Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  XX.

  THE PRICES WALKED SLOWLY DOWN THE BUDA STREET TRIMMED WITH plane trees. “I need oxygen replenishment,” said Scott, and so they set off toward Margaret Island in silence. John spun a cigarette over and under his knuckles from finger to finger, a sleight of hand he had learned in eighth grade with a ballpoint pen. They walked on, past Moscow Square and the market stalls, crossed the trolley rails and the traffic of Mártírok utja. The bus station and subway and tram stops and vegetable markets gave them something to do with their eyes.

  “How’s Mária?”

  “She’s good.”

  “Do you have a light?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  The afternoon smog nibbled his nose hairs, and Scott sometimes lifted his hand to cover his mouth. John patted his pockets for a truant book of matches. “So what’s the story with you guys?”

  “Who guys?”

  “You and Mária, the lovingest dovingest pigeons in all Pigeontown.”

  “Story? I don’t know. Hard to, hard to say.”

  “Is she Jewish?”

  Scott laughed unpleasantly. “I have no idea. Tip-top question though, bro. I’ll get right back to you on that, and you can send home your report to Mom about Scotty’s latest crimes, you rotten little shit.”

  “You really think that?”

  “No, of course not, why would I? Water off a duck’s back, baby.”

  Paralysis crept over John’s thickening tongue. He had left Karen’s and walked across the river to pick up his brother for another of the stilted, tangential, droll, useless weekly dinners he had initiated, all the while spinning and massaging a little statement into shape to present to Scott—a damp and sticky confession of confusion, loneliness, excitement, fear, pride. And yet now he couldn’t find the moist clay pot he had so lovingly crafted. No sentence would start. None of his feelings merited the exertion necessary for a single syllable, and everything wafting off Scott told him to keep his mouth shut. If he felt dramatic when he walked out of Karen’s building, when he squinted and put on his sunglasses, if he felt pleased with himself on her boulevard as the cars coughed in sympathetic unison and the architecture seemed almost as important as Mark madly insisted, if he felt a mildly funny pang of regret at his vanished and ridiculous principles, if, a block later, he wondered what this meant for him and Emily (did it retroactively downgrade her or prove her relative importance, make her more meaningful or meaningless, was he shallow or manly, had he made himself strong or thrown away something of irreplaceable value and where did he get these antique notions), if, near the new Burger King in the Octagon, he was suddenly swallowing down an actual urge to cry, an urge that was finally transmuted into a slightly forced chunk of laughter as he crossed the Chain Bridge, if he stopped twice between the bridge and Scott’s school to leave stupid jokes on Emily’s answering machine, if he opened the door to the school praying that Scott would explain everything even as he knew Scott would do no such thing, well now, stepping from Margaret Bridge onto Margaret Island, following the footpath to a green opening where a group of young boys was playing soccer, he felt only a growing compulsion to get something, anything, definitive from his brother, even rage: “So are you in love with Mária?”

  “That sounds like a song cue from West Side Story.”

  The children tripped and struggled to maintain control of the soccer ball. “Have you met her family?”

  “John, are you kidding? We basically just got together, okay? Now, cut it out.”

  Kick, miss, fall down, grab knee and wince, stand up, run upfield to be in place for potentially heroic goal. Wait there, pick nose. “So how is it? What’s it like?”

  “How is it?” Scott scratched an ear. He watched the game. “It’s like a spring rain-shower. It’s like Rome under the stars. Box seats for opening day. Your name called from across a crowded room.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Oh yes, deadly serious. Psychologically complex. Troubling French film stuff. Knock-down, drag-out brawls. Lots of threats. It will all end in tears and yet somehow we can’t let go.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “That too. Fun-loving. Kooky. Wacky. Kisses in the rain. Tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons. We’ve got the world on a string, dontcha know.”

  “You’re pretty happy, then?”

  “Excruciatingly. Never knew what the word meant until now. Never glimpsed it, never smelled it, never had a clue, but now I light up from the inside, you know, like I carry a little nightlight in my belly that glows right up inside my happy little head.”

  “She must be a hell of a woman.”

  “Salt of the earth. Charms the birds right out of the trees. Can’t help loving dat girl. Moxie and spunk, tinsel and Teflon. That’s my baby.”

  “Sex must be pretty extraordinary.”

