Prague (54 page)

Despite her laughing assent, Nicky did not cast off with him. As John wobbled and wavered and threw up from seasickness on his little wooden raft, she easily crossed the narrow, shallow straits to 1991 on the flat stepping-stones of exposure after exposure, click after shutter click: John outside the offices of BudapesTodaij painting his name in the white snow: John standing on the Chain Bridge, his hands in his coat pockets, his shoulders high against the wind, an unlit cigarette on the very edge of his chapped lips, a beefy and mustachioed Hungarian policeman gamely frozen with a ferocious expression, pretending to strike John on the head with a truncheon; Nadja and John on the piano bench talking; a very round-faced woman at the bar gently crying, half her lower lip twisted and bulged between her teeth: the skinny Hungarian bartender leaning his elbows on the bar and listening dubiously to a customer (back only): a peevish couple at a small table, arguing in front of their embarrassed third friend, and Nicky capturing the instant when the angry woman's drink flew horizontally out of its glass toward her boyfriend; the black singer holding the microphone by its stand with one hand, looking at his watch on the other, and beginning lo say the hard-won Hungarian words announcing the New Year; kissing couples wrapped in spirals of backlit smoke; a digital clock posting a red 2:22 just over the head of the round-faced girl, now happy again and talking eagerly and gesturing, a little wide-eyed and manic, to three men: the saxophonist, a young goateed American P.R. executive with a copy of Jozsef Attila's poetry held at his chest behind crossed arms, and the singer, at the maximum dilation of a gaping, leonine yawn ...

To go back: 11:42 on the piano bench: "Now what does that remind one of, shaven heads and New Year parties? Oh yes. May I bore you with a memory?"

"Please."

PRAGUE I 303

"Then here we are in 1938. New Year's Eve again. Berlin was a very entertaining city in those days, a certain electricity in the air, assuming you were, well, you know, of course. Not everything was clear yet, you understand. I was a little tight, most likely. I believed I played better the piano when I was a little tight. So I am playing. What would the tunes be, I wonder? Mostly German things, no jara that year for them, best to know your audience. We are in a private party. Thanks to a friend of a friend, I am gathering some very handsome money at parties. A lovely season; 1938 is becoming 1939.1 do not know how much longer I will stay in the city. Perhaps I will leave the next month. I am young, anything is possible—friends, romance, adventure. You know this feeling. I am sure. And now a soldier—a party guest—has made a suggestion, very loud, to me. He suggests he and I should celebrate the New Year, which is only a few minutes away, in a particular fashion. I am not sure I can even tell you the English translation for what he proposed; it was one of those German words that simply stretches on forever and in one word manages to convey what in English would be a very long paragraph. So let us leave it to your imagination, Mr. Price. I think with your beautiful and provocative friend there busy with her camera, there is very little you cannot imagine. Berlin: My crude tormentor is wearing jodhpurs. He is young, but he is an officer. And the scars: He has one litlle ridge across his cheek and another longer one on his scalp. This second would not be obvious, but he has a shaven head, like your new friend. I say nothing, I play a little louder. I am hoping he will go away. But he says his notion again, louder now, quite loud. I am very young: 1 do not know what to do. So i lie and 1 say. 'Thank you, but I am married.' Ach, the little fraulein iss married? Vvvere iss diss hussband who sends you lo sell yourself as a piano playing whore?' I have no friends at this party, it is late, 1 am staying in an hotel across town. I am beginning to imagine horrible endings to this evening. I am still playing. I make believe that I need to look at the keys, even though this is a little humiliating for me. to pretend this, and then, before 1 can frighten myself too much or say something witty but foolish, which was also a possibility, I am rescued. Another officer appears on the other side of the piano. 'The lady iss a friend of mine.' the new one lies. 'If she vvvishes to be left alone, then I advice you leave her alone.' This new one is the same rank, I think, or higher perhaps. Jodhpurs also. Shaven head. The scar on the cheek the same. Like a man scolding his mirror. I smile at my savior and move my eyelashes like a lady and continue to play. Of course, the first soldier is a little tight as well and is not about to

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finish with me so easy. Fear goes fast, and now I confess to pride; I am worth the attention of two young military lads. I am safe now. so I can enjoy this. And I confess also to amusement as the first soldier insults the second, the second insults him back. Their voices are very quiet as they threaten each other. The first one leans across the piano and slaps my hero. I continue to play, but now I am not going to miss anything by foolishly looking at the keys. And I confess, I smiled. It was delicious, John Price."

