“And the baby, what happens to her in this Hollywood ending?”
“That’s the tragic part. They have to leave her behind,” I said, the corner of my eyebrow tipping heavenward with great significance. Grand romance, stirring fight scenes, nail-biting suspense, and, when the tail credits roll, not a dry eye in the house. Then, for the sequel, Tom returns to Prague as a resistance fighter, on a mission to find and rescue Julia’s baby!
Monika said, “Sounds very Hollywood.”
“You never go see Hollywood films?”
Monika shrugged, meaning she did, but didn’t like to admit it.
I said, “That’s my point. Everybody goes. I respect the European attitude of art for art’s sake. But the problem is, art is business and business is money. If you want to make films you have to make money. Europeans make films based on intellect, meaning they’re mostly enjoyed by intellectuals, because after all, if we’re going to be candid about this, not many people are interested in or capable of intellect. Hollywood makes films based on emotions, so they make films for everybody, because everybody has emotions. One system is elitist and the other panders to the lowest common denominator. The question then is whether to make films for the public or for twelve intellectuals in an art house in Paris. Me, I’ll take the public and a fat paycheck.” Listening to myself speak, I realized I might sound too commercial. No artistic soul. The truth was, I did feel capable of that special personal project, though I had never bothered to articulate it. It wasn’t my fault the market for such projects didn’t exist. It was the system. I said, “I’d love to write one of those small, personal films one day. Nothing I’d like more than to forget bankability, pay-or-play, and merchandising deals and make a film that comes from my heart, that would define the world as I see it, something really me, you know?”
Monika hid her laughter in a crumpled napkin.
“What?” I said. “What’s so funny?”
Her face flushed red behind white linen. “I think you’ll make a hundred million dollars one day,” she said.
I took it as a compliment.
Admiring the views of Prague from Charles Bridge later that night, I waited patiently until the angle of Monika’s gaze dropped from the castle, and then I kissed her. I had anticipated a kiss more romantic than passionate, but Monika had other intentions. She turned her hips and screwed into me. Her mouth found my neck, my throat, my mouth again. I let my hands cascade down her sides and eddy under the hem of her miniskirt. When I gently slipped the elastic bands and brushed her sex, she leaned back against the stone ledge and I thought of our two bodies igniting in free fall from the bridge, the rush of air blowing our burning clothes above our heads as we drop, entwined, burning like fireworks to a cindered terminus.
“Someone’s coming,” she said, and with a deft twist left me pressing my groin against a patch of stone and wondering if a pun was intended. Two pairs of Doc Martens clomped past and stopped at the next statue. Giddy voices. American slang. Shaggy hair and slackly vacant faces. Hippie-spawn. Like many young Americans in Prague, they fancied themselves musicians. They sat cross-legged, an upended hat for tips placed in front. Their guitars strummed out a paean to rebellious youth while two voices began a hopeless search for harmony.
Monika approached the musicians, took a coin from her purse, and dropped it in the hat. Her small act of generosity annoyed me. A couple of young girls drifted past, sat in front of the empty hat, and began to sing along. Soon a small crowd would gather, the smell of pot would waft through the air, wine would pass from hand to hand, and the voices of brother and sisterhood would rise in chorus. What inanity. I took Monika by the arm and invited her to my apartment. She broke away and ran to the middle of the bridge, where she leapt onto the ledge and caught the sleeve of one of the bridge’s nineteen stone saints. Profiled against the night sky she looked so like a goddess among saints I solemnly kissed her slippered feet, then not so solemnly licked her ankles and calves.
“Come home with me!” I cried.
“I can’t go home with you.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t understand,” she said.
There are few challenges more compelling than one to understanding. “Sex isn’t that important,” I lied.
“Sex is important. But with Sven here, I can’t.”
I must have groaned when she mentioned her brother.
“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand you’re a grown woman who should do as she pleases.”
“When everyone around you dies and just one person is your entire family, you do not just do as you please, grown up or not.”
“I’m afraid you lost me there.”
“I told you about my family.”
I blinked once, twice. The Gypsy girl, the count, the gardener’s assistant. I had taken Monika’s story as fairy tale, had forgotten that to her it was real as history. I said, “The baby who escaped the Nazis, that was your mother? But how did you get to be Danish?”
“How did you know I was Danish?” Monika seemed not just surprised but alarmed.
“You told me.”
“I have an excellent memory for this. I did not tell you.”
Her passport. I was an idiot to forget a minor detail like that. I so believed myself an honest man with her, I mistakenly assumed I was one.
“You just seem Danish. Your accent.”
Monika’s stare did not forgive. Was it possible she suspected? I ransacked memory for a clue and said, “You and your brother were speaking Danish last night, in the club.”
Monika climbed down from the ledge and leaned against the hem of a saint’s robe, deciding whether or not to believe me. I didn’t question why my knowledge of her nationality should be so important. She said, “My mother escaped to Denmark in 1968.”
Nineteen sixty-eight. The year of Nixon, Prague Spring, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact nations.
“She was running from the Russians?”
“Not at first. She knew a Danish man there, Sven’s father. When the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, Mother stayed. Maybe she knew, even then, that she was not going to have good luck. She died, with Sven’s father, in a boating accident when I was five.”
