by Ed Ifkovic
Stop, I told myself—my mind wandering. During my recent stay in Berlin, I’d undergone a sea change. Germany had always felt like an ancestral home—from the comfortable distance of Chicago. We spoke German in our parlors, we cooked German food. But close up, Germany swelled and gloated…a land bubbling with sentimentality and gnawing rage. I imagined an unseen voice whispering in my ear. “Come, Edna, come Julchen, get out of here. Get out!”
The Romanovs in Russia were cardboard cutouts from a child’s book. Grubby peasants looked in on gold and silver, out of reach, blinding them. And Austria-Hungary, the stern though trembling hand pointing at its far-flung regions—from Hungary to Bohemia, to Moravia, to so many other lands, unaware that the edges of the wonderful tapestry were always the first places where the unraveling began. Maybe not unaware—but indifferent. But…so what?
I sat there and asked myself: So what? Yet Harold made it his business to pinch and prick and shove the underpinnings of that Austrian Empire. He held a mirror to its wizened face. Is that why he had been beaten, threatened? Austrian spies reported the annoying American who seemed determined to foment trouble?
Baffling, all of it.
The waiter hovered nearby in a rigid Prussian stance, arrow straight, waiting for me to look up. When I did, he bowed and asked in garbled English whether I wished anything else. He was not Markov or any other familiar servers I’d come to recognize, but a thin blond, blue-eyed young man, boyish, though with a jagged blood-red scar on the side of his mouth that gave his face a peculiarly sardonic cast. I shook my head, no. Another bow, lower, a clicking of heels, and then he left me alone.
I’d spotted the poet István Nagy sitting a few tables away, his profile to me, his gigantic Aubrey Beardsley nose tilted up. As the waiter walked away, the poet turned to me, eyes squinting and then conspicuously dropped back to the sheaf of papers spread out on the table before him. He held a pencil in the air, poised as though waiting for heavenly inspiration, then tapped it against his pale cheek. But his poetic muse seemed absent at the moment, so he sat back and contemplated the Danube. But as I watched, he flicked his head toward me, checking on me, then away—more than once. An unsettling monitoring of my activity. What part did he play in this café drama?
I’d never looked closely at him. A stringy looking man, perhaps in his late forties, maybe older, wearing intricate layers of clothing, despite the day’s heat. But dated, even to my American eye—a waistcoat draped over his shoulders, unbuttoned, his arms not in the sleeves, a brocaded vest studded with silver buttons inlaid with flat pearls, a garment that smacked of diplomatic courts of a half-century before. The cuffed old boots, the mocha-colored trousers, the checkered scarf wrapped around his neck as if to ward off chills from the river. That sculptured profile exaggerated his hawk-like nose, very British decadent, a thin moustache lost under its mountainous proportions, and a stubby Van Dyke goatee, carefully manicured. His brown hair, tinged with specks of white, grew over his shoulders, the last refugee from some Bohemian quarter of a distant past. He was an art-nouveau cameo etched against the Danube.
He kept watching me, though furtively.
Inspector Horváth and another man crossed the terrace, headed into the hotel lobby, and spotted me. “Miss Ferber,” he addressed me, bowing.
“Inspector Horváth.”
A slight smile. “You remember my name?”
“Of course. You impressed me, sir.”
He bowed again deferentially. “An honor.”
“You were told about last night’s attack?”
“Yes. In fact, I am here to interview your Mr. Gibbon.”
“Well, he’s not mine, let me assure you. I gather he’s resting in his room. He returned from the hospital this morning, head bandaged, a black-and-blue welt on his chin, but probably filled with the same dogged determination to tempt fate again. His wounds will be battle scars. We’ll have to read about it.”
Inspector Horváth’s smile suggested he’d not fully comprehended my words.
I’d seen Harold briefly that morning, shuffling in, an attendant leading him to the elevator. Standing in the lobby, I’d called to him, but he avoided me, bending slightly, his head dipped into his chest.
