Prague: A Novel

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I had high hopes for the music myself. Please keep me informed. No, no, of course not, it’s quite all right. By all means stay there. Operations here will suffer on without you. Oh, not at all, you’re quite welcome.” Charles hung up. “The thing is, Krisztina really is an asset to the organization. You should keep her on—not to tell you your game. I’m sure you have plenty of your own people like this, but she’s a local, and that can really help.” He turned down an Australian cigarette.

  I know I’m just one of the parasites, but sometimes we have the best view of our host body. Frankly, from where I’ve latched on, the thought of Hungary and its post-Communist chums suddenly becoming quasi-NATO members has the feel of being introduced to your dad’s new wife’s kids, your new crap stepsiblings, who move in and start playing with your stuff and call your dad “Dad.” Yet whose heart doesn’t go out to the Maggies, the new kid in a big school? Like the last tyke to be picked when choosing sides for a game of kickball, Hungary stood sheepishly on the sidelines until President Bush finally said, “Aw heck, come on, Zsolt! We sure could use your spunk!” Or, as Lieutenant Pál, my host at mortar practice, so eloquently explained, “I am not altogether entirely certain that our mortars would be very effective in a desert situation. So we were happier and also more confident in being help by sending the medical personnel.” Well, water flows under the bridge faster than it used to, and this particular epochal war seems to have become a memory before we even got the chance to ration, or do middle-of-the-night civil guard duty, or sleep with soldiers’ left-behind wives. It’s hard to keep track of the passing epochs nowadays, as a friend of mine once pointed out. It’s early March, so that puts us in the delirium and exuberance of the postwar period. Of course, a war that starts with Churchillian calls for blood, sweat, and tears, victory at any cost, the salvation of the free world but then ends with the military equivalent of a violent retarded child suddenly forgetting why he is in the middle of throttling this particular gerbil and then tossing it aside while it’s still able to catch its breath . . .

  “Yo, call me when you get in. I just had my islanders in again. These guys move. I love watching efficient people in action. I’d forgotten what they looked like, I’ve lived here so long. Loved your Gulf War thing, by the way. Call when you have a minute to talk about real work, okay?”

  “Hey ho, it’s the king of 1991! Long time no screw, your majesty. How’s the Price of Love?” She pecked his cheek and led him by the hand to the clothesline loosely stretched outside the black curtains that formed her darkroom. Clothespin-supported, there hung, still slightly damp, ten enlargements she had just spawned—goats in a field, the statue of Vörösmarty, classical French paintings of nude goddesses in varied poses, each ham-hock thigh more generous than the last. There were also pictures, still streaked with reflective and evaporating liquid, of events in which he was a star but that had never even made the short trip to his short-term memory. He gazed at them in amazement, wondered if perhaps they were collages, but they seemed too normal for Nicky to have bothered, and they did tickle, ever so delicately, if not memory, exactly, at least a sense of personal plausibility: a piano bench supporting him and Nádja, Dexter Gordon smoking on the wall just behind them; a bar stool he seemed to be kissing on its leg, two puzzled faces above him; his face sharply top-lit, on the Blue Jazz stage, holding the microphone, his eyes sleepily half shut, his lips curled into a rascally, lascivious semi-smile; his top half in a booth at the Blue Jazz, his head propped sloppily in both hands, a little line of drool catching a blue light, the only filament of color in the black-and-white composition. “Will you come with me?” he finally managed to ask, and even wheedled a little, to erode her unexpected, nonspecific resistance. “For art’s sake. You might find it, you know, artsy. I could use the company. I’ve walked by it for the last three days. I think you’d just, you know, for curiosity’s sake.” Some very small part of him wondered quietly if this might not be the long-approaching moment when she would just come to him.

  Krisztina had fallen asleep, at three in the afternoon of all times, on the contoured chair, her arms crossed, her heels hooked underneath her on the chair’s crossbar, and her head hanging heavily, nearly to her lap. Even through sleep the soreness of her neck persisted, and in her semi-slumber she could feel the sickly space between each vertebra, clotted and hot and almost audibly starchy. She tossed her head from side to side in search of the pillow that for weeks she’d known only in dreams, and her eyes opened for a moment, and she saw Imre staring at her. Before the thought had registered, her eyes had shut again, and it took her several seconds to fight upward, to break the surprisingly thick surface and emerge into full wakefulness. Even then, she lost another second or two trying to focus her gaze. His eyes were shut. It might have been a dream. She took his hand and stroked his brow and chanted, chastened.

