Prague (20 page)

John, newly appointed advocate for the building's alienated population, closed Mark's courtyard windows and began to hunt for the offending stereo. He came instead, in the apartment's bedroom, upon a large gramophone, complete with metal crank and brass horn. His eyes spun as he attempted to read the faded, peeling label on the revolving black disc: Afr-Bekft Grl. As his puffy and disheveled host had gone to the kitchen for drinks and John could find no volume control on the elderly box, he gently lifted its enormous tonearm. His skin crawled in anticipation of the excruciating scraping sound to come, but smooth silence flooded the building at mid-verse. In the sudden calm, his touch lingered on the fluted, molluscular ridges and lips of the dull brass horn. He wondered at previous owners, noted a deep scratch in its metal that must have taken great force to create—a bored child with a penknife, a careless mover with a doorjamb, a jilted lover with a grudge.

"My newest treasure!" Mark explained. He carried two sweating glasses of iced tea in his fat, damp hands. "I knew you'd love it, especially. I had you in mind when I bought it, actually: 'This, John will appreciate.' " He had purchased the functioning wind-up antique the day before from a small electrical shop in his neighborhood. It was accompanied by eight thick black discs, strange sounds from a time decades before Mark's birth: coy, archaically smutty lyrics extolling archaic modes of flirtation and sex, flapper dances as ancient and foreign as Etruscan funeral rituals or Aztec virgin sacrifices. Mark's unexplained swollen face left John wondering if he had interrupted a scene with some vanished stranger now hiding in the tub or sneaking out the back or if a tear-stained letter now waited, stuffed half written or half read in a drawer.

But Mark smiled and sweated, complained of no interruption, gave John his drink, and talked rapturously of the records. "I really like that one." He pointed to After-Breakfast Girl "I played it, played it a few times since I got it yesterday, but, ah, listen to this one." Despite John's protests, Mark reverently changed the record, his palms flat against the disc's thick edges. His eyelid tic kicking as he laughed, he cranked the device then delicately placed the tone-arm. As the scratches congealed into a voice and a jangling piano, Mark began to dance a slapdash Charleston.

That's the kinda dance that a fella can do

That a fella can do

That a fella can do

That's the sorta dance that a fella can do

With a gal who knows the rules!

The damn toy seemed to have just one volume setting, "because, you know, the past has to scream to be noticed," Mark said in a professorial tone. John peeked through the curtains to see if the neighbors were mounting a lynch mob against the foreign maniacs. When he turned away from the window, Mark was still flapping his fleshy arms like an elephantine competitor in the late hours of a dance marathon, and he was also crying.

Or possibly not. The sweat that flowed and jumped from his hairline and eyebrows could have explained the watery, stung look of his eyes, and his panting and laughter seemed sufficient to justify the red nose and slobber. Unless he was crying.

"Jesus, I'm sorry I came. Please, in the name of God, stop. Take a shower. We're supposed to have lunch. This is horrifying."

"I love this song! Listen to it! This is music! Why couldn't I?" John refused to answer the nonsensical question even on its first and second repetitions, which is when he decided (relieved) that Mark was joking in some obscure, historiographical way—"why couldn't I" most likely being the last words of some nineteenth-century parliamentarian or circus performer. The dancing ended, the noise melted into the consonance of the gramophone's whooping repetitive scratch and Mark's wheezy breathing. John closed the device's lid. "Watch it with this thing. Your neighbors want to kill you."

Mark flopped down onto the couch and chewed ice cubes. He nodded and spoke very quickly (John thought briefly of Karen's patter): "I know and they, they would, because, the thing is, I had a pretty serious breakthrough today in my work. You know, I'm going to have this appendix, a daisy chain of nostalgia. Basically, you start with this year or whenever and you find the cultural wave of collective nostalgia that's happening right now, like, say, a thing for the fifties, which we are definitely entering now. I'll have to pinpoint it and back it up with the usual evidence—crew cuts, Chet Baker record sales, capri pants—but then I'll go backwards to the longed-for time in question and I'll find—and I know it's there—that there was actually a nostalgia wave then for some even earlier

time, right, and I'll pinpoint it and go back to its source, and sure enough there'll be another one and on and on, all the way back to Charlemagne. The good old days, you know."

'Are you going to shower before lunch?"

"I will, absolutely. But the problem is, it's too broad. Why forty-year chunks, right? What about a decade at a time? Someone in the eighties longed for the seventies, whether that's the 1970s or the 1470s, you know, so I could daisy chain in decades. But then I realized I could actually document it even tighter. What about annually?"

"We could go for paprikas and goulash. I think I found one place that might serve them."

"Exactly. This is my breakthrough. So of course the music makes them mad, that always happens like that, actually. Why not monthly? I could do that. I could prove monthly. I could. It's easy-easy if you know how to research, if you know what you're looking for. I could take you back every month to William the Conqueror. But then maybe that's not close enough, is it? To really matter to people. To cure them, I mean."

"I met a woman you'd really like last week, this old piano player." "This is where I make my name, John. You're going to be very proud of me, and that's the whole point. And this is why the neighbors are a little cranky. Daily. I can prove daily. Today, somebody longs for yesterday and they are leaving steaming evidence of their sadness and I can prove it, but yesterday there was somebody who was sure happiness ended the day before. I can go all the way to Jesus Christ and keep going. It's going to take research, I admit that, but this is there. And I will help people, despite themselves. So, you know, my neighbors had better get used to that and, and stop coming at me about the music or the rest of it."