The best photograph from nearly an entire roll that Nicky exposed within the three surrounding minutes: the two of them sit side by side on the piano bench, Nadja closer to the wall, John nearer the audience. Lit from above by spots designed for bands, their faces are brightest at the top, more shadowed toward their necks and bodies. Nadja's left hand dips into the keys while the other floats just above them, poised to snag with a deft swoop the next melodic idea. She wears the red gown she wore the night they met, which she wore often. He has angled his head to present his left ear to her story and still aim the stream of his exiting smoke up and off to the right, away from her. Above them both, painted on the wall, the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon—winged and haloed and a little droopily bored—angles his head in just the same way and emits a stream of lightly painted smoke parallel to John's.

"With that, they very slowly walk away from me. The first soldier shows me a very serious look, a little dangerous, a little wvolfy. If he should return alone from whatever combat is about to happen, then I should certainly not expect the kid-glove treatment. My hero, though, smiles quite gently, almost laughs, to tell me this is only a silly game and no harm will come. He is taking off his gray jacket. And, John, I am very pleased. I know that women must not confess to things like this anymore. We are not, of course, your gewgaws to scrapple over, you terrible men. But I confess! Find me guilty of thought crimes against my sisters! It was a pure sense of new power, like they tell me I am crowned queen at midnight. I feel at this moment I can have any man I wish in this room, or in all Berlin, and in fact I did meet my husband not long after this. But to go back: They are about to disappear out of the apartment's doors, but first they have become very polite to each other. Each tries to hold the door for the other; it takes them some long time even to go outside. The bowing and the clicking of their hoot heels becomes a little music-hall farce. They do not look at me during this, but it is for my benefit. At last they manage to leave the room: My hero has finally agreed to accept his enemy's courtesy, and he exits first. The

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door closes quietly behind them. The crowds of guests, many drunk, many dancing, fill the space. I continue to play, and the hostess approaches me to make some musical request."

Months later, spring of 1991 was making its initial assault on winter's ramparts, and the white March rain made acidic hissing noises as it drilled little silver-gray holes hallway into the depths of the crusty, brown-spoiled banks of old snow, leaving behind a landscape of lunar craters, and in the evening, as the indecisive temperature dipped again below the critical figure it had so recently overtaken, the snow that had been winning its release toward water-hood reverted again to filthy, bumpy ice and sand and a whole season of frozen, time-suspended traffic and dog odors. The photograph of John and Nadja and Dexter Cordon lay flat on a worktable in the photographer's underheated studio. Her adjustable razor blade moved slowly around John's ear, hair, nose, and his stream of smoke, which was now as integral a part of his circled, chapped lips as a comet is unthinkable, is something else entirely without its tapering tail. His tilted profile and smoke stream were destined to top a composite of his naked torso (imperceptibly younger) on the galloping back legs of a goat (courtesy of a photographic field trip to the Moravian countryside). Running hard and exhaling that cool, gray, now-sourcelcss smoke, John the satyr would soon stride with caprine surefootedness on cloven feet and hairy, naked thighs over the hexagonal bricks of Vorosmarty Square. A week later, when pasting, rephotographing, and developing were done, he would chase—around the front of the metal crowd gathered at Vorosmarty's feet—a maiden, nude, laughing mockingly over her shoulder at her mythical, smoke-breathing pursuer. Her long, blond, windblown tresses would be just insufficient to disguise Nicky's face and slightly insincere laughter. Her arms would reach forward away from the goat, her fingers tensed into a clawing grasp of unmistakable avidity for the other female haunches just disappearing behind the rear of the poet's post, all three of the photo collage's participants chasing in a permanent circle around the crowded monument.

