Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  I got to know Prague in novel ways. If there were changes in civic administration or traffic regulation we translated something about it, along with countless leases, deeds, press releases, and contracts. I learned in detail if not in advance about scores of arrests and indictments. Coincidentally Amanda started bringing home reports and articles and draft speeches that she corrected for her clients. Her homework had international scope: most of it corresponded somehow to the expansion of the European Union. Sometimes I helped her on weekends, sitting at a sidewalk café on Parĭžska Street. I said we were just like Sartre and de Beauvoir and she snorted. She worked and wasn’t sure what I did all day. She’d take philosophy over business waffle in a heartbeat, she said.

  Employed, I felt even more lonely and isolated. Hana and I were tired of each other by the end of each day, and socializing with Terence was a terrible mistake most of the time, depending upon which conspiracy theory he had embraced that week. Once in a while he was almost charming, when reminiscing about a summer spent painting houses and getting stoned in Maine, eating his weight in lobsters and ice cream. Other times he was morose about his tenure in the CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, or all four—counting Soviet tanks on the East German border, or listening to Russian voices from the back of a van in East Berlin. His details were interchangeable. His thesis was that he was a war hero. Perhaps he was and could not therefore tell any truths. On the other hand, he was ferociously intelligent, doing crosswords in Hungarian for fun while getting drunk in the mornings.

  Terence’s flat was in a small menacing square in the Old Town, ten minutes’ walk from Graceland. Once a week I was dispatched to buy coffee and snacks for the whole office, which I enjoyed even though it cut into my earnings, and Hana’s, too. Directly across the square behind a wall that never encountered direct sunlight was a law firm. I had seen Valerie coming and going half a dozen times before I recognized her. We compared notes one lunch hour and decided our jobs were very similar. Over lunch the following week she suggested that together we could probably draw a map of Prague showing the net worth of notable residents plus who was sleeping with whom. On Fridays Amanda joined us after work for drinks in an expat bar called La Casa Blů. Dave never showed and Valerie didn’t talk about him much.

  I said one Friday that there was a problem with Valerie’s proposed map of Prague, an omission. Amanda rolled her eyes. I tried to tell her about my recent discovery of an item in an American newspaper about a Czech silver medalist who had recently died in a Galveston nursing home. She was survived by three children and eight grandchildren. Her husband had passed away two years previously. No mention was made of her toes, although it was noted that she had emigrated in 1968, as if this were a commonplace occurrence. I was sure that I could do a better job of reporting than that, and I wondered how or if Czech newspapers covered her death. I learned that she was born and raised in Kutná Hora, and that in later life she became a goldsmith.

  But Amanda wasn’t interested. On this and other things, she said, the world had moved on except for me.

  I told Valerie and she promised to ask someone at work how they would go about determining the identity of our former neighbor. There was surely a property register at the very least, an electoral roll, some footprint.

  She came up short on those things. The apartment building had until recently belonged to a collective whose individual members’ names were not recorded. But Valerie also brought with her a huge and horrifying brochure. Unknown to us the building had been purchased by a developer who envisioned it entirely renovated and filled with IKEA flat pack beds for tourists to sleep on. The courtyard might get flowers and a fountain. The roof would be retiled with Australian terra-cotta.

  SOVIET SQUIRRELS

  Mr. Cimarron made a series of large objects out of real hammers and real sickles. The wooden shafts of the hammers could be aligned as a platform, wall, or roof, with the hammer heads on alternating sides. The sickles served as adornments and two sickles facing each other formed apertures of adjustable size. When I asked him what they were for he said birds.

  “Don’t you think they might injure themselves on the blades?” I said. I had stopped by his studio unheralded and unannounced.

  “When is the last time you used a sickle?” he said.

  “Never.”

  “Exactly. They haven’t been sharpened for several decades.”

  “And you are confident that a bird is going to want to live in one of these things.”

  “Not necessarily a birdhouse. A bird study. A trysting place.”

  “I’m sure they have some artistic merit,” I said, “but I’ll be surprised if your birds appreciate it.”

  “Look at this one,” he said, holding aloft a kind of large spider with a wooden abdomen and six curved pointy legs. “And pretend you’re a squirrel.”

  Put that way, each object looked eminently purposeful and effective. The blades didn’t need to be sharp.

  “It’s not like you to make something useful,” I said.

  “It pains me,” he said. “But at least I am not helping people.”

  “Where do you propose to hang them?” I said.

  “That is the real dishonor,” he said. “This is commissioned work. I must hang them where I am told to hang them. My client owns a hotel outside Prague with extensive gardens on a sensitive migration route.”

  “You’re building rest stops between Kenya and Norway.”

  “I should export,” he said. “Also effective against lions and tigers. Would you like to help me install them? John Steinbeck once stayed there.”