Inevitably, John was laughing now. "Please, I'm begging you to go shower." Mark toweled off while John read a Herald Tribune in the kitchen, at the small table, underneath a poster promoting Sarah Bernhardt's upcoming tour of America. "I'm glad you came when you came," Mark admitted in a tone the shower had softened, slowed. "The music was actually starting to get to me, I think." He toweled his head and disappeared into the bedroom. "I bought you something." He returned to the kitchen, the towel around his waist now, and placed on John's head a fedora with a laminated PRESS card in the band. He left John, amused, experimenting with jaunty angles.

In the international paper John read an article about" The New Hungary"

by a renowned foreign correspondent. It described a nation psychically damaged by years of tyranny, hoping for change, but stifled by economic hardship and entrepreneurial inexperience. The writer detailed a clear Hungarian national character, the shared traits that would have an unavoidable effect on the nation's growth into democracy and free markets, compared their prospects to those of the more promising Czechs. The journalist peppered the piece with anecdotes of ordinary Zsolts, their travails, hopes, fears. John shouted excerpts of the article down the hall to Mark, but disguised the nation in question, as in "Blank is a country that has known more than its fair share of hardship, and if the Blanks are wary of strangers, it is for good reason; if they have a reputation for charming slipperiness and an endearing pessimism, it is hard to blame them. The Blank people look to the future with understandable trepidation." Mark was dressed now and John asked him to identify the Blanks, whom he admired and envied in this context.

After three wrong guesses (Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina), Mark lost interest and admitted he didn't read current newspapers ("Besides, everybody looks to the future with understandable trepidation"). He had only bought this particular copy because something was odd about it, right on the front page. The Canadian tapped significantly at the date at the top, smiled, and awaited his friend's dawning realization, but dawn did not arrive. It was the correct date, John pointed out. "Obviously " was the sarcastic retort. "Oh, come on! Look at it! You know how in the first couple days or weeks of January the dates on newspapers look strange," Mark explained patiently, as if to a child. "Like they're from science fiction, where someone travels into the future and is stunned to see a paper because the year at the top of the paper is so weird and far into the future? That happens the first few days of every year, right? Like, 1990? Not 1989 anymore? Or you know how for the first few checks you write after New Year's, you have to think about what year to write, and you might even put down the old year by mistake? Well, look at the date on the paper again!" Mark tapped it loudly and whistled. "This is the latest in the year this has ever happened. I mean, it's July, but the date has that science-fictiony feel today. When I saw the paper I was amazed, because dates have been mostly fine since, like, the second or third week of January, but then today—it was just before the gramophone called me from the shop window—I saw this paper and I was, like, July 14, 1990? That looks bizarre. So I bought it as a souvenir. This is a record: It's July, after all. You should buy a copy. Something to show your grandkids."

Over lunch on Castle Hill, the historian talked again of eras and the significance of dates in a way John could almost swear was a joke. He didn't find it at all funny, but it felt like a social duty to laugh at Mark's words, as if Mark were pretending to lose his mind, aggressively demanding from his audience at least a polite laugh of appreciation for the effort.

"Think about the year 2000. That's only ten years away, but the number is ridiculous. It's not a real year, like 1943 or 1862 or, or 1900, if you must have zeroes. Two thousand is nonsense, from movies. Honestly, I—" Mark flipped leaves of lettuce around on his plate. They sat on the patio behind the Hilton Hotel, luxury built around the ruins of a medieval monastery. John listened to his friend speak and wondered what made a man like Mark Payton worry about the things he worried about, wondered if it wasn't all affectation. But to what end? Surely there must be an unaffected first cause, a sincere reason that prods the affected to act that way. Perhaps Mark had cobbled together this strange persona for mating purposes, perhaps a plump but plain Canadian, one of nature's bachelors, would naturally seek a way to differentiate himself from the buffer, sleeker competition, and the Man Obsessed by the Past must have some lurid, offbeat appeal in whatever dark grounds of sexual hunting his type was compelled to stalk in post-Communist Central Europe. Or, maybe Mark was entirely scrubbed free of affectation. Maybe his research work and his natural inclinations had just gotten the better of him and he really couldn't get out the door anymore without thinking how the date didn't feel right or the architecture was criminally violating him. Maybe he had lost the skill (if he had ever had it) of carrying on conversations about anything but lost time; perhaps he subsisted solely on a diet of linden tea and madeleines.

"Honestly, I find it frightening. It's too futuristic a number—it's not for men like me. And you. It's for spacemen or conglomerates." Mark was gripping his silverware until his fingers turned white, but John was staring at two young tourists—a man and a woman—arguing in front of one of the fairy-tale bastions along the promenade. They were out of earshot. The man poked the tip of the woman's nose with a firm index jab, an oddly clear symbolic punch. She turned her back and stomped off.

Mark noticed at last that he was talking only to himself. "I'm really growing tiresome, aren't I? Me and my 'issues.' " He held up four fingers around issues, looked for a companionable laugh, which didn't come, and returned to his food. "You met a woman piano player, you said, a piano player?" he said, re-

membering a scrap of conversation from an hour before. "What about you and Emily?"

"Different sort of relationship." John wondered when and how his non-romance had become public knowledge.

"No great mystery," Mark said, answering the unvoiced question. "If you know how to watch. And before you interrogate me, no, I can't tell you a thing about her. By the way, what's up with you and Scott? What did you do to that

guy?"

John declined to answer, spoke instead of the nightly visits he had been paying to Nadja at the Blue Jazