Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  While Ivan and I drank to his hard work and good fortune again and again and again, Rosa finally opened up to Amanda. There was in Rosa’s mind an idée fixe called Western Woman, and Amanda realized Rosa was trying valiantly to become one overnight. In the first place this meant improving her English, and in the second place it meant absolutely everything else. What to wear, how Amanda got her exercise, how to cook food that had failed to evolve or improve since the Second World War, how to avoid roving packs of vicious football hooligans, and what time to serve tea to the neighbor ladies—all came up for discussion, along with how to dress the boys.

  “Well, we don’t really do high tea anymore,” said Amanda.

  Ivan was chiefly aghast at the prospect of room temperature beer.

  I had a momentary recollection of my first aspirations with Amanda—venturing into terra incognita together, our world a stable arrangement of pillows and coffee and books, with events and other people elsewhere as chaotic as they liked to be; how I had planned to borrow my opinions on movies and politics from her to spare myself the trouble of thinking.

  Rosa was turning herself into a new woman, Ivan into a new man. Amanda and I were both bored at age twenty-six. Moreover the boredom itself seemed like some form of heresy for the two of us, sworn enemies of boring things like mortgages and careers. Ivan and Rosa were our reverse image, westward bound, with diametrically opposed intentions.

  COLD WAR

  Amanda made several trips on her own. A Russian oligarch’s wife was buying Russian Vogue, so she flew Amanda to Monaco for a week of immersive English-language training around the racetrack and the roulette wheel. The Latvian central bank engaged her for intercultural training. I was proud of her. I hadn’t imagined that teaching English as a foreign language could be a whole art form and lifestyle all at once. I used to watch her hips as she walked through the airport departure gates, an insouciant roll, a suppressed swagger, and a promise that when she returned she would still be mine. A nuclear power plant under construction in Tajikistan required its engineers to learn to communicate with their Western overlords. She phoned me from Dushanbe; I heard a thin click on the line. I am sure we were both put under surveillance. She told me that the British consul arrived at the airport twenty minutes after she landed at 3:00 a.m. She had some visa trouble but he seemed to have known she was coming. The connecting flight from Moscow had been full of itinerant fruit pickers. She managed to communicate with them using rudimentary Czech. Changing rubles at Domodedovo was a special form of hell. In Dushanbe she was shadowed everywhere. It was impossible, she said, to distinguish between secret police and pervy men.

  In her absence I migrated among various pubs. At work Hana and I churned out an endless succession of translations of Czech News Agency bulletins for the Prague Business Journal and The Prague Post—in a sense I was responsible for more Post copy than Dave was. The gist of it all was that wherever you looked, somebody’s money was missing. Apparently some people in New York and London found this distressing. After work I detected a citywide influx of fine ashtrays, fine barstools, vibrant wallpapers, intriguing contemporary art, excellent sound systems, and gleaming brass bar fittings. At last Czech beer had the accoutrements it deserved. Peering into the details was just churlish.

  I met some strange people. One Englishman in a Žižkov bar insisted that he made a living smuggling penguins. He claimed to service a niche of an international black market between zoos. I pressed him on the obvious questions of storage and transportation of merchandise. He had a ready answer about refrigerated shipping containers and frozen warehouses in the deep countryside. I asked how he fed the penguins. “Things are like gulls,” he said. “They’ll eat anything.” He was vague about price per beak, since it depended heavily on what a client zoo could pay—Tokyo and Nairobi played in very different leagues. I thought at the time that he was merely a mischievous drunk; only on the following day did it occur to me that I might have been speaking to James Bond.

  The following night I met three very friendly Russians named Dasha, Masha, and Pasha. They claimed they had got lost looking for Mexico. When I asked how long they were staying Dasha said maybe lunch or maybe dinner. In retrospect I felt sure they were checking me out.

