Prague (46 page)

"Who was that?" asked John.

'As I believe I just said, old business, okay?" Her cheek nearest John bore a very clear impression of four white fingers, a phantom admirer marveling at the softness of her skin, and she drank her share of the next tray quickly. "No good to wallow in the past, right, Marcus?"

Mark blinked hard to focus his eyes, wipe away the summer haze, and fend off the late-night shrivel of his contact lenses. "Can I interview you for my research? You're my new hero."

"No can do," she said, standing and pulling John by the hand. "Because after a fight, Mark, I like to get laid. Sol need Johnny here to take me home now. I'd invite you to join us, but a lapsed heterosexual is of no use to me this evening. " She began to place forints on the table, but Mark refused them and told her he meant to buy the larger of her two photographs as well, that he would contact the show's organizers tomorrow to arrange it. She literally jumped up and down twice, clapping her hands. She kissed him on the forehead, plainly

moved, stroked his cheek, and looked as if she might cry. She thanked him and thanked him again, then took her date in hand toward Andrassy lit.

As they walked in silence toward his apartment, where no hidden cameras awaited him, John understood for the first time that Mark came from money, possibly a great deal of money. For months, the Canadian had bought rounds and rounds of drinks, meals and meals for everyone, had bought John weekly gifts, and now he planned to buy a work of art priced at nine months of John's salary, even though the scholar had no visible means of support. "That's kind of terribly sad," John muttered, meaning that he hadn't known this and Mark was probably his closest friend in the city, but in the volatile, variable emotional landscape that liquor—and Unicum in particular—can create, John was soon over that hill of sadness and into new country, a green and pleasant vale, where he was happy to be leading such an interesting life, happy his friend was buying art he had modeled for, happy to be following Nicky, who obviously held some secret for living a full and rich existence, happy to be drunk, happy not to be photographed having sex tonight, happy to be so clearly free of Emily, terribly sad not to be with Emily, though he knew that yet again, after a misdirected struggle, he had been thrown back to hardly knowing her, wondered what she must feel like living entirely in secret, following only her best judgment, but then very happy again to be pinned against this brick wall and feeling this soft and gnawing mouth attached to his, the taste of cigarette smoke and liquor on the lips and then the feeling of her scalp against his face and her face against his neck.

"You know what I like about you, little boy?" She licked his ear. "You miss all kinds of stuff. You just glide right through, totally peaceful."

A lonely drink or two later, Mark left the sidewalk table, returned directly to the gallery, and pledged to purchase the photograph of the couple having sex, who were in fact at that moment having sex (after Nicky had pulled from her backpack a gift for him: a contact sheet where his torquing body still supported its own head, a head displaying, over twelve photographs, a narrow range of alternately bovine and vulpine expressions, which their owner could only try futilely to forget a few minutes later, even as he knew he was duplicating them).

Concluding his transaction at the gallery-cinema-disco (a small label now read SOLD, in two languages), Mark set off through the night for the lobby of the Forum Hotel, where comfortable chairs and broad, glass-topped tables sprout-

ing a garden of bowls flowering salty peanuts awaited him, where Western-polite waiters in black vests would bring him Coke in little bottles, and where, best of all, CNN would be playing the latest news from the Persian Gulf crisis and he could sit until dawn watching the approaching war story unfold and think of nothing else, for once. He was so hungry for it that he once or twice broke into a jog, which quickly ended with out-of-shape gasps and self-mockery, and the happy knowledge that he needn't run after all, because it played twenty-four hours a day, the very, very latest at any hour.

FOR
   
MOST
  
OF
  
AUGUST
   
1990,
  
FOR
  
THE
  
VERY
  
FIRST
  
TIME
  
SINCE
   
HE
  
HAD

painted himself green and wondered why his Canadian world did not understand and love him, Mark decided he was living in the present and he was overexcitedly proud of it. He had never even heard of CNN until three weeks earlier, but now not only did he love it, he loved that he loved it, that he sincerely savored something so very, very modern. This infatuation proved he would be okay; it distracted him from his multiplying fears. He quickly learned the names of the American generals and defense officials, all the news network's postula-tors, the titles and relative influence of the various coalition representatives. In his apartment he hung a four-foot-square map of the Middle East and daily festooned it—consulting the latest International Herald Tribune for the appropriate coordinates—with paper cutouts he had spent a morning trimming: little boats for the coalition fleets, little tanks for artillery and armored units, little helmets for infantry, paper flags of the proliferating belligerents, and red, curved, dated arrows to show troop movement.

News, and so literally new: a war on TV with real-time play-by-play. What could be more modern than to watch news all the time, coverage of events happening in any corner of the world, what must have once required days, weeks, months to reach you? He was living in the nineties with all his heart—the 1990s. A joyful anticipation he had never felt before: When the headlines came up again on the half hour, would they be mere repetitions of the headlines he had just heard at 3 A.M., or would something new have broken in the interim? The very history of the world formed itself for him, every half hour, a time lapse comfortable enough to render Mark an Olympian spectator, lounging on his cloud while horned, shaggy-shinned goat-men finger-fed him delicacies from gold goblets and silver salvers.

FK/UiUb
  
\
 
I.YI

For three weeks his precarious happiness gave him an aggressive, feverish sort of confidence to pursue his research with a semblance of personal detachment and equilibrium, because the high point of his day—for which he longed while in libraries or antique stores or at his desk—balanced undeniably in the present tense, when the welcoming Forum Hotel would open its maternal arms to him and he would watch the mortals perform their antics.

