Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  Months later, spring of 1991 was making its initial assault on winter’s ramparts, and the white March rain made acidic hissing noises as it drilled little silver-gray holes halfway into the depths of the crusty, brown-spotted banks of old snow, leaving behind a landscape of lunar craters, and in the evening, as the indecisive temperature dipped again below the critical figure it had so recently overtaken, the snow that had been winning its release toward waterhood reverted again to filthy, bumpy ice and sand and a whole season of frozen, time-suspended traffic and dog odors. The photograph of John and Nádja and Dexter Gordon lay flat on a worktable in the photographer’s underheated studio. Her adjustable razor blade moved slowly around John’s ear, hair, nose, and his stream of smoke, which was now as integral a part of his circled, chapped lips as a comet is unthinkable, is something else entirely without its tapering tail. His tilted profile and smoke stream were destined to top a composite of his naked torso (imperceptibly younger) on the galloping back legs of a goat (courtesy of a photographic field trip to the Moravian countryside). Running hard and exhaling that cool, gray, now-sourceless smoke, John the satyr would soon stride with caprine surefootedness on cloven feet and hairy, naked thighs over the hexagonal bricks of Vörösmarty Square. A week later, when pasting, rephotographing, and developing were done, he would chase—around the front of the metal crowd gathered at Vörösmarty’s feet—a maiden, nude, laughing mockingly over her shoulder at her mythical, smoke-breathing pursuer. Her long, blond, windblown tresses would be just insufficient to disguise Nicky’s face and slightly insincere laughter. Her arms would reach forward away from the goat, her fingers tensed into a clawing grasp of unmistakable avidity for the other female haunches just disappearing behind the rear of the poet’s post, all three of the photo collage’s participants chasing in a permanent circle around the crowded monument.

  But to go back: On this March night (which felt colder than the depths of January, because of one’s overripe longing for spring), the razor successfully cut away the last component, removing John’s hands from Nicky’s hips and John’s vertical torso from both its grimacing head and its invisible nether regions. Nicky spread flat the various curling pieces of her future work, began to assess differences in scale and shadow, when a sarcastic, complaining voice called out from the shadows that blanketed the bed, “I think it’s a little much, you doing that with pictures of him while I’m here.”

  Nicky did not look up; she even let enough time pass in uninterrupted concentration that the complaint was about to be reissued, when at last she allowed herself a response, mellowed from the delay: “I don’t remember asking you. It’s an absolute miracle I even can work with you here.” The urge to burst into tears—tedious, the root of too many headaches that spring—announced itself but was not permitted to mature. Yelling was tedious, too, the cause of too many wasted hours while ideas for art simmered away until only stale residue remained. Something easy and amusing had transformed into something stupid and sticky. Emily’s initial appeal—her innocence, her total transparency, her ready malleability—had somehow lured Nicky into this, this middle-aged marriage, a cycle of strife and forgiveness where work was endangered and Nicky was growing accustomed to being scolded. “Oh look, I’m sorry,” Nicky finally said, but could not look at her. “Please don’t do that. Please just lay off tonight. I am so tired of fighting. Just lie there. Just sleep and let me watch you. I love that I can work with you drifting in and out of sleep. Just let me work. Please.”

  “You saw him this week. You promised you wouldn’t see him anymore, and I know you saw him.”

  “You know I did?” The brittle, tapered end of her attenuated tenderness snapped. Nicky put down the razor blade and rested her forehead on the heels of her hands. The bright lamp screwed to her worktable cast dark and peculiar shadows of her head and fingers against the wall. “Goddamnit, his friend died. Please. Just not tonight, okay?”

  “Not tonight? Well, how about never then? Would that suit you?”

  “Oh my God, until this very instant, I never saw what my dad liked so much about hitting girls, but right now—yeah, never would suit me just fine. I am so sick of you both. You’re just the same. You’re weaklings. You should be together. Just get out so I can get some fucking work done for once.” But the last sentence was bluster; Emily had already left.