  The hotel was more of a complex, almost a village, in the mountains, with air so clear and pure I felt dizzy walking through gardens filled with marble and white limestone statues of great men—Marx, Wittgenstein, Beethoven—that lined gravel paths and supervised the cultivation of roses. I didn’t think the Great Men likely to appreciate Mr. Cimarron’s ironic contraptions. He had parked the car and gone looking for the hotelier in one of several large colonnaded buildings. There were couples and families taking pictures—evidently Marx with bunny ears never fails—but nobody around who looked like a guest. It struck me that the place was less hotel than international conference center with nothing currently on.

  Mr. Cimarron emerged and said that he could not find his client or anyone else. We tried the door of another colonnaded building and it opened. Inside we found a vast empty lounge full of antique furniture, with flocked wallpaper depicting fanciful birds and a stopped clock on a black marble base on the mantel over a feeble fire. Through another door we came to a large library consisting only of books with leather spines, with rows of standing desks on which monks would copy manuscripts—at least, it wasn’t a library that anyone would know how to use now. A stack of thick leather-bound ledgers contained on inspection records of train arrivals and departures.

  In a third building we found a disconcertingly modern kitchen with a phalanx of pint glasses still drying upside down on a towel next to the dishwasher, but it was not obvious who put them there. An adjacent dining room was not so much modern as modernist: polished granite floors and midcentury furniture. A three-hour dinner there would evoke all the anxieties of the age, starting with back pain.

  “Surely,” I said, “there is a sign that says Reception somewhere, and a receptionist sitting under it.”

  “You Americans will make everything unfit for human habitation eventually,” said Mr. Cimarron.

  “Well, there must be a gardener.”

  “It’s good to be out of Prague,” he said. “Every inch drenched in blood and steeped in alchemy, with a whiff of Soviet body odor.”

  “You should write for Lonely Planet,” I said.

  When we finally found a gardener she told Mr. Cimarron in Czech that the hotelier had been arrested and taken away in a dawn raid. The police themselves had lingered until just be
fore we arrived, interviewing staff and dismissing them one by one. She had stayed on because there was quite a bit of pruning to get through.

  “Well, did she say why he was arrested?” I said.

  “Possession of excess money,” he said.

  “Anything a little more specific?”

  “The problem is that I meant to claim some of the excess money in return for your hard work.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “You’re about to. I don’t have room for these things. Where shall we hang them?”

  “I don’t know. Are we talking storks or warblers here?”

  “I think we can rule out emus. Otherwise I have no idea.”

  We explored the grounds further—or at least an arboretum, a wildlife refuge, a lake, and a tennis court. On the surface of the tennis court I found a piece of paper. It was the itinerary for an annual convention of diabetes researchers concluded the previous month.

  “Let’s go back to the wildlife refuge,” said Mr. Cimarron.

  “What do you know about your client?” I said.

  “He’s very fat,” said Mr. Cimarron.

  “Do you have any helpful information?”

  “He uses a wheelchair,” he said. “And a loud whistle to summon his staff.”

  “We can probably eliminate violent crime,” I said.

  “If I’m not mistaken he was a lawyer or a professor or both. Ah, and the hotel was confiscated from his family in 1948. Later he crossed some line and got volunteered for the steelworks.”

  “Jolly.”

  “Well, it was. You joked with all the doctors and judges and dissidents around you, and steel was the last thing you thought about. I think this is how he lost the use of his legs. Still preferable to the uranium mines.”

  “So he didn’t rob a bank.”

  “Keen on wildlife. Hence the preserve and the bird feeders,” he said.

  “But corrupt.”

  “I don’t know. There are only two ways to make money: crime and exploitation. The rest of us just cover our expenses.”

  “I don’t think he was exploiting the diabetes researchers, do you?”

  “I’m sure their employers do that,” he said.

  The man in question had done marvelous work with his wildlife refuge. Split log fencing and screens of trees divided it into microhabitats; there were egrets in a marshy area and corncrakes nesting in a newly mown field with signs in Czech, German, and English explaining these things. We could also expect deer, fox, wild boar, and, most thrillingly, European lynx if we knew where and how to look. Tall trees obscured or revealed a distinctly Czech sun rolling through the sky like a lopped-off head; a bird of prey wheeled beneath it looking for something fragile to terminate.

  “It will probably be in the papers tomorrow,” said Mr. Cimarron.

  He selected some climbable trees on the edge of a small meadow and produced some lengths of chain. I gave him a boost up; he was nearly weightless. We hung all six Soviet anti-squirrel devices but did not fill them since we didn’t know what with and didn’t have any anyway. Back in the first building Mr. Cimarron had tried he left a note in what looked like a standard, non-fancy office, with a desk and a chair and a telephone, but all the filing cabinets were ajar and the files missing.

  * * *

  —

  Incidents involving molten metal, said Ivan the following day, are almost always fatal, for the simple reason that molten metal rarely travels in small quantities; if several tons of dry sand or anything else dropped onto a person the result would be the same as with an equal weight of liquid steel, although the temperature involved, 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, might yield some other symptoms. The explosions common at steelworks, he continued, varied in damage mostly according to ventilation. He had investigated several. Harmless explosions in open spaces occurred daily. Ivan didn’t think the hotelier had lost the use of his legs to mere burns. The likeliest explanation in Ivan’s opinion as he read and translated the newspaper for me was that the man had been involved in some unspecified crushing accident on-site decades previously.

