Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  “Hey, Amerikai! New York! California! Hey, hey! Tor! Porte!”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, get a fucking clue!” Nicky climbed off, stomped nude down the narrow rectangle, and unbolted the rattling door. Faced with this naked baldness, with this self-explanatory, disgusted fury, the red tracksuit retreated, launching a defensive, lame sort of lascivious leer at the nude vision, then turned away, threatening something unintelligibly Hungarian. When Nicky returned, ready to pick up where she had left off, she found her partner in tears. “What is this?” she asked, still angry at the interruption, and now horrified at this gross violation of house rules. But she wasn’t cruel; she could make herself semi-lean against the chalky white and yellow wall, and hold the sobbing boy’s head on her lap and stroke his damp, curly hair and mutter the embarrassing little nonsensibilities that people seemed to like muttered in these cases, even as she scolded herself for all the work she could have gotten done this afternoon.

  IX.

  March. A series of newspaper articles and television stories, a dozen concentric circles radiating from an epicenter in Budapest (John’s desk, to be seismically specific) and trembling all the way across oceans: I promise this is my last column on this deal, but its twists and turns are worth keeping an eye on as your legs dangle off your comfy chair in the Forum lobby and you irritably ask your indifferent waitress why she can’t make proper coffee. Because now, with Median, the new Democratic-Capitalist Hungary™ has earned the noisy, vulgar trust of a real, live multinational, and there can be no better endorsement for an orphaned, ex-Red nation hoping to join the family of nations than the cold-eyed blessing of men whose money matters to them . . .

  . . . If you recall our story a few months ago about our own hometown boy, that young Clevelander far away in Eastern Europe whose spunk and determination . . .

  At last, windows could be opened a few inches at the height of day. Krisztina opened one now. “We should celebrate with some fresh air,” she said softly, for with fumbling and spillage in equal measure, Imre had used a straw: A small trickle of orange juice had bubbled between his lips and, sated, he blinked only once when asked if he wanted more. Did he want some air? Did he need another pillow? Would he like to listen to some Gypsy music? She still could not quite bring herself to talk press business to his blinks. She decided he needn’t worry himself with it yet, though she knew she simply could not bear to be the one to tell him or, perhaps worse, to be the last to learn that he had known all along and had simply never bothered to tell her, had approved it all long before he was ill. Still, she could hardly look at him, sick and dizzy as she was from the syrup of guilt and fury that boiled in her. Unable to scream or sob, instead she tried to force herself to enjoy her role as a full-time nurse of sorts, a tedious cheerful voice with an artificial smile and exhausted eyes who allowed herself to go home once a day for a shower-bath and a change of clothes, and, she noticed lately with overwhelming sadness, that she wasn’t even enjoying the usual pleasures of early spring weather. She had noticed recently that Budapest was in what her mother used to call “the impatient time,” when children demanded winter’s end, and they hated the dark spaces between buildings that protected the last of the last season’s snow, stubborn and horrible little leftovers precisely the shape of their patron-shadows.

  Neville Howard’s law firm occupied the second story of an Italianate villa high up Andrássy út, the first floor of which was still a faint and fading pink remnant of other times, red times when the villa had been on the Avenue of the People’s Republic, of even brighter red times when it had sat at the top of Stalin Avenue. To the firm’s chuckling irritation, the villa’s first floor was still occupied by the Society to Promote Soviet-Hungarian Friendship, which had recently watched its ideals and purpose vanish in one befuddling event after another, until the Soviet ambassador himself was looking for other work, never to give his old Friends another thought. The members of the society clung to the inside of their villa like confused ivy, and swallowed their bile and their doubts, heard the supercilious greetings of their new neighbors—specialists in stock market deals—and today looked through the windows that remained to them, at the ornate wooden benches on Andrássy út. There, under the newly warm sun and over the quickly surrendering snow, young client (a newly minted financial genius) and young counsel (his star rising fast in the firm) consulted post-lunch, both leaning back and stretching out their legs, both allowing the sun to warm them through their closed eyelids and open topcoats. “He’s slightly better,” said young client. “He seemed glad to see me, as much as you can tell with him. Pity. I explained the deal, the value of his shares, the arrangements for his care. I think he was relieved I had taken care of everything, to the extent he followed me. Ohhh, mixed feelings probably inevitable, of course. So look. You’ll be in charge of executing all those odds and ends for him, since my plans are pretty well set.” “Of course, naturally,” said counsel.

