Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  I probably fell in love with Amanda fifteen years before we met, when a girl of my age named Sophie stuck her tongue out at me while I queued with my family to receive Communion at the church of St. Wulfram, whichever degenerate and parochial bastard he was, in Grantham. Sophie wore a pale blue choir frock and her sandy blond hair in a ponytail. She was angelic and rude like Amanda.

  * * *

  —

  The door to the apartment stood at the top of two flights of wide marble stairs in an Art Nouveau building in the Jewish Quarter, the façade adorned with stylized pharaohs and brickwork meant to resemble mother-of-pearl. The Spanish Synagogue was across the street. All the best bars and newest restaurants were five minutes’ walk away.

  As he showed us into the flat, the estate agent was evasive. The date of the building was unknown, the cost of utilities uncertain, the previous tenants untalkative, but probably Russian. The landlady he’d met only once was certainly Russian, or at least no Czech woman was ever named Maja. Some of the furnishings—decorative plates on gold-plated stands atop an unpainted plywood bookshelf—might have been Ukrainian folk art, but he didn’t know if that stuff would remain. It didn’t. The number of tenants with access to our own future stairwell if we signed the lease was somewhere between twelve and sixteen, but the building itself was a quadrangular complex with access to each façade and an indeterminate number of communal and maintenance doorways. There was, somewhere, an elevator, or possibly more than one. He was unsure how long the flat had been on the market.

  Amanda asked the questions, though none of the answers mattered. She was tired of my elbows and knees when we slept on my pullout sofa in Žižkov, and we were both exhausted by the carnival of trolls, ogres, and deviants at Hotel Doom. We had known each other only two months, but met daily and shared all, and we were determined to start and end each day with conversations over the same pillow. We could argue, of course, later over the size and color of the pillow, or get several. First we needed a roof.

  And perversely, we loved the flat. Some previous tenant had painted the bedroom walls a lurid brothel pink; instead of repainting it Amanda bought faux leopard skin rugs and a zebra stripe duvet. We called the place Graceland. The kitchen floor had a fever of black-and-white tiles in fragments glued back together, and one sky-blue wall with framed pictures of esoteric plants captioned in Latin. Opposite the blue wall stood a substantial piece of cabinetry installed sometime in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The vertical surfaces of this cabinetry were all stained and gashed with mysterious evidence of events in the distant past, as if a previous tenant had a penchant for throwing cats. Our bathtub was sufficient for two people to sit in with books, hot drinks, and ashtrays in the evenings. We had a running dispute about whether Matisse or Mucha should preside over the bedroom; I favored Mucha because of his local origin and affiliations, but Amanda thought him too commercial and suspected that I just wanted a lovely nymphet to look at every morning. Without telling me, she bought and had framed the kind of Matisse print in which six blobs of paint implied a humanoid figure, but it did look very good on the wall, and she invited me to choose something for the bathroom.

  The only drawback to the place was a German toilet with a shelf of the lay-and-display kind. You deposited your product on a kind of dry shelf where you could inspect it for clues to your health before flushing. Toilet fashion had since evolved in Germany, we gathered, but we were stuck with a relic of another era.

  * * *

  —

  We had been there only two weeks when a neighbor fell to his death from a fourth-floor balcony facing a courtyard. We didn’t witness the event or see the body. Amanda answered a knock on the door one Saturday morning and found a police officer who spoke no English on the other side. After some initial confusion the officer recruited our neighbor Gabi to translate. Gabi did not speak English either, but she and Amanda spoke the same stripe of French.

  The man, in his seventies, had been feeding pigeons. Had we known him? Seen anything? I went to our balcony to look.

  In summer weather through open windows we heard invisible fathers yelling at invisible mothers who yelled at invisible children who cried. “Bohemians are not very bohemian,” said Amanda. We avoided the balcony and the courtyard because it gave us the feeling of having passed from the first world thrum of street level into some dire pocket of deepest Ukraine; we had in our flat some comfort and security, but just over the balcony’s edge lay ravaging want and madness.