  “He’s much the same,” Charles responded. “Thank you for asking. We’re always hoping for news of progress.”

  “And so his position in regards to this agreement?”

  “Unchanged,” Neville answered.

  Her building’s concierge—a mustachioed, athletic-looking man in a shiny red tracksuit—smiled broadly as soon as he peered at John and Nicky through the lace curtains of his apartment door, just inside the archway leading to the courtyard. He had known with a glance that they were foreigners, and he opened his door already apologizing, “Nem English, nem Deutsch.”

  John said simply, “Nádja,” and made a face to express that he wasn’t expecting to be led to a live woman’s door. His ignorance of her family name struck him only then.

  “Igen.” The man nodded sympathetically.

  John mimed turning a key. “Igen?” he asked. The man shrugged broadly and looked down to the floor as his eyebrows rose in a bilingual display of hesitation. “My grandmother,” John said in English, then managed in Hungarian, “My mother on my mother.” The Hungarian touched his slicked-back hair in confusion, and so John held his two hands flat, one above the other, to simulate a family tree. “My mother,” he said, and moved the bottom hand. “And my mother,” he said, and moved the top hand: “Nádja.” The superintendent shrugged, locked his door behind him, and walked them up four flights of stairs, his athletic sandals slapping rhythmically. John imagined his poor elderly friend trudging up and down all these stairs, every day.

  “Amerikai?” the man asked them as they stopped for breath at the top. “Yoowessay?”

  “Igen.”

  The super nodded with admiring significance, lofty-browed. “Igen, igen, yoowessay, yoowessay, nagyon jó.” He led them to a short, dark hallway off the main corridor. He paused in front of the last door at the hall’s underlit terminus, and he absently jangled the keys. “Jó. New York City,” he offered conversationally.

  “Yes, New York City,” agreed John.

  “Ah! California,” suggested the man, nodding.

  “Yes, yes,” John concurred. “California.”

  At last he unlocked it and held it open for the Americans. “Okay,” he said, almost sadly, perhaps hoping to be invited in. “Okay.” Finally he retreated, leaving the deceased woman’s family alone in the apartment. The sound of a sliding deadbolt gave him a moment’s pause.

  “Please please, Imre. Please, Imre. Please, Imre. I saw you before, didn’t I, Imre? Now please again, Imre.”

  Neville distributed four copies of the document and opened his own to page 6. “We do have two points still to discuss. I’m terribly sorry to bring them up now, but perhaps we can reach a quick accord and initial the agreements as necessary. I think we can still have everyone out by four. Your flight is when?”

  Two rooms—a narrow rectangle entering one side of a small square—suggested the very first, teasing chambers of a pharaonic tomb, though not as well lit. John fumbled for lamps. Nicky reached the far side of the square room and swept from the single window the stained, thin, pea-green curtain. John walked the perimeter of the rooms
slowly; he could smell the unmistakable aroma of unoccupancy. A pivoting, warped, discolored metal rod jutted from the wall just over the foot of the tiny bed, and from it dangled Nádja’s red dress on a hanger. The bed was unmade; the sheets were thin in places. On the bedside table lay a paperback romance novel, facedown, opened a little past halfway. On its upside-down cover, under the title in English and the author’s name, a muscled, shirtless man with a rapier squeezed the arms of a woman, who tossed back her head and lifted up her leg. Next to the book sat a battered, unidirectional English–Hungarian dictionary and a notebook filled with closely written Hungarian, the romance novel’s in-progress translation. A small cassette player sat on the floor, two unlabeled tapes on top of it. On a hook over the tiny stove hung a garland of pointy dried red peppers, a diabolic lei. In Nádja’s tiny bathroom (a closet off the entryway rectangle), John found a teeming garden of perfume bottles, a collection without any logic for either daily use or obscure investment, dozens of bottles, balanced on the sink and on a rickety, wickery table and on the sporadically tiled floor, most of the bottles with just a final few spittly bubbles of scent remaining in their bellies, golden and clear and light blue liquids just deep enough to envelop the tips of their spray-hose stamens. Underwear—painfully old, old, old—molded itself to the edge of the cracked and caulk-flailing tub.