  To go back: the first instant of 1991. The singer’s Hunglish announcement of midnight brought kisses and cheers, pursed lips and raised eyebrows, a round of drinks on the house and mock combat with pool cues, handshakes and sudden generosity with tobacco in all its forms, truces in ongoing arguments and the strange, sudden calendar-triggered emergence into consciousness of long-growing, subterranean tendrils of feeling. John lightly kissed the pianist on her cheek. “That’s far enough, Price.” Nicky’s voice came from behind them. “I can’t have him laying his hands on yet another woman in Budapest, Nádja.” The photographer kissed his boozy lips, then sat on Nádja’s other side, the three of them crowded onto the piano bench. Nicky loaded new film, and Nádja playfully exaggerated the squeeze for space, pretended she could only move her forearms to play.

  “So my Germans, John Price. They return after perhaps one quarter hour. The New Year instant has come and gone, like here, and we are now in 1939. They left to fight for me last year, and when they return, much has changed. They have fought, this is clear. My enemy and my hero both have bloodied shirts and marks on their faces. The jodhpurs of my hero are torn at the knee. The villain has an eye that is blackening in gradual shades, but it is like trying to see a clock’s hour hand move. My hero also has a cut on his cheek, just above his scar. But, believe me, these are things you do not notice at first. How can this be? Because at first you notice they are happy; you see they are great friends now, this year. Much has changed in a year. At first, I see that in 1939 neither one cares enough about me even to look at me. They walk into the room with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They call for kirsch. They toast each other and shake hands and embrace. Again the kirsch, again the embrace. It is disgusting. This has nothing to do with me at all. Perhaps combat has made them respect each other, or some cock-and-bull like this that men sometimes worship when they spend too long away from women. Perhaps they were friends before, perhaps they do this often at parties, they find a girl to play on and frighten and then they humiliate her. Perhaps they are of some intimate friendship that demands this ritual.”

  Years later, pick an age for John, pick a city somewhere, and another New Year’s Eve begins with acquaintances and drinks at his new apartment. They ask about the pictures hung on his walls, carefully framed and transported memorabilia of his world travels, the first thing he unpacks and places in each new home. And when the strangers stop in front of the moody black-and-white of the piano in the smoky room with the old woman and the boy side by side, someone asks who took it and someone else asks who is it, and John (answering both or neither) says, “An old friend.” Polite curiosity touches on the antique photo of the crying baby, and then another guest (an acquaintance’s newly introduced husband, whose name has still not adhered to John’s memory; a jazz fan and a trivia buff and something of an incorrigible know-it-all, he and John will grow to dislike each other irreparably before the night is over) says, “Well, if you ask me, I’d say that’s Dexter Gordon,” and the conversation swings into jazz stars of the mid-twentieth century.

  To go back, John was far into his ocean crossing now, with no sight of—and no interest in—landfall. He was very drunk and therefore alternately sullen, sappy, disoriented, chatty. “I don’t even know her last name,” he was complaining to Nádja when Nicky was far across the room photographing something. “Can you believe that? I mean, I’ve seen it, but I’ve never heard her say it. I can’t even pronounce it. Symbol there somewhere, if you can find it, because I can’t . . .” The next instant, both women were sitting in front of him laughing. When Nicky had arrived, he had no idea; she had just been far across the room, and
what was so funny anyhow?

  “That’s the fucker hit me with a rock.” John squinted at a man sitting at the bar, plainly an American, talking with a plain American girl. “That’s the fucker, Nic, hit me with a rock.” The man sneezed often, and the bar in front of him was bumpy with bunched-up cocktail napkins. “Whom hit me. Let’s you and me go kick the shit out of him.” Nicky laughed as John advanced, blinking and talking before his enemy had even noticed him. Nicky’s shutter clicked and clicked. “You want to hit me with a rock? You can’t just hit me with a rock. I’ll show you how to hit me with a rock.”

