Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  “Boo!” she still said every morning, as a gift to her dad. “Boo!” she said this Monday morning while the Julies still slumbered. Emily had had about five hours of sleep the night before, but she reminded herself that she was working hard at her new job and she was still getting used to new food, new air, new words, new people, not to make excuses. She hoped all of this would explain her body’s excessive appetite for rest and other uncharacteristic lapses. Certainly it was temporary.

  The day of her high school graduation, a friend grimly warned Emily about the “freshman fifteen,” the inevitable weight all young women gain in their first year of college. Emily had never heard the phrase before, and realized that if it hadn’t been for her friend’s stray comment, she might never have been prepared. She was furious with herself for being ignorant of such a well known, avoidable danger.

  Emily gained six pounds her freshman year at Nebraska, six pounds in muscle tone she kept to this day, this Monday morning when she made another futile effort to scare the sun back under the earth, not because she wanted to go back to bed, but because she was pretty sure her dad, whom she missed terribly just now, could use the rest, and—seven time zones to his east—she was his first line of defense.

  “Kezét csókolom, kisasszony.” The old Hungarian security guard at the embassy’s front door always greeted Emily with the same words: “I kiss your hand, miss.” He would smile as broadly as he could without revealing the teeth he had never known were bad until he started working for the Americans.

  “Then I will never wash it again, Péter,” Emily would say, and he would wheezily bow, not having precisely understood her as she bounded through the security gate and into the lobby manned by two U.S. marines in a bulletproof enclosure. “Good morning, marines.”

  “Miss Oliver, good morning,” the crew-cuts would reply in unison.

  “Todd,” she said this Monday, pointing to the black soldier’s sleeve insignia. “When did you get that second rocker?”

  “Confirmed on Friday, sewn on Saturday. Thank you for noticing, Miss Oliver.”

  “Congratulations, marine. Are you going to lord it over Danny now?” she asked, referring to the white corporal in the booth.

  “He does need discipline, Miss Oliver.” He smiled at her, as people everywhere tended to do.

  She admonished the new promotee to be firm but fair and made a point to call him gunnery sergeant. She walked through the metal detector, regathered her change and keys from the soldiers on the far side, where her smile triggered yet more grinning. She walked behind sliding glass doors into areas of the embassy with lead-lined walls and microphone detectors and communications scrambling systems, in which secure environment she would make the ambassador’s coffee, smile at the Hungarian finance minister, pick up the ambassador’s shirts, and lunch at a table with the wives (and one shy professorial husband) of French diplomats while the widowed ambassador met in a separate room with the diplomats themselves.

  She was working hard. She appreciated the opportunity and the importance of her work. She admired her boss and her colleagues; they were about what she had expected. She was exceptionally well prepared for this experience, she reminded herself. Everything was fine. Her father had told her how well-suited she was for this. He was enormously proud of her. She reminded him of her mother, he had told her at the airport, and of a South Vietnamese colleague of his, killed in the Laotian highlands just before Christmas 1971. These were his two highest compliments. Everything was going fine, and just as she had expected.

  And yet, how to explain certain aberrations?

  Yesterday, Sunday, she had been reading under a tree on Margaret Island. Bells chimed eleven o’clock, she was reading and watching a group of American and Canadian guys play a shabby sort of touch football. None of the boys would have passed muster in even the most relaxed Nebraska game, except for Todd and Danny, of course. And then she was opening her eyes and the sun was well behind her and she was staring at the underside of the treetop and the players were all gone except for one, sitting next to her, leaning against the tree, reading her book. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-thirty.” She made him say it twice; she thought he was kidding. She was still drowsy, even fell asleep again for a few more minutes. A five-and-a-half-hour nap in public.

