The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  John did not savor the moment for long as, with a winning smile, Scott took his turn: “I’m really glad John tracked me down here in Budapest.” Emily nodded happily at the warm fraternal sentiment. Mark and Charles looked at their hands. “Really. Like a dream come true.”

  A gloomy waitress passed tantalizingly close to the table, and John made a hopeful wave and managed to snag her flickering attention, but he spoke not a word of Hungarian. Scott, having spent five and a half months teaching English, spoke almost as little. Mark had been submitting to private Hungarian lessons for a month, to no avail. Emily admitted that she was only able to sound out written words and carry on excruciatingly simple conversations, thanks to her daily classes at the embassy, so John turned for help to Charles Gábor, the bilingual son of Hungarians who had fled to the U.S. in 1956.

  “Ó kér egy rumkólát,” Gábor said to the stone-faced waitress. Unresponsive, she walked off.

  “Jesus. What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing.” Gábor shrugged. “I said you wanted another rum-and-Coke.”

  “Well, she looks pissed off,” John said with a sigh. “It’s probably because I’m so obviously a Jew.”

  While physically his self-assessment was undeniably true, his grim assessment of anti-Semitism in Hungarian waitresses killed the mood at the table. His blond, blue-eyed, pug-nosed brother grudgingly consoled him, “No, waiters and waitresses here are all like that. They do it to me, too.”

  “Well, one way or the other, that’s my turn,” said John, and Gábor let out a small and condescending whistle of appreciation at an excellent play, for a beginner.

  Sincerity seemed to have sprung fully formed from Charles Gábor’s head, and among the younger Americans, Canadians, and Britons first trickling then flooding into Budapest in 1989–90, the game’s popularity was one of the few common interests of an otherwise unlikely society. Charles had explained the rules in October ’89, the very evening of his arrival in the city his parents had always told him was his real home. He played it late that jet-lagged night with a group of Americans in a bar near the University of Budapest, and the game spread throughout the anglophones “like a mild but incurable social disease,” in Scott’s words. The virus left the sticky table and was carried to English-as-a-Second-Language-school faculties, folk and jazz bandmates, law-firm junior partners. It was laughingly explained and daily played by embassy interns and backpacking tourists, artists and poets and screenwriters and other new (and often well-endowed) bohemians, and by the young Hungarians who befriended these invaders, voyeurs, naïfs, social refugees. Each day, Sincerity proliferated as Budapest began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making or to cash in on a market in turmoil or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a Cold War–torn city or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic, though one sensed such a potent license would expire far too soon.

  ROUND TWO

  CHARLES LOOKED STERNLY AT JOHN WITH AN EXPRESSION MEANT TO CONVEY a sense of “you’re not going to like this, but I have to speak the truth” and said, “ There will come a point, after this initial post-Communist exuberance wears off, when the Hungarians will realize that you can have too much democracy. They’ll realize they need a slightly stronger hand at the helm, and they’ll make the right choice: a strong Hungary with a real national-corporatist philosophy.” He paused, gazed hard at John and Scott, and concluded, “Like they had in the early forties.”

  Mark: “As my dad always said, one’s pain should always be held in perspective. There is always someone worse off than yourself. That’s a perennial comfort.”

  Emily: “The world contains more nice people than mean people. I really believe that.” John could see she plainly did believe that, and he knew that this basic faith, rare and extraordinary, was precisely what he lacked and needed in order to live a full and important life. He also loved that the duress of telling two lies right off the bat had been too much for Emily, and now she faced the daunting prospect of producing two in a row to finish.

  Scott, not really up for the game at its highest levels, turned to bland possibilities: “I like Pest better than Buda.” He lived and worked in the Buda hills, across the Danube from Pest’s flat urban rings and grids.

  “Boring,” muttered Gábor. “Beneath the dignity of the game. You suck.”

  “Fuck you, fucker,” riposted the English teacher.

