Prague: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  He took Emily’s hand. “Yes, but it’s where you find—the world isn’t just—doesn’t it matter—” Finally, he just emitted a grunt, maddened frustration that smoked through his clenched teeth. “I was interviewing these soldiers tonight, your friends the marines. Nádja is the other side, the opposite of that. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “The marines? I’m not sure I follow you, no.”

  “Look there. Look!” John grabbed her shoulders and rotated her, faced her toward the Danube, stood next to her and pointed downriver where the Chain Bridge’s lights had just switched off—the very moment Emily was speaking—and now left that monument lingering against the dark sky and water like an afterimage projected behind closed eyelids. “And that!” he said, gathering sureness, almost shoving her to look up at the gray-black silhouette of the extinguished palace set against the blue-black sky, almost nothing more than a palace-shaped absence of stars. “Those are real, Em. Those are the world right now. Our world. And so is Nádja. Her life is—that’s how it ought—” His voice softened, shifted from excited to soothing. “And you’re here with me in it.” And his head inclined, and his hands held her face, and his lips found hers for a moment and another and another and one half a moment more, and he was inarguably right, right about all of it.

  “No.” She leaned away. “John.” She pulled away from his hands. “That’s not for us.” She smiled and laughed, her standard technique to help boys gracefully escape their embarrassment or anger at this moment. “We’re both an Unicum or two over the limit, young man, and it’s a school night. I’ll walk myself home and you get some sleep. I’ll catch up with you at the Gerbeaud. You can tell me what Nádja thinks up to say about me.”

  She’s gone. John Price stands at the center, the highest point in the gently sighing arch of the Margaret Bridge, and he leans against the parapet, tries to focus his eyes on the stones of the Chain Bridge. He wishes they had been on that bridge, a few hundred yards downstream. That’s where he would feel complete, where he belongs. There, she would have understood; that kiss would have made inevitable sense. After a while, he bites his lips, considers and rejects in turn going to visit his brother or Mark Payton or Charles Gábor. He pushes himself away from the steel railing, his hands gritty from the bolt heads they rested on. He walks back toward Pest, spits into the Danube.

  VI.

  A week later, a few hours before getting luxuriously drunk at the Old Student with John, Charles submitted his rebelliously wordy report on the Horváth Press to the Presiding Vice, who read most of the first sentence of every paragraph, then had Zsuzsa fax it to New York: My strongest recommen . . . As an opening maneuver in the Hungarian thea . . . With clear synergies with our . . . The attached data leads me to confidently predict more profitable sectors than current management env . . . Likely exits include: grow to suitable threshold for public offer on BP exchange, 18–24 months. Alternately, an industry consolidation is rated a “highly likely” in 6 analyst reports (attached), implying a highly probable M&A opp . . . Due to a historic alignment of rare circum . . . CM Gabor, Budapest Office.

  Charles then disappeared from view for nearly nine days, Saturday morning to Sunday evening. His secretary declared him out of town. His home answering machine spoke and claimed to listen but was unable to produce the man himself. He was absent from evenings at the Gerbeaud, nights at A Házam, and everywhere else. On Thursday night, John, desperate for a heterosexual man’s view on Emily, took a tram and bus out to Charles’s place in the hills and rang the bell. There were lights behind the curtains, but no one came to the door. On the seventh day of Charles’s absence, John’s answering machine coughed up this impersonation of the missing man: “There is never an end to it, God help me.” Charles was noticeably slurring. “Is there an end to it, Johnny? God help me, I don’t think there is.” The next evening, Sunday, Charles rematerialized, dapper and reposeful on the Gerbeaud patio, smiling, stubbornly refusing to discuss the past week or the gray-haired couple with whom he had spent that endless week and then just dropped at Ferihegy Airport to catch their plane to Zurich, connecting to New York, connecting to Cleveland, thank sweet Jesus.

