Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  Until the evening of the twenty-third of that month. Because then, everyone in Budapest—even those as devoutly ignorant as Imre—knew something had happened. Imre was sweeping the plant’s floor, absorbing if not enjoying the dusk-quiet scratch of his work, when a young man, out of breath, banged on the wall under the open garage door of the loading area. “Who is in charge of this place?” the woman with him asked, also breathless, excited.

  “I am,” said the man with the broom, since at that moment he was floor foreman, a rotating title that signified little, as only cleaning was in progress.

  “Then can you print this?” asked the young man. Now Imre saw the pistol stuffed in the waist of the boy’s trousers. Now Imre saw the glow of the beautiful girl’s face. Now Imre read the single sheet the boy handed him: a disruptive meeting of writers and poets, then a student demonstration fired on by the ÁVO, the army called in to crush the students but arming them instead, demands, violence. Two-sided violence at last.

  “Yes, we can print this.”

  For thirteen days Imre slept little, read much, and scarcely left the press floor. Those who had run the press for seven years were suddenly absent, but new faces came and left the plant constantly. News arrived at all hours, typed or handwritten or merely recited, out of breath. Imre began issuing orders: a secretary to type this piece, a messenger to get paper rolls delivered, a driver to distribute single-sheet bulletins all over the city, an art student to draw what I tell you: a dueling pistol, yes, that’s right, but a longer barrel, yes, good, now a burst of smoke and a ball, but with the letters . . .

  Out into the crackling city they sent sheets that were not even proofread. Spelling errors and smudged ink proved the paper’s pressing accuracy and revolutionary authenticity. Copy was merely printed, topped with date and time, and handed to impatient delivery drivers as quickly as possible. (The job of paperboy was suddenly dashing and dangerous, the preserve of swaggering young men.) The headlines of Facts made little sense to Imre at first, as if he had forgotten how to distinguish plausible from implausible: Army Backs Students Against ÁVO; Russians, Go Home!; ÁVO Shoots 100 Unarmed; Imre Nagy Walks with Us; Freedom Fighters Empty Prison; Nagy Sends Russians out of Budapest; Time for Elections and End of Warsaw Pact; Party HQ Falls to Us; Nagy Pulls Us out of Pact; WE ARE INDEPENDENT! WE ARE NEUTRAL!; Full Soviet Withdrawal Being Arranged; Schools to Reopen—Soviet Troops Back; Soviet Troops Withdrawing; Soviet Troops Promise to Withdraw; Soviet Troops Withdrawing; Soviet Troops Missing; Soviet Troops Circle City; Soviets Attack—Resist! USA Will Back Us!

  Imre rode out of Budapest the night of November 7, four days before the establishment of martial law. He said good-bye to no one, invited no one—including his children or their married mothers—to join him except those who were standing closest to him the moment he decided to leave. He drove an orange pickup truck owned by the press. Ten days earlier, the art student had painted the old Horváth colophon on the truck’s doors and the press’s motto on its back hatch. Now, with the streets torn in tank-tread strips and explosions and gunfire constantly audible, Imre deemed it wise to paint over the speeding MK bullets, so only the words The Memory of the People stood out black on the otherwise blank vehicle. Imre chauffeured three former press workers who had returned to help produce Facts, together with their wives and children, a cat and a dog, and whatever possessions could fit in the space remaining. They soon merged into the caravan of similarly overstuffed vehicles that crept nose to tail from the west of the city to the Austrian border, flanked on both sides by slightly slower snaking lines of overburdened or underburdened pedestrians.

  When they crossed into Austria, Imre had not slept in three days. Safely across, stopped at a holding point, he slept drooling behind the wheel. He dreamed he was carrying a blank white pennon over his head. His arms grew tired and he was about to lower them, but his tiny daughter appeared, looking just as she had during his dismal visit that first warm day in March but now speaking with eerie, urgent maturity: “No, Papa. If you put that pennon down, there will be terrible suffering. All of those people will die. Your failure.” She pointed behind Imre, as if great multitudes of supporters awaited his next move, depended on his steadfast arms and the inspirational sight of his snapping pennon. He turned to see just who she meant, but there was no one behind him. He turned back and she was laughing at him until tears rolled down her little cheeks. Nevertheless, unwilling to disappoint her if no one else, he stood with the pennon over his head, and his arms burned, and a wind picked up and blew dust in his eyes and he wanted to lower his arms just for a moment to rub his eyes, and the wind blew harder, and he turned his head from side to side, but the wind blew all the harder from all directions, as if he were the target, the blustery endpoint of all the world’s winds, which smelled of potatoes . . .

