Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  XVI.

  MARK’S ABSENCE, AFTER TEN DAYS AND SIX UNRETURNED PHONE MESsages, John diagnosed as unmistakable stage-two Visiting Family Syndrome. The symptoms were now easily recognizable in the plague-ravaged community. Stage one: murmured references to “a busy week ahead,” increasing quietness, sporadic personality aberrations (irritability, childishness, hysteria, isolation). Stage two: total disappearance for five to fourteen days, except (possibly) for hurried introductions of friends to jet-lagged, shy, elderly people with peculiar or nonexistent senses of humor. Stage three: sudden and boisterous return to society with exaggerated ubiquity and gluttonous appetite for drinking, dancing, and romance; and a twitchy, logorrheic rhapsodizing over the joys of living single in Budapest.

  John would have much to report when Mark recuperated. Charles Gábor had quit his job, to the dumb amazement of the Presiding Vice, and now had fifteen days to move out of the bungalow his firm had bought him. In depositing his check, John had added nicely to his annual income, but could not think of anything to acquire except perhaps a rocket pack with which to soar high over Budapest, orange cones of flame propelling him—a legend of the expatjourno scene—on his cometlike way. He would consult with Mark on how best to be rich, since the Canadian carried it off with such aplomb. And Mark would learn Charles had also soared high above the rooftops, courtesy of John, Ted Winston, a squadron of felonious gentlemen on Wall Street, and the insatiable appetite and daffy logic of the American news machine, which in this case John himself had tickled into action with a series of pieces as the deal heated up:

  . . . Finally, for those of you following my ongoing coverage of the capitalist who saved Hungarian culture, my sources tell me the Gábor-Horváth bid to reclaim the ancestral institution is in to the government, and the money-famished Maggies find it extremely compelling. Other bidders should think twice or three times before bothering to challenge these zealots. “There are lots of marvelous other properties to be bid at,” I was told by one highly placed representative of the State Privatization Agency, sounding very much like an ungrammatical usedcar salesman gearing up for a holiday weekend . . .

  . . . If such a thing were possible, the news is even more humiliating from some of their overseas ventures. In Budapest, for example, after several months of apparent paralysis, during which time the firm seemed unable to kickstart any projects, a junior associate of the firm has now resigned in unmistakable frustration with his do-nothing employers and is leading his own efforts at rejuvenating an old Hungarian publishing house. This story, carried in the local English-language paper for several weeks, came to international attention in light of recent investigations of the firm’s U.S. dealings by the federal prosecutor’s office, led by an attorney whose political aspirations are hardly a closely guarded . . .

  . . . And, on a lighter note, one of our own young Cleveland men is showing what’s possible with a little imagination, some money, some nerve, and a whole bunch of American-style idealism and Lake Erie can-do. Carl Maxwell has the story from the fine old city of Budapest, the capital of the nation of Hungary, located far away in Eastern Europe. Carl? . . .

  And, in expectation of continued payments, John strove, inside his column and out, to keep Charles’s success churning along. He swallowed hard and played the role of hearty networker on Charles’s behalf, harvesting rich people and Hungarian government officials unearthed in the course of interviews and stories. More entertainingly, he prepared descriptions for Mark’s amusement of these inane introductions and repetitive conversations, of the faux-macho manner and the coy behavior. “I turn out to be a very gifted pimp,” John planned to tell his friend. “It’s a noble profession, with a great history.”