“I don’t like it when visitors are so…so assaulted in our streets.”
I frowned. “We don’t much care for it either.”
His engaging smile, a bow, and he headed to the hotel.
István Nagy gargled aloud, though he sounded as though he immediately regretted that indiscretion.
“Sir?” I called to him. He refused to look at me. “Sir? You seem to find my brief talk with Inspector Horváth disagreeable?”
He shot a stern glance at me. “You presume too much.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Mr. Nagy.”
“The petty lives of Americans, especially the rich ones who visit our country, do not interest me.”
“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. I’ve seen you inside the café, leaning to the side, fearful that you’ll miss some scrap of gossip spoken at a nearby table.”
He bristled, pursed his lips. “I sit quietly and write my poetry.”
“Yet you sit in a café populated by Americans and British.” I smiled. “Are you honing your English-language skills?”
“My English is serviceable, madam.” He offered a sickly smile. “As you can of course hear at this moment.”
“I’ll grant you that. Where did you learn English?”
“In England, which is why I speak English. Unlike you Americans who speak…wild Indian.”
I chuckled. “Ah, as a boy you must have consumed Beadle’s dime novels. Deadwood Dick and that sort. Cowboys and Indians and Buffalo Bill and…”
“I read Shakespeare,” he interrupted me.
“Another wild man if there ever was one.”
“The American movie sweeps over the young people of Budapest, madam. Sweltering halls with giddy men and women watching your idiotic Charlie Chaplin and galloping Wild West romance, all to the tinkle of a maddening piano.”
“So you sit in that darkened hall and believe you’re seeing the real America?”
“I don’t go to such movies, madam.”
“But you’ve become a social commentator on them, no?”
That bothered him. He turned away.
I stood up and walked to his table. “We haven’t had a conversation, sir, though you seemed to have listened in on many of mine…and that of my friends.”
He refused to look up. “Nor do I plan to have one now.”
He infuriated me. At that moment, watching the beads of sweat form on his brow, the tendons on the back of his wrists tremble, and hearing a deep intake of breath, I suddenly understood something. Perhaps István Nagy was not a bystander to the tragedies and comedies that happened in the Café Europa. Perhaps he was a player. But what did that mean?
I sat down in a chair opposite him. “May I join you?”
He was furious but spoke in an even, steely voice through clenched teeth. He tugged at the scarf around his neck, exaggerating the movements like some fin de siècle British esthete performing for friends—or trying to escape from my intrusion by choking himself to death.
“I rather you not, madam.”
I ignored that. “Perhaps we can…” I stopped because he raised a hand, palm out, fingers spread out. He started gathering his pads, tucking his pencil into a vest pocket.
“Are you aware, Miss Ferber, that in Europe it is considered improper for an unaccompanied lady to do what you’re doing—uninvited, you sit with a gentleman. Do you understand how that looks?”
“Of course I do.”
“Perhaps in America where there are no rules of conduct such behavior is acceptable.”
“No, actually it isn’t. The unchaperoned lady is a badge of dishonor in most places. So be it.
My mother would be horrified at my behavior. She’d agree with you. Applaud you, in fact.” I waited a heartbeat. “But, yes, even in America unchaperoned women do not behave so…indecorously.”
“And yet here you are at my table.”
“Sad, isn’t it? I’ve obviously displayed moral lapses in more than one country.”
“You make light of it all.”
“Sir,” I got serious, “I’m deeply aware of the archaic conventions of the day, especially regarding the proper conduct of women as regulated by short-sighted men.” I chuckled. “But I’ll let my friend Winifred Moss address that issue. She’s much more in tune with the ugly strictures men place on women. But, truthfully, I am hoping you can give me some answers.”
“About?”
