Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  Young American males, dressed in the style of five years earlier, spoke German to one another through awkward lips and were rewarded with overwhelming laughter. He recognized the American sitcom, popular when he had been in high school and college, now dubbed and redelivered to German cable. He remembered with ease the characters’ names: Mitch, Chuck, Jake, and Clam. The four men—now Fritz, Klaus, Jakob, and Klamm—wisecracked auf Hochdeutsch in a TriBeCa loft apartment, in a SoHo bar, in Kafkaesque offices in midtown Manhattan, in Brooklyn parks, until John recognized this very episode. He dimly remembered a couch in his freshman dormitory, remembered slouching with three slouching friends (one whose name escaped him entirely). They had watched this very episode. The four characters had made a bet, he recalled: The first of them to meet a girl and manipulate events so that she invited him to her apartment to prepare him a “good home-cooked meal” would win one hundred dollars from each of the other three.

  Five years later, in German, John could hardly believe how dated the men’s outfits and hairstyles appeared. Nineteen eighty-six had not been so long ago, but there—with their lips forming words entirely different from the ones coming from the television’s speaker—they seemed as antique as hippies, greasers, G.I.s, flappers, doughboys, Edwardians, Elizabethans. He remembered the episode’s last scene several minutes before it came on, remembered sitting on the couch with his three friends, enumerating and berating the show’s absurdities and insults to their intelligence: The four defeated characters sat on their own sagging couch, watching their television, glumly but wittily mocking an overdrawn romantic film from the 1930s in which a woman prepares her average-Joe beau a good home-cooked meal.

  John held his thumb to the appropriate rubber pimple and the channels each flashed a frame or two for him in desperate pleas for attention—a race car changing la, a billiards ball ricocheting off the near bumpe, an occluded front moving in from the Atla, Hungar, ungari, Ger, erma, erman, Germa, Fren, in the execution of unconventional warf—until a series of electrical stimuli moving faster than thought pulled his thumb off the rubber pimple and four buxom, beautiful, blond German women moaned and pleasured a very fat middle-aged man with a shaggy horseshoe of greasy, gray hair and no clothes but a monocle.

  The remote control escaped to the floor and he grew too occupied to retrieve it. His eyes narrowed and his thoughts disconnected as the blood evacuated his brain. A car stopped outside and honked to summon a passenger, and as its door opened, its stereo was so loud that even up three stories floated the sounds of that one song. The four women courteously and efficiently took turns and John imagined himself in their midst, imagined their faces under their blond hair, the faces of Emily Oliver and Nicky M, of Karen Whitley and the speed skater and the two girls who had thought he was a movie star, and—his thoughts slithered free of all censorship—even old Nádja and Krisztina Toldy; and synapses buzzed and even Charles Gábor’s face appeared for a moment before it was replaced by another Emily Oliver and another, four times over, from every direction, equipped with extra arms and hands, four heads and faces, a hydra of Emily, who smiled and snarled upon him from every direction and serviced him in ways that no earth gravity would ever allow.

  Breathing slowed, and the photographs of his wife and child sat in their accustomed places . . . gotta remember to bring those. He fell asleep as the car and its radio faded down Andrássy, and (one last feeble thumb exertion) the television murmured weather reports from around the world, as he had lately found it difficult to sleep without the sound of subdued broadcasting in the room. He dreamed, he woke and flipped channels and dozed again and woke again and dozed again and back and forth. Charles Gábor was on TV, submitting suavely to interrogation. He and the interviewer sat in revolving leather chairs under a dangling, illuminated sign: MONEY TALKS. The interviewer asked easy questions disguised as aggressive questions: “For a fellow who seems to me young enough to still be fascinated with shaving, how did you accomplish this feat, Charlie?”

  XII.

  HIS LIMITED LUGGAGE STOWS WITH SATISFYING SYMMETRY AND FLUSH edges, like toy baggage built especially for the form-fitting overhead bin of a toy train. He sits at the open window and gazes at the platform, that very word redolent of possibility, potential.

