Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  The cab had lurched several blocks before Charles, without losing his place in a practiced but still fresh discourse on the Gulf War, retrieved the envelope from his jacket pocket. He fondled the Hilton-crested packet without looking at it and spoke of the ambiguous charms of Saddam Hussein, then finally, slowly, opened the envelope with measured uninterest: He tore the edge off its short end, describing the cold economic truths belying the hot political justifications for the desert combat. With a nonchalant puff, he blew the envelope into a cylinder and slowly slid out a sheet, which he could not be bothered to unfold. A good audience, John was suitably amazed by Charles’s languor and repose, or at least by his unquenchable desire to amaze. War motives analyzed (“You can be humanitarian and greedy at the same time; it’s just harder”), Charles unfolded the typewritten paper but did not look at it (“I really do believe you can shoot, starve, bury alive, burn, and bomb people, even innocent people, for humanitarian reasons, but it takes a great deal of emotional maturity”). The glow of passing streetlights illuminated his face in regular, sliding washes of pale yellow, each identically speckled with the gray transparencies of the taxi window’s smudges.

  “Okay, I’m duly impressed. Look at the thing already.”

  Charles bowed his head in gratitude and at last read the typed sheet. “Huh,” he allowed. “That’s about what I thought.” He started to laugh and shook his head. “If I’d been high.”

  John redirected the cabdriver, and took Charles to the Blue Jazz for the first time. His friend’s growing, irrepressible excitement and his admission that Melchior’s offer had surprised him induced in John a warm feeling toward Charles that he rarely experienced, and this justified sharing his favorite place with the celebratory partner.

  That comradely warmth lasted until just before they had taken their coats off and sat down: Nádja wasn’t there, to John’s disappointment, and instead the room was smeared with the pea-green sounds of a sextet of avant-garde free-jazz types. “I love this song!” Charles exclaimed, and John immediately regretted not sticking with the Baal Room. “Jazz is just so great. All the cats poppin’ their thumbs to the rat-a-tat-tat of the drums.”

  The conversation was enlightening, at least. For John, listening to Charles explain the meal they had just eaten was like going out for an entirely new evening, since apparently a whole eveningful of events had transpired without John even noticing. Charles described his frank admiration of, and pure enjoyment in, Melchior’s “gamesmanship.” The freakish little tics, the candid admission of being fooled, the casual, artless abuse of Kyle, the gruff yes-no/now-or-never/no-negotiating/no-bull manner tickled Charles, and he respected “the work that went into its preparation.” John’s assertion that it had been Melchior’s natural personality amused Charles nearly to choking. “All of it was very well done,” Charles contradicted him, “but it would be meaningless if Melchior couldn’t turn it on and off at will. If that’s all just him,” he lectured patiently, “then the man is nothing but a psycho in a cowboy hat. Worse than that, just a lucky businessman rather than a skilled one. No, he’s a serious man, our Hubert. It’s very well done, so don’t feel bad. But—and I say this with professional certainty—it’s all a put-on, even if he never stops doing it anymore, even if he does it in his sleep and will die doing it.”

  Charles had been curious to meet the man, of course, but certainly hadn’t expected an offer he could take seriously—maybe a minority investment offer, maybe a slightly marked-up buyout of his 49 percent, he had half hoped back in December, when Harv first started seeming credible about an introduction. But this . . . this was “gloriously, gorgeously high, high beyond dreams.”

  John longed for Nádja’s presence; he felt he would be able to pay better attention to Charles if only it were her on the stage, if only he knew the evening would end with just the two of them, him walking her home. He had never walked her home before, and that seemed a pity. He savored an image of a new nightly tradition: At the gray, quiet close of her working nights, he would see her home and they would have tea or sherry and good conversation in her fire-lit parlor before he headed off to . . . wherever. Nádja’s apartment would be a treasury of her amazing life so beautifully, so fully lived: that unlikely scribbled catalog of books and records—creased, yellowed, but there in the pulp; photographs of all her people and places; letters in remarkable handwriting, from eras when the mail came thrice daily; drawings of her, which she would handle with care but not worship, considering they had been sketched by hands of greatness, hands for whose other, more finished works museums fought one another like enraged children. On a shelf, mysterious souvenirs: a bullet casing; an ancient and curling identity card issued by some long since disbanded organization to some young man long since gray or gone; a rolled and tied citation from a government vanished from the earth. “Good night, John Price,” she would say in her leathery foreign-movie-star voice, “or good morning, as the case may be,” and they would kiss each other’s cheeks at the door, and he would walk out into the dawn air and feel like he was in the right place, ready to go meet . . . whomever.

