“That’s ridiculous. This is completely ridiculous,” Scott said, and immediately stood up. “It’s impossible. It would have been suicidal. I’m afraid you’re mis—” But he just shook his head and walked away from the table before he finished, wisely and healthfully refusing conflict.
Nádja smiled at her remaining listener and accepted a light from him. “Well, you know, I must agree with your brother. Particularly as I listen to myself reciting those records. It is impossible. The story is quite absurd. I mustn’t spout such fairy stories.”
“Not at all, please. Ignore him. We’re not even really brothers.”
“Tosh! Do not ever be polite to me just because I am as old as an antique vase, John Price. Of course my story is ridiculous. Scott is far cleverer than you, I think. No wonder you dislike him so. Yes, you do. But he is right: What sane person would believe that another sane person, while bombs explode and hours matter, as they rarely ever do, would write down the words”—she closed her eyes—“The Iliad, Pope’s translation into English, cloth cover with golden floral design, 1933.” She reopened her eyes and patted the back of John’s hand. “Your brother is completely correct. Do not believe an old woman who tells such ludicrous stories. She is a menace to your happiness, John Price.” She breathed out smoke, and John wished for all the world that Nádja were twenty-four. “Yet there we were, and we did it. We knew there was a risk, of course, we were not fools, we were merely excited and sure that this was worth it and that we would survive and have this tale to tell later, elsewhere, to very impressed admirers like you and that we would have the pleasure of rebuilding this collection. Bombs are exploding down the street and we are writing our catalogue raisonné. We do not know what is the situation in the countryside. We do not know if we have one hour or one week to reach Austria. But we do it. By only candlelight, now my husband—my beautiful husband”—John was sincerely, momentarily jealous—“stands at the bookcase and seizes the books, reads titles as fast as I can write. I do not have his shorthands. He kisses favorite books even as he places them onto the floor for the last time. We are laughing sometimes at what we do. We were laughing when we finished our scribbling. He kissed me. We were laughing, John Price. We had won! We rescued our life—not just our silly bodies like the other refugees would do, but our very life together too. We spoke of when we will remake our home in London or Paris or Amsterdam or even your New York City. Every day we will do this: We will together pass our new, free days in searching in music and bookstores with our list and find our records and buy our books until the list jumps to life. We were laughing because we were escaping with the blue plans, the design for our happiness, and if they exploded our building, if they burned our books, if they melted our records with their flame-shooters, if they fouled my piano, they will still not hurt us.
“We left our home, finally, with the clothes we were wearing and our precious lists. Memory is peculiar: I can remember those descriptions of books and records in details, but I am not at all certain how many pages we carry. I remember a group of papers, perhaps twenty pages. But I sometimes can feel the weight of hundreds of pages. I dreamt for many years of running with a single sheet between us, both of our hands necessary to support its heaviness. I can see that clearly as a memory, but I know this is not true.”
The bartender, doubling as an announcer, introduced the evening’s headline band. Scott returned with a drink and a refreshed smile, turned to watch five musicians take the stage. Three of them had played behind Billie Fitzgerald; John and Emily had bought them drinks—the Russian twins and the Hungarian pianist. Fitzgerald, though, was replaced now by two young American men in business suits and with shaven heads—a black singer and a white saxophonist. As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, “ ‘Beatrice,’ a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife.”
Nádja listened in silence for several minutes. “It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price.”
“Get to the end of the story,” Scott prompted her. “I smell a defining tragedy in the offing.”
“Is that what’s coming?” she mused. John marveled at her ability to disregard the irrelevant Scott, but thought she seemed bored with the story, seemed to debate whether to wrap it up as quickly as possible or just laugh it off. “Yes, there was a motor for a spell, then the petrol goes, so then walking in groups, then just the two of us. And then we were stopped. Not so very far from the border, I know. In an open field, just after we came out of a wood. A very young Russian soldier found us and our list and made us stand while he turned the pages this way and that, waiting, one imagines, to learn Hungarian in a flash of insight. Well, you know, Russian privates are very rarely granted such flashes, so after a bit, he finally calls for his officer. The officer came over from the open military car, the what is it, the, the, the jeep, and he knew enough only Hungarian to talk like a caveman. ‘What?’ he yelled, with his head far out in front of his shoulders, like this, and he waves the papers, shaked them at us. My beautiful husband smiled at him, a perfect gentleman ready to help the poor fellow understand what was the situation. He said, ‘Friends. Music. Books.’ He gently took the sheets from the gorilla’s hands and pointed to the Russian names, even though they were not in Cyrillic script. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Chekhov. Turgenev. Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Prokofiev.’ He whistled themes from the music. He sang to them. Under the stars, he sang. He sang very well. And I thought, There will be no problem, because his voice does not waver. They will hear he is not nervous and so we are harmless and so there is no problem and they will let us go with our list, and when we tell this story to our new friends in Austria we will tell it as though it was an audition for the Vienna opera. My husband pointed to the paper and said in a funny Russian accent, ‘Prokofiev!’ and he whistled the theme from Peter and the Wolf, and he pretended to be the hunter, pretended to aim his big blunderbuss. And the boy—the private, the first soldier—begins to smile. And he whistles the next part of it! And we know everything will be fine now. ‘Da! Da! Kamarad!’ my husband says, because this boy truly is a comrade to know this music. He was ecstatic, my husband, he laughed and they whistled the music from Peter and the Wolf together! There we stood, the four of us, on a dirty road in the Hungarian countryside, only a few kilometers from the Austrian border. Only a few kilometers from Broadway, from the Seine. There was half a moon. There were lights from the Russians’ car. There was I, trying to not appear tempting to hungry Russian soldiers. I still appear tempting in 1956, gentlemen.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment.”
