The sharp clarity of this vision was beautiful, and Imre marveled at what had happened of its own accord: A purpose could grow over decades without your ever knowing, until the end, when a garden was laid out for you, a garden you helped plan and build without ever knowing it, and it waits for you.
That night Imre slept soundly and dreamed—not unpleasantly—of his father.
XIV.
“MR. HORVÁTH WILL JOIN US PRESENTLY. HE IS APOLOGIZE FOR HIS DELAY, but ask we begin the coffee of us.” Krisztina Toldy sat across from Charles Gábor at the long, blond-wood table of the conference room in the Vienna offices of Horváth Verlag and poured dark black into bone-white Hungarian china. The conference room, with a picture window that looked down on a large hall of silently spinning presses and blue barrels on orange forklifts, was decorated with a framed verse, paintings and photographs of Hungarian history, and engravings of the evolution of printing. Charles skimmed over the German and Hungarian captions with flickering attention: tidings of a new dawning age/And with the force of a ball from a pistol; Mátyás Accepting the Peace of Breslau; Gutenberg Printing a; Kossuth Leading a; a Printing Press Circa; Imre Nagy Standing Tall Despite; a Printing Press Circa; Bánk bán and the; a Printing Press Circa; maps of Budapest and Hungary 1490, 1606, 1848, 1914, 1920, 1945, 1990.
Krisztina Toldy’s spectacles hung on a thin golden chain around her neck, and her black-and-white hair was pulled back so tightly into a braid that individual hairs at the top of her forehead could be seen and counted as they emerged from their follicles. Charles counted for a while as they drank. She sipped with her eyes down, silently, and Charles pitied her slightly. There she sat, in charge of softening the money man, little knowing that everything she did amused or irritated him and little knowing that it absolutely didn’t matter anyhow what she did because he had sat through enough awkward coffees in his months of venture-capital work, had heard enough slick or humorous or stuttering assistants like Krisztina Toldy work their way through these opening acts, and nothing ever came of it. So he wished she’d get on with her spiel so that the man himself would appear on cue in a flurry of papers and hangers-on and they could talk just a minute or two longer, just long enough for Charles to find the weakness, figure out just why this whole thing was a crock of shit (which it must be if it was run by Hungarians, even Hungarians in Austria), and he could go spend the weekend in Innsbruck on the company’s dime before heading back to BP on Monday to report to the Presiding Vice that this particular band of lazy Magyars wanted a billion dollars or the power of invisibility or a nuclear submarine in exchange for a 33 percent share in some paintings of Hungarian history and a big hall of undoubtedly outdated printing presses.
“He is great man, Mr. Gábor. You cannot imagine what he has faced against and achieved nevertheless. It is quite very remarkable.” She spoke crap English (despite Charles’s offer of either Hungarian or German) and with great earnestness, as if this were the first time she had found the words to say precisely what she had personally witnessed and come to believe. Charles scoffed without moving a muscle or making a sound, a skill of which he was very proud. “He save my father’s life, Mr. Gábor,” she continued confidently, unaware. “My father work for Mr. Horváth in Hungary. A day come when . . .”
Oh great. A reminiscence. Charles felt he had heard this story before, but with different characters. Somebody had saved somebody else from some horrible disaster, but at terrible personal sacrifice and years of some sort of suffering, and yet no regret because whatever. Was this a movie he’d seen? So familiar . . . Ah yes, an old parental standby: One of Charles’s distant cousins had done something not unlike this and, my God, can you even imagine the dilemma, Károly, the sacrifice, the courage, the etcetera and the etcetera.
