Prague (22 page)

"Up there" was a single room with two tables, two chairs, two phones, several boxes of contradictory business cards, and little else. And then a too-loud voice—Harvey Lastnamelost—and hard hair split by a white straight-edge part, and a hand shaking John's violently while John's vision blurred and his head swelled. A proffered glass of tepid, salty club soda. Saxman sent out for coffee. A story about Harvey (check notebook for last name), heavy with post-Cold War symbolism, something about the Soviet ambassador, broad hint

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that the ambassador would take a job with Harvey, wolf out of a job, empire crumbling, rats, sinking ships, very droll to sit in the office of the Soviet ambassador sipping brandy, once the very control room of his empire's outpost, the room from which this country used to be run, for God's sake, and then to have him virtually begging me for a job, or at least a lead! Beautiful moment. What's your story going to be about? I was profiled before, you probably read in the FT and the Journal, both right behind us, smart journalism supports the cause. Exciting what we're going to do here, brave new world, a chance for all of us to make money together, and that's exactly what I tell the Hungarians: I want them to get rich, too, because I know I can get rich happier and faster if we all get rich together. All in the same boat. Western-style office buildings, I have a head start on approvals, option for building convention center, minister a close friend of mine, first-class fellow, I admire his poetry, published poet you know, these new artistic governments, so funny, they won't last here or in Prague, of course, it's nice after the Commies, but eventually they'll get back to having businessmen and lawyers in charge and that's how things get done, you can't really have a cabinet full of sculptors, more of a tourist attraction for now. John, I tell you, between you and me, just us right here right now, all I can say is best time for a man of honor and faith to step up, never will there be an opportunity like this, not just for the money men but for this country, will they throw off their shackles, I want to see money make men free, John, I'm the luckiest man alive to be here now, we're planning an opening fund $ 3 7 million, I want them to get rich right alongside me. That's right, and it shows a respect, too, the little Hungarians are pleased with. We can't just storm in and start buying up their country at fire-sale prices just 'cause they're down and out, right? Actually, John, we can. No, I'm kidding. I suppose that some of the smarter ones will make money, can hardly help it if they're not entirely as stupid as I sometimes suspect they are. It's all about how you choose to live life, you see, John. A man grabs life by the ankles and shakes her, sees what comes out of her pockets. I like your style, John. You're like me. How old are you? You ever want to get out of writing for the paper, you come talk to me. John, men like you and me deserve certain things, have to bite life on the neck and see if she screams, tickle her tits, you know? You want life? Well, she wants you to show her you can handle her, that you know how to get her wet. She wants to be mastered. The Hungarians used to know that, but they've forgotten how to do it, sad to say, and sad to see: a country of men so busy playing dumb under the Russians,

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they wake up one day and they can't help it, they're not playing, they're just dumb. John, honestly, I would love to teach them how to do it again, but there's no time for that. Opportunity's now. It's a matter of forward motion, you're like me, can't imagine why you don't put down your pen, grab your cock, and come work for me. I recently met with, and I said, "Senator, when you're ready to leave politics and return to the real world, there's a corner office in Budapest with your name on the door, a bright brass nameplate."

THE FIRST RIDE BACK up the hill was almost entirely joyful: the view only improved, grew more panoramic by the second, each moment shaming the last, until suddenly, treacherously, the car jogged to a stop and the tin roof of the uphill station hung halfway over the front window and then the door clattered open and the whole thing felt like the ridiculous, panting, slightly nauseous anticlimax at the bottom of a roller coaster. A few minutes standing at the walkway at the top, leaning against the railing, enjoying the immobile view, sufficed to send him home to work again.

But of course this next ride down could not possibly have the innocent enjoyment of the first. This second descent was stained with the knowledge of how the end would feel just a minute later, so the joy was both briefer and more precious. When the car stopped with a shudder at its noisy, smoky, crowded lower terminus, Mark—shuddering, too—had the sensation that forty seconds of peace on the first trip down had become, this trip, thirty seconds, but a much more intense thirty seconds. He left the station again, ready to go home, ready to laugh off the unnecessary round-trip, but then wondered if the pattern would continue on the next trip, if it would become twenty seconds of new-found profundity, and if such a pattern didn't have some bearing, actually, on his research.

JOHN COULD SCARCELY BELIEVE how weak he felt when he finally propped himself into a cab's backseat. He grunted as his head scraped along the vinyl. In his pain and polygonal anger (the guy with the rock, Harvey the aesthetically offensive investor, Scott the inaccessible bastard who would never let John make things right), he was inspired: Grab life by the ankles. He decided to give the driver Emily's address. He leaned from side to side as the cab's bald tires slid with each turn into the hill. He would let her see him like this, would let her rescue and nurse him. A picture of sacrifice and love: a victim's very last energy

spent on a kiss. This is how it began. I should have gone to a doctor but I went to your mother. I kept hoping the Julies weren't there. And they weren't. Do you remember the first thing you said, Em, when 1 poured out of that cab? Tell them what you said. You

said,

"John Price? You are not healthful? Scott is being absent." The accent was Hungarian. He looked around, hoped Emily might somehow still appear, though he was at his brother's house and she was hills and hills away. Maria wore his brother's college T-shirt.

THE TRIPS UP, however, grew only finer and finer. By early in the evening, as the sun started to disappear behind the funicular and the view was lit by a fading, westering, indirect light that seemed to lend the buildings a more forceful third dimension, made them jut out from the silver-blue-green sky in shimmering bas relief, the rides became almost too beautiful to bear, and on several of the ascending journeys Mark felt his eyes wet with gratitude. The motion conjured the magic, the gradual change in the panorama over the ascending minute, watching this picture paint itself, flatten itself into two dimensions. Yes, it was pleasant to stare at the finished product from the walkway at the top, but it wasn't as potent as the slow ride up to that same walkway.

