The beauties of Český Krumlov—a medieval castle and narrow streets vigorously bare of the detritus of industrial society—hid in Gothic darkness when I arrived by train that night. Monika had not checked into the room I’d reserved at the Hotel Růže, nor booked another under her own name. I tried describing her, but the clerk’s English was limited to hotel terms, and no matter how often, slowly, and loudly I repeated myself, he was incapable of understanding sentences more complex than “Room please” and “Change money.” He accepted my hundred-dollar bill without suspicion. I penned a brief note to Monika, stuffed it into an envelope, and mimed instructions to tape it within view behind the desk.
Quite possibly she had been delayed. Picking up the phone, I called long distance to the Merkur Hotel and received the desk clerk’s report that Monika had checked out that morning. Evidently, her brother had followed, and evasive maneuvers had been required. I stared out the iron-framed window in the far corner of my room, no larger than the window of a jail cell, and watched the silver twist of river and cramped black streets of the old city below. It suddenly occurred to me what had happened. Monika had come to the hotel and, fearing an untimely appearance by her brother, had registered under a false name. Clever woman! The difficulty was that she had so expertly concealed her presence even I had been deceived. That other explanation for her absence I refused to consider, save in bleak and furtive moments, like cracking a door open to a closet full of rats.
The note remained taped behind the desk when I hurried downstairs the following morning. I camped in a stuffed chair in the lobby and waited. I left the chair three times for anxiously cramped micturations and twice for meals in the adjacent dining room, where a carefully positioned chair afforded a view to the lobby. On each occasion the front door swung open or feet padded down the stairs, my heart accelerated and stomach lurched behind. None of the many dark heads that turned my way bore Monika’s face. Two days later, I took a return train to Prague.
A postcard awaited me in the morning’s mail, bearing a trite view of Charles Bridge on the front and Monika’s signature on the back. She wrote:
Sven’s being a boor. Won’t let us go away together. He’s terrible when angry! It’s best to go home to Copenhagen. Don’t be upset with me. I’ll write again from Denmark.
Love, Monika.
P.S. I came back to get you at the club, but you were gone. What happened?
I must have read the card a hundred times before I noticed it had been postmarked in Vienna.
10
Prague suffered a plague of street musicians that year, mostly young American men who sought a sense of self-identity through popular music and wished to get laid by one of the young girls certain to flock like desperate moths to a dull flame. Almost anyone with a guitar singing popular songs on Charles Bridge could draw a crowd, and every night tourists clotted around one in particular who made a small fortune encouraging the crowd to sing along to old Beatles tunes. I crossed the bridge every night going to and from Jo’s Bar, and a few nights after the arrival of Monika’s postcard, something in a peripherally glimpsed profile ground my heels into the cobblestones. The last musician on the Malá Strana side was Andrew, eyes closed, singing with the desolate passion of the earnest but undertalented. I knew he played guitar, but then nearly every young American in Prague did, to one degree of ineptness or another. I crept closer, considered but rejected the idea of dropping a donation into his hat as too contemptuous a gesture, and instead listened to his voice. He wasn’t half bad, on key as far as the music allowed and sweetly angst-ridden, but among the hundred passersby who heard his three minutes of chorus and verse I was the only one to stop. When the final chord strummed out, I clapped my hands. Andrew opened his eyes, surprised at the applause, and, seeing the ironic character of his audience, grinned sheepishly.
“Is this a benefit for your Bosnian refugees?” I inquired, in the manner of a good-natured joke.
Andrew cradled his guitar into its case and slipped shut the locks. He stared as if mystified at the empty hat at his feet, a brown and lumpy old thing he never meant to wear, and for a moment I thought he might do the decently theatrical thing and toss it into the river, but instead he clenched it humbly under his armpit, like a Frenchman might a loaf of bread. As he performed these motions, not unconscious of my presence but not acknowledging it either, I feared he prepared to flee because he thought I mocked him, which of course I did, but only with the best of intentions.
