Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  At the Gerbeaud, she found the Julies already in hilarious possession of a dusky patio corner, and she joined them for the eightieth reanalysis of Calvin’s potential as Julie’s soul mate. When the life had finally bled out of that whimpering topic, the other Julie told Emily, “Eric in Consular asked me about you again today. But he really is too creepy-looking, so I told him you were going out with John Price.”

  “Oh no, no. John’s a little out there for me, thanks. My family would think he was a Martian.” And they talked about entertaining Mr. Oliver for the coming week. “Does he want to see a lot of, like, farming stuff?” asked a Julie.

  Caffeinated and pastried, they wandered to the river to watch the fireworks blossom over the palace. “And it celebrates what, exactly?” asked Julie, and Emily effortlessly rattled off the history of violent, well-loved Saint István.

  Eleven o’clock, A Házam. As she took comfort in the overwhelming noise near the bar, she recalled a snippet of last year’s required reading: Crowded nightclubs offer the advantage of both noise—as it is difficult to be overheard or recorded—and excuses, as there are any number of people you might justifiably be there to see. She danced agreeably with an egotistical dolt from Commercial Section, easily identifiable by his eye movements and mistimed jokes as a would-be fumbler (there: not so callow a Motivation Analysis, thank you very much) and actually (as she looked at him sweating under the steaming spotlights) reminiscent of the JV football player/aspiring drummer who had quickly relieved her of her girlish burden the fall of her sophomore year at Nebraska.

  She smoothly declined the dolt’s offer to take a walk, babe, citing Julie’s blues as her responsibility and excuse to stay upstairs on a sofa. She watched Calvin-less Julie chat up a goateed American P.R. executive while she bore the brunt, all alone, of another hour of Julie’s Calvinomics. And then, nearly midnight, nine hours until her father’s plane was to land at Ferihegy Airport, she stood to go, dreading the looming Calvin rehash surely still to come back at the bungalow when: “Hey, it’s the farmer’s daughter at last. You don’t come here often enough.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I’ve been hoping to bump into you since we met.”

  “You have?”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Why bump into me?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about you. You puzzle me.”

  “Me? That’s hilarious. I don’t puzzle anyone.”

  “Okay, right there. See, this is going to be fun, because I can tell when you’re lying. So what are you drinking?”

  “My friends were just leaving.”

  “Great. Do you want to go with them, or do you want to talk to me?”

  And the Julies don’t mind at all, catch you later, and two hours pass in inexplicably perfect conversation, never veering anywhere near work or anything threatening. Even better than being listened to attentively (which is joy enough at the moment, after weeks of Ed and Calvin-chatter and the attentions of tonight’s dolt and his brethren) is savoring her companion’s spicy stew of complaints, passions, self-criticism, self-love, self-interest, and the sudden, unstrained compliments for things no one ever noticed about Emily before. That’s what a compliment should feel like, she thinks, nearly misty-eyed: completely motiveless.

  One in the morning. Off the noisy square (more rat-a-tat firecrackers for Saint István) and suddenly swallowed in the charm of the dark and decrepit Pest streets, Emily would do anything to keep the conversation going, but her effort isn’t necessary: The conversation thrums on its own internal power. “But how did you become you?” Emily asks, wants to know this more than anything, hypnotized as she is by the girl’s irregularly shaped personality, which seemed to take no notice of any functional requirements but was instead the purely ornamental, unashamed expression of what any right-thinking person could only call selfishness. But in this one case, selfishness was suddenly—no other word would do—attractive. “Everything about you is so . . . I haven’t ever known anyone like you, I don’t think.”

  “Well, that’s because they don’t allow us in Nebraska, as a rule.”

  “Oh please, but please let’s not bring up Nebraska.”

  “Oh no, let’s. Absolutely let’s bring up Nebraska. If Nebraska makes you that uncomfortable, we are definitely going to talk about Nebraska. Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska.”

  “My father’s coming to visit tomorrow.”

  “Good or bad thing? Because if it were my father, I’d ask you to steal me a gun from the embassy.”

  Two in the morning, too tired to stroll in circles anymore. A dark little café-bar only two tables wide. Up three narrow wooden steps to the back section behind the hanging drapes, the tiny room lit with hooded green lamps, the velvet banquettes the only seats, so they had to sit side by side, squeezed close together to reach the pear brandy on the tiny carved table. (It’s best to avoid quiet, intimate eating places, as they are easily surveilled, both visually and audibly, and there is no excuse for your presence there if there is no overt justification for the meet.)

  “When did you know you were an artist?” Emily asked.

  “When I was about four. I cried if my mom wouldn’t take me to the art museum. I could copy anything there by the time I was nine.”

  “I’d love to see your paintings.”

  “Really? I’d love to show them to you. We’re pretty near my place right now, if you want.” And only just then did she consciously know: floating exhausted in the small hours of the night, having the first undeniable fun she’d had in ages, dead tired, dreading her father’s arrival, irritated at the self-imposed restrictions of her work, owed something for—but she stopped creating false justifications. They were, she scolded herself, dishonest. More to the point, they were irrelevant, as she could think of no reason to resist this attraction (managing with almost no effort to ignore the risk to her work, her family, her carefully constructed public persona, even to what she had long considered to be her true private one).