Charles played a private game to pass the time: He made all the facial expressions appropriate to Toldy’s story but tried to do so without hearing a single word of what she was saying. To assure himself that he wasn’t cheating, relying on her words to cue his sympathetic faces, he silently ran through German-language pickup lines he might need that coming weekend in Innsbruck. Occasionally, inevitably, her strident words broke through his defensive concentration. Then and only then he would allow himself the crutch of English in his mute seduction rehearsals, but only as long as was necessary to battle her back to inaudibility:
“There was only two doors and the hatch behind the main press. Very quick, Mr. Horváth push my father down into . . .” I’m not trying to be pushy, but you remind me very much of a painting I saw today at the museum: You have that quick, raw energy and life, die wichtigste Sache . . .
“And there was Mr. Horváth who merely say, ‘Gentlemen, what bring you to . . . ’ ” What brings you to this place? I’ve never seen you here before. When you see someone like you, you don’t forget it. You just don’t. Eine lange Zeit her ich bin gereist . . .
“Three and a half years! For three and a half years Mr. Horváth is forced to . . .” Thirty-five schillings seems a fair price for beer this good. Do you know we can’t get good Austrian beer in the States? Amerikanisches Bier ist nicht . . .
“They could have kill him.” It kills me not to be able to explain the effect you have. On me, of course, but on everyone. Look around you. Look at those guys at the bar; they feel it too. Ich bin nur tapfer genug Dich anzusprechen, und sie waren es nicht.
“My family is Jewish. Who was worst, my father was often ask, the Nazis or the Communists? He always say: The Nazis put me in camp and say they will destroy me; then the Communists put me in camp and say they will teach me be a better man. At least, my father say”—a broad and wisely ironic smile from her at this point, and the hair seemed even more tightly pulled back until Charles expected to see actual popping depilations from the puckered flesh—“at least the Nazis were honest with me.”
Charles gave Krisztina a look that he hoped would express: his sympathy; his quiet wonder; his eagerness to speak, work with, and give vast quantities of money to such a man as saintly Imre Horváth; his hope that her father lived and prospered still and was not plagued all his life by terrible guilt for the price his employer paid on his behalf; and finally his polite and understandable desire that she shut up now and bring in the main guy so Charles could find out where and why this particular clown show would hemorrhage any money his firm transfused into it. Then Charles could stage his own daring escape in the nick of time, narrowly making the express train to Innsbruck.
Krisztina Toldy poured more coffee for the American boy and began to sense she was not accomplishing either of her two assignments. How could she relax him and make him feel the importance of the press? She realized her two tasks were contradictory: To educate this boy would require verbal force, which would hardly soothe him. Besides, there was something incorrect about this boy. His smile and word of thanks were wrong. He was made of dirty mirrors. She saw he did not care what she said; he was too spoiled to understand what Horváth had done with his life. She tried her best to entertain the bearer of U.S. dollars, but in midsentence she would find his posture, his expression, his lips and hair so maddening that she would begin teaching and then end by haranguing.
Charles found this exhibition of her predicament increasingly entertaining, savored the sight of her at war with herself, and after his initial impatience, he began to hope Horváth would be infinitely late so that Charles might instead watch this tightly coiled aide-de-camp finally bust a spring. He memorized his favorite example of her confused outpourings and he recited it to Mark and John the next Monday evening at the Gerbeaud: “I am believing you will find Mr. Horváth an extraordinary businessman in your Western style, except that in the fundamentally, he is a man of moralness, and perhaps that is something you have seldomly seen in the West, or perhaps even never, since you are all unfamiliar with how living under the Communists did make some men strong. But perhaps this is impossible for your understanding what I mean.”
Charles nodded and smiled sympathetically. “Mr
. Horváth certainly was lucky to have been exposed to the Communists’ inadvertent influence,” he said. She rose and fetched a fresh pot. The coffee was offered and rejected, then accepted on second thought just as she was sitting down again.
“Do you have questions I might to answer?”
“Yes, thank you. This is a family-owned business, I think you wrote in one of your letters to my firm?”
