Prague (2 page)

To her right sits a young man who recently asserted quarter seriously that he will return to school only "when they institute a master's degree in living for the moment." Scott Price's declaration testifies to a diet of self-help books, brief and impassioned love affairs with Eastern philosophies, and a cyclical practice of wading in and out of various regimes of psychotherapy, accredited and otherwise. Scott's repeated requests, however, each sharper than the last, that Charles ask the elusive waitress whether the Carpathian mineral water contains any sodium, and his evident frustration at Charles's unwillingness to comply or even take the question seriously, belie Scott's recent public claim to "have achieved a new, better relationship with anger."

Seven months ago Scott swayed very close to a heaving stage-front amplifier in a
Seattle
nightclub, and he bathed in a long-overdue and honey-sweet epiphany. "Look at Me, I'm Above It All"—an early hit during Seattle's dominance of American pop—roared over and through him, and though he knew the song's title was meant ironically, he chose not to take it that way; from that moment, he would be above strife, out of reach of another recently fumbled relationship, yet another unhappy work situation, and, most of all, his family's long-distance constrictions and chills and cruelties. He knew he would not return the next day to the small athletic woman who had been guiding his failed six-week effort to tweeze out and incinerate any repressed memories of his par-

PRAGUE
17

ents doing something even more sinister than what he could naturally recall. He stood between the amp and the crowd, and the sound peeled from him years of resentment, which he knew he would never need again.

He left the
U.S.
a week later, not informing his family in
Los Angeles
, punctuating nearly two years during which contact with his parents and his brother was already infrequent. He surfaced, breathing easily, in
Budapest
. There he put his college degree to use as Assistant Head of Programs at the Institute for the Study of Foreign Tongues, a privately held chain of schools—first
Prague
, then
Budapest
,
Warsaw
,
Sofia
, plans afoot for
Bucharest
,
Moscow
, Tirana— hawking that most valuable commodity: English.

It is not only at that school or at this table that Scott's ash-blond hair, nearly Scandinavian features, svelte muscularity (tank top), and patently Cali-fornian health stand out. In any corner of Budapest he looks positively exotic, an obvious foreigner even before he confidently mispronounces one of his few words of Hungarian, or, in slow, pedagogic English, pesters underpaid waiters in state-owned restaurants that haven't changed their pork-predominant menu offerings since the birth of Stalin to make him something vegetarian. Not so different after all, Scott has joked, from his
L.A.
childhood spent among three foreigners claiming to be his parents and younger brother. (Though Scott neglects to mention that he was then the tremendously—cartoonishly—obese blond Jew in a family of more traditional models: short, slim, curly-haired, olive-skinned.)

After four months in
Hungary
, Scott blundered into his predictable but somehow always surprising moment of sentimental weakness. Late one night, bothered that his mother might suffer even more regret than he would wish for her, he sent to California a postcard with a picture of Castle Hill in Buda and the text Am here for a while teaching. Hope you are all okay. S. He regretted it as soon as the card schussed into the little red mailbox, but he consoled himself that he had given no address, and surely even they would be able to read between the lines. His carefully constructed world was still safe.

Except that two months later, to Scott's right sits today's fifth competitor, his newly arrived and disproportionately loathed younger brother, John.

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ROUND ONE

"WELL,
  
LET'S
  
SEE
  
WHAT'S
  
WHAT
 
THEN,"
  
SAID
 
THE
  
INVENTOR
  
AND
  
UNDIS-

puted master of Sincerity. John Price watched Charles stretch his arms around the back of his chair, lace his fingers together, and lean back slightly to permit the lowering sun to touch his face. A symbolic opening of the game, John noted, as if Gabor were holding himself up to the light, an illustration of candor. And yet, it was an intentionally symbolic action. Indeed, John thought he could see that Charles liked the idea of his competitors/friends noticing the symbolism but then being smart enough to reject it as not only a mere symbol but also an inaccurate one, a silent trick, since he surely did not believe that turning his face to the sun demonstrated any actual candor. And, John thought further, perhaps this was a small compliment as well, since Charles trusted that you were clever enough not to take the gesture at face value but to know that the act of intentionally symbolically revealing himself was meant to show that he was not revealing himself. Alternately, Charles might have been stretching.

Charles changed directions, leaned into the cluttered table, placed an elbow on its marble. He looked sideways at Mark and his brown eyes relaxed into a misty warmth. "To be perfectly honest, Mark," Charles said, "I sometimes envy your passion for your research." His gaze rested on Pay ton a few seconds longer, the desire to say more wrestling with the regret of having said so much. A wistful half-smile pulled up one side of his elegant mouth. His eyebrows climbed one carefully calibrated step toward the stark-white parting of his jet-black hair. "Your turn, Mark."

John had only been in
Budapest
two days, sleeping on his brother's floor, meandering alone through the city with a new and already out-of-date map, occasionally being introduced halfheartedly to Scott's friends. John had only just met this group, but even he suspected that Charles had no envy of Mark's research. Gabor had essentially just told the Canadian that he had zero interest in his life's work, had just allowed himself the luxury of saying the obvious: To a venture capitalist, Mark's scholarly, slobbery obsessions with the past were laughable. And Mark had even begun to laugh.

Mark grew distracted by a waitress passing close to the table. Scott re-

minded him, "It's your turn. We're going counterclockwise." And Mark made a small gesture of having his attention brought back to the game despite himself, a little play of candor that struck John as amateurish compared to the mae-stro's opening.