  The man turned his head toward the angry drunk wobbling in front of his traveling companion, a childhood friend reeling off a messy divorce ending a very short marriage. “I’m sorry?” the tourist said in response to the little he had heard (“himmy wihuh rah”). His voice was soft, stuffed from his cold, slightly apologetic.

  “Not good enough, chum. Too late to be ‘I’m sorry.’ Not good enough at all.”

  “Do we know you?”

  “Oh there are lots of us I suppose hard to keep us clear, all us rock catchers.” John lunged at his sworn foe but could not maintain his balance, and he fell to one knee, grabbing the man’s arm as he descended. When that arm was instantly shaken free (“Hey, guy, get your hands off me”), John continued his fall and struck his lip—with sharp, incisive teeth perfectly angled behind it—against the woman’s foot and then was led off in another direction by Nicky.

  “Save it for me, darling,” she consoled him. “My feet need ferocious biting, too.”

  Nicky sat him in a booth, tipped a glass of ice against his mouth from time to time, and watched it slowly turn cloudy red. “I’m in no condition to fight, to be honest,” John admitted, and the glass fell over and ice and pink water turned black on the table’s surface. “Hey, listen.” He could not open his eyes, but something in him compensated; his eyebrows, his lips, the muscles of his cheeks all became enormously expressive so that he resembled a very agitated, blind vampire as the blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth. “Hey, listen. I think I gotta say this now. I really, I love you, Emily. I know you don’t want to hear that right now, but I do.”

  “That’s very sweet. Thank you,” she said, and John passed out for a while. Later, Emily must have left because, slumped against the booth, no different in posture from when he slept but for his half-open eyes, he saw Nádja speaking to Nicky. They laughed and smoked a few tables away, their heads together, and John knew he must be dreaming because those two had never met. He watched them touch each other’s hands when they spoke, watched Nicky snap close photos of the old woman’s face and hands and shoulders, watched them point to him in his booth and make unhelpful, pitying faces—a moment so clichéd and cinematic that part of him wondered about the paucity of imagination such a dreary dream must imply. Later, that concern was allayed by a long and feverishly hot round of REM that seemed to go on forever, at ever decelerating speeds, and he woke alone to 1991 in the turpentine steam of Nicky’s apartment, dressed and sticky on her bed with unrecollected resolutions and low-resolution recollections and a wheeling, circling desire to feel that this year might, in some unspecifiable way, be his year.

  IV.

  Early in January John noticed, with a surprisingly sharp sadness, a certain fleeting science-fictiony feel to the dates at the top of newspapers. He thought of Mark simply leaving, just knowing this place was not good for him and somewhere else would be better and so decisively departing in a certainly temporary moment of strength. John considered, staring at the improbable, odd date stuttering its way across the hotel’s newspaper display table, whether this place was good for him, whether he shouldn’t go away. But he had too much to do here, too many ties.

  Outside, large-flaked snow materialized just above his head from out of the monochrome gray, as though the low sky were being rubbed against a cheese grater. He stood on the Chain Bridge and remembered kissing Emily Oliver here, months ago. It was months old now, that cherished memory, though of course a split second later it provoked a wince of shame, since that cherished memory was atomically fused to the stinging memory of the awful moments that followed it, and the stupidity he had displayed to her for months, and her secret that he still proudly, dumbly guarded. (And the kiss hadn’t even been on this bridge, he only then recalled.) Months had passed since then; he hadn’t even seen her since Halloween. What right did her ghost have to enter him as she pleased? And if that doomed bridge kiss had not been the last? If tonight he held her asleep against his chest, so close that the stream of breath from his nose brushed her eyelashes. Or if she stood here now and he leaned in to kiss her, but again she said no and so he simply pushed her hard over the rail and she cried slightly as she fell, vanished into the comforting mist long before he heard the delightful, distant splash.

  He needed a change, just like Mark, a break from the same old people, though his circle had been shrinking month by month since the social high point of his arrival last May. He needed to go where he would be encircled by friends of the right sort. He belonged in Prague; he had known this for almost a year. Life waited for him there, waited with some goal achievable yet elegant and thrilling.

