The Dinner Party

by Joshua Ferris

  “I bet the Communists wouldn’t have allowed Segways in this town square,” I said. “Bet they had more self-respect than that.”

  “Yes, they would have forbidden it as capitalist tool.”

  “That would suggest that it’s somehow useful.”

  A dark-skinned young man in a blue tuxedo had a pair of old ladies on the hook. Too old, I thought, to be doing anything on a Segway. Nevertheless, a minute later, the stouter of the two was handing off her purse to the taller one and climbing aboard. She’d clearly lost her mind. Looking down at her feet, groping blindly for the control bar, she just barely managed to get on. I thought for sure the man would come to his senses and call it off, but he only seemed to be encouraging her.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  Both Antonin and I were watching when the man finally let go. That old lady glided forward easy-peasy for about five feet, then veered violently to the left and headed straight for a couple licking ice cream cones while looking down at a map. They barely managed to glance up just before she walloped them, and I mean walloped them. They tumbled, and the old lady just went flying. They climbed to their feet and dusted themselves off. Not so the old lady. She was still lying on the pavement when Antonin and I descended into the dungeon.

  “Know what that was?” I asked him.

  He didn’t, and looked at me inquiringly.

  “Participation in the world,” I said.

  Upon our return, the old lady was laid out on a gurney and being loaded up into the back of an ambulance. A peal of siren replaced the general pall, and slowly the ambulance coasted out of sight. The crowd dispersed, and the day resumed.

  “You know a lot about Prague,” I said on our way out of that square at last.

  “Well, I hope so,” he said.

  “I was just wondering what I could tell you about Cleveland. There isn’t much. How to avoid the toll roads, and where to get your shirts cleaned.”

  He smiled. “That can be important.”

  “You know a lot about history, too. What do you do for a living, Antonin? I must have known at one point, but it’s slipped my mind.”

  “Call me Tony,” he said. “I am tour guide.”

  “You’re what? A tour guide?”

  “Well,” he said. “We are on tour, yes?”

  I laughed. “You’re a tour guide?”

  “Yes.”

  “An actual guide!”

  “Yes!”

  “How did you…?”

  “Get involved with your group? The embassy is arranging it,” he said. “But I don’t work for embassy. Here.” He removed a business card from the inside pocket of his suit coat. It read: ANTONIN MALIC, PRAGUE WALKING TOURS.

  A tour guide! With part delirium, part delight, I began to laugh. Tears came to my eyes. I had to stop walking so I could double over and howl until I went mute. Was it really all that funny? Maybe only I thought so. But how good it was to laugh like that. Ruin was over. Insomnia was past. And when I looked up again, I saw Antonin, I mean really saw him, for the first time. He was smiling helplessly along with me. An honest-to-God guide!

  In the Old Town, where the medieval streets were tall and twisting, Death continued to be the star attraction. But the crowd quickly got to me, my laughing jag was a thing of the past, and I was eager to get a move on. Where to, exactly? No idea. This was Tony the Tour Guide’s show. But I was determined to get there first.

  What was wrong with me? Here’s what I feared would happen one day. After a lifetime spent in a hurry, I’d wake up and realize that there was never any destination, life was all tour, and in a paradox beyond comprehension, some more real destination would be revealed, one I could never have dreamed of, and at last I’d see that I had come in dead last.

  On Karlova Street, down which a cab had ventured for a fare, the crowd was so thick that the poor driver was at a standstill. I was behind Tony when I saw my chance. I halted, then swung around the rear of the car while he continued ahead of me, oblivious. One last look and I ducked into a café.

  The steely stormtrooper behind the counter lined up four espressos on the worm-eaten bar, and I downed them one after another.

  It was an awful thing to do. As the coffee was being prepared, Antonin was negotiating his way through a thick crowd, only to look back and find me gone. No doubt he stopped and scanned the crowd in a growing panic. All so that I could indulge myself. If his tour so far had taught me anything at all, it was that throughout history, some people acted nobly. Me, I had never loved anyone but myself.

