Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  Later she was talking again. “I mean this. What I said. You are like me, I think, but you need to drive harder forward. I see this when you standed cold with your little notebook. And later, too, when you say some things. You know, he is the best trainer in the world. Do you understand I talk not only about skating now?”

  He watched her dress, one elbow shoring him up on the too-acquiescent sofa bed. Across the room, she seemed convincingly human but too far away to take very seriously. She wore jeans, rolled several times at the ankle and also folded over the top of her wide, black leather belt, tightened to a handmade hole well past the final factory-punched option. Too long and too big at the waist, the jeans still threatened to burst at the thighs. (That morning in her silver leggings they had resembled two pieces of ridged, hard-shell carry-on luggage.) She put on her bra, a gauze of pink purchased during an hour’s break from training, racing, sleeping, and carefully quantified but voracious eating on a three-day trip in eastern France.

  He hoped she wouldn’t quiz him on what she had said, as he couldn’t remember any of it, not two words except for the part about the unlucky bird, but he did feel a last flicker, a snuffed-wick fondness for this girl as she daubed some makeup and gathered her coat and bag; he quarter-wished she’d stay the night instead of going home to drink protein shakes and critique slow-motion videos of old races and fall asleep early and alone.

  MTV played a pop tune—that song, the one that seemed to be everywhere that season, the song that got under John’s skin so that even though he couldn’t quite hum it, each time he heard it, he recognized it with the keen sensation of bumping into a well-loved old friend. A lush, romantic composition, its lyrics were hard to understand, but something about loss and rescue caught and stuck in John’s head. The music seemed to have been written and recorded solely to reach John in moments of happiness or sadness, camaraderie or solitude, until anything at all memorable about the whole season was accompanied by these sounds crooned by a sultry, six-foot-tall Greenlander, reminding him that rescue was possible, imminent.

  And it played the next morning on a radio in the newsroom as he was battling the boredom of an uninspired first paragraph and a snottily blinking cursor—

  As the old joke goes, “Who was that woman I saw you with last night?” “That was no woman; that was a member of the East German women’s swim team.” The chunky, steroidal mystique of those East Bloc Amazons who have whupped the behinds of our dainty little-girl athletes for the last forty years of international competition is now open to closer investigation, and after being granted unprecedented access ||||

  —when Charles called from the hospital.

  V.

  25(Q)(III). If during the term of this agreement, either partner should become disabled so that he is unable to carry out or conduct normal activities and, in consequence, to fulfill the duties or to communicate to others his wishes for the fulfillment of the duties required of him under this agreement, then in such an event (“Incapacity”), the non-disabled Partner or any such other representative as the disabled Partner has previously delegated in writing shall be entitled to have complete authority in the management and operation of the Partnership’s affairs, to make all operational decisions in connection with the business of the Partnership without consulting the disabled partner if such consultation is impossible due to Incapacity. Incapacity must be confirmed in writing by an attending or examining physician in the presence of both the non-disabled Partner and the undersigned designated attorney for the Partnership. Third parties dealing with the Partnership during either Partner’s Incapacity are entitled to rely on the signature of the non-disabled Partner, or expressly delegated representative.

  VI.

  January died and February was born in a hospital that for all its sprawl may as well have been nothing more than a single, echoing, nearly windowless corridor and a semi-private, steamy, entirely windowless room, both tiled in dirty white, both smelling strongly then weakly then strongly again of chilling antiseptics and, under that, something persistently, irredeemably, gleefully septic.

  “It’s a terrible time for this to happen.”

  “There is a good time, Mr. Gábor?” Krisztina Toldy did not look at the junior partner.

  “Obviously, I don’t mean to say—”

  “We rely on your confidence and knowledge to sustain us for a time. Yes.”

  “Of course, I merely meant—” In the hallway’s erratic fluorescence, her skin was the color of moonlight and the whites of her eyes a bacterial yellow. Charles wished she wore some makeup, even a single flesh-tone smear across the forehead.

