Prague (10 page)

"To think: state-of-mind verb," he replied. "In the world of science you may be right, Zsofi. But what do I say about English? Tibor?"

Tibor spoke very slowly and with a trace of the British accent imprinted on him by his first English teacher. He stroked his unruly black beard as he talked. "English is a matter of attitude as much as vocabulary, you say, Scott. I know you say this. It does seem to be more true than of Hungarian or German. Your slang changes more rapid, and your culture style has encouraged more, mmmmph, more shattering? Shattering of the tongue into groups of speakers?" A few attempts were necessary to untangle the linguistic wiring of Tiber's thought, but he and Scott finally succeeded, and Tibor continued as Scott printed the new vocabulary on the white board. "Yes, to splinter into subcultures, each with their own language. Yes. Exactly."

Tibor had a Ph.D. in Hungarian literature, spoke fluent German, read Latin and Greek, was a published author on the work of the nineteenth-

rHUUUC
   
!

century Hungarian revolutionary poets Sandor Petofi and Boldizsar Kis, and was expecting a university appointment for the approaching term. Scott, as he told the students the first day, "spoke flawless English vernacular, a product of twenty-seven-odd years of rigorously enforced linguistic immersion in an Anglophone culture."

His pupil proceeded: "It is my belief that irony is the tool of culture between creative high periods. It is the necessary fertilizer of the culture when it is, how does one—mi az angolul, hogy parlagon hever?"

Zsofi, though entirely at a loss as to what Tibor was getting at, was the fastest with the Magyar-Angol dictionary. "To lie fallow," she reported proudly.

And Scott was back at the white board writing in red erasable marker: To lie fallow. Fallow (adj. agr.) Tibor continued to massage the mass of twisted black hair falling from his chin. "Fallow. Yes," he began again. 'American culture lies fallow now. There is nothing living, only things waiting. And the earth gives off only a smell. This smell, not pleasant, is irony. Like this newspaper writer. Very self-knowing." Self-conscious (adj. psych.) "Yes. This is the self-conscious newspaperman's place in the world, I am thinking. It is the role now of your writers and thinkers in your culture to absorb what have come before, to filter the last good harvest, and to throw off the—the bad wheat."
Chaff (n. agr.)
"To throw off the chaff. To clear the land. Put in fertilizer. Put the good grain in the tall barn." Silo (n. agr.) "In the sheelo. To throw off the chaff, put good grain in the sheelo, put the bad-smell irony everywhere, and wait for new seasons." Tibor stroked his beard. The rest of the class looked to Scott as the day's curriculum had unexpectedly delved deeply into agricultural questions.

"Well. Who agrees with—"

"Oh, also, Scott, I am sorry."

"Yes, Tibor?"

"Arcadia is not a mythological paradise as Eden. It is a real part of the Greekland." Greece (country) "A real part of the Greece. It symbolized first, as you say, a green and perfect country life, but then we learn that Arcadians were very uneducated and violence and cruel. For smart people then after, Arcadia is a symbol of intellectual's wrong effort to see happiness in savages."

Silence.

"Okay, great. Thank you, Tibor."

"This is not good," insisted Zsofi. "It is a simple question, yes? Does he think it is true, he saved us from Russians by liking to watch MTV?"

Istvan, a young politician from one of the new parties, who would six

years hence become minister of the interior, responded, "It is Marx upside down, and I think, yes, he may be right. Capitalism provided for people better than Communism, and with strong TV signals everybody knowed it."

"Knew. Simple past. Know, knew, known."

"We all knew it."

"YOU WANT COME
 
HOME WITH
 
ME?"

Mark, who had been staring at the young man from across the nearly empty bar, answered yes in a lurch. "No," he corrected himself. "You come home with me."

And so it was that Mark Payton slept with his first Hungarian and later, when the need to make conversation returned, found himself in the cliche role of the spent adventurer who seeks to feel human again with the stranger in his bed.

Early summer moonlight spilled over the bedside windowsill and onto Mark and Laszlo, both stretched out nude. Laszlo smoked a hand-rolled post-coital cigarette, a nostalgic affectation Mark found charming and atmospheric, and he read the gesture as a sign that this Hungarian stranger felt as the Canadian did about the world. The smell of the cigarette rising in the old apartment brought the building to life, made Mark's Buda home more real to him. Such cigarettes had been rolled and smoked here during wars and revolutions, under tyrants, at moments of hope, during peaceful stretches of simple domesticity. Mark thought of his own childhood homes, of dormitories and first apartments, all modern, bare of history and therefore of peace. Here, though, was a bridge to the better past, smelling of tobacco from a plastic pouch.

"They say the best place to learn a language is in bed." Mark delivered this ridiculous proverb in a plausibly deniable tone but still hoped to provoke the offer of an intimate, collegial tutorial. The Hungarian made a quietly dismissive noise.

Mark tried again; rolled over and propped his chin on his stacked fists. "El-nezest, warn, megtudnd mondani mennyi az ido?"

Laszlo laughed low. "You learn in a class?"

"Yes. Igen. And on my own. Why are you laughing? Did I say it wrong?"

The man blew a stream of smoke at an angle just slightly away from Mark's face. "You speak anything besides English or you like all Americans?"

"Okay, one: Kanadai is different than amerikai. And two, yes. I read classical and church Latin and ancient Greek. I speak pretty good Quebecois. I have functional Cornish and I can speak Manx."