  At three in the morning an artist’s studio has an overpowering effect on outsiders, even people who don’t like art in general or the artist’s work in particular: the unfamiliar smells, the physical evidence of frustration, the naked presence of some success but vast amounts of failure, the obvious sacrifice of conventional values (cleanliness, order, luxury) for others (space, ventilation, light), the merely functional furniture splattered and ripped. The unmade, squeaking single bed.

  “I’ve never done this before,” said Emily.

  “I know. I would’ve remembered.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “That’s not a very interesting story, I have to say.”

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh, that’s original.”

  “I am totally unoriginal, aren’t I? Why don’t you hate me? Don’t answer that. I’m sorry. It’s just, this isn’t me.”

  “Really? This part here?”

  “You know what I mean. I don’t even know how I got here . . . What? What did I say? I didn’t mean you should stop.”

  “That’s pathetic. Don’t be a chicken-shit with me. I didn’t drag you here. You’re not drunk. You can go home now if you don’t like this.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Of course I’m right. This is obviously you. It’s just no one has ever told you so before.”

  And only then she allowed herself to recall that this was reckless, a career-ending offense if discovered, but that didn’t alarm her. What alarmed her was how little she cared, how much she wanted to be her own creation and judge, how much she wanted to be like Nicky.

  And on that awful flight home months later, bumping down into Lincoln Airport, still not sure what she was going to say to her father, not sure herself if she had quit or been fired, feeling the weight of his heart and her mother’s death in her hands, she still felt (at least for right now, until she saw his face) that Saint István liberated from Communism was a more apt symbol
than a drain.

  XII.

  One hazy morning, not long after Nádja explained to him the woman he loved, John sat in the Forum Hotel lobby. He thought of Emily’s secret life, how he would guard the truth for her until, perhaps, such an exercise might teach him something that would make him more like her, more appealing to her. He understood that this was pretty pathetic.

  “ . . . Because the Jews did that to Hungary.” Imre shrugged and mopped his forehead with a silk paisley pocket square. John studied his notebook to see if any of the mandarin jottings there could delicately wrap Imre’s icy comment in some warming context. His attention having wandered, large swaths of this interview had been lost, and his notebook offered only the indecipherable scratches of a long dead civilization. He might have been quoting. He could have scornfully been voicing the opinions of others. He could have been making an ironic point. Charles could have paid him to say it for entertainment’s sake. These possibilities all came at once, one on top of the other, until their sheer tangled mass sufficed, and John—recalling Imre the juggling street performer and pornographer to the good, horny citizens of Bonn, recalling the money at stake for all three of them—blamed his own lapsed concentration and dismissed the comment as not serious.

  Imre dabbed his brow again and turned his chair away from the late afternoon glare of the river-view wall of windows. “I’ve a terrible headache—these vile televisions everywhere in these days,” he muttered, and waved his damp handkerchief at the large screens wheeled into the lobby to provide constant coverage of the dogs of war snarling and peeing in the faraway desert. A German tourist was disputing his bill at the front desk, decrying the supplemental phone charges, the cable television surtaxes. His young son began to cry, then scream. The boy’s mother seized him around the waist and loudly told him to be quiet. The child screamed with more force. “It is really too much,” Imre told his two young companions, and wrestled with the knot of his tie as if it were actually blocking air. “Outlandish.”

  “Nein! Nein!” the tourist was yelling.

  “The view: one of uncertainty, but one of readiness,” bawled a young woman standing on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, trying to make herself audible over the scream of jets and the roar of water somewhere classified in the Mediterranean.

  “Bitte, mein Herr,” tried the deskbound concierge.

  “No! No! No! Let me go!” screamed the little boy in German while his mother attempted to soothe him by striking his bottom with an open hand.

  “Károly, perhaps business later,” Imre mumbled.

  Charles rose from the lobby coffee table, strode to the desk, spoke German to the tourist and Hungarian to the concierge, smiled on the little boy, and within two minutes had the family out the door and the concierge warmly shaking his hand. He tipped a bellboy, who turned down the televisions’ volume, and peace completed her reconquest of the Forum lobby. John watched admiration kindle and glow on Imre’s face and marveled that it could take so little.

  After his interview and their shared meal, Imre held court in the hotel lobby: Over five and a half hours, Charles presented to his partner six tentative investors with lingering questions. The investors—all of whom had read John’s ironical but apparently grudgingly admiring profile of Charles in BudapesToday—took their turns examining this investment opportunity, talking about themselves while Imre nodded and Charles and John walked around and around the block. They had a drink in the John Bull English Pub, then stood by the sunset-frosted river in front of the hotel, leaned against the railing, and watched their business mutely unfold at the lobby table behind the huge picture window and their own ten-foot shadows, watched Imre charm the salt heiress, impress the sporicidal-efficacy-validation-equipment manufacturer, and listen with evident interest to the discount lawn products magnate.