  Neville interrupted. “I understand his closest family is a distant cousin in Canada. Is that correct, Károly?”

  “Ms. Toldy would know better than I.”

  Plainly uninterested in the question, she made impatient gestures with her head and feet, eager to return to the invalid’s room. “He has no direct family member at all. His will is with the lawyer in Vienna. He has no contacts of the Canadian cousin.”

  “No heirs,” Charles confirmed. “He always spoke to me of Krisztina here as his closest family.”

  “Speaks, Mr. Gábor. He is not died yet.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  She re-entered Imre’s room.

  The hospital was set back from the street, a ring of decrepit brick wards huddled together for warmth around a snowy courtyard with slushy shoveled paths over which bulky male nurses in short-sleeved shirts wheeled stretchers and chairs from building to building. The compound resembled a nineteenth-century model reformatory that, a century later, had long since grown up and abandoned the ideals of its designers, now reforming none but imprisoning plenty. When John had wandered far enough and asked enough semi-bilingual people and misunderstood enough answers that he finally arrived in the right building, he found Charles seated handsomely on a wooden folding chair in the long corridor immediately outside Horváth’s room. The junior partner was examining a sheaf of financial tables supported on a leather portfolio. He touched the capped tip of his pen to the papers with a rhythmic bounce, and his lips moved slightly in silent review of the numerical battalions parading under his command. To his side, between his shoulder and the door frame of Imre’s room, a mop sprouted out of a stained white plastic bucket and rested against the tiles, peering nonchalantly over Charles’s shoulder, occasionally sliding coquettishly along the wall into him.

  John, knowing it was a foolish question, pronounced it like the foolish question it was: “So, are you okay?”

  “What? Yeah, whatever. I mean, obviously, you know, it’s a terrible thing.”

  “True.”

  “And the quality of care here, my God. I think animal-rights people negotiate better hygiene for lab rats. I wouldn’t get my hair cut in these conditions. I feel like I might catch a stroke just sitting here. Honest to God, these people.”

  Halfway down the long, straight corridor (resembling an art student’s exercise in Renaissance perspective), a nurse behind a desk quietly sang that song—John’s song—and the Hungarian-accented lyrics trickled all the way to him in sporadic whispers: canchoo see . . . therr iss no ans-ser buhchoo . . . we coot be in heh-venn . . . so losst forr so lung, too menny . . . She had misheard “I walk all night long, and think only of being us,” however, and the words reached John with a key consonant vertically inverted: I wohk oll night lung, end tink only uff peen-uss.

  “What’s funny?” Charles squinted at him. “Whatever. They are funny, I suppose, the little things your life hangs from, you know?” Charles ran his hands through his hair, an exotic gesture of tiredness John had never seen Charles allow himself.

  “I do,” said John. “These things make you realize it. Are you okay?” He put his hand on the seated man’s shoulder.

  “I mean, my God. A little, tiny blood vessel bursts and suddenly my young working days are spent bored to tears here in the scummy, tiled bowels of Boris Karloff Memorial.” He fluttered his
lips. “Just kidding.” John bounced the mop handle from hand to hand.

  The stroke had raped and rampaged unnoticed, or at least unreported, for perhaps two days before Horváth had been found. Tests showed it had probably set to work in earnest the previous Friday. Krisztina had been visiting family in Győr; Charles had been in Vienna on press business; Imre, alone in Budapest, had most likely suffered all weekend from symptoms he chose not to take seriously. By the time he was tripped over by Charles on Monday morning, at least some of the opportunities to forestall neurological damage had been lost. The doctors were vague; Charles grumbled that their artful evasions would have gotten them booed out of a first-year case study discussion section. In hurried, hushed conferences, the physicians warmed one another with a spirited discussion on the likelihood of potential “damage to speech” as opposed to “damage to language,” a distinction Charles would have found obscure even if Imre were not now comatose for the third consecutive day. “He’ll wake up when he is ready, we think,” offered one of the doctors, gently placing a reassuring hand on Charles’s biceps. “Yes, of course,” Charles had cooed, patting the pale and furry paw on his arm. “Growing boys need lots of sleep.”

