HE STILL OCCASIONALLY RECALLS plotting his brother’s death so many years ago and, that very same night, conceiving the child whose vicious arrival killed his wife, and in an instant of extreme pain, he still cannot deny that the two events are connected, and he is pricked by a barb of the perfumed religion he never otherwise touches: The child was conceived in the shadow of his sin, and he essentially murdered his wife that night nine months before her death, by taking her when murder was still throbbing in his head. And in these moments, the guilt of his crime is so physically painful that he will close his eyes to defend himself. This wince, much less common ten years on, is still immediately followed not by relief but by an almost equally painful feeling that he is a fool. Tonight, though, in front of a fire that is not quite sufficient to warm the room, the boy has noticed his father’s face and for the first time musters the courage to ask what pain his father suffers to cause such an expression. “You are almost too big to sit in my lap,” his father replies, pulling the boy up from his toy soldiers to join him on the long chair. He looks at a son and summons up a favorite thought, one that has soothed him many times in the past: Most men would consider the boy the murderer of his mother, but I do not; he is an innocent in my eyes. I will never make him pay for what he did to me.
THE LOUNGE’S FURNITURE consisted of wooden cubes, some stools, a couple of mismatched, salvaged booths, and several dilapidated couches flung randomly around the room. On every available surface someone smoked, drank, kissed, laughed, stared. A giant placenta of smoke obscured the ceiling and attached to a hundred smoking fetuses through a hundred smoky umbilical threads.
HE LIVES ONLY to the spring of his forty-second year, dying on an unusually warm night. His son, now a nineteen-year-old soldier in the army of the Empire, finds the body, but not until the next morning, as he has spent the night away from the house, first on patrol, and then in a brothel with two of his comrades. The disposition of the house falls to his uncles and the lawyers, and doesn’t, at first, much interest him one way or the other. Never much light or amusement there, if you ask him. And with those rousing words he turns his back on his father’s funeral and marches to barracks, arm in arm with his comrades, all of them eager to “shake life by the heels and see what comes out of her pockets.”
AS EARLY AS JULY 1990, A Házam danced on the precipice of overpopularity; everyone felt that their secret had slipped out of their control. The very hippest Hungarians felt there were too many foreigners. The very hippest foreigners had the impression there were too many uncool foreigners. The rest of the foreigners, unaware they were uncool, were noticing too many obvious tourists. By September, it would become a favorite bar from the past that you couldn’t really go to anymore without aching for the good old days when it was yours alone. But for a few weeks in July of that year, before it won praise in a collegepublished budget travel guide for its authenticity as a locals’ hangout, A Házam was everyone’s first choice.
SOME MONTHS LATER, over the lawyers’ and his uncles’ occasionally strident advice, he stands firm and orders the house and all of its furnishings sold at the best possible price and the money deposited in his account. That and his father’s legacy will provide him with an ample cushion to support his military career. His defeated uncles have not seen the boy more than once or twice a year for his entire life, their brother having kept increasingly to himself over time. They remember a quiet boy willing to do what his father instructed, and they are somewhat surprised at his sudden decisiveness, offended that their counsel is so flippantly and brusquely ignored. The younger uncle takes the soldier to lunch at the Casino, however, and finds the boy really quite amusing, though with nothing more serious on his mind than women, the new comic opera, military advancement. The house is sold at an excellent price within five weeks and the uncles do not hear from him again.
Twenty years later, October 1915, the one who took him to lunch notices his name in the fallen heroes list in Awakening Nation.
THE FRONT DOORS, which let in the July heat, opened onto six concrete steps that led down to the narrow sidewalk and road. On the fourth step from the bottom sat Mark Payton and John Price. Across the little square from them, a few old women leaned out of their upper-story apartment windows and angrily or curiously watched the crowd of young people milling below them.