The singer stepped to the microphone, unbuttoned his suit coat, and sang over the gentle chords and walking bass:
And now I’m lost without you,
Star-crossed without you,
Tempest-tossed, mildewed and mossed,
And not infrequently sauced without you.
“More champagne?”
“Köszi, John Price. That would be delightful.”
John lifted the empty bottle and his eyebrows at a waitress.
“So—moonlight and jeep light and amorous, hungry soldiers and big bad wolves and the guns in the distance and wherever will it all end?”
“You embellish a bit, my Danish critic, like a professor, of course, but let’s see. Yes. Well, my husband and the soldier acting out Peter and the Wolf. The officer all this time is examining our pages, and now he interrupts their game. ‘Nyet, nyet.’ Still they whistle and play. ‘Nyet!’ And now they stop. ‘No. Why?’ he demands. He knows this much Hungarian. ‘Nem. Miért?’ My husband stopped. He was pained and he showed it. ‘Miért? Friend, life. Music. Books.’ The simplest Hungarian he could manage. The fundamental elements. Then he said the same in German. Then French. English. Neither of us knew any Russian, so he was only
just hoping to find a tongue in common with the officer. ‘Zene. Musik. Musique. Music. Könyvek. Buecher. Livres. Books.’ I never have forgotten his face, his voice. He was an angel on earth. Eloquent in eight words. He was”—she thought for a moment—“an ambassador for life and beauty and art. He was asking these stupid shit peasants to rise up from their Russian dirt to embrace civilization. And if they looked at him, why shouldn’t they want to? He was fearless, so much a man. He pointed to me. ‘A feleségem. Meine frau. Mon épouse. My wife.’ What could be clearer? Less threatening?”
She exchanged Hungarian chat with the waitress who cleared their dinner plates, and accepted another flute of champagne from John. She blew her smoke away from Scott and touched his hand, vowed never to light up in his presence again now that she saw his abstinence. “Melancholic Dane, you must forgive an old woman who has endangered your fine pink lungs.” The bass thumped out the last notes of a vamp.
“Yuri on the bass, ladies and gentlemen,” said the singer to polite applause. “Yuri on the bass.”
“Yuri looks to be about fifteen, no? He is very much like that private who whistled with my husband. Now I must finish this long and tedious recollection so that you gentlemen can spend some time with ladies more to your tastes . . .”
“ ‘What could be clearer and less threatening?’ ” said John. He twirled his champagne flute’s stem between his thumb and index finger.
“Yes. Except to this officer. One must, I suppose, imagine his heart, vile as the thought naturally is. He is far from home. He hopes to do his part in putting back this restless corner of empire, a corner not even Slav, after all, that always puts on airs, thinks itself better than the Poles and Czechs and Bulgarians and Russians, and—remember—that fought alongside the Nazis only twelve years ago, the same Nazis, let us imagine, who killed this officer’s father, perhaps. In the middle of this little revolt, he must do his duty. On a deserted path quite, quite close to the dangerous border with the West, with those same Nazi people, perhaps he thinks, because, well, Austrians, after all. And here, on this path, come a young man and woman who seem to speak everything but Russian. And they carry a group of papers, oddly spaced and labeled, sheets of writing, improbable and random lists of names and words, including Russian names. And of course, after some of the record album titles, there are serial numbers. And after every book, words who make a strange kind of sense in his little Hungarian: red cloth, morocco, gold-embossed. What could be clearer? What could be more threatening? I have often thought of this officer, of course. Did he truly suspect our papers were codes of secrets? Or did he simply hate us? Us Hungarians who did not trouble to learn Russian but talk in French and German and English. Hungarians who cause trouble and cause him to be sent away from his family and home in Russia to make us behave ourselves. Did he know people like us and just hate us, us people who talked about Tchaikovsky and Turgenev and Chopin? Or perhaps none of these names sounded even familiar to him, and I make of him an anti-intellectual when he was something much simpler. Maybe his heart held only his orders: Stop everyone, suspect everyone, shoot everyone. I don’t know.”
The music changed tempo and she started to remove a cigarette from its pack, then stopped, pushed the white tip back into hiding. “I am so very sorry, Scott. Some things I do not remember so easily. Hope beat its wings and flew away the next moment, when I saw him fold the sheets and place them in his jacket’s pocket. He barked something in Russian to the private. He looked at us and pointed to the car, to that jeep. ‘Budapest,’ he said with no tone at all. My husband nodded immediately and laughed, ‘Da! Gut. Ja. Igen, nagyon jó. Da!’ as though we were lost on this road and wanted nothing more than a ride home to the blazing capital. My husband laughed loudly and smiled at me and said in English, ‘Darling, run when I say!’ as if he were saying, ‘A happy stroke of luck, what? These jolly lovely gentlemen are going to take us back to Budapest!’ ”
The singer introduced the next song: “An old tune for those who find love confusing when it comes and even more so once it’s gone.”
