Prague (21 page)

'A lot of that stuff could be verified. You've got to know most of it's improbable to the point of—" Mark professionally and calmly began explaining research techniques John could use to check Nadja's stories. The topic relaxed him. "Every story has aspects that can be checked." He spouted a catalog of scholar's tricks: address records for given years, boat registries, refugee rosters, the tour schedules of world-renowned musicians.

"Check her? Why? Do you think she's a liar?" John regained his tone of mild noninterest. "I hadn't really taken her too seriously myself. I just thought you'd find her entertaining."

"Hey sure, I'd love that. Bring me to meet her, hey? What about tonight, the two of us?"

They passed from the patio to the Hilton lobby, then back outside, through the revolving doors and into Szentharomsag Square. "I gotta do this interview. I'll catch up with you at the Gerbeaud." John turned to the right.

"Call me, hey? We'll visit the pianist." Mark turned left toward the palace and the National Gallery, wondered when they'd catch up with each other, he could go and do his work at the Gerbeaud right now, be sure to be there when John turned up. He pushed through an immobile throng of pathetically indecisive tourists and was suddenly angry at the damage they were doing to the mood of Castle Hill. As he emerged at the herd's far side, his anger quickly transformed into anxiety: He was bothered by the sense that despite his best ef- a forts to hold it tight to himself, his hard-won peace had been stolen from him by I conspiring, malignant forces during lunch. John was not an official delegate of ,| the malignant forces, but he was more and more their unwitting instrument, a as were all of these unpleasant tourists, as was the young waitress with the J dragon-headed-lamb tattoo on her sinewy, starkly hairless forearm. It was a a great relief to be away from company now. It was so much work to explain 1 everything to everyone, even to John, whose obtuseness was often incredibly I charming but also exasperating and possibly even willful. It was so much easier ,; to be alone, if one could find just the right location. The palace courtyard shone 1 in Mark's memory with an almost palpable, almost edible promise, a promise | with a color all its own: a sort of soft golden red. The palace courtyard would do ] the trick. He bore the five-minute walk through heat and tourists with the knowledge that soon his day would find soft golden-red comfort.

He installed himself near the courtyard fountain and eagerly awaited the peace that should flow from the continually splashing water and the soothing, historic construction on all four sides, the permanently prancing stag, the flagstones and archways, the high windows and the square of eighteenth-century blue sky.

Yet nothing.

His eyes moved slowly, then quickly, from one of these pacifying sights to the next, faster and faster in frustration as he felt less and less at ease, more and more betrayed by the place, by the flagstones and archways in which he had put his faith. Even in the few short months since his arrival, there were fewer amenable places. He closed his eyes and tried to hear only the water fall from the mouth of the fountain with precisely the same noise it had made for centuries.

Rudely imported from the imbecilic vendor just outside the palace and freshly stripped from their chocolate innards, bright yellow-and-blue candy wrappers, like a troupe of supernatural acrobats, tumbled, cartwheeled, took wing, and soared over the brown flagstones of the courtyard. Mark made an ef-

fort to look elsewhere but was greeted by fat German tourists in shorts two sizes too small and Americans with video cameras filming each other film each other and a squadron of Japanese photographers and a middle-aged British couple who wore matching plastic waist packs and sunhats topped with plastic-coated pictures of the queen mum. Mark leaned back to stare at the upper stories of the palace, the clouds that sponged the blue sky behind the oxidized eagle's head. But it was too late. The palace felt like another dreary theme park, built to look not like the past, precisely, but the way the past was commonly accepted to look by the dimmest members of the present, a fantasyland with crummy rides, but workers dressed convincingly as sullen Hungarian tour guides.

A day's worth of reading awaited Mark faraway on his kitchen table. The music had prevented him from working last night and this morning, and lunch had dragged on for a heartbreaking eternity. The two piles of books under the poster of Sarah Bernhardt seemed to him forlorn and needy as they grew and teetered and beckoned to him to leave the palace. There was a towering stack of books on millenarian cults of the approaching year 2000. Next to it and in its shadow, there moped a sad, small bump of slim texts on millenarian beliefs around the year 1000. The promise of work did nothing for him, though. He had been working seven days a week for several months now, with breaks only to meet friends and sit at the Gerbeaud or to sit alone in this palace courtyard (now dead and off his list forever), sit on the benches in Kossuth Square near Parliament, sit on the Pest-side riverfront, sit near the opera, sit at the Gellert, swim at the Racz Fiirdo, walk slowly through Pest, avoid the construction sites, imagine old construction sites instead. He slowly stood, taking it on a cracked faith that it would feel good to work by the time he got home, if he could make it home safely. He wondered how John's interview was going, hoped he understood the fedora and would wear it right. It was only two-thirty. He left the palace and, too hot to walk down Castle Hill's winding path to the river, he bought a ticket for the minute-long funicular ride that carted shutterbug tourists up and down the slope. He stood at the little station at the top of the hill and watched the two counterbalancing cable cars, each with about eight passengers, as they glided up and down in opposite motion, passed each other mid-trip, and, in between runs, gazed sadly at each other from opposite ends.

JUST OUT OF THE Hilton's revolving doors, John was embraced by the July heat, particularly heavy after the air-conditioning of the lobby. Had it grown hotter since he had lunched on the patio a few minutes earlier? he wondered.

Could climatic fronts be so specific as to start on opposite sides of a hotel? He tried to concentrate on the interview for which he was already half an hour late. He came to the end of little Tancsics Mihaly utca without being aware of his surroundings, except for the way the cobblestones bent the thin soles of his shoes into concave embraces. Why Hungary what investment prospects do you have do you miss the rough-and-tumble of Washington how do you think the Hungarians see your work what bars and restaurants do you prefer is life here what you would have expected and in the future will all of this be noticed as an event why does what you do matter are you proud of yourself is that even the right standard these are ridiculous questions.