  The courtyard was a shadowy box canyon full of rear windows, laundry lines, and garbage. The three police officers below were the first people I had seen in it. One officer offered a cigarette to another. The third was peering up. I thought I dimly remembered a diminutive white-haired man so wiry he might have just slipped through the balcony’s iron grate.

  When the officer had gone Amanda and I both felt a need to get out of the flat. We walked forty-five minutes to the nearest croissant at the French Institute café, and we shared the International Herald Tribune over coffee. We didn’t discuss the dead man. By unspoken agreement that could wait. Suddenly it seemed that our courtyard might be haunted.

  We wandered over the river to an unfamiliar area. Both of us happily agreed that the purpose of a long walk is to get lost. Mission accomplished, we washed sandwiches down with beer in an unfamiliar bar and somehow made our way slowly home, where we found a police summons taped to our door with a handwritten explanation in French by Gabi. If we were unable to find a willing translator one would be provided for us.

  PIGEON 2 (B)

  The uses of communist-era buildings remained controversial, particularly those in which people were tortured and killed. The police station, Ivan explained to us as he drove us there, occupied a structure where nothing terrible was known to have happened, yet the archives of who informed on whom had been kept there. Everyone agreed it would have been better to locate the police force in a temple of violence than a shrine to mistrust, but the authorities imagined that they were being sensitive. We pulled up to a long domino of a plate glass and granite building, and Ivan led the way inside and announced us at the reception desk.

  We were called in for questioning and were about to experience a feeling that Czechs of Ivan’s generation must have had every day. There was a permanent dread in the air. The detective was in his fifties, judging from the proportion of grey to white in his hair and mustache and the lines engraved in his jowls. Before he had put one question to us through Ivan I had formulated several: Had he held his job through the revolution? If so, what had his role been in the suppression of dissent before and during it? Under what conditions had he begun his job, and how had he advanced without being purged when the wind changed? Why wasn’t he working part-time in a factory or drinking beer and feeling ostracized in his home village? There was a Czech saying Ivan had told me about that under communism it was okay to be ahead of your time, but not by more than about six months. The political sensibilities of those who weathered the transition were suspect. Elsewhere senior bankers were converting state assets into Spanish and Portuguese villas for their families through suspect privatization schemes, seasoned politicians were consolidating power in association with known villains, and entire towns were being turned over to Russian mafiosi, along with much of the national infrastructure—our policeman was likely quite tame as rogues go. When Czech people hear British and American people grumbling about shady politicians, said Amanda, later, they must want to pat us on the head.

  Fortunately we had Ivan, like Virgil, as our guide. The detective and Ivan exchanged flurries of Czech, and Ivan turned to us and said, “Inspector Sokol apologizes for the inconvenience, but says that sadly he cannot question the pigeons.”

  Both men spoke for a while as if Amanda and I were not there, with Ivan pausing occasionally to summarize what had been said. The inspector wanted to know our jobs, legal status, length of stay
to date and intended length of stay if known, and how we came to be the sole foreigners in our building. Ivan was able to answer all of the above on our behalf. While they talked I examined the room, trying to figure out which division we were in: there was no helpful sign reading Homicide or Larceny in English. Various notices in Czech were pinned to a pegboard, and an electric typewriter sat next to a rotary phone on the inspector’s desk, but it was not his office—it was too clean for that. It was a space for taking statements. I had not noticed initially that we were being recorded.

  The inspector asked whether we had ever observed or spoken to our unfortunate neighbor. Neither of us could remember doing so. Had we noticed, observed, or heard anything on the afternoon or evening in question? We had not. Amanda remained calm and cool throughout; I kept expecting the inspector to break into English and say, This will go down on your permanent record, or for us to be dragged to a small cell.

  He continued: How well did we know our other neighbors? Not at all, except for the owner of the beagle who greeted all passersby on the second-floor landing whenever she was cleaning.

  The inspector leaned back in his chair and considered the ceiling before speaking to Ivan at length in carefully chosen words; Ivan leaned back in his chair and considered the ceiling before delivering a carefully worded translation; the manner in which we received the information was of the nature of a mouse traveling through a snake.