  He awoke because an impatient, amused Austrian immigration worker was blowing in his face.

  XIII.

  IMRE AWOKE IN AUSTRIA. HE BEGAN TO SEE A PURPOSE, A PROGRESSION from point A to point B, a strict logic underlying the events of his life. Dramatic phrases came to him in Vienna, twirled and whistled for him, in the refugee center and later, alone on a wooden bench in a cold, damp park at twilight. He could not argue with them. They sounded like truth: I was born for this. My family died for this. I lost the press in 1949 for a reason. They sent me to that camp for a reason. I was floor foreman on the twenty-third for a reason.

  Imre began to feel—very strongly, very often—that he had not only a purpose but an inherited purpose. He stood in a long line, some ahead of him, many behind him. He was expected to hold his place in that line and teach the next generation how to hold theirs. “A permanent institution is composed of impermanent humans, and each of them must contribute their very souls, their impermanent and unimportant lives, if the institution is to preserve its immortality. This is true of a nation as much as a business,” Imre wrote in his application to a foundation underwritten by a Hungarian film producer in Hollywood. The wealthy immigrant loaned Imre enough money to start Horváth Verlag in Vienna, a sum the applicant repaid in only three years.

  Imre rebuilt. He staffed with refugee Hungarians whenever possible. He began by publishing a series of short pamphlets in eleven languages on the history of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and he turned a profit on the sale of several thousand of them to the United Nations. Intending to show the world what was at stake back in Budapest, he hired linguists to translate classics of Hungarian literature, science, mathematics, music, drama, poetry, and history into English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, and Hebrew, and he shipped this Babel of Hungarian all over Europe and North America. Horváth Verlag also printed language textbooks and local histories for Hungarians trying to adapt to their new homes in Vienna, London, Toronto, Cleveland, Lyon. Imre commissioned new translating dictionaries of the Hungarian language, which enjoyed a brief vogue after 1956 as the West generously and momentarily opened its heart to the freedom-loving refugees, the collective Time magazine Man of the Year.

  As the 1950s became the 1960s, Hungary’s Communist government softened slightly and Imre found opportunities to profit from exile. He hired underemployed émigré Hungarian scientists to translate new Western scientific and medical textbooks, which he then brought back to Budapest himself and sold to the Hungarian government. With each sale, the government ordered its state-owned Horváth Kiadó in Budapest to strip the books and reprint their covers without the provocative MK symbol of Horváth Verlag Vienna.

  Imre traveled on his Austrian passport and discreetly met acquaintances from times past. He also brought gifts to two adolescents, who could not quite follow their mothers’ explanations as to who he was. On his first visit he came with inappropriately childish gifts, which baffled and irritated their recipients, then returned with joyfully accepted Beatles records. After only these two occasions, though, in a coincidence he tried hard not to dwell on, the two mothers—strangers to each other—within a day of each other both
asked him not to come again. Both said his presence was too confusing for the children and their younger siblings. And for the women’s gentle, generous husbands.

  He returned from these trips to Budapest with manuscripts his old acquaintances had discreetly slipped him, and he would print a few copies despite the expense, and he would store them in the verlag’s archive or try to interest the Austrian government or universities in subsidizing the loss. He established the Horváth Verlag Shelves at one of the university libraries, and German translations of the smuggled texts nestled there, almost undisturbed in perpetual readiness (alongside other, more popular Horváth publications). Occasionally, these secret journals, essays, parables, or histories were cited in works of Soviet-studies research, doctoral dissertations, or scholarly articles. But not often.

