by Ed Ifkovic
“You never answered my question, Mr. Gibbon. Why have you been exiled here?” I stared into his eager, bony face. A ferret, I thought, some jittery little forest creature, all buck teeth and watery eyes. But I saw something else there: a cunning little boy, Tom Sawyer whitewashing a picket fence perhaps, the unloved boy of the village who could be funny and charming—and wanted the world to look at him. That crooked smile under so emphatic a moustache and outsized beak nose. The flashing hazel eyes, unblinking, or blinking too rapidly, the sense of absolute wonder there. Wily, this reporter, and not to be cavalierly dismissed.
Harold was nodding at a portly man sitting nearby. “Simpson of the New York Tribune,” he whispered. We watched as Mr. Simpson was joined by another man who was dapper in a summer Prince Albert coat, a pince-nez, an enormous cigar clutched in his fingertips.
“Important, that man.” Harold smirked. “Or at least he thinks he is. Jamison. The New York Times.”
Winifred sighed. “You visit Budapest and you are surrounded by Americans.”
Harold grinned. “Sooner or later anyone hungry for English-speaking folks finds his way to the Café Europa.” He pointed to a rack of international newspapers. “Sixty papers, mostly English, but also German, French. The Morning Post from London, three days late. Even”—a shocked look on his face—“the Hungarian and Austrian papers. Budapesti Hirlap. The Vienna Reichspost. The Berlin Vorworts.” A heartbeat. “I’ve been here over a year now.”
“So you said. But, once again, why are you here?” I probed. “Certainly that scoundrel Hearst didn’t send you here to cover the morganatic marriage of Cassandra Blaine and Count Frederic von Erhlich.”
He chuckled. “That’s a bonus, really, though such marriages are stale news now.” He carefully rolled another cigarette, taking his time, peering closely at the tobacco. “I’m here to chronicle the end of it all.”
Winifred, impatient, rolled her eyes. “The end of what?”
He waved his hand toward the bank of windows overlooking the Danube. “The final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The end of Franz Josef’s long and awful sixty-something-year reign. Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. The Serbian Question. Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexed in 1908 by Austria without so much as a by-your-leave, an insult to the Serbians living there. The Serbians hungry for vengeance. War. Serbia, a thorn in Austria’s side. The rabble-rousers in the streets, the anarchists, the stink bombs, assassination of local officials, the—”
“And you’re convinced it’s ending?” I interrupted.
“The empire is a crumbling massive weight, the most un-talked-about secret. Franz Josef recently had a bout of pneumonia, probably dying soon, and this…this Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a nasty piece of snobbery, ready to reign over its decline and fall. Read Gibbon—Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” A foolish grin. “Another inquisitive Gibbon. I plan to write my own Decline and Fall of the Austrian Empire.”
Raising his head, he sniffed the air. “You can smell the decay.”
I smiled. “That’s just this hotel crumbling around us.”
“You seem so sure of things,” said Winifred.
“I smell war now. Hearst smells war.”
“Well,” I said, “he did help to bring about the Spanish-American War—”
“Rumors, unfounded.”
I went on, “Is that why you’re here—to help push Europe into war?”
A mysterious smile. “They’re doing a pretty good job of it by themselves, no?”
“But what’s your reason?”
“I’m a restless man, a wanderer. I put my ear to the ground and listen for the drumbeat. It just happens that a man like Hearst—a man who believes in banner headlines—hires folks like me. I’m the kind of guy who looks at the world and says: You, talk to me.” His eyes flashed. “Somebody’s gotta be a war’s Homer. Why not me?”
“Why Budapest? Why not Vienna?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then, slowly, in a stage whisper, “Franz Ferdinand is very unpopular here because the Hungarians know the heir to the throne—der Thronfolger—despises them. Hungarians don’t like being yoked to Vienna. After 1867 they coerced the emperor into a dual monarchy—Austria and Hungary, but that black-and-yellow Habsburg flag rankles the good Magyar patriot. Vienna is closed in tight, folks avoiding reality, lost in dreamy Strauss waltzes and strolling the Ringstrasse under the rows of lime trees. Here—well, people talk in private, huddle in coffee houses while they sip apricot barack. Perhaps the war will begin here.”