“Come have a drink. We’ll talk,” I said.
“Can’t. I’m meeting someone.”
Was he really going to meet someone, or did he find my company so repellent that he invented excuses to flee? Andrew’s evasions so terrified me they may have created the only possible circumstance in which I could later tell the truth. I said, “I have something to confess to you. Something important.”
“Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow will be too late!”
“It can’t be that serious.”
I hunched over the bridge’s stone ledge and looked significantly at the river below. “How serious is suicide?”
Andrew observed me with suspicion, rightly suspecting I bluffed. I waved him off with the admonition that his meeting was more important. If I wasn’t bluffing, he couldn’t risk being complicit in the consequences. He led me down a set of stone steps to the Kampa, a small island near the castle side of the river. An outdoor vinárna nestled under the arch of the bridge, its few tables overlooking Čertovka, Devil’s Stream in English, which flowed between island and shore. We ordered red wine to thicken our blood against the chill night air. Andrew waited for me to explain. I tried my best to look tragic. I said, “What happened to your Bosnians?”
“They’re still there. More every day.”
“I thought you’d left Prague for the summer.”
“If you don’t want to talk about what’s bothering you, fine, I’ll go.”
“It’s hard to start.”
“Start anywhere.”
I hadn’t planned what to say. Until that moment, it never occurred to me to tell the truth. I said, “I fell in love.”
Andrew’s laughter cut me open from throat to gut.
“I amuse you?”
“You always seemed too—well, nasty to love anybody. You know, narcissistic, selfish, slightly vicious.”
I often think Andrew needed my monstrousness to reaffirm his virtue. I represented a boundary from which he could happily measure his moral distance, knowing no matter what his behavior he could never approach the territory I inhabited. Of course it’s possible I’m projecting attitudes Andrew never possessed, that I imagine for myself a metaphysical importance when I might have been a merely unwholesome and sometimes unwelcome presence in his life. I write this account as though understanding the actions and motivations of persons who, as well as I might pretend to know them, have thoughts and emotions inaccessible to all but themselves, and which even they most often cannot or will not understand. My image of Andrew pleases my own desires and compulsions and might be contrary to Andrew’s idea of himself. Others who know Andrew might read this account and complain that my descriptions don’t fit him at all, that he’s someone else entirely. The problem is unavoidable unless I stick to basic facts, such as this and that happened on a certain day, which even then, because the facts were not documented by public record, would be facts privately remembered well after the event and thus susceptible to distortions of convenience and interpretation. I never have spoken to anyone accused of wrong, whether a prosecutable crime or a lapse in judgment, whose memory of events was not influenced by self-justification.
When Andrew asked the identity of the unlucky woman, I described the strange circumstances of my meeting Monika; how her violent response to my vomiting at her feet had inspired feelings I knew existed in others but had never experienced myself. From the tears welling in my eyes to the swelling of my throat, it occurred to me as I told the story
that I loved her from the bottom of my heart. That I could feel such an emotion astonished me. Perhaps it wasn’t the deepest and most pure love, but the bottom of a brackish pond is still the bottom, no less so than the bottom of an alpine lake. The telling so involved me I never bothered to gauge Andrew’s reactions. When I described my near-fatal encounter in the Gypsy club, he laughed knowingly.
I said, “I shouldn’t have told you. I’ve made myself ridiculous.”
“Love makes us all ridiculous, you more than others.”
“If you saw her, you’d understand my feelings.”
“I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“She conned you.”
Whenever that possibility had fluttered into conscious thought I had smashed it; to hear Andrew voice it openly brought a buzzing of blood to my head. “Impossible,” I blurted.
“If you hadn’t stolen a glimpse at her passport, you wouldn’t know her name. If you hadn’t followed her, you would have gone to the Hotel Paříž the day after being robbed. The receptionist would’ve told you there was no recent guest fitting that description in the hotel.”
“She had a good reason to lie to me. She was ashamed to be staying in a fourth-class hotel.”