  My paternal grandfather worked for the CIA. Amanda’s first cousin Paul was shot dead by an IRA sniper on his first day patrolling South Armagh at the age of nineteen. I couldn’t imagine that either of us fit any profile of people who like to run around damaging national interests. Amanda suggested when she returned that the new definition of dissident was someone who dares to leave home.

  In the ’70s both superpowers were competing to industrialize sub-Saharan Africa. My grandfather supervised various new factories in Nigeria and Kenya. The only thing he ever said about his other, covert work was a casual aside to my dad: he copied the serial numbers from heavy machines, and so did his Soviet counterparts. He knew and they knew and he knew that they knew and they knew that he knew, so they all enjoyed sipping coffee together in the mornings and discussing the weather. One afternoon in Nairobi his car exploded while he was in a shop with his servant. The bomb, however, was intended for a visiting diplomat who also drove a blue Peugeot. At least, that is what he told the family. My grandmother knew nothing of his CIA involvement until after his death, when the government sent her a letter commending his dedication.

  In a more civilized era, Amanda could have been a valuable, coffee-slurping, sunshine-evaluating asset. Instead she was rudely called to the British Embassy in Prague and told to be careful about going to sensitive places on a freelance basis. If she could show documentation of institutional backing, red flags might not be raised by the apparently guileless and objective system. Amanda replied that she was going to spend a week of the following month teaching at a Swedish paper mill.

  I lounged around with takeaway burgers and fries whenever she was away; she said she wished I traveled more so she could know what that was like.

  * * *

  —

  Valerie asked if I would like to join her in a visit to Benátky, the modest manor house outside Prague where Tycho Brahe had lived, if only to see the steps the elk rolled down. I agreed. Valerie and I caught a local train, a smoke-filled two-carriage thing useful for outrunning glaciers, and from the station where we disembarked it was a two-mile walk on gravel roads to reach the house. “No wonder,” said Valerie, “nobody has written about this place before.” A tree-lined drive became an exclamation mark at an unused circular fountain in front of the house, as if the whole thing were designed for vintage sports cars to turn around in front of. There were no cars or signs of other visitors, but the front door, an enormous mélange of wood and iron, was ajar. On the other side of it a plastic bucket with a lid sat on a desk next to a pentalingual sign soliciting donations. There was a chair next to the desk, suggesting that someone was around somewhere, but enforcing the donations policy clearly offered that person ample opportunity for refreshment elsewhere. Valerie slipped a fifty-crown note in, which was worth at least two beers.

  A staircase in soft worn white marble addressed us fifteen feet from the door, broad, gentle, and incompatible with visions of rolling elk. In a gallery through a door left of the staircase Valerie found a leaflet explaining that the manor had been inhabited until 1948. To the right of the staircase I found a small but beautiful library. One shelf was devoted to recent spy thrillers in French.

  Upstairs we found several bedrooms and another set of stairs too narrow for antlers, leading, according to a sign on the wall, to Tycho’s observatory.

  The sign was misleading; the floor above contained a cramped room full of curious objects like toys. Arcs and angles, rods and spheres of bronze pointed and pivoted and spoke mutely of math; small cards identified each item as a sextant, quadrant, or armillary sphere and informed us that each of them established in theory what the eyeball could establish in practice only t
hrough a telescope, which had not been invented when Brahe lived. Each item was a miniature model of some final law of the universe, and together they illustrated the ultimate economy of things; motion was meaning. The concentric mobile circles of an armillary sphere represented God’s onion, and the pie-slice wedge of a sextant was an aperture leading to an all-encompassing view. The originals had all been destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War; we were looking at reconstructions drawn from Brahe’s copious writing and drawing. An artist’s note underscored Brahe’s optimism—a conviction evident in every component of every instrument that someday all speculation and superstition would be swept away by the universally intelligible language of measurement. Photocopies of Brahe’s colorful illustrations hung in some cases above or next to the re-created instruments.

  “With funding this place could really be somebody,” said Valerie.