  But Scott’s wedding day arrived, and that evening Charles reported to the uninvited John that Mark had been notably absent from the small ceremony. Charles, in an attack of sensitivity John found almost funny, did not mention John’s absence but produced instead an amusing edition of the nuptials, highlights selected especially for him: Emily had worn a broad, round straw hat, a sundress, and sandals that crisscrossed her brown ankles. “In other words, she looked like she was auditioning for a douche ad.” The church was scarcely occupied: Charles and Emily, a few English teachers, a half dozen of his students, a quartet of Mária’s sultry friends, and seven of her relatives. The groom, wearing traditional Hungarian formalwear, stood between Mária’s brothers, two fire hydrants wrapped in Hungarian Army dress uniform. “It looked like a capital punishment trial.” The Catholic ceremony was aggressively lengthy. Hymns swelled and rolled infinitely on like symphonies, sermons droned like college lectures, blessings passed like merger-and-acquisition negotiations. The congregation rose and stood until Charles’s legs ached and shook and he struggled to straighten his spine. The congregation sat immobile until his buttocks melted away against the smooth wooden bench transubstantiated into steaming concrete. Some hours and one kiss later, they were directed just next door, to the Hilton’s patio. Under a yellow-striped canopy supported by metal poles flaking white paint and sporting little Hungarian flags on their ends, four tables were set with lunch, slightly to one side of identical tables serving identical lunch to tourists intimidated and exhilarated by the sudden apparition of verifiably nontourist life.

  And that was all John ever learned of his brother’s wedding. He had not spoken to the groom or seen him since the engagement was announced a month earlier. He certainly hadn’t received a written invitation as others had. But he also had failed to congratulate his brother after the purple-mustache fiasco, and perhaps that’s all it would have required. But now, after so many years of pursuit, that had been more than he could muster. It didn’t matter. Seriousness was certainly elsewhere.

  As Mark’s absence persisted into the second week of September, John decided the Canadian was probably on a research trip. He should have said something prior to departure, but Mark could do as he pleased. John had stopped by enough times, left enough messages. In the meantime, he had better things to do.

  That afternoon, he stopped by Mark’s building to see if his friend had returned. With Scott a lost cause once and for all, with Emily still too daunting to approach, with Charles shuttling between Budapest and Vienna, with Nicky oddly unavailable and more than usually off-putting, and with a long two hours before Nádja started playing, he had nothing better to do. In truth, he hungered for company. He was flinging the early autumn rain from his twirling umbrella, knocking on the unresponsive door, rattling the resentful knob, peering against the rebelliously reflective windows, when a large, bearded Hungarian emerged from a neighboring apartment. A long stream of foreign words—John caught az amerikai—accompanied this ursine arrival. John pointed at Mark’s apartment and corrected the beard floating just above his eye level: “Kanadai.” More foreign chatter ensued. Finally the man rubbed his right thumb and fingers together and banged twice on Mark’s door: Rent seemed overdue. “Ahhh,” John said. “Okay, okay.” With more sign language he convinced the man—a landlord or superintendent, evidently—to unlock Mark’s door and the two of them walked inside, each with the other’s permission.

  The super stopped in front of the enormous photograph leaned against the wall, John’s copulating torso at its center. Nibbling his beard and staring at the work with a worried concentration, he slowly nodded. John wandered from room to room, opening cupboards, drawers. Mark’s clothes were gone, his luggage was gone, his toiletries were gone. Some laundry had been forgotten, now stiff and stinking in the washer, and his jumbo gramophone stood in the corner. His books and his notes remained, all removed from the shelves and neatly stacked on the kitchen table, under an envelope with Nicky’s name on it. A panicked rip, but John found in it no suicide note (and quickly resented being tricked into the momentary panic), only a blurry Polaroid: one half of Mark standing to one side of Nicky’s grand work, pointing toward it with the same air of proud ownership as the Elizabethan courtier. Nicky’s work was inverted in the photograph (pr
ofessor on the right, courtier on the left), and the visible half of Mark’s face was covered with a Polaroid camera: The photo had been taken, badly, by Mark himself, using a mirror.

  Whatever this scene was, it seemed at first to John a bit unreal or just the latest off-kilter display of the peculiar scholar—not so much something he did do as something he would do. Mark hadn’t killed himself or been kidnapped: He’d just gone away, pointedly saying good-bye to no one, and now John was childishly angry at the affront, then quickly sorry for himself. He phoned Charles: “Did Mark tell you that he was leaving?” He felt relieved not to be the only one. “In that case, I have someone here for you to talk to if you’re still looking for an apartment. And tell him to let me stay alone until you get here.” He handed the phone to the landlord (unwilling to pull his eyes from Nicky’s vast and stimulating work).

