Prague (6 page)

Why, according to one of Mark's surveys, did fully 48 percent of the entering freshman girls at McGill University bring with them from home a framed copy of Robert Doisneau's photograph The Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, an icon of interwar Paris (cataloged Nostalgipathic Place-Era #163). Another 29 percent of the girls bought the print within six months of matriculation.

Why, according to publicly available sales data from the publishers, did prints of that beloved poster vastly outsell Alfred Eisenstadt's thematically indistinguishable VJ Day Kiss, Times Square, even in Paris, where a measurable level of cross-cultural envy should have hoisted the American past Doisneau? Or, conversely, if you didn't buy that, then why didn't familiarity and ethnic pride nudge Eisenstadt's numbers over the Frenchman's in New York sales?

Why was there a sudden upsurge from 1984 to 1986 in orders placed with Ontario's specialty furniture manufacturers for Victorian daybeds, a popularity far too large to be attributed solely to the period films that appeared in a crinkly crinoline rush from 1982 to 1985?

Why did the years immediately following World War One show a drop-off in all manner of antique sales in Toronto except for military equipment and pictures?

Why was the videocassette of the film Casablanca rented three times more often in Quebecois video stores than in Ontarian outlets, even after statistical corrections for VCR-owning populations and the number of available dubbed copies were made?

Why did the past (and, more often than not in Canada's case, someone else's past) do this to us?

Like a dying man railing against an unfair God, Mark kept asking, "Why?" And every academic question was merely a restatement of a more pressing personal one, one he had been asking nearly as long as he could remember thinking, one he was embarrassed to ask even as he kept asking it despite himself, one he would only share with a friend while drunk or laughing: Why am I unhappy in the era and the place I was given?

It did not take a very long acquaintanceship before Charles labeled Mark "sad beyond help, unfit even for commodities trading." Scott, in turn, had identified the Canadian as "prematurely elderly."

MARK WAS VAGUELY EXPECTING SOME HUNGARIANIZED VERSION OF ONE OF

his familiar Canadian antiquarians the morning he walked between the two matching cannons that guarded the entrance of the Gellert Hill shop. Having thus far spent his European research time in libraries, this was his return to fieldwork and he was prepared to meet, in this city of renamed and re-renamed streets, another odd soul making a fair to poor living selling off the histories of others.

The door closed behind him with the predictable tinkling of a bell, the shape and placement of which he knew without looking. After the bright sun, he stood for a blind moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the shop's intentionally dim light and, he knew, allowing the still invisible owner to inspect him and assess his likelihood to buy.

'American? Deutsch? Franfais?"

The voice was the Hungarian male drone, and Mark answered before he could locate its owner. "Kanadai. Beszel angoMP" He rashly used all three of his Hungarian words at once.

"Yes, yes, of course. But you talk very good Hungarian. We should do that." And the voice behind a desk, behind a gold floor lamp, had a face: thick black hair, thick and drooping black mustache, pale, bags under the eyes, the head tilted slightly back, polo shirt and a gold-link bracelet.

"Oh no, no," Mark said politely, still at the door, the bell just fading away. "Nem, I mean," he said, now truly exhausting his Magyar vocabulary. "I only know how to ask Beszel angolul"

"Canada, you say? Your mama and papa are Hungarian, of course." "No, actually. Irish. And English. Some French and German. Cherokee, claims one grandmother. I'm a mongrel."

"So how do you talk Hungarian so nice? You have the Hungarian girlfriend, I think."

'Actually, ah, no. I just came last month." "Plenty of time." "Yes, but actually, no."

"You find them pretty, though, yes? Our Hungarian girls? The most pretty anywhere? Like French girls?"

"Yes, sure. Very pretty."

"Well, you know what is true. The best place to learn a language is in the bed."

"Yes, I've heard it said." The Hungarian looked down at some papers on his desk and Mark looked away, ready for the inevitable shaving mugs, the incomplete sets of silverware, the refuse of dead people's mantels.

Instead, his eye snagged on a photograph on the man's desk, a small framed picture of a group of soldiers, vintage World War II. Payton could not identify the uniforms, but he did recognize almost instantly the pale soldier squatting in the front row, second from the right, staring at the camera with sleepy eyes and a droopy black mustache. "You were a soldier?" As soon as he spoke, Mark knew the question was foolish; this man would not have been more than a child.

"Yes, how do you know this of me? Oh, I see. No, that is my father. Many say we have similar looks. It was with friends who joined together, this picture. Right when they start. He had to shave his mustache soon after this. This was a farewell-to-mustaches picture." Mark picked up the photograph and stared at the antiquer's absolute double (but for the fatigues), the soldier's head thrown back, allowing him to look down his nose with ironic martial bravado. "Come to look here." He led Payton to a corner of the store, where oil paintings in golden frames lined the walls and leaned against each other on the floor. "My grandfather."

High on a yellow wall hung the same man's face again. Here, his mustache was slightly longer and his hair swept back. He wore a blue cavalry uniform with golden braiding on the shoulders, and he stared, in three-quarters view, from out of the dark background tones. The haughty officer's eyes, from a head thrown slightly back, followed Mark's with military frankness as the scholar walked back and forth in front of the painting.

