Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  “I’ll be no trouble, ma’am. I promise.”

  “Don’t be like that,” she said to John’s reflection deep in the mirror. “You can stay sometimes if we keep at this little project.”

  John propped himself up on one elbow to watch her remove tarps from unfinished paintings. “Can’t you work with me here? It’s almost midnight. I’ll be mouse-quiet.”

  “I just told you. House rules: Art first, everything else third. Guests are encouraged to reread those rules before requesting entry.”

  “But I like your work,” he tried feebly.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she said, as sincerely thrilled as ever to receive praise. She stroked his face and kissed him softly. She whispered in his ear: “But you have three minutes to get the hell out of here so I can work.”

  “I think you want me to stay.”

  “Stop it,” she snapped. She stood and walked back to her easels. “Please don’t say stupid shit to me. Rules are rules, or no more playtime. That’s all.”

  And so, just after midnight, he sat perched at a hotel bar and watched English-language TV news footage cycled perpetually on the half hour. Iraq repeatedly invaded Kuwait and animated arrows unfurled across map borders in sweeping curves. On the second repetition, John laughed quietly at this quickly old news, and a live, unbroadcast voice said, “What’s funny? Where’s the joke? What’s the gag?” John looked to his right. About forty-five, he wore a tan canvas-and-nylon-net vest with a dozen Velcro-fastened and zippered pockets. His brown hair was thin in the standard patterns and combed straight back in damp ridges. “Really. What’s the joke? Big trouble in the Mideast, no?”

  John shook sticky peanuts into his mouth. “The joke? I don’t know. I had the idea for a second that this might be a hoax. Doesn’t it seem slightly funny to you? A war between whatever and whoever, and one of them invades, and there’s tanks and desert strategy and a world in crisis, and the journalists get to sound more intense . . .” John ran out of words; the man listened and nodded but plainly was not getting it.

  “Ted Winston. The Times.” The man clenched his jaw muscles and offered his hand across his immobile body.

  John introduced himself, waiting vainly for the Times’s city of origin. “BudapesToday, I suppose.” He waited for the real journalist to start laughing.

  “BudapesToday? Oh yes indeed, the local English thing. Envy you. I could tell you were a journo. First post? Getting to understand the country? That’s the way.” Ted Winston clinked his glass twice with a black plastic stirrer, then clicked his tongue and pointed the stirrer at the thickly mustached, muscular, black-vested, and bow-tied Magyar who was lazily wiping condensation rings off the bar. As his glass was refilled, Winston demanded of John, “Describe this country to me in sixty words or less.”

  “Sixty words or less?”

  “Good training. What you’re here for.”

  John clinked his own glass twice and clicked his tongue, but his magic fizzled. “The girls are pretty. How many is that, the-girls-are-pretty: four? So, then another fifty-six words . . .”

  “You’re joking, okay, I appreciate that. I like a sense of humor. This is good,” Ted Winston said. “But here’s something I learned when I was about your age, Price. I learned this from Chou En-lai, the Chinese premier. I was green, Price, green green. I’d seen a bit of the ’Nam, but I was still young. Seeing a man die doesn’t necessarily make you one. I learned that the hard way. Anyhow, I was in Peking, following Nixon over there, Peking then, you know, very big moment, very serious events.” Winston clinked his glass, clicked, and pointed again. “Had a moment alone with Chou himself. Handsome devil. Smelled like jasmine, though—oddest thing, never will forget it. Handsome devil, and I don’t swing that way, I should specify at this point in time. Any rate, the premier was answering one of my questions, and he fixed me with his little gaze. You know, when they want to, they can just about pierce you through with a hard look, those people. The strong ones can just look at you. How else do you explain the billion people who didn’t overthrow Communism last year, huh? Point is, the premier explained to me that the Chinese ideogram for—have you heard this? The Chinese ideogram for opportunity is composed of the two ideograms, in progression, for midget and giant, in that order. The midget becomes a giant. Do you get it? That’s an opportunity. That’s how the Chinese see it, anyhow, and I think they’re right on. Fascinating little bastards.”