“About Harold Gibbon and Cassandra Blaine and…and Zsuzsa Kós…the whole…”
He narrowed his eyes into slits. “I’m a simple poet. I write nouvelle chanson about the courts of love. The Jugendstil or what you Americans call art nouveau. The slipping of winter into spring. The maiden in a field of summer flowers. The…”
“Very nice, I’m sure. Lovely. Delightful. Yet events are happening that need to be looked at.”
“By you?” His voice broke and his eyes grew cloudy.
“Why not? I’m a reporter.”
He groaned. “Americans in Budapest are always reporters or…rich women in silk and fur.” A rumble from deep in his throat. “Now I see the two can be one and the same.”
A twinkle in his eye, his pale lips turned up briefly, a nod of his head. What was clear to me at that moment was that István Nagy, despite his protests to the contrary, welcomed this conversation. He wanted it, naysayer though he was. That baffled me, and intrigued. Something would be said here. He signaled to a waiter who returned with a bottle of wine and another glass, though Nagy had said nothing to him.
My tone was conciliatory. “Sir, you’re an habitué of the café. You are obviously comfortable there. You see what happens. You must have opinions on the murder, on the attack on Harold Gibbon, on whatever happens.”
He pointed. “Let me tell you something, Miss Ferber. I adopted the Café Europa years back—long before its unfortunate discovery by the Americans and the British. The old, creaky hotel became a—muse. Yes, a muse for me.” A sliver of a smile. “I’m charmed by its failings, its faded glory. Even though the lights dim too often, and sputter, hiss, making my heart quake. As a young man, fresh from a sojourn in Vienna where my first poems were published in a literary journal, my first poems, I found a comfortable table here.”
“Vienna? But you’re Hungarian?”
“My mother was from Vienna. An old Austrian family. Von Hofmann. Very respected, moneyed. My father was a professor in one of the university departments. A Magyar who loved Vienna. He died happily there.”
“But you returned here to Budapest?”
He paused. “None of this is really important, Miss Ferber.”
“It’s conversation.”
He drew his lips into a thin line. “I’ve discovered that nothing is ever just conversation. Behind your American vernacular is always some nagging question or suspicion or insult.”
I smiled. “Never just idle curiosity?”
“Not in my experience. Americans are wily and smug, a deadly combination.”
“Agreed. But such a combination makes for intriguing character, no? Perhaps we all become minor characters in a Henry James novel when we step onto European soil.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What is it you wish to ask me, Miss Ferber? The sun will soon set and I prefer to contemplate the Hungarian sunset on the Danube in silence—the somber, wistful, echoes of a past on this lovely river.”
“Probably a past that never existed.”
A sardonic smile. “It only matters that it lives in my memory.”
“True.” I leaned in. “I’ve seen you talking with Jonathan Wolf, sir.”
The abrupt shift in conversation registered not one bit. Nonplused, that same smile stuck to his face, he waited a moment. “That man bothered me as I sat alone. Once again, an American who does not wait for an invitation.” He eyed me suspiciously. “I suppose it’s a national characteristic. Every plot of land on this earth is his territory, occupied or not. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt presumed to send that mythic white fleet around the globe, insisting it sent the message that America had arrived on the international landscape, well, Americans place their bodies wherever they will.”
“So Mr. Wolf is not a friend?”
“I scarcely know the man. I’ve seen him lingering around the hallways, sheltered by what he thinks are invisible doors, watching, watching.”
“I did see you talking to him that night as you sat on a bench on the quay.”
That stopped him. “Really? Were you hiding in the bushes by the locust trees?”
“I saw you push him.”
A long pause as he considered what to tell me. Finally, sighing, he said, “He disturbed my silence.”
“So you shoved him?”
“He asked too many questions.”
“About what?”
“Well, if you must know, and obviously you do, since Americans have taken all rudeness as their province, he first feigned an interest in my verse, his being supposedly a lover of Dante Rossetti and that circle.”
“Really?” That surprised me.
“Amazing, wouldn’t you say? And he looks like any wealthy American on the Grand Tour, buying folk baubles he’ll display back in America as relics of some fabled European past.”