  John (whose rum-and-cola had since arrived, placed for no good reason in front of Mark by a similarly sullen but altogether different waitress): “Fifteen years from now people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s. That’s where real life is going on right now, not here.” He reached across the table to gather his drink but knocked Gábor’s liqueur onto Scott’s lap. Scott jumped, accepted Emily’s speedy offer of a napkin, and applied fizzing, high-sodium Carpathian water to the brown herbal goop spreading over the crotch of his running shorts.

  “Blot, don’t rub,” advised Emily with real concern.

  ROUND THREE

  “I HAVE TO ADMIT,” GÁBOR SAID SLOWLY WHEN SCOTT WAS SEATED AGAIN, “I was briefly jealous just there when Emily took such an interest in you, Scott.” Charles raised his eyes to her, then looked away, letting his breath stream out in a flutter of the lips before adding, “And the matter of blotting your shorts,” as if the smutty coda to his comment might disguise its embarrassing inner truth.

  John stopped breathing, stunned at the sudden barriers to the life plan he had been formulating for the last half an hour. Forced to admit that there was personal history at the table of which he was unaware, he finally consoled himself with the likelihood (75 percent) that Charles had been lying. On the other hand, he recalled that while explaining the rules, Charles had cited “one of the game’s most beautiful aspects: Players sometimes don’t know themselves precisely how much truth they’re telling.”

  “You’re a bad person, aren’t you, Charlie?” Emily wagged a finger.

  Charles looked away, hoping to disguise something he had revealed, or to reveal something he only wanted to appear to disguise, and so he tricked another waitress into coming to the table, and before she was able to realize the trap, she found herself taking orders for replacement drinks and food. “Poor woman,” he said as she wound her sour way back into the café. “She’ll never survive the new economy. This whole country needs its ass kicked.”

  “You can’t take two turns, Charles.”

  “No, I know. That was just my opinion.”

  Mark was nodding. “I guarantee there was never sullen service in this café when it was founded. You’re up, Em.” “Oh, jeez. Do we have to go on with this? This isn’t the way normal people should spend their time. Okay, okay, gimme a sec. . . . I think I could live in Hungary forever. I don’t ever want to move back to the States.”

  John smiled at the idea of this most American of girls slowing and settling into a Central European permanence, raising her Hungarian children to be the first trusting and cheerful nonsmokers in the nation’s history.

  Scott’s third-round offering: “English is harder than Hungarian.”

  And John’s: “Scott is our parents’ favorite.”

  One could always feel the same sense of malaise creep over games of Sincerity near round four, a peculiar discomfort just out of range of consciousness, a wave of sleepiness or spaciness. Nongame conversation would proliferate, but also grow testy, as players were commonly exerting a great deal of energy trying to remember what they had already said and what of that had been ostensibly true. That evening in May, it looked as if only Charles Gábor and, perhaps, Emily had not lost their sparkle. As it edged toward six o’clock, everyone but Scott, an avid nutritionist, had consumed too much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. Scott was leaning back in his wrought-iron chair to stare at the softening sky filtered through overhanging branches. John was feeling that dull d
isappointment and heaviness in the legs of stepping up onto an immobile escalator. Mark had gotten drunk off Unicum, the rough herbal liqueur beloved of the Hungarian nation, and, as he tended to grow maudlin under the influence, was massaging a tendril of red hair and gazing at the dusty airline office with a wistful pucker of the lips and a sorrowful tilt of his brow.

  Read on for an excerpt from National Bestseller

  Angelica

  by Arthur Phillips

  I suppose my prescribed busywork should begin as a ghost story, since that was surely Constance’s experience of these events. I fear, however, that the term arouses unreasonable expectations in you. I scarcely expect to frighten you of all people, even if you should read this by snickering candle and creaking floorboards. Or with me lying at your feet.

  So. A ghost story! The scene opens in unthreatening daylight, the morning Joseph cast the child out of their bedroom. The horror tales Constance kept at her bedside always opened peacefully, and so shall hers:

  The burst of morning sunlight startled the golden dust off the enfolded crimson drapery and drew fine black veins at the edges of the walnut-brown sill. The casement wants repainting, she thought. The distant irregular trills of Angelica’s uncertain fingers stumbling across the piano keys downstairs, the floury aroma of the first loaves rising from the kitchen: from within this thick foliage of domestic safety his coiled rage found her unprepared.

