Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  He tried to angle his umbrella to shield himself and the journals from the majority of the rain, but his ankles were quickly soaked; he suddenly was wearing dark, uneven boots. A puckering puddle leaped and embraced him to the groin; he sported the particolored tights of a court jester. Passing cars twice massaged his traffic-side arm and hand with cold brown water. By the time he made it downhill to the river—a chaos of concentric circles in frenzied competition—he was cold through. Soon he was running across the Liberty Bridge and down the Corsó, and he was out of breath and soaked when he sat down next to her in the nearly empty room, bearing his mesh sack and the childish, hopeful bribe of a Rob Roy. “Tell me a story,” he demanded quietly.

  “Good heavens, John Price. You look—”

  “Tell me one of your stories.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Please. About anything. Just tell me a good story.”

  PRAGUE

  PART FOUR

  I.

  Nine clear recollections of autumn 1990:

  (1) Charles Gábor answering his (formerly Mark Payton’s) door wearing underwear on his head, his nose peering unappetizingly from the Y front.

  Charles spent so much time in Imre Horváth’s company now—redrafting revenue models and management plans, being gently lectured or intensely exhorted on the press’s importance to Hungary’s history and its future moral development—that the younger man was prone to remarkable childishness when liberated from his partner’s magnificent company. Charles answered the door with underwear on his head; he also wore a silk Chinese dressing gown, metallic blue and spangled with golden dragons and pagodas. “I’m beginning to suspect the previous tenant was not practicing the most rigorous heterosexuality.” Charles flapped the tails of Mark’s abandoned robe, rescued from a secluded and hence forgotten bathroom hook, and produced a long cigarette holder from a pocket.

  John’s world had shrunk to Charles, Nádja, and Nicky, when he could win her attention. He slumped into a chair. “You actually liked that guy, didn’t you?” Charles asked, slightly amazed at the possibility. “I could only take so much of him, to be honest. I’d’ve liked him fine, but I always thought he was pretty judgmental. Like people didn’t do business in the past, or something, and I invented it last month.”

  “Whatever.”

  Charles finally took the underwear off his head. “Say, ah, did your brother mention anything to you about today?”

  “No, I haven’t talked to him in a while.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  (2) And, so, later that afternoon, Charles, explaining that he was “all about better family communication, baby,” took John to the Keleti Station, without an explanation, and there presented him to Scott and Mária, about to board their train for a permanent move to Romania—specifically, Hungarian-speaking Transylvania—to teach English and music, respectively.

  John’s eyes floated irresistibly through the cool air to the station’s overhanging roof: peaked at a right angle, ribbed with rusted metal supports, not quite transparent, dirty white, like the plastic top of an enormous, shabby garden shed. The two brothers slowly walked the platform—lit by sunlight distilled through the dusty translucence—while Charles and Mária went in search of newspapers and chocolate for the journey. “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

  “Oh please.”

  “How was the wedding?”

  “It made all the international bridal magazines.”

  “Listen to me.” John stopped walking. “You know what I think? Everybody hates their childhood, and they talk about overcoming it and how their shitty family shaped their personality. But how can that be? If everybody had a shitty family, then why do we all have different personalities? It must not be the relevant thing, you know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be . . .”

  “This is precisely why I didn’t tell you I was leaving.” Scott laughed, checked his watch. “So okay, bro, now don’t follow me this time.” Another laugh. “Or I’ll have to kill you, which is completely legal in Transylvania.” A laugh. “Seriously”—a serious face to match—“I don’t ever want to see you again.” A pause, then a laugh.

  “What did I ever do to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever happened to you, I didn’t do it.”

  “No, of course you didn’t. You’re perfect. Don’t ever change.” A pause. “You have to flow a little better, bro. You take things way too heavy.” Pause. “But really”—smile—“I never want to see you again.” Laugh.