  And yet she stayed under the tree, felt no need or desire even to stand. She lay with her hands behind her head, her knapsack serving as a pillow, and she talked with John because she couldn’t think of anything else to do or anywhere else to be, a strange sensation. She talked about her family, simply because he asked. She talked more about her family than she ever did, showed almost no reflexive discretion or loyalty, because those did not seem to apply to this situation, for which she felt herself unprepared but with none of the adrenaline rush and careful analysis that unpreparedness usually triggered.

  “Tell me about your dad,” he had asked, somehow sniffing out the central issue immediately.

  Where to begin? A farmer, a widower . . . no, she decided to begin with the circles. Ken Oliver had inculcated in his children the value of the circles. We live in the center of five concentric circles—each of us does—and the circles define our place in the world and anchor us against danger, and also magnify our own strength like waves coming off us. At the center, there is the individual with his or her individual God-given gifts; then the circle of education, which is the ability to develop those gifts; then the circle of family; then the circle of community; then of country; then of God. Duty flows outward from the center; strength flows inward toward the center.

  “Whoa. Do you believe that?”

  Of course. Although no one had ever asked with that tone before. She didn’t usually talk about it with anyone who didn’t already know about it. Beth, her elder sister, married and with two kids on another farm about forty miles closer to Lincoln, did say once that the circles were maybe not that helpful, even to Dad. (Beth remembered their mother most clearly and said her death affected Dad just by “making him even more like him.”) Emily had repeated Beth’s heresy to Robert, her younger brother, a marine now at Twentynine Palms. Robert disagreed, said Beth just hadn’t thought hard enough about it yet. No one could ask her older brother, Ken Jr., of course, since he just took off one day and that was the last of Ken Jr. “Drugs,” her father explained, and never mentioned him again, though he did do some volunteer work with a local church group that helped recovering addicts.

  “So you pretty much come from arranged-marriage country,” John said.

  “Oh absolutely. I’m promised to a farmer seven counties over, and I come with three nice cows, but I have to pass a purity test after I come home from Hungary.”

  She didn’t tell John all of the rest of this, but she told him enough that she later wondered what was happening to her in this country.

  From 1961 to 1967, Ken Oliver’s tours in Vietnam and the surrounding countries were reasonably rare and of reasonable length. After Tet, however, he had no choice but to leave his wife and four kids in Georgetown and spend more than three leave-free years in Saigon, making frequent trips up north and into Laos. The last of these expeditions occurred just after Christmas 1971, during which he witnessed the death of “the noblest man I ever knew, Emmy.” He made it back to Saigon “by the grace of God” only to receive word that his wife, Martha, had gotten quite suddenly ill and that he had immediate leave to go back to Georgetown to see her. He never returned to Vietnam, resigning from the service after Martha’s rapid death and taking the kids to Nebraska, where his own parents lived in a vast agricultural expanse better suited to raising children than Georgetown’s diplomatic parties and cancer wards.

  John must have been sitting there watching her sleep for a couple of hours, she realized, even after his friends and brother had left the island. Men who thought and spoke like lesser versions of her dad were all around the embassy, but people like John were not. He was so aimless. He enjo
yed this sort of aimless talk, seemed to have no need to be busy. He was not like the Julies, who were just party girls, not serious at all, just biding time until they found men. Nor was he like Charles, who resembled nothing so much as certain money-grasping (and Emily-groping) agribusiness majors at Nebraska. Scott was angry, like a smart-aleck teenager. But John . . . and Mark was a new type, too. The strangest thought came to her as she stared up at the birds on the lowest branches and John talked about what sounded like a miserable childhood, though he was laughing about it: There was probably a range of people she had never experienced in this world and for which she had no preparation.

  He asked about her mom, and she simply answered him. “I was only five. I remember my dad cried at the funeral. But never again, Beth says. It was hard, I think, for him. I missed her for the longest time, but that wasn’t really the sort of thing you could talk about. It wasn’t fair to him to bring her up or make him think he wasn’t enough for us. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Jesus, Special Assistant. I think you’re allowed to complain about that. You had two great parents and you lost one. What else is complaining for?”