  “I have suffered this insult too long,” he said. “I cannot countenance a single night more of this—this reversal of nature. You encourage this upending of my authority. You delight in it,” he accused. “It ends now. Angelica has a bedroom and shall sleep in it. Am I understood? You have made us ridiculous. Are you blind to this? Answer me. Answer!”

  “If she should, my dear, after all, call out for me in the night?”

  “Then go to her or not. The question is of no significance to me, and I strongly doubt that it is of any to her.” Joseph pointed at the small bed, unobtrusive at the foot of their own, as if noticing it for the first time, as if its very existence justified his cruelty. The sight of it refreshed his anger, and he kicked it, pleased to see his boot spoil the bedding. He had calculated the gesture to affect Constance, and she retreated. “Look at me when I am speaking. Would you have us live as a band of Gypsies?” He was shouting now, though she had not contradicted him, had never once in seven years contemplated such rebellion. “Or are you no longer capable of even a single act of obedience? Is that, then, where we have arrived? Move her before I return. Not a word more.”

  Constance Barton held her tongue before her husband’s hectoring. In his imperial mood, when he imagined himself most English even as he strutted like an Italian bravo, reason could sustain no hope of gaining a foothold. “For how long would you have delayed this, if I did not at last relieve you of the womanly decision?” Against the acquiescence of her silence still he raved, intending to lecture her until she pronounced him wise.

  But Constance would have been seeing farther than he was: even if Joseph could deceive himself that he was merely moving a child’s bed, she knew better. He was blind (or would feign blindness) to the obvious consequences of his decision, and Constance would pay for his intemperance. If he could only be coaxed into waiting a bit longer, their trouble would pass entirely of its own accord. Time would establish a different, cooler sympathy between them. Such was the fate of all husbands and wives. True, Constance’s weakened condition (and Angelica’s) had demanded that she and Joseph adapt themselves more hurriedly than most, and she was sorry for him in this. She always intended that Angelica would be exiled downstairs, of course, but later, when she no longer required the child’s protective presence. They were not distant from that safer shore.

  But Joseph would not defer. “You have allowed far too much to elude you.” He buttoned his collar. “The child is spoiling. I have allowed you too much rein.”

  Only with the front door’s guarantee that he had departed for his work did Constance descend to the kitchen and, betraying none of her pain at the instruction, asked Nora to prepare the nursery for Angelica, to call in a man to dismantle the child’s outgrown bed and haul the blue silk Edwards chair up from the parlor to her new bedside. “For when I read to her,” Constance added and fled the Irish girl’s mute examination of her.

  “Watch, Con—she will celebrate the change,” Joseph had promised before departing, either failed kindness or precise cruelty (the child celebrating a separation from her mother). Constance ran her fingers over Angelica’s clothing, which hung lightly in her parents’ wardrobe. Her playthings occupied such a paltry share of the room’s space, and yet he had commanded, “All of this. All of it. Not one piece when I return.” Constance transmitted these excessive orders to Nora, as she could not bear to execute them herself.

  She escaped with Angelica, found excuses to stay away from the disruption until late in the afternoon. She brought her weekly gifts of money, food, and conversation to the widow Moore but failed to drown her worries in the old woman’s routine, grateful tears. She dallied at market, at the tea shop, in the park, watching Angelica play. When they at last returned, as the long-threatened rain broke and fell in warm sheets, she busied herself downstairs, never looking in the direction of the staircase but instead correcting Nora’s work, reminding her to air out the closets, inspecting the kitchen. She poked the bread, criticized the slipshod stocking of the pantry, then left Nora in mid-scold to place Angelica at the piano to practice “The Wicked Child and the Gentle.” She sat across the room and folded the napkins herself. “Which child are you, my love?” she murmured, but found only sadness in the practiced reply: “The gentle, Mamma.”