  I didn’t mind once the espressos took effect. I left a fat American tip and skipped out of there.

  “Tony!” I cried.

  He was standing in the street with his back against the brick wall, doing his best to pick me out of the crowd. “I don’t know what happened,” he said.

  “Well, we’re together now.” In my euphoria, I briefly took his arm. “Let’s go see all the rest of the immortal things, Tony, what do you say? Take me to all the very best spots!”

  Let history unfurl. Let the savages kill. For the rest of us, there is the art of living well in a dangerous world.

  We pulled up before an open-air market. Still high as a kite on my four espressos, I found my will to live again and peppered him with questions.

  “Were these stalls we see here today around during the Communist era?”

  “Yes, as matter of fact.”

  “And were they selling the same things?”

  “Of course, not everything,” he said. “Today this market is very touristical.”

  “And were you giving tours back then?”

  He had been leading tours through Prague, he told me, for thirty years, since the late eighties, when his audience consisted of Soviet architects, party apparatchiks, contingents of vacationing East Germans.

  “Was your tour a lot different for those folks?”

  “How meaning different?”

  “Did you tailor it to a Communist audience? Were there, I don’t know, fewer churches and more…steelworks, or whatever?”

  “Still people are wanting to see churches,” he said. “No, I must say, it was same tour.”

  “Was there anything under Communism that was better than it is today?”

  “Better?” he said. “Under Communism?” He gave me an emphatic frown as he shook his head. “Absolutely nothing.”

  Then I wanted it to be over. The caffeine wore off, and I wanted to go home. I was on some bridge—the greatest bridge in the world, according to Antonin. What was so great about it, other than providing an opportunity to jump?

  Everywhere we’d gone that day, bronze plaques kept popping up to mark some historic occasion. Here resistance fighters had dug a tunnel, here the dissidents had withstood the tanks. The whole city was like that: one giant monument to the heroes and martyrs. But what about those of us just trying to get by? I put on my sunglasses and stared out at the water.

  In the distance was the riverbank I had run down a few nights earlier. There was the bench where I’d sat at three in the morning, trying to catch my breath. If I had keeled over that night, as I’d feared, what would I have left behind? It was plain as day: nothing. No flowery memorial would have marked the spot, certainly no bronze plaque. I might as well kill myself, I thought. Why not? What did my life amount to? What had I done to make a difference? Ah, but I was forgetting. Thanks to me, there were billboards, hundreds of them, in fact, some promoting nothing more than their own availability. I liked to tell myself that the terror that stalked me in Prague was the terror of being sent for, hunted down, caught in the crosshairs of history. But my terror in the light of day wasn’t of that sort at all. It was the terror of failing to even merit the attention. I was a speck of dust.

  Everyone knows it’s important to be on the right side of history. But I had the sudden sense, vertiginous, awful: it didn’t matter. Tell me the difference between the heroism of the martyrs and the perfidy of the traitors once dea
th has leveled them both at last? Perhaps if evil were vanquished, if the virtuous took evil down with them—if, somewhere in Prague, there stood plaques that said “Here lies murder,” “Here lies war,” “Here lies brute force”…but there were no such plaques and never would be. The world was a continuing shit show despite the innumerable heroes and martyrs. Why had I even gotten out of bed?

  Here I should introduce the good Dr. Haymark and convey his opinion that it was time to give the antidepressants a try. But I didn’t need drugs. I needed to get the fuck out of Prague. This kind of provocation was entirely missing in Cleveland, where there were Dunkin’ Donuts, outdoor malls, and a sports arena with an enormous parking lot. You never had to think about shit like this. You couldn’t locate a bronze plaque there if your life depended on it.

  “Beautiful view,” Tony said.

  I turned, and there he was beside me, actually using his eyes to apprehend what lay before us. I made no mention of what my colleagues and I would do to this view if given half the chance. “Yes, it is.”

  A moment of silence passed. I said, “I’m going to Syria.”

  He didn’t reply. He might have thought he misheard me.