  “There is little or nothing suspicious,” said Ivan, “says the inspector. But the man in question was a known wanker.”

  I looked at Amanda in hopes she would know whether this was meant literally or figuratively.

  “In the sense of a public nuisance, or an unpleasant person?” I said.

  “A tosser? A twat?” said Amanda. Ivan plunged into his dictionary.

  “A dickhead?” I said.

  “An asshole,” said the inspector, in English.

  “An informant,” said Ivan, not looking up.

  TRIUMPH

  We never learned the man’s name nor how many lives he had ruined or in what ways. Apparently you could just say, under communism, Elliott belongs to the jazz club, and thus sentence Elliott to ten years in prison, and the point, as far as I could tell, was not that Elliott was a dangerous radical but that in prison there is no jazz. In other respects communism sounded pretty grand to me. I had several students who were nostalgic for the days when your only obligation was beer in the garden on a summer afternoon because there wasn’t any work to do but there was total job security. Under the new Western rules there still wasn’t any work to do but you had to look busy. The notion that work itself was somehow virtuous had been foolishly imported.

  Some of the dead man’s things appeared on a wooden bookshelf, presumably his, inside the foyer of our building, with a sign in Czech declaring all of it free. There were some egg cups, a couple of framed nudes in pencil, several books in Czech and two in Russian, a blue vase of famed Bohemian crystal, some lamps, a clock, an apron, several worn and distinguished men’s caps, a Florida postcard with Wish You Were Here in English on one side and Czech scribble on the other (did the man have a child or children studying, vacationing, or living in America?), a mirror, some plants, various spices, a transistor radio, a miniature glazed Buddha, a one-piece woman’s swimsuit with fraying elastic around the edges, some swimming goggles, and a stack of newspapers.

  “We could use that mirror for the hallway,” I suggested.

  “I don’t want to look in it every day and wonder if I’m a wanker, too,” said Amanda.

  She pulled out the newspapers—all of them yellowing and dating from the late ’70s—and said she hoped they captured some pivotal moment in the man’s life so that we could at least learn his name. Although we couldn’t read the papers we soon discovered that their common denominator was not him but an Olympic swimmer—a beautiful Czech woman photographed at moments of triumph, receiving medals, plaques, and accolades, giving interviews. She had a different smile for each photographer but never appeared without one, and she always met the camera with bright inquisitive eyes. The swimsuit in one newspaper photo appeared to be the same as the swimsuit next to the glazed Buddha. The only thing we gleaned about our deceased neighbor was that he had once been in love.

  Neither of us slept well for the following week. I dreamed in agitation of pigeons and swimmers, and I dreamed of conversation and intimacies on the balcony with Amanda, shattered by one or the other or both of us falling fifty feet. One morning I was inspired to suggest marriage and she burst into laughter. The idea had come to me in a paroxysm of fear; anything could happen to anybody at any time, and the only defense was to agree that it wasn’t going to happen between us.

  “I am not here,” said Amanda, “to be your last resort.”

  * * *

  —

  One of our neighbors at Graceland was a German woman named Sonja with a nuance-smashing communication style. Amanda said that she felt the purpose of any question Sonja asked was really to say, What’s wrong with you? Sonja told me privately that as an American I was at least capable of direct speech, unlike, presumably, the decorous Czechs and the wily British. She was from Düsseldorf, but she worked for the EU. She had been successively posted to Brussels, Strasbourg, and Prague, which sounded like a career going downhill but represented growing autonomy and responsibility. It also involved a sickening deterioration in the standards of public swimming pools and teeth, among other things. She returned to Germany as often as possible, where she swam twice a day and got her teeth polished often.

