Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  Overhearing two American women, John spoke with a very slight Hungarian accent to the less pretty one. “I am sorry to be interrupting you,” he began. “I know you must be told this all of the time. I do not mean to bother you, but I want to tell you very much I like your movies. I am the very big fan of you.”

  She played along for a bit, but soon set him straight and explained to the poor Hungarian that he had mixed her up with someone else. He pretended to be embarrassed, she was flattered at the error, and a few drinks and a couple of dances later, immediately after she had crunched and swallowed an ice cube coated with the last remnants of her sweet vermouth, they were kissing, and her tongue felt corpsely cold but humanly soft. The ice had raised little bumps on its buds, and she tasted of the sweet-and-spicy apéritif. He was amazed he had succeeded in his ploy, but a few drinks later, as they walked to his apartment (his Hungarian accent forgotten back in the frigate, along with Charles and Harvey’s quiet business tête-à-tête), she said something—he couldn’t quite remember what—that made him understand she had never believed his line, never believed he was even Hungarian, and, realizing this, as the sofa bed voiced its first creaking complaint, he wished he had not aimed so low but had complimented the prettier of the two women instead. The next morning, a cursory, throbbing investigation revealed that the nowanonymous girl had stolen not money but his dental floss, his only belt, and the backpack filled with Mark Payton’s notebooks, a loss he took very, very hard.

  II.

  ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEWS MURMURED INTO CHARLES’S LAWyer’s office late in the afternoon of the sixth of December: The State Privatization Agency had accepted Horváth Holdings’ bid (combined cash and restitution vouchers) and the company was now the owner of both Horváth Verlag (Vienna) and the salable remnants (some improved, some dilapidated) of the Horváth Kiadó (Budapest): reasonably modern printing facilities; decrepit trucks and tolerable warehouses; a staff of forty-eight (fully 50 percent superfluous); a catalog of textbooks and old, requisite Soviet writers; partnerships with two newspapers and two magazines; and two floors of a grimly unashamed, squattingly ugly office block in the Pesti suburban waste-lands. For Imre, the right to profit from his own name in his native country, unopposed. And for Charles, 49/51 splits aside, the chance to run something real.

  The next day, Charles spent his morning organizing a celebration of their victory, and that evening the tribute opened with the last guest’s arrival inside the warm Gerbeaud. Before John had finished brushing snow from his shoulders, Charles stood up and recapped for his audience the relevant details of Imre Horváth’s story: heir to tradition, victim and survivor of Communism, indefatigable protector of a people’s memory, visionary, hero. Krisztina smiled ceaselessly while Imre himself pursed his lips in majestic calm and lowered his eyes, but not his head, to examine the tiny glass of golden liqueur on the table in front of him. Charles lifted his own cordial to “my mentor, my second father, my conscience, a hero of Hungary.” The old man, never more imposing, more etched and girded by history, rose to embrace his partner, and the other five applauded and touched drinks.

  Around the corner from the Gerbeaud, on the soft, fresh snow, they found two fuming, humming limousines, patiently waiting and commissioned to ferry the party from past to future. In each of their womby interiors, two backseats faced each other and, next to each, a collection of half-filled crystal decanters sat snugly clinched in formed black velvet holders. In the lead car, Charles solemnly poured short drinks for Imre, Krisztina, and himself, while in the trailing limo, Harvey, his sax-playing assistant, the English lawyer, and John started giggling like schoolboys as they topped up tall, textured tumblers with a little of this, a little of that, a bit of the clear one, and—voilà—that’s called a Long Island Iced Tea, Neville. Oh, is it?

  At their next stop, as the two groups reconvened, two distinct moods met and bounced away, like two weather fronts crunching into each other: “My God, this is . . . good Lord, you have the key,” Imre was murmuring in quiet Hungarian as Harvey emerged from the other car asserting that the best place to learn a foreign language is in bed.

