Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  Three trips later, as the tail end of sunset, like a peacock wandering over the lip of a hill, trailed a few final slivers of silver into the west, and the east darkened from teal to navy to plum, after Mark had shared the wooden bench with the elderly photographer who was not a retired spy but in fact a Welsh cardiologist on his way to meet his wife for dinner, Mark stood at the bottom of the funicular and tried to regain the feeling of smugness he had felt on so many descents that day: Some people never even get five seconds when they glimpse life’s beauty, he insisted. “Five seconds,” he repeated, this time aloud.

  Some hours later, Mark stood a few feet to the left of that same spot. He decided now that he could not end this day on the down trip, that the sensation after the descents, standing here in the roundabout of Adam Clark Square, was growing too powerful; this funicular could never carry him home. He bought a ticket from the girl whose shift had started three hours before, and he did not notice the unkind expression on her face or the tone of her question—A ticket for you today, sir?—or how she called out to her friend at the turnstile. He did not notice the sarcastic way her friend welcomed him into the car. Instead, he thought about the pleasure of the ascending trip with an anticipation he knew he would hold up to later experience as the very benchmark of good, real life, the first unspeakably delicious tremble as the cables began to move. In later years, perhaps, the very thought of the Budavári Sikló (he noticed on this last trip the wooden sign with the funicular’s Hungarian name) would hum and vibrate with happiness for him. Perhaps he would not be able to look at a picture of it or read about it in a guidebook in the travel bookstore next to his Toronto home without feeling a quiver of electricity run along his spine, and he would recall sunsets that used to last all day and those five seconds that had made the other seventy years seem almost worth the bother.

  JOHN LAY ON HIS STOMACH. His hands were on the sofa’s cushion, under his chin, and her warm washcloth touch parted his hair and lifted away—gently, stingingly—the layers of red and brown. She smelled like a flower. Her hands moved very slowly. She apologized three times for Scott’s absence, twice asked if she was hurting him, wrung out the cloth, said it was beautiful that John came here when he was hurt and in need, trusting in his brother first of all. He wondered if she was serious, wondered what she knew and what Scott said of him. She let one hand rest, soothing, on the washcloth on the back of his head and the other gently kneaded his neck. He lost interest in whether she had been joking.

  Scott had told her so much about the brothers’ life in beautiful, beautiful California, she said, which she would love to see someday, and this was like another time, was it not? John coming to Scott, hurt on his head? She recounted the secondhand story to one of its own lead characters: Several children had made fun of John for being fat, and when he tried to fight them, he was hit on the head, just like this, and he had come to Scott for help, just like this, and Scott had beaten up two of the other children while John watched and bled and cried. John listened to this episode of his childhood—accurate but for the reversal of the brothers’ roles—but did not correct her, even wondered by her tone if she did not know she had been told a refracted version and was now daring John to set her straight.

  John recalled Scott as he had been. Scott had been fat, so ridiculously fat, John recalled with a keen pleasure, and he still was fat really, lean and muscular physical appearances aside. He closed his eyes and listened to the trickle of the washcloth twisted over its bowl. She spoke of Scott’s life from the kitchen as she poured him a cold drink, fondly retold Scott’s exploits to his brother without thinking he would have already heard them, an obtuseness John found endearing. She spoke of athletic accomplishments that had never happened, regaled John with acts of adolescent rebellion he recognized as the feats of their childhood friends, but all with Scott in the leading roles—Scott’s misaligned fireworks, Scott’s outrageous nudity, Scott’s spray paint, Scott’s guitar. Now quite near him, she offered ice water and healthy food, urged him to eat, asked him what he liked best about California, then (John somehow knew this was coming next, could have finished her next sentence for her) Mária retold the story of the little girl in the swimming pool after dark who had been saved, but in her version, wet, clothed John, gasping for air as he dragged the girl to the deck, metamorphosed into wet, clothed, gasping, dragging Scott. “It was very bravery, was it not?”

  “A brave man, our Scott,” he agreed, and touched her cheek. John sat up straight, as if a weight had been taken from him, and old wounds scarred up smoothly in time-lapse haste: Scott had nothing to offer, no future potential. John had for years been pursuing a receding back: Now he had caught it, turned it to face him, and found he had the wrong fellow all along. Scott wanted John’s past? My God, he could have it; John certainly wasn’t using it. John would happily trade it for the present: It was only too bad that Scott didn’t take grasping Mária seriously, because that would make this even funnier: the flower scent and her nearness. The licensing smile. Her lips did not move immediately away. A tentative response. Then a soft cheek, perhaps in gentle rejection. But then the lips again. His hand against the outsize T-shirt of his brother’s alma mater, the picture of the college mascot, flaky from careless laundry, distorted over her shape, itchy against his palm. Her smiling reference to the clock and the time remaining until Scott’s return: “A brave man, our John.”

  I.

