Prague (37 page)

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"We do indeed have projects in mind, sir. He and I were discussing different possibilities prior to your arrival." He crossed his arms and leaned slightly toward John. "I suspect our firm's history and future would be of great interest to your readership," he said with a serious expression, and John silently swore not to break eye contact first, though it became almost impossible not to flinch from the blue stare. The three men left the Gerbeaud, walked up Andrassy lit, and pursued their crisscrossing agendas: Imre attempted to tell his firm's newsworthy story to the American reporter; John attempted to sell a burnished, partnership-worthy version of his newly Hungarianized friend to the old businessman while keeping himself amused; Charles helped them both.

Soon, to his relief, John could feel his tenacious awe of Horvath entirely swept away by a refreshing, astringent breeze of unadulterated disgust, though John called it clarity. He cleared his mind of the disconcerting smoke and dust of Imre's tragic life and smug moral worth and instead began to see through him. The man's stories were egotistical parables, clumsy and garish and self-serving. Horvath had obviously crafted this idea of himself and was now forcing it on everyone: "Ohhh, sir, if one thing was clear to me, it was a responsibility. Since I am a very small boy, I was told of my family's responsibility to our country and the burden I would bear. 'The people's memory,' Boldizsar Kis called our press, and my father repeated this to me often. One day I would be responsible for maintaining this memory, I knew. Do you know Kis? No? A great revolutionary leader for democracy. Kis wrote a poem to say our press told the story of the Hungarian people, to themselves and to the world. We remember for a nation. Like you Jews with your Passover, I believe. But our story is still being written, it is not ancient history about pharaohs."

And, with that, before they had even passed the Opera House in their stroll up Andrassy, John had the old man cut and dried and pasted in a notebook, just as Charles had described him: pompous, self-important, proud of the badge of righteousness that history's lottery had randomly granted him, and (Charles had neglected to mention) probably a rank anti-Semite.

But two nights later, John sat to Imre's left at a dinner arranged by Charles and his thoughts were much more difficult to corral. "Mr. Horvath, this is my friend Mark Payton, the famed Canadian social theorist and historian" was how Gabor had introduced the last arrival, and from the moment the four of them sat down in a private dining room at a Swiss restaurant in the City Park, John noted the great speed at which his disgust for Horvath alternated with fascination and then quiet stretches of pure respect, noted his inability to assign

Imre to definitive nonseriousness. "If you pay attention, you can discover much about yourself in a work camp," Horvath was saying to Mark at one moment, and John felt small and useless in the presence of a man who had lived such a life. "My press was at the very center of the revolution in 1956," Imre said to the gloomy Canadian only minutes later, and John rolled his eyes.

The restaurant sat in the shadow of Vajdahunyad, the park's nineteenth-century castle, and the private dining room had windows on two sides: The castle's turret loomed out one, and out the other the moon had just begun with a wide smile its slow, monthly yawn. Charles dealt with the wait staff in a peremptory and impressive manner, every gesture a demonstration of his executive skill. He had selected the wines carefully the day before and now raised his first glass of Meursault in a toast to the future of the Horvath Press and to the memory of the Hungarian people. Four glasses met and sang under the shimmering prisms and electric hum of the chandelier.

Despite John's doubts about the Canadian's stability under pressure, Mark had been assigned the role of Charles's trusted cultural adviser. He interpreted this role practically as a mime; he spoke little, just pursued Imre's own history with a predictable, gulping avidity. 'An author came to me after the war." Imre crossed his arms and leaned toward Mark but looked off over his head in search of the past. "He had been published by the press in my grandfather's day, if you can believe such a thing. My father was forced to cancel his contract, though, because his works really did not sell at all, though I know my father would have wanted to keep him, despite the losses. This fellow kept very impressive company in his life, belonged to clubs of writers and artists, you know, was of a very influential, important generation..." Mark lightly touched the tips of his right-hand fingers to his left palm and nodded slowly.

Four waiters brought the first course, Balaton fogas filleted and braised en piperade, as Charles had dictated the day before in consultation with the chef. The staff placed the domed dishes simultaneously in front of all four men and on a signal removed the covers with a flourish. Over the next three and a half hours, the wine changed color again and again, grew heavy, then smoky, then viscous and sweet. Course followed course until the fish starter was as far distant as the memory of a childhood picnic lunch, a whiff of sauce and a remembered snippet of talk, an instant of passing light on a companion's face. From fish to greens to soup to meat to tart to cheese and fruit, John tried to stand straight against Imre's great gusts until the lectures and the monumental histories, the provocative rhetorical questions all spun into one long mono-

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logue, which seemed to John the next day to have swallowed weeks rather than hours, and been addressed to him alone, a long immersion in Imre that John could not conceivably have resisted:

"A work of art, Mr. Price. That is our life, everyone's life can be this. I think you are perhaps like this, too. I think we are not so very different, you and I." John silently hoped this might be true. "A life must make sense, it must have a beginning where its purpose is revealed, a middle where its purpose is achieved, and an end where its purpose is made clear to another, to the next generation, who can maintain that purpose, transmit it." John suspected the man had said this before, knew he was talking like this now only for his press coverage, but at the same time he could not drive away the unwelcome and embarrassing, silly sensation that Imre was revealing something of the greatest importance, a moment John swore he would remember forever. "Great powers have been used to muddy my purpose. But I could not be diverted. I say this not as pride. I do not boast," he boasted, "but I say this as wonder: Such is life that I simply followed what I knew to be true and strength came to me." Courses had come and gone, but the re-education flowed uninterrupted, John now leaning close, his thumbnail propping his teeth apart. "I am telling my own story. They tried to take it from me, to tell their story instead, but they were beaten. That is the worst violence one man can do another, young sir. Do you see this? There is torture, but one can withstand that. There is prison, but that is not too much, either. But to steal another man's story is to steal his life, his purpose." He was going in circles, John noted, struggling to get out of Imre's grip and feel like an adult again.

