Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  “Really? It wasn’t like a statement or something? You just never thought about serving?” She sat quietly. John’s presence confused her just now, his untetheredness, his belief in nothing in particular. He was so unfocused, she felt fuzzy simply being near him. Things she was certain of a few minutes before now seemed questionable. “I’ve never asked my brother Robert if he’s, you know, well, happy in the Corps. Do you think that I should have? Is that strange? Cripes, what time is it? I gotta go back in.”

  John had come to the embassy with an invitation meant to reveal something of himself to her, to open a private space in which they could be alone together. “There’s someone I really want you to meet,” he finally managed to say as they stood in the lobby under the eyes of two marine guards and several cameras, visible and invisible. “She’s amazing. You’ll love her.”

  She agreed to meet him at the Blue Jazz, better than a night catching up on contact reports while wondering if she looked sufficiently happy to pass mysterious muster, better than wasting valuable time with the pointless Julies. She fingered the plastic I.D. card clipped to her lapel, examined John: She wondered if he was happy in a way she was not, wondered if there were some dangerous telltale betrayal of her father or of her principles that showed on her face but not in a mirror. And she retreated through the self-locking double glass doors to do her shy ambassador’s bidding.

  He watched her disappear. Now fearing he had answered her enlistment question incorrectly (and needing one more column for this week anyhow), John moved across the lobby to the marine guard booth. He salvaged Todd Marcus’s name from the touch football game on Margaret Island a thousand years earlier. The marine pushed a button that permitted his voice to squawk distortedly through the Plexiglas wall of the guard station.

  III.

  SCOTT HAD MADE THIS TRIP BEFORE, WITH NERVOUS GIRLS IN OTHER worlds. He had traveled back in time with them, had entered a childhood home with a college or post-college girlfriend of some maturity or style and then watched in happiness as she split in two: into a girl younger and younger the further they penetrated the house, and into a woman made somehow strange by the experience. He watched in scientific wonder as they grew shy or uneasy or punchy or aroused or irritable. Best of all, when closely watched, these symptoms grew more acute, so that by merely walking very slowly down a hall, turning his head very slowly from a photograph of sweetheart in tears on Daddy’s lap, age three, to sweetheart standing right there, looking peculiar, almost nauseous, age twenty-three, he could induce even more peculiar nausea without himself ever feeling a thing but scientific splendor and a certain frothy omniscience.

  Sweetheart herself—so stylish, sultry, self-contained just this morning—would weaken, diminish ever so slightly, under the glare of swimming trophies, stuffed animals permanently alert in plush formation, dollhouses, ribbons for horseback riding, collages of photos of good times with grade-school pals, pasted with significant one-word clippings from teen magazines: BOYSHEART-SECRET. He would stand behind sweetheart and kiss her neck, catching her eye straight in front of him in the same pink-framed mirror in which she had first learned to braid her nine-year-old hair, in which Mom had floated over her shoulder and stroked her head and reassured the crying thirteen-year-old that she was beautiful, so very beautiful no matter what those other silly children (who were just jealous) said.

  To see the bedspread she chose when she was twelve, which had served her for all the years before him. Did she exist before they met? How truly strange that she did, and that she looked like that, that she wore that skirt and played with these toys and entertained those friends and imagined this or that future for herself and butterflied her way to third place in the girls under-fourteen 4 x 100 relays, when really, all those years, she was sitting warm in her cocoon becoming a butterfly for him.

  With each room they grew more and more uncomfortable, which he found more and more arousing. Sweetheart would slow down and linger to avoid entering the most embarrassing rooms, or speed up and try to pull him away when she saw something in his eye, some laughter or new understanding as he fingered and inspected the little-girl lives trapped in the hardened amber of her bedroom.

  After these little history museums, they would approach the central chamber, her parents’ room, where there could be no question that something would happen on someone else’s conjugal bed, the very soil whence she had blossomed.

  Today he received his threshold kiss just outside the door, and then the key turned and the door squeaked open and the hallway awaited him and he already knew what he would find. But he did not find it, and its absence made him light-headed.