"You know," Mark said in a Canadian-accented singsong, apparently somewhat surprised to hear himself admit it, "I'm actually beginning to warm up to those boots," referring to the knee-high open-toe lace-up white-vinyl go-go boots that graced the feet of all Gerbeaud waitresses, women from eighteen to sixty-five, who were also condemned to yellow miniskirts and white lace aprons. All five of the Westerners were baffled that people a few months into post-Communism wouldn't pull down their mandatory go-go boots with the same liberating fervor they had demonstrated in pulling down their tyrannical government. In any event, even the dullest novice to the game would have realized that a man writing a popular history of nostalgia, who had seen cheerleaders and style-free Canadians wearing boots just like that all his life, was probably not going to "warm up" to the look in this context.

And yet there was Emily Oliver wagging her head back and forth, trying to decide whether to believe him. She trapped her bottom lip between her teeth and was examining Mark with visible mental energy, even said, "Hmmm." Finally, she seemed to realize (quite transparently) that she was being quite transparent, and she went to some effort to compose her features. Everyone watched this transformation, and they all smiled with her in their communal struggle not to laugh.

"You are a master of deception, my girl."

"Stop it, you! You came up with this weirdo game, so excuse me if I need a little practice. Normal people were raised to tell the truth, you know." She set her jaw, inhaled, and prepared herself to lie.

And John Price fell in love, five-fifteen one Friday evening in May 1990.

Emily cocked one eyebrow in an unwitting parody of conspiracy and confessed, "I struggle with serious depression all the time. I mean, very dark periods, where I feel totally hopeless."

After a momentary hush, frank hilarity burst from Mark and Scott. Even Charles smiled broadly, though he tried to show the game more respect. Emily herself was forced to look at her lap. "I'll get the hang of this," she said. "You watch."

John, however, was not laughing. He was watching his life unfold at last. He was watching a woman incapable of lying, and he told himself this was one

of life's rare treasures. He saw that Emily—as her lie revealed—had never known neurotic depression and therefore lived close to the surface of life, found the soggy and eternally multiplying layers of self-consciousness and identity an easy burden to strip away. He felt a strange contraction of the muscles around his eyes, and he scraped his lower teeth against his upper lip.

John did not savor the moment for long as, with a winning smile, Scott took his turn: "I'm really glad John tracked me down here in
Budapest
." Emily nodded happily at the warm fraternal sentiment. Mark and Charles looked at their hands. "Really. Like a dream come true."

A gloomy waitress passed tantalizingly close to the table, and John made a hopeful wave and managed to snag her flickering attention, but he spoke not a word of Hungarian. Scott, having spent five and a half months teaching English, spoke almost as little. Mark had been submitting to private Hungarian lessons for a month, to no avail. Emily admitted that she was only able to sound out written words and carry on excruciatingly simple conversations, thanks to her daily classes at the embassy, so John turned for help to Charles Gabor, the bilingual son of Hungarians who had fled to the
U.S.
in 1956.

"6 ker egy rumkoldt," Gabor said to the stone-faced waitress. Unresponsive, she walked off.

"Jesus. What did you say to her?"

"Nothing." Gabor shrugged. "I said you wanted another rum-and-Coke." "Well, she looks pissed off," John said with a sigh. "It's probably because I'm so obviously a Jew."

While physically his self-assessment was undeniably true, his grim assessment, of anti-Semitism in Hungarian waitresses killed the mood at the table. His blond, blue-eyed, pug-nosed brother grudgingly consoled him, "No, waiters and waitresses here are all like that. They do it to me, too."

"Well, one way or the other, that's my turn," said John, and Gabor let out a small and condescending whistle of appreciation at an excellent play, for a beginner.

Sincerity seemed to have sprung fully formed from Charles Gabor's head, and among the younger Americans, Canadians, and Britons first trickling then flooding into Budapest in 1989-90, the game's popularity was one of the few common interests of an otherwise unlikely society. Charles had explained the rules in October '89, the very evening of his arrival in the city his parents had always told him was his real home. He played it late that jet-lagged night with a

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group of Americans in a bar near the University of Budapest, and the game spread throughout the anglophones "like a mild but incurable social disease," in Scott's words. The virus left the sticky table and was carried to English-as-a-Second-Language-school faculties, folk and jazz bandmates, law-firm junior partners. It was laughingly explained and daily played by embassy interns and backpacking tourists, artists and poets and screenwriters and other new (and often well-endowed) bohemians, and by the young Hungarians who befriended these invaders, voyeurs, nai'fs, social refugees. Each day, Sincerity proliferated as Budapest began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making or to cash in on a market in turmoil or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a Cold War-torn city or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic, though one sensed such a potent license would expire far too soon.

ROUND TWO

CHARLES LOOKED STERNLY AT JOHN WITH AN EXPRESSION MEANT TO CONVOY a sense of "you're not going to like this, but I have to speak the truth" and said, "There will come a point, after this initial post-Communist exuberance wears off, when the Hungarians will realize that you can have too much democracy. They'll realize they need a slightly stronger hand at the helm, and they'll make the right choice: a strong Hungary with a real national-corporatist philosophy." He paused, gazed hard at John and Scott, and concluded, "Like they had in the early forties."