  “But the size of the bid sort of retrospectively gives new meaning to everything that happened at dinner. You can see they’re in a hurry, right? We’ve kept them waiting, thanks to Imre. So now bid high, absorb whatever loss is necessary, because it’s a landgrab, that’s the order of the day.” John noted his friend’s wide-eyed excitement, all of his coolness steamed away by the warm liquor, and maybe even by the wailing squeals ricocheting off the stage. “Don’t they have strippers here? Why do you come here so much?”

  Of course, bully-buying media was a dangerous game. Buying newspapers wasn’t like buying a cannery. Newspapers talk: Force one to sell (“. . . getting you out of our way . . .”) and you might get two weeks of nasty abuse from the very object of your desire before you are able to consummate the deal and shut her up. And thus, Charles motored on tirelessly, here was an interesting detail: Median had started with Horváth before talking to all those other outlets Melchior had listed. “And why does he want Horváth first?” Melchior had complimented Charles on getting good press and understanding its importance. “You get it yet? He wants Horváth first because of . . .”

  “Yes, yes, because of you.”

  “No, child. Melchior wants Horváth first because”—Charles pinched John’s cheek hard enough for John to make a noise—“of you, you little darling.” Median would come one way or the other, but it was worth Melchior’s time and money to try to do things in the right order. Median had chosen not to make a privatization bid for the Horváth Kiadó because John had convinced Harvey had convinced Kyle had convinced Melchior that no foreigners could win a bid for something as highly symbolic as the press. And now Melchior respected the men who had held him at bay. And he wanted their assistance: Median’s first acquisition in Hungary—and Austria—would occur under the soft, flattering light of favorable news courtesy of Team Charles, rather than the uselessly hysterical strobe that greeted Melchior’s first acquisition in Czechoslovakia, where a few self-righteous, apocalyptic editorials had led to actual protests, “a bunch of truly silly people lying on the ground in front of the offices of some punky underground newspaper, the sentimental editors of which didn’t even realize they had just won life’s lottery.” If we are going to sell ourselves, sell our history to faceless moneyed men, why have we gone to all the trouble of rebelling, and of teaching ourselves to tell the truth no matter what the consequences? What can it mean when this organ chooses to surrender itself to the first brainless millionaire who offers us a little hard currency? Now that we are a free country and a poor country, what are we not willing to sell? I only hope that my Czech brethren are wiser than the men who employ me and who . . .

  Across the room, the bandleader, his giant hands cradling a tiny trumpet, mumbled some grateful farewell Magyar into the microphone, and Thelonious Monk’s recording of “April in Paris” rained from the speakers. The two friends stumbled throug
h a very clumsy game of pool, and John was keenly aware of the snickers of better players waiting for the table. “Guys at this level”—Charles leaned on his cue and spoke while John shot—“don’t waste their time over asset-by-asset valuation drudgery. They leave that for sparkling personalities like Kyle to deal with. Guys at the top just have the right instincts, and what doesn’t work at first, they make work out of sheer force of will. You have to love that. He’ll make Horváth profitable, faster than I can, just because of how big Median is. To make people feel they’re asking you to act. So beautiful.” Charles sat on the edge of the table. His feet dangled and he held the cue under his chin; a little blue chalk circled the tip of his nose. He had the face of a little boy looking forward to a baseball game. “Honestly, John, I’m not a sentimental guy, right? But it’s rare, isn’t it? To see something so beautiful. It’s elegant.” The point Charles had taken two hours to come to was that he needed John again, both for his typewriter and for talking to some of his press pals he’d made back when the Horváth deal had started. “Hubie was late to come here because he believed you. You’re a talent of rare ability. This is the start of a serious career for you. You have the ability to make things happen. That puts you up above the mass of people. You can see things as they really are. People think the world and the newspapers are just full of all kinds of acts of God. But you understand the true meaning of events. You’ve proven you can control the mechanics of what other people think are forces of nature.”