  And then the train: a smudged, battered, smoking refugee from an old war movie, the very curve of the serif letters on its rounded, soot-gray flanks a typographic throwback (BUDAPEST–BUCUREŞTI NORD) that Mark would have loved, and Scott leaning from the window as the beast jerked into motion, dragged itself toward the bright blue autumn daylight that was the station’s fourth wall. Scott leaned dangerously far out the window, an aggressive display of joie de vivre; his legs were the only part of him not visible. He waved both his arms in an exuberant farewell windmill; his face split into a smile, wide and dental; he held his brother’s eye; and then his near hand folded into a standard obscene gesture, only for a moment, then broad smiling waves again, then the obscene gesture, back and forth, until the train receded far enough to make its first curve. A cool fall breeze pushed candy wrappers and cigarette ash along the platform; all that was good about the season wafted in the air around this ambiguous recollection in the making: Mária, quietly appalled not to be headed west, smiling resignedly over Scott’s shoulder, and Scott—dressed up in a tweed jacket, a white oxford shirt, and a tie—leaning out from the antique train, waving and smiling, hostilely or mock-hostilely giving his brother the finger as impossibly white clouds met the first chugs of black from the dwindling locomotive and an impossibly blue sky jigsawed itself into the space between the uneven façades of neighboring buildings and the overhanging roof, and Hungarians on the platform waved to other shrinking passengers, and the enormous clock, unwashed in decades but keeping a fair semblance of correct time, advanced in echoing clicks without benefit of the Swiss quartz chronometric technology advertised in the watch billboard beneath it.

  And with every passing year, when bright September days outside an open and steamed bathroom window recalled the scene to John, he would examine the slowly but unmistakably aging face squinting above his bathroom sink, and though it had never much resembled Scott’s, the boy in the receding train never aged another day; only the occasional scrap of his handwriting—written in moments of sentimental weakness from points ever farther east—showed any evidence of passing time, but his face was always and would forever be blond-framed and smiling, always touched from behind by a lovely Hungarian wife, always possessing some profound and crucial knowledge John could not achieve, always heading off into blue late-summer skies with early-fall temperatures, the kind of weather that exists only in retrospect.

  “Now some entertainment, please!” was the battle cry of the season, a phrase flexible in meaning. John muttered it now, Scott and Mária’s train having left a strangely quiet station behind it, and Charles understood that John meant “good riddance.”

  “You slept with her, didn’t you?” Charles asked.

  “It seemed like the thing to do.”

  “Oh, that it was, absolutely.”

  They walked out of the station and into the bright sun of Baross Square just in time to see, at an outdoor café table, a large man in a blue windbreaker stand up in fury and tip the table over, spilling drinks and glassware onto his horrified female companion. They watched him scream at her as she covered her face with her hands and began to weep. They watched him unzip his pants, remove his member, and laughingly spray urine all over her shoes and the upturned table and the scattered dishes. Two slight waiters consulted and chose not to intervene (one decisively retreating inside the café, but only to return with a mop).

  “It’s going to be a good autumn,” Char
les said. “The omens are looking very positive.”

  (3) The first unarguably fall night (September), when a sweater alone is insufficient after dark.

  The tree was shedding its distinctive leaves, almost all at once. In an effort to hold her attention one more minute, and to impress her with whimsy, he said they looked like little Oriental fans. Nicky said no, they looked like a fleet of perfect, motorized half-shells, frothing into shore, off of which a swarm of nude but shy newborn Botticelli Veni had just disembarked, padding onto the sand to check in at an exclusive, goddesses-of-love-only beach resort where they would lounge and sip frosty, fruity cocktails (served by eunuch waiters) while still managing to keep their legs delicately crossed and one arm strategically positioned over their naked breasts. Oriental fans!

  So, he kissed Nicky, pressed her against the rail and kissed her hard, with all he could muster in his heart and groin for her, tasted onion and smoke, felt the swell of her chest, kissed her with force in the vain hope he could drive away the distant, familiar look he had seen creep over her face an hour earlier during dinner (as they debated whether poor Mark wanted to be found or not): Soon she would say she was feeling particularly inspired and itchy for work, and she would not let him come over, or would not let him stay any longer than was necessary for certain combinations to be executed. He kissed her to argue for time. He held her arms tightly at her sides, then gripped her face in his hands. She moaned; he sighed. “Damn, boy, very hot, but you’re gonna have to hold on to that till tomorrow, ‘cause I’m feeling itchy to . . .” And he let her walk home alone—“rules are rules, playtime is over”—but after they parted he couldn’t help wondering if she was really going home to work, and he toyed with the idea of following her, steadying himself behind cold trees, watching from a safe, dirty distance as her smooth scalp glided down Castle Hill, onto the roundabout, over the bridge, down the boulevard toward her decayed little street, and would she work or would she be met?

