Prague (14 page)

HE WALKS SLOWLY down the center of the empty room, toward the wine rack, and his thoughts come quickly. Easiest matter in the world to loosen this wine rack, for example, so it falls on someone reaching for a bottle in a high nook. There would be blood and broken bone, and if it were late at night and the victim had already drunk a large quantity, the explanation for the accident would glow in the very red face of the deceased. I will express to my father how pleased I am to take his suggestion, how fine an arrangement that stock-jobbing position is, and then I will invite my good brother over for a brotherly dinner. How late we could dine, how happily I would see my wife off to bed, how pleasantly I would send the servants away, how joyful I would be to sit up late, chatting and drinking with my beloved brother. And then I would take him down to show him the cellar. How horrified I will be! How heartbroken! It is like the loss of the sun—no, that is too much.

HALFWAY DOWN THE ROOM, at the very center of the throng, a wooden platform stood high enough that people could dance beneath it. Perched with his head just under the ceiling, an army buddy of Tamas's operated the sound board. Just behind his aerie, next to its splintered and graffitied wooden ladder, Charles Gabor, wearing khakis and a black polo shirt, buffeted by the twist of the crowd, was kissing a very short girl he had never seen before but who moments earlier had bumped into him and plunged her hands into his pants.

HOW DIFFICULT CAN iTbeto poison a potato, he wonders as he stands in front of the ledges cut into the back wall. No, the risk of the wrong person eating it, or ... of course. It's a new house. Surely the balconies might have been installed badly, a balustrade may be loose, a person could easily fall. The wine rack seems the best plan.

AT THE BACK of the room, on a ledge cut into the wall, Scott and Maria held hands, yelled things to each other, but as they sat directly beneath one of the club's speakers, they soon gave up, hoarse, and settled for kissing and watching the band. The volume of the guitar and the bass suddenly dropped, the tape
 
: jockey brought up a scratchy recording of a funk drumbeat, and the blond woman approached the microphone. She closed her eyes, crossed her arms,
  
; placed her hands over her breasts, and sang in Hungarian-accented English, with a well-trained operatic voice:

We all live underneath the hammer

Wielded by Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Glamour.

The crowd, with variable English fluency, joined in a repetitive chant of the couplet while the woman's singing slid slowly but definitively away from her operatic training into a hard-rock voice, then to a raw scream. She snarled, more and more angry, and the sound of the crying baby grew louder, the ukulele more piercing, the bass groove ever more complicated, and the Hungarian national anthem more and more confused. People jumped up and down and screamed the lyrics, couples danced, and young men shoved other young men they did not know. Hungarian and foreign men smoked near the front of the stage, trying to look moderately interested, shaking their brains, almost to the man, in search of the right thing to do or say in order to win even the slimmest chance of sleeping with the singer.

HIS ANGER HAS PASSED, and with it his more baroque plots. He completes another circle of his basement, his free hand dusted with white from dragging it along the cool walls. He arrives at the staircase again, still hoping for his brother's death, but now only in a vain effort to forestall thinking about what he must tell his wife, what he must agree to do. He will never kill his brother. Far more horrible solutions will be necessary.

ON THE LEFT SIDE of the room beckoned the dance hall's only exit, an opening to a brick staircase that rose from the poured-concrete floor, lit by the same clamped, hooded spotlights. This sole artery was stenotic with descending prospective dancers and ascending drinkers hopeful for fresh air. Everyone smoked.

JUNE HAS BECOME MARCH and he sits on his basement stairs again, crumbles bits of the mortar between his fingers, and tries not to listen to the screams. He tries instead to think about some detail from his government job. He is not unhappy with the post. All the nonsense he caused, the broken cup... It turned out to be the simplest thing in the world. Rather pleasant, even. He told his wife of his father's announcement that very night, of course, said he had expected it, had known about it for months, he said, simply hadn't wanted to bother her with the details on their honeymoon and wouldn't she be proud to say to her friends that her husband held a post on the stock exchange and ... But by then the damn tears were coming again, and even though he tried to stand up and go to the other room before she saw them, he allowed himself to fall back into her arms when she pulled his hand, and he simply wept there, ashamed, while she stroked his head and brushed the white dust from his hair and began to kiss him. The screams stopped, but he doesn't know when, doesn't know how long he's been sitting in silence as well as darkness. He climbs up to the kitchen. He stops to listen. The screams are definitely over. She must certainly be out of danger, but he does not move from his position near the cold kitchen stove. Then screams return, but now they are the first protests of a baby. And still he does not move.

THE STAIRS LED from A Hazam's dance cellar to its ground-floor bar and lounge. Behind the bar, Tamas and two other men ministered to the crowd's needs. On the walls behind them hung framed photographs of various Soviet

and East Bloc leaders, all autographed to Tamas, though in Hungarian and with the same thick black pen and the same hand. "Big Tamas," read the Hungarian inscription on Stalin's photograph, "I will never forget that time with the three Polish girls! You are the best! Joe." "Tamas, your house, my house: There is always a party. Rakosi." "Tamas, mistakes were made, excesses committed, but never by you, cool baby [these last two words in English]. Nikita K." "You come to my house, T. I'll show you what the girls like! VN Lenin." "Best wishes to our dear young Tamas from Mr. and Mrs. Ceau§escu."