“My God,” I said.
“It’s bad luck in my family to fall in love. Sven is all I have.”
“But he’s your half-brother after all, not your husband.”
“You saw how possessive he is. If he thought I loved you, I don’t know what he’d do.”
“Is that a warning?”
“If you want. I meant it to be a confession. Confessions never have just one meaning.”
“What if I confessed I’m already in love with you?” I said, and even though I felt astonished such words could come from my lips and not be an outright lie, I wasn’t certain the words were mine; it seemed I cited lines in front of a camera. When she kissed me in response I was struck with the feeling that Cut! would be called at any moment, the true feeling between us would dissolve when the director announced it a take, and we would march back to our separate trailers to prepare for the next scene.
“Tell your brother you need time alone,” I begged. “Travel by train to a little town I know, Český Krumlov. I’ll book a room there. Will you do it? Will you come?”
8
Early the next afternoon I went to the American Express office on Václavské náměstí, where the first of every month I drew $750 from my account in Los Angeles. That same day a like sum was deposited into my account from a trust fund left by my grandfather. The size of my inheritance was much larger than such a paltry stipend indicates, but owing to the watchfulness of my father, who served as executor of the will, I was not allowed to touch the capital or enjoy the full benefit of interest payments until I reached thirty years of age. Father did not trust the salubrious effect of money on my character. He wished to keep me out of the gutter, but close enough to smell it, in the vain hope of encouragi
ng a work ethic. His strategy was thwarted by Prague’s post-Communist economy, where $750 was a princely sum. My rent, which was double that of anyone else I knew, totaled $300. I lived quite well on the balance in a town where a buck could buy a movie ticket, a pack of good American cigarettes, or a liter of the best beer in Europe. When I needed mad money, I traded a few of my photocopied hundred-dollar bills. It gratified me to obey the letter of Father’s rules while violating their spirit.
I began to pack for Český Krumlov late that night. According to plan, I was to leave the next morning. Monika would take an afternoon train to avoid her brother nosing out the true purpose of her trip. We were to be gone three days. First thing, I counted out a dozen lubricated supersensitive condoms from my drawer and tossed them into a suitcase. Call me an optimist. Then casual clothing, a book for skimming on the train, and, lastly, a Hasselblad camera I’d bought, following my French buddy Marcel’s example. Just past eleven a persistent finger on the buzzer forced my eye to the peephole, where on the other side of the fish-eye lens stood Monika in a fetching black minidress. The prospect of early consummation trilled through my groin.
“Put on your coat,” she ordered when I swung open the door.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“To a nightclub.”
“But isn’t it late?”
“You don’t want to be with me?”
“Of course I do, but why don’t we just stay here?”
I tried to catch her in a casual embrace and maneuver both of us onto the bed, but she adroitly slipped into the entry hall.
“If you don’t want to go with me, that’s okay,” she said, clearly meaning that if I didn’t go with her, I might not see her the next day in Český Krumlov. I grabbed my coat and met her outside. A taxi waited by the curb. I reconciled myself to the probability that I would not sleep more than a couple of hours that night. The taxi careened through streets designed for peasant carts and the occasional horseman, streets no longer than one hundred yards laid out at oblique angles, like sticks bunched together and dropped. When the taxi sped around a corner, I took advantage of centrifugal force and leaned into her. She pushed me away but fell into my arms on the next curve. As we kissed, her hand slid up my thigh. I said, “I want to know every inch of your skin, every ripple of thought through your mind. I want to know your past, your present, your future.”
When we kissed again, lights flashed behind my closed eyes: her face an image pulled down, registered, and shot through with light twenty-four times a second. Although my sexual experiences were many and varied, everything I knew about love came from Hollywood, as I had been able to love only vicariously, through the performance of actors on screen. Celluloid moved me in a way that flesh and blood could not. That night in the taxi I sat in the dark of my eyelids and watched a movie of myself kissing Monika. I became not only the audience but the actor performing the scene, and the man on whom the actor based his performance—I even felt in some vague way I directed the scene. Though I’d watched myself perform before, I’d never felt the performance connect to the man, and this merging of theatrical and human identities fulfilled me in a way that I had never before experienced, not even in the sanctity of a cinema.
There was something naturally theatrical about Monika, and when I contemplate why she alone has been able to awaken human feeling in me, I’m always drawn to the similarity between her and certain Nordic actresses, particularly Garbo and Bergman, who could convey with a gesture, glance, or single spoken word the existence of a rich and tragic past. I envied Monika the Old World charm of having a past. I had a Los Angeles past: bulldozed, paved over, rezoned, and rebuilt to gleaming modern standards, a past pounded to dust by skyscrapers and ribboned in freeway. Every now and then when something troubled me and I didn’t quite know why, I hired an analyst to pull from my tarry depths an old bone. We cleaned it off and admired it together and guessed its meaning: a cancellate fragment from an uncaring father, or the compact splinter of a distant mother? The truth of the archaeology didn’t matter. Invent a history to give it reason. But of the immediate past, the remembered past, the uninvented past, I had none. The future continually reinvented me.