"Don't get angry on me," said Laszlo, flicking ash into a bedside glass of water. "I just am wanting to say that in these languages—"

"I'm not angry."

"Fine, okay, you not angry. But look. In English you say, 'Hey, man, what time it is?' Right? So where did you learn Megtudnd mondani mennyi az ido?"

The scorn surprised Mark. He had learned it from a Hungarian textbook. Didn't it mean What time is it?

"No. It means, 'Excuse me for bothering you, very high up sir, I am nothing, you are a big important person, we are from different classes, I am like an animal. I am guilty to bother you and you are ashameful to talk to me, but I am too poor to own a watch and too scared to go into store to look at a clock, I am dirt, but can you please, please, be good and tell me what time is it and then maybe spit on me if you like, since I am only a little faggot to you?' " Laszlo took one last drag, then dropped the butt into the water glass, where it made the sound of fading expectations.

"I said all that, actually? Hungarian is awfully efficient."

"Man, what time it is?
Mennyi az ido?
That's it. Simple."

Mark rose from the bed and walked to the bookshelf to find his textbook and notes. "But what about being polite?"

The naked Hungarian lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. "What I say was polite. But yours, yours was like British shit. We are not British, man. We have chance to be new now, with the Communist shit finished. What will be us now? We start from nothing, so why be British? These are rare chance now, you know?"

The intellectual point—the idea of developing a new culture based on free elections—struck Mark as laughably ahistorical, but, relieved at least that the nude man was interested in subjects like this, Mark grasped at the chance for connection. "You can't make new people, Laszlo. You still speak the same language. Besides, it was only the government. You still have your culture and the country and the buildings and people's habits." Mark disappeared into the kitchen and struck a match to light the stove, an Old World necessity he found beautiful and comforting. He put on a kettle and called into the next room, offering tea.

Laszlo sat cross-legged on the bed and rolled another cigarette, then put

n i n u n

on his briefs and rose to examine Mark's shelves. He turned his head sideways to read the spines. The authors' names nearly all ended with Ph.D. and M.Phil. The covers were colorless and the titles bisected with colons: The Devil You Know: State, Society, and Angst in Berlin, 1899-1901. Mapless, Flapless, and Hapless: Early Popular Images of Aviation. Mistakenly Thought: A Compendium of Discredited Science. You Had to Be There: Approaches to Humor, 1415-1914. Piqued in Darien: Expressions of Emotion in WASP Culture, 1973-1979, by Lisa R. Pruth, M.Phil.

Mark returned to his bedroom holding two cups of tea. He found Laszlo wearing underwear. Two lamps were now on, and the foreigner was messing up the order of Mark's books. The curtains were still open, and Mark was at a loss as to what to do first. Put on his own underwear? Close the curtains? Protect his belongings? He felt himself suddenly sweating, and his chest and stomach hurt. He sloshed the tea on the TV table, grabbed his own underwear and jeans, tugged them on hurriedly, and sat in the apartment's only chair.

"Hey, relax, man," said Laszlo without looking up from the title page of You Had to Be There. "You read all these books?" Laszlo asked in the present tense. Mark thought the stranger's voice carried some scorn or doubt. Only later would he wonder if it had just been the untranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions.

'All of most of them, most of the rest of them." Mark's stock answer spilled out of his mouth in one sullen, toneless word—allofmostofthemmostoftherestof-them—and he watched it fall into the linguistic cracks between the two of them. A syllable or two splintered off and lodged in the Hungarian's ear. Mark saw him wrestle with the words and was pleased he had confused this arrogant foreigner, had forced him to acknowledge his lack of what he probably valued most: English fluency.

"All or most of the rest?"

"Yeah. That's right," Mark replied. "Mostly all of rest or not within."

The Hungarian nodded and looked back at the book he was balancing open. He sipped his tea. "What else you learn from your book of Hungarian?"

And as quickly as it had come, it left. Mark softened and answered with a proud smile, "Legyen szives, uram, kerek szepen egy kdvet."

"Man, you go and do it again, fuck Jesus. You want a coffee, just ask it. You say please fifteen times first the waiter gonna be asleep. Kdvet kerek. That's it,

PRAGUE I 59

man." He examined the author's biography on the inside back cover of Piqued in Darien.

"Yeah, but why should I trust you, Laszlo? What if everyone in Hungary thinks you're the rudest guy in the country and I learn how to speak Hungarian from you and then I'm the second rudest guy in the country, even though actually I was polite at home, even for a Canadian? Suddenly polite Mark becomes rude Mark and I never even know it."

"Big fuck. Who's cared?"

"I'm not scared. I'm just saying—"

"Nobody's cared."

"Okay, some people are scared, but so what?"

"So, fine, one guy's cared, but just be different and new. Be rude, man, if that's what life and Hungary make you."

"You're not Hungary, Laszlo. You're just you. You're just—"

"Yes, nice working. You catch me. I trick you. The secret police pay me to make foreign men act rude. You're a genius from reading all your books." He tossed the book on the bed, kicked his jeans up off the floor and into his hands.

Mark saw in the collection of the jeans the clear first step to the door. Thinking only slightly, he stood up, placed his tea on the table, took off his own jeans, and lay back down on the sofa bed. "Hey, don't go. Tell me about the new, about what the new Hungarians will be like. Tell me about that." The words crowded their way out of Mark's mouth, but Laszlo kept dressing.