Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  Just inside the desert hut, the six men passed under the assessing eye of two muscled bouncers, gigantic Hungarians in short skirts, sandals, headpieces with sculpted snakes and vultures at the forehead, tubular beards wound with spiraling golden thread, and guns tastefully tucked in tunic waistbands. “Oh isn’t this sexy,” John said. “I’m already muy aroused.” The palm trees swayed under the disco ball, and the tables were laid with plastic dishes of figs. No chairs, only rugs and throw pillows: The gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor, and their shoes were removed by women in golden bras and translucent silk trousers, which flared then gathered into slender golden anklets shaped like serpents devouring their own fake-jeweled tails. On either side of the sand-strewn stage, imposing video screens played a loop of climactic moments from classics of the world’s intimate cinema, and after fifty minutes, one’s sense of déjà-vu could no longer be explained merely by the limited ways those climactic moments could be performed.

  “Wow, what’s best is the authenticity. Because this is how people lived in biblical times. I mean, of course, you know, really swinging people.” John’s voice was muffled by hand-fed figs.

  Vaguely Middle Eastern music yowled over loudspeakers while, on the stage, a pantomime began. Two harem members—bound together and under guard by a shirtless, none too Arabic man with a plastic scimitar—mimed anguish, pleaded silently for pity from their merciless guard. Soon an idea dawned on one of the two women, and very little time was lost before the scimitar was tossed aside, the guard was stripped, and the two harem members began negotiating their freedom with an unsurprising (and oddly uninspiring) form of ransom, while the audience smoked, drank eighteen-dollar fingers of Scotch, munched gritty figs, and had their shoulders rubbed and their hair tousled by staff in golden bras. This drama was performed nine times daily by the same company of commedia—two married couples, all childhood friends.

  Here the service was aggressively competent. Charles was gold-carding the drinks, and refills came quickly, sometimes without even being ordered. “We have lots of new people we can fire starting next Monday, so don’t worry,” Charles said when people thanked him for drinklet after pricey drinklet. Harvey was unable to pull his eyes from the stage, trying to not even blink, but out of the side of his mouth he said to his assistant, “Didn’t I tell you I’d show you amazing things if you came to work for me?” Two women flanked Imre, and he placed forint notes in the garment pouches designed to receive gratuities. Neville watched the stage with an expression of tremendously serious discernment, a litigator searching for the fatal flaw in a complex cross-examination.

  “Jesus, what am I going to do with you people?” But John got no response, whispers swished from Imre to his partner, and a gesture was made to the maître d’, and then a woman was straddling John’s lap. Imre raised a silent toast to John, and John smiled back with a head shake of strained amusement. Soon she evaporated.

  A fake camel trotted across the little stage, and it bowed to the sand to allow another actor—an emir? the harem’s owner? a brigand?—to descend and approach the writhing trio. With no physical evidence of arousal other than the flaccid expression of passion on his face, this new addition was soon nude and writhing too, to no apparent surprise on the part of the earlier entries. John pointed out to his colleagues that under a close reading, one could discern a certain lack of penetration in the performances and a certain softness in the definition of the male characters; they seemed unable to achieve the firm bonheur that the merry tone of the scene demanded. Scotch appeared in front of him and quickly disappeared like the smoke its flavor resembled. More whispered orders crackled from Imre to Charles to a waiter, and Charles apologized to Imre for something unclear. Across the room, a bouncer irresistibly asked a drunken German to leave the club while a bikinied waitress stood by in a cocked-hip, pursed-lip attitude of violated dignity. The people of the desert formed a caravan. The German tourist tried to join it on his way to the exit. He was lifted by the hair and invited to the door. Behind the bar, a bottle broke and Hungarian obscenities spilled out. The people of the sands whirled like two clumsy quadruped dervishes.

  “Your friends make you Christmas present,” steamed into his ear in a vaguely Russian accent.

  Charles laughed at the expression on John’s face, but Imre nodded solemnly at John, accepting gratitude that had not yet been born. “You kids be home by ten,” Charles said. “With the grateful compliments of Horváth Holdings.”

