Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  “How do we know if we can understand each other right now?” she said.

  One of her reforms was a smoking ban inside the flat. I stepped onto the balcony where we kept a studenty soup can filled with waterlogged cigarette ends. While I smoked I considered the fateful balcony across the courtyard. Fifty vertical feet did seem like a shallow, meaningless transition, an adjustment of coordinates. A horizontal shuffle of the same magnitude would do you no harm whatsoever. I had heard somewhere that to ensure success you should land on your chest. Perhaps he had done that, or perhaps he was just old and unlucky. I once locked myself into a girlfriend’s apartment accidentally, and I had to jump from the balcony to get out. About eight feet. I bruised my heel badly.

  Amanda joined me and wrinkled her nose as always at the courtyard stench of cabbage and urine. We pitched in with our sanctifying incense, moving our cigarettes to and from our mouths like censers, lustrating the air, to no avail.

  MAZURKA

  I spent a week proofreading a translated Ministry of Defense report on the effects of depleted uranium on plants, animals, and children. Of particular interest was the question of what happens when depleted uranium is introduced into the waterways of a desert ecosystem. Trees retreat, carcinogens climb ranks in food chains, and human birth defects and leukemia spike wherever the material is used. Millions of people will be tasting metal through their fingertips for generations to come, and inhaling radioactive dust. A conclusive study of these environmental and health effects, the report noted, would require the funding of a large, generous, and wealthy nation.

  Amanda got both of us invited to an international symposium on “Politics and Morality” hosted by the Ministry of Culture. The motto and starting point for all lectures and panel discussions scheduled was a line from Immanuel Kant: “Politics says be wise as serpents, with morality adding, as a limiting condition, and as guileless as doves.” Participants included many eminent statesmen and intellectuals. Topics to be covered included “Politics and Faiths,” “Morality and the Global Economic Order,” and “Moral Europe.” Economists flocked to Prague like alchemists did six centuries before them. Governors of places like Lower Saxony joined in, and the streets filled with famous academics. Wealthy Western wives clotted the quaint boutiques selling Bohemian crystal. Muslims with correct views were granted speaking engagements. Venues varied according to anticipated crowd size, but none of the events was held in Prague’s hundreds of churches, eight synagogues, or lone mosque. That in itself said something about the era, said Amanda. Furthermore, she said, serpents aren’t wise and Kant didn’t give doves much credit.

  All the speakers we saw were beautifully dressed. Several Scandinavians wore striking eyeglasses—colorful, bold, yet playful, and not garish. Every lecture hall had a population of handsome Germans with earnest faces, broad shoulders, and neckties in colors like iridescent salmon. Dapper and industrious Italians discussed GDPs in flawless English. Women, who represented about a third of the speakers across nationalities, did not bother looking businesslike—they wore flowers and birds and butterflies on blouses and skirts and scarves. British politicians looked tanned and relaxed and excited about juice bars. The Americans in particular moved with grace and ease and good humor, spoke knowledgeably about interest rates, and had the good manners to drink plenty of Czech beer and compliment their hosts on it. Amanda wore her poshest frock, a satin emerald thing over leather high-heeled sandals with thin straps around her ankles and calves. I had a velvety black jacket and some tapered coffee-colored French corduroys.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the convention we had dinner with the president of Poland and five hundred other distinguished souls. The Hotel Paris polished everything thrice beforehand, and drafted fifty blondes to deliver food and replenish drinks. The menu featured things like wild boar pâte, which didn’t appeal to me; and pigeon breast with juniper berries; and salmon with grapefruit, which sounded more like art than food; and shelled spider crab with a creamy coral emulsion; and saddle of rabbit in Parma ham. Every table went through the agonies and intricacies of ordering rarified wines; I felt out of place when I ordered beer and rabbit. The Polish president, Nobel laureates, central bankers, and leftist firebrands all sat far away at the high end of the room, while we were at the table nearest the door.