  SK IMRE HORVÁTH, IN YOUR YOUTHFUL AND TIPSY EXCITEMENT, something as pretentious as the meaning of life or his purpose on this earth. Or, thoughtlessly passing the time with your eye on the blonde across the crowded room, ask him a question as banal as the reason for that glass of milk he takes at nearly every occasion, even this cocktail party. Concerned about maintaining your diplomatic wardrobe, ask him how his Italian suits are so marvelously well tailored and perfectly dry-cleaned, the Hungarian clothing industry being what it is just now. Pondering a possible book or article (which will probably never progress past a few scribbled bullets on a damp napkin), ask him whether Communism will ever return to Hungary, whether democracy will last. Scour for common ground and ask him what ails the Hungarian national soccer team this year. Strive to understand this little country where you are passing a few jet-lagged days before hitting the vistas of Vienna and the parties of Prague, and ask him who brought more suffering to his nation, the Nazis or the Russians. Ask Imre Horváth anything, O Westerner, and he will begin his answer in about the same manner.

  He will begin with a strangely gentle smile. If you know nothing of the man, this first smile will seem disarmingly profound, vaguely amused, even a little ridiculous, but in ways you cannot quite specify. He seems to know something he cannot bring himself to tell you, and both of you find that funny, though not in the same way.

  But if you know more of his life, if your host dropped hints of this or that episode, this prelude is immediately exempt from laughability; Imre Horváth becomes one of those rare and intense people whom you could never even conceive of mocking. You may have heard of his arrest. He lost everything, escaped Hungary to rebuild a family fortune, came back several times despite looming threats and even some threats made good. You have heard he shared prison cells and perhaps torture chambers with men who have now, in the fairy-tale justice of 1989–90, ascended to power in Hungary by free election.

  Now in his smile you suspect you witness a struggle, not a joke. He must have suffered terribly at the hands of the Communists, and you imagine his smile surfaces from beneath dense layers of horrible memories, must prove itself strong enough to deserve visible expression, prove itself stronger than the omnipresent memory of tyranny (which, for all you know, is probably as painful as tyranny itself ).

  He is a tall, broad man, who communicates strength in his posture, his tone of voice, his gestures, his large hands. His thick, steel-colored hair flows straight backward in a waterfall of silver that reaches nearly to his shoulders. He wears it long for a man of his age, but he does not seem to w
ish he were younger. His eyes are of a translucent blue, the color of shallow water in a swimming pool. They are clear, despite his sixty-eight years, and the whites are veinless. His gaze reminds you that he was often tested, that behind these mournful, amused eyes there are depths beyond your reckoning, and yet he would like to answer your question to the best of his ability, to help you understand a time that must seem to you (his smile implies) like ancient history. Because you are a child and you come from a nation of children.

  You are growing overly sensitive, perhaps. You feel something meaningful communicated in the skin and muscles around the squint he narrows at you (despite perfect vision), in the eyebrows that come together and then, upon meeting, rise and part company in mild, mild amusement, heroic in itself, after God knows what efforts by God knows what forces to crush it.

  When you ask him your little question—profound or prosaic, about tea or tyranny—he will seem to marvel at the sweet and unlikely triumph of Life and Justice that allows for a world in which you, young person (though you may be nearly as old as Imre himself), can thrive and exert yourself, free of dictators, and have the time and freedom to wrestle with questions such as this one. He appreciates this new world, charmingly represented by you and your curiosity.

  Only a second or two have passed and now he speaks: “Ohhh, my friend . . .” The “ohhh” is a sound as rich as a long bow stroke on a cello’s open string, full of feeling, history, that mild amusement again: “Ohhh, my friend, you must understand how it was to be here,” he will say with an accent that reveals a long habit of imperfect English. “I never, or perhaps I should say first . . . no. That is to dredge seafloors. There is nothing there but an old man’s . . . Instead, only this: Not so very long ago, before you came to visit our beautiful country and live here in our humble Budapest, this was a different place. It was on the surfaces, yes, as today, but truly very different from the place you enjoy now. I love the new dancing nightclubs the young people have made come to life. We owe you a great deal for this . . . Ohhh, you see, then there was no room in this nation for the man who would not bend, who would not swallow lies, who would not act the parrot in a room of imbeciles. There was no room at all for such a, such a, shall one say, fool as that, except, perhaps, he belonged in dungeons. And yet to be such a one as this, this fool, for whom there is no room, a type as impossible as some mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man and yet real. Real yet impossible. Can you imagine being such a one as this, in such a place? I hope you shall never have to. You are very lucky, and have been given great things. And you will do great things, I can see this inside you, oh yes, absolutely. But back then, the poor imbeciles in government, in secret-police chambers and other such game rooms of stunted, cruel children, what can these poor imbeciles do when such a wild beast walks free? They stop. They gawk. They fumble for orders. They consult secret manuals and hold secret meetings. They try to be cruel, for they have not the imagination to do anything other. They whisper awkward to each other. ‘We cannot admit he exists,’ they say. ‘Yet we have nowhere to put him, and he stands there as real as a tree. Can we tell the people not to look? Or say he is not what he appears? Shall we say nothing? Perhaps he will go away. Can we kill such a beast as this, or will he rise from the death?’ This is the complexity your fine question grapples with, my friend. Ohhh, it is difficult to know how much to tell you . . .”