  “The poor old guy,” he sighed to John. “Honest to God, what a mess for him. I almost feel like I should have known. Do you think I should’ve known? He was telling me a story the other night in the office and he didn’t remember he’d already told it to me, like, the day before.” Charles drafted John to fill his hall seat for a few afternoons while he steered the press on his own. John was to call Gábor’s mobile phone if anything at all should change. Over the following days, when bored, John did phone in reports on lightbulbs being replaced and the disappointing progress of the abandoned mop. Once Harvey answered the phone, and though he put John right through to Charles, John forgot his joke and didn’t call again.

  Attempting to balance on the back legs of the folding chair, John slowly realized he was expected to maintain his respectful orbit and not stray too close to the flickering sun. As a Károly proxy, he was allowed to sit on Károly’s wooden chair in the hall and listen helplessly to doctors conferring in Hungarian. Krisztina Toldy, however, sat inside the room by Imre’s bed, consulted actively with the doctors, and said little or (more often) nothing to John as she entered and exited the patient’s room and very delicately closed the door behind her.

  He read. He jotted notes for columns. He wandered to the very end of the telescoping hall to look out the single dirty window, through the chain-link barrier just beyond its glass, onto the courtyard and the shuttered, smoke-stacked factory across the street. Every day when he turned the corner and approached the hospital, he tried to calculate from the ground where this window was. The building did not seem long enough to contain the hall; the walk from wooden chair to window required a conscious mustering of boredom-inspired energy. When he returned from these cheerless treks, he would look at his watch, then close his eyes and try to guess when thirty seconds or a minute had passed. He was rarely even close; his internal time mechanism seemed to be made of rusty springs and sticky, rickety joints turning gelatinous cogs. How many golf balls could you fit in this hall? And Krisztina Toldy would come out of Imre’s room and John would raise his eyebrows to ask, What news? And she would pass down the hall without making eye contact, and he would suddenly feel accused of dark misdeeds, would imagine she thought all he wanted was the news of Imre’s death at last, as if he were there for nothing else and Charles wanted nothing more than the old man’s demise reported quick-quick over the mobile phone.

  After five afternoons the mop still had not changed position, and John wondered whether its operator had quit or if the families of post-Communist patients were expected to pitch in and mop the halls a bit for the length of their loved ones’ visits. It finally occurred to John, looking at the bucket water, which had darkened in his days of surveillance, that he could write a column on this little outpost of authentic Hungariana where no comfortable expat would ever have cause to visit. It would be a burning exposé of a scandalous situation, and better yet, it would be an impassioned plea for Western help in resuscitating the once strapping medical establishment of plucky, unlucky Hungary. This would debut a startling new direction in his work. Purified in the white flame of protest and sizzling with emotion, he would join his generation in improving the world. He opened his notebook and tapped his pen against his teeth. Sometime later, Krisztina emerged and mutely glided down the hall toward the elevator; it was not a bathroom or telephone trip. She would be gone awhile.

  Smocked Imre lay on top of the covers; a smoothly folded blanket draped across his feet and lower legs. Fluids traveled at different speeds along a network of predictable tubes. No television chattered, only elderly machines that blinked and beeped unobtrusively. John was surprised to sit on just another folding wooden chair; he had assumed a better place back here. From the other side of a stained white curtain floated other beeps, half a heartbeat slower than Imre’s. The two machines—Imre’s and the shrouded unknown’s—beeped twice in unison, then the hidden one fell slightly behind, a little more each time (beep-p . . . beep-eep . . . beep-beep . . . beep—beep . . . beep——beep . . . beep———bee-beep) until it had fallen so far behind that it collided into Imre’s oncoming beep and merged slowly again into temporary unison.