  If I could have confiscated the jackets, vests, shirts, ties, underwear, socks, shoes, handkerchiefs, cufflinks, belts, suspenders, wristwatches, eyeglasses, and wedding rings of the male guests, I could have bought a small house or two. Better yet I could build one: pillars of stacked shoes, laces entwined, could stand in each corner, while jackets with arms braided could hang between them as walls. The interwoven legs of trousers could serve as a roof. The lighter garments of the women could be hung as curtains or fashioned into soft beds. I had no plan for the newly naked guests.

  After dinner and coffee several of the jackets and trousers and wing-tipped shoes led the dresses and gowns to a large and almost empty adjacent chamber, where the cuffs arced like searchlights and the shoes scuffed each other while the gowns floated as if hung on balloons. A string ensemble played near the front of the room. We recognized the violinist from the blazing grace and dignity of his playing and the ineradicable grimace on his face.

  * * *

  —

  During an interval Radovan, drenched in perspiration, spotted us and asked for a sip of my beer, a frank acknowledgment that he was very glad to see us. We admired his performance and asked what he had made of the whole conference.

  He shrugged. “I’m sure it would go down very well in Vienna. What do you think?”

  “Food’s good,” said Amanda.

  “I have only a few minutes,” said Radovan, handing me an empty glass. “Your parents,” he said to Amanda, “left us a beautiful note offering us free run of their house at any time.”

  “Oh, good,” said Amanda. “Will you take them up on it?”

  “I have always wanted to hear the choir at Wells Cathedral,” he said.

  “I think the choir at Wells Cathedral would quite like to hear you,” she said.

  “I must return to my post. I’d be very pleased if you danced.”

  “I have no idea how,” I said.

  “We,” said Amanda.

  “With your permission,” he said, slipping an arm around Amanda’s waist, “I will show you. We are about to play a mazurka.” He taught Amanda how to turn in half circles with occasional half hops.

  The mighty waited.

  Next he took me by the waist and the hand to show me how to lead. It consisted chiefly of counting to three repeatedly and pretending on every third beat that I had been shot in the thigh when I last led my troops into battle.

  FLOOD

  In late summer of our second year it rained biblically every day for over a week, and the river became very angry. By day three gulls appeared to be frolicking in fast currents, but by day five they looked terrified, and by day seven they and all of Prague’s pigeons had fled for higher ground. It continued to storm, shower, and drizzle. The old dam south of the city was deemed adequate, dubious, and hopeless in short succession. Whole walls of water had to be released through the city. The river was increasingly thrilling to watch—we saw a waterborne railway boxcar racing toward Charles Bridge like a torpedo, diverted by an emergency crane. The boxcar couldn’t be stopped or caught; the crane simply stuck a mechanical arm in the water and somehow survived impact without toppling and killing the operator. The boxcar slid under the bridge and took aim at the next one. Enormous uprooted trees followed suit. Soldiers lined the river’s edge. Working flat out they got each sandbag placed moments before the water crested. Immense steel barriers lined riverside roads like toys put there for the river to play with. People gathered to watch the pulses released by the dam course through the city. The work of fifty soldiers over twenty-four hours vanished ins
tantly.

  I had a cell phone. Amanda didn’t. I was walking to work on the eighth day of rain when Valerie called. We had been meeting for drinks after work while Amanda was busy or traveling, and we kept on top of each other’s lives. She was close to hyperventilating, and it took me a moment to figure out that she had heard something about evacuations on Radio Free Europe. I told her to put a toothbrush and spare clothes in a bag and go to work anyway. I pointed out that even if evacuations were ordered there would have to be a notice period. Half an hour later while I was nursing a coffee and waiting for my computer to boot, Valerie called again, sounding suddenly like a field marshal and commanding me to return immediately to Graceland.