  The girl in the overcoat held his arm, but John turned back at the door for a last look at this sclerotic erotica. Everyone seemed at their ease in that palace of secondhand lust and thirdhand furnishings. One of the women sat on the table’s edge, suspending herself over Horváth’s lap with arachnid grace, her long bottle-and-booth-tanned legs arched angularly to form most of a hexagon and her toes pointed on the floor far to each side of the publisher. Her hands gripped the back of the old man’s head; she bunched his silver hair between her fingers and moaned. She hunched her shoulders, threw back her own head, and pulled Horváth’s face into her chest.

  The limo left the two of them in front of John’s Andrássy út apartment, and John was still chuckling to himself as he turned the massive skeleton key in his building’s front door lock. The hero of antityranny—the memory of the people—had bought him a Kyrgyz hooker named Claudia, with feline eyes and a little Euro B.O. under a fruity perfume. They would have a cup of coffee and call it a night, and the next day he would show that he could take a joke, be one of the boys, do business the way it was done around here, evidently, and still maintain both self-respect and good genital health.

  But then the girl removed her clothing with such velocity and facility that John realized how much more practiced strippers are at undressing than the average person, and his priorities shifted.

  Later, the girl said, “Now I fake the finish for you, okay?” At first John thought she must have stumbled on a knotty vocabulary problem or that perhaps she was offering a special service of Scandinavian origin, but no: She stared up at him with the expression of a tired end-of-shift waitress. “Now, mister? Okay? Now? Okay?”

  “Yes, fine, Jesus Christ, go ahead and—” But already her shouts and moans were rattling John’s picture frames, and a stream of Kyrgyz words filled his ear, conveniently foreign, translatable however he wished.

  Unfortunately, a noticeable amount of time passed after her tour de force before John understood she was awaiting a similar finale from him; she was waiting to punch out. “Some other thing, mister? Some other thing?” John closed his eyes. In this new darkness, he imagined, as he thrashed himself against the girl, that he was thrashing himself against . . . this very same girl, the sole difference being that he was enjoying it. He pictured himself roaring with masculine, earthy pleasure, clawing at the very parts of her that he was in fact clawing at, but with a tactile shock and intensity he had never achieved in reality. The imagined girl watched him with eyes widening in growing excitement, and behind his closed eyes, John pictured his own eyes wide open and widening further as heat and electricity washed over him, poured fire from his spine and coccyx. He saw these two happy people enjoying each other with neither doubt nor second thought, living nowhere but in this nuclear embrace. He imagined their hands gripping each other until blood seeped crimson around the perforation her nails would make in his knuckles. He imagined the two bodies squeezing together tighter and tighter until all distance was erased.

  To no avail. He opened his eyes and saw hers were impatiently open, too. His hands clutched the pillow behind her. “Some other thing, mister? Some other thing?”

  “Shut the fuck up. I fucking told you no,” he spat. He closed his eyes again and buried his head between her breasts, arched his back, and, with a groan, returned her favor and faked the Finnish, too.

  III.

  The last evening of John’s 1990: John and Nicky shared a street-corner, lamp-lit kiss under sticky, fast-falling snow (turning from white to yellow th
en to white again as it crossed diagonally into and out of the lamplight). They descended into the crowded Blue Jazz as the American singer was dedicating the last song of his band’s set—“Georgia on My Mind”—to the memory of Stalin. By the time John returned from the bar with three drinks, Nicky had already sat down and introduced herself to Nádja, and the two women were leaning across the table toward each other, overenunciating to make themselves heard over the slightly too loud music and chatter. “My darling boy, I already like her so very much more than the filly with the jaw. May I touch your head, my girl?”

  “The jaw?” Nicky asked her escort while bowing her head and allowing the ancient fingers to skim the texture of her scalp. “The jaw?”

  “Never mind. Long story.”

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” he heard Nicky saying. He was a little surprised to hear the self-proclaimed princess of candor produce something so tritely polite and lightly a lie, as he had never told her anything at all about Nádja.