  He found Nicky still standing by the window, holding a small framed picture to the light. “Look what she kept,” she said happily. “I can’t say I approve of the frame.” She showed him the New Year’s photo at the piano, under the muralized, smoking Dexter Gordon, the only picture in the apartment. There were no posters on the walls, no letters, no scraps of this or that, no medals, no proofs. He slumped on the bed. “There’s nothing here. Nothing,” he muttered, amazed to unearth no evidence in the dwarfish chest of drawers, nothing beyond the few clothes and forint coins, the comb and brush. “This isn’t her life,” he said sadly. Perhaps someone had already come by and taken personal items away while John dithered on the street in the March wind and fickle sun. “It’s a good picture,” Nicky said, “if I do say. She was so happy when I brought her a batch to choose from. It was very flattering. And sweet. She was very funny about you.” John noticed, as the surviving sunlight licked them, how delicate and beautiful were Nicky’s hands. Despite the paint stains, despite the bitten nails and the raggedy, ridged cuticles, her long fingers curved gracefully and she held the photo to the window’s light with a gentleness he found touching, even if it was an act of self-love. She, too, could be a pianist with those fingers. He pulled the flimsy, stained curtain off the battered peg; it swept in front of the little window again. He imagined the two of them in this small apartment, in the enforced darkness of a wartime blackout, in the menacingly unpredictable electrical power of a crisis, a coup, a counterattack. Tanks rolled down the street, his street, where he had lived all these years in peace with her. He laid the photo on the little table, covered the romance novel with it, took her hands.

  “Now look here, Mr. Howard. I’m sure Mr. Melchior hasn’t come all this way to be told you have any significant changes to the agreement at this point in time.”

  “Let it be, Kyle.” The monotone again, the eyes anywhere but on another human face.

  “As I mentioned, they aren’t major changes, but I cannot in good conscience advise Charles to—”

  “Maybe let’s not sweat the small stuff, Nev. Hubert’s come a long way to get this done.”

  “Oh, my Imre, thank you, thank you. Can you hear me? Can you let me know you hear me? You have such beautiful eyes, you are so good to show them to me! Thank you. Can you squeeze my hand? Can you? Oh, very good! Don’t make yourself tired, of course. You are so good, you are so good. I want to get the doctor now. Oh, you don’t know where you are, you poor man, you are so good. I will be back in only a moment. Don’t be frightened. I am here, I have never left your side. You don’t understand me, do you? Oh, you look so lost, please just believe me, you will understand, you will be yourself soon, Horváth úr.”

  And if they come for him, then this is how he wishes to be taken, from her arms, from this narrow little bed, which can scarcely bear the weight of the two of them. Let them all climb out of their tanks to sit and gawk and applaud as she and John ignore them. Her hands are everywhere, her mouth is everywhere, their clothes, emptied, collapsed in a useless pile—let the Russians have them. Though they never left their beloved little apartment, they have made their successful escape, he and his wife with the beautiful pianist’s hands and the hoarse voice and the soft day-old stubble on the top of her shaven head and the acquired taste of that tremendous jaw. His beautiful, brave wife: She would not choose to be anywhere else but here making love with him; she would choose a city under attack with him over any safe paradise that lacked him. And the list they have spent so many hours making, let it go, let the Russians burn it or eat it or give it to shrugging, stymied cryptologists. There is no frontier to cross that they cannot cross right here and now as their bodies merge—his and his wife’s—as they close so tightly that there is no longer a clear distinction where one begins and the other ends; a fusion has occurred, as it does every time they are together; parts are exchanged, and no one finishes quite the same as they began. So let them have her piano, her easels and canvases and darkroom, all her secret papers from the embassy—the hell with all that.

