Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  Scott shook his head aggressively and yelled, “There’s always the weasel, Ned. He comes to the unspoiled place where people are happy and he pretends to be happy, too, and then he goes off and tells all the other weasels about it, and then they all come back in hordes the next month, and you can’t breathe for all the weasel shit all over everything.” Ned’s good eye skittered away in search of allies or explanation while his bad eye floated aloof above their heads. “I won’t participate in this,” Scott said angrily, and was immediately sucked backward into the crowd.

  “Ignore him,” Charles said. “Fire away. We’ve all lived here for years. We’ve got you covered, Neddy.”

  The boy smiled in relieved gratitude. He pulled from his backpack a large notebook and a sheaf of photocopied maps and lists, then eagerly wrote down all of the lies Charles, Mark, and John could produce. “Gay bar,” Mark said to fully three quarters of the nightclubs Ned recited from his list. “Gay. Gay and violent. Straight but tipping. Gay. Bi-curious.” Ned expressed some astonishment at the proportions. “Every generation has its Sodom.” Mark shrugged. “For some reason, Budapest is the queerest city in Europe right now.”

  “I wouldn’t bother giving prices in forints for these hotels anymore,” Charles said, looking over Ned’s notes. “The country is moving officially to the U.S. dollar in eight months. It’s a done deal.”

  “Did you get a chance to visit the dental museum?” John printed Scott’s address on the “Worth-a-Visit” sheet. “The world’s largest collection of famous people’s dental casts. Plaster models of Stalin’s teeth, Napoleon’s, stuff like that. Simulations, blowups. You can floss life-size wax models and see what sort of crud would have been caught in Lenin’s teeth, for example.”

  “A lot of it was lost during the war,” Mark sighed, shaking his head sadly.

  As Charles detailed the fascinating view from the spectators’ gallery of the commodities exchange where Hungarian financiers in suits traded (and sometimes slaughtered) actual live farm animals on the trading floor of a downtown office building, exchanging literal pork bellies, and Mark interjected with descriptions of the public sex booths that had been allowed in the Hungarian countryside, once a year from dawn to midday on Saint Zsolt’s day, for the last six hundred years, and Ned wrote as fast as he could, sensing an editorship in his junior year, John again felt disembodied hands reach over his shoulders, now running over his chest, now rubbing his stomach. “You are here searching nice pleasures, dear brother?” was hissed into his ear, and John saw Charles looking at him and his invisible but unmistakable masseuse with a certain tilted-head expression of dawning joy.

  “Yes, I did,” John said loudly enough for Charles. “He just went to get a drink and said he hoped you’d be here tonight.” He pointed off in the direction of Scott’s last appearance.

  “Too sad. We must be planning smarter, favorite brother,” came the whisper, this time accompanied briefly by the wet aural incursion of what was most likely a tongue. He leaned forward quickly, to free himself and to hide from Charles, who still stared with open curiosity and amusement. John turned to conduct an overt conversation with the rest of Mária, but she had already been consumed back into the pulsing masses.

  Mark was telling Ned about the complicated rivalries and contradictory treaties between Gustave the Unappetizing, Otto of the Laryngians, and Lajos the Crass (“You probably know his famous quote, ‘Power is marvelous, and absolute power is absolutely marvelous’ ”), but Charles was just sipping his drink and considering John with the same curious entertainment. “What?” John demanded, but Charles just kept on, with half a smile coming and going.

  Scott reappeared, and Charles said, “Mária was just here.”

  “Looking for you,” John added. Scott disappeared in search of her. “What?!” John repeated, louder, to find Charles’s laughter undiminished. John moved off to the bar.

  Sometime later he was back at the table and Ned had been replaced by a tall, long-haired man in jeans, a jean shirt, and a jean jacket. “I in your seat?” he asked John in a Slavic accent, making no movement to leave and something in his tone making it clear that no offer to leave would be forthcoming. The man bent forward with his elbows on his knees and rolled a cigarette at the table. “You American like these two?” He jerked his head toward Charles and Mark, who mumbled, “Canadian.”