  Early the next morning, he sat on the note from the Very Pathetic that had been waiting on his chair since Tuesday, four days after his report had made its own trip to New York:

  Charlie—NYHQ fast on the pub q. Ixnay, puppy. No way, Hosay. The guy’s not even Hungarian. He’s an Austrian. It’s an Austrian company, Charlie. No good having the first deal be about a bunch of Austrians, right? Gotta say: I think you should have caught this.

  Charles leaned his forehead against the still-cool window and passed ten minutes in disgusted consideration of the VP’s belief-beggaring stupidity. He then made a few notes on a yellow pad, drew a flurry of straight arrows with big, filled triangular heads that flew from one scribbled, abbreviated idea to the next, twice ending in ornately doodled question marks. It was half a plan, anyhow. He placed one call to a lawyer friend and another to the State Privatization Agency. Finally, after four more minutes of forced meditation while furiously waiting for an international dial tone, he was connected to Imre Horváth in Vienna. “Jó napot, Horváth úr,” he began brightly. “Gábor Károly beszél. Jó hírem van [I have some good news].”

  “It’s a little complicated, deal-structure-wise,” Charles told John twelve hours later as the journalist lay on the office couch watching sunset change the colors of the glass sky behind Charles’s head.

  “The word you’re struggling for is lie. You are lying. It’s a lie.”

  “This is an ugly and overused term.” Golden, heavenly sunbeams shot through silver clouds and lent his silhouette a spiky halo that forced John to squint. “Just loan me the credibility I am credibly entitled to, and everything will be fine. Check this out: I hired a cleaning lady, a cook, and a gardener this weekend,” he said. “I have a staff. Is that not the funniest thing you have ever heard? A staff. The point is, just help me convince Horváth I’m the guy, and we’ll explain the firm’s sad position later. When the humor of it will be more readily comprehensible.”

  “I understand from our mutual friend you are a rising and a respected journalist,” Imre Horváth said as John sat, three days later, to join Charles and the publisher for the last half of their meeting over the Gerbeaud’s coffee and milk, respectively. “My family has been in your newspaper business for six generations,” the Hungarian continued. “I expect we shall return to this line of work in Budapest before long.” As he sat in the heat of the patio, John’s very first response to Imre—less than thirty seconds after meeting him—was awe, an uncontrollable emotional and physical response that John felt in his spine and his tailbone, his palms and forearms, his cheeks and his kidneys. He was taken by surprise after Charles’s mocking descriptions of Imre; in person, the Hungarian was an imposing figure, and the gossipy snippets of history and suffering Charles had mentioned placed Imre in a different category of humanity altogether.

  Of course, Imre certainly took himself seriously, John realized a minute later in an effort to break free of this stifling, unacceptable awe, this sharp envy. Imre was talking about something very prosaic—old newspaper-production methods—but John’s mind strolled through a prairie landscape of jealousy of those who proved themselves in the ultimate test of their era and came up worthy. “There was a moment of surprise, yes, when the AVO burst through the door,” Imre was saying, and John’s envy quickly disguised itself for its owner’s benefit as something much more dignified and palatable: scorn: John resented Imre’s failed and transparent efforts to coax envy and admiration. He began noticing with satisfaction the holes in Imre’s stories, the richness of his suit, his monumental will to impress.

  And so now John undertook with pleasure the mission Charles had assigned him. The lies blossomed effortlessly. He pushed the conversation as far and as fast as he could, dared Charles to keep up. “Who’s that playwright you are always quoting, Károly?” John asked hi
m. “The fellow with the biting satires? Horn, isn’t it? What was the one you read aloud to us here last week?”

  “Marvelous!” exclaimed Horváth. “His works are printed by our family since their first editions, all of the plays.”

  “Whatever happened to your plan to finance a theater, Károly?” John asked Charles. “Károly has often told me, Imre, that it was a love of culture, an aspiration to civility, that brought him into venture finance in the first place,” John heard himself saying as Charles bit into a pastry. “Quixotic but true. I want my profile of his work to show how he’s always hoped to use capital to promote culture. So far he’s been disappointed at the common thinking of those who surround him. I think he doesn’t realize how rare is the clarity of his vision.”