  Left to himself, John knew he was supposed to take some action, understand something about all of this. He boiled water for the Czech strawberry tea the stingy kitchen had yielded. He listened to and then erased three weeks of his own lonely voice on the otherwise unoccupied answering machine, the pleading tone of his messages both fascinating and repellent. He sat at Mark’s small table, underneath the Sarah Bernhardt poster and the hollow map borders. He read Mark’s notebooks from beginning to end, ready to understand, expecting explanations with each turn of a page, open to any messages Mark or Fate cared to send him, even as he began to tell himself that, yes, Mark had left without saying good-bye, but it didn’t matter, wasn’t serious, couldn’t have any bearing on anything real . . .

  The dated journal entries began in March, six weeks before John’s arrival in Budapest, and they comprised, for a couple of months, dense, efficient, formalized records of research: numbers, quotes, references, cross-references, chapter outlines, half-finished essays, descriptions of antique stores spiked with parenthetical library call numbers. Essays on particular episodes of Budapest’s history and the effect of these episodes on the city’s landscape made John sleepy; he refilled his tea and opened the window. He began to doubt he would find any messages, lost track of what he was expecting to find, imagined himself—sometime in an indeterminate future, in a better place—discovering that some friend had disappeared and intently scouring the friend’s abandoned notebooks looking for an explanation.

  . . . with neither insight nor interest, the matter dropped by Parliament, and lingering questions of responsibility to the past ignored by population eager to (selectively) forget . . . cross-ref: Pruth on collective nostalgia during transformative eras . . .

  . . . percent of pop knowledgeable about and angry at treaty of seventy years earlier remarkable—compare to pivot dates in West. Cross-check betrayal-centric national myths to measurable depth of affection for pre-betrayal habits, etc. . . .

  . . . How long until the country, or certain sectors (elderly, e.g.), begin to long for some intangible element of recently discarded Communist past (stability, security, etc.)? Worth measuring the penetration and durability of this “nostalgie de la misère” and comparing it to the penetration and durability of ironic faux-nostalgia for Communism (i.e., photos in A Házam, V. I. Lenin’s Pizza Shack, college-age participation in campy October Revolution parades, etc.) . . .

  . . . Ponder this: a teenager in 1953 Hungary rebels against the fools who teach him and the foolish peers who sheepily go along with the Party line. It turns out, thirty-six years later, that that rebellious teenager was moral, a hero of conscience. Question: Had he grown up in Canada, would he have rebelled anyhow just because he was a teenager? Survey thought: Is there a higher degree of nostalgia for adolescence among people who, retrospectively, turn out to have been adolescents under a system subsequently acknowledged to be immoral?

  These initial semischolarly efforts soon wandered away from grovey academia. Even as early as late May, essays about Mark’s reactions to his research dominated, displacing the research itself. The writing grew introspective, almost adolescent: descriptions of loneliness and desire John found embarrassing, long lists of questions about the meaning of life and work, tirades against family members and acquaintances, odd essays: Is memory a substance, a fluid secreted from within coiled knots of slick brain jelly, tricked out by smells? Do bumps on the head dislodge this mnemonic ooze? Or is memory an electrical force tickled out by quacky or wise practitioners of alternative medicine who touch mappable mnemonodes, and unleash a sudden flow? Or is memory a library, dusty and stuffed beyond all logic, a chaos beyond the skill of any taxonomist to save, book and book are dumped, a thousand thick volumes a day fill the library lobby and climb the stairs, overflow the elevator shafts, clog the toilets and sinks, crush metal shelves like paper, fall from the shattered windows in a schluffy heap onto the sidewalks and a few ancient, torn copies, deposited long ago, are suddenly available again, and old men stop and stoop and marvel to flip through crumbling pages that nearly melt under their touch and their tears as they read of their childhood pets and their mothers’ private recipes, of neighbors inexplicably menacing and the smell of father’s face after he shaved . . .

  Man’s third primal urge. Unlike Thanatos, which drives man to look forward to the end, and Eros, which drives men to look directly down, Retros drives us to look backward.