  The TV was repeating the headlines from one half hour and one hour earlier, and as the war hadn’t proceeded very far, the same journalists filed the same reports from Baghdad, Washington, Kuwait, and elsewhere. “But if one thing is clear from Brussels, we haven’t seen the end of this crisis.”

  “You can say that again,” Ted Winston confirmed. “By no means have we. By no damn means the end of this crisis have we yet seen.” Clink, clink, click, click, point. “How long you been in-country? You know the soul of this place?”

  “I don’t, but I generally wouldn’t trust a landlocked country for seafood.”

  Winston nodded as if he had received the answer he expected. “You should be getting under the skin of these people. That’s what I’d be doing in your shoes. This country needs explaining right now, right this damn instant, and you’re in the catbird seat. Grab this nation. Shake it. Look at it from every goddamn angle. If you write what you know—and only that—you can shape this country. People look to us—they’ll look to you—to make sense of a senseless world. And what’s that mean to you?”

  “I’m sorry, what’s what mean to me?”

  “Midget to giant. Remember that. Midget to giant.”

  Two peroxide prostitutes sat down to Winston’s right and began speaking rapid melodious Hungarian to the bartender. The smell of their perfume was overpowering, and John discreetly hid his nose in his empty glass. “I smell a lot of me in you,” Winston said to John. “Make your mark and the big boys are going to come calling. That’s how it works. Opportunity.”

  “As far as the emirate of Dubai is concerned,” said a young woman in front of a black metal security gate flanked by palm trees and surveillance cameras, “it’s all wait and see. At this point in time, there is conjecture and still more conjecture. For the people of Dubai, there is only waiting. They can only wait . . . and see. And then? It’s still too early to say, but the fear is, not for much longer. Back to you, Lou.” The bartender delicately licked one index finger and began counting the large stack of cash the two hookers had given him, forming separate piles on the bar with each new national currency he uncovered, tapping occasionally at a pocket calculator and making penciled notes with an awkward left hand, interjecting now and again quiet, menacingly dubious questions. Ted Winston suffered brief solitude.

  John left forints on the bar and stood to go. The reporter remained seated to shake his hand. He clenched his jaw muscles and blinked several times. “Outstanding to meet you, Jim. Call me here tomorrow, I’m staying the week.”

  Still too early to face his wife and child, John found himself on the familiar piano bench. He talked to Nádja almost at random, trapezing from slippery synapse to slippery synapse: his infuriating brother’s baffling engagement, an artist friend who worked too hard, pompous journalist drunks, the eternal Emilitic mysteries, the assistance Charles Gábor requested of him, which he was not sure he wanted to—“Imre Horváth?” she interrupted, as John sketched his vague, hesitating hesitations about Charles’s affairs. “Really? Your friend is doing a business with Imre Horváth? I knew an Imre Horváth. He was a bit of a rascal, I would have said.”

  They compared Imre Horváths and tried, without perfect success, to come to a conclusion. It was impossible to merge or distinguish the two with any certainty. Nádja had no memory of her Horváth having any connection to a publishing house, but in those days everyone had been trying to hold down whatever jobs they could, and certainly she would not exclude the possibility. As she played piano to the nearly empty room, she described the man she recalled
from forty-some years earlier, the man who had inflated her cousin with child, a notorious lothario, but also something of a clown. At one time he had made money by juggling and doing magic tricks for little children’s parties, sometimes performing on street corners for change, even singing and dancing passably when necessary. She had heard someone say, though this was years and years ago, that he had set up shop as a pornographer in Bonn. A monumental figure? Certainly not the man she knew. Tortured and imprisoned by the Communists? Not that she could recall, but that was hardly a distinguishing characteristic in those days. A natty dresser? No, this one had been like everyone else, making material last, inheriting, patching, through wartime then postwar then Communist shortages.