Until his night with John and Nicky, when, three hours after they left him at the table, he realized exactly why CNN so pleased him: It reminded him of old newsreel footage. He had just watched four repetitions of American soldiers marching under a journalist's baritone voice-over. Four times, and each half hour the one goofy soldier looked straight at the camera and mouthed the words Hi, Mom! And each time the troops walked by the camera, they seemed less and less modern, more and more a future historical document or bouquet of future personal memories—the time I was in the service, 1 was on CNN, my son greeted me on CNN, my late son, my son who was killed in the desert war, my buddy said, "Hi, Mom," on CNN, I remember my sergeant chewing our asses because some joker I didn't even know had said, "Hi, Mom," when CNN was filming us looking sharp, your father was a soldier, here's a videotape of him, your grandfather was in the army and fought in the first desert war, you can view the footage on the computer-visualizer unit, the film looks funny, Mom, why do the soldiers look like that? And on their fifth inspectional march-by of Mark, a film of fine sepia clung to these young men, newsreel marching soldiers off to save the world again, may as well be in jerking, sped-up, black-and-white, and with a shock of discovery, Mark stood up from the hotel lobby table where he sat at 3:3 7 in the morning, shoveling peanuts into his mouth and drinking the lukewarm Coke right out of the little bottle (out of which glass teat it tasted just like it had in the Toronto tennis club where he had sat once a week—ages six to nine—and watched his father play badly), and he realized miserably that he had been conned. No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-

century Eastern Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it. Their politics, their culture, their technology, their lives were out-of-date, no problem as long as they didn't know it, but they knew. They knew that life was faster, sleeker, richer, and in full color just over that vicious Wall, just across that Iron Curtain (the defining feature of their lives built and dubbed in the 1940s, crafted from barbed wire and mines unchanged in design for decades).

He turned away from the screen and looked out the picture window onto the nearly empty (one pimp, one drunk, one sleepy, hostel-less backpacker) Corso. CNN was the newsreel of his day, he thought. "My day," he said aloud, and the waitress looked up from wiping down the same square foot of cocktail table she had been slowly, vacantly polishing for minutes. My day: That in itself triggered misery. Dying was happening all around him and within him. Faster than he could live and grow, he was dying and shrinking. Could it be—he examined curiously the Forum night staff (the concierge, the bucket-wheeling maid, the waitress)—that some people were still living and growing, that they didn't know everything was already old and dying? Was it right to tell them, or was it right to hold his tongue?

The same poison oozed into his blood two hours later, as the sun was just rising. He was in the midst of Saudi territorial waters, blearily scribbling dates on curving arrows, repositioning paper ships, when he knew the whole act was futile, a vain effort to ignore the noise. He was fooling no one. He angrily tore the map down the middle, leaving two strips of West and East dangling irrelevantly from the wall, and he shredded slowly each lovingly clipped boat and helmet and tank and curving arrow, heaped a little pile, beat his swords into confetti. The ominous feeling thumped stronger still at noon, when the gallery people roused him from sweaty, head-turning sleep to deliver his purchase and accept his huge stack of forints in a shoe box, and he leaned the enormous work wrapped in brown paper and twine against the peeling, faux-wood armoire. Not even worth unwrapping: The art was already old. Nicky was the improbable, eccentric character in someone's future memoirs of fin-de-siecle bohemian Budapest, and the future reader would be shocked to see her as she looked at publication time, age eighty, would prefer to cling to the grainy old photos of her as a bald and beautiful young woman. The same feeling pulsed at twilight, when John came by to pick him up and they walked toward the evening's party (at the home of Charles Gabor's attorney, a dashing Anglo-Hungarian who had

hired members of the Budapest Opera to sing in his garden while his guests cut deals, flirted, drank), and the two friends talked about the Persian Gulf, and John laughed when Mark hopelessly said there would be a war.

'A war? Over that stuff?"

"Not a war. The war. Our war. The very feel of this city is going to change; it's already changing. This is not just the end of August 1990. These are the last months of our peace, the end of the summer before our generation's war. 'What did it feel like the summer before the war? Did you know time was running out? Could you tell it would all be swept away?' The summer before." John turned to gauge his friend as they walked.

Mark felt himself being examined, knew how he sounded, and wanted to say something to put his friend at ease, even though he sounded that way because of how horrible this truth was, but he didn't know what to say, and didn't know how to explain that he—Mark himself—was the summer, the dying peace. Though they walked slowly through a quiet and pleasant evening, Mark felt time rushing by his ears like drunken traffic, like supersonic trains, like a herd of salivating, rolling-eyed, dust cloud-stamping beasts. He had let his guard down. CNN! For some reason he had stopped watching time carefully, and now he was being made to pay for his inattention. Now he was forced to sit, brutally strapped to a stake, with his eyelids pried open. One idea soothed him, a new idea: Perhaps time rushed by less painfully in a place that didn't look old, that had no history. Toronto, for example.

"Are you hungover still?" John asked.

As they passed the Gellert Hotel (uniformly hailed in every guidebook for its "faded glory," making it, for a couple of weeks way back in mid-May, Mark's favorite haunt on the Buda side) in the first clear touch of evening, when the humidity vanished before a cool sigh of breeze, Mark bit at his lip and said he wasn't feeling well, and before John could say much at all, the Canadian had turned around and sweatily puttered back up Gellert Hill toward his apartment.