  At the end of these audiences, John took the elevator to the fourth floor and returned with his colleague from the Times, whom he introduced to the subject of that journalist’s next insightful story, which, echoing John’s own column on Imre, would run in the Times three days later and be picked up by the International Herald Tribune the day after that.

  “Am I excused now, please?”

  “You are excused, my Hebraic conniver,” said Charles. “Exquisite work, by the way. Heroic, really.” And as Ted Winston and Imre Horváth leaned toward each other over the glass-topped table behind the glass wall, John left Charles on the Corsó and walked slowly through the gathering evening to a cracked and colorless building on a deliciously charmless, no longer desirable little street not far from A Házam.

  “Yes, you can stay,” she said at the door, kissing him and wiping turpentine from her hands with a fuzzy multicolored rag. “You’re cute, and I even admit to missing you lately. But you’re out of here first thing in the morning, because the show goes up the day after and I’m hanging stuff all day tomorrow. No grumbling.” He moved from lamp-illuminated brightness to shadows, dropped onto her bed, and watched her clean her brushes, wondered if he might not be in love with her. “But will you come to the show?” she asked in a different tone of voice entirely. “Will you? I really want you to. Please come.”

  XIII.

  Visibly out of place amid the summer-of-’90 crop of expat hipsters at “The New Americans” opening night, John and Mark sidled slowly through the gallery lobby of the old movie theater, past art photos hung from corrugated cardboard partitions, while from stereo speakers on the ashtray floor Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s duet fondled the memory of tall, tan, young, lovely, unwinnable women who strolled the beaches of 1960s Brazil. The men gulped sour white wine from plastic cups, smoked, and periodically stepped aside to let Hungarians reach the movie theater’s concession stand or ticket booth. (That evening’s double feature was selling well: Battleship Potemkin and Battlestar Galactica with accompanying music composed and played live by a Hungarian rock band.) The photos on display were, for the most part, reasonably accomplished renderings of the accepted artistic subjects of the day, comparable to similar hangings in New York: black-and-white close-ups of genitals, tattoos, old people, factories. Against this stark background, Nicky’s two entries outstood sharply.

  Her first was of an epic size, easily seven feet tall and four across; the small price tag next to the work quietly requested a buyer of substantial means. Glossy black plastic framed the complex self-portrait. Nicky herself, lifesize, posed as a variety of art professor: a tweed, leather-elbowed jacket over a black, ribbed turtleneck, corduroy slacks, loafers. She wore a thick brown mustache, oval spectacles, dark and rebellious eyebrows, and her own bald scalp. Her expression was pedantic. She stood, unaware of the photographer, in what appeared to be the gallery of a museum. In the midst of giving a lecture, she pointed with a stick at a large painting, opulently framed, hanging from a dark-wood-paneled wall to her left. This painting (Holbein? Dou? Teniers?), which she evidently described for unseen students, portrayed a type of seventeenth-century courtier: a young man in buckled shoes, dark hose, puffed and slashed slops, a jeweled dagger at the belt, jerkin, starched ruff collar, a pointed beard, and thin mustache. He, in turn, stood with one leg turned outward, stiff in the style of the era. The tiny black filament cracks of the painting’s age appeared most visibly on his face, collar, and hands. Unlike the professor who described him, he stared directly at the viewer. With his left hand, he made an iconic, stylized gesture of sincerity, his fingers resting on his heart, and, with his right hand and an expression of haughty pride at owning such a valuable object, he invited the viewer to enjoy yet another framed work of art, this third item resting on an ornately carved easel to his right. This small work—equidistant from the professor and the courtier—was framed in dark wood, counterbalancing the gold-painted frame surrounding the courtier himself and the glossy black plastic that framed the entire piece. This second painting—the painting within the painting within the photograph—was in fact plainly a photograph, and unabashedly, unenjoyably pornographic: a couple, phot
ographed head-on, engaged in a variety of posterior interconnection, the man kneeling behind the woman, who rested on all fours. They both faced the camera and the viewer, as if in obedience to their seventeenth-century owner. The man performed open-mouthed with half-closed eyes and a tilted-head, exalted expression of ecstatic enlightenment; the woman stared blankly, anti-titillatedly bored. Her long red hair, parted severely in the middle, framed her supporting arms, which, in turn, framed her exposed breasts. Her mounter—his upper arms and torso behind and above her hips, his legs visible only to the knee behind and between her supporting thighs, his hands on the points where her buttocks melted into her foreshortened back—sported a diabolical beard and mustache identical to that of the proud seventeenth-century “possessor” of the photo, but also a lush head of blow-dried blond hair. Under a toy tiara.

  This internal photo—so jarring to the expected retrograde progression (professor to courtier to older portrait still)—usually won the work more attention than a quick walk-by. In his happy examination, Mark realized that the seventeenth-century painted courtier, like the twentieth-century photographed professor, was in fact Nicky. Mark understood this first, but at the same moment that he was asking, “Isn’t that your friend, too?” John was saying, “Oh man, that’s Nicky, I can’t believe it,” except John was pointing at the gloomy red-haired woman taking it from behind.