  She lay on her back in the silence, watched the branches and the softest blue sky. What indeed was it for? There was an answer to that. It was just bubbling up in her memory, something about—and she recognized the look in John’s eye, had seen it cloud up boys’ faces, just before they leaned in to kiss her. “ ‘Complaining,’ ” she quoted with a smile, shoving her book into her knapsack, standing up, and slapping the dirt off her legs, “ ‘is for people who don’t know how to make things better.’ ”

  Monday at the embassy, she checked her to-do lists, read the Monday Memos. She would be accompanying the ambassador to a reception at the Saudi embassy this evening. She also had a note from her supervisor, asking for a moment of her time, which he used to chide her for a relatively minor lapse in judgment on her part that he had witnessed last week—not a major incident, but if she was going to learn, then it should be brought to her attention. “Thank you,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “How’s your famous father?” he asked.

  Complaining was certainly not for being justifiably corrected at work, she reminded herself as she went downstairs to confirm schedules with the ambassador’s driver. And yet she hated the schoolmarmish, uptight scolding over virtually nothing, and then she was ashamed, not just of not taking correction well (for which you should be ashamed) but of her original honest mistake, for which you should never be ashamed. And that—to be ashamed of making an honest mistake—revealed nothing nobler than dirty pride, which of course was shameful.

  XII.

  JUST FOUR STREETS AWAY FROM THE AMERICAN EMBASSY’S IMPOSING façade sat an even more impressive villa, rented for a ninety-nine-year term by Charles Gábor’s employers, a New York venture capital firm whose 130-year-old name would literally, several months after the events described here, fall from its perch on Wall Street and crash into the pavement, disintegrating into marble dust and pebbles, only a few days before its executive board—with bluster and denials—would itself, due to similar structural errors, disintegrate into convicts, parolees, state’s witnesses, memoirists, and consultants.

  But in 1990, in a piece of symbolic topography destined to find its way into one of John Price’s columns, Charles Gábor, a venture capitalist one year out of business school, worked in a riverfront office that was larger and more luxurious and with a better view than the U.S. ambassador’s.

  Charles Gábor was a grandchild of ’56, one of those Americans and Canadians whose parents had left Hungary after the failed anti-Communist uprising of that year. In Toronto, Cleveland, and New York, this younger generation had tried to explain to their primary school chums that the S in Sándor was pronounced Sh before bowing to superior numbers and thereafter answering to Sandy or Alexander or just Alex. Then they would patiently explain to their middle school friends that no matter what President Carter says, the Communists are bad, they stole my country, until, at last, in tenth grade, they grudgingly accepted the idea of the Soviets as threatened or misunderstood and the Cold War as an inexplicable mutual aggression with plenty of blame to go around. Later they would tell their high school history teachers that the Versailles Treaty was properly called Trianon and was a vindictive and ill-conceived act that mercilessly and unwisely stole land from defeated governments struggling to rebuild, uprooted innocent families, incited more warfare, and led to generations of tyranny . . . before they finally stopped beating their heads against the curriculum and admitted that, yes, the winners had done what they had to do. At Versailles.

  Those who went to college would major in East Asian studies, communications, finance.

  On summer break, though, one might be at home and listen with amazement as one’s father, slightly drunk for the first time in memory, would let slip that he had not just escaped in 1956 but had fought, had run up the back of a tank, dropped a Molotov cocktail in its hatch, and shot the emerging panicked blond, crew-cut Russian boy through the eye with a generations-old revolver, shot him just underneath a mole sprouting two long hairs, and then had run as the body slumped back into the tank, blocking the only exit for its choking, burning comrades.