Emily Oliver sat with the two men from time to time, appearing on one side or the other of Mark, reflected streetlight curved over her dark eyes. When she laughed at John’s jokes, when he watched her listen to Mark talk about his latest research (and when she and John had danced in the steaming basement and had drunk at the smoky bar), John’s senses sharpened, not only in the quantity of aromas he could distinguish, for example, but in the meanings he could perceive beneath them: The final time she sat on the stairs, an element in her perfume reacted with the fragrance of the trees on this particular street, and the little cars’ diesel fumes turned in the summer air with the competing brands of cigarette smoke, until it all smelled of significance and beginnings, real life and permanently memorable moments.
“Because there isn’t anything new of any value,” Mark answered her sorrowfully. “In science, I suppose there is, but even that never really has any effect on you or me. We only benefit from scientific discoveries years after the fact. You actually should be nostalgic for really old medical researchers.” John flicked his cigarette butt onto the street and leaned to one side to allow a crowd of Americans to pass between him and Emily. When he re-elevated to conversation position, she was disappearing upstairs among a flock of hilarious Julies.
And later, when the Julies swept her downstairs and down the street, waving at him and Mark indistinguishably, John cursed his ineptitude and their intrusion and her inaccessibility in quick succession. That same mixture of aromas now curdled with a faint tang of probably permanent despair. She was locked behind some barrier, and he could not say whether she wanted him to break through or not, and, if she did, why she wouldn’t or couldn’t help him. His theories multiplied and contradicted one another: He was not effortlessly openhearted enough to match her, and so she could only disapprove of him; she had some knowledge that, like breathing, could not be taught, but which she unconsciously waited for him to prove he understood. Perhaps he should be more forward. Or less.
“It is, is it really, is you?” someone asked him. Two Hungarian girls, about seventeen or eighteen, had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned back to look at John with eager amazement and happy doubt. One whispered something, they both giggled, then the thinner girl pushed the fatter one toward him. “Is it you, it is?”
“I suppose so,” said John. Handling this situation smoothly would amuse Emily, he thought, before recalling that she was no longer there.
“We are very big fans of you,” said the pushed girl.
“Every movie!” The thinner one stepped forward, regretted having allowed her friend such easy conversational prominence. “We have seen every of your movies!”
“Really?” said John. “Which one’s your favorite?”
The girls laughed uproariously. “I do not know the name in English,” said one, slightly panting. “It was showed last month at the Corvin. Where you are lost in the outer spaces with the blond girl and the two funny little dogs.”
“Of course, of course,” said John. “That’s my favorite, too.”
“She is not really with you in the real life is she, this blond hair in the cinema?” asked the thinner girl, ignoring Mark’s laughter.
“She is not the right one for you,” said the fatter girl seriously, and her friend berated her in Hungarian.
“Okay, we leave you alone now, but thank you. We love every of your movies. But wait, we want to say this, too,” said the thinner. She looked at the ground, then at her friend for support, then at John from under a wrinkled brow. She spoke quickly and seriously. “We read this in the paper. Please, because we are loving your movies we say this. Stay off of the drugs, please. You are s
o good a cinema actor and a very beautiful boy, even in the real life. Please no more, the drugs. We know they will kill you if you do not stop them. We know it is hard.”
“We know it is hard,” agreed her friend, “but they will put you back in the prisons if you do not stop. Please.”
John was moved by their concern, had never had young women nearly in tears over his well-being. He knew he couldn’t make any promises; that would be unrealistic with a problem of this scope. He thanked them again, said only that he would do his best. They stood shyly one moment more, until one asked if she could kiss his cheek and the other quickly applied for the same favor. John hoped Mark would report this to Emily without being instructed. He waved back each time the girls looked over their shoulders as they walked arm in arm down the dark street.
Laughing, neither Mark nor John could guess what actor he had been, but for a tick or two of alcohol time, he still felt warmed by his fans’ attention, until the next wave of migrating club-folk herded onto the street and slowly melted away, revealing Charles Gábor, kissing the tiny woman who had groped him in the basement. His head and neck drooped low to meet her upturned face. She stood on the tips of her toes and kept her balance by clutching his ass with both hands. He bent his knees slightly and helped stabilize her by pressing one hand against her back and massaging her chest with the other. John and Mark silently watched their friend lick the short girl’s neck and speak Hungarian with her. Spring-loaded by lust, the girl leaped up, wrapped her legs around Charles’s stomach and her arms around his neck. They kissed again, his head now stretching up to meet hers, and Charles stumbled down the street like that, blindly, toward a boulevard and a cab.