  “Branko’s from Yugoslavia,” Charles said brightly. “He wanted to sit down. He’s great.”

  “Serbia,” Branko corrected him with a hard expression.

  “What’s the difference?” John asked with half a laugh.

  “Difference? Difference is Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia,” the man said with disgust, licking and sealing his rolling paper and patting his jacket for a lighter. “It fucking is a big difference.”

  “Come on,” John said, oblivious of Mark’s discomfort and Charles’s eager attention. “Don’t tell me you can even tell one from another. You guys all look the same. Try living somewhere with real racial problems, like New York, where you can tell each other apart at a glance.”

  “I am a Serb! I am a Serb!” Branko stood up in a lunge, leaned across the table until his nose nearly touched John’s, and thumped his fist against his own chest. “I am a Serb!” Spittle gathered at the corner of his lips. “I AM A SERB!”

  “Admirable clarity,” John managed, and set sail again into the sea of people.

  He pushed through toward the staircase, guiding himself by sound. Down the narrow passage of smoke, stepping on feet and keeping elbows out of his eyes, he descended to the throb and moan of Cash Ass. He watched Scott and Mária kiss off to one side. Scott pointed to the ceiling with an irritated expression, said something to her, but then laughed as she tickled him. John drove into the dancing mass, looking for Emily and Bryon, unsure of how he would gracefully decouple them.

  Jostled and poked, twisting away from flailing limbs and heads, shoving when shoved, cursing the stupidity of Emily being taken in by Bryon as if he were not the least acceptable mate in the history of male-female relationships, John thought he heard a woman’s voice call his name. Looking for a familiar face, he pushed all the way to the far side of the crowd, heard his name again, and was pulled onto one of the niches cut into the wall. She was completely bald, but John found her very beautiful. Her thin, arched eyebrows suggested her hair would have been black. “You’re John Price,” she yelled over the music. She was American. John could only agree that he was John Price. She laughed at his confused smile and his open examination of her skull. “Go ahead,” she yelled, and placed his hand on top of her head. “It’s a little stubbly because I haven’t shaved since last night. I’m Nicky M. I take pictures for the paper. I saw you there a couple times. I liked your thing on the marines. Very noble. Or mock-noble. Whatever that thing is you do.” John recalled a name printed bottom-to-top in small type alongside newsprint photographs of new restaurants, music groups, and Soviet tanks leaving Hungary: the initial N, then something starting with an M, something generously syllabic and foreign, encrusted with uncommon consonants.

  “I’ve seen your pictures.” He inclined toward her every time he shouted. “I always thought you were a man.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s the M for again?”

  “Forget it. It’s Polish. You’ll be asking me how to say the goddamn thing all night when we could be talking about something more interesting. Just Nicky M. Hey, how tall are you? What are you, like, five-ten?” She pulled him off the niche and into the crowd. Conversation, straining before, now proved impossible and they danced until they were both sweating profusely, Nicky pulling her black tank top out of her military fatigues to fan air onto her stomach. She looked him in the eye longer than he could stand while they danced, and he often found excuses to slink free, wiping sweat from his eyes, looking at the floor, pointing to someone who was dancing ridiculously or turning to dance with his back to her. But she was always ready to look him in the eye a
gain. She yelled something he couldn’t quite catch.

  “What?”

  “You’re all about sex, aren’t you,” she yelled again, an assertion, not a question.

  “What does that mean?”

  “There’s just something about you. You’re just so all about sex.”

  “No, no,” he shouted. “I’m interested in all kinds of things, like, well . . . all kinds of things.” He made a display of puzzlement. “Well, maybe you’re right. Wow! Say, I am all about sex.” Nicky did not laugh at his clowning, just raised her eyebrows and nodded to say, “See?” and now, at last, looked away, turned and danced with her back pressed against him, and laced her fingers through his.