  Spring doesn’t imply warmth in this part of Canada, but the plump, red-haired young man, slightly dulled by pills, was satisfied to wait for his ride outside in the eye-stinging chill. He had grown to like the outdoors these past months; after Budapest, the rural surroundings here had an inoffensive timelessness to them (except for one view, through the game-room picture window at dawn, uncomfortably reminiscent of the Thomas Cole painting The Last of the Mohicans). He sat on his luggage, said nothing to the mild psychologist who waited with him. When his parents’ station wagon arrived to collect him, he accepted another of the doctor’s business cards and was reminded of the helpful mnemonic for daily peace, and he shook his well-wisher’s hand. He absorbed gentle hugs from his parents, now in their second decade of finding him saddening and obscure, and he sank into the backseat with the elderly chocolate Lab he had named for one of Charles I’s dogs years earlier. He watched the collegiate hospital recede through the car window, noticed that he did not yet achingly miss his time there, and he would have been hard-pressed to say that the pills were not basically an improvement, more or less.

  On the last evening of March, it would be another week before you’d be tempted to take your evening drink on the patio and another two before you could indulge that temptation without quickly regretting it and retreating, fumbling with cups and saucers, back inside. But on this last evening of March, sitting warm inside the Gerbeaud, near the window’s reminiscent views but far from the door’s drafts, with the sound of clinking dishes and the scent and rattle of coffee beans pouring in or out of brass bins, relaxing under the lighted mirrors and mirrored lights, well-accustomed to the by now endearing sight of grouchy waitresses in fringed vinyl boots, taking as long as necessary on your way back from a job that didn’t matter to you on your way to wherever you were going next where it wouldn’t matter if you were late or not, you could find very few places more pleasant to sit alone and have a coffee than the Gerbeaud, unless you were bothered by the unmistakable prevalence of noisy Americans having conversations like this one:

  “Now, this is funny. Guess who turned up at my apartment last night. Slightly drunk. No? Krisztina Toldy. She threw herself at me. Threw herself. As in, ‘Hey there, good evening, let’s skip the drinks, just take me.’ The classical model of throwing oneself. Wait, it gets significantly funnier. So I say, ‘No, I’m sorry, old evil sorceress lady, I’ll pass,’ and she gets violent. Extremely. Like she threatens to kill me. ‘Kill’ me. She has a gun, she tells me, and she’s going to shoot me. ‘Shoot me? For not having sex with you?’ Which, you know, is not unfunny. And what does she do? No? No guesses, Mr. Price? Fine: She starts to kiss my neck. Little nibbly things with dry lips. Like a rodent taking little bites to see if I was salty enough to store for winter. So, fighting down my red-blooded manly urge to throw up, I say, ‘No, really, gunshots aside, I’m not going to have sex with you.’ But what did our mothers teach us to say, John? ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Please, please.’ Which is what I like to hear from all my nympho-violent admirers. So I said, ‘I apprecia
te the offer, and your politeness, your manners are impeccable, but really, I’m not going to—’ and hey, presto! The gun is real. They can be quite daunting, guns, you know, even little ones, which, to be fair, I think I have to admit might be the right description for this one. ‘What I said about your manners, Miss Toldy? You recall that comment? Well, under the new circumstances, I have to say—’ but she tells me—and I am translating loosely, directly into English vernacular here—to ‘shut my fucking mouth or I’—she—’will kill you.’ ”

  “Kill me? What did I do?”

