“But I—!”
“Stop!” he commanded, and tugged portentously at his ear, a clandestine gesture intended to convey the information that people might be listening. He strode vigorously through the maze of corridors and ushered me into his office, where he asked, shutting the door, “How is your very good friend, Ambassador Black?”
I resisted the temptation to paranoia. He had not called Ambassador Black and asked about me. Ambassador Black had not said she’d never heard of me.
“I’m not here to discuss my relationship to Ambassador Black. I’m here to discuss the behavior of your colleague.”
Zima tossed the folder onto his desk and lit a cigarette. He watched me for a moment over the smoke and said, “The mafia, Mr. Miller.” He could have said almost anything and made as much sense to me at that moment. The potatoes, Mr. Miller!
“Did you know we have more than five mafias in Prague? Serbians, Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, Romanians, and Italians have mafia now. Weapons, drugs, money laundering. Only local country not to have mafia here is Czechoslovakia, if you don’t count taxi drivers.”
To be polite, I smiled at his jest. “Last night, your friend Bortnyk—”
Zima held up the palm of his hand and opened the folder on his desk. “New crime is to follow merchants. To neni Amerika. This isn’t America. We have no checks here. Good joke in English. No checks in Czechoslovakia. Businessman puts money into briefcase, hundreds of thousands of crowns, and drives to place where money must go. Somebody follows and bang! Takes his money. That is my problem.”
Zima closed the folder.
“You do not interest me. Vůbec ne. Not at all.”
“Are you going to do nothing?” I exclaimed, vexed.
“We will arrest thief, I hope.”
“Not about your stupid merchants. About Bortnyk!”
“But Mr. Bortnyk is not my responsibility. If you want to make complaint, you must contact Budapest police.”
“I’ll contact the local English language press is who I’ll contact,” I threatened. Prague boasted two weekly newspapers, both with a jaundiced eye for scandal. “I will not be harassed by a mad Hungarian!”
“I think you’re safe for some days. His train left this morning.”
“Thank you for the information.” I bolted from the chair, annoyed at the game of fetch he’d forced me to play.
“Stop!” Zima called.
I turned at the door. Zima looked down at the sheaf of papers on his desk, face wreathed in smoke from the cigarette pinched between his fingers. He carefully turned the top paper over and said, “I hope you become more like other Americans. Enjoy a little harmless fun. Drink too much beer, smoke cigarettes, play guitar on Charles Bridge, find young American girls to sleep with you. Then go home. If you continue to rob tourists, I will arrest you, even if it displeases your good friend Ambassador Black.”
6
The next morning the title page of a new screenplay flew from my imagination with astonishing ease. Satisfied I’d made a good start, I rose from my desk and put a pot of water to boil. The movie would tap the knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe I’d acquired since moving to Prague. A great love story, peppered here and there with elements of a thriller. The lead character would be an innocent American, someone here to teach English to the natives, a naive but boyishly hip young man who possesses some special talent that triggers at a key point in the action, saving the day. Maybe an English teacher isn’t the right occupation. Better yet, a young American businessman. Not a carpetbagger capitalist, but someone with ideals. Like somebody from Greenpeace. Why not Greenpeace exactly? The lead character, we’ll call him Tom, is a Greenpeace executive who becomes accidentally embroiled in the smuggling of radioactive materials from the Ukraine. A perfect irony! But how does Tom get fooled into acting as a smuggler? A woman, of course. A heartbreaking Slavic beauty fresh off the steppes, untouched by the carnality of Hollywood. We’ll call her Julie. Later we discover she was smuggling uranium to pay for an operation in the West to save the life of her crippled younger brother. A message movie with foreign locations, tragic love, stirring action, and a cast of thousands. A perfect vehicle for Tom Cruise. Julia Roberts for the Slavic beauty. Tom and Julia in the same picture! A sure hit!