  “Oh yes. Kinky. Loving. Communion of souls. Deepest bond. Language without words. Return to Eden.” Scott rubbed his eyes. “Body-mind unity. Vulnerable, immutable, you name it. Pfff . . . secrets of the Orient. Techniques from lost scrolls. What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “Consider it done.”

  The soccer ball escaped the children’s tenuous control and rolled toward the brothers’ bench. John kicked it back into play. After another minute or so, it finally rolled between two balled-up windbreakers at the far end of the green, and the small boy whose foot had inadvertently last touched it sprinted on his little legs in a wide, exuberant circle. He pumped his fist and waved his wee index finger while absorbing the intoxicating but inaudible screams and cheers of the World Cup crowd. “Magyarország! Magyarország!” the child yelled as he completed his circuit of the stadium. His teammates embraced him and hoisted him precariously on their little shoulders for another lap. The brothers added their four hands to the applause.

  “That is precisely how I feel all the time,” John said.

  “Yeah, it’s genetic.”

  They crossed over to Pest and walked down the riverfront to the Blue Jazz. The club had developed a doorman in the last week, and he asked the brothers something in Hungarian. “Nem beszélek magyarul,” the Prices mispronounced their ritual greeting simultaneously.

  “Fine. Americans?” the bouncer asked in English. “Dinner and music?” he grumbled, and took their entry fees.

  As the rooms slowly filled, the club’s new house pianist played. On the handwritten chalk sign propped outside, she was simply NÁDJA. She looked about seventy, a thin and breakable woman in a flowing red gown that, although it fit her well, had done so for many years. As she moved slightly to her music, she resembled an exotic species in an aquarium, a brightly colored swath of tattered material floating and swaying in her own private current. On the cracked and ringed lid of the aging upright piano sat an ashtray, a package of Mockba Reds, and a silver lighter. She played an odd and ceaseless medley that skittered across decades and styles: now a jazz standard recognizable to anyone, “All of Me,” played in a very traditional manner with gentle improvisations in the style of the era; then a Scott Joplin rag, memorized and reproduced verbatim; suddenly a bebop tune, Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” with a chorus or two of proficient bop soloing; “Watermelon Man,” a jazz-funk tune from the 1960s, with the original album’s standard piano groove and Dexter Gordon’s saxophone solo transposed for her right hand; “Angel Eyes,” “Everything Happens to Me,” and “The Night We Called It a Day” in quick succession, a tribute to a forgotten songwriter; a Chopin prelude, only about two minutes long but performed with careless ease; then a Broadway hit and, as it was “Maria” from West Side Story, Scott and John put away their pool cues and moved to a table to watch the elderly hands tap and hammer the elderly keys.

  As the tune ended, the brothers applauded with about the same spirit as they had the soccer game. This was the first acknowledgment the pianist had received since she’d begun an hour and a half earlier. She turned to her fans and dipped her head, a gesture John
found strangely moving; it hit him with inexplicable force and significance; he felt it was the answer to his day, to the questions he had been unable to phrase to his own brother. A faded old woman bows ironically to joke applause, he thought with a calming sensation. Emily and Karen were immediately viewed from a far-distant perspective, as if on a sunlit hillside, and they looked fine there. John very much wanted to meet the pianist.

  The bartender flipped a switch and filled the club’s air with the smoky scratches of an early Louis Armstrong recording. Nádja rose, collected her cigarettes and lighter, and glided toward them. John was unreasonably excited even as he heard Scott mutter, “Oh Jesus.”

  “I suspect you gentlemen are American,” she said in the raspy voice of a golden-age movie star. John stood and lit her cigarette. He shook out the match and offered her a seat, introduced himself and his brother.

  She emitted a slow, fine stream of smoke and conversation waited for her. “An intriguing pair,” she murmured. “One brother Jewish, the other Danish. How did this come to pass, John Price?”

  As a rule, the sound of a European-accented voice merely saying the word Jewish was enough to set John on edge, but now he was charmed to acknowledge the disparity that had for some twenty years previous been an instant conversational bore, family reunion tedium. “I make it a practice never to exchange genetic histories with a woman I’ve just met, at least one whose name I don’t know,” John replied after taking time to light his own cigarette.