“You hate to see something like that,” Mark said, standing and heading across the square. “Come here, I want to show you something.”
The road quickly quieted, as if a door had been closed, as they left the club behind. John followed Mark onto a small side street, where Hungarian drifted out from open ground-floor windows. Under Trabant and Skoda tailpipes, puddles trembled, overlaid with gasoline rainbow spirals like tiny stray galaxies.
“I love your columns, you know,” Mark said. “They feel like the subject of a future legend about some lost, glamorous time. ‘Remember those columns back in the early nineties?’ ”
“Thanks,” John said distractedly, not in the mood at all. “What did you want to show me?”
“A lot of things. I want to show you a lot of things. I’m curious if you—this street, to start.” Mark ran his fingers through the red hair at his temples, pulled it until it stood straight out to the sides, like feathery tufts on a sickly bird. “That’s what got me into this research, since you ask. Actually, I guess it was Emily who asked, but I’m drunk enough not to distinguish. I love everything about this little street. The lives that used to be lived here. The way people felt here. What it felt like to stand here and be in love. Can you imagine standing right here and being in love and seeing the world how it looked before movies existed, before movies made you see everything a certain way?”
Mark walked backward down the middle of the street, his head tilted back to examine the buildings he was passing. He pointed out architectural details to his semi-willing tour group, described in equally zealous tones the planned and unplanned features; neither was superior for him: delicate cornices and bullet holes, carved dates and crumbling stonework, once elegant upper-story stone balustrades now missing one or two urn-shaped pillars, gaping like sparsely toothed old crones whose charms only Mark could detect. “Please, please tell me you know what I mean.”
“Oh yeah, yeah. Buildings.”
“I love that this little street is so perfectly run-down, but you can still see what it looked like when it was a new development, probably the 1890s or so. Look how the street is laid out so it delivers the opera house for maximum surprise and drama.” He stopped just where the street began to reveal Andrássy and the opera. “Alternately, you come this way, after a romantic night at the opera, and just a few feet away from the lights and the carriages, you have an intimate setting for a lovers’ stroll. You’d walk down this street and feel perfectly happy, perfectly alive, and you’d never wonder why. But the city planners did it on purpose. You know, there are very few places in the world where I am at home. Isn’t that pathetic? And there are actually fewer of them every day, too. And they’re shrinking. Does this happen to you? There is going to come a time when there will only be a very small space. And that’s all I’ll have. I’ll have to remain very still and only look in one direction, but then I’ll be okay, actually.” He laughed. “You know what I mean, John?”
And John laughed, as he assumed Mark meant him to.
They turned onto Andrássy, away from John’s apartment, onto the long stretch of tree-lined boulevard leading to Heroes’ Square. Mark’s face glowed briefly green under a neon sign hanging in a ground-floor shop window: 24 ÓRA NON-STOP announced a grocery store and snack bar, and John followed him into the fluorescent dazzle and onto a tall counter stool.
“Egy meleg szendvicset, kérek szépen,” the Canadian said to the fifty-year-old woman who materialized behind the counter. John ordered the same and an Unicum. His shirt stank of other people’s cigarettes and his eyes hurt; he wondered what time it was. The woman turned to a small toaster oven on the shelf and began cooking two pieces of rye bread with melted cheese and slices of pink ham. She poured John his black digestif. They watched her in silence, looked at their own half reflections in the window. John ordered a second.
“Do you ever wonder why artists hung around cafés?” Mark asked in a quiet voice, staring at the woman’s apron as she licked a bit of melted cheese from the back of her thumb. “This is what I did all day today, and I kept thinking of you for some reason, that you in particular would like this. Really. So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafés?” He waited for an answer, and when none came, he said this was serious, that the answer mattered.