"He wears the uniform of the emperor's guard. We have it still, there." The man waved across the shop at a headless cloth mannequin in a braided blue jacket, matching tight trousers, and spurred black leather boots. "I do not sell these, of course. For now." The shopkeeper returned to the desk and riffled through more paintings leaning against the back wall. "Here, we find it," he exclaimed, and turned to face Mark with another golden frame, this one smaller. Two Hungarian hunting dogs, vizslas, lay awake on a floor of chessboard

black-and-white tiles. A young boy knelt beside them and rested one hand on the head of each dog. He wore short pants, a velvet shirt, and a lace collar. A woman, presumably his mother, wore her dark hair loose, and it fell over her shoulders and blood-red dress. She smiled slightly from within the embrace of a large ornate chair. She held a baby in flowing baptismal clothes. Standing beside her, his hand on her shoulder, in front of half-open French doors revealing a green park, stood—yet again, to Mark's delight—a man with the shop owner's face. Now he wore an expression of serene, paternal pride, his head again tilted slightly back. His uniform featured long tails over tight white trousers. An eyebrow was slightly cocked. He wore no mustache and his long black hair was held in a short ponytail, but the resemblance was otherwise total.

"This," the owner said as his finger hovered near the baby in the baptismal gown, "is my great-grandfather, the father of him." He gestured toward the headless mannequin. "This boy, soon after this"—he pointed to the elder child with the dogs—"died. This is lucky, I think. For my line. The picture is done in 1822. The boy with the dogs, who is dead, is five here. His father, my great-great-grand, I think is born in 1794. He was a nobleman, you can see."

"All the men in your family serve in the military?" The antique dealer clicked his tasseled-loafer heels, and Mark asked if there was a picture of the man himself in uniform.

"Of course, of course," he replied, and his English began to grow oddly worse: "But is not of pride. It only, you must know, tradition one way and desire another." Mark nodded encouragingly. "I have a picture, but I find it very little." He brought out a small plastic photo album, turned a few of its pages, and pointed to a black-and-white snapshot glued under a cellophane sheet. "This is when I am twenty. I am in a base near Gyor and we train against Austrian invasion. A ridiculous idea, you know, to think we fight Austrians in 19 70."

The photograph showed a young crew-cut soldier in green fatigues, staring at the camera, holding his floppy cap. His head was angled slightly downward, and his broad smile appeared almost shy as a result. His eyes wrinkled up tightly as if he were facing bright sunlight. His face was tanned and cleanshaven. "This one here is you?"

"Yes, yes, of course. But it is not like my father or grandfather, is it?" The man was not referring to any physical dissimilarity. "I am not a free man here who fights for his people, am I? No. I am here a boy who has no choices. To fight in that Hungarian army was like to be a slave for Russia. It was like the Hun-

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garian Legion of the Russian Soviet Imperial Army. My father fought for Hungary. My grandfather fought for his emperor. My great-grandfather and his father—these were proud men. And they carry arms for their people and their families and their land, for Magyarorszag, for Hungary. And I?" He stared hard at Mark, his resemblance to his painted ancestors growing^'m 1970 I must join a conqueror's army. I should be an officer, a cavalry officer to be commanding, but I am instead a slave, or a trophy, like when my family's land becomes a collective farm. And I can never be a high officer, because my family history make me a class criminal, you understand. What must I do? Hey? What?"

"I don't know."

'A soldier fights, but a Hungarian cannot accept this lie of an empire, this Russian shit.
What do I do?
Do I fight like a brave man or do I say no like a brave man?"

"I don't know."

"I do what my grandfather would do. I train and I work with a gun and running and digging. If an enemy attack Hungary, I would fight. But they don't attack. You know why?"

"I don't know."

"Because the enemy already here. They never leave after the World War Second. So I am a bad soldier. I make mistakes. I lose equipment. I take my troop into the woods and we have wine and food and we talk all day instead of doing what the Communist idiots tell to do. I have honor by fighting the enemy by not fighting. But I have no honor as they had." He waved at his ancestors on the walls, at the headless cloth mannequin. "No honor as a true, open defender of the fatherland."

Disgusted at the rape of tradition by corrupt ideology, Mark sought the words to express his groaning empathy (and mild envy), unaware that he had simply been hooked by a sales pitch he had never seen in Canada and now appeared as naive as some American tourist ready to buy an Elizabeth II Jubilee commemorative shaving mug. 'And what do you shop for today? I can show you maybe a nice jewelry for your girlfriend?"

UNTIL
 
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SCOTT

Price never looked quite at home in Budapest, and he liked it that way. He was,

for a start, legitimately tan and shimmeringly blond. He smiled often, easily, and, in the eyes of the average Hungarian, excessively. He favored conversation about nutrition and digestion and the politico-economic implications of both. He daily braved the toxic fumes of Trabants, Dacias, Skodas, Wartburgs, and the occasional madly stampeding Mercedes to jog over the guidebook bridges and along the parapets and paths that run alongside the Blue Danube, which was this morning, as always, the deep cerulean Matisse blue of caramel or mahogany.

In his college shorts, running shoes, tank top, and a bandanna to hold back the white-gold sheaves of his hair, he irritated the Hungarian pedestrians, who, smoking more often than not, stared at him in his froth as he stamped by. It was one thing to run with your athletic teammates, all in matching track suits, or in the countryside as part of military training, but to wear almost 1 nothing and sweat up and down the Corso marked one as aggressively foreign, j More than one old woman, conditioned in her own way, scolded Scott as he f passed. "Don't run fast near people!" she would bluster, unable to find the words to express her dismay. Not that it mattered, since Scott only had enough Hungarian to smile and puff out "Kezet csokolom," the standard polite greeting of men to women. "You are going to kill someone!" they hissed. "I kiss your hand!" he would say, running backward. "This is not right to do, your running!" they yell. "I kiss your hand!" he says. "No running! No running!" "I kiss your hand!" Scott told his students he found their elderly compatriots to be charmingly loquacious and delightfully supportive of young men seeking to maintain good cardiovascular health.