  Your question is forgotten, by you most of all. Either you were only making small talk when you asked it, thinking it unlikely you would discuss weighty matters with such a man as this and now you are pleasantly surprised, almost intimidated by the confidence; or you were straining to ask something about which, you now realize, you know almost nothing. So now you will learn the essence of this matter, a priceless gift, tonight at this cocktail party, an unhoped-for glimpse of what the real world can be, vouchsafed to you, who would otherwise have glided through life exposed only to surfaces. This breathing symbol, who has stood immovable under the rush of History, has now stepped down from his plinth and his granite horse to stand next to you, to nod gravely and suffer you to place your tiny, trembling hand on his beating heart.

  And yet he is not without Modesty. “I hope I am not boring you with this silly talk.” There is in nearly every gesture and word the unspoken assumption that what he has done and what he has said are precisely, necessarily what you would have done and you would have said. And with a humble nod and a flush of pleasure at this unlikely and patently unbelievable compliment, you thank Modesty for having taken time from what must be a very busy schedule indeed to pass this message to such an undeserving auditor.

  Imre Horváth enters this story today, July 15, 1990—for all his monumental dignity—as a file folder modestly awaiting his turn at the bottom of a stack of file folders on the surface of a desk glowing gold from river-bounced sunlight.

  II.

  LINGERING OVER THE CITY LONGER THAN ITS APRIL OR FEBRUARY COUSINS, the July sun didn’t reach Charles Gábor’s west-facing Danube-view window until late in the afternoon. By then he had processed nearly twenty-five of his files for the day. Some demanded very little of his time: balance sheets precariously off balance; cheeky assertions of 1,500 percent return on investment within “maybe at the most perhaps six weeks, we are confidently in projecting conservatively”; insufficiently provocative references to unnamed inventions; warm offers of 49 percent partnership in rickety Communist-era building-material companies in exchange for a “reasonable investment in human retraining, plant and tool re-purchase, manufacturing process re-engineering, marketing re-evaluation, and trade network re-construction. Management decisions, naturally, will remain in the hands of those experts currently experienced in the operation of this factory.” Other files opened onto loving, soft-focus vistas of badly stocked shops, elderly shipping containers, weather-beaten vineyards, rows of compulsorily smiling old women in headkerchiefs sewing by hand traditional Hungarian costumes.

  Some files merited slightly more attention: portfolios sent from the State Privatization Agency (the unique new bureaucracy charged with selling back to the private sector the same properties stolen from it forty years earlier); not entirely impossible sales projections for not thoroughly undesirable products; management passingly familiar with Western accounting standards; and six different pairs of childhood friends who wished to open sporting goods stores. None of these would lead anywhere, Charles was certain. His whole job was a joke. Nothing the Hungarians could come up with would ever pass muster with New York, which was, of course, too busy cash-lavishing Prague to pay the Magyars any mind. He had come to this backwater, it now appeared, only for a P.R. stunt.

  With only two files remaining in his stack and the sun bright behind him, Charles pushed himself back into his chair and stretched his arms over his head until his elbows cracked and his fingertips touched the window. Yawning, he pulled the bottom folder from the stack, a mental game to prod the drudgery along. Later, he would tell a story of prescience, flashes of intuition, canny business savvy.

  Dear Sirs and Madams,

  The pertaining information under attachment is in regards to the Horváth Press, which publishing house has been held in the family Horváth dating since the year of 1808. The currently sitting head of the family is Mr. Horváth Imre, Director-General of the Press. He is available for discussions as to possible investments, joint ventures, or other conceived natures of relationship. If the pertaining history and financial datas make interest to your firm, Mr. Horváth stands prepared to have discussions at a time to be determined of mutual convenience.

  With every best wish for any such talk,

  I am your humble servant, Toldy Krisztina

  HEAD OF SECRETARIAT

  A HORVÁTH KIADÓ/HORVÁTH VERLAG/

  THE HORVÁTH PRESS

  Charles wandered lazily through the dense underbrush of accompanying documents. He blamed poor presentation and his own creeping sleepiness for his confusion as to the exact whereabouts of th
e Horváth Press. Financial data referred to a plant in Vienna, but the Toldy woman’s letter and the Horváth name implied a Hungarian publishing house. The financials and photographs boasted enough professional veneer to win closer inspection later, but nothing about the package could hold his fading interest or prop his heavy lids. He slid the folder toward the day’s few other Investigation-worthies and opened the final file of his supply. He soon recognized it as a rewritten application, laughingly rejected a few weeks earlier on grounds of bold managerial incompetence but now sparkling with shiny new adjectives and paradigm shifts, thanks to an American P.R. firm’s craftsmanship.

  Leaning against the window frame to look down upon the glowing golden Danube, Charles found his thoughts wheeling over familiar late-afternoon terrain: the frustration of obeying gutless superiors, the absurdity of fielding offers for maximum investment and limited control, the horrifying prospect of always manning the engine rooms and never being handed the helm. When he thought of this country and these people as the country and people he had been promised since childhood, he grunted audibly, as if from stomach pain.