Extraordinary Renditions (24 page)

Authors: Andrew Ervin

BOOK: Extraordinary Renditions

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Melanie was humming to herself when Nan spun her around with a clanging of cameras and kissed her over and over on the lips. She was too rough.

“I’m leaving,” Melanie told her.

“I know.” Nanette had been crying too. She kissed Melanie again, even harder. Like she was angry. She was hurting her.

“I’m not leaving
you,”
Melanie said. It was a lie, and they both knew it. She heard the music more clearly than her own words. “I’m leaving Hungary. I have to get out of here.”

“Baby, I fucking hate this city,” Nanette said. “Let’s go somewhere else. Let’s go to Vienna, like you’ve been saying. You can’t leave. That photo I want to shoot, the iconic one—I just have this
sense
somehow that you’re going to be in it.”

Maybe you’ve already taken it,
Melanie wanted to say, but didn’t. Leaving Budapest would be more difficult than she had hoped. “I’m going home,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘home?’” Nanette’s voice sounded like a squealing oboe, the instrument the rest of an orchestra will use to get in tune.

“Back to Boston,” Melanie said. She had work to do, work she could never accomplish living this way. She needed to call Harkályi.

Nanette wiped her running nose. “You can’t leave me here.”

Melanie stared at the water, taking in the view, with no interest in discussing what they both knew would happen next. She couldn’t wait to get into comfier clothes, to get the mask of makeup powder off her skin. Unwilling to argue, she headed back toward the Coca-Cola sign. Nanette followed her part of the way, then went into Eve and Adam’s to find a booth.

Melanie trudged up the stairs to their stinking, filthy apartment. So many steps. Her violin case swung at her side. She needed a change of clothes, and then to find Nan’s good scissors. First, though, she really needed to transcribe in her neatest handwriting the series of notes that would soon make up the main theme of her Symphony No. 1 (“Duna”).

EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS

COLOPHON

In honor of this book’s Hungarian setting, the text has been set in Ehrhardt type, which was designed by Miklós (Nicholas) Kis. After taking religious orders, Kis traveled to Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century to learn the arts of printing, type design, punch cutting, and type casting. He not only learned these skills, he excelled, creating an amazing number of outstanding fonts during an estimated ten-year period. Then, as planned, he brought his new skills back to Hungary and printed several editions of the Bible and other religious books in the Hungarian language before his death in 1702 at the age of fifty-two. Perhaps it was because he was a humble, religious man, perhaps it was because he was a foreigner and was no longer around to claim credit, but whatever the reason, all of the fonts he created in Holland were initially attributed to other designers, including Janson and an extensive range of Greek and Hebrew fonts, in addition to Ehrhardt. Only within the second half of the twentieth century has the full range of his achievement been revealed by typographic historians. The full impact of his work on the development of Hungarian publishing and culture is still being evaluated. At Coffee House Press we lift our mug to salute the many unknown artists who contribute to our shared culture.

T
he coffee houses of seventeenth-century England were places of fellowship where ideas could be freely exchanged. In the cafés of Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, the surrealist, cubist, and dada art movements began. The coffee houses of 1950s America provided refuge and tremendous literary energy. Today, coffee house culture abounds at corner shops and online.

Coffee House Press continues these rich traditions. We envision all our authors and all our readers—be they in their living room chairs, at the beach, or in their beds—joining us around an ever-expandable table, drinking coffee and telling tales. And in the process of this exchange of stories by writers who speak from many communities and cultures, the American mosaic becomes reinvented, and reinvigorated.

We invite you to join us in our effort to welcome new readers to our table, and to the tales told in the pages of Coffee House Press books.

Please visit www.coffeehousepress.org

for more information.

FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, from Target, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Abraham Associates; Allan Appel; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; Robert and Margaret Kinney; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; David Smith; Charles Steffey and Suzannah Martin; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation;
Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation in memory of David Hilton; and many other generous individual donors.