He passed a lamppost, green and stuck with bits of poster for last year's elections and something called THE NEW AMERICANS. And there was a small tan-and-white hound with long, plush ears folded like velvet curtains, a hound that hopped on three legs in an effort to push his fourth leg ever higher, to keep his balance while he dishrag-twisted his torso to urinate higher and higher up the lamppost, arching in a vain effort to seem, retrospectively, a big dog to later sniffers.

John came through the old fortification called the Vienna Gate, picking up his pace, and surprised a couple leaning against a tree, kissing. He lost his breath as he recognized the woman whose back was to him: Emily. He stopped, stared, couldn't believe how quickly it had fallen apart. Her partner's one visible eye opened, saw immobile John, and his tilted, half-hidden face changed, filled with menace and readiness. "Mi afaszt akarsz?" he hissed at the stranger.

John fumbled for some Hungarian, decided instead on saying her name, maybe asking why, but she was already turning her head to see who had taken her lover's attention and lips away, and she revealed herself to be a round-faced Hungarian girl with braces on her teeth and far-apart eyes. "Oh, elnezest kerek," John managed with a gesture of peaceful misunderstanding, fell back into English. "I thought, wow, I'm sorry, I thought I knew her, but I didn't, I mean..."

The man slid from behind the girl, took a step toward John, revealed the oddity of his haircut, demonstrated the depth of his English. "You know her? Who the fuck you are?"

"No, no, my mistake. I don't know her. I just thought—"

"You take a big look now, go ahead, now you are looking real careful at her, yeah? You know her?"

"No, I sure don't." A ready smile, still, haha, these things do happen.

The Hungarian seemed unable to understand John's denials. He stayed be-

side his threatened property. "You don't know her, you had your look, so fuck away now, man."

John resisted correcting the obscene grammar, laughed, and continued walking down sloping Varfok utca. Behind him, he heard the menacing bad English shift into Hungarian rumbling, interrupted occasionally by the complaining song of the unkissed female. Her voice predominated a second or two or three and then John felt a warm nausea in his head, followed by a sharp pain as his knee and left palm hit the ground. When he lifted his right hand, it returned from his scalp wet and red. Still on the ground, he turned—wincing, dizzy—to see the man biting his thumb at him, walking quickly backward toward the ancient fortified Vienna Gate, pushing his woman up the hill behind him, as if counterattacks might still be in the offing. The conquering rock was round enough, John noticed with an interest he knew was out of place, to keep rolling down the hill past where its latest victim still knelt.

MARK'S SENSE OF STOLEN peace dispersed with the first jerk of his funicular car's descent. He placed the corner of his ticket in his mouth, let two eyeteeth meet in the blue paper slip's punched hole. The east appeared in the front window of the car, unrolling from the bottom up: nineteenth-century Pest, the gloriously antique Chain Bridge, and the slow-moving, brown Danube laid themselves out for him. The sun painted stripes of white and yellow on the river for him. He felt his heart rate slow, and sounds organized themselves for him: the whir of the funicular cables, the invisible bird whose song did not grow more distant as the car descended and so, Mark realized happily, must in fact be sitting on the roof to drink in the same flying joy as Mark himself. He could hover here happily forever, drift and sit in the sky like a child's dream of flight. His morning and his lunch retrospectively swelled with comprehensible importance, he felt fond of John again, trusted and admired him, looked forward to seeing everyone at the Gerbeaud soon, looked forward to the warm bath of work that awaited him.

When, however, the two funicular cars passed each other halfway, Mark felt a small sadness bite at his throat. He hurriedly reminded himself of the Parliament's mass and height, its ridges and curves and spired helmet, the ring roads' arching embrace of Pest's grid, the clouds that trolled their shadows through the streets and dragged them soundlessly over buildings without snagging them on chimneys or antiquated antennae ... but aching moments later, all of that was being snatched away from him. With shortening seconds, Pest's

riverfront buildings rose and blocked everything to their east, the Danube shimmered one last ripple, then evaporated like a summer highway mirage behind the Buda traffic at the bottom of the rail—silent, flattened toy cars just a few seconds earlier, but now inflated and sprung into speed and noise.

At the bottom of the hill, he did manage to leave the station, proud of pulling himself together, ready for work. But then all the cars on the roundabout in front of the Chain Bridge stopped him and he looked back up at the cable car resting at the top of the hill. There was actually no decision to be made; it was simply a matter of answering an imperative need. And so he turned back to the funicular's ticket booth.

JOHN MADE THE LAST downhill block with only one or two stumbles, his cold hand glued to his hot, matted head. The shabby office building's elderly concierge guided him to the wooden door with the typewritten paper affixed to it with three strips of transparent tape: HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT GROUP, INC. The young American man with the stubbly shaved head, ill-fitting khakis, and worn blue blazer who answered the door found the alarming sight of John Price's bright red-smeared palm held up in mute explanation of why he could not shake hands quite yet. "Can I use your bathroom?"

The basement washroom's cold water burned a hole in John's head and flung cherry swirls into the caramel-vanilla patterns of the ancient sink. He cautiously dabbed at his scalp with a paper towel and looked at the familiar figure floating over his shoulder's reflection: "You're the sax player from the club, right?" he managed to say before leaning back over to vomit, rattling the brain in his concussed skull. The voice behind him admitted it uneasily and asked John not to mention it "up there." John rinsed his face and mouth. "You dress sharp when you play. What's with this high school graduation outfit?" He leaned over and gagged again. The voice requested again, in a pathetic, pleading tone, not to mention his secret musical life "up there."