  After the revolution the man became one of several investors who used government money to purchase government shares in the steelworks, after which it was mismanaged into the ground. A great foundry of bridges and battleships, an icon of Czech industry and ingenuity, an employer of generations—its blast furnaces lay cold, its ladles sold or scrapped, its rail spurs derelict.

  “Is there any mention of the hotel?” I said.

  “No,” said Ivan.

  “Well, he avenged himself beautifully.”

  VELIKONOCE

  Shopping in the Christmas market that November, a woman nearby said, “Blow job?” I said, “Pardon?” Amanda steered me by the elbow toward some decorative eggs, while suggesting that I learn to identify a sales pitch.

  Preparations for Czech Christmas were always absorbing but the prospect of experiencing Czech Christmas wasn’t. Large blue plastic tubs appeared on street corners, and you could get the huge carp inside decapitated while you waited, or let it live in your bath until the appointed hour. Prague gutters ran with bloody water, like, said Amanda, lambs’ blood in Greek sewers at Easter. Many Czech Christmas traditions seemed devoted to predicting who in the family would die in the coming year. The others predicted who would or would not get married. Few of these traditions were observed strictly anymore, but I had the impression that historically Czech Christmas was a time of terror and tears.

  During the previous Christmas I had returned to the United States and Amanda to the UK; spending the holidays together felt like some rite of passage we had inexplicably skipped before. Amanda suggested and I agreed that we might get bored, just the two of us. Like surreptitious heathens, we went looking for a large ham. We invited other expats for dinner as Christmas carp refugees. As if by accident we discovered that we were going to have eight guests at Graceland. We bought a second ham.

  The only guests I knew were Dave and Valerie. The others were Amanda’s. At the last minute I realized that if we were going to be loud we had better invite Sonja, too. Amanda thought our neighbor would surely be returning to Germany, but I discovered that instead she had laid in enough alcohol to get through the week alone in a coma.

  Amanda wanted to do something traditional, but I argued that we should do something American, like boil the ham in eight liters of Coca-Cola. I also made corn bread in three varieties—Mild, Hell, and Texas—mixed some bacon with some green beans, and mashed sweet potatoes with brown sugar and orange juice, melting a few marshmallows on top. The last dish aroused suspicion. The chief problem was that it was the same color as Christmas carp.

  * * *

  —

  Dinner conversation was full of lively speculation on the scriptural justification for eating carp. Fish was symbolically important in Christianity, of course, but the choice of a bottom-feeder was unusual. Sonja pointed out that carp is also theoretically served on Christmas Eve in Germany, but that she didn’t know anybody who ate it. Valerie suggested that loving the lowest, humblest, and most mud- and crap-filled of fishes might be the most Christian of all gestures. Surely Czech Jesus would see through our airs and pretentiousness and admonish us for enjoying such a delicious ham.

  Amanda had decorated a small plastic tree with state-issued ornaments from the ’80s she’d found in a flea market. They were avidly secular and symbolically meaningless glass baubles, but she had folded a thousand-crown note into a Star of David and placed it on top for good cheer. With Sonja’s help we had made a festive drinks tray.

  Nearly all of us had begun as teachers of English in Prague, yet each of us had drifted into work better paid, less stable, and less obviously conducive to building a career trajectory of accumulated expertise that could be applied at subsequent stages. Rivers of paperwork required drafting and proofread
ing in English for the European Union to annex Central Europe, and the concurrent expansion of NATO also demanded herculean administration. We were all froth on a wave of international ink spilled by Czech diplomats, lawyers, economists, politicians, and military men, and we were collectively aware that when the wave crested we would scatter, perhaps surfacing elsewhere as some smaller more isolated thing.

  In addition to Dave’s newspaper, Valerie’s law firm, my translation agency, and Amanda’s ministries, we had a guest who worked on developing international study programs, and another whose work involved turning Prague into an international conference center on par with Vienna, and a professional freelance translator of literary fiction. Somehow as an actual EU bureaucrat Sonja became the high priestess of the table. Her work was inherently dull and absurd, to do with the welfare of working animals in developing countries, but she had a deep and unshakeable faith in bureaucracy.

  “Well,” said Valerie, “is a carp a working animal?” Valerie wore a green sweater over red jeans and the rest of us looked dim and disengaged by comparison.

  “I work for the benefit of donkeys and horses,” said Sonja, patiently, as if Valerie were a child.

  “But if you accept a fish as an animal you could argue that a carp does a lot of work,” said Valerie.

  “Define work,” said Dave. Valerie waved him away without looking.

  “But they don’t work in a domestic or agricultural sector,” said Sonja, still earnest.