Prague (66 page)

Breathing slowed, and the photographs of his wife and child sat in their accustomed places... gotta remember to bring those. He fell asleep as the car and its radio faded down Andrassy, and (one last feeble thumb exertion) the television murmured weather reports from around the world, as he had lately found it difficult to sleep without the sound of subdued broadcasting in the room. He dreamed, he woke and flipped channels and dozed again and woke again and dozed again and back and forth. Charles Gabor was on TV, submitting suavely to interrogation. He and the interviewer sat in revolving leather chairs under a dangling, illuminated sign: MONEY TALKS. The interviewer asked easy questions disguised as aggressive questions: "For a fellow who seems to me young enough to still be fascinated with shaving, how did you accomplish this feat, Charlie?"

HIS
   
LIMITED
   
LUGGAGE
   
STOWS
  
WITH
   
SATISFYING
   
SYMMETRY
   
AND
   
FLUSH

edges, like toy baggage built especially for the form-fitting overhead bin of a toy train. He sits at the open window and gazes at the platform, that very word redolent of possibility, potential.

The station platform, where arrivals and departures change everything and , . . Who might come to sec me off? Oh ... Still, something thrilling about... The giant skeleton key will be a great conversation piece there, if they don't use the same sort. On the cobbled streets, with my group, or my head on a pillow with just the right face facing ... Is that her come to, did she find out, relent, track me— Well, the same hair, sort of. Look at this, this was the key to my ... Platform. Like the beginning of some movie: the young man at the train station, about to head off for who knows what, places unknown, leaving just in

time...

The train stutters forward, and his heart with it. His heart lunges far out

along the kilometers of track, far faster than the train itself, over borders, to new lives, reaches nearly to its goal, but is snapped elastically back, fust clear of the station's roof, the buildings that flank the tracks on either side, like canal-front properties, glide by, accelerate in uneven bumps of speed. Through May-first fog, he leaves the city behind him; he faces the way he is going—not what he's leaving—ready for whatever, whoever, might come.

Countryside of green and the occasional factory, farmhouse, hut. eviscerated hillside (green frosting on gray cake) with immobile cranes and abandoned trucks, the magic seductress dance of undulating black lines in the window.

That poor old man, a work of art, to live a work of ... It's all a game, remember, and the winners are those who can tell serious from not. It isn'I. after all, war, tyranny, poverty, torture, Nazis, or Soviets. Not. really fatal, after all, just a digestive disorder, avoid certain foods, not as if he didn't become a multimillionaire, I do understand that. Just keep clear on what's serious and . . . These things that happened arc not really... they're just...

The outskirts are the worst. For hours seated in one position, you feel— deliciously—nothing. You are free of past and future, you float in amniotic potential, but then the outskirts and the last twenty minutes stretch out forever, grow immense, relentlessly block your increasingly urgent arrival.

Life will start there, at the end of this ride. I will step off the train onto the platform. But there it will be Rurope for real, untouched by war: no reconstructed "old towns" for the benefit of self-deluding tourists. Honesty in everything. And that honesty attracts a different type. There I'll find the people who ... 1 spent a birthday in Budapest. No, can that be right? Did I not notice? I arrived last year in May, today is May, so what did 1 do for it? Doesn't matter. This year will be different, surrounded by seriousness. Real life awaits, birthdays, a redem...

The train circles and circles. After crossing all this globe in a speeding straight line, suddenly the train slows and spirals in imperceptibly smaller circles around his destination, and he imagines being condemned to wander forever the interminable outskirts, a gray limbo of al most-there ness. The train continues its bank through dismal suburbs, the destination still invisible: it hides somehow just inside the endless spiral, postpones the moment. He dozes.

The temperature of the window against his cheek changes, turns suddenly hot. He awakens, and there she is at last, with one half of his own transparent, wet face faintly superimposed upon her like a watermark. There she is.

though still far away, strangely far for all the agonizing minutes burned in approach. She is entirely contained, a single image exposed in a moment's glance: a land of spires and toy palaces and golden painted gates and bridges with sad-eyed statues peering out over misty black water, a village of cobblestones and stained glass unlicked by cannon, and that fairy-tale castle floating above it, hovering unanchored by anything at all, a city where surely anything will be possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prague would be significantly less coherent (and probably not even bound) without the good work or good works of superstar editor Lee Boudreaux, Tony Denninger, Phebe Hanson, Erwin Kelen, Peter Magyar, Mike Mattison, ASP, DSP, FMP. MMP, incomparable agent Marly Rusoff, Toby Tompkins. Budapest 1900, by John Lukacs, and. of course. Jan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ARTHUR PHILLIPS was horn in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speech-writer, a dismally tailed entrepreneur, and a five-time jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992, and now lives iii Paris with his wife and son.