Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  “You know what I like about you, little boy?” She licked his ear. “You miss all kinds of stuff. You just glide right through, totally peaceful.”

  A lonely drink or two later, Mark left the sidewalk table, returned directly to the gallery, and pledged to purchase the photograph of the couple having sex, who were in fact at that moment having sex (after Nicky had pulled from her backpack a gift for him: a contact sheet where his torquing body still supported its own head, a head displaying, over twelve photographs, a narrow range of alternately bovine and vulpine expressions, which their owner could only try futilely to forget a few minutes later, even as he knew he was duplicating them).

  Concluding his transaction at the gallery-cinema-disco (a small label now read sold, in two languages), Mark set off through the night for the lobby of the Forum Hotel, where comfortable chairs and broad, glass-topped tables sprouting a garden of bowls flowering salty peanuts awaited him, where Western-polite waiters in black vests would bring him Coke in little bottles, and where, best of all, CNN would be playing the latest news from the Persian Gulf crisis and he could sit until dawn watching the approaching war story unfold and think of nothing else, for once. He was so hungry for it that he once or twice broke into a jog, which quickly ended with out-of-shape gasps and self-mockery, and the happy knowledge that he needn’t run after all, because it played twenty-four hours a day, the very, very latest at any hour.

  XIV.

  For most of August 1990, for the very first time since he had painted himself green and wondered why his Canadian world did not understand and love him, Mark decided he was living in the present and he was overexcitedly proud of it. He had never even heard of CNN until three weeks earlier, but now not only did he love it, he loved that he loved it, that he sincerely savored something so very, very modern. This infatuation proved he would be okay; it distracted him from his multiplying fears. He quickly learned the names of the American generals and defense officials, all the news network’s postulators, the titles and relative influence of the various coalition representatives. In his apartment he hung a four-foot-square map of the Middle East and daily festooned it—consulting the latest International Herald Tribune for the appropriate coordinates—with paper cutouts he had spent a morning trimming: little boats for the coalition fleets, little tanks for artillery and armored units, little helmets for infantry, paper flags of the proliferating belligerents, and red, curved, dated arrows to show troop movement.

  News, and so literally new: a war on TV with real-time play-by-play. What could be more modern than to watch news all the time, coverage of events happening in any corner of the world, what must have once required days, weeks, months to reach you? He was living in the nineties with all his heart—the 1990s. A joyful anticipation he had never felt before: When the headlines came up again on the half hour, would they be mere repetitions of the headlines he had just heard at 3 a.m., or would something new have broken in the interim? The very history of the world formed itself for him, every half hour, a time lapse comfortable enough to render Mark an Olympian spectator, lounging on his cloud while horned, shaggy-shinned goat-men finger-fed him delicacies from gold goblets and silver salvers.

  For three weeks his precarious happiness gave him an aggressive, feverish sort of confidence to pursue his research with a semblance of personal detachment and equilibrium, because the high point of his day—for which he longed while in libraries or antique stores or at his desk—balanced undeniably in the present tense, when the welcoming Forum Hotel would open its maternal arms to him and he would watch the mortals perform their antics.

  Until his night with John and Nicky, when, three hours after they left him at the table, he realized exactly why CNN so pleased him: It reminded him of old newsreel footage. He had just watched four repetitions of American soldiers marching under a journalist’s baritone voice-over. Four times, and each half hour the one goofy soldier looked straight at the camera and mouthed the words Hi, Mom! And each time the troops walked by the camera, they seemed less and less modern, more and more a future historical document or bouquet of future personal memories—the time I was in the service, I was on CNN, my son greeted me on CNN, my late son, my son who was killed in the desert war, my buddy said, “Hi, Mom,” on CNN, I remember my sergeant chewing our asses because some joker I didn’t even know had said, “Hi, Mom,” when CNN was filming us looking sharp, your father was a soldier, here’s a videotape of him, your grandfather was in the army and fought in the first desert war, you can view the footage on the computer-visualizer unit, the film looks funny, Mom, why do the soldiers look like that? And on their fifth inspectional march-by of Mark, a film of fine sepia clung to these young men, newsreel marching soldiers off to save the world again, may as well be in jerking, sped-up, black-and-white, and with a shock of discovery, Mark stood up from the hotel lobby table where he sat at 3:37 in the morning, shoveling peanuts into his mouth and drinking the lukewarm Coke right out of the little bottle (out of which glass teat it tasted just like it had in the Toronto tennis club where he had sat once a week—ages six to nine—and watched his father play badly), and he realized miserably that he had been conned. No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren’t rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn’t scratchy until television, and silent movies weren’t a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it. Their politics, their culture, their technology, their lives were out-of-date, no problem as long as they didn’t know it, but they knew. They knew that life was faster, sleeker, richer, and in full color just over that vicious Wall, just across that Iron Curtain (the defining feature of their lives built and dubbed in the 1940s, crafted from barbed wire and mines unchanged in design for decades).