  “No, I’m sorry, John, that was a poor translation. Me. The point being, my mouth was now shut, so I can’t ask what my other options are, what her negotiating target is, as we used to say in b-school, couldn’t plot out a road map for getting to yes, and so I swallow hard. I know what I have to do. I nod philosophically, under the circs, and I start to unbutton my shirt like, ‘Okay, okay, we’ll have sex and nobody needs to get shot,’ and I admit the thought is going through my head a) things could be worse; it’s conceivable she could be uglier, b) being this desirable is a cross I have to bear, and c) it’s not completely out of the question that in the throes of passion, I may be able to disarm her. So I start to unbutton my shirt and give her a sort of basic, ‘Okay, even though I’m doing it at gunpoint I’m not a complete spoilsport, so come hither’ look. And she does what?”

  “She shoots you dead.”

  “No, but a good guess. She lowers her gun hand and starts to cry.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I swear to the filthy God of your afflicted, unpleasant people. She starts to just bawl. Which to me is a little much, because, hey, I was willing to go through with it. Sobbing now. Sah-Bean. So I button my shirt and, real delicate-like, try to take the gun, as in, ‘Hey, you’re obviously pretty shook up, babe, let’s put this away while you just have a good cry and we’ll wait till you feel better before we call your country’s corrupt and muddled law enforcement officials and see who can afford to bribe them the most.’ But, amazingly, she doesn’t go for this and sort of feebly points the gun at me again. Feebly works as well as anything else, so I sat down on the couch and waited for her verdict on which way the evening was headed. As I said, I’m the sort of man who is willing to have sex with an ugly, middle-aged hag rather than being shot with bullets. One of those things that sets me apart.”

  “Everybody knows this about you. We admire this.”

  “I’m willing to believe that my grip on time was a little weak at this point. So I think I sat on the couch and watched this woman sob and occasionally wave her gun at me for, I’m thinking, let’s say, twelve minutes. Sob, sob, sniffle, shake and point shaky gun at me, drop arm, sob, sob, sob, repeat. Like, fifteen minutes. And for what? Did she shoot me? No. Did she make me have sex with her? No. She cried and pointed and started to say she had a demand to make and then I’d start unbuttoning my shirt again and she’d say, ‘No, not that, not that,’ and start crying again and then after a while she just leaves. I look out the window, and she’s had the cab waiting the whole time. That was my Saturday night. That and then German porn on cable.”

  “But why?”

  “Because they all look like the St. Pauli girl.”

  “Let me rephrase: But why?”

  “Oh golly, John. Gee, I have no idea. Let’s ponder the possibilities. She’d had a really bad day? I remind her of the guy who killed her dog? She was raised in soul-crushing, loveless poverty? Hmm, it’s an overwhelming mystery that will puzzle us to the grave. Oh, by the way, can you drive me to the airport in a couple weeks? I’ll borrow a van for my stuff. I got some funny news this week.”

  “Well, had you ever gotten around to telling her?”

  “Me? No. I think you did, in your articles. I told him.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Oh, but of course! That’s exactly how I want to spend my last weeks in this shit hole. Oh come on, don’t look so put upon. She didn’t shoot me, after all—focus on the positive! It was meant to be a funny story. You are a vindictive race, you people. Poor woman was blowing off a little steam. In the end, no one got hurt and no one had to have sex with anyone old and haggy. I had already made sure to get her some money, too, you know. I went out of my way. Put a bonus for her in the agreement. She deserves it. Like you, by the way. Neville’ll be in touch.”

  The stuttering, half-formed, badly pointed questions that Charles would have mocked and left unanswered anyhow were spared their humiliating fate when a knock spattered against the window behind their own reflections and a bald head and portfolio were waved in. In the time it took Nicky to walk right to the door and then left to their table, John and Charles were unable to come up with a convincing lie or plan. “Hello, little boy.” She kissed John on the mouth, and he smelled liquor. “Hey, I’m Nicky,” she said to the man in the suit.

  “I met you this summer, if I remember right,” Charles replied.

  “Oh hey, yeah, at A Házam, that’s right.” She took Charles’s hand and curtsied, dropped her stuff on an empty chair between them, and borrowed a coin to pay her toll to the dragon guarding the bathroom. “You speak Hun, right? Order me something good.”