  Mark had done no work at all for several months, perhaps nothing of any significance since the first few weeks after his arrival. The scholar would attempt, in the midst of these outpourings, to focus, and for a day or two would produce the same sort of serious entries he had made at the beginning, but they would not last.

  There is an old Canadian school of thought that runs: If you don’t talk about it, it will go away, and this is a valid point. Nobody likes trouble. Look in their eyes when I relax—they tense up. Now why is that? Because I am inverted. I am the hanging man. I walk backward and I must stop being proud of it. It is wrong to walk backward in front of other people. Things could be significantly worse. The pain of others worse off than oneself. War dead, of course. They killed a lot of Canadians at Dieppe, lots of little boys with pasts, lots of favorite hand soaps, lots of nights spent with the wireless set, lots of other memories. Every time I ask them to see like me, they smile. And they are right; I must stop. Viruses demand quarantines. I am ready, I tell you, it’s all done now, it’s tamped and tamped and tamped I am stamping and tamping and stamping, I’m ready, I’ll be good, please I’m done being away from everyone I’m so ready, please, please, please, I’ll be good.

  The journals did not end here, on this unpalatable cocktail of the pathetic and the deranged. Instead—and this bothered John more than all the rest, more than the tedium of the research, the grating angst, or the increasingly credible yet still somewhat unbelievable notion that Mark was literally “ill” or “in danger”—instead, the last of the notebooks ended with Mark realizing how he sounded and then flinching. John saw Mark grow disgusted and drape himself in ironic amusement:

  Wait! This is becoming the testament of someone “unwell.” How boring. I’ve gone all unwell. I see I need to remove myself from unhelpful stimuli, go where things are safely bland. You agree? Fair enough. And this is unfortunate, my failure, as it necessarily obscures the point; sickness is boring. The most interesting thing about Einstein was not his lactose intolerance. Just because I’m not tip-top doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I could be perfectly healthy and still be right about everything else. There are billions of people who are healthy and who agree with me. I know there are; I can prove it; read my dissertation; I did prove it. Of course, I just can’t bear to talk to them, any more than you can bear to talk to me. And why should you? Of course, one must remember this: Unrequited love is not fatal, it’s just a temporary digestive disorder that leaves no visible marks, only a newly acquired but permanent inability to ever eat certain specific, unnecessary things again without having terrible digestive distress. Shrimp gives me gas, so I don’t eat shrimp. I don’t sit up nights crying about shrimp, right? All right then. Have two aspirin a
nd a full glass of water, remember? Now I really need to shut up. I have grown “!” and a little “yikes” and somewhat “ah, I see . . .” That’s fat Canadian fags for you.

  Thus ended Mark Payton’s efforts to expand his doctoral dissertation into a popular history of nostalgia. And John remembered with sorrow that he had never introduced Mark to Nádja, though Mark had asked several times.

  He didn’t know where to put his eyes, embarrassed, even ashamed, by everything he looked at: the two strips of disparate geography with soft white torn edges, the poster of Sarah Bernhardt, yellowed where it met the wall and spotted with something orange-brown that had spattered from a frying pan, the stack of spiral notebooks and thick texts: Shreds of Glory, Remnants of Pride: How Empires Die and Are Remembered. Was Sade a Sadist? Was Christ a Christian?: An Exploration of the Nomenclaturic Issues Surrounding Charismatic Leaders. Budapest 1900. Are You My Sergeant?: Mnemo-Temporal Dysfunction in Combat Veterans. A fly materialized on the cover of the top text, A Century’s Ends: Cultural Transformations in the ’90’s, 1290–1899 by Lisa R. Pruth, M.Phil. It strolled a few inches and rested, then promenaded again. It stopped for the second time in the recessed black title stamped on the red cloth. It rubbed its hands together and examined John through its hundred golden eyes. John crushed it into the black C of Cultural and sat for several minutes examining its new shape in the gray, rain-spotted light pushing through the window. Fractured hairline legs and translucent wings angled from its wet body like modern sculpture. No matter how hard John blew, the wing trembled but did not detach. Less than an hour until Nádja started playing. Everything that was serious, that truly mattered, waited on that piano bench.