  “When I get back to Cleveland,” I said, “I’m going to Syria. Are you following what’s happening in Syria?”

  “In Syria? Yes.”

  “The bombings? The refugees?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding and looking off. He was right not to pursue it. What would Syria want with a forty-three-year-old fat man like me?

  “Please, take your time,” he said, “but I get off now. I meet you there, on other side.”

  I told him I was ready to go, and we set off together.

  “Not my favorite part of Prague, this bridge,” he said.

  “I thought you said it was the greatest bridge in the world.”

  “Capitalist boast,” he replied.

  The remark lingered as we walked past a white-haired accordionist, and in light of it I thought back on other descriptions, other claims. Prague, he had told me as we went along, had the finest architecture, the newest cuisine. The best cars in Europe, the oldest pilsners and pubs. Even what was awful was first in class. The grisliest murders! The bloodiest wars! Everything out of his mouth had been a capitalist boast! I thought I was getting a history lesson, but even history was subject to the prevailing winds, and those winds were currently blowing out of the west.

  The bridge marked a difference. On the bridge he went off script for the first time.

  “You put to me this question. What was better under Communism than it is today? And to this question, I can only say again: absolutely nothing. But now, in time of capitalism, there are maybe too many tourists in Prague.”

  “Isn’t that good for your business?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But for the man, maybe not so good.”

  “What a strange question you put to me,” he said a few minutes later. “Most people want to know only horror stories of Communism, but you ask something very different.”

  We were climbing the stairs to the castle. They were endless, steep, and exhausting, extending at a heavenly grade, and I was winded again. “Let’s take a breather,” I said.

  I reached the ledge and looked out. When had I let the weight go? How had I come to feel so old? When I had the presence of mind again to take in the view, it was of still more gables, dormers, and domes. And in the far distance, cut in half by a rising funicular, a great green swath of civic garden.

  “There was very famous Czech TV show called The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman,” he said. “Have you ever heard of this?”

  “No.”

  “Major Zeman was Communist James Bond. Always bright, tough, and brave, just like Western hero. I am fourteen, fifteen years old, something like this, and we are watching this show every week, me and my father. He was true Communist, believing in socialism, in Soviet Union. Very wonderful man. Now is dead.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Of broken heart,” he said, “after Communism ending. We fought about this. We did not see eye to eye. There was nothing better for anyone in Communist times, nothing nothing. But we are watching Major Zeman together, and both of us love it. I’m calling him Pavel Danes—Prague Spring reformist character. Always drunk.” He smiled. “You make me remember it.”

  “I watched TV with my dad,” I said. “Crime Story, with Dennis Farina.”

  “I think fathers are good at this,” he said.

  When at last we reached the top of the castle, we were greeted by three armed guards. Antonin exchanged some words in Czech with them.

  “They are sending us away,” he said. “Something has happened. He doesn’t say what.”

  We returned down the stairs. In Prague, you go from bronze plaque to bronze plaque saying, “Well, thank God that tragedy is over with, at least.” Then the next day you learn of the hostage situation: three men, six dead, ties to terrorism. Nothing changes. Catholicism gives way to Protestantism, Communism replaces the church, capitalism effaces Communism, terrorism threatens them all. In my travels since visiting Prague, I’ve come across other plaques in other cities—London, Warsaw, Montreal—each a single station in a worldwide memorial for the dream of human progress.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That is where we were having our coffee.”

  The streets unknotted from the historic district, and we left the bridges behind. We entered a new neighborhood, where I saw a sign for a Hooters (“12 Buffalo Wings, 200 Kč”) among the stuccoed cherubs and concert halls. A woman called down to someone from a third-floor apartment, and a fat taxi driver, licking a thumb to better turn a tabloid on a stone step, peered up at her, reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose.

  “‘Killing an Arab,’” Antonin said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Very famous song by the Cure,” he said. “We were at university when we hear this song for first time. We are listening—it is very strange. It changes for us everything. We are starting to dress all in black. Like Robert Smith, you know? At my university, we called this gotici.”

  “Gotici,” I said.