“She was making it impossible for you to trace her.”
“She was in love with me.”
“She wouldn’t even sleep with you.”
“We were going away together.”
“No. You weren’t going away together. You were being set up. The night before the supposed consummation you were drugged and robbed and left for dead. Did you tell her you’d be carrying a lot of cash?”
“Of course not.”
“You gave her the line about being a famous Hollywood screenwriter, I bet. She knew you’d have money for the weekend.”
Despite Andrew’s accusations, I remained willfully dense. I refused to suspect Monika. About her brother I had no illusions. Sven had motive, opportunity, and weapon. I was a rival for Monika’s affection. No doubt he wanted to see her an old maid bound to him forever. Sven had to eliminate me once he realized she had fallen terribly in love. Hadn’t she written that he had forced her to return to Denmark? The jealous bastard spiked my drink and left me behind to be robbed by the Gypsies. That was the only allowable explanation.
I asked, “What route does the train to Copenhagen take from here?”
“Up through Dresden.”
“Not down through Vienna?”
“Exact opposite direction.”
She had hastily posted the card between trains in Vienna, not realizing when she wrote that he intended to take her not to Copenhagen—but to where? I pulled a dozen slips of paper from my coat pocket and found like the joker in a pack of cards the receipt from Gerbeaud that had slipped from Monika’s purse the day I met her. The receipt had been folded into her passport, next to an open train ticket. “Budapest!” I exclaimed.
“Further south of Vienna,” Andrew offered.
I couldn’t explain to him how I suddenly knew where to find her; the simple truth would not honor the preternatural awareness, edging by moments closer to absolute certainty, that Monika wanted—no, expected—me to find her. When I need something to be true I invent the circumstances that would make it so and invest the fabrication with the greater reality, so that when presented with the fact of a matter and my memory of it, I’ll swear my memory is the more accurate version. The only explanation I can give is a desperate need to conform reality to expectation. Life seems to me a series of injustices, and the only way I can cope is by believing so fervently in what I want to be true that I can no longer distinguish invention from fact. I said, “I just now remembered that, in the event something went wrong, we made plans to meet at a little café we both know in Budapest.”
“And you actually think she’ll be there?”
“Why wouldn’t she be? The only question is when,” I answered confidently.
Exasperated, Andrew railed, “Then why are you depressed, why do you threaten to throw yourself in the river, why am I sitting here drinking wine with you instead of meeting my friend?”
“I’m not depressed anymore and you’re sitting here because I’m also your friend,” I suggested.
“This is a waste of my time.” Andrew backed away from the table, the half-liter carafe of wine emptied. “You’re buying, I presume.”
I asked him to stay and drink another. He refused. Perhaps I chafed about his remark about my wasting his time. I chided, “Off to meet your little clubfoot?”
The line seemed clever the moment before I allowed my voice to sound it, and disastrously rude the moment after. The unchecked compulsion to twist a harmlessly witty remark into something damaging has plagued all my relationships and inspired an untimely end to several. I have attempted to trace this compulsion to its roots but am frustrated at the end by a dense and twisted mass of psychological material that refuses to yield to analysis. Dr. Quellenbee has noted that I’m simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-destructive, an obvious insight from a quack who does not hold my character in high regard. A psychic I once visited informed me that in one of my past lives I poisoned an entire dinner party of twelve, including my immediate family and closest friends, and that in attempting to poison my current-life relationships I’m acting out what she called past-life psychic residue. Like most Southern Californians, I consider myself such a complex character that I require a team of psychiatrists, psychics, astrologers, and tarot and palm readers to sort myself out, yet even with such expert guidance the mystery of my being remains largely impenetrable and my behavior unexplained.
“What did you say?” Andrew demanded, unable to believe I’d said what he thought I’d said. “How did you know about her?”
I pretended not to understand the question.
“You followed me, didn’t you? Last week after we met on the bridge.