  As the girl’s playing broke and reassembled itself, Constance finally forced herself up to the second floor and walked back and forth before the closed door of Angelica’s new home. No great shock greeted her inside. In truth, the room’s transformation hardly registered, for it had sat six years now in disappointed expectation. Six years earlier, with his new wife seven months expectant, Joseph had without apparent resentment dismantled his beloved home laboratory to make space for a nursery. But God demanded of Constance three efforts before a baby survived to occupy the room. Even then it remained empty, for in the early weeks of Angelica’s life, mother and daughter both ailed, and it was far wiser that the newborn should sleep beside her sleepless mother.

  In the months that followed, Constance’s childbed fever and Angelica’s infant maladies ebbed and flowed in opposition, as if between the two linked souls there were only health enough for one, so that a year had passed without it ever being advisable to send the child downstairs to the nursery. Even when Angelica’s health restored itself, Dr. Willette had been particularly insistent on the other, more sensitive issue, and so—Constance’s solution—it seemed simplest and surest to keep Angelica tentatively asleep within earshot.

  Nora had placed the chair beside the bed. She was powerful, the Irish girl, more brawn than fat to have hoisted it by herself. She had arranged Angelica’s clothing in the child-sized cherry-wood wardrobe. Bleak, this new enclosure to which Angelica had been sentenced. The bed was too large; Angelica would feel lost in it. The window was loose in its setting, and the noise of the street would surely prevent her sleeping. The bedclothes were tired and dingy in the rain-gray light, books and dolls cheerless in their new places. No wonder he had kept his laboratory here; it was by any standard a dark, nasty room, fit only for the stink and scrape of science. The Princess Elizabeth reclined in a favored position atop the pillows, her legs crossed at the ankle; of course Nora knew Angelica’s favorite doll and would make just such a display of her affection for the girl.

  The blue chair was too far from the bed. Constance pressed her back against it until it clattered a few inches forward. She sat again, smoothed her dress, then rose and straightened the Princess Elizabeth’s legs into a more natural position. She had raised her voice often at Angelica during their day out, barked sharp commands
(just as Joseph had done to her) when kindness would have served better. The day she was destined to lose a piece of her child, the day she wished to hold her ever closer and unchanging—that very day, how easily Angelica had irritated her.

  This shift of Angelica’s residence—this cataclysmic shift of everything—coming so soon after her fourth birthday, likely marked the birth of the girl’s earliest lasting memories. All that had come before—the embraces, sacrifices, moments of slow-blinking contentment, the defense of her from some icy cruelty of Joseph’s—none of this would survive in the child as conscious recollection. What was the point of those forgotten years, all the unrecorded kindness? As if life were the telling of a story whose middle and end were incomprehensible without a clearly recalled beginning, or as if the child were ungrateful, culpable for its willful forgetfulness of all the generosity and love shown to it over four years of life, eight months of carrying her, all the agony of the years before.

  This, today, marked the moment Angelica’s relations with the world changed. She would collect her own history now, would gather from the seeds around her the means to cultivate a garden: these panes of bubbled glass would be her “childhood bedroom window,” as Constance’s own, she recalled now, had been a circle of colored glass, sliced by wooden dividers into eight wedges like a tart. This would be the scrap of blanket, the texture of which would calibrate Angelica’s notion of “soft” for the rest of her life. Her father’s step on the stair. His scent. How she would comfort herself in moments of fear.

  A stuttered song usurped unfinished scales, but then it, too, stopped short, abandoned in the midst of its second repetition. The unresolved harmony made Constance shudder. A moment later, she heard Angelica’s light step on the stair. The girl ran into her new room and leapt upon the bed, swept her doll into her arms. “So here is where the princess secluded herself,” she said. “We searched high and low for Your Highness.” She ceremoniously touched each of the bed’s dark posts in turn, then examined the room from ceiling to floor, playing a prim courtier. She visibly struggled to ask a question, moved her lips silently as she selected her words. Constance could almost read her daughter’s thoughts, and at length Angelica said, “Nora says I shall sleep here now.”