“Since eighteen-eight, yes. Yes, the Horváth family is the business for one hundred and eighty-two years.” She was energized again and leaned forward. “He is the sixth to guide this company, this Mr. Horváth. Our Hungarian history has until so far made it impossible for him to bring the most profits to the house—as I know your Western standards must have—but he has kept the press alive and free since forty-three years, like his father did in the wartimes. And we do make profits. We do not lose money here, sir. His father had your name.” Pause. “Károly.” Her enthusiasm faded as she considered this coincidence, but she continued on. “His father also guide us through danger. We are given leaders that times require for us, Mr. Gábor, and we are blessed to have Mr. Horváth.”
“If it’s a family business, then who is Mr. Horváth’s heir?” Charles interrupted before she could screech another love song. “Which of his children is he preparing to take over the leadership of the company after his death?”
She looked a little shocked to hear reference to her employer’s demise, but Charles made no apology in word or gesture. “No, no, Mr. Gábor. Mr. Horváth will not have a death. He is immortal!” She chirped at her humor in the face of this horrible boy.
Charles replaced his empty cup on its saucer and leaned forward to reward Ms. Toldy a smile commensurate to her witticism. He had enjoyed her struggles to this point, but now he had heard the first piece of information worthy of his trip. Mr. Horváth was old (running the company for forty-three years) and was evidently heirless, as his trusted aide had dutifully not answered Charles’s question.
“Heirless,” he confirmed to his two friends that Monday evening at the Gerbeaud.
“Can’t he use an inhaler?” Mark asked. “I did when I was a kid.”
“There’s a spray you can rub on your scalp now, I think. It makes it grow back,” John offered.
The door to the conference room opened and Charles forced a smile. Imre Horváth, his glasses propped up on his forehead, entered signing papers held by a young man. Two other young men followed them into the room. Papers over flowed, pens scraped, last-minute urgent advice was taken, split-second decisions made, and brilliant, multilayered orders issued in two languages. Charles stood slowly, drawn upward by script and ritual, simultaneously bored and alert, expecting little. “Ohhh, Mr. Gábor” came the English words tinseled in middle-European accents. “You must accept my apologies for being tardy.”
“Horváth úr,” Charles responded entirely in Hungarian. “Please do not apologize. Ms. Toldy has been excellent and informative company.”
The emperor stopped short with exaggerated surprise. His court, too, froze, and the emperor made the recognized face of astonishment, followed by the acknowledged hand gestures of delight. “It is too wonderful,” he exclaimed in English. “You speak Hungarian like a genius. These are exciting times when the best young Americans speak Hungarian.” The three attendants grinned appreciatively, and Ms. Toldy, standing at the head of the table, smiled and relaxed in her hero’s presence.
The older man who wanted the younger man’s money shook the hand of the younger man who wanted the older man’s position, and they continued their courtly dance. They descended into chairs on opposite sides of the long table. A glass of milk, apparently, materialized in front of Horváth, and Charles watched coffee reappear in his own cup. Ms. Toldy sat at Imre’s right, and the three attendants slid themselves, in decreasing height, into three chairs on their master’s left; Charles faced the five of them alone.
Imre spoke again in English, a generous gesture in order not to strain the young man’s undoubtedly shallow pool of Magyar: “My good Mr. Gábor, we are very honored to welcome you to our press today. We are quite at your disposal. Your trip, I hope, was—” The script was followed precisely (alternating in generous English and generous Hungarian, until the man who reverted first to his native tongue would have admitted the same defeat as the man who lets his business rival pay for the lunch): the names of the three other men, the ritual exchange and tribal inspection of business cards, a joke about the ritual of exchanging and tribally inspecting business cards, Charles’s request that the others call him Károly, Horváth noting the coincidence, Charles’s travel experience, Vienna, the neighborhood, the building, the sound of the presses clattering behind soundproof glass, questions as to how a young man could speak such flawless (an exaggeration, intentionally crafted to be transparent) Hungarian, brief explanations of family history, a reference to the weather and the inevitability of references to weather, a joke implying great age and wisdom, the teller having seen all the weather there is to see and expecting no more surprises in this life, the prints upon the wall. “This one”—a slow caress over the glass that protected the framed verse—“was written about this very firm, about our Horváth Press, when it was still young and still, of course, in Budapest. A great poet wanted to tell the world about how we . . .” The man’s story illuminated nothing; Charles nodded accordingly. “. . . and yet, no doubt ancient history, an old man’s nonsense, you come all this way to talk business and here I am—” a mock-humble claim to be uninteresting, a deceptive claim semi-subliminally boasting its own inaccuracy, in fact designed to illuminate an actual, robust appetite for commerce. Conclusion of introductory remarks, shiny delicious early train to Innsbruck not yet an impossibility.