  There were photos in the hall, but none of her. Here an older brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army. There a black-and-white of (late) Dad, bowing his head as a ribbon was hung around his white neck. And this must be Grandfather here—ah, happy days with army buddies, buddies from different armies, including, ah yes, I suppose that would be the case.

  He turned to her, but this time no embarrassment awaited him. She looked up at him with the same smile and affection she always showed, but today, something more, something like an inspection of him, some curiosity as she watched him examine her family’s photographic residue. A glass case: That same ribbon Dad was bowing his head to accept just over there, a medal stamped with Hungarian words and a bust of, ah yes, I suppose that would be the case.

  There were no horseback-riding prizes, no trophies for swimming, just more pictures of a strange-looking family incapable of smiling for photographers. Whenever Scott began to speed up for the next room, she slowed him down, made him linger, slid her arm through his, pulled him close, and watched as he looked.

  She made him look at every room. There had been five of them here once. With two elder brothers gone and father dead, now only Mária lived there with her mother and three cats. The apartment was smaller than any place he’d ever known a family to be raised, and he inferred, wrongly, poverty. The brothers’ little cube was unchanged since their departures: no rock star posters or college pennants, just stern young soldiers, official portraits in plain picture frames, old dumbbells and elastic bands with handles, a few books in Hungarian and Russian, and a small bulletin board pinned with snapshots of tanks and artillery pieces and jet fighters.

  She’s just like me, he thought. She comes from nothing, too, a stranger to these people who surrounded her from birth. She had never looked so beautiful as at that very moment, in front of a picture of a Russian attack jet unfurling sharp vapor. He had finally found the only other citizen of his country.

  Her room was smaller still, painted a light blue some time ago. The bed, the chair, the desk, the shelves crowded with illegible books, the weird Eastern European crafts and dolls made of un-plush, unlovable substances. On her desk sat the homework he had himself assigned her. On her little bulletin board were stuck two pictures of Miami and one of Venice Beach cut from a magazine; a reproduction of a Manet; a black-and-white picture postcard of a U.S. sailor kissing a woman in Times Square; a picture of a Rodin sculpture, plaster-white and erotic; three photos of her with friends, but none that showed a girl any younger than the woman he knew. On a small table next to the bed was a photo of him taken from a low angle: He was leaping in the air, nothing but blue sky and clouds behind him, flying like a god, his extended arms suspending him from an ascending American football (launched from out of frame by Mark Payton), while two hands (all that was visible of his brother) clutched uselessly at Scott’s old college T-shirt, in a vain effort to pull him back to earth. “I wish I could show you my childhood bedroom right now.”

  “I would like this very much.”

  “No, you’d hate it, but you’d understand why we’re so perfect together.”

  She smiled and pulled him past the chair and desk her grandmother had taken from a neighboring apartment when the residents moved away (leaving all their belongings behind), pulled him toward her mother’s old single bed, its intricately carved headboard a
distinct luxury and, to a trained eye, evidence of privilege and unusual buying power.

  IV.

  LATER, WITH CROWDS STILL MILLING AROUND VÁCI UTCA AS GRATES WERE pulled over windows and as peasant women began gathering off the pavement the scarves and fleece-lined vests they had not sold that day, and with the sun low enough to stretch the ice-cream vendor’s shadow all the way to the end of the street, John reported to the first of the two dates he had arranged that morning. He shrank, notebook in hand, into a booth at the New York Amerikai Pizza Place Étterem, and greeted Gunnery Sergeant Todd Marcus and his three comrades, the men he hoped could teach him something elemental (if undeniably foreign) about Emily.

  With their identical crew cuts, polo shirts, and Bermuda shorts, the four marines thrilled the new restaurant’s young management with the priceless American authenticity they exuded. The five men poured pitchers of Czech beer and pulled apart unwilling slices of pizza decorated with ham, corn, canned pineapple chunks, tiny frozen rock shrimp, whole fried eggs, blood sausage, paprika, and other standbys of New York pizzerias. John, tipping back the press fedora Mark had given him, flipped through his notebook and settled on one of the very few questions he had managed to think of all afternoon.