  “Can you blink? You can? Did he, Doctor? That was a blink for us, wasn’t it? Oh, Imre—Horváth úr, excuse me if I call you Imre. You have been asleep for a very long—”

  “Fräulein, perhaps we should allow him to adjust slowly. We do not wish to shock—”

  “Yes, fine, but let go of me. Horváth úr, if you can hear me, just blink twice quickly. Can you do that for—hey! Yes! You are so brave! You Swiss, did you see? You saw? You would not believe me, but you saw! He hears, and he can say yes. Two blinks is yes from now, okay, Imre? And one is no. Until you talk we will do this . . . Oh, there is so much to tell you, yes. Let go of me, Swiss! Okay, I will leave with you, but, Horváth úr, I will be back. You rest now, Imre, and I will tell you everything when you are feeling more energy. Please, Swiss, let me be.”

  “Amazing. I bought the damn thing in Tokyo a week ago and now it’s stone-dead. Won’t make a bloody mark. Paid five hundred dollars to have the damn thing in monogrammed gold.”

  “Please take mine.”

  A knocking on the door, quiet at first, then quickly louder. “Amerikai? Hey! Amerikai! Mit csinálnak? Nyissák ki az ajtót!” The sound of troops—John held on for one more moment—the sound of troops who knew he was here. Let them splinter the deadbolt and beat down the door and storm in, poor imbeciles, stunted cruel children; let them shoot me dead just as I am right now, I will fall forward, exhausted, onto her body and into her arms one last time.

  The sensation was a new one, something vibrating through rubbery muscles. He was amazed to feel his thoughts moving far more quickly than the corresponding events. A peculiar and wonderful feeling, like coming to himself after an incredibly long and deep sleep. The sight of the pens moving across the documents was remarkable: They moved so slowly that Charles could see the ink pouring out in black rivers around the tiny balls in the pen tips; he could hear the scratch of those balls carving canals in the paper, could hear the rustle of the ink rushing into those canals and then crackling as it froze. In the space of a single signature, he had time enough to think of poor old Mark Payton, not (amazingly!) a total fool after all: There are moments that matter a great deal, moments that draw onto and into themselves all three time zones—past, present, future—and forge of them strange hybrids: future-past, present-future, past-present. As his own pen carved and poured and froze the beautiful lines and swinging curves of his signature, he knew the feelings he would have about this moment forty years in the future, the growing love he would have for this precise instant. He heard the beauty not only in the sound of his pen scraping along the paper right now but the growing bea
uty of that same sound with each passing year, as if a noise could grow louder with each echo, ringing out perhaps most loudly at an anniversary (March 12, 1992; March 12, 1999; March 12, 2031), but loud as well on dates wholly unrelated to this one, triggered by little things: a broken golden pen, a man with a substantial subnasal mole, a metallic cologne like poor Kyle’s, a tie like Neville’s (an odd taste the Brits all seem to have—where did he find such a pattern?). But most of all there was this present—the sight of that signature and the tremendous testimony of it: He had sold for much more than he had bought. He had definitively proven his alchemy. What was financial genius but an ability to see the future more quickly than anyone else? This signature—right now spilling out from around that tiny metal ball—proved that he could grasp the very soul of assets, could assess their essential worth before anyone else, could then mix with those assets his own magical, potent seed. Payton had been right, and for a moment it was true: He sincerely did envy the researcher his impassioned scholarship ( . . . one of the game’s most beautiful aspects . . . ). His heart beat in his ears, and he suddenly feared he might blush or giggle or otherwise give himself away to these other men.

  “Your colleague is very loyal to you and was with you for every of these days for a very long time now.” Imre did not have the muscle control to smile or to cry, but the news, in this cold doctor’s poor Hungarian, that his partner had not left his side (throughout whatever this experience had been) penetrated the clouds of his cyclical semi-wakefulness, and he hoped Krisztina or the doctor would bring his colleague in as soon as possible. He understood he was in a hospital, and that he was very tired and that his eyes moved but nothing else and that his throat was terribly dry. But that Károly had not left his side, had been here every day for a very long time now during this . . . Imre’s eyes closed again, and the doctor wiped the pool of moisture away from the corner of his patient’s mouth.