  He didn’t watch her descent for long, turned instead and walked back up the hill and side-streeted aimlessly until he thought to walk toward the little basement bar decorated with bullfighting paraphernalia and operated by a teeny old Hungarian couple who, that summer, after John had come regularly over a month or two, introduced themselves shyly and offered him a taste of real absinthe, stowed under the bar in a black bottle blown into the shape of a laughing, crying bear.

  (4) The lingering ring of crystal kissing crystal.

  “In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning: ‘I’m going into publishing’ meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, ‘It looks like I’m going into publishing.’ Or someone gets nailed with a professor’s question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: ‘Looks like someone’s going into publishing.’ If they could see me now, I would get so much crap for this deal.”

  Imre arrived late and accepted a glass of Bordeaux. “Károly was just telling me how the future of publishing was an issue of frequent discussion at his business school,” John said.

  “This is marvelous, and I tell him that he must bring just this thinking from his education, he must bring home the new thinking, what he has learned abroad.” The two men clinked glasses and said something in Hungarian.

  And for some reason that exact moment distilled into pure memory and clung to John for many years, drifted throughout him like a dormant virus. They almost looked alike at that moment, the two businessmen, and John believed in the story, in Imre’s destiny and life, believed that an ancient institution was hurtling into the future with all the youth and energy of Charles Gábor, mock-embarrassed or not, as its turbine. At that moment the two men formed a mirror image centered on the point where the two wine glasses touched: the bent arm sheathed in a light wool suit sleeve and a pinpoint-stitched shirt closed with a silver cuff link, the shoulder leaning slightly forward like a fencer en garde, the stern and (mildly ironical) focused expression, the mobile wrinkle around the eyes, the sweep of hair, the intense hard faith in the fellow staring back from just across the crystal bridge. John sat to one side, and for the brief time the ringing crystal echo sprinkled through the air and fell to the table, he felt a hot throb of envy at the back of his throat, like a professional matchmaker when she wonders—for the first time in a long, successful career—if she hasn’t left her own happiness until too late.

  The three of them walked, that cold October evening, through Deák Square, where the pit that would become the underground parking for the Kempinski Hotel had reached its lowest point and the glass hotel was primed to spring upward from this deep crouch. Imre led them down the boulevard to the front door of a gentlemen’s club called Leviticus. John politely announced he was heading home to an early bed. He let the business partners disappear under the canopy shaped like the entrance to a desert hut: fake skins (canvas) stitched together and stretched over (artificially) straining wooden (painted metal) staves. He turned onto the boulevard and counted his blessings, laughed aloud at the sycophantic antics Charles still had to perform—having to follow the old man into a strip joint, for God’s sake, archetypal haunt of the world’s loneliest men and women. Mark would have had a field day with that.

  John identified constellations on his way to the Blue Jazz, looked obliquely to bring them into focus. Just as Imre, when seen obliquely, he decided, had no grandeur at all, was, to be honest, a ridiculous, ridiculous man; Charles had condemned himself to a career of indulging the whims and appetites of a very nonserious old fool. Charles, viewed obliquely, was not much more impressive.

  (5) (A recurring dream image in later years, long after he congratulated himself that he had forgotten even to think of her, forgotten even her name: Emily Oliver nude but for a feather boa, floating against a green sky, lofted by plush, luxurious, silver wings and cradling an American football against her body with one arm, her other extended in a running back’s locked-elbow blocking position.)

  This perennial, gaudy oneiric bloom sprouted from seeds planted Halloween of 1990, when, floating over other guests’ heads on a slightly raised platform, Emily really did wear football shoulder pads under a green Philadelphia Eagles jersey, and her tight white pants, although convincingly gridironic, were in fact a pair of her favorite casual slacks. John considered approaching her, using Mark’s vanishing act and his own (failed) efforts to track him down as an excuse for their first conversation in months. But the opportunity kept skittering away. Now she was talking to a man whom John did not know but could identify—from his haircut and bulk—as an embassy marine, despite his sparse Tarzanian wardrobe of a fake leopard-skin bikini bottom, loincloth, and shoulder strap. Far across the rented hotel ballroom, unnoticed in the crowd and shadows and his costume, John watched them talk under a banner with greetings written in two languages: English (HAPPY HALLOWEEN) and Hungarian (WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN-STYLE COSTUMED CELEBRATION OF THE EVE OF THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS). The jungular marine held Emily’s football helmet (the painted silver wings on its temples would later sprout into three plush, luxurious dimensions), and he spun it lightly between his two middle fingers; he touched it gently with fingertips that, John thought from his post across the room, proposed something sinister in their dexterous manipulation of the headgear.

