of her head down, an inch at a time, too slowly to bear, hair, eyes, ears, mouth, neck, breasts, arms. “The stomach”—his hands fanned over Nicky’s smooth skull as her tongue slid over the writhing snakes of his abdomen—“of Chardin’s Young Schoolmistress.” John’s jeans flew across the room, a striving broad-jumper, and slid to a stop in a tight embrace of a table leg. “Her legs like Manet’s waitress at the Folies-Bergères Bar.” A gust of wind scattered the last strings of fog, and the new woman was revealed to him entirely.

  He felt her body lay down next to him. His eyes let in no light; behind closed lids he looked hard at the great love of his life, and as this woman ran her hands over him, as she pulled him on top of her, as she pressed him to the wall, as she yelled and shook underneath him, he was, he knew, for the first time, participating in his real life, a work of art. Bright lights flashed, but he fought and held his eyes tightly shut and would allow nothing to end this, would never again allow the beloved to run away and hide, to dance out of reach, to taunt from deceptively short distances just across hidden quicksand, to float just one bridge away. Flashes turned the black to yellow and blue, but he refused to be fooled by these retinal will-o’-the-wisps into opening his eyes and letting her escape him again.

  IX.

  Fleeting, of course, those sensations of clarity and arrival. Despite her physical generosity, Nicky was in her own way as unattainable as Emily: He felt, in her spattered apartment, like a much cherished witness to her life, even a key supporting character, while again suspecting that his own real life was locked up at the top of a Buda hill, in Emily’s bungalow. Infuriating: all this time wasted in unquenchable unrequital. He stared at his reflection in the bar’s long mirror. This was too much, the worst sort of foolishness, and not even confined to romance: His evenings with Nicky imagining Emily, meetings with Imre longing for Scott’s unsolicited forgiveness, nights with Nádja wishing her younger, and here now yet one more drink pretending Scott might someday develop into some other brother entirely. This must end.

  Scott was yelling something at John now, even though he sat only two bar stools to the right. He yelled, but to very little purpose, since the music was far stronger than even his pink lungs. Only a few scrappy phrases plowed through the din and found an inlet to John’s ringing right ear: . . . going to . . . harried . . . moon . . . Romania. John stared straight ahead, nodded, crunched an ice cube. He had decided some minutes before not to bother scraping the hell out of his throat in order to engage in pointless conversation under the sampled sirens, bass, and keyboards. Behind the bar, behind the bartender, behind the glass shelves of liquor that rattled in music appreciation, a long tube of purple neon ran the length of the back wall and was duplicated by the mirror immediately behind it, so that John could stare at his reflection and see two purple neon strips stretch just under his nose, a thick, glowing purple mustache as long as the bar. And while he played these games, the studio-stuttered voice of an Australian dance-pop phenomenon howled, When ya gonna dance are ya gonna gonna dance gonna dance gonna gonna dance dance dance? and in the mirror, the veins in Scott’s reflected neck were now swelling into throbbing cords, and he plainly (but inaudibly) was yelling at John, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

  Outside—later, drunker—within the shifting crowd and clashing odors, John found them all in a closed circle, one person thick except at one bump, where Scott stood immediately behind Mária with his arms around her waist and his head on her shoulder, her hand arching up to ruffle his hair. The circle: Mária, Emily, Bryon, Mark, Zsolt, Charles, and a new (temporary) young woman, four fingers of her right hand comfortably pinched in the right hip pocket of Charles’s jeans, a stranger to John but undeniably branded as Hungarian by her perfume. “Thank you, thank you,” Scott was saying. “Thank you, thank you,” echoed Mária. Charles smiled lazily, amused. Mark sucked a tooth, his sweat perceptible to John. Bryon had an arm around Emily’s shoulder but one around Mark’s as well. “Oh, it’s so great, it’s so neat. Isn’t it great?” Emily asked John, the late arrival. “Yes, it is,” he answered to please her, without caring to know what “it” was. Only after Scott and Mária had left, arm in arm, did Charles say, “Congratulating that was hardly natural,” and described the couple waking up on the first morning of their honeymoon to share “a good, contritious breakfast.” Harried, John understood only now was, of course, married. It, so neat and great, was an engagement, the annunciation of which had excited from John merely nods and crunched ice and purple neon mustaches the length of a bar.

  He wondered what he would have said had the Australian dance music not turned that one consonant away, and if harried had stayed married. Hadn’t the music, in fact, given John the opportunity to respond sincerely for once? He told himself he had made his last effort.

  X.

  Nicky athletically dismounted, after an impressive display of Latin terms. “I gotta do some work now.” John didn’t immediately catch her meaning. “You can’t assume the package includes overnight hotel every time, friend.” She tossed his underwear at his head. She stood in front of one of her dozen mirrors, this one a cracke
d, dirty full-length mounted on an antique wooden stand, and she adjusted the angle of her tasseled red fez. “Wild nights are fine now and again. But if I don’t get enough sleep, then the Muses won’t visit me and then I’ll be useless.” She fine-tuned the fez and examined her profile.

  “I’ll be no trouble, ma’am. I promise.”

  “Don’t be like that,” she said to John’s reflection deep in the mirror. “You can stay sometimes if we keep at this little project.”

  John propped himself up on one elbow to watch her remove tarps from unfinished paintings. “Can’t you work with me here? It’s almost midnight. I’ll be mouse-quiet.”

  “I just told you. House rules: Art first, everything else third. Guests are encouraged to reread those rules before requesting entry.”

  “But I like your work,” he tried feebly.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said, as sincerely thrilled as ever to receive praise. She stroked his face and kissed him softly. She whispered in his ear: “But you have three minutes to get the hell out of here so I can work.”