Winifred was shaking her head. “True, Serbia is rearing its head these days, a country still angry about the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But a small kingdom, afraid of Austria’s thrust and power?”
“Serbia wants a port on the Adriatic it will never have, though a Greater Serbia demands it. That upstart kingdom will never let go of its impossible dream. Serbia will always be the world’s mosquito, insignificant, but eternally buzzing in your ear. Every so often you have to swat it.”
I laughed out loud. “World politics in a nutshell, according to Mr. Gibbon.”
“So,” Harold continued, “I’m here to watch the world fall apart, bit by bit.”
Suddenly, with an abrupt thrust of his arm, Harold waved across the room, snapping his fingers, and a man rushed to our table.
“Mr. Gibbon, sir?” The man bowed and stood too close to Harold.
“Dear ladies, you’ve met Vladimir Markov?”
Winifred and I shook our heads. I’d seen the café proprietor bustling about, a quick smile on his cherubic face. The roly-poly man, eyes enlarged by thick spectacles, in his late fifties, dressed in a vaguely funereal black cutaway suit, wore an elaborate scarlet cravat bunched at his neck, an incongruous puff of dandyish color.
He grabbed my hand, and then Winifred’s, and kissed each. The Old World Küss die Hand rankled my small-town-girl American soul. Winifred squealed, unhappy, and Mr. Markov, confused, apologized to Harold but not to us.
“A pleasure,” I mumbled.
Amused by our discomfort, Harold grinned foolishly and spoke to Markov in German—which I understood. “American women cannot be touched.” Then, surprising me, he warbled in rapid-pace Hungarian with Markov, who bowed repeatedly, answering him. “Igen. Nem. Igen.” Yes. No. Yes. “Nem értem.”
I’d mastered a smattering of Hungarian, an impossible language, I’d come to realize, though I struggled with a Baedeker phrase book at night in my rooms. A runic confusion, neither Germanic nor Slavic, but after a week or so of guttural German, blunt-edged, the spontaneous flow of Magyar struck me as melodious, each word accented on the first syllable—perhaps I was wrong—but with a lyrical power that soared, ending every periodic sentence with a whiff of marrow-deep melancholy.
Markov and Harold chatted on in Hungarian, the proprietor deferential in his repeated bowing, and both kept looking at Winifred and me.
“He offers you wine,” Harold finally said. “For the beautiful women.”
Winifred grumbled. “Then he’d best wait until they arrive.”
Markov addressed us in choppy English. “This is home”—he waved chubby fingers around the room—“to the American and British visitor to our lovely Budapest.” He snapped his fingers and an old waiter in a white linen jacket brought a bottle of Tokay and three glasses.
A slender boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, in dark pants and florid red cravat, stood nearby and waited, a pitcher of water cradled against his chest. Markov nodded. “György, come.” The boy moved closer. “My wife’s nephew, from Russia like me, but new here. And green as spring lettuce.” He chuckled. “He has never seen Americans before he arrives a week ago. He stares with open mouth.”
“We don’t bite,” I noted, smiling at the skinny boy with the prominent Adam’s apple and colicky black hair a little too greased and polished. He bowed at me, tippi
ng the pitcher so that the water spilled onto the marble floor and worn oriental carpets. Markov berated him quietly and then apologized—again to Harold—and the boy stepped back, scratching his neck nervously.
Harold chatted in Russian now—another surprise—and burst out laughing. “Markov says little György is fascinated by Cassandra Blaine, the American girl with the golden hair. The laughing girl, he calls her.”
Rudely, we all turned to glance at Cassandra, who was dipping a spoon into some chocolate ice-cream confection, and György, realizing we’d learned of his infatuation, turned scarlet and spilled more water. Lips pursed, Markov pointed to the kitchen door. The boy scurried away.
Markov spoke to Harold. “Too sad, my situation. A favor to the wife. You know how that is.” He winked. “A peasant boy, used to cows and sheep and digging winter potatoes. The necktie—she is a noose on a young boy.” He shrugged his shoulders, backed away, headed to check a large copper tea samovar on a sideboard.
“A good sort,” Harold told us as he watched Markov pour tea. “A diplomat. He smiles at everything. You ask him about Franz Josef and Serbia or Albania, anything political, and he smiles and bows and backs away. He’s Russian, so you never know what he’s really thinking.”