  The station platform, where arrivals and departures change everything and . . . Who might come to see me off? Oh . . . Still, something thrilling about . . . The giant skeleton key will be a great conversation piece there, if they don’t use the same sort. On the cobbled streets, with my group, or my head on a pillow with just the right face facing . . . Is that her come to, did she find out, relent, track me—Well, the same hair, sort of. Look at this, this was the key to my . . . Platform. Like the beginning of some movie: the young man at the train station, about to head off for who knows what, places unknown, leaving just in time . . .

  The train stutters forward, and his heart with it. His heart lunges far out along the kilometers of track, far faster than the train itself, over borders, to new lives, reaches nearly to its goal, but is snapped elastically back. Just clear of the station’s roof, the buildings that flank the tracks on either side, like canalfront properties, glide by, accelerate in uneven bumps of speed. Through Mayfirst fog, he leaves the city behind him; he faces the way he is going—not what he’s leaving—ready for whatever, whoever, might come.

  Countryside of green and the occasional factory, farmhouse, hut, eviscerated hillside (green frosting on gray cake) with immobile cranes and abandoned trucks, the magic seductress dance of undulating black lines in the window.

  That poor old man, a work of art, to live a work of . . . It’s all a game, remember, and the winners are those who can tell serious from not. It isn’t, after all, war, tyranny, poverty, torture, Nazis, or Soviets. Not really fatal, after all, just a digestive disorder, avoid certain foods, not as if he didn’t become a multimillionaire, I do understand that. Just keep clear on what’s serious and . . . These things that happened are not really . . . they’re just . . .

  The outskirts are the worst. For hours seated in one position, you feel—deliciously—nothing. You are free of past and future, you float in amniotic potential, but then the outskirts and the last twenty minutes stretch out forever, grow immense, relentlessly block your increasingly urgent arrival.

  Life will start there, at the end of this ride. I will step off the train onto the platform. But there it will be Europe for real, untouched by war; no reconstructed “old towns” for the benefit of self-deluding tourists. Honesty in everything. And that honesty attracts a different type. There I’ll find the people who . . . I spent a birthday in Budapest. No, can that be right? Did I not notice? I arrived last year in May, today is May, so what did I do for it? Doesn’t matter. This year will be different, surrounded by seriousness. Real life awaits, birthdays, a redem . . .

  The train circles and circles. After crossing all this globe in a speeding straight line, suddenly the train slows and spirals in imperceptibly smaller circles around his destination, and he imagines being condemned to wander forever the interminable outskirts, a gray limbo of almost-thereness. The train continues its bank through dismal suburbs, the destination still invisible; it hides somehow just inside the endless spiral, postpones the moment. He dozes.

  The temperature of the window against his cheek changes, turns suddenly hot. He awakens, and there she is at last, with one half of his own transparent, wet face faintly superimposed upon her like a watermark. There she is, though still far away, strangely far for all the agonizing minutes burned in approach. She is entirely contained, a single image exposed in a moment’s glance: a land of spires and toy palaces and golden painted gates and bridges with sadeyed statues peering out over misty black water, a village of cobblestones and stained glass unlicked by cannon, and that fairy-tale castle floating above it, hovering unanchored by anything at all, a city where surely anything will be possible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prague would be significantly less coheren
t (and probably not even bound) without the good work or good works of superstar editor Lee Boudreaux, Tony Denninger, Phebe Hanson, Erwin Kelen, Peter Magyar, Mike Mattison, ASP, DSP, FMP, MMP, incomparable agent Marly Rusoff, Toby Tompkins, Budapest 1900, by John Lukacs, and, of course, Jan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ARTHUR PHILLIPS was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speech-writer, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992, and now lives in Paris with his wife and son.

  ABOUT THE TYPE

  This book was set in Photina, a typeface designed by José Mendoza in 1971. It is a very elegant design with high legibility, and its close character fit has made it a popular choice for use in quality magazines and art gallery publications.