HE STILL OCCASIONALLY RECALLS plotting his brother's death so many years ago and, that very same night, conceiving the child whose vicious arrival killed his wife, and in an instant of extreme pain, he still cannot deny that the two events are connected, and he is pricked by a barb of the perfumed religion he never otherwise touches: The child was conceived in the shadow of his sin, and he essentially murdered his wife that night nine months before her death, by taking her when murder was still throbbing in his head. And in these moments, the guilt of his crime is so physically painful that he will close his eyes to defend himself. This wince, much less common ten years on, is still immediately followed not by relief but by an almost equally painful feeling that he is a fool. Tonight, though, in front of a fire that is not quite sufficient to warm the room, the boy has noticed his father's face and for the first time musters the courage to ask what pain his father suffers to cause such an expression. "You are almost too big to sit in my lap," his father replies, pulling the boy up from his toy soldiers to join him on the long chair. He looks at a son and summons up a favorite thought, one that has soothed him many times in the past: Most men would consider the boy the murderer of his mother, but I do not; he is an innocent in my eyes. I will never make him pay for what he did to me.

THE LOUNGE'S FURNITURE consisted of wooden cubes, some stools, a couple of mismatched, salvaged booths, and several dilapidated couches flung randomly around the room. On every available surface someone smoked, drank, kissed, laughed, stared. A giant placenta of smoke obscured the ceiling and attached to a hundred smoking fetuses through a hundred smoky umbilical threads.

HE LIVES ONLY to the spring of his forty-second year, dying on an unusually warm night. His son, now a nineteen-year-old soldier in the army of the Empire, finds the body, but not until the next morning, as he has spent the

night away from the house, first on patrol, and then in a brothel with two of his comrades. The disposition of the house falls to his uncles and the lawyers, and doesn't, at first, much interest him one way or the other. Never much light or amusement there, if you ask him. And with those rousing words he turns his back on his father's funeral and marches to barracks, arm in arm with his comrades, all of them eager to "shake life by the heels and see what comes out of her pockets."

AS EARLY AS JULY 1990, A Hazam danced on the precipice of overpopularity; everyone felt that their secret had slipped out of their control. The very hippest Hungarians felt there were too many foreigners. The very hippest foreigners had the impression there were too many uncool foreigners. The rest of the foreigners, unaware they were uncool, were noticing too many obvious tourists. By September, it would become a favorite bar from the past that you couldn't really go to anymore without aching for the good old days when it was yours alone. But for a few weeks in July of that year, before it won praise in a college-published budget travel guide for its authenticity as a locals' hangout, A Hazam was everyone's first choice.

SOME MONTHS LATER, over the lawyers' and his uncles' occasionally strident advice, he stands firm and orders the house and all of its furnishings sold at the best possible price and the money deposited in his account. That and his father's legacy will provide him with an ample cushion to support his military career. His defeated uncles have not seen the boy more than once or twice a year for his entire life, their brother having kept increasingly to himself over time. They remember a quiet boy willing to do what his father instructed, and they are somewhat surprised at his sudden decisiveness, offended that their counsel is so flippantly and brusquely ignored. The younger uncle takes the soldier to lunch at the Casino, however, and finds the boy really quite amusing, though with nothing more serious on his mind than women, the new comic opera, military advancement. The house is sold at an excellent price within five weeks and the uncles do not hear from him again.

Twenty years later, October 1915, the one who took him to lunch notices his name in the fallen heroes list in Awakening Nation.

THE FRONT DOORS, which let in the July heat, opened onto six concrete steps that led down to the narrow sidewalk and road. On the fourth step from the bot-

torn sat Mark Payton and John Price. Across the little square from them, a few old women leaned out of their upper-story apartment windows and angrily or curiously watched the crowd of young people milling below them.

Emily Oliver sat with the two men from time to time, appearing on one side or the other of Mark, reflected streetlight curved over her dark eyes. When she laughed at John's jokes, when he watched her listen to Mark talk about his latest research (and when she and John had danced in the steaming basement and had drunk at the smoky bar), John's senses sharpened, not only in the quantity of aromas he could distinguish, for example, but in the meanings he could perceive beneath them: The final time she sat on the stairs, an element in her perfume reacted with the fragrance of the trees on this particular street, and the little cars' diesel fumes turned in the summer air with the competing brands of cigarette smoke, until it all smelled of significance and beginnings, real life and permanently memorable moments.

"Because there isn't anything new of any value," Mark answered her sorrowfully. "In science, I suppose there is, but even that never really has any effect on you or me. We only benefit from scientific discoveries years after the fact. You actually should be nostalgic for really old medical researchers." John flicked his cigarette butt onto the street and leaned to one side to allow a crowd of Americans to pass between him and Emily. When he re-elevated to conversation position, she was disappearing upstairs among a flock of hilarious Julies.

And later, when the Julies swept her downstairs and down the street, waving at him and Mark indistinguishably, John cursed his ineptitude and their intrusion and her inaccessibility in quick succession. That same mixture of aromas now curdled with a faint tang of probably permanent despair. She was locked behind some barrier, and he could not say whether she wanted him to break through or not, and, if she did, why she wouldn't or couldn't help him. His theories multiplied and contradicted one another: He was not effortlessly openhearted enough to match her, and so she could only disapprove of him; she had some knowledge that, like breathing, could not be taught, but which she unconsciously waited for him to prove he understood. Perhaps he should be more forward. Or less.

"It is, is it really, is you?" someone asked him. Two Hungarian girls, about seventeen or eighteen, had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned back to look at John with eager amazement and happy doubt. One whispered something, they both giggled, then the thinner girl pushed the fatter one toward him. "Is it you, it is?"

"I suppose so," said John. Handling this situation smoothly would amuse Emily, he thought, before recalling that she was no longer there.

"We are very big fans of you," said the pushed girl.