  “I do. We are the owners, after all. It was simply a very kind gesture on a friend’s part to advance me a copy for tonight.” Charles put the key in the lock but did not turn it. Instead, he waited until his audience had quieted itself on the snow-dusty loading dock, and then he recited in English. “This is, of course, a warehouse now, and it is one of the properties that Horváth Holdings acquired yesterday. It was, more relevantly, the stage for a piece of history of which this nation should be aware and proud. A little more than thirty-four years ago, when our country fought futilely for its freedom, our friend Imre stood in the middle of the storm, standing for truth. From this dock where we now stand, he fired broadsides of truth against tyranny, and for thirteen days he reclaimed his Horváth Kiadó from its captors.” Charles turned the key, heaved up and open the rolling metal door, and, inside, pushed a button on a rectangular box dangling from the invisible ceiling on a thick black cable. After two fluorescent stutters of surprise, all the pieces of a sparsely stocked, high-ceilinged hall with cracked concrete floors showered into order.

  “My God, how did you know?” Imre asked his partner, his voice thickening and moistening.

  “I said to him only what my father said to me,” replied Krisztina Toldy.

  “Welcome home, Imre,” Charles whispered in Hungarian, shaking his partner’s hand.

  Krisztina and Imre walked far into the starkly lit, nearly bare warehouse, out of earshot, and the old man lightly touched spiral metal staircases and corrugated walls, turned small lights on and off, gently picked up and replaced a leaning mop, gazed at the ceiling as if it were an unlikelihood. The rest of the group lingered by the door.

  “My God, it is the most beautiful warehouse I have ever seen,” John said to Charles. “Can we see a sewage treatment facility next?”

  “Old boy does seem to like warehouses,” agreed Neville, swirling the remnants of his Long Island Iced Tea.

  Harvey sat on a crate, his mute musical assistant shuffling at his side. “All right, Charles, spill the beans. Is the old-timer banging the Toldy woman, huh? What do you think?”

  For the warehouse-to-dinner leg, Charles and John changed cars, and John spent a teetotal trip watching Imre and Krisztina speak nearly inaudible Hungarian across from him. After several minutes, the pair fell silent and they looked out their respective windows, through the smoked glass that filtered exterior life to little more than nervous headlights, Impressionist river lights, and haloed, pale streetlights hovering over perfectly circular banks of silver snow. John watched the old man’s eyes shift in back-and-forth twitches as they followed first one light, then the next. After a bit they closed, and Imre folded his hands in his lap.

  “What happened in that warehouse?” John asked the woman softly.

  “Unimaginable courage. Principle. A rare moral clarity.” She said each word slowly, her eyes on the brown and gray and white world outside.

  They arrived sedately outside the Restaurant Szent Lajos, where the four others smiled easily and laughed loudly as they descended from their vehicle. “How was your guilt trip?” Charles asked John, the two of them holding the restaurant’s doors, waiting until last to enter the fin-de-siècle Hungarian institution.

  “Don’t put me in their car again.”

  “Believe me, I know the feeling. Welcome to my job.”

  Where Charles had opted for fine cuisine on previous occasions, tonight he painted with other colors, and the old man’s conversation justified the choice: “I dined here for the first time with my father, my mother, and my two brothers on my name day when I was, ohhh, ten years. In these days, there was so many waiters, and they moved like nothing you have ever seen. It was a very great thing to come here. Like a dream—the waiters and the dishes and the music, the smoke from cigars, the women. A magic place, even if you were not a little boy.”

  A tire
d, elderly man in a baggy vest and drooping clip-on bow tie slapped a stack of sticky laminated menus on the table without stopping to speak. A younger waiter unwillingly watered their glasses and shouted something to his older colleague, who was now already halfway down the length of the room. The older man did not look back, just raised his hands and dropped them in a gesture of exhausted disgust, while the unsupervised waiter filled two glasses to overflowing and never touched two others.