  “Okay, so are you guys all into Rambo?”

  Through gulps of pilsner and melting cheese, three marines made derisive comments: pretty cool but unrealistic . . . all about ego . . . totally stupid. Gunnery Sergeant Marcus added, “I’ve read some of it, but I prefer Verlaine,” and John did not quite see what he meant.

  “Okay, look. Here’s what I want to write about. You guys are marines, soldiers, trained to kill. I want to write about what that means to you. About, you know, duty and courage and death. All that stuff. That sort of deal.” John looked from one to another expectantly. Kurt, a twenty-two-year-old sergeant, very politely excused himself and went to the counter for hot pepper flakes.

  “Dude, get napkins,” said Luis.

  John began again. “So what would you guys fight for?”

  The chewing paused to allow for the securing of more slices and disbursement of more beer, and John thought he could see something amused or scornful in Todd’s expression. “I gotta tell you,” said Kurt, returning from his forage. “I love this place. Craziest pizza I’ve ever seen, but I do love this place.”

  “Yeah, okay, but seriously. What would you guys fight for?”

  “You mean, like, what are we paid?” asked Danny.

  “Not much, dude,” said Kurt. “Way below minimum wage.”

  “No, no, what would you fight for? What causes? You might die, right, in a war?” He turned from one placid chewing face to another. “So what would get you out of the foxhole?”

  The feeding military men said nothing until, at last, Luis—a particularly muscular Latino-Wisconsinite of twenty—wiped his mouth and looked at John as if he had to explain something to a child. “Dude, dude, no. That’s not cool. First of all, nobody at this table would die. We take care of each other. And then, so second, it’s not like you can choose, you know. It’s not, like, optional. We don’t get to vote on it. We’re the Corps, man. And I thank God for the privilege.” He pulled another slice from the tray and wound the straggling, sagging cheese around his index finger.

  Kurt nodded. “Jack, when you sign up, you say, ‘I’m yours, man.’ And, besides, the officers know what’s what.”

  “Right. Of course,” John said. He could not think of another question. The three across the table were all looking high over his head at pop music videos playing mutely on three TV screens behind him. “But maybe an example,” John tapped his teeth with his pen. “Okay, Hitler was bad, obviously, but what about—”

  “Madonna was better-looking when she did ‘Like a Virgin,’ ” said Kurt.

  “If the Russians invaded Latvia, would you give your life to save it?”

  “I’d do Madonna to save Edlatvia.”

  “I’d invade Slovakia, Slovenia, and Slavonia to do Madonna.”

  Todd spoke quietly: “The world works because people—bad people, John—believe we’d fight for anything the president says we’ll fight for. We’re the best-equipped, best-trained fighting force in the world, and that about covers that, as my mom used to say.”

  “Dude!” The soldiers slapped greasy hands. “Yo, yo, write that down!”

  “Hey, will your paper pay for another pizza?”

  John struggled to rephrase his question, but the more he thought about it, the less he was able to hold on to it. It had seemed obvious—as he sat in the Gerbeaud drowsily preparing for this interview and preplaying the definitive date that would follow it—that the marines would quickly see things as he did, would agree that war was total futile insanity, that (short of defending rape-threatened loved ones or something) nothing was worth dying for, that they were gambling their limbs and blood to pay for college or to learn electronics, and the resulting column would be called something like “You Bet Your Life!”

  He would go to war for Emily, of course, silently answering his own question as the men obscenely derided the video of a Spanish pop singer dressed as a toreador weeping over the naked dead body of a woman with the head of a bull, a sword stuck between her lovely shoulder blades. Not only to protect Emily, but if she just asked him to go to war, he would. He would fight and kill if she would watch. What would she want to see him do? He could sit behind a machine gun, grit his teeth, shake as the force of his weapon tore into wave after wave of oncoming men, shredding them, yanking their arms up and their heads back, skewing their bodies into intriguing zigzags. Was she still watching him? Then he could fight close, crack the butt of his rifle against another man’s face, crush his nose, rupture his eye, crumple his jaw, and, when the enemy fell and tried to cover his head with his hands, John could shatter the skull at the temple, which, he had once heard, is only the thickness of an eggshell, drive shards of bone into the man’s brain and continue pounding still. Would she watch? Would she stand close, stand somehow out of danger but right next to him, close enough so that he could feel her breath in his ear, urging him on, pleading with a soft sigh that he not finish yet? Could he fall on top of an enemy, pull back his head by the hair, drag the blade across the neck, feel the tight skin at the throat give and peel away, uncurl from the blade like paper yielding to flame?