  It took John nearly three hours and several drinks to remember to ask, back at the bar, “What about Imre?” but by then Charles had already taken a cab back up Gellért Hill.

  He sat alone at the far right end of the bar, Charles’s words still singing (“like the Gulf War boys keep saying, Don’t get in if you don’t know how you’re going to get out”), and he gazed at the antiquated pay phone wreathed in black-ink garlands of graffiti in three languages. His thoughts moved with liquorish fluidity: That’s the phone Emily used once introduced her to Nádja wish Nádja never told me what she saw in her. And he asked the bartender where the pianist was.

  “She died, man. Too bad—she was a good lady.”

  John sat still, waited for the stupid joke to give way to a serious answer, croaked, “Really?” heard the confirmation, nodded, chewed his slippery, rebellious lip, walked slowly away from the bar. He meant to walk to the bathroom, but before he was halfway across the room, he started to run.

  VIII.

  She was breathing a little heavily; this did not escape the Swiss doctor’s notice. She insisted: He had squeezed her hand when she said his name.

  “It is extraordinary unlikely, fräulein, at this moment of the progression, for such a turning and, while I know difficult as this is to be hearing, those who are not physicians are so often fooled by . . .” Krisztina Toldy closed her eyes tight, shook her head, very slightly shuddered as if to shake from her neck and shoulders this doctor’s snowy alpine manner, absolutely refused to listen to another word. She had no time for perverse disbelief. She had said Imre’s name and at last Imre had responded; it was a simple truth.

  But the doctor’s uniform smile unfurled, tautly immobile over his closely trimmed, triangular black beard. From his great height, he looked down on the frenetic little woman as at a small girl with Father Christmas fantasies, and he tolerated himself to be led into the patient’s room, to cradle the patient’s limp hand, and to be hushed by an increasingly intense Krisztina while—each minute slower than the last—she chanted Imre’s name. He stood across the bed from her, slightly hunched, his translucent clipboard under one arm, keenly aware of the ticking clock, his hand damp in that of the comatose man, and a measured dose of anger diluted his patience, drop by drop, repetition by repetition of Imre . . . Imre . . . “Now please to listen to me, fräulein. I must insist. I have in every way my sympathy for you, but Herr Horváth faces—mein Gott.” And then, with sharpened attention, he waited in silence for several more minutes (now flitting by, where previously they had slouched), until he scribbled in German on his clipboard the observable facts: 22:20–22:35: patient responded to verbalization by producing hand pressure, feebly, 3x/.25 hour, each occasion immediately after enunciation of patient’s name, right hand only. Krisztina bent over and gently kissed the sleeping forehead, caressed the contorted, silver-bearded face.

  “It’s wonderful, that’s wonderful, Krisztina. I’m absolutely thrilled. Please call me as soon as there’s anything else to report. I’ll be in this evening. And by all means I’ll tell everyone here the happy news.” He hung up. Her enthusiasm was not uninfectious. “These spreads here,” he said to the young Australian, both of them working late, with their neckties pulled into loose Y’s, “are foreign-language sales of the Hungarian-classics catalog, by country. Obviously not a gold mine, but a low-cost and reliably renewable—”

  “Still, one must maintain a realist view of the roll of events,” the physician said, injecting a health-giving dose of Swissimism. He was able to perceive, with the clear-sightedness for which his colleagues had long esteemed him, that this unbalanced young lady could easily fall victim to hyperemotional responses if the patient did not immediately leap from the bed and dance for her. This image amused him, and he hoisted his smile both for his own pleasure and to soothe her overexcitement.