  Instead, that afternoon Editor assigned him a story that took him to an outlying suburb at the crack of a bright and freezing dawn. He shivered until his jaw ached and his spine spasmed between his knotted shoulder blades. He waited and watched at an outdoor training facility surrounded by frozen, crunching flatland and garbage piled behind fences.

  “I saw you cold this morning with your little pen and your little notebook—unh—and you were wishing to be inside the dressing building. You could not suffer cold.”

  “True.”

  “And—unh—I watch you ask questions of coach very cold and you were very unhappy. I knowed exactly then your problem. Do you know what your problem?”

  “My problem?”

  “Listen—unh—I tell you a story.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, yes—unh—now.”

  He was safely back in his apartment now, warmer, since on top of him crouched a nude speed skater, displaying Olympic stamina and competitive verve. Her hands (and most of her weight) pressed down on John’s shoulders, effectively pinning both his torso and his arms; he could only lift his head an inch or two. Her thighs pivoted forward and back from the knees at a fierce, metronomic clip.

  “Listen, boy, when I go to training in winter morning and we are outside in the ice, it is bloody cold. You only do’d it once and you know.” She breathed easily despite her athletic pace. “To warm us, the coach say, ‘You do twothousandfivehundred meter fast as can.’ We do this, we skate a long way. And then—unh—we do it again. After the seventh time of twothousandfivehundred meter, it really is hurting, and I think my legs never hurt so bad, I got to stop.”

  John lifted his head as far as was possible and looked at those legs now. The triangular (nearly pyramidal) sculpted calves lay parallel to his thighs, and her own thighs were folding up and down at an extraordinary rate. At the apex of her action, the thighs emerged from the knees at nearly a ninety-degree angle and, from his viewpoint, seemed like enormous pulsing pistons, engineering achieved on some brightly lit, 99.999-percent-dust-particle-free, laser- and robotics-equipped conveyor belt in Hamburg.

  “But I go on through pain—unh. It is how you get great and go to the Games and win gold. I know this. So I just not think of pain and skate. Finally, after two more twothousandfivehundred meter, I say, ‘Coach, my legs burn too much now.’ He looks at me—unh—like I make fart, you know? And he say, ‘Yes of course they burn. This is good. Sprint another twothousandfivehundred meter. Do not stop, because you know what comes after the burning?’ Do you know this answer, John? Do—unh—you know what comes after the burning?”

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “I said no also. ‘Coach, what comes after the burning?’—unh.” She released his left shoulder just long enough to brush a
few straggling, sweaty bangs off her forehead. Her hand returned to its position; her fingers fell naturally onto the white marks they had left behind. “He said, ‘After the burning comes agony, okay? Now, skate.’ And he shoots his gun. He has a gun always at the training to start races and also inspire. He uses always the—unh—the real bullets.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “He—unh, unh—one time trying to make us skate faster and he point up in the air and shooted and a bird fall on the ice—unh. That is for you, too—unh—John. After burning comes the agony. You must—unh, unh—you must reach all the way to the agony, because who knows—unh, unh, unh—what waiting for the brave on the other side!” The rocking accelerated further, to inspirational speeds. “Now, boy! Now!”

  As she rolls off, she suddenly becomes almost human: Her lips are a little parched; there is a white something at the corner of her eye that he wants to wipe away for her. When she turns away, puts her legs over the side of the bed, sits up, and switches on the bedside lamp, the yellow light filters through her dangling hair. She pulls the damp strands together and wraps a rubber band around them, and the movement of her hands reminds John of someone, he can’t quite think whom. Her hands are, after all, not hyperdeveloped but like a girl’s. The curve of her back as she sits on the edge of the bed just out of reach, and her head, turned now to the lamp and her shoulder, the corner of one eye just visible over that shoulder and her arms locked and her palms pressing hard and flat against the mattress: He knows she is waiting for him. He can almost think of the right word now to bring her to him and they can begin, but then John has fallen asleep.