  “If you were gotik, like me, you loved the West. We saw L’Avventura. We read Philip Roth. This was not acceptable to socialist regime after Prague Spring. We had no choice, we do it behind their backs, and maybe for us that is making it sweeter. Maybe.”

  I looked over, and saw a man catching up with lost time.

  “It was not because of Communism that we love this time. But because we are eighteen, nineteen, twenty. We are young. We are curious. We are free. Strange, I know. But true. Under Communism we are free. And because people are hungry, because they are scared, absolutely nothing is better under Communism. But of course everything is better when you are young.”

  He smiled. We walked along in silence.

  “I’m not listening to music anymore,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

  We stood inside the courtyard of a historic palace, now a privately owned boutique hotel. Antonin’s voice fell to a whisper. Here Mozart, devastated by the failure of his Figaro in Vienna, found refuge in Prague, in the former court of Earl Pachta. “Pachta was great patron for Mozart,” Antonin told me, “and in this courtyard, he is making some of his very best music of all time. But now.” He gestured. Among the thriving topiary and marble columns of that hotel lobby stood a selection of Škoda cars, on display as in a game show. There was no trace of Mozart. Behind the cars, glossy banners in Czech advertised what any citizen of the world would recognize as technical specifications and fuel efficiencies. Antonin, drawing me closer, loosened the corner of one of the Škoda banners to reveal a plaque that lay concealed beneath, documenting the maestro’s presence in this very place and commemorating the composition of his Prague Symphony.

  And on Tržiště Street, he stopped me and pointed across the cobblestones.

  “Many years ago,” he continued, “there was bakery just there. Now it is KFC. But when I was a boy, I was c
oming to this bakery with my grandmother. Look there, okay, that arch? When I’m walking with my grandmother, we are going under that arch and up this street, to just there, and the whole street is smelling like fresh baking bread. Was it smelling so good because we are so hungry? Or because I am only six years old? I don’t know. But if someone is putting gun to my head and saying you must tell to me the one thing better under Communism, that is what I’m saying to them. The bread,” he said. “Smelling the bread. Eating the bread.”

  We parted outside the Hotel Superior. It was an abrupt farewell—we shook hands, and he was gone.

  It was, he told me in parting, for him one of the better tours. He was seeing the city as if for the first time—“in new light,” in his words. It was what he loved about Prague, old, familiar Prague: it was never the same city twice. But it also seemed to leave him melancholy. Toward the end, the tour guide had gone quiet.

  Like most things in life, after I’d spent all that time bitching and moaning in anticipation, I was sorry it was over. I asked Antonin what I owed him, but he wouldn’t take money from me. I watched him dissolve into the foot traffic streaming down Ostrovní, and Prague returned to a place where I was alone, utterly alone.

  I retrieved my room key and, surging with feeling, decided to skip the elevator. But something happened to me on the stairs. I was taking them two at a time when I slowed, turned, and abruptly sat down. Overlooking the lobby, I was vaguely aware of a running vacuum and the other rote noises a half-rate hotel makes in the late afternoon. Antonin had been my first history lesson, the only one of any relevance or human scale: history lived inside people’s heads as much as it did on plaques or in some formal record. That was bad news for me. In Cleveland, generic-seeming Cleveland, I could not escape a living history of me doing the most horrible things. Pressing myself on women. Telling bald-faced lies. Cheating. Stealing pills from friends’ cabinets. Fucking their wives. You’d never believe all the shit I’d done in my life if you were just meeting me in a boardroom, sizing up my suit coat and shaking my hand. Half my life I spent as a monster. I’d done worse, much worse, than pluck a little tulip from the ground. I was no innocent. I was a scourge, a blight, a roving maw. I was a maniac. Fuck my fellow man. I hated him the minute he got in my way. Fuck progress if it meant nothing to me personally. I was a terrible burden and an awful premise, and then I was put into practice, to stain Cleveland and terrorize its citizens. And now I was here, an inheritor of Europe, enjoying a day of sightseeing in beautiful Prague.