  “To be at the Szent Lajos. At ten years, anything can be very beautiful because everything is new. You don’t wait for something better. What is in front of you can still amaze you. A room of stylish people is only amazing. You feel beauty very strongly. It shocks you. I had never seen a place so alive as this night here. I know my brothers were trying to look as they belonged here, but I knew they were not old enough yet. This room was full of people who were living lives of great importance, I thought. Yes, this room was full of music and chandeliers cut from the sun. The chairs were dark wood and had the softest cushions. The tables were golden and marble, and the silver shined. The ceiling was a fresco of angels and clouds.”

  The vast dining hall was almost empty. Dozens of dissimilar tables, placed intimately close to one another, held only a few widely spaced parties: American businessmen, loud and laughingly happy, making fun of this crap restaurant that their concierge had recommended; visiting Hungarian exiles, quietly stunned after ten to forty years, trying to distinguish what was visibly in this room from what was in their insistent, contrarian memories; local bureaucrats, hunched over the same meal they had ingested for decades, accustomed to the setting as to old shoes; and at one table, like a corrupted, feeble echo of Imre’s recollection, a family self-consciously and unhappily celebrating some milestone of one of the children. The room’s odd, nauseating light seeped from large 1960s space-age plastic globes hanging from orange vinyl-coated wires. Stained steel cutlery swaddled tightly in paper napkins formed an uneven, trembling pyramid in a plastic tub on a wheeled cart. A boy rolled the cart slowly up and down the aisles, pushed a wet rag across empty tables, leaving a damp V, then scattered a few of the cutlery rolls behind him.

  “Ohhh, and there was a zinc bar just there, the whole length of that wall. The bartenders were strong men and handsome, and they tossed glasses and the steel shakers to one another. They spun off each other as they passed in this little space there, under the windows. And outside the windows there was the first snow of the year, and lights outside so the snow falled like pieces of silver against black and yellow, and it looked very quiet outside and was very loud inside, and the two separated by only a window seemed very beautiful.”

  Two inevitable Gypsy musicians were moving now from unwelcoming table to table in sequined vests and tight, spottily shiny trousers. One stretched and bear-hugged his accordion, looking only at his fingers or the floor, while the violinist bobbed and grimaced.

  “Mr. Price, I see you laugh when the Gypsies play now, and you are correct. They are a joke now, for tourists, like so many things after state control, a little dead, a little more shabby product. But then! Ohhh, people were different. Hearing live music was different. We did not have stereo cassettes in our ears all day and your compact discs to capture any kind of music in the history of the world. When music was difficult to find, it was very powerful. And the Gypsies themselves were men of fire, rustic gods who could enchant you and make you dizzy. People throwed money—not just coins, but paper—at the musicians, and late at night the dancing was extravagant, and furs were draped around women more beautiful than you can imagine, with necks all like swans, and they danced until dawn appeared in the window up there.”

  Through that window they could now see their waiter outside, laughing with a colleague, lighting one cigarette on the butt of the last, untroubled by any sense of pressing responsibility elsewhere. Sometime later he returned and, with yellow fingers, scraped a pencil stub across a torn slip of pink paper. He said nothing and did not look at the person whose order he was taking, but three times he just shook his head when someone requested a particular dish, and he wrote nothing. No explanation: His eyes stared far off until Harvey’s assistant, Krisztina, and Neville all changed their orders and the waiter, still looking elsewhere, made a few marks on his paper. Charles ordered two bottles of wine even as the man walked off, shouting at the kitchen doors.

  “Tonight is my third time here, thanks to our friend Károly. Later, I was with a woman, and I was twenty years old. I knew I was watching a theater, but that was no less beautiful. We were all the actors in this amazing theater. I felt something else as well that second time. Budapest was still fortunate, but there was a war. In the beauty and the excitement and the sound of an orchestra that night—they sat just there—there was a taste of something like desperateness. Everyone knew perhaps tomorrow there will be no Szent Lajos, no party. You taste it in everything. The women were still beautiful and laughed, but they laughed one little piece too loud. One felt we were rushing to the end, to the limit of beauty, and also we were trying to hold it back, and to show everyone else we were not afraid. It did not all end the next day, but it did end soon. And, ohhh, very suddenly.”