  Out in the air, he sat on the stoop and forgot about Emily, drank and talked with Nicky. She shaved her head every day with an ivory-handled straight razor inherited from a grandfather. She honed it on a leather strop emblazoned with her initials and a burnt-black profile of Frida Kahlo. She used her small BudapesToday salary to pay for her “real life” as a photographer and a painter. In two weeks, she was going to show in a group exhibition in the lobby/gallery of the Razzia movie theater, and he should come, she really hoped he would come.

  They were back at the couch; more drinks were bought. Charles was still exerting himself on Ned’s behalf. When the travel writer finally stood to go, he offered profuse thanks. “And tell the blond guy I’m really sorry if I offended him somehow,” he said to John, who suddenly felt terrible for the kid, for the lies he was carrying off in his bag. He considered stopping Ned, telling him they had misled him. But then Emily and Bryon were back, and Mark, too, pale and damp, troubled by something, and he remembered the hordes of tourists who would ring Scott’s doorbell to see Hitler’s teeth, and he felt much better.

  “This place is getting crowded,” Emily said. “It’s hard to picnic in locust season.”

  “Ooh, farm talk! How charmin’!” Nicky drawled at the stranger’s comment before flopping down next to her on the couch, taking Emily’s hand, and interviewing her as if she came from a distant planet or a chapter in history. John watched Emily’s face as she made conversation with the woman least like her on earth, and he compared their opposing appeal. “Are you for real?” Nicky was asking her when Scott and Mária returned, and Scott, holding Mária’s hand to his lips, mentioned again to everyone the “very real threat to us,” but no one paid him much attention and, as if everyone suddenly being in the same place was too unstable—an artificial, cyclotron-generated atom with an unnaturally swollen number of protons and neutrons—people soon decayed back into the plasma and disappeared for the night: Mark to read (“Call me, JP, hey? I want to meet that old pianist”), then Emily to sleep (“Really neat to meet you, Nicky”), then Bryon (“Great job, Scott, really, you’re looking good, keep it up” and a hug for John, who suspected his old schoolmate was leaving to meet Emily discreetly), then Scott and Mária, arms around each other’s waist, leaving without a word for anyone. Pleading work the next day and telling John to call him about another possible job “on the Imre thing, which looks like it might end up being very interesting indeed for both you and me,” Charles vanished, leaving John and Nicky strewn on the couch.

  “Who were all those people?” she asked, taking his hand and placing it on top of her head.

  “I have no idea.” He thrilled to the buzzing tickle of her stubble against his gliding palm.

  “I think we’ll bump into each other again.” She stood up, bent over, and kissed him. Their noses touched and she widened her eyes, poking gentle fun at his surprise. “But I think it’s a little overdone to meet in a club and go home together,” she said with a winning smile, and disappeared too.

  VIII.

  “KÁROLY, IF YOUR PLAN IS GOOD AND YOUR SKILLS AS YOU CLAIM, YOU will do what you propose in a month and these terms will apply. This is fair?” More than fair. On a Wednesday-morning handshake, Imre promised Charles thirty days in which to finance the Horváth Kiadó’s renaissance. Charles wondered which other VC firms had received the same exclusive promise.

  Imre clasped Charles’s hand long after it was natural, and peered into his eyes. “I don’t want only a bank,” he said. “I want the future.”

  “I very much understand. That’s why I’m doing this.”

  The agreement was simple. Charles, having applied for and been quickly granted a leave of absence from his firm to raise money for the Horváth Press’s expansion, repatriation, and renovation, would have August to accomplish his first step. With the full support of his firm (which, Charles explained, was hamstrung by geographic limitations in its charter but was eager to see Charles succeed), he would contact and secure commitments of financing from a group of Western investors. The terms of those agreements were entirely his affair. The minority investors would individually contract with Charles, so that the money he brought to Horváth would represent, in essence, one person (Charles) freeing Horváth from having to negotiate with a group. Charles would then represent this consortium and, on its behalf, acquire 49 percent of a new company, incorporating Charles’s new money, the Horváth Verlag in Vienna, and the symbolically insufficient (or insufficiently symbolic) credit vouchers paid by the Hungarian government as compensation for the 1949 confiscation of the original Kiadó. Imre would retain 51 percent of the new company, whose first transaction would be to bid on the rump Kiadó held by the Hungarian state, essentially paying the ransom money necessary to release Imre’s past into his control. (The reality was simpler still. Charles, having never mentioned Imre to his firm since they brilliantly rejected the best deal they were going to see this year, had not applied for a leave of absence and would do nothing so loopy—throw away an office, a salary, business cards—until he had secured himself a viable deal with Imre.)