  To go back: John’s New Year’s expedition had begun a few hours earlier in the BudapesToday newsroom, where people wandered around their own desks, shy among co-workers they had seen every day for months and months. With Charles and Harvey off skiing in Switzerland (“Swiss misses give frosty kisses,” Harvey had said unprovoked while Charles, out of view, rolled his eyes), John felt a real ache, hoping Nicky would turn up. He could not stomach setting off into 1991 with any of the others, not even Karen Whitley, who had lately donned a transparent attitude of jaded, sophisticated, take-it-or-leave-it disappointment, laced with a golden thread of ironic guilt-mongering, dusted all over with a heady vanilla body-spray scent of still-availability.

  Passing a dull hour at this office party—listening to four co-workers’ similar movie plots and Karen’s alternating insinuations and scorn—he finally saw Nicky. He gave her the chance to smell for herself how fetid the overgrown earth of this gathering had become, then took her aside, asked her to travel with him across a liquorish sea to the sunny, welcoming coast of 1991—a green and promising country rich with sweet, orange, fibrous fruits and red berries shaped like tiny nipples, an island of unsurpassed happiness, where in fact (here he bit her ear) he quite seriously expected to be named king, a happy, naked king beloved for his munificence and slightly feared for his unpredictable appetites. He confessed to her what her nose had already reported: He had already set sail on his boozy crossing. She would have to swim a ways to catch up, but he was willing to wait.

  Before they could escape, Editor stood on a desk chair holding a plastic cup of cheap Hungarian white and painted a picture of “prahspruss toims ahett,” while the two seafarers grabbed each other’s groins behind a screen of computer monitors but in view maintained profound, wrinkle-browed interest in the remarks of their chief. She agreed to voyage with him; she tickled his Adam’s apple with her nails and whispered her assent in his ear. He smiled at her. She was probably, he realized, his closest friend on the entire continent. In persistently asking nothing of him, in repeatedly rejecting his offers of anything resembling emotion or affection, she had become (he saw in the fluorescent light of these cramped offices) overpoweringly important to him. (He was far enough into his evening’s cruise to grow sentimental—but not so far that he could not recognize it and excuse it as the inevitable and acceptable response to the shimmering, whispering, accelerating rush of 1990s dwindling hourglass sand.)

  Despite her laughing assent, Nicky did not cast off with him. As John wobbled and wavered and threw up from seasickness on his little wooden raft, she easily crossed the narrow, shallow straits to 1991 on the flat stepping-stones of exposure after exposure, click after shutter click: John outside the offices of BudapesToday painting his name in the white snow; John standing on the Chain Bridge, his hands in his coat pockets, his shoulders high against the wind, an unlit cigarette on the very edge of his chapped lips, a beefy and mustachioed Hungarian policeman gamely frozen with a ferocious expression, pretending to strike John on the head with a truncheon; Nádja and John on the piano bench talking; a very round-faced woman at the bar gently crying, half her lower lip twisted and bulged between her teeth; the skinny Hungarian bartender leaning his elbows on the bar and listening dubiously to a customer (back only); a peevish couple at a small table, arguing in front of their embarrassed third friend, and Nicky capturing the instant when the angry woman’s drink flew horizontally out of its glass toward her boyfriend; the black singer holding the microphone by its stand with one hand, looking at his watch on the other, and beginning to say the hard-won Hungarian words announcing the New Year; kissing couples wrapped in spirals of backlit smoke; a digital clock posting a red 2:22 just over the head of the round-faced girl, now happy again and talking eagerly and gesturing, a little wide-eyed and manic, to three men: the saxophonist, a young goateed American P.R. executive with a copy of József Attila’s poetry held at his chest behind crossed arms, and the singer, at the maximum dilation of a gaping, leonine yawn . . .

  To go back: 11:42 on the piano bench: “Now what does that remind one of, shaven heads and New Year parties? Oh yes. May I bore you with a memory?”

  “Please.”