I sat down to write, the cup of coffee warm in my hands, and …
Nothing. My fervent swarm of ideas diminished to a few stray buzzings or, worse, became inexplicably cliché-ridden between the moment of inspiration and inscription. I stared out the window, thinking about the seven-figure sale I was certain to make once the script was finished, if only I could get it successfully started. The greatest writers suffer from writers’ block. Some say the greatest novels were never written at all!
Shadows shifted over the piles of refuse in the courtyard as the sun tipped above the rooftops. A cat in heat rubbed her back on a patch of sunstruck ground and howled. I closed my eyes and thought about the hundred ways the film might begin. A short time later, I fell asleep.
I couldn’t remember what I had been dreaming when the phone woke me: something simultaneously bright and dark, like underexposed film projected onto a blank screen. I can never remember my dreams. I glanced at the clock. Nearly four. I answered the phone to a woman’s voice calling, “Good afternoon!”
The telephone line hummed and popped as I struggled for a response. Margit? Helga? Karin?
“I called to say I hope you haven’t forgotten me.”
“Of course I haven’t! How are you?”
“You really don’t know who this is, do you?”
The woman’s laugh, sharp and clear as glass, jolted me to sudden perspicuity. “Monika! How did you get my number?”
“If you don’t want women to call you, don’t print your phone number on the front cover of your notebook.”
“Yes, well, I don’t normally,” I began, hoping for a clever rejoinder, but wit remained frustratingly out of reach. I cleared my throat to hide the incompletion and waited for her to launch into the reason for her call, fearing she might have lost something at the café and wanted to ask whether or not I’d seen it. Paranoia. I hadn’t tried that one with her. When the conversation stalled for several seconds, it occurred to me that she was as interested in me as I was in her. I said, “I missed you at Lávka last night. Will you be there tonight?”
“Not tonight.”
“Where, then? When can I see you?”
“You could try the hotel café at eight. Do you know where I’m staying?”
The Merkur, of course. I said, “No idea.”
“The Hotel Paříž. Just around the corner from where we met.”
After we hung up, I decided to be charmed by her little lie. It was the kind of lie I might tell, had I been poor. She was ashamed of having to stay in the shabby Merkur. The Hotel Paříž was one of the city’s finest hotels, a brass and oak museum piece in the Art Nouveau style. It fit her image like a glass slipper.
The rest of the afternoon did not pass quickly. At five I began to dress, unable to restrain myself any longer, but no matter how many times I changed my mind about which shirt to wear with which jacket and pair of pants, I had completed dressing by half past the hour. For two hours I tried to read, but my eyes wouldn’t stick to the page. Minutes after the last remembered sentence I would catch myself staring out the window lost in an absurd romantic fantasy of saving fair Monika from a gang of uranium smugglers. I tossed the book aside, annoyed that love aroused from my imagination such incipient adolescence, and hastily walked to the Hotel Paříž, arriving a half hour early.
When the waiter came to take my order, I asked for mineral water. Couldn’t allow myself to get drunk. A fine surprise that would be, if the moment Monika walked into the café I opened my mouth and once again vomited on her feet. I regretted arriving early. She might not come at all. If she does, the anxiety of waiting will have destroyed my nerves. The waiter approached, balancing a platter of drinks colored a comforting amber and one clea
r bland fluid which he deposited at my table. She had recognized me as the vomiting fool. She despised me. She had called to execute her revenge. She laughed, knowing I eagerly awaited a woman who never planned to show up. Only alcohol could dim the lightning strikes of paranoia flashing across my brain. I clutched the mineral water between my two hands, gritted my teeth, and when the waiter next walked past ordered a Scotch, which I drained in one long draught.
Monika arrived punctually fifteen minutes late and, no doubt surmising that my early arrival signaled the greater of our impatiences, greeted me with a radiant smile. Her waist was cinched to a delicate thinness by a gold and blue sash with a zigzag weave, and below her ballooning Turkish pants I glimpsed an ankle so exquisitely formed I nearly swooned onto the table. I tried to think of something to say. Something sharp, incisive, astonishingly perceptive, and revealing a profound understanding of human civilization. My mind blanked. Say something coherent, then. Anything. A grunt or groan will suffice. I tried smiling. I had waited all afternoon to talk to her, and now that she was before my eyes waiting for me to speak I could think of nothing save the crushing movement of time. Much better to stroll grandly in, twenty minutes late, some adventure fresh as air on my lips.