But to go back: On this March night (which felt colder than the depths of January, because of one's overripe longing for spring), the razor successfully cut away the last component, removing John's hands from Nicky's hips and John's vertical torso from both its grimacing head and its invisible nether regions. Nicky spread flat the various curling pieces of her future work, began to assess differences in scale and shadow, when a sarcastic, complaining voice

called out from the shadows that blanketed the bed, "I think it's a little much, you doing that with pictures of him while I'm here."

Nicky did not look up; she even let enough time pass in uninterrupted concentration that the complaint was aboul to be reissued, when at last she allowed herself a response, mellowed from the delay: "I don't remember asking you. It's an absolute miracle I even can work with you here." The urge to burst into tears—tedious, the root of too many headaches that spring—announced itself but was not permitted to mature. Yelling was tedious, too, the cause of too many wasted hours while ideas for art simmered away until only stale residue remained. Something easy and amusing had transformed into something stupid and sticky. Emily's initial appeal—her innocence, her lotal transparency, her ready malleability—had somehow lured Nicky into this, this middle-aged marriage, a cycle of strife and forgiveness where work was endangered and Nicky was growing accustomed to being scolded. "Oh look, I'm sorry," Nicky finally said, but could not look at her. "Please don't do that. Please just lay off tonight. I am so tired of fighting. Just lie there. Just sleep and let me watch you. I love that I can work with you drifting in and out of sleep. Just let me work. Please."

"You saw him this week. You promised you wouldn't see him anymore, and I know you saw him."

"You know I did?" The brittle, tapered end of her attenuated tenderness snapped. Nicky put down the razor blade and rested her forehead on the heels of her hands. The bright lamp screwed to her worktable cast dark and peculiar shadows of her head and ringers against the wall. "Goddamnit, his friend died. Please. Just not tonight, okay?"

"Not tonight? Well, how about never then? Would that suit you?" "Oh my God, until this very instant. 1 never saw what my dad liked so much about hitting girls, but right now—yeah, never would suit me just fine, I am so sick of )'ou both. You're just the same. You're weaklings. You should be together. Just get oul so I can get some fucking work done for once." But the last sentence was bluster; Emily had already left.

To go back: the first instant of 1991. The singer's Hunglish announcement of midnight brought kisses and cheers, pursed lips and raised eyebrows, a round of drinks on the house and mock combat with pool cues, handshakes and sudden generosity with tobacco in all its forms, truces in ongoing arguments and the strange, sudden calendar-triggered emergence into consciousness of long-growing, subterranean tendrils of feeling. John lighlly kissed the

pianist on her cheek. "That's far enough, Price." Nicky's voice came from behind them. "1 can't have him laying his hands on yet another woman in Budapest, Nadja." The photographer kissed his boozy lips, then sat on Nadja's other side, the three of them crowded onto the piano bench. Nicky loaded new film, and Nadja playfully exaggerated the squeeze for space, pretended she could only move her forearms to play.

"So my Germans, John Price. They return after perhaps one quarter hour. The New Year instant has come and gone, like here, and we are now in 1939. They left to fight for me last year, and when they return, much has changed. They have fought, this is clear. My enemy and my hero both have bloodied shirts and marks on their faces. The jodhpurs of my hero arc torn at the knee. The villain has an eye that is blackening in gradual shades, but it is like trying to see a clock's hour hand move. My hero also has a cut on his cheek, just above his scar. But, believe me, these are things you do not notice at first. How can this be? Because at first you notice they are happy, you see they are great friends now, this year. Much has changed in a year. At first, I see that in 19 59 neither one cares enough about me even to look at me. They walk into the room with their arms around each other's shoulders. They call for kirsch. They loast each other and shake hands and embrace. Again the kirsch, again the embrace. It is disgusting. This has nothing to do with me at all. Perhaps combat has made them respect each other, or some cock-and-bull like this that men sometimes worship when they spend too long away from women. Perhaps they were friends before, perhaps they do this often at parties, they find a girl to play on and frighten and then they humiliate her. Perhaps they are of some intimate friendship that demands this ritual."