  “Well, little boy,” said Charles when the white saucer clinked and the aged waitress atop the velvet stool nodded Nicky sternly past, “this is not a promising start to an evening of tender courtship. You want to run and I’ll cover for you?”

  “Too late. Let the tender courtship begin.” And a few seconds later John was rising and Emily was descending into the other empty chair between the two men.

  “Hello, gentlemen. I’m very glad to see you maintaining fine old traditions.”

  He had smelled diesel fumes mixed with spring scents one recent morning and decided that he and Emily were equals at last; having guarded her secret during the long, eventful winter proved something. Before his confidence faded, he had called her with an out-of-the-blue invitation à trois (on an unassuming Sunday, for heaven’s sake). And in fact she had responded so eagerly that he had been briefly heartened, had put the phone down, lain back, and received some refreshed and nearly convincing visions of future Emilial bliss. And yet the sight of her now slumping into a chair and rebinding her ponytail was undeniably underwhelming. Her winter and spring appearances in his dream-life had been glowing, throbbing; she had been multiples, exponents of herself, a boiling, universal female essence barely containable, practically Hindu. In person, however, she was unable to change forms, did not glow, was plainly tired. She was as pale as every other nonstripper after a winter on the Central European plain. Her white oxford hung limp, defeated and unironed.

  Nicky returned and kissed him again on the mouth, an entirely gratuitous gesture: He hadn’t, after all, seen her since Nádja’s apartment three weeks earlier, and besides, she had already kissed him a few minutes earlier. And so he thought for a moment that Nicky felt threatened by this unknown girl’s arrival and was immediately making all relationships clear for the stranger, but he had to admit to himself that such things didn’t really happen. He introduced the two women. Charles’s face projected a favorite expression.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Emily, and John noticed a coldness in her voice, or (he corrected himself at once) merely hoped he had. He toyed with the corollary idea that perhaps she was jealous, and this time a different and better story might unfold.

  “Yeah well, to be strictly accurate, we met this summer, at A Házam.” Nicky set her straight with a certain subdued irritability.

  “Did we?” John saw Emily’s momentary confusion. “Yes of course. I remember.” He appreciated Emily’s desire to make things easy for people.

  Silence followed until Charles asked to see Nicky’s portfolio and she withdrew from between the black cardboard flats a photo collage. “It’s called Peace,” she said, passing the picture to Emily, who held it for the two in-leaning men:

  A family of four enjoying a picnic in a park. Arranged a
round a sky blue blanket, under a blanket blue sky, circling a wicker basket of shiny food, a smiling mother and father, a smiling young girl, and a smiling younger boy. Everyone smiled. The mother was in the process of smilingly unpacking the meal. The little boy smiled hungrily at the spread. The father, smiling, rested his hand on the mother’s shoulder. The little girl in a little girl’s dress lay on her stomach, resting her smiling head in her palms and kicking her bare legs and feet up behind her. The mother was missing a tooth. The little boy was drooling from the far corner of his mouth, and bleeding slightly from his near ear; his tan trousers were grotesquely soiled. The father was not looking hungrily at the food; follow his eyes: He was looking hungrily elsewhere. The little girl had three parallel bandages adhering to both of her bare soles. Partially obscured by a tree, a man—naked under a raincoat, fedora, and sunglasses—was squatting and defecating while photographing the family from his hidden vantage point. “That’s supposed to be you, Johnny,” Nicky explained, quickly and quietly, not wishing to belabor the obvious. In the upper left, bugs—“locust season,” Nicky clarified—were just entering the scene; their densely spaced limited number implied a vast swarm croaking to appear from just out of frame. Finally, in the far-distant background, on a pond in the park, a rowboat with a figure standing unsteadily in it. The figure—too distant for its gender to be clear—held an oar over its head, caught in the backswing before clubbing something or someone either in the boat or in the water.

  “It’s basically a big fuck-you to my dad,” Nicky offered offhandedly before adding, “or really anyone who tries to own me.”