Winifred spoke up, a trace of pique in her tone. “Are you interviewing everyone for your own Decline and Fall of the Austrian Empire, Mr. Gibbon?”
He smiled and winked at her, improperly. “Well, anyone who’ll talk to me. The landed gentry rule Hungary, even over the nobles. But the workers are the ones who’ll tell you the true story. The unvarnished truth. The vendors in the flower market. The attendants in the mineral baths up on Mount Gellért. Newsboys hawking papers. The Gypsies in their camps. The Jewish storekeepers, the café owners, the grubbing artists.”
“Jews?” I asked.
“You’re in Judapest, ma’am. That’s what the current mayor calls it.”
I said, my voice hollow, “My sad father’s home.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t the aristocracy that’s got the rhythm of this city, let me tell you. It’s the old lady who wanders into the gulyás restaurant peddling her violets from Matra mountaintops. She understands that war’s coming. The Gypsy violinist with his czigany music and rat-tail cigars. The Serbian men in scarlet capes and sashes.”
“Yet you linger here, Mr. Gibbon. In this café. With us.” I pointed to the expansive French doors, open now to the flagstone terrace spanning the quay that dipped down toward the Chain Bridge and the Danube.
“Café life, Miss Ferber. Look around you.” He pointed to a man with a high flat forehead under slick wavy hair smoking a cigarette in an elaborate holder jutting from a goose-quill stem, wearing an ill-fitting jacket buttoned up to the neck and high-buckled boots.
“István Nagy, a poet. He’s always here. He watches the foreigners. He hates us. He writes bitter art-nouveau verse about the fall from grace of the new man in the new century. The New World—that is, the rich Americans—comes to gloat at the fin de-siècle decay of an empire he stupidly adores. He longs for the days when Vienna was one grand ball that went into morning. The pre-Lent carnivals with masks and flirtation, Strauss waltzes played from the bandstand.”
“How do you know this?”
He ignored me. “And there.” He pointed to a corner table where two young men sat with an empty wine bottle, two glasses, and a chunk of dark bread, both holding sketchbooks. “The modern Hungarian artists, followers of that zigzag nonsense done by Matisse and Picasso and their ilk in Paris. The short one—the one who looks like a carnival clown with a lopsided grin—he’s Lajos Tihanyi. His father was a friend of this café’s owner. They linger here, him and his buddy, the tall lanky boy, Bertalan Pór, and sketch…us…everyone. That’s all they do. They’ll sketch you and you’ll look like you’ve been twisted into a salt pretzel, your head not where it’s supposed to be. Three arms, maybe. I don’t know. People as cartoons. It’s beyond me, but I’m just a working scribe. Tihanyi is deaf and dumb, so you will hear him sputter and groan, utter garbled sentences. Bit of a temper, in fact, easily rattled. He’ll sneer at his friend, but this Pór is a calm sort—nothing gets to him. He smiles and makes peace. Frankly, I’d kill the clown.”
Winifred held up her hand. “Stop, Mr. Gibbon. Please.”
Harold arched his voice. “The avant garde, them two.” He whispered. “Like everyone else, they’re waiting for the death of Franz Josef. Der alte Herr.”
“Sir,” I began, “you impugn…”
“We’re a circus act for them, truth to tell.”
I glanced at the two young men, both absorbed in their sketching, glancing up now and then toward the open doorway, their chalk rolling over their pads.
Suddenly, grunting, Harold jumped up, twisting his body like a wobbly top. Eyes wide and flashing, he stammered, “Guess it’s time to question the lovely damsel.”
With that pronouncement, blurted loudly enough to turn heads, he rushed to Cassandra’s table. He stood so close to her that it caught her chaperone off guard. The old woman nearly toppled back in her chair. She squawked and put an iron grip on Harold’s forearm. Harold, purposely ignoring her and half-bowing to Cassandra, blithely introduced himself—“Harold Gibbon, Hearst syndicate, reporter”—and requested an interview. Every eye in the café found him.