  Seven plates of congealed chicken paprikás, seven limp side salads heaped and wet with cold canned corn, three bottles of surly wine, and five half-filled glasses of tepid, suspension-filled water straggled to the table in lazy groups. John laughed and Neville laughed and Harvey laughed, and soon all seven of them were laughing loudly as one after another identical, unappetizing dish was tossed to the table with a clatter.

  No one dared dessert or coffee. Charles paid for the untouched food. But when they stepped into a biting wind and the drivers stamped their feet and swung open limo doors, John and Neville and even Harvey shook Imre’s hand and sincerely thanked him for the meal.

  The caravan set off for the Hilton casino on top of Castle Hill. The front car held only Charles and Imre, as the rowdier elements had kidnapped the only available female, vowing, with Neville as their cultured spokesman, to render her “really quite embarrassingly intoxicated,” a plan as chillingly daunting as an interplanetary voyage. The front car crossed the Margaret Bridge to Buda, but instead of climbing to the hotel, it followed the quay and crossed the Danube again, back to Pest, this time over the Chain Bridge. It wove through the Belváros, then crossed back again over the Elizabeth Bridge. The second car’s driver placidly followed his colleague, but his male passengers grew louder in their protests as they continued their zigzagging route, back and forth over the river.

  “There are two people I really must find soon,” Imre told Charles in the silence of the leading vehicle. Through the slightly open window, Imre watched the river, which he had impulsively requested to see over every bridge, and Charles gathered his coat around himself. “I have—I do not think I have told you this—two children somewhere in Budapest. They do not know me. But I would like them to know now, now I have something to show them. Now that our project is coming to success.”

  Charles sat quietly, hugged himself against the cold, heard this odd confession with his black overcoat buttoned tight at his throat, and felt his heart beat fast at the thought that he had very badly miscalculated. “I’m sure they’ll be very proud of you.”

  “Ohhh, let us not overstate the case, my friend.”

  “Why the hell do they keep crossing the river up there?”

  “I am sure there is a very good reason Mr. Horváth and Mr. Gábor have.”

  “Does he make you call him Mr. Gábor? You really shouldn’t encourage that.”

  “I have not seen either of them since they were fourteen.”

  “Twins?”

  “No, not precisely.”

  “So, counsel, all you guys get raped in boarding school, right?”

  “That’s right, Harvey. Rather a rite of passage for our people. Won’t hear a word against it, old boy.”

  “I do not know even if their mothers still live.”

  “Wou
ld you like me to look into it for you, try to track them down for you?”

  “Don’t your parents mind, for Christ’s sake? All their sons are being sodomized for, what—like, six years? Will you let your son go through that?”

  “As I said, a rite of passage.”

  “Ohhh, I do not know yet. Now that I say it aloud, I am less sure. Let it be for now, I suppose. But thank you, friend.”

  At the Hilton, the slightly neurotic excitement trembling on the perimeters of the gambling tables repeatedly shook the group apart and reorganized it into different combinations. John had the impression that all around him bubbled matters of great importance while he was left with chats about nothing at all. Imre and Charles bet and won side by side, and, though facing the same direction (their eyes rising in tandem from the spinning wheel to the croupier), they slightly tilted their heads toward each other and spoke out of the sides of their mouths. Harvey took Charles aside twice and explained something with broad gestures while Charles looked him in the eye and nodded very slightly. Krisztina, whom her captors had utterly failed to intoxicate, seemed at times to beam with happiness and at others to wear an expression of darkest suspicion, usually whenever Charles and Imre were alone together. Charles and Neville had a very serious-looking drink at the bar, but when John stepped up to join them, the conversation turned out to be entirely about cricket. Later, John watched Harvey in barely controlled anger issuing inaudible scolding to his assistant until they were blocked from view by three wide Hungarian gangster types, who rolled up to a blackjack table in one massive, sextuplebreasted row.