  The skeletal octet of Franz Liszt conservatory students, unclear which of the elderly songs in their tattered American Popular Tunes book were actually familiar to Americans, counted off a Hungarian-language rendition of “After-Breakfast Girl” played with a Latin beat, and the crowd shuffled, and five gigantic, puffy playing cards with pink human faces and skinny limbs in red or black tights and sleeves—an improbable royal flush—danced in a sort of conga line, two steps forward and one step back, one more step back and two steps forward. Finally, the last royal rectangle waddled out of his way and he could see her again. Tarzan had swung off. Her back was to hi
m. Emily floated farther away now, her bright white number 7 proud under the familiar ponytail, and then there slithered a white-gloved hand and black-sleeved arm around her waist, and the hand’s twin circled the front of her neck, insinuating itself under her chin, tipped her head back, and then there were lips against her ear, or perhaps a nose against her cheek—John couldn’t be sure, because from where he stood there was only a back covered by a cowled cape and a mask of a famous trademarked cartoon mouse, with his signature enormous ears but a smile altered by the costumer: wide open and menacing, with four razor-sharp fangs.

  “The journalist! I owe you a big thanks.” A sudden intrusion hobbling in from the middle distance: an eye-patched, kerchiefed pirate, a live parrot on a shoulder, Harvey the investor atop a very convincing peg leg, which must have been severely restricting the circulation in the calf he’d tied out of view. John’s article on Cap’n Harv had won its subject significant attention, apparently; he’d attracted some investment queries, the story had been picked up in his hometown newspaper and radio back in the States, he’d found himself in the center of some interesting deals and people, he was feeling pretty pleased with the nice coverage, et cetera, et cetera. Even when John could shift his jealous focus onto this unsteady, clunking man, he had difficulty assessing if Harvey wasn’t pulling his leg, or even obliquely threatening him; John had, after all, written a profile so aglow with uranium-poisonous irony that it should have sent any normal man’s heart ticking up like a Geiger counter. It was inconceivable that it resulted in business investment and respect. To the extent he had expected ever to hear from him again, it would have been in the deliciously unequal combat of the “Letters to the Editor” page, where John could savor some ill-conceived, ungrammatical, unprovable claim to decency, which would of course only present to John the delightful gift of writing another column (“Our reporter responds . . .”) in which to try out new barbs on this fish’s slick silver lips. Or, John half expected for a few weeks that Harvey, failing even the courage to risk a public duel in print, would squeeze out some oily legal correspondence, amusingly suitable for framing. But no, here instead there was nothing but rosy-cheeked Halloween glee and future gain coming off this grinning, chattering pirate, and now Harvey had, if John understood correctly, a tip if John was interested; there had been inquiries—Harvey had made/received some inquiries—and the question of the Horváth Press’s privatization was a little more hotly contested than it appeared in the, shall he say, interestingly slanted local coverage to date, and would John be curious to hear about a syndicate—not a syndicate, that’s the wrong word—but a sizable interest, a concern, as it were, that may be in a position to throw some thumbtacks on Gábor and the old man’s road, or, on the other hand, in the alternative, as lawyers like to say (and here a wink, unnoticed, since his winking eye rested behind a patch), they may be in a position to perhaps bring the end of the rainbow a little closer and make it a happy little leprechaun day for everybody close enough to the deal to drop their hand in the pot o’ gold, and perhaps, if John and Gábor would like, this concern, let’s call them South Sea islanders (perhaps a pirate joke of some sort), South Sea islanders (repeated with a self-congratulatory laugh), I think I am alone in the unique position to convince them to turn in their thumbtacks for rainbows, if you see my point . . .