Cassandra, sputtering, looked to her chaperone and squeaked out a feeble, “Mrs. Pelham, you—”
But at that moment the redoubtable Mrs. Pelham, doubtless a veteran of caring for innumerable charges, deftly retrieved a summer parasol conveniently hidden, and jabbed Harold’s side. He yelped like a recalcitrant puppy and backed away. Mrs. Pelham spoke through clenched teeth. “How dare you, you brutish mongrel?”
At which Winifred let out an unfunny laugh.
Harold slunk back to our table, slumped into a chair, and offered a grin to the audience he’d gathered. “You gotta try, no?”
“Mr. Gibbon,” I began, “perhaps you should—”
But the giddy, ridiculous moment ended abruptly as a group of men entered from the terrace and stopped. Harold sucked in his breath.
“What?” I demanded.
“Endre.” One word, hummed softly.
“Who?”
“Cassandra’s lover. Her old lover. The man she abandoned after her horrible mother contracted her out to Viennese aristocracy and a pathetic, worthless title. A friend of mine. Endre Molnár.”
The young man stood in front of his band of friends, all of whom had stopped their chatter, his eyes resting on Cassandra, who self-consciously touched her exquisite hair. Silent now, Endre watched her. He was tall and lanky and dark-complected, his black eyes set under a high forehead, his black hair swept back and down his shoulders—very Heathcliff, I thought. A swashbuckling moustache over razor-thin lips. A granite face, strong, rigid, shadowy. His smoldering stare radiated melancholy. Dressed in polished high black boots, blue trousers, and a white linen shirt that contrasted with his bronzed skin, he dominated the room, ruled the space. Every eye turned to him. Even Winifred, frowning at the melodramatic moment, stared.
One of the men with Endre leaned into his neck, but Endre shrugged him away, and spoke loudly in Hungarian.
“What?” I asked Harold, my linguist at hand.
“He said he belongs here—his friends come here.”
Mrs. Pelham sputtered unhappily as the room watched Endre’s rigid body. Even the two artists laid down their sketchpads, and waited. Cassandra Blaine, perhaps not realizing what she was doing, had stood, one hand gripping the table, her body swaying. Mrs. Pelham reached out, demanding the girl sit down, but Cassandra, a catch in her throat that we all heard, pushed her away. She sobbed out loud. Cassandra was staring at Endre, and he at her. It was marvelous, I thought, and melodramatically beautiful, this moment out of, say, an Offenbach operetta. Or even Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, all
the rage a few summers back. Or The Gypsy Baron. I expected to hear a plaintive Gypsy violin, maybe, a drumbeat, a wail from an unseen singer. A stage curtain, dropped.
But then, the spell broken, Endre turned away sharply, his face mournful but dismissive. A coldness there, calculated. And, in a flash, he disappeared back out onto the terrace into the late-afternoon shadows and golden sunlight glinting off the Danube. We stared, all of us, mesmerized, at the empty space.
“Well…” Winifred began.
Harold’s head was twisting around like a dervish, unable to focus.
Turning, I spotted György standing by the kitchen door, dripping water onto the floor from the pitcher he seemed unable to control. I followed his startled gaze. In the shadowy entrance to the café, near the corridor that led to the hotel lobby, stood a tall, burly man with a dark beard, a derby on his head, arms folded over a barrel chest. I jumped. Though everyone else was gazing at the empty doorway to the terrace, the man was fiercely focused on Cassandra. My throat went dry, my heart pounded. The boy looked scared, which I understood because the man reeked of menace, danger.
When I looked back at the entrance, no one was there, just shadows and dim light. The man had disappeared. And for a minute I doubted what I’d seen there. But a shaft of fear passed through me as my eyes drifted back to the hapless Cassandra, crumpled over her table.
Chapter Two
Late afternoon in the café, we watched Markov switching on lights, lighting the fat candles on the long tables banking the open French doors, a woman in a housemaid’s smock sweeping the steps leading to the terrace. A slight wind blew in the sweet scent of roses from the garden, mixing with the raw whiff of river sludge. A lazy hum from the strollers along the promenade on the Corso, the occasional piercing laugh, someone yelling to a friend across the way. Winifred and I were loathe to leave the room, caught by the narcotic rhythm of a café readying for nighttime—the tinkle of unseen glasses and dishes, blackbirds sweeping across the terrace and onto the locust trees, György plucking dead blooms from a basket of blood-red Jacqueminot roses on the sideboard.