  An embarrassed silence invaded the suite. The crumbly and coagulating remnants of a continental breakfast littered a black lacquered tray by the open French window, attracting the traffic noises of Szentháromság Square as well as spastic, motelike mites. On the reflective, swooping cross-section oak of Imre’s bedside table, the latest Mike Steele imbroglio—Lather, Rinse, Murder, Repeat—lay open and facedown, forming a little protective tent over a pair of horn-rim reading glasses. The open closet door boasted a dozen fine suits, shivering and swaying from time to time in the breeze. Charles silently gathered his notes and business-plan drafts. As the men wordlessly shook hands again at Imre’s door, dry-cleaning came to collect his Hilton-emblazoned laundry bag and Ms. Toldy emerged from her room across the hall to prepare Mr. Horváth for his other appointments that day. She nodded frostily to Charles, enjoyed shutting the door on him and the laundry maid simultaneously.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, John Price sat in his corner of the BudapesToday office almost alone. Karen Whitley was taking four days off to entertain her visiting parents, and two other employees had just quit, one to return home, the other to accept a vaulting, gravity-scorning promotion to be the number two in an international newsmagazine’s newly hatched Budapest bureau.

  Pondering the two overwhelming personalities in his life, John watched his cursor, tried to separate Imre’s seriousness from Emily’s.||||

  ||||Throughout Budapest, all around us, walk the survivors of moral examination. Tall walk the brave, hunched walk the craven, but we are visibly different from them, as surely as if we wore decorative scars across our cheeks and discs in our lips. We of the West have been spared certain tests, and there are those who thank God for the||||

  My God, she went home with Bryon.

  ||||apparently permanent commutation of that dreadful trial. But some of us, perhaps, ache for it. We know we might not succeed, as many of those who lurk the streets of Budapest with downcast eyes did not succeed. We know there is no pleasure to be found in the yoke of tyrants. But nevertheless, there are those of us from the faraway West, the lucky West, who think of such trials with a certain envy. At least you would know who you were. You would know what you were made of. You would kno
w the limits of your potential. And if you succeeded? If you did not break? Can we say for certain there is no pleasure to be found in that yoke?||||

  To live a work of art. Emily would understand what that means. What Imre is. What Scott will never understand. I am not ready for her, and she knows it. I’m not serious enough. Not something enough. She is waiting for me to be something enough. She is trying to teach me how to live like her. She is waiting for me to see something clearly and to show her that I see it. She could not kiss me from a position of inequality.

  ||||And though one sees in many of the Hungarians a natural envy for our wealth, our ease, our pardon from History, still there is, even in the eyes of the defeated, a certain pride that is justifiable. Even those who were beaten, who compromised, who collaborated, who lost their way, who thought they did right when they did wrong, or who knew they did wrong but felt they had no choice, or who took advantage of the times and now regret it or merely suffer reprisals in choking anger—even in the eyes of all of these, I see something very much like condescension: We have not been tested, and they know it. No one has asked us to collaborate in order to save a friend, to distinguish between dark gray and dark gray. Even those who failed stand somewhat taller when they look upon those of us who were not even tried. They do not only envy us. They also laugh at us. And I cannot say they are wrong.||||

  Is she with Bryon even now, taking the day off to laze and love under sticky sheets and open windows, slowly, nakedly fetching cold drinks? There’s that bald girl.