  I lingered longest over a mural on the south wall. If, I read, there had been no ceiling, and it had been nighttime, and I had been somewhere in Brahe’s native Denmark, I could have charted the passage of stars overhead to within two arc minutes by referring to the mural. I didn’t know what an arc minute was or how such a thing might have worked. On the wall a pitiless maiden withered a lovelorn swain with a glance discarded over her shoulder, a goat eluded a yeoman while his lord tipped a wineskin, a boy tugged a rope attached to a bell much bigger than he, and a knight struggled to restrain his innards erupting from a mortal wound. None of these things corresponded to any constellation I knew of—some interpretive key was missing. The original mural, I read, was painted by Brahe himself, who also left behind a great legacy of poems in Latin. Death quells many things, read the artist’s note, but not communication. Anyone could see that five hundred years ago there was still some reason to hope.

  There was also a small exhibit dedicated to the astronomer’s nose. A drunken student brawl, clashing steel, one fateful swipe through the upper cartilage. Both duelists retired, honor presumably satisfied. Whether Brahe’s prosthetic bridge was silver, gold, copper, or bronze remained a mystery. A fashionable man, he may have alternated noses between home and state or court occasions. Perhaps he had one nose for science and another for love. Perhaps the love nose had an elaborate case and a variety of polishing rituals unknown to all but its wearer. It was horrible to consider Brahe’s nose falling out in the middle of seducing some local wench: all that intelligence, prestige, wealth, and power instantly ridiculous. Better to hide forever, publishing nothing in the cold companionship of stars, leave the question of celestial immutability to somebody less deformed.

  Worse still, after all he had accomplished and bequeathed to humanity, he was remembered chiefly for his nose.

  TUMBLEWEED

  Amanda wrote from Berlin, where she was teaching for two weeks. Germans, she grumbled, were far too progressive in making youth comfortable around obsolete technology. The public library where she planned her lessons was loud with chatter and chirping phones and elaborate mating rituals between students, all of them equipped with soft drinks and laptops. But construction work outside her hotel room window commenced at 8:00 a.m. sharp, so she couldn’t work there.

  Valerie invited me for a drink at La Casa Blů, a sleepy saloon by day and a crucible of excess and abandonment by night. We met at 6:00 p.m.

  I had become tired—perhaps under Amanda’s influence—of Americans with their wrenching personal problems, which all seemed to call for the same gravity as the death of a parent or the illness of a child; perhaps it was just the Americans that we knew in Prague, but it always seemed to require a half hour or forty-five minutes’ interrogation to determine that really the person in question was just bored or frustrated, or, perhaps, mildly depressed. I hoped that Valerie and I could just drink and not swap life stories.

  The coat she wore was stoplight red and she seemed to illuminate the room. We talked about new restaurants and new shops (we could eat at the Brazilian place later if I liked). She told me that after her parents divorced she had grown up in a neighborhood she described as a refuge for formerly wealthy people. All the children played together outside and all the parents were friends; it was like Mexico without the disease, poverty, crime, corruption, and sunshine. Before the divorce they had lived in a neighborhood with plenty of money and plenty of children, but the children didn’t really play together and neither did the grown-ups. Her mother had remarried, and Valerie had a couple of stepsisters. But more important her father had figured himself out, and he was always happy to hear a soccer ball smack against the living room window—as proof that all the formerly wealthy people were raising happy, healthy children. The most tragic thing that had ever happened to her was that she wanted to pursue ballet, but when she got to college she realized that she was a head taller than everyone else, and a professor suggested something modern instead.

  Two or three drinks in I found myself describing my own wrenching personal problems; I had always imagined myself with tenure and three children like my father before me, but unlike him I was going to make my marriage work. I couldn’t get started, though, because somewhere in there Amanda had spotted a job description she didn’t care for, and my aunt’s death shadowed everything like a cloud riveted permanently into the sky. I couldn’t see the point of remaining in Prague and I would never return to Indiana, and I was increasingly unemployable in both places anyway.

  Valerie had a liberating way of not caring about anything I told her; she was patient with my navel-gazing but there were more important things to do, like drink and be merry.