“I don’t know. Inspiration from the atmosphere.”
“Ha! No, you’ve been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafés didn’t have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them. First they were just rooms with coffee in them. No more atmosphere than this place.”
“Amerikai?” asked the counterwoman. Her hair was the color of muchturned brass doorknobs, and her breasts hung against their faux angora restraint like overweight sloths.
“Nem, kanadai,” responded Mark. She nodded, satisfied with the conversation, and turned to straighten items on the shelves: liqueurs, packaged cakes from Norway, German breakfast cereals with German cartoon mascots, French contraceptives bearing explicit instructional and marketing photographs.
“All the way back, I can follow them,” Mark said. He rattled off dates and names and events with an expert’s ease, starting slowly, then building in excitement: 1945—Lenoir hopes café life will be just like it was before the war and even organizes a group to assure that the best cafés stay open, with the same hours and menus and tables; 1936—Now, before that war, Fleury sadly decries how much the cafés have changed since before the last war. He is too young to know this as an observed fact, but he writes it in his journal nevertheless. He also writes, with childish delight, about actually seeing Valmorin one day at his café. He’s amazed to see his idol standing there, in the flesh. “He thought Valmorin would never come to the café anymore because of its supposed decline,” said Mark. “After that day, he never wrote a word of complaint until Valmorin died. Then, of course, he declared the cafés well and truly dead, though he still went all the time. That was 1939.”
Nineteen twenty: Valmorin himself, in a letter to Picasso, writes that perhaps cafés aren’t as important to the art world as they were in Cézanne’s day. Eighteen eighty-nine: Cézanne writes in his journal that he feels unwelcome in the café because of his break with someone whose name escaped Mark just then, despite hitting his forehead repeatedl
y in an effort to dislodge it. But Cézanne has to make his appearance at the café nevertheless. He writes that the whole café scene is a professional necessity, but an embarrassment, a farce played out by monkeys. “That was his word, John,” Mark said with admiration. “Monkeys. And back it goes,” he continued. “It’s a perfect chain. Everybody cites some dead guy for why he has to go to the café. Everyone says the cafés worked well at some point just before their own birth. But go back to that date, and someone else is saying the heyday was a few years earlier. And then I actually found it. My discovery. Mine. You will be amazed by this. I memorized it. I read it over and over again, like, for an hour or two, actually. I could hardly believe it when I found it. It was so . . .” Here he could only shake his head. He described a letter to Jan van den Huygens, dated 1607.
Van den Huygens was an innkeeper and artist, a specialist in painting drunks and prostitutes, since, in his inn, they were plentiful and cheap, often forced to pose to pay off bar tabs. He would dress them in fanciful costumes of ancient Rome so that they could pass for Bacchus and Venus, safely sellable canvases at the time. The finished products, however, lacked that classical something. “They just look like sad, broken-down people in bedsheets,” Mark clucked, “with a drunken grin and red cheeks or an exposed tit or two. Van den Huygens didn’t sell more than a few of the things his whole life, actually, but he painted acres of them. They turn up now in some of the less choosy Dutch provincial museums and in U.S. and Canadian college collections hungry for anything that can pass as an Old Master.”
John signaled for a third Unicum and Mark waited patiently.
“Van den Huygens receives a letter in 1607 that should by all rights have been immediately thrown away. Instead, thank God, it survives for four centuries, because van den Huygens dies less than a week later. He dies, and his widow has a canny realization: A sale of her husband’s paintings and papers might bring in some ready money, actually. I think she has a gift for seventeenth-century P.R., because in less than a month she manages to sell all the paintings of a man who never managed to sell more than a few during his life. She sweetened the deal with the late artist’s ‘papers.’ His diaries and his letters—including this one from 1607, which happened to be still warm on a table when he keeled over—get sold, and the buyer (an art dealer who always, always, always backed the wrong horse) catalogs every scrap of paper that the widow van den Huygens sells him. The papers are bound in fine leather, with gold embossing. And that’s that.”
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