“Yes, the same past you entertain in your mind.”
For the first time he offered a real smile. “Touché, my dear Miss Ferber.”
“That was it—that talk of poetry?” I smiled. “That’s why you shoved him?”
“Of course not. I’m not a foolhardy man. Mr. Wolf has no good intentions in Budapest.”
“What do you mean?”
He stared into my face. “He purposely goaded me. A remark that I—I might be a spy. That’s when I shoved him.”
“A spy?”
“For the Austrian military.”
“Are you?”
“He’s a mad man.”
“But that was it?”
A puzzled look covered his face. “Bizarre, his questioning, I must say. He asked about the hotel guests.”
“Like?”
“Like the Blaines. He saw me saying good morning to Marcus Blaine. That pleasantry stunned him, I gather.”
“Mr. Blaine?”
“He didn’t return the greeting, as I recall. But Jonathan Wolf wondered about our…friendship. Of course, there is none.”
Blaine? That flummoxed me. What was Wolf up to? “That seems absurd.”
“Exactly. If you must know, once again, I suspect that he’s not an American, despite the tailored clothing and bundles of dollars he sends flying into the Hungarian economy.”
“That surprises me.”
“Score one point for me then.”
“What proof?”
“None. He has a slight accent that suggests he’s from Eastern Europe, though it’s been polished and honed.”
“Hungarian?”
“One wonders. That, or Slavic. Perhaps German.”
“What else about him?”
He waited a moment, glanced toward the Danube. The light was shifting as twilight neared. A rosy haze at the horizon, a patch of cobalt blue around the wispy clouds high in the sky.
“I believe he’s an Italian anarchist.”
“Mr. Nagy, why?” My voice rose. “I can’t imagine an anarchist looking so…”
“So splendid in a suit?”
“Well, yes.”
“I know in America—and even here, sadly—the cartoonists depict the anarchists as grubby
socialist Muscovites in peasant garb, running through the streets with lit bombs in their hands. Left-wing Jews.”
I smiled. “Yes, I’ve seen such cartoons. We had a Haymarket riot in the States—horrible—and the cartoonists did just that.”
“Anarchists are the true spies, my dear lady.”
“And they’re in Budapest?” At that moment I felt that Nagy didn’t believe what he was telling me—it was some foolish lie calculated to get me to react. An Italian anarchist? Jonathan Wolf?
He went on. “You forget, an Italian anarchist killed our beloved Empress Elisabeth as she strolled a river bank in Geneva. There are troublemakers everywhere, especially in the empire. With the crisis with Serbia looming, they lie in wait. They look for opportunity. You do know that there have been attempts on Franz Josef before. On other members of the royal family. A Bosnian Serb threw a bomb at Franz Ferdinand already. The brutal Young Bosnia, insane radicals. The ultimate prize is the old man himself. Franz Josef. That would be cataclysmic.”
“You are an apologist for the old regime, I take it.”
“I am loyal to the Habsburgs. They civilized our lives, even here in rebellious Budapest.”
“But not modern.”
“Modern?” A mocking tone. “You mean automobiles and the like? America insists the world mimic its love of foolish invention. Someday America will ruin the world with its noisy contraptions. Without a royal family, an emperor, we flounder, slide back into the Dark Ages. Chaos.”
“And how do you fit into the scheme of things?”
“I hope I am the bard. The empire’s Homer, though not of epics but of simple elegiac lyrics.”
“Odes to the end of something?”
He grimaced. “Now you sound like that pesky reporter, Mr. Gibbon.”
“He predicts a war shortly.”
“There will be no war. None. The world fears the awesome Austrian army. Serbia squeals like a cornered pig in a sty—which, by the way, is where they discover their monarchs—but Austria-Hungary is mighty. A day’s skirmish perhaps, the Serbian weeps and licks wounds, and Emperor Franz Josef dines that night on consommé, partridge, and caviar.”