“Nice day today,” I said.
Idiot. Her head barely lifted from the drinks menu.
“I wouldn’t know. I spent it with lawyers.”
“Legal trouble?”
“Are you afraid I might be—what did you say I was yesterday? Murderous?”
“Of course not, I just was trying to, to, to. …” I was just trying to make conversation, trying not to appear stupid, and failing at both.
Monika looked up from the menu. The right corner of her mouth hooked toward her brow. I’d never seen a smile so cruel. She asked, “Are you nervous?”
“Nervous? No. It’s been a day. A tough day, I mean. Nice too. Nice but tough. You know. Here and there. But the lawyers?”
“My family owned property in Prague before 1948.”
“The Commies then?”
“Nationalized it. With everything else in the country. Banks, factories, apartment buildings. You couldn’t even keep a house.”
“I heard about some new law, something about giving it back?”
“The restitution law. First you have to prove it belonged to your family, so we talk to lawyers all day. My brother and I.”
“Where, by the way, is your brother?”
“At Lávka.”
I laughed out loud at her cleverness. No wonder she didn’t want to meet there, under the watchful eye of big brother. I had to get my nerves under control, had to remain conscious that Monika quite likely wanted me as much as I desired her. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger from a hovering waiter. Didn’t want to seem cheap. Was it really possible that Monika didn’t remember me? That I had seen her quite by accident in the metro and she had later called to arrange this private evening away from her brother? I asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve eaten?”
“I’m famished,” Monika confessed. Eager as I to meet, she hadn’t eaten a morsel all afternoon. I suggested we dine in the adjoining room, by Czech standards a nice little three-star affair. We ordered appetizers, talked our way through a menu heavy on old Czech favorites like broiled boar livers and poached asshole of antelope, and once we had made our selections I asked, “What did your family own, that you hope to get back?”
“A palace.”
“What kind of palace?”
“Seventeenth century, with the usual Socialist improvements.”
“I’ve never met a princess before.”
“I’m not a princess.”
“A countess, then, or a duchess.”
“I’m not. I’m a bastard.”
“You could be a Gypsy for all I care.”
“A Gypsy? Explain what you mean.”
I heard both shock and outrage in her voice but couldn’t determine why the notion should so upset her. Gypsies were everywhere in Prague; even the casual observer perceived the hostility they engendered in the Czechs, who mostly considered them members of a criminal underclass rather than an oppressed minority. I said, “It was just an example. I didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t mean to insult me, or didn’t mean to be racist?”
I brought a forkful of cold goose heart to my lips, but could not convince my mouth to open, and returned the morsel to its plate. I said, “What I meant was, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m American. You know, classless society.”
“Can’t someone be both princess and Gypsy?”
“I didn’t mean to insult anybody.”
“I’m not accusing you. I’m asking.”
“Gypsies are nomads. Fiddles and no fixed addresses. Nontraditional ideas regarding private property.”
“You mean thieves.”
“In other words.”
“Why don’t you just say so? Why hide your racist attitudes behind complicated language?”
I didn’t remember how the argument had begun. Should I attempt to explain, change the subject, or snatch the knife from the appetizer dish and rake it across my wrists? With an angry toss of her head, Monika disciplined a raven lock of hair that had tumbled to her eyes. She seemed obsessed with this Gypsy thing. Why couldn’t one be Gypsy and princess both? Her skin was too light, her eyes too green. But a single ancestor one or two hundred years ago would leave scant genetic evidence. Call it deduction, a lucky guess, or proof that Monika and I knew each other in ways that defied conventional logic. I said, “You’re part Gypsy, aren’t you?”