  I found her rifling through the dead man’s things in the foyer one evening when I got home from work. She was looking through the newspaper clippings in particular, and it turned out that her interest in swimming paid off. The woman pictured, she told me, had broken a toe poolside at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, but swam anyway to claim the silver in the women’s 200-meter freestyle, losing to her East German adversary by one-tenth of a second—a difference surely attributable to the toe and the distraction the pain shooting through her leg must have caused her. When asked later by an international press gang how she had broken her toe, she said, “Oh, I can’t do anything right on land.” After that she was applauded and admired much more than the gold medalist, who sulked over losing the limelight.

  The newspaper didn’t say, but Sonja knew, that later that month the swimmer defected, and never returned to Prague.

  The Soviet tanks rolled into the Old Town Square in August, said Sonja, and the Olympics were held in October, and in November in Vienna the United Nations ratified the most successful international treaty of all time, the Convention on Road Signs and Signals. I began to worry that what lay ahead was some kind of German conversation in which everything is equally interesting. Sonja’s father had worked for the West German ministry of the environment, and he had told Sonja dozens of stories of Czechs and Slovaks escaping the Soviet occupation on skis and canoes into Austria. Negotiations over stop signs and speed limits took place in an atmosphere of dread and dismay, and Vienna’s Red Cross shelters were full of Czechoslovak refugees. The year 1968 was also the beginning of the Open Era in tennis, when professionals were invited to compete against amateurs. I already knew that since Milan had mentioned it many times, and could seemingly supply the names of champions of every major tournament for any given year since.

  The Olympic swimmer’s defection had been on everyone’s lips in Vienna. She had said she was taking a short walk to test her toe. Of course she was being followed, but the Mercedes waiting for her was unexpected. Afterward it was thought that she had broken her toe on purpose, or perhaps that she had not broken it at all. A further mystery was how such a person could be of any value or consequence to the West; that is, who sent the car and why.

  Sonja did not know where the swimmer had defected to and suggested that perhaps she had been given a new identity. “But,�
�� I said, “she was briefly in every newspaper in the world. Surely she would be noticed.”

  “You think people are that observant?” said Sonja, and it did sound like What’s wrong with you?

  Her views raised a whole suite of questions about our newly deceased neighbor. Had the swimmer obtained valuable intelligence from him? Had he turned nasty after or because of her defection? What if, after the revolution, they had made contact, and she wrote that she was happy in Des Moines, that her three children had simple strong American names and spoke only English? I asked Sonja if she had ever spoken to the man.

  “Twice,” she said. “Once he helped me at the front door with some groceries. He said I should shop at the potraviny instead of the lahůdky because better selection and lower prices. It felt like a criticism, but he was right.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “If so, I have forgotten. The other occasion was a sunny day when he suggested I should grab a man and go boating. I thought that somewhat rude, too. As though he pitied my solitary condition.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “No. The river is filthy.”

  I asked if she knew anything else about him, whether she had ever seen him on the street or run into him at the lahůdky or the potraviny. For that matter as a Czech man he must have had a nearby barstool accustomed to his presence.

  “Yes,” she said, “but the Czechs keep strange hours. The elderly all ride the Metro at rush hour, have you noticed? So they can be reassured they aren’t dead yet.”

  I thought of my Žižkov landlady and how I never saw or heard her go out. Those vile pastries had to originate somewhere. I noticed after speaking to Sonja that on the Metro every young woman was beautiful and every young man was injured. Canes and crutches and casts, eye patches, bandages, and back braces; I put it down to the national love of ice hockey, tennis, and skiing. Yet she was right about rush hour, too. Whenever you needed to get somewhere you had to elbow hordes of stooped grey-haired women and bald crippled old men, and none of them had any companion or compelling reason for rushing across town at 7:30 a.m., unless they were all seeing the same doctor, simultaneously. I thought this must be what happens if you never learn trust. Fortunately the communists were extremely good at public transport and all the stations were very attractive. Each tunnel was lined with space-age aluminum panels in thoughtful color schemes, featuring either large bubbles or indentations, convex and concave, breasts and anti-breasts, all the length of the platform. My favorite station was Pankrác, because it sounded like “punk rock,” until Vlasta told me it was the site of a famous prison where more than a thousand people were guillotined during the Second World War.