  “Watch out, world evil, , ’Cause Here Comes Hungary!”—John’s two-part consideration of the Hungarian contribution to the Gulf War coalition—had him traveling steadily for several days. He had not quite exhausted his dwindling reserves of irony; he noticed the incongruity of his surroundings to the internal monologues he could only turn off temporarily and with great difficulty. “I’m a Pathetic, Sentimental Idiot,” for example, blared so loudly as he sat in the waiting room of the newly minted press relations officer of the Hungarian Army headquarters that it may as well have been on a public address system. “She Was One of the Rare People Who Know How to Live” belted out its kitschy libretto a day later in a military camp as a press aide guided him from underheated building to underheated building. “What Kind of Freak Bawls for an Hour in a Hungarian Toilet Stall?” gave the first of its several performances to the rhythmic shoop-pop-bang accompaniment of mortar practice on a snow-dusted, wind-blasted plain halfway between Pápa and Sopron. Typing up the first installment of “Watch Out, World Evil . . .” back in the BudapesToday office was delayed by a particularly insistent, richly appointed revival of “I’m a Pathetic, Etc.” At noon the next day, he impatiently, quasi-bilingually interrogated three Blue Jazz employees before he found one who could give him Nádja’s home address. “She Was One of the, Etc.” murmured a subdued reprise as he walked back and forth past her apartment building that afternoon, the next morning, and the afternoon after that, ridiculously unable to enter or knock on the flaking paint of the little door cut into the gigantic old carriage entry. Astonished at his gaping absence of nerve, he retreated to Nicky’s. She was the only person he could imagine accompanying him, no matter how many weeks since last they saw each other.

  A curved plastic rake scraped along the sole of his foot and then returned to its special felt case in the doctor’s jacket pocket. There were controlled experiments involving series of loud noises and voices saying different words at different volumes. Long gusts of paprikás-scented breath swept his face. Pins prodded his toes, gently at first, then ferociously after the doctor had left the room, and Krisztina drove the pins with enough force to bring little beads of red blood to the thick, textured surfaces of his pale yellow feet. When left alone, she held his hand and chanted his name, with little more inflection than a regular churchgoer for whom the meaning of it all has begun to slip away. A special machine propped open his eyelids, then allowed them, with an almost soothing hum, to descend into repose. A specialist shared the news that recent research had suggested, in certain cases not entirely dissimilar to that of Herr . . . Herr (embarrassed clipboard examination) . . . Herr Hortha here, that it would seem perhaps
there is some thinking that a well-positioned and very mild electrical stimulus could perhaps have a salutary effect. Krisztina declined to electrocute her hero on such lukewarm testimony. A very kind English nurse suggested that music to which the gentleman had been partial whilst awake might very well be the thing to hurry events along a bit; she had seen it work jolly well before. And so a small compact disc player and a CD of some traditional Gypsy music (both gladly paid for by Charles) were duly summoned and did indeed produce, to Krisztina’s careful eye, a sporadic and tiny contraction of the right cheek as well as at least two grade-2 squeezes of the right hand, but then nothing. And then late—very late—one evening, with the television playing loudly (a proudly vague explanation of what U.S. Special Forces had accomplished behind the Iraqi lines), Krisztina struck Imre across the face. She had been virtually living in two hospital rooms since the end of January, and now, after the short-lived exhilaration of the hand squeeze, no matter how loudly, sweetly, seductively she said it, his name was no longer producing any results at all. She had drunk a little that night, and some small measure of self-pity had seeped into her blood with the alcohol. Her usually homogenized feelings had curdled slightly and, to her confusion, she was angry at Imre. She slapped him that night, twice, while pleading with him a little nonsensically. She struck him out of anger and frustration and also because it might be the desperate, unconventional, but successful tactic guided by feelings surer and deeper than complacent Swiss medicine. Either way, he did not open his eyes, and, having turned up the volume of the television (“these boys each carried what we call a ‘hot ball,’ and the less said about that, the better”), she sat heavily in the contoured chair next to the bed and allowed herself to weep, slightly and with great control.