Monika set her champagne glass aside, carefully folded her arms together on the table, and stared at me for several long seconds. The full meaning of the look evaded me. More than one of the seven basic emotions were always at play in her eyes, and the combinations encrypted more often than revealed. My perception astonished her, that was clear enough, but her eyes when I had the strength to meet them also expressed fear and anger. Unsettled, I moved to refill her champagne glass. She said, “This is the second time you knew something about me you couldn’t know. My great-grandmother was half Gypsy.”
“And a princess?”
That I guessed foolishly persuaded a smile to cross her lips. When I returned the champagne bottle to its nest of ice, the fear was gone but not the anger. The anger never completely disappeared from gesture or glance. She said, “An orphan. Her mother was a young peasant girl from Kostalec, a village not far from Prague. Married at fifteen to a farmer.”
“A Gypsy farmer? Doesn’t sound typical.”
“The farmer was Czech. So was the peasant girl.”
“Then how?”
“The farmer worked the girl and beat her when he drank. She had food and a roof, but I don’t think her life was much more than that. One day she heard music coming from the woods, someone playing a violin. She crept close and hid in the bushes to listen. The Gypsy playing the violin was young and handsome, and I’m told even now the Gypsies remember how beautifully he played.”
“She fell in love?” I guessed.
“It’s a story the old women in the village still tell, handed down from their grandmothers. Every week the Gypsy would play in the woods, and every week the peasant girl would come to listen. Sometime later, a baby girl was born. The farmer suspected his wife was unfaithful because the baby’s hair was black, but he couldn’t be sure because her skin was white. When the Gypsy began to play in the woods again, the farmer followed his wife and killed them both with an ax.”
“Jesus, what a story. You could make a film with that story. High-octane music behind, something by the Gipsy Kings.”
“I could get rich, selling my great-grandmother’s murder to Hollywood?”
The sarcasm startled me. “It’s a habit of mine,” I admitted. “I always think in terms of film. Blessing or curse, I don’t know. It’s the way I make things real.”
Monika reached her hand toward my face, and her fingertips lightly traced the line of my jaw from
ear to lips, a gesture I found both intimate and intimidating. She said, “You’re so American.”
“How so?”
“Movies are always in the present tense. Movies are now. Movies don’t live in the past. Just like Americans.”
After dinner, we strolled through the neighborhood, pausing to admire the ornate Art Nouveau cornices and crenelations of each building we passed. I feared she might ask about my family legacy, and if I chose to tell the truth I would have to confess my descent from a long and ill-distinguished line of used-car dealers. To forestall a lie, I asked how she could expect to inherit a palace, descended as she was from a Gypsy and peasant girl.
“Because the story doesn’t end there. Each generation passes its history to the next. The story never ends. My great-grandmother inherited her father’s black hair and love of music and her mother’s fine Slavic features. She was beautiful, one of the great beauties of Central Europe, but the villagers hated her. The cause of murder and scandal. Half Gypsy. When she was fifteen, her grandparents gave her a one-way ticket to Prague. Her only contact was a distant cousin, a dishwasher in the Hotel Paříž.”
“You mean where we had dinner tonight?”
“At the turn of the century it was the best hotel in Prague. The cousin thought his fortune was made when he saw how beautiful the Gypsy girl was. He promised fancy clothes and jewelry if she agreed to have sex with the rich guests of the hotel. She refused, so he threw her to the streets. That night, she wandered Prague until she came to a garden. She wanted to curl under the bushes to sleep, but the night was warm and the moon full, so she began to sing. The song was full of sadness and a little fear, because the river was just across the garden, she could hear it rushing against the banks, and she thought when the song ended she should throw herself into it and drown.”
Monika and I walked along a wall fifteen feet high, buckled and crumbling the length of it. Electric light and a parked car were the sole twentieth-century relics in a gray and brown cityscape of cobblestones and peeling baroque town houses. At the end of an alleyway the river Vltava rushed black as the night sky, sprinkled with city lights. Monika stopped at a gated arch. I peered through the bars and from the garden of fruit trees and rose bushes recognized our location as second only to the castle in the rank of famous noble residences.
Gypsy Hearts Page 6