  I considered being annoyed but she had moved on to another frivolous and inconsequential anecdote: how her father’s colleagues in the 1980s before the divorce had joked that he needed a wife, and he had said everyone needs a wife; my wife needs a wife. I said again that I felt sort of blighted by my own decision to flee from reality and live in Bohemia, and she told me the uses of castor oil in torture and childbirth. I gave up and followed in her unpredictable wake, and I began to enjoy it. Later when she suggested dancing it seemed like a good idea, and still later when she kissed me it seemed like a mistake that I could easily overlook the next morning.

  For the rest of that week I oscillated between feeling very alive and feeling very unworthy of that distinction. It was a week of deeply anguished conversation with our clothes off. Valerie had neglected to mention that she was not remotely cheerful at home, and that in addition to her profound relationship with her body she also had a bellicose arrangement with her self-esteem; for my part I learned that although I came across as confident and self-assured at first, I was clearly misrepresenting myself; moreover she didn’t like scrambled eggs and found my indecisiveness about what else we might have for breakfast supremely irritating. Both of us were disappointed with our compromise of butter on toast, if only because the bread was that horrid Czech stuff with cumin seeds in it, and she was going to lose her patience if I talked about Amanda anymore…Some of my deficiencies that came to light that week included a slow speech pattern; listening to every remark was like watching a tumbleweed roll over the Indiana desert, she said; and she noted my stupid expression, whenever the prospect of more sex arose, as though I thought I was about to go on an excursion. I managed to get through most of her wine.

  LAUNDRY LINES

  “It is a shame,” Amanda had said, “that we never married. I think divorce is rather glamorous, like getting out of rehab.”

  She was aggressively cheerful during her last week in Prague, when she slept in the bedroom and I slept on the kitchen floor. She had taken a day or two to absorb things, privately. Once her mind was made up, however, her feelings were clearly none of my business. She practically chirped good morning and good night as a form of punishment. When I asked what she was going to do back in Britain, she said she might train to be a librarian. I couldn’t tell if she was serious. Initially she’d have to work in a nursing home or a call center flogging conservatory wind
ows. She made that sound like a thrilling adventure. She spent every evening that week out for farewell dinners and drinks—she was immensely popular—but she said she didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I suspected she kept quiet for her benefit, not mine. I wanted to stay in touch. She agreed to that unconvincingly. I noticed when she packed that she didn’t pack anything associated with me. She said one morning that she was looking forward to boring people with her story of how she once had dinner with the president of Poland.

  I tried endlessly to put myself inside her head imaginatively if only to see what damage I had done. Not how she felt about my betrayal per se but what pictures of the future I had shattered and what aspirations I had compromised. What devastated me most on reflection was the idea that I would never see our child strapped across her chest like a grumpy albatross. I’m sure this thought did not trouble her. But it was precisely because we did not have plans, children, assets, mortgages, or even careers that what I had done was so terrible. All we had had was each other. When I had tried to explain this she had reassured me that I’d done us both a favor.

  Afterward I was living off beer purchased with loans from my mom that I had no realistic plans to repay. At work Hana had requested a reassignment because my increasing distraction imperiled her ability to pay rent; soon afterward Terence fired me. I couldn’t have paid the rent for Graceland solo, anyway—though I did, for a few months, at Mom’s expense, spend mornings and afternoons on the sofa with coffee and books or newspapers, a parody of domestic contentment. And yet a little earlier each day I took my empty bottles to the lahůdky and exchanged them for eight full bottles of Radegast so I could marinate in sorrow on the courtyard balcony while the evening grew dark and cold. I felt, at last and at least, kind of Czech. I knew that I was supposed to cheer up and look for a job, but I also knew the natural order of things. Women hung out the laundry on lines. Later they reeled it in again. A man’s white linen long-sleeved shirt, still wet, spiraling oddly as it fell, was the nearest thing to meaning or beauty there was, but that meant the woman had to go down there and fetch it and wash it again.