  After only a few trips, Imre began sending subordinates to Hungary carrying his compliments. His staff would discreetly meet his old acquaintances and deliver new textbooks to the government in his place. Going back seemed like unnecessary effort, so much discomfort, when, after all, there was plenty of staff to send. Vienna was pleasant enough; it was morbid to return persistently, stubbornly to tragic Budapest.

  His sense of mission, so acute in 1957, would falter from time to time. And as it did—as if it had been a temporary vaccine now expiring—he suffered from panic attacks, would fear going into work, without even faintly being able to understand why. He would stand in front of his bathroom mirror or the telephone in his hall, would mumble to himself, would say aloud the names of everyone he knew in Vienna, search for someone he could talk to, but he could never think of the right person. And so instead he would scramble to fill the sudden gaping, gasping spaces of his heart. He could not understand why he was suddenly driven to do something, anything, why he would feverishly offer himself to charitable organizations or sit in the pews of a Catholic church every afternoon for weeks or go to the dog track or play chess for hours on end in the cold of a public square or frequent brothels with the burning appetite of a sixteen-year-old boy but the budget and imagination of a fortytwo-year-old man of the world.

  For a short time at the end of the 1950s (and then again in 1968, when the Czechoslovaks staged a short but critically acclaimed revival of Hungary’s drama from a dozen years earlier), Imre became interested in émigré political clubs. He joined organizations with names like the Viennese Society for the Support of a Free Hungary and the World Free Hungary Group. He would sit quietly at meetings as reports were read, detailing the failures of Hungary’s planned economy, listing the latest rights violations with improbable precision (“102 arrests, 46 beatings”), and debates were held on the proper role of the Church and the nobility in any future democratic Hungary.

  Imre was at times simply unable to go to the press. He might head to the office on foot, as usual, but instead of arriving in ten minutes, he would still be wandering through the city or sitting at a café several hours later. When, by sheer force of will, he did manage to get to the office, he would work with great and speechless intensity until late at night to atone for his lapse. The next morning, however, he might repeat the whole process, sitting at an outdoor table at eleven-thirty, drinking his fourth espresso, puffing his cheeks at the crossword puzzle, bouncing his leg at hummingbird frequency.

  From peaks of religious zeal, in which he lectured his employees on the importance of their work to the people of Hungary and the culture of the world, he would fall into depressions, during which he might come to the office but never leave his desk, and his Hungarian assistants would carry on business without consulting him until, after days or even weeks, he would snap out of it and begin asking frenetic, scattershot, detailed questions of them. At the end of this spell, the faith in his calling would return as if from a holiday: refreshed, warm, even-tempered.

  When these unscratchable itches had passed, he would sincerely and quickly redouble his commitment to the press. He would tell himself he had momentarily gone mad and forgotten why he existed. Do not forget again and you will never feel so lost again, he would remind himself, confident in his memory’s ability to be permanently fixed. He would even write this sentence down and place it in his filing cabinet, the better to assure his future stability and dedication to the press. He knew he would need to teach his successors to plan for their own attacks of panic and doubt. So many things they would need to learn to preserve the press’s immortality.

  In 1969, he developed a stomach condition that demanded a torrential, nearly constant inflooding of milk, and even long after the condition had healed, he drank almost nothing else.

  By the middle of the 1970s, he no longer slept well. He woke several times a night and each time had to wait longer before sleep would return. Having learned that changing positions did not bring relief, he forced himself to resist flipping from side to side in vain hope as the humming digital clock flipped from 2:30 to 2:31, 3:30 to 3:31, 4:30. It was beneath a man of his history and purpose to moan and spin and gnash his teeth simply because sleep no longer came willingly or for long. If the world’s most ridiculous tyrants could not break him, then a little lack of sleep would not reduce him to tears. He lay in bed, still but awake, for hours. Soon, mornings turned on him, grew crueler and crueler. A little before five, Horváth would make the first of several trips to the toilet. He would walk, at that hour, with very little of the statuesque majesty that he had acquired in his years of exile. He would wear his pajama bottoms tied under the loose and yellowing skin of his belly, and the strap of yesterday’s sleeveless undershirt would fight for shoulder space with the thickets of coarse gray hair the barber arrested weekly as it attempted to creep to the level of the shirt collar. Now, though only in his sixties, he stumbled often and fell occasionally, though never with serious effect.