  “We are relying upon it,” Imre intoned, “and I am glad to hear I am not the only one who sees this strength and promise in our Károly. Your readers, Mr. Price, should be interested in the successes that can come to a man of youth, energy, and culture as Mr. Gábor is. Particularly now. Particularly in Hungary.”

  “Precisely. What I find striking”—John decided to use Charles’s nom de guerre as often as possible—“is Károly’s literacy in a profession that too often stresses the bottom line. Károly is an old-fashioned type, a European type, but a remarkable amalgamation of his Hungarian culture and his American upbringing.” He paused to light a cigarette and pretended to search for the right words, though he felt tremendously articulate; he could have produced great chunks of this stuff without stopping for breath. “A gentleman first, a businessman second, our Károly. I am fascinated to see if there is room for such a specimen as Károly in the world today. One can hope, but dare not be certain.”

  “Take it easy, killer,” Charles said when Imre excused himself. “Let’s play it a hair slower. You sound like his Hungarian sycophants back in Vienna.”

  “Károly tells me you are returning to Hungary with quite extensive plans,” said John when Imre had returned.

  “We do indeed have projects in mind, sir. He and I were discussing different possibilities prior to your arrival.” He crossed his arms and leaned slightly toward John. “I suspect our firm’s history and future would be of great interest to your readership,” he said with a serious expression, and John silently swore not to break eye contact first, though it became almost impossible not to flinch from the blue stare. The three men left the Gerbeaud, walked up Andrássy út, and pursued their crisscrossing agendas: Imre attempted to tell his firm’s newsworthy story to the American reporter; John attempted to sell a burnished, partnership-worthy version of his newly Hungarianized friend to the old businessman while keeping himself amused; Charles helped them both.

  Soon, to his relief, John could feel his tenacious awe of Horváth entirely swept away by a refreshing, astringent breeze of unadulterated disgust, though John called it clarity. He cleared his mind of the disconcerting smoke and dust of Imre’s tragic life and smug moral worth and instead began to see through him. The man’s stories were egotistical parables, clumsy and garish and self-serving. Horváth had obviously crafted this idea of himself and was now forcing it on everyone: “Ohhh, sir, if one thing was clear to me, it was a responsibility. Since I am a very small boy, I was told of my family’s responsibility to our country and the burden I would bear. ‘The people’s memory,’ Boldizsár Kis called our press, and my father repeated this to me often. One day I would be responsible for maintaining this memory, I knew. Do you know Kis? No? A great revolutionary leader for democracy. Kis wrote a poem to say our press told the story of the Hungarian people, to themselves and to the world. We remember for a nation. Like you Jews with your Passover, I believe. But our story is still being written, it is not ancient history about pharaohs.”

  And, with that, before they had even passed the Opera House in their stroll up Andrássy, John had the old man cut and dried and pasted in a notebook, just as Charles had described him: pompous, self-important, proud of the badge of righteousness that history’s lottery had randomly granted him, and (Charles had neglected to mention) probably a rank anti-Semite.

  But two nights later, John sat to Imre’s left at a dinner arranged by Charles and his thoughts were much more difficult to corral. “Mr. Horváth, this is my friend Mark Payton, the famed Canadian social theorist and historian” was how Gábor had introduced the last arrival, and from the moment the four of them sat down in a private dining room at a Swiss restaurant in the City Park, John noted the great speed at which his disgust for Horváth alternated with fascination and then quiet stretches of pure respect, noted his inability to assign Imre to definitive nonseriousness. “If you pay attention, you can discover much about yourself in a work camp,” Horváth was saying to Mark at one moment, and John felt small and useless in the presence of a man who had lived such a life. “My press was at the very center of the revolution in 1956,” Imre said to the gloomy Canadian only minutes later, and John rolled his eyes.