Nádja screwed up her face, as at a smell. “Oh really, one can hardly talk about anything with jazz singers around. Everything becomes quite immediately silly. I’ll tell you the rest some other time.” The singer began to croon over grudging chords, insinuating bass, and whispering brushes. “Or at least when this sentimental rubbish is over.” Scott shoved back from the table and went to the pay phone, shaking his head.
While the saxophonist breathed a mournful, meandering solo, Nádja asked John about his brother, complimented the absent Scott without any evident irony. She asked why a man who could be a movie star or a politician came instead to teach “his unpronounceable and mongrel tongue to us poor Magyars.” John had no answer for her, and realized just then—considering all that he had wanted from Scott for years—that he barely knew his brother or his brother’s motives. But he loathed admitting ignorance to her on any topic, so he said that English majors had almost no options in the United States after graduation and were forced to become a sort of refugee themselves, deployed to the four corners of the world to teach the only skill they had, which was valuable proportionally to how far from home they wandered. He was pleased when she laughed, loved how she exhaled smoke and amusement simultaneously.
“It is remarkable. He is a Swede in the Congo here,” she said. “There is always something interesting in this world.” Applause rose from the tables like heartbeats suddenly amplified, and the band announced the end of its set. “Unfortunately, if you will excuse me”—she stood—“I am expected at my piano while the orchestra reposes.” She and her flute of champagne sailed toward the stage, the whimsical carved prow of an invisible ship.
Scott returned immediately but did not sit. Nádja began a striding “As Time Goes By,” and Scott crumpled and dropped Hungarian bills on the table, one at a time. “That should cover my share in tonight’s theatrics. She didn’t finish it, did she. Right. Twenty bucks says you never quite hear the end. I’m getting out of here just in time, boy-o. In fact, you know, let’s take a little break from these weekly charades, okay?”
“Suits me fine, chief.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Good night.”
“Right.”
XXI.
Some girls need their glass of claret,
Or to be draped head to toe in ferret.
And I know ladies who like lunch time
And there are those inspired by tea
And there are those who want to tussle
Only in chalets après-ski.
And some pretty things like the bal musette
Or to hear bandoleons and a castanet,
But my girl need not leave the kitchenette,
As long as she has plenty flaming crêpes suzette.
Sure, I could make her drink before dinner,
But that would never win ’er.
For an ante-prandial brandy’ll
Never make this girl a sinner.
Cocaine makes her nose bleed
And reefers make her sleepy.
For cash and jewels she has no greed
’Tis pastry makes her weepy.
Because she’s most spectacular
When she’s post-jentacular,
She’s my after-breakfast girl!
She’s my after-breakfast girl!
Angry faces and loud music greeted John as he entered Mark’s apartment building one morning about a week later. Hateful expressions floated behind curtains pulled aside, eyelids narrowed behind windows shut tight despite the July heat. On the dark stairway, two old women bore down on him, stopped his ascent, blocked his way, began absolutely to scold him, though his crime remained necessarily obscured in its Hungarian description and his plea for forgiveness foolishly disguised itself as foreign babbling, a noise that provoked his accusers even more, until they finally continued down the stairs, throwing their arms forward and their infuriated glances backward at the menac
e.
The building’s courtyard and the two tiers of walkway that circled it echoed with strange and scratchy old music, a Charleston-sounding dance tune from the 1920s, something about eating breakfast. Static and noise drifted around the singer’s tenor voice like snowflakes drawn to a streetlight. John hardly needed to exert his imagination to know the music’s source and why the residents were blaming him for the disturbance: The sound grew, unsurprisingly, louder as he approached Mark’s door and it required strenuous pounding before he gained admission. Mark stood in his underwear (boxers, sleeveless T), and his face was red and bloated; John had the impression he had been crying, but now his peculiar friend was smiling broadly and was soon wiggling and dancing around his apartment to the window-rattling noise.
John, newly appointed advocate for the building’s alienated population, closed Mark’s courtyard windows and began to hunt for the offending stereo. He came instead, in the apartment’s bedroom, upon a large gramophone, complete with metal crank and brass horn. His eyes spun as he attempted to read the faded, peeling label on the revolving black disc: Afr-Bekft Grl. As his puffy and disheveled host had gone to the kitchen for drinks and John could find no volume control on the elderly box, he gently lifted its enormous tonearm. His skin crawled in anticipation of the excruciating scraping sound to come, but smooth silence flooded the building at mid-verse. In the sudden calm, his touch lingered on the fluted, molluscular ridges and lips of the dull brass horn. He wondered at previous owners, noted a deep scratch in its metal that must have taken great force to create—a bored child with a penknife, a careless mover with a doorjamb, a jilted lover with a grudge.