  One morning in 1986, he came out of his apartment in his bathrobe and drank a glass of milk while enjoying the spring sun struggling through the dirty skylight over the building’s courtyard. He stood at the railing of the rectangular walkway and wished his neighbors good morning as they emerged for work. A young man, a stranger, appeared, a little out of breath, from the top of the stairs to his left. He looked carefully at Imre’s face, and Imre smiled. “Herr . . . Rossmann?” he said after a slight hesitation. Blushing, he explained that he was supposed to meet someone here, someone he had never seen, he only had his description, and he was sorry to bother Imre, but if he was not Herr Karl Rossmann, could he show him which was Herr Karl Rossmann’s apartment? Imre pointed to the door on the opposite corner of the courtyard, then entered his own apartment and, after the briefest pause, actually wept a bit, for he had been mistaken for Karl Rossmann, a very, very old man, a tremendously old man.

  He grew vain. He began to require as much as ninety minutes to prepare himself in the morning, with exercises designed to tone aging muscle and complicated underclothes that shaped. He groomed and clipped and pared and filed and tweezed and powdered and tweezed again. He wore outfits that had to be composed with care, adjusted, then pressed just so with an intricate machine bought from a French company and shipped at great cost from Grasse.

  In the late 1980s, as he slid deeper into his sixties, he did not think about retiring or selling the press; nor, on the other hand, did he vow to continue it at any cost or refuse to sell it under any circumstances. Months could pass without a thought for anything but commercial nuts and bolts: What was selling, can this paper be bought cheaper, why isn’t this color registering properly, is Mike Steele still popular, should we increase the production of this or that or cancel this or expand that?

  And then came 1989. From the first bulletins, Imre knew exactly what he was seeing, knew what would happen before it happened. Again and again, always the same, history would repeat this gruesome dance of hope and despair: protest marches, a faint and almost funny optimism, a government confused—menacing one day, pleading the next, sputtering promises of reform (practically mispronouncing the unfamiliar word)—then the ominous crackle of the fir
st gunshots, the rumbling, thundering approach of the inevitable, the familiar stench that would again rise from the shredded streets any day, any day now, and then . . . and then . . . nothing? This time an explosion that never came. He squinted through first one eye, then the other; he pulled his hands away from his ears, and there was no explosion. No retribution. No innocents slaughtered. No invasion from the east under cover of flimsy, insulting justifications. No tanks in the streets. No butterfly-fragile attention of the world alighting ever so briefly on the wound of Central Europe. Instead, impossible but true: an almost messianic impossibility come true, an unimaginable realignment of the very stars in the sky—the Wall down, the Iron Curtain down, the Communists down, and elections and freedom and the country free, and can such things be? Has an old man gone as mad as Lear?

  And again, reading the latest papers in his café, watching the American cable news on the giant screen in his office, talking to his managers, he received it more strongly than ever, the strongest it had been in thirty-two years: Hurrying home from an irresponsibly long holiday came Imre’s burning sense of purpose. That evening he did not pick up his habitual, latest Mike Steele novel from his bedside table. Instead, he laughed out loud. He laughed as he lay down. He put down the glass of milk and he laughed out loud at the latest unbelievable headlines from home.

  He laughed because he understood. He had lived in Vienna all these years for a reason. He had maintained the press, despite his doubts, for a reason. He had been careful with his health, his appearance, and his money for a reason. He had not found a family, had not been tied down for a reason. He had found the strength not to quit for a reason—1956–1989: thirty-three years, a Christian number, and he laughed again. And now he was called home. He was called to make the press strong again, back where it belonged, and to let it serve as the memory and conscience of a people, and to make the press live into the next generation and the one after that and the one after that, and on and on, if he could be wise enough, if he could rebuild one more time, if he could find the right people to prepare and teach, people of culture and vision and strength and uncorrupted youth, if he could teach them well enough so that the importance of the press would sing to them as well, if he could write down for them those few diamond rules and principles that would assure the press’s permanence. These new faces would provide Hungary with its memory and its conscience, and they would care enough to do important work for an entire nation and would learn, as he had learned, how to use their impermanence to build permanence.