  John stared at Imre’s slow-breathing belly on the convex mattress under the blinking screens and tangled tubes. He looked briefly at the twisted lips and newly dimpled cheeks, and then away again in haste.

  He looked at his own hands and recalled a made-for-TV movie he’d once seen where the loving family of a comatose old woman had spoken to her unresponsive ears, determined in their fierce love that somehow “she can hear us, darn it, I know she can, and I’ll do anything, do you hear me? Anything for her, I won’t give up on her, so don’t you dare give up on her . . .” And so, not wishing to be heard by whomever lay beyond the curtain, John shifted his chair toward the head of the bed, rested his elbows on his knees, and began to speak haltingly to his friend’s boss’s chest.

  “Well, I certainly hope you get better, Imre. You’re very impressive when you’re not, you know, like this. I don’t like to think about what happened. It seems wrong that this can, and that’s it for somebody who has done and seen everything you’ve done and, and seen . . . That whole thing about your life as a work of art. I wonder, was it worth it? I wonder that often about you. Was it worth it? Fighting tyrants? Everything you gave up to be on the right side when it seemed like the losing side? I sometimes imagine making an incredible sacrifice for someone or something: Oh, I lose a limb or I’m paralyzed or I even lose my mind under some extreme duress . . . and then if somebody asks me—and I’m limbless or paralyzed or only semi-lucid—they ask me if it was worth it. And I always wonder what I would say. I would so want to know that I would say, ‘Oh yes. It was worth it. Of course it was worth it,’ even as I’m sitting there with some horrible mutilation. I think about you often, actually. It occurs to me that you know something very, ah, very . . . It would be a shame, obviously, if, you know, I would feel very bad . . . I actually, ah, feel very bad, huh, about the whole—”

  John was ashamed to feel his throat tighten. He rubbed his eyes until the tickling sensation passed. His absurdity seemed to have no limits anymore, and so he thought immediately of that kitschy television show when Krisztina Toldy tapped him firmly on the shoulder. She scoldingly smoothed Imre’s blankets and pillowcase, though John had touched nothing.

  “Oh hello,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Time circulated strangely in the hospital. In the hallway, it sloshed into standing pools, still and stagnant, so that the clock could barely muster the energy to register a change commensurate with the discomfort John felt in the hard little chair outside Imre’s forbidden room as he sat and waited, perhaps forever, for the daily arrival of Charles or the specialist. Then, in a rush, the calendar would drop dates like a palm tree in sea
son, and John would realize with amazement it had been a week, ten days, two weeks, nearly three weeks already since the stroke, and still Imre did not move, did not acknowledge, and still Charles paid John to sit guard for him while managing the press’s affairs kept the junior partner “just incredibly busy.”

  Two days later, some excitement: One of the patient’s eyes opened when blown on as the specialist had blown on it every day for three weeks. It shut again, and brain readings showed little difference.

  The next day, Charles and Krisztina arranged to have Imre moved to a private clinic in Buda run by Swiss doctors. “For all I know the Hungarian doctors are great geniuses,” Charles admitted, “but we have to do all we can for him, you know? It sure seems like this is a better place.” John sat now on an ergonomic steel chair molded with a little ridge so that his buttocks were separately cupped. He leaned against the robin’s egg–blue corridor wall while, hourly, at five after the hour, doctors nodded at him and entered the shiny chrome-and-marble room, then emerged to make a note or two on the translucent robin’s egg–blue clipboard nestled in a translucent Plexiglas rack mounted on the sighing hydraulic door, which bore a brass doorplate engraved and screwed in the very day of the patient’s registration, as if he were a new executive: ZIMMER 4—HERR IMRE HORVÁTH. Softly down the carpeted hall, from a doctor’s receding back, floated the whistled melody of John’s song.

  “I can’t put it off any longer, is the thing. I know this isn’t the most tender thing I can say at the moment,” Charles said two days later as Neville spoke in hushed and halting German to one of the consulting physicians, “but he’s not exactly leaping out of bed to run his company, and this is not the optimal time for that kind of laziness.”