  The restaurant sat in the shadow of Vajdahunyad, the park’s nineteenth-century castle, and the private dining room had windows on two sides: The castle’s turret loomed out one, and out the other the moon had just begun with a wide smile its slow, monthly yawn. Charles dealt with the wait staff in a peremptory and impressive manner, every gesture a demonstration of his executive skill. He had selected the wines carefully the day before and now raised his first glass of Meursault in a toast to the future of the Horváth Press and to the memory of the Hungarian people. Four glasses met and sang under the shimmering prisms and electric hum of the chandelier.

  Despite John’s doubts about the Canadian’s stability under pressure, Mark had been assigned the role of Charles’s trusted cultural adviser. He interpreted this role practically as a mime; he spoke little, just pursued Imre’s own history with a predictable, gulping avidity. “An author came to me after the war.” Imre crossed his arms and leaned toward Mark but looked off over his head in search of the past. “He had been published by the press in my grandfather’s day, if you can believe such a thing. My father was forced to cancel his contract, though, because his works really did not sell at all, though I know my father would have wanted to keep him, despite the losses. This fellow kept very impressive company in his life, belonged to clubs of writers and artists, you know, was of a very influential, important generation . . .” Mark lightly touched the tips of his right-hand fingers to his left palm and nodded slowly.

  Four waiters brought the first course, Balaton fogas filleted and braised en pipérade, as Charles had dictated the day before in consultation with the chef. The staff placed the domed dishes simultaneously in front of all four men and on a signal removed the covers with a flourish. Over the next three and a half hours, the wine changed color again and again, grew heavy, then smoky, then viscous and sweet. Course followed course until the fish starter was as far distant as the memory of a childhood picnic lunch, a whiff of sauce and a remembered snippet of talk, an instant of passing light on a companion’s face. From fish to greens to soup to meat to tart to cheese and fruit, John tried to stand straight against Imre’s great gusts until the lectures and the monumental histories, the provocative rhetorical questions all spun into one long monologue, which seemed to John the next day to have swallowed weeks rather than hours, and been addressed to him alone, a long immersion in Imre that John could not conceivably have resisted:

  “A work of art, Mr. Price. That is our life, everyone’s life can be this. I think you are perhaps like this, too. I think we are not so very different, you and I.” John silently hoped this might be true. “A life must make sense, it must have a beginning where its purpose is revealed, a middle where its purpose is achieved, and an end where its purpose is made clear to another, to the next generation, who can maintain that purpose, transmit it.” John suspected the man had said this before, knew he was talking like this now only for his press coverage, but at the same time he could not drive away the unwelcome and embarrassing, silly sensation that Imre was revealing some
thing of the greatest importance, a moment John swore he would remember forever. “Great powers have been used to muddy my purpose. But I could not be diverted. I say this not as pride. I do not boast,” he boasted, “but I say this as wonder: Such is life that I simply followed what I knew to be true and strength came to me.” Courses had come and gone, but the re-education flowed uninterrupted, John now leaning close, his thumbnail propping his teeth apart. “I am telling my own story. They tried to take it from me, to tell their story instead, but they were beaten. That is the worst violence one man can do another, young sir. Do you see this? There is torture, but one can withstand that. There is prison, but that is not too much, either. But to steal another man’s story is to steal his life, his purpose.” He was going in circles, John noted, struggling to get out of Imre’s grip and feel like an adult again.

  “Youth can tolerate such meals,” Imre was saying. “Mr. Payton here can drink four different wines and his expressions remain as calm and serious as when he begin. I have a very distant relation who entered a monkeyhouse, and he—no, this is not the word, is it?” he asked, and with the others laughed loudly, wiping his eyes. “Thank you, Károly. He went into a monastery,” he said the word in three syllables, “and he taken vows to be a moderate ascetic. I don’t think this would be suiting any of you, except perhaps you, Mr. Payton,” and everyone laughed again.

  “A moderate ascetic? That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?” asked John. “If you’re into denying yourself things and then you deny yourself even the pleasure of denying yourself things, that’s got to hurt.” Imre laughed the loudest, and John felt a rush of pride.