“Please, Andrew. Everybody in town has seen you with her. I merely heard the rumor and said something impolitic because I was angry.”
Andrew looked down at me, mouth still gaped, not believing a word, astonished by how I could so casually follow insult with lie. He said, “She lost her foot to a land mine, you asshole.”
I said, “Oops.” That explained his sudden desire to teach English to the refugees. “Shall we just forget I said anything?”
Andrew turned and ran out the gates of the vinárna. I called his name, said he had misunderstood, pleaded for him to be reasonable. My voice bounced off the stones arched above the vinárna, rang clearly across the water of Devil’s Stream, but never reached Andrew, who didn’t slow or glance back. I shouted at him, shook off a waiter’s restraining arm, commanded him to stop, until my throat tightened and strangled me to silence.
11
By the fourth day in Budapest, I had completed a check of the more common tourist hotels, rising early each morning to ask for guests named Andersen at the front desk of every hotel listed in my guidebooks. I found two sets, both septuagenarian couplets with tour groups from Copenhagen. Afternoons I devoted to staking out Gerbeaud. I never dwelled on the possibility that Monika was not in Budapest. Several times each day I spotted her. She was the face on the tram sweeping past, the turned shoulder entering the metro, the sunglassed woman in the car stopped in traffic at the light just ahead, the willowy figure watching me from the railing of a cruise boat parading the Danube. I once caught her absently gazing at me from behind the window of a department store and, shoving through the crowds of shoppers, discovered in her place a fashionably dressed mannequin. That all these apparitions vaporized on second glance did not discourage me. Days passed. The list of pensions and private apartments I visited each morning grew shorter and less reputable. I spent more of my time loitering at Gerbeaud, eating pastries and drinking cappuccino. The constant hope of seeing her visage cross the threshold and the liters of cappuccino and kilos of pastry I consumed each afternoon produced a continuous state of nervous ex
citement. My hands trembled constantly. I could not speak without stuttering. Any contact with fellow vertebrates brought such stress that I could not breathe. I wore shades in the dimmest corners to curtain a psyche as fragile and vulnerable as cracked glass.
I allowed myself to leave Gerbeaud for an hour each afternoon, reasoning that she couldn’t enter, consume her pastries, and leave again in so short a time. Those first afternoons I did little more than nervously circle the block, afraid that a moment of inattention would lose her forever, but as the days passed with nothing more than false sightings, I realized that I needed to make a gesture of faith before she would appear, and scoured the neighborhood jewelry stores, looking for that rare symbiosis of gold and precious stone fit for an engagement ring. What woman could resist the wildly romantic gesture of a marriage proposal from a man who had chased her through half of Europe? Father would be happy to hear I’d settled down at last and, as a gesture of approval, relinquish control of my trust fund. Monika and I would have a small fortune at our disposal. From Budapest we’d fly to Morocco or Greece, rent a villa on an island, lounge on the beach by day, and fill the nights with love-making. The prospect sent me into erotic delirium. I found the perfect ring in an antique shop owned by an old man in a wheelchair: twin serpents entwined amid a field of diamonds and garnets. I pointed out the ring and with my finger on the glass display case scrawled a number 25 percent less than the list price. When he attempted to argue I pounded my fist on the glass. We compromised at 15 percent, though the bastard wrapped the ring in tissue rather than supplying the case it deserved. When I returned to Gerbeaud, I examined on vacated tables lipstick-stained glasses and pastry crumbs for evidence of Monika, certain she had come and gone in my absence. I spent the rest of the afternoon vainly waiting for her return, if indeed she had been there at all.
At some point in my vigil I lost contact with normal waking consciousness and became a creature not entirely of this world or any other. Images of Monika consumed me. I played out our past and imagined future thousands of times behind the blank screen of my eyes. When a waitress or lost tourist inquired anything of me so simple as directions or payment I stared as a ghost might at flesh and blood. I had ceased to exist in any dimension beyond self-imposed limbo.
Gypsy Hearts Page 10