  She not only set him at ease, but somehow, with her thin and elderly arms, she was lifting him high up in the air. Her faded elegance and fraying dress, her peculiar employment, her graceful manner and instant mastery of the situation, her glamorous directness: John felt a flutter of fear that she would soon leave the table, and strove to keep her there. Scott watched his brother’s transformation and said very little.

  “Quite wise, John Price. But what about the melancholic Dane? Will he explain the dissimilarity?”

  “I doubt he’ll be able to,” John replied. “Our parents swear lifelong fidelity. Would you like a drink?”

  “A Rob Roy would be a small thrill,” she smiled on him. “You are very kind.”

  Scott, though, rose and seized the excuse to leave her company. Her odd, old-fashioned, upper-class English spiced with the vague accents of Central Europe irritated him. John’s clowning irritated him. Her dress irritated him and her drink order irritated him. John liking her irritated him. Anything that would keep John in Budapest one more minute irritated him. Scott would leave the club as soon as possible; he could do without these weekly fraternal tortures anyhow; maybe tonight would mark the end of that forced labor. He returned with his mineral water, John’s Unicum, and—after the bartender had angrily consulted a little booklet tied on a chain to the back of the bar—a Rob Roy. He slumped into his seat and managed, “That’s a nice ring.”

  The ancient hand encircling the light orange highball was weighted by a large green-and-silver barnacle. “You are very dear, Scott, to mention it. A gift from a time unspeakably long ago. It has been stolen from me, recovered, used as a bribe, and recovered again. What else? Let’s see . . . It was very many years ago at the center of a blackmail situation. And it appears on the hand of a French countess in a terribly mediocre painting from two and a half centuries ago, which you can still see in a very crowded room in the Louvre. This I know sounds a bit of a shaggy dog, but I am told it is true, on an exquisite authority.” She held out her hand and gave the ring an appraising look. “It is in horrid taste, isn’t it?”

  And a strange pause in conversation. She smiled at the two young men, something less of condescension than of invitation, watched them weather her onslaught of improbability. The brothers both laughed—two very different sounds—and she quickly knew from the dissonant tones which of them would provide her more conversational pleasure this evening even before John said, “Why do I suspect you were doing the blackmail?”

  “John Price, you are a cheeky young man and I think I am going to like you enormously. Perhaps I will answer your question after we have dined.”

  “I am very glad you will do us the honor.”

  “A man of the press,” she said over the paprikás and champagne. “Are you a brave foreign correspondent itching to dispatch from the front lines during our next inevitable Soviet invasion?”

  “More of a society columnist, to be honest. A historian of the moment.”

  “Delightful. And Prince Hamlet?”

  “I teach English to the local savages.”

  “And we are savages, are we not?” Nádja twirled a strand of gray hair around a long and wrinkled finger, a gesture half the men at the table found grotesque while the other half found it inexplicably enchanting.

  She said she was half Hungarian, born in Budapest, in the palace on Castle Hill, in fact, though no more details were forthcoming. “I have lived elsewhere, however, for long stretches, as you Americans say. We have a most unfortunate habit of jollying up to rather the wrong side of world wars, haven’t we? And then being invaded by our Russian friends to pay for our sins. I have been forced, from time to time again, to join the sorority of refugees. Yet I come back. And now we are invaded by handsome young men of the West, who come to write in the paper about us and to teach us their guttural, overly complex tongue and sell us better athletic equipment. To our invaders.” She lifted a flute of the champagne she had suggested to John.

  “To your invaders.” One of the invading horde clinked glasses with her.

  Scott decided that Nádja was like a hostess in a gentlemen’s club, that she received a commission on overpriced drinks and food she charmed guests into ordering. Yet as bait, she seemed so microscopically specific a taste, he wondered how she could possibly earn. He watched his brother’s face when she spoke, and vice versa.

  “I, with various members of various families, left my country in 1919, returned in 1923, left again in . . . 1944, returned in 1946, left again—yes again, quite an addictive habit, isn’t it?—in 1956 and returned only last year. And I think that is more than enough roaming the globe for one life.”

  “Did you lose everything each time?” John asked with undisguised awe.