  He turned away from the screen and looked out the picture window onto the nearly empty (one pimp, one drunk, one sleepy, hostel-less backpacker) Corsó. CNN was the newsreel of his day, he thought. “My day,” he said aloud, and the waitress looked up from wiping down the same square foot of cocktail table she had been slowly, vacantly polishing for minutes. My day: That in itself triggered misery. Dying was happening all around him and within him. Faster than he could live and grow, he was dying and shrinking. Could it be—he examined curiously the Forum night staff (the concierge, the bucket-wheeling maid, the waitress)—that some people were still living and growing, that they didn’t know everything was already old and dying? Was it right to tell them, or was it right to hold his tongue?

  The same poison oozed into his blood two hours later, as the sun was just rising. He was in the midst of Saudi territorial waters, blearily scribbling dates on curving arrows, repositioning paper ships, when he knew the whole act was futile, a vain effort to ignore the noise. He was fooling no one. He angrily tore the map down the middle, leaving two strips of West and East dangling irrelevantly from the wall, and he shredded slowly each lovingly clipped boat and helmet and tank and curving arrow, heaped a little pile, beat his swords into confetti. The ominous feeling thumped stronger still at noon, when the gallery people roused him from sweaty, head-turning sleep to deliver his purchase and accept his huge stack of forints in a shoe box, and he leaned the enormous work wrapped in brown paper and twine against the peeling, faux-wood armoire. Not even worth unwrapping: The art was already old. Nicky was the improbable, eccentric character in someone’s future memoirs of fin-de-siècle bohemian Budapest, and the future reader would be shocked to see her as she looked at publication time, age eighty, would pref
er to cling to the grainy old photos of her as a bald and beautiful young woman. The same feeling pulsed at twilight, when John came by to pick him up and they walked toward the evening’s party (at the home of Charles Gábor’s attorney, a dashing Anglo-Hungarian who had hired members of the Budapest Opera to sing in his garden while his guests cut deals, flirted, drank), and the two friends talked about the Persian Gulf, and John laughed when Mark hopelessly said there would be a war.

  “A war? Over that stuff?”

  “Not a war. The war. Our war. The very feel of this city is going to change; it’s already changing. This is not just the end of August 1990. These are the last months of our peace, the end of the summer before our generation’s war. ‘What did it feel like the summer before the war? Did you know time was running out? Could you tell it would all be swept away?’ The summer before.” John turned to gauge his friend as they walked.

  Mark felt himself being examined, knew how he sounded, and wanted to say something to put his friend at ease, even though he sounded that way because of how horrible this truth was, but he didn’t know what to say, and didn’t know how to explain that he—Mark himself—was the summer, the dying peace. Though they walked slowly through a quiet and pleasant evening, Mark felt time rushing by his ears like drunken traffic, like supersonic trains, like a herd of salivating, rolling-eyed, dust cloud–stamping beasts. He had let his guard down. CNN! For some reason he had stopped watching time carefully, and now he was being made to pay for his inattention. Now he was forced to sit, brutally strapped to a stake, with his eyelids pried open. One idea soothed him, a new idea: Perhaps time rushed by less painfully in a place that didn’t look old, that had no history. Toronto, for example.

  “Are you hungover still?” John asked.

  As they passed the Gellért Hotel (uniformly hailed in every guidebook for its “faded glory,” making it, for a couple of weeks way back in mid-May, Mark’s favorite haunt on the Buda side) in the first clear touch of evening, when the humidity vanished before a cool sigh of breeze, Mark bit at his lip and said he wasn’t feeling well, and before John could say much at all, the Canadian had turned around and sweatily puttered back up Gellért Hill toward his apartment.

  XV.

  Imre selected for their meeting a small and dingy coffee shop wafting bleach and wet cat, a mystifying, willfully weird choice of locale as far as Charles was concerned. “I signed comparable papers just there, in that building,” Imre explained. He pointed across the one-way street to the pocked offices he had entered the afternoon of his father’s funeral to receive the rusty keys to his crumbling kingdom.

  “Did you? Well, I don’t expect you’ll sign anything today.” Charles withdrew from his leather case the deck of papers his lawyer had delivered at the garden gala the night before. He laid them on the ringed and burned simulated marble. “Why don’t you look these over at your leisure and then initial at all these little yellow tags: here, here, and here, and sign there. You date that and then another initial there and then sign the bid application there and there. Krisztina can run them over to Neville’s office.”

  “My father’s attorney became my attorney this day, you understand. It was a very strange moment.” Imre sipped his coffee and, surprising Charles, thoughtfully removed his cigaresque fountain pen from an interior pocket. “I had known this moment would come, of course. I must have waited for years for this day to come. Still, one is always a bit surprised when it happens.”

  Charles blindly agreed. “But wouldn’t you want some more time to look these over?”

  “Yes, yes.” The older man tapped his capped pen on the pages, but still he looked through the sun-sparkled dusty window and across the street. He poked his pastry with his fork and a crack appeared across its fitted top sheet of amber caramel. “You are in a similar position today as I was then; it is remarkable.”

  “Of course.” Charles composed his face in accord with Imre’s melodrama.