  John felt himself straining to make these two Imres one. He wanted very badly for the giant to have been a midget. “Did your Imre have the ability to make you feel your whole life was very, very stupid?” he asked before he could stop himself, and the left half of his mouth climbed high in a strange sort of laughter while she raised an eyebrow at him. “Phew,” he said, and rested his head in his hands. Through the cracks between his fingers he watched her wrinkled paws move with surprising quickness over the keys until she grew bored with speed and melody, then her fingers stretched and clawed and crossed over one another into intricate chord positions and she played only harmonies in slow, pulsing rhythm.

  “Fire me up a gasper, John Price.” He lit two and placed one between her ancient lips. “Your little friend the other evening,” she said, rolling the cigarette to one corner of her mouth. “She is not going to fix your very, very stupid life, I do not think. If that is your plan. She is not for you.”

  “That seems to be the consensus.”

  “And this makes you unhappy and peculiar? Why? You have other ones, I think. Why a girl with this awful, this very strange, big jaw?”

  “It is a big jaw, isn’t it?”

  “Quite big. Very big indeed. You know, at this hour, I stop playing entire tunes when people are tired like this.” She gestured with the cigarette between her teeth at the sleepy faces in the corner. “They will remember this sound even when they forget the tunes.” She splayed the wax-covered twigs and produced a dark and distant noise. “I loved a famous American astronomer once, John Price.”

  He laughed. “You did not. You’re a notorious liar. Everyone says so.”

  “No, no, not everyone. Only fools like your dark brother and your little friend with the giant’s jaw would say this. She did, did she not? Don’t look surprised and ask me how I know. Of course she had to say this. You can see that, no? No? Oh, then you are not paying the attention I hope from you. And, yes, I did love a celebrated astronomer. Never doubt what I tell you. I will never lie to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” John said quietly.

  “Good Lord, you promise to be terribly unamusing tonight. Try to amuse me, please, my dear. Chin up, chappy. I did love an astronomer and he was a very boring man. Like your little Miss Oliver, he was admirable but not very interesting, like a joke explained. Do you believe me now?”

  “Wait,” said John, and shuffled to the bar for his Unicums and her Rob Roy. He greeted the saxophonist from Harvey’s office and the black, bald singer, eating their salary for the night. They asked him how he knew Nádja. “She’s my grandmother.”

  “One night, my astronomer and I made love in his observatory on a mountaintop in Chile. For the occasion, he opened the roof of the observatory and spread a mattress on the floor for us.” The chords shifted more rapidly, brightened. Loud laughter was punctuated by the clicks of pool balls. “We lay on our backs, nude, looking up through the roof at this night sky, far away from cities. There were, of course, more stars than I have ever seen anywhere other.”

  “That’s why they put observatories there.”

  “Precisely, clever boy. We lay there, and I ask him why it was that, when you look directly at a star, it disappears. ‘What sort of science is this,’ I ask him, ‘where you cannot look at your subject without it disappearing?’ And he said—like a teacher always, him, very boring, ‘You must learn to look obliquely.’ I had never heard this word. He said, ‘You cannot look at it directly. You must look near it, not at it, or you will frighten it away. Obliquely.’ Of course I knew this already—every little child knows this—but I liked this new word, this obliquely. You know this word?” John watched her settle into a chord, then strike it again and again, altering the position of only one finger at a time but each time changing the light in the room. “I think perhaps you might benefit from this skill. You might, for example, look at your friend with the monster’s jaw a little more obliquely.” John had long since abandoned his efforts to understand things for the evening and was hoping only that she would keep striking the keys. “Oh, you foolish boy. Why do you want to be with one of those? She is not even good at it. She has given up everything one can enjoy from real life, and what has she won in return? Very little, I think, not comprising your sad heart, which, I concede, is not without value. It is neither here nor there how she makes her money, but what do you want with her precisely? This is not an interesting person with a life of stories ahead of her. You don’t want this type. In a war perhaps I approve, but I don’t see a bit of a war right now. And even then, her skills! Horrifying! That is, when said and done, half of their charm, to watch them dance for you, to think and maneuver and smile for the footlights. But she! She would not even defend herself when I toyed with her right in front of you; she just ducked away and pretended not to understand me. Why would you want someone so weak and foolish? Don’t look like a sad puppy. She is weak. At least do not you lie to me. Confess to her body, you want her body, though I saw her and there are certainly finer bodies to be had. Good Lord, that jaw—there would be three of you in the bed. Do you really want this one’s heart, John Price? Do you want her to take yours and make it right? Do you want this one to peer deep into you and see how wondrous you are? You want her to be the one who saves you? I do not think she can do this. This is very unlikely, I think—”