  “Money could be moved or hidden, even in those dark ages, John Price . . . But once”—she quietly laughed and gently skewered a cube of chicken paprikás—“once, I hoped to save—oh, this is a long and silly story. I must begin a little further back. In 1956, I was living in Budapest for ten years. I was married to a gentleman of great breeding and cultivation, but he had allowed himself to become embroiled in the anti-Soviet violence of that year. When the Soviets decided to finish us once and for all, my husband and I opted for a hasty departure. We had left it rather late, incurable optimists that we were.” She sipped her champagne. “We needed to get to the Austrian border with some speed, but how much speed was not completely clear. The potential loss of money did not worry us; I could always play piano. We hadn’t so very much to lose, quand même. And I am not a sentimental woman, John Price, so the loss of old photos or mantelpiece gewgaws did not reduce me to sniveling. No, my husband and I had only one regret. We had collected in our years together a sizable library of books and a large set of record albums, neither of which were readily available in those days. Guests had brought us gifts discreetly, knowing our tastes. We had friends who worked in bookstores, one who managed the symphony and traveled with them, others made for us jazz recordings taken from the American radio. We were very proud of our home: books in Hungarian, English, German, French, recordings of classical and jazz musics.” A pearl string of bubbles swerved and danced as she tapped on the side of her glass. “We could never, and certainly not at this late date, hope to carry our treasures out of the country with us. Hungary was closing its every border, every gap in its skin, with terrible speed. We had to accept this fate, that our treasure would be stolen from us, and there was terrible regret over this. But my beautiful husband was clever to the very end. He had
an idea, you see, because . . . well, I lied about not being sentimental, I’m afraid. I am really an incurable liar, John Price. It is a terrible character flaw and I must correct it. I will soon. You will help me. But in the meantime you must never believe a word I say. So, yes, he saw me weeping—it is ridiculous to say now—over Alice in Wonderland. Not the Bible, not Petfi or Arany or Kis, not even Tolstoy. I could not bear to lose my Alice. He saw me on the floor, holding it like a baby—and this is why I was begun to weep—holding it and a record of Charlie Parker called “Blues for Alice.” First I was laughing—I had never noticed the two of them together before. I joked to myself that the song was about the book, and then I was crying, and my husband, gathering clothes for our escape, found me, acting a very foolish little girl. He did not scold me for wasting time. He understood at once why I was crying, and he told me what we would do, and we did it. We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene, John Price, for it was very beautiful. There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home. Where you grew up, where you and our Scott were boys. Where you fell in love and kissed your first little girlfriends. Now that road is shredded, torn in pieces, because tanks are very heavy, you see, much heavier than regular motors. These tanks are in your road, and there are boys not much older than children, younger by far than you are now, throwing bottles of gasoline at tanks! There are explosions echoing down the streets where you once played—what would you have played? Is it baseball? And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper. Listen to us: I am reciting as fast as he can write, sometimes he is abbreviating and I kiss him and swear I will kill him if he cannot read his little shorthands when we are in our new home. I am reciting and making the piles of books and records as he writes them. I still remember even some of the words I said, titles I will never forget. They still come to me at times for no reason: Bach, Brandenburg Concerti, six discs, 1939, Berlin Philharmonic, von Karajan conducting. Louis Armstrong Hot Sevens, 1927: “Willie the Weeper,” “Wild Man Blues,” “Alligator Crawl,” “Potato Head Blues,” “Melancholy,” “Weary Blues,” “Twelfth Street Rag.” Beethoven’s Complete Music for Cello and Piano, Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals in Prades, France, 1953, three discs. What do you think of that, John Price? One hundred and thirty-one record albums, every song noted, conductors, dates, performers, places. Fourteen reel-to-reel tapes of radio broadcasts: Die Fledermaus, Metropolitan Opera, 1950, Ormandy—a Hungarian, you know—conducting. Adele sung by Lily Pons; Alfred, by Richard Tucker. Madame Butterfly, 1952 at La Scala, Tullio Serafin conducting, Renata Tebaldi singing Cho-Cho-San. Art Tatum at the Esquire Concert in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, USA, in 1944 with Oscar Pettiford and Sid Catlett: “Sweet Lorraine,” “Cocktails for Two,” “Indiana,” “Poor Butterfly.” Dvoák’s “Cello Concerto in B Minor,” Pierre Fournier with Vienna Philharmonic, Rafael Kubelik conducts, 1952. My God, they still come to me so easily! And then three hundred and four books. Every author, the title of every story or poem in anthologies. Goethe’s Faustus in two volumes and Young Werther, in German. Chekhov, stories in Hungarian. Every title, publisher, edition, description of covers, each—”