“You are very kind, Horváth úr,” continued Charles in Hungarian. “I am here, of course, on behalf of my firm”—the older man nodded at Charles’s frank admission that he merely represented other, more powerful, men with money—“to hear more about your company and about the specifics of how we may be able to help you.” Charles realized how his words had been taken and so he added, “In that my report decides the firm’s next steps.”
Charles’s questions leaped one at a time from the notebook in which he had lodged them the previous night. As the questions sprang up over the table, Imre would compliment them, charm them, allow to dance before them visions of history and tyranny, bravery and cunning, place them in a receptive mood before assigning one or another of his assistants the task of filling in details, until the question drifted, exhausted, back down into the notebook, to be replaced by the renewed vigor and insight of its successor. The questions in Hungarian probed cash reserves, capital assets, distribution networks, employee counts, backlists and catalogs, balance sheets and production schedules, income statements and lines of credit, supply chains and unit costs; the answers in English spoke of stories and histories, personalities and ancestors, dramatic events dictating difficult decisions, and dictated decisions yielding surprising results. Each time, Imre in English flattered Charles’s Hungarian questions, and Charles in Hungarian flattered Imre’s English anecdotes, until an assistant, following his boss by using chunky, metallic English, provided the details that Charles had originally requested. “Your question is insightful, young Károly. Our financial records are entirely at your disposal. The specifics of your question touch on areas we have begun to examine quite closely as we preparing for this great move back to our homeland.” And gradually Charles was allowed to understand what precisely Horváth wanted from Charles’s firm.
For the last thirty-some years, there had been two Horváth Presses—the larger one in Budapest, nationalized without compensation by the Communists in 1949, and the smaller one in Vienna, reopened by Horváth after his escape from Hungary in 1956. As a victim of the 1949 nationalization, Horváth was now entitled to a reimbursement by the new, democratic Hungarian government: a symbolic restitution for his 1949 losses, a symbolic amount paid in vouchers that could only be
used to buy back nationalized property (his own or someone else’s) or to invest on the new, wobbly Budapest stock exchange. Horváth was looking for enough outside investment to pool with his feeble vouchers, resulting in a large enough bid to buy back everything that had been stolen from his family in 1949, to refurbish the reclaimed property to 1990 standards, to combine the healthy, profitable enterprise in Vienna with the rebuilt enterprise in Budapest, and to make the Horváth Kiadó once again the vocal memory of the Hungarian people. “Ohhh, Mr. Gábor, this State Privatization Agency, it is charmingly named, no? Perhaps my vouchers will come with an apology? Or a greeting card signed by my jailers? Perhaps I will find they give me my vouchers but have already sold my press to some sad, abused greengrocer? So we must act with speed, you and I. But Balázs”—he nodded to the tallest assistant (though still shorter than the imposing Horváth)—“is wise in matters mathematical. Balázs, what do you say to Károly’s clever question?” And the young Hungarian who lived and worked for his hero in Vienna provided the American in English with the accounting data he requested. And the same scorn, the same zealous faith Charles had felt emanating from Krisztina Toldy floated around Balázs’s answer as well—no harsh words, nothing in fact but real and projected numbers were discussed, but Charles’s rebellion, his unwillingness to bow low to the seated god, seemed to offend everyone in the room but the flesh icon himself.
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