  Nádja teased, laughed, while John, draped across a folding chair, blew smoke rings and, with one eye tightly shut, poked his finger through each uneven and trembling nebula, tried to understand what Nádja was saying, the improbable idea that Emily was a . . . that she had lied in everything she had ever said since the day he met her . . . she was amazing . . . she approached the world entirely self-contained, able to project whatever she wished, whenever she wished, hiding everything, needing nothing and no one, in control of every element of herself and her surroundings. No wonder she would not accept him; no wonder he did not measure up to her. At that moment, he loved Emily Oliver more than ever before, but he did not wonder how he could win her, since she was unwinnable. She retreated up and away from him, out of reach, like a smoke ring. He crossed his arms, closed his eyes, propped his feet on the struts of Nádja’s splintering piano bench.

  “Play it, Grams!” yelled a voice from the bar.

  Then there was a male singer crooning—almost croaking—a song John had never heard before:

  You’re common, you’re beneath me

  You’ve nothing of value to bequeath me

  I’ve better choices for my bed

  Yet I can’t get you out of my head.

  Your crimes no one could defend

  I often hope you’ll meet a ghastly end

  Still, every night I think of better lines I might have said

  Because I can’t get you out of my head.

  I have some sort-of friends who still insist and sing your praises

  They scold me and say I’ve misunderstood you

  They shake their heads at all my cool, cruel practiced phrases

  Then look away and sigh, “Oh, how could you?”

  But I don’t bother with them anymore

  No friends of mine could defend such a . . . [unintelligible moan]

  Surely I can face the future without dread,

  If only I could get you out o
f my head.

  John was awoken, shaken, by the bartender, the last one there in the clean and well-lighted club, the man responsible for locking up and shutting off the stereo, the output of which John had just dream-requisitioned as his own composition, and the two of them walked out together into the first gray premonitions of dawn.

  XI.

  MONTHS LATER, ON A SMOOTH BUT NEVERTHELESS STOMACH-CHURNING flight home, examining a plastic-coated map of Budapest unfolded on her tray table, Emily found two possible, not quite mutually exclusive symbols for that day months before. One: It had been August 20, 1990, the first celebration of Hungary’s national day under its proper name (the Feast of Saint István) since 1950, a statement of independence and self-determination. Two: Her path that evening as traced on this map of the city—from 5 P.M. to 3 A.M., seven stops in the shape of a spiral, circling a drain.

  Five o’clock, top floor of Liberty Square. In the spacious office, she held three different ties up to the ambassador’s jacket selection for the festivities to be held at Parliament that night. “I think we have a winner here, sir.”

  “Thanks, Em, lost without you. Listen, we’ve had a lot of late nights in a row here. Why don’t you take tonight off, celebrate with friends instead of me. Watch the fireworks down by the river. You could use a break.” A simple act of employer generosity, although of course she could not stop herself from wondering if she had complained or, worse, somehow unknowingly shown by her behavior that she needed his kindness.

  “That’s very good of you, sir. Let me run that by Ed.”

  “Ed’s not the ambassador, Emily. Take the night off.”