  “How I could have been happy on such a day, I cannot now say. But I certainly was. And this city, this wreck of a ship that once was proud—I was happy to be a help rebuilding this ship. It was a wonderful time to live here, to tell the truth. Today is not so different. To rebuild. To know your role.”

  Through the window, Imre considered the building that had once housed his family’s fortunes, and the shade of that July morning, altered from its years of wandering, appeared to him. He remembered the obvious significance that had filled the room. His father’s lawyer had hesitated: Would this young man rise to the occasion? Imre had been tangibly transformed by the very act of signing; his signature itself was a voyage across an invisible frontier—the trip from the left side of the empty line to the right, leaving a curving black trail behind him. A swirl of black ink and the conclusive stabbing slash of the accent mark on Horváth—´—made him a symbol of something important and large. Everyone in the room had understood.

  Charles chafed, not for the first time, at the similarity of his and Imre’s suits, both a light tan twill this morning, though Imre’s was double-breasted. It irritated Charles to be dressed similarly to anyone else in a room. It implied a slipping market value for his uniqueness and made him feel as if he were talking to a child who had just learned to annoy through mimicry.

  Imre rose from the table and walked to the window, where backward letters and old webs and clots of dust cast shadows on his face. He absently carried his fork and left his pen on the table with the partnership agreement and the privatization application. “The weather comes back to me, very distinct. Sun, some clouds, terribly hot. I smelled something bad in the courtyard of the office building, old rubbish in the heat. My father’s lawyer wore trousers sewed together from scraps. We all did in these days, though some of us wore them better than others, I may say to you of all people. The most important day of your life, a wonderful moment, but to know it as it happens, you feel like God Himself is holding you up in His hand. I knew the importance, that Imre the man was now secondary to the future of this . . . You are the same. You are learning this.” He spoke with his back to the younger man, stared at the large, dark brown bricks across the street. “Each of us together—ohhh, listen to me. Show me where to sign and we will get on with it.” He did not turn from the window, though.

  “Good Christ, it took some strange twists and turns, but it’s done,” Charles told John later that day as he handed him a light blue check, the flimsy, thin equivalent of seven months’ salary at BudapesToday. “After all that, he barely read what he signed. Just challenged sections at random. But he kept misting over with memory while I told him where to initial. How the hell he managed to run anything for forty years is beyond me. Hey, did I tell you that two of my investors quoted your profile of me back to me when they signed on?”

  John squinted and held the check up to the shower of glaring gold arrows shooting off the river and streaming into Charles’s office. The paper cast a light blue rectangular shadow across John’s eyes and nose. Its watermark—two sirens kissing the cheeks of a surprised sailor, his mouth and eyes perfect O’s of astonishment—vanished and reappeared as John passed the slip back and forth between himself and the light.

  “I’m going to miss this view.” Charles slapped his palms against the giant window. He had succeeded, and would soon resign, revealing to his flummoxed, flabby firm that he had accomplished in his spare time what they couldn’t manage during business hours. He had tricked sufficient funds from the pockets of various missionaries of money, and, with Imre’s unexpected initials that morning, that consortium had become the 49 percent shareholder (with the entire 49 percent of the voting rights held by Charles) of a new Hungarian company comprising Horváth Verlag (Vienna), Charles’s sizable infusion of other people’s investment, and Imre’s privatization vouchers (hardly a windfall, just the gesture of a proud but impoverished government). Gábor had, at the last moment, instructed his attorney to augment the company’s wealth with the nearly worthless vouchers issued to his own parent
s for their childhood apartments. He was now the highly influential junior partner of something very real.

  For two days, however, John did not cash his check—payment for “press relations consulting”—or send it to his bank in the States. Something about depositing it put him off; it was too abrupt, a farewell to the watermark, he joked to himself, that he was not yet prepared to make. Two nights the sirens kissed their sailor and John considered. Two days, he kept the paper in his wallet, and at odd times—while typing at the office, tippling at the Gerbeaud, tupping at Nicky’s—he imagined the watermark—two-dimensional, pale, fluid—come to life in his pocket: the sirens’ streaming hair, the soft lips on the cheeks of the startled mariner, the sailor’s desire to seize them both in aqua-carnal embrace battling with his knowledge of their power, his inevitable surrender. “Kiss me, my siren,” John murmured to the bald and naked woman painting by 3 a.m. lamplight on the third night. She had thought he was asleep. Trembling slightly at his voice, she coldly told him to leave and sleep at home. He liquidated his tormented sailor the next morning.

  XVI.

  Mark’s absence, after ten days and six unreturned phone messages, John diagnosed as unmistakable stage-two Visiting Family Syndrome. The symptoms were now easily recognizable in the plague-ravaged community. Stage one: murmured references to “a busy week ahead,” increasing quietness, sporadic personality aberrations (irritability, childishness, hysteria, isolation). Stage two: total disappearance for five to fourteen days, except (possibly) for hurried introductions of friends to jet-lagged, shy, elderly people with peculiar or nonexistent senses of humor. Stage three: sudden and boisterous return to society with exaggerated ubiquity and gluttonous appetite for drinking, dancing, and romance; and a twitchy, logorrheic rhapsodizing over the joys of living single in Budapest.