When I opened my eyes again, the road had widened and the taxi hurtled at great speed through what seemed to be a canyon of stacked concrete blocks. A light rain drew slashes across the passenger window. Squares of light gleamed in monotonous pattern beyond the glass. Squinting through the rain, I caught the blurred suggestion of laundry hanging from a balcony.
“Panelaks,” Monika said. “Socialist housing for the masses.”
The driver executed a dizzying combination of turns on streets identical, one to the next, and pulled in front of a concrete apartment building claimed to be our destination. I stepped into a landscape of tramped mud, asphalt, bits of toilet paper, broken glass, and the smell of spilled beer. Rows of identical apartment blocks crumbled into the mud. Modern ruins. I asked Monika what could possibly interest her in such a dismal environment. She led me to the nearest ruin and through a set of glass doors to a sepia-skinned man—I took him to be Indian or Pakistani at first glance—who demanded a hundred Czech crowns from me before allowing us to pass. The floor trembled with a retrogressive disco beat.
“You’ve discovered an underground music club,” I guessed.
“This is the culture house for Romanies,” she said. My step faltered.
Concerned by my sudden sweat and paling skin, Monika asked, “Are you all right?”
No. She did not say that. In my imagination she said that. She noticed nothing. I needed an excuse to stop, turn around, go back. She pulled me down a hallway lit with a single sputtering incandescent. At the end of the hall spilled a rough stream of brown skin and black hair. My glance darted from one half-obscured face to the next, searching for a familiar hook of nose or twisting brow, any prominent feature to aid recognition of the Gypsies with whom I exchanged my counterfeit bills. How was it possible that Monika, who seemed to know everything, did not notice that I was turning to stone? She led me into an auditorium muddied by cigarette smoke. A hundred men and perhaps fifty women sat at cheap cafeteria-style tables or danced at the opposite end. The moment I entered the room the men began to whisper mouth to ear and the women to stare coldly in my direction. Monika claimed two chairs at the back wall, asked what I wanted to drink, and when I stuttered out my answer merged into the crowd at the bar.
As the only non-Gypsy in the room, I was watched by everyone; those few not looking directly at me watched in the expressions of those who were. I resisted the urge to glance wildly about, looking for the face that would recognize me, shout an accusation in a language I had no hope of understanding, and in that crowded room begin my dismemberment. I took slow deep breaths of secondhand smoke. No one could possibly recognize me. I took precautions when changing bills. Baseball cap, jeans, tennis shoes, map in hand, and camera strapped around my neck: a perfect caricature of the American tourist. Dressed that night in Armani herringbone sport coat and black slacks, I bore no resemblance to that other creature. It occurred to me I was staring too long at my hands, clenched together on the table. I casually glanced around. Naturally everyone noticed and immediately looked away, so that it appeared no one watched. A good front was all. I must pretend confidence. A smile cracked my lips apart. I was cleverer than any man there and need not be afraid of anyone. The man next to me huddled over a mug of beer. His teeth looked like a line of infantry decimated by machine-gun fire. He glanced my way. I held on to my smile. He measured me in sections, like a butcher might a cut of meat, and sank his ruined teeth into the head of his beer. I shouldn’t smile, I decided. Monika set my drink on the table, a double Scotch on the rocks, and said she wanted to dance.
“Here?”
“If you don’t want to, I can dance by myself.”
Monika alone on the dance floor would be dangerous provocation. The DJ played a song by Queen, the most popular group in Prague that year, though most o
f the natives were happily ignorant of the slang meaning of the group’s name. Where were the fiddles, the slashing dancers in peasant skirts or shiny chinos, the raging fire, the bottles of wine; in short, where were the Gipsy Kings? The young men affected the Western look of jeans and button-down shirts, the young women miniskirts, dark hose, and floral print blouses, and together they danced the same amorphous disco found all over the world. Their sartorial style varied little from one individual to the next, as if a group decision had been made to adopt that particular veneer of Western culture, with variations unacceptable. I shuffled my feet and bobbed my head and tried to keep close to Monika, who could not sway her hips in any way not charged with sexual invitation. The men watched her like hungry prisoners. The women looked like they wanted to poison her. I was mostly ignored.
“You’ve been here before?” I shouted above the music.
“Several times.”
We returned to the table, where I bolted my Scotch.
Monika said, “The men here are different from the Czechs. They’re violent, and violence interests me.”
“Why?”
“Because death interests me.”
I normally considered death obsessions evidence of an arrested adolescence. My normal perceptions never applied to Monika. Just as her every gesture held profound meaning, her brooding over death seemed instead proof of a tragic nature.
“I don’t think I’ll live to be thirty,” she said.
“Nonsense. You’ll live to seventy.”
“But I don’t want to live to seventy. I don’t want to be old. I don’t want plans. I don’t want a job, family, pension. The past is death. The future is death. That leaves only the moment.” Monika took my face in her hands and kissed me. I could taste the melancholy on her lips and traced along the dolphin surfaces of her tongue a delight in personal tragedy. Monika seemed as much in love with her history as bound to it. I closed my eyes and drank as much of her as I could hold.
Gypsy Hearts Page 8