And as a scholar, he was interested to note that the window of pure peace did close slightly on each descending trip, but those shrinking, sinking moments grew geometrically sweeter and more trembling; the pleasure of the trips up increased only arithmetically. By sunset, with the couple standing next to him in the car kissing loudly and the girl's braces reflecting the light in silver flashes between embraces, the moment lasted only five seconds, perhaps— three seconds before passing the ascending car and another two seconds after—but in those five seconds, there was an annunciation, the feeling of absolute comfort and of loss simultaneously, a flight into the permanence of an antique postcard (he had been in or just out of the frame of some hundred tourist photos in the course of his miles of vertical, back-and-forth travel that afternoon). Permanence and impermanence blended, became momentarily identical—the permanence of his rightful place, and the impermanent view, impermanent buildings, the fading light, fading years, styles shifting so fast, somehow the undeniable but elusive meaning of life. Five seconds is all, but that's more than most people get in a lifetime, he thought, felt smug in that fifth of the five seconds, until the sixth, when it became clear that those cars were

going to grow noisy and smelly and large again, and the river, growing black with sparkling stripes, was vanishing yet again, taking its promises and history and permanence with it.

The hundred snapshots that featured Mark would come to life over the next weeks in photo shops all over the world, he realized. The back of his head in shadows or the corner of his face lit by a lowering sparkle of sun or one eye red from the flash or his whole face caught in a moment of perfect peace: He— they—would turn up all over the world, in a hundred bulging paper envelopes, on a hundred translucent negative strips, in a hundred slides bordered in thick white plastic-coated cardboard. Who would develop the picture, the one of perfect peace and happiness, the sight of him in his own skin in the right place on earth, at his perfect moment when the beauty of the past and the possibility of his own life were not in grim, relentless opposition? Stockholm, Sweden? A couple just returned from their honeymoon, which years later they would agree comprised the happiest six days of their lives. But now, still young, still looking forward with an infant's faith that life would only grow richer and happier, they flip through the photos that represent the high point of their love, and there in the corner of a shot from day six is the face of a stranger, a face at the precise moment of its deepest satisfaction with its life. Dubuque, Iowa? A group of high school students return from their summer educational trip and must prepare reports on what they learned. One student cannot find the words to explain the significance of the face in the corner of her picture of Pest taken from the moving funicular. She can only pay with her own pocket money (earned from babysitting and paper routes and a little soft-drug dealing) to have the photo blown up to poster size and then silently place it on an easel for the class to gaze upon until (take as long as necessary, ignore the ringing bell) they feel what Mark means to them in their malleable youth. Tyson's Corner, Virginia? An elderly American man—recently widowed, a long-retired spy—returns home from a nostalgic trip to all the Cold War hot spots where his life's meaning was written in invisible ink, and he meant to take a picture of the wooden bench inside the funicular where he once sat and received microfilm from the only woman he ever truly loved, a woman shot for her betrayal of her country, shot on his account, and he hoped for a picture of an empty bench, but who is that young red-haired man in his picture and why does he look so—so... What would possibly be the word that could explain the significance of his plump face?

Three trips later, as the tail end of sunset, like a peacock wandering over

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the lip of a hill, trailed a few final slivers of silver into the west, and the east darkened from teal to navy to plum, after Mark had shared the wooden bench with the elderly photographer who was not a retired spy but in fact a Welsh cardiologist on his way to meet his wife for dinner, Mark stood at the bottom of the funicular and tried to regain the feeling of smugness he had felt on so many descents that day: Some people never even get five seconds when they glimpse life's beauty, he insisted. "Five seconds," he repeated, this time aloud.

Some hours later, Mark stood a few feet to the left of that same spot. He decided now that he could not end this day on the down trip, that the sensation after the descents, standing here in the roundabout of Adam Clark Square, was growing too powerful; this funicular could never carry him home. He bought a ticket from the girl whose shift had started three hours before, and he did not notice the unkind expression on her face or the tone of her question—A ticket for you today, sir?—or how she called out to her friend at the turnstile. He did not notice the sarcastic way her friend welcomed him into the car. Instead, he thought about the pleasure of the ascending trip with an anticipation he knew he would hold up to later experience as the very benchmark of good, real life, the first unspeakably delicious tremble as the cables began to move. In later years, perhaps, the very thought of the Budavari Siklo (he noticed on this last trip the wooden sign with the funicular's Hungarian name) would hum and vibrate with happiness for him. Perhaps he would not be able to look at a picture of it or read about it in a guidebook in the travel bookstore next to his Toronto home without feeling a quiver of electricity run along his spine, and he would recall sunsets that used to last all day and those five seconds that had made the other seventy years seem almost worth the bother.

JOHN LAY ON HIS STOMACH. His hands were on the sofa's cushion, under his chin, and her warm washcloth touch parted his hair and lifted away—gently, stingingly—the layers of red and brown. She smelled like a flower. Her hands moved very slowly. She apologized three times for Scott's absence, twice asked if she was hurting him, wrung out the cloth, said it was beautiful that John came here when he was hurt and in need, trusting in his brother first of all. He wondered if she was serious, wondered what she knew and what Scott said of him. She let one hand rest, soothing, on the washcloth on the back of his head and the other gently kneaded his neck. He lost interest in whether she had been joking.