  “You got any more questions, guy?”

  Three of the marines departed together, but Todd asked John which way he was headed. With an hour to kill before his date, he and the marine walked toward the Corsó. “Don’t feel bad. You can’t be too surprised you don’t get the answers you’re looking for. Pacifists don’t usually enlist. At least not in the Corps.” Todd walked with his hands in his shorts pockets and happily inspected the buildings, the good views, qualifying female pedestrians. “You ever notice I’m the only black man in Budapest?”

  John reflexively turned his head to scan the crowds. “Are you? I suppose I hadn’t—no, there’s a jazz singer, a bald guy. There’re two of you. Does it bug you?”

  “No. I’m exotic here. That’s cool. I was posted at the embassy in the Sudan before this. Down there, I was just another well-armed black guy. So this is all right.”

  They reached the riverfront. Docked below them, casino boats lit up the July evening haze, and across the river the lights of Castle Hill floated over the tourist funicular creeping up and down the slope.

  “Hey, newspaperman, do you know how many men died at Verdun?”

  “World War One? No idea.”

  “Six hundred thousand in four months. About five thousand a day. About three or four guys every second, for four months. The English used to let guys from the same towns stay in the same units together, as a recruitment incentive. You know: ‘Sign up with your chums and you can go off together on the great adventure.’ ” John had no idea what Todd was driving at, and found it difficult to concentrate on the details of World War One while the marine was smiling at every passing woman. Todd said “Hey the
re” to a blonde. He walked backward to watch her receding figure melt into the crowd, and she looked at him over her shoulder and fluttered her fingers at the huge, dark foreigner. Todd waved and laughed and returned to forward motion. “It kills me,” he said. “I can’t fraternize with listed nationals, and these sweet little Hungarians are still listed. Can you believe that? Still officially Red. That’s a nice view, isn’t it?” Todd pointed to the Chain Bridge just as its strung lights illuminated and buzzed white against the lemon-lime and pigeon sky. The wind snapped alive the canvas tarps that—until sandblasters and masons could be paid for—modestly covered the Communist emblems carved into the highest points of the bridge’s stone arches.

  The two men sat on a wooden bench in front of the modern hotels that had replaced the Hungaria, Carlton, and Bristol (all bombed to pieces), and they watched the passing girls and the antics of a sparsely talented sidewalk caricaturist, all of whose scribbled examples of movie stars seemed about the same: buck teeth, rippling waves of jaw muscle, tiny little legs. Todd smiled at two women strolling arm in arm. “You can tell by their clothes,” he said. “The trick is to find Western European or American tourists. Those you can fraternize with. And with them you’re exotic, because you live here but you’re not Hungarian, so you’re not too exotic.” He shifted his weight. “So after a battle like Verdun, you could lose a whole village of English guys—everybody. They signed up together, they trained together, their unit went to the Somme together, they got stuck in the mud together, and—boom. Bad luck. The village now has no men between eighteen and forty. In one second. Every son, boyfriend, brother, you know. Boom.”

  John was pleased at last to have won, to hear a soldier admit that war was useless. Now he could explain to Emily his principled refusal to enlist. He pulled out his notebook, and Todd continued: “Who thought up that policy? Honestly makes you wonder about the English, you know? Whoa, don’t write that.” Todd’s fingers tapped a martial rhythm against the bench’s wooden slats. “But really, it’s like they wanted to turn people against the war. I’m always amazed there wasn’t a big protest thing during the First one. Of course, they were a little queasy about jumping into the Second.”