  Charles Gábor’s parents met in Cleveland, though they had both escaped from Hungary at the same time. Family legend grew around the amazing coincidences of their love: They had been at the same marches, then some of the same street battles of the uprising, had left the country within a day of each other, had killed time in refugee-holding areas in Austria within a kilometer of each other, had reached Cleveland within a month of each other, but still did not meet for another two years, until New Year’s Eve of 1959–60, when, at a party, Charles’s father was kissing another girl (“If I remember her name, it will be a miracle—Jane, Judy, Jennifer, Julie, something very American”) and, with closed eyes and one hand full of angora-sweatered breast and the other stroking plaid kilt–draped rump, heard his future wife shout at someone, “Happy New Year when they still sit at my Gerbeaud with their fat, stupid Russian faces? When those Russian animals are defecating on my streets? It is not happy. Not happy at all.” Charles’s father often told his son he had fallen in love with her voice, views, and unwilling English even as his tongue was in the other girl’s mouth.

  Charles, né Károly, was not born to a couple eager to experience the wonders of American assimilation, and his first language was Hungarian.

  “In your hometown, there is an island in the river where you can play football and then have ice cream and a bath and a massage.”

  “I am too small for football.”

  “Nonsense! You would be very good as goalkeeper. You will be tall enough someday. I should begin teaching you to play, where to look when their offense breaks through your defenders, how to bend your knees so you can jump in either direction.”

  “They do not have goalkeepers in football, Father.”

  “What are you saying? Ildikó, what is he saying? What are they doing with him at that school?”

  “Your father is right, Károly. You would be an excellent goalkeeper. That ice cream,” she squeezed his father’s hand. “My God. Sour cherry.”

  “But this ice cream is good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is okay, but the ice cream on that island is like nothing they make in Cleveland.”

  “I think I am right about football.”

  His parents often tried to reconstruct for each other the lives they had led in parallel before they met, their reminiscences often triggered by Charles’s current age, as in: “I tried to walk across Lake Balaton when I was a little girl, not much older than that.” She gestured at her son. “I thought I was tall enough.”

  “Then that was the age I kissed a girl for the first time. Dohány utca. I kissed her on the cheek.” He stroked his wife’s cheek with the back of his hand. “She was a Jew, and even though I did not know what the term meant, I knew something about it was dan
gerous and I thought I was very brave, because my father would have found it quite alarming.”

  “I was kissed the first time right next to the Vajdahunyad. I miss that stupid castle.”

  “Whenever I think of the Corvin I cannot believe you were there and you could have been hurt and we would never have met. There was a great battle at this movie theater, Károly. Not a movie about a battle, but a battle at the movies! Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  His parents spoke often of real estate in mysterious hands, and struggled to re-create for each other (and for their heir) the homes they had known.

  “You have an apartment, Károly, smaller than this house but much more beautiful, in the fifth district of your hometown. It is yours and someday you will be able to reclaim it and live there.”

  “You have another apartment in the first district, my boy. Also very beautiful!”

  “I have two apartments and this house? How will I know where to live?”

  “This house is nothing special. It is those apartments you will like.”

  “I like this house. Clark lives next door. And Chad lives on the corner. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

  “Don’t be silly. No one is going to make you leave this house, but someday you will want to, because they will give your apartments back to you and you will be very proud to have such lovely homes in your hometown.”

  While the little boy sat on the floor with his toy soldiers and dreaded being forced out of his house, his parents described his two apartments, and as they did, they left the places they had been standing (near the fire, near the cocktail cart), came across the room to each other, and lay down on the couch, his father’s arm around his mother’s neck. They stared at the ceiling and whispered details of their apartments to each other in quieter and quieter tones until Charles could not hear them at all, and he was relieved to be left alone to play on the floor of his house, in the company of his friend the cat, Imre Nagy (Big Jim, as he introduced him to friends). The cat had lived in that house longer than Charles himself, and would, nightly, pounce on and bat from paw to paw one of Charles’s soldiers, a shiny silver knight with a sword. The glint of it attracted the cat, and though he ignored the rest of the tiny military forces, that knight was nip.