"Youth can tolerate such meals," Imre was saying. "Mr. Payton here can drink four different wines and his expressions remain as calm and serious as when he begin. I have a very distant relation who entered a monkeyhouse, and he—no, this is not the word, is it?" he asked, and with the others laughed loudly, wiping his eyes. "Thank you, Karoly. He went into a monastery," he said the word in three syllables, "and he taken vows to be a moderate ascetic. I don't think this would be suiting any of you, except perhaps you, Mr. Payton," and everyone laughed again.

"A moderate ascetic? That's a little extreme, isn't it?" asked John. "If you're into denying yourself things and then you deny yourself even the pleasure of denying yourself things, that's got to hurt." Imre laughed the loudest, and John felt a rush of pride.

"What is the word in English, John—" Charles asked with the hint of a Hungarian accent as the crumb-sprinkled dessert plates floated away and a

third round of sweet Tokaj wine appeared in small glasses—"for ..." Charles waved his hand in the air to capture the word, brush away distractions. "Mi az angolul, hogy megelegedettseg?" he asked Imre, and Imre nodded and said in English, "Exactly, exactly so, Karoly."

"I first drank Tokaj wine at the Gerbeaud with my mother. I remembered this when you and I first met there, Karoly. Life was actually very pleasant in the 19 30s here in Budapest. I fear I am beginning to speak in ways of my father. He always would say, 'If you did not live before the First World War, you cannot possibly know how pleasant life can be.' To be honest—"

"I'm sorry, but that's horseshit," said Mark, breaking a moody silence nearly half as old as the lengthy meal and knocking over an empty glass without noticing. "Complete horseshit."

"Shut up, Mark," snapped Charles.

"No, really. 'You cannot know how pleasant life could be if you did not live in Belgium before the First World War.' Victor Margaux, 1922. 'If you were not here in Virginia before the War Between the States, you cannot imagine how pleasant life could be.' Josiah Burnham, 1870. Talleyrand twice, if you can stand it. First, 'He who did not live before the revolution did not know the sweetness of life,' and then, rethinking things, 'Qui n'apas vecu dans les annees voisines de 1789—he who did not live during the revolution cannot know what is meant by the pleasure of life.' 'Sir, you cannot know what is meant by a pleasant life if you did not live in green England before those Germans came here to roost.' The Marquess of Westbroke, 1735. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit." Mark's voice rose with each example, and a second glass, this one with remnants of an early-evening red wine, tumbled to the floor, sprinkling Horvath's loosened tie as it spun and dove.

"Imre, please excuse me for—" Charles began in Hungarian.

"No, no! Not at all!" Imre was staring at the Canadian in fascination.

"I tried to tell you he's been a little nuts," John laughed at Charles's efforts to remain calm as Mark fumbled to pick up a glass and refill it, horseshit-horseshit-horseshitting all the while.

"No, no." Imre grasped Mark's shoulder. "He is brilliant man and very right, our scholar in our little club. How do we expect to grow up and make a better world if we are all sadly aching for some other?"

"Exactly my point," said Mark, pouring and missing.

Imre grew distracted by a wine spot on his Hermes tie, then pulled himself away from it to stare at Charles with a raised eyebrow. "Fire," he said intently.

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"Fire and a stomach to say, 'No more!' This is what youth offers, and I think today's Western youth more than any other. You who grew up with everything are ready now to demand more, to say no more!" He spoke to all three of them, and never had he seemed to John more of a performer and, what's more, a wonderful performer despite outrageously weak material: "I fear this country, our MK, has lost that stomach but we will come home, Karoly and I, and we will give it to them. 'Here is your stomach back,' we will say!" He raised the first glass at hand, a water glass with a cigarette butt submarine diving and resurfacing under the command of an indecisive skipper. "To the Hungarian stomach and all you can teach it, men of the youth, men of the energy, men of West!"

Four glasses clinked and slightly spilled.

"Enough," said Imre, more dignified in his cups than the others. "Now we go home." Charles, the host, considered protesting this usurpation of his privileges but let it go as Imre said to him, "Tomorrow you and I must talk again."

They filed precariously down the stairs. The act of standing and moving shook all of them significantly, and they paraded in wobbly single-file silence into the empty main dining room, where, under lowered lighting and the sound of dishwashers both human and automated, tired waiters sat and stood smoking in unbuttoned, stained black vests and undone bow ties, dangling and symmetrical like bat-hide stoles. The restaurant's violinist and accordionist, in black-and-gold traditional costume, had put aside their instruments and now sat at a corner table deep in conversation, a single table lamp illuminating half of each of their faces. They turned their heads only slightly, darkening them, as the four drunks fumbled out the restaurant's door and the lock clicked behind them.

Fresh air and the smell of the park's trees shuffled the sensations in their heads and legs and stomachs. The men swam through the humidity and headed toward the towering gallery of Heroes' Square. For a minute or two longer no one spoke, until Imre bellowed into the night—not a word, just a youthful holler that sounded strange to all of them after the cacophony in the little dining room and the silence since. Charles laughed and yelled a nonsense grunt, too. "Horseshit!" the publisher shouted in response, in an accent that floated between Budapest and London, and he tousled Mark Payton's damp red hair. The Canadian laughed an odd, gasping laugh. "Horseshit!" he concurred at the top of his voice. They came into Heroes' Square, an empty, spotlit semicircle of enormous pillars and statues, arching over the top of Andrassy lit.