  There was a notice taped to the front door of the building in Czech that even I could read. At ten o’clock the army was moving in and the residents were moving out. It was 9:48. I found Amanda upstairs hastily adding bananas and books to a stash of clothing. I was angry that she had not found a phone to call me; it felt like a minor betrayal in an hour of need. Yet there was no time to argue over it, and I made a mental note to thank Valerie later. At ten o’clock the army went from door to door as promised. A long line of buses awaited those without private arrangements. An ancient warning siren system was finally permitted to indicate that American bombers were inbound. Amanda was barked at sharply in Czech. We boarded the nearest bus. If only there had been someone to bribe. Through the bus window we could see water bubbling up from sewer grates and manhole covers.

  All but one of thirteen bridges were closed, and it took our bus two hours in creeping traffic to reach the school building that served as our shelter. We could only guess which part of Prague we were in because we could see Doom, defiantly beige against an aggressively dark sky. Inside the school gymnasium there were about two hundred cots and at least double that many people. We didn’t try for a cot, just a patch of wall space to lean against. Most of the men sagely went to nearby pubs, and the hall was filled with stressed-out mothers berating their freaked-out children, but the dominant sound was that of helicopters thrumming outside in the rain.

  I guarded our things while Amanda went to find a pay phone to call her parents. She returned an hour later and reported that the BBC was running nothing but flood, and we were just two of fifty thousand evacuees. She gave me directions to the phone and I called my mom. I imagined I could hear birds singing from her end of the line. I was staring through the tempered phone booth glass at the television tower. I burst into tears.

  She said I should probably get back to Amanda and call again when it was all over. The CNN footage was shocking, she said. She was glad we were safe.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, Amanda and I ate our bananas, slept sitting up with our backs against the gymnasium wall, and found a tolerable pizzeria within walking distance where we read our books. She ruined Kundera for me when she pointed out that his English translations omit Czech diacritical marks while retaining those of other languages, so Zürich has an umlaut over the u and Salvador Dalí gets to keep the smeary dotted i at the end of his name, but Žižkov is missing its butterflies.

  Meanwhile in the city proper, nine people died, seventeen buildings collapsed, and hundreds of people became homeless, 280,000 public library books were ruined, and a gorilla drowned in a building that was submerged at the zoo.

  Valerie was stranded at some other shelter in some other suburb, but from her we learned that some brave souls had begun breaking the quarantine once the waters began to recede, so we grabbed our things and set off, unable to find a road that ran straight until we came to the famous overland suicide bridge. The bridge was closed, but walking underneath it led us straight to the city center.

  At the periphery of the devastation the only signs of life were automotive—ambulances, fire engines, and police cars. Farther in, soldiers limed the streets against disease. The air smelled of water and raw sewage and dead pets, and the sunshine was merciless. Outside our favorite cellar bars and restaurants stood heaps of tables and chairs and refrigerators and freezers covered in mud. The proprietors stood on the sidewalks openly weeping. They were permitted in, I think, to assess the damage. There must have been other residents sneaking in like us. The authorities had bigger things to worry about, and every soldier we saw looked pale and haggard and ready to collapse.

  Both of us felt a burgeoning sense of shame. It had been exciting to watch the river rise, and the army spring into action, and to watch the mundane turn violent and new, to know that we were briefly at the center of the world’s attention. It was commensurately horrific to examine in glorious sunlight the ruined livelihoods and wrecked aspirations of small business owners and young urban professionals and little old ladies who lived alone—every floating photo album, abandoned chair, smashed picture frame, and lost shoe implied a whole life carefully attended to and abruptly smashed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet both of us had inwardly cheered the flood on, because violence demands an audience. It was as though Prague were a person who had experienced some trauma, and she told us her story in incoherent fragments as we walked. Her sewers were breached, her streets violated, her foundations sabotaged, and although she could endure all that, her children were persecuted, too.