  “Then here we are in 1938. New Year’s Eve again. Berlin was a very entertaining city in those days, a certain electricity in the air, assuming you were, well, you know, of course. Not everything was clear yet, you understand. I was a little tight, most likely. I believed I played better the piano when I was a little tight. So I am playing. What would the tunes be, I wonder? Mostly German things, no jazz that year for them, best to know your audience. We are in a private party. Thanks to a friend of a friend, I am gathering some very handsome money at parties. A lovely season; 1938 is becoming 1939. I do not know how much longer I will stay in the city. Perhaps I will leave the next month. I am young, anything is possible—friends, romance, adventure. You know this feeling, I am sure. And now a soldier—a party guest—has made a suggestion, very loud, to me. He suggests he and I should celebrate the New Year, which is only a few minutes away, in a particular fashion. I am not sure I can even tell you the English translation for what he proposed; it was one of those German words that simply stretches on forever and in one word manages to convey what in English would be a very long paragraph. So let us leave it to your imagination, Mr. Price. I think with your beautiful and provocative friend there busy with her camera, there is very little you cannot imagine. Berlin: My crude tormentor is wearing jodhpurs. He is young, but he is an officer. And the scars: He has one little ridge across his cheek and another longer one on his scalp. This second would not be obvious, but he has a shaven head, like your new friend. I say nothing, I play a little louder, I am hoping he will go away. But he says his notion again, louder now, quite loud. I am very young; I do not know what to do. So I lie and I say, ‘Thank you, but I am married.’ ‘Ach, the little fräulein iss married? Vvvere iss diss hussband who sends you to sell yourself as a piano playing whore?’ I have no friends at this party, it is late, I am staying in an hotel across town. I am beginning to imagine horrible endings to this evening. I am still playing, I make believe that I need to look at the keys, even though this is a little humiliating for me, to pretend this, and then, before I can frighten myself too much or say something witty but foolish, which was also a possibility, I am rescued. Another officer appears on the other side of the piano. ‘The lady iss a friend of mine,’ the new one lies. ‘If she vvvishes to be left alone, then I advice you leave her alone.’ This new one is the same rank, I think, or higher perhaps. Jodhpurs also. Shaven head. The scar on the cheek the same. Like a man scolding his mirror. I smile at my savior and move my eyelashes like a lady and continue to play. Of course, the first soldier is a little tight as well and is not about to finish with me so easy. Fear goes fast, and now I confess to pride; I am worth the attention of two young military lads. I am safe now, so I can enjoy this. And I confess also to amusement as the first soldier insults the second, the second insults him back. Their voices are very
quiet as they threaten each other. The first one leans across the piano and slaps my hero. I continue to play, but now I am not going to miss anything by foolishly looking at the keys. And I confess, I smiled. It was delicious, John Price.”

  The best photograph from nearly an entire roll that Nicky exposed within the three surrounding minutes: the two of them sit side by side on the piano bench, Nádja closer to the wall, John nearer the audience. Lit from above by spots designed for bands, their faces are brightest at the top, more shadowed toward their necks and bodies. Nádja’s left hand dips into the keys while the other floats just above them, poised to snag with a deft swoop the next melodic idea. She wears the red gown she wore the night they met, which she wore often. He has angled his head to present his left ear to her story and still aim the stream of his exiting smoke up and off to the right, away from her. Above them both, painted on the wall, the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon—winged and haloed and a little droopily bored—angles his head in just the same way and emits a stream of lightly painted smoke parallel to John’s.

  “With that, they very slowly walk away from me. The first soldier shows me a very serious look, a little dangerous, a little vvvolfy. If he should return alone from whatever combat is about to happen, then I should certainly not expect the kid-glove treatment. My hero, though, smiles quite gently, almost laughs, to tell me this is only a silly game and no harm will come. He is taking off his gray jacket. And, John, I am very pleased. I know that women must not confess to things like this anymore. We are not, of course, your gewgaws to scrapple over, you terrible men. But I confess! Find me guilty of thought crimes against my sisters! It was a pure sense of new power, like they tell me I am crowned queen at midnight. I feel at this moment I can have any man I wish in this room, or in all Berlin, and in fact I did meet my husband not long after this. But to go back: They are about to disappear out of the apartment’s doors, but first they have become very polite to each other. Each tries to hold the door for the other; it takes them some long time even to go outside. The bowing and the clicking of their boot heels becomes a little music-hall farce. They do not look at me during this, but it is for my benefit. At last they manage to leave the room: My hero has finally agreed to accept his enemy’s courtesy, and he exits first. The door closes quietly behind them. The crowds of guests, many drunk, many dancing, fill the space. I continue to play, and the hostess approaches me to make some musical request.”