  The evacuation notice still hung on the front door. We let ourselves in and stood listening for a moment in the foyer. We heard nothing. We climbed the two floors to Graceland, and I held my breath while Amanda put her key in the door. There was no damage aside from meat spoiled in the fridge when the power went. We still lacked power, but we had candles. Amanda made sliced avocado on crackers for dinner. We drank awful Moravian wine, a client gift we had been avoiding. She told me that if I were the last man on earth—which is how both of us felt in that place and that time—she wouldn’t necessarily develop a space program. We went to bed early.

  I don’t know whether light or noise woke us up. A savage industrial rain pelted a megawatt moon. A malevolent angel hovered in the courtyard, bleating. Allied warcraft air-dropped demonic drummers on Prague. The body of Christ bled light from the punctures of a thousand machine-gun rounds. Gradually I realized there was a helicopter in our courtyard with a spotlight trained on our curtains.

  We held hands under the duvet, not knowing if we were under attack, arrest, investigation, or suspicion. The courtyard echoed and amplified the whirling blades. The finger of light insisted.

  Amanda suggested we wave, in case they were using thermal imaging equipment to check if we were alive and not stricken somehow. Both of us waved at people we couldn’t see on the other side of the curtains. Almost immediately the helicopter left us first in total darkness and second in vast, marine silence.

  REFLECTIONS

  At the Golden Lion, Ivan announced that he had been offered a job—headhunted, in fact—by a conglomerate vast and diversified beyond description. His job would entail evaluating culpability in catastrophic events around the world. He was moving to London, although—Ivan hoped—only for long enough to make an obscene pile of cash. The catastrophic events were predicted to pick up speed anyway, thanks to climate change, resource depletion, and postmodern logic in political circles.

  “It’s a strange arrangement,” said Ivan. “Because Britain doesn’t actually make anything. All they make is Excel spreadsheets. When I went for interview I didn’t see a single employee enjoying a cigarette. The business is completely divorced from the business. So I don’t know. I’m moving from a regional post of tangible realities to an international post that feels to me largely theoretical. I might gradually cease to exist.”

  As a sort of farewell, Amanda and I were invited to spend a weekend at Ivan’s country cottage—his dacha. Otherwise we might never have learned that he had a wife and two kids. The dacha was essentially a camping cabin with an enormous cellar under a trapdoor for storing beer. Mrs. Ivan—Rosa—emerged from a bedroom periodically to prepare meals. The boys, Milan, nine,
and Jarek, seven, climbed trees and waded in streams and threw rocks at each other while Ivan sat in a lawn chair in the sun with beer. The countryside began at the door. “What am I going to do with them in the city?” he said with a sweep of his hand. I could see from what he said and the cold weight of the beer in my hand as I sat in my own lawn chair that I was experiencing one of the higher forms of civilization. Occasionally he had to shout but never move. The cell phone his employer had issued him received no signal within ten minutes’ walk. In the mornings he chopped wood or played tennis.

  Inevitably I thought of Milan’s dead twin, of a life that should have been lived: trees climbed and apples picked and knees skinned; humiliation and emasculation time and again at the whims of lovely young ladies; groveling and degrading himself for fifty years just to pay rent; and ultimately passing the whole arrangement along to some miniature half clone and showing him or her how it is all done. And I thought of Milan’s compulsive tennis playing, as if he could never get enough because he was always playing for two. He had gone recently on a tennis holiday in Spain—a mistake, he told me. The other guests had seemed more interested in who was playing on the next court over than in the game itself, and he had developed a special disdain for what he called “social tennis.”

  Amanda got quickly bored. An hour or two of beery babysitting was her outer limit. She took a couple of walks on her own but felt stared at like the village eccentric—like if she had a dog she might have had an excuse, she said. Privately she told me that she couldn’t figure out what the hell Rosa did all day. After the boys were asleep Rosa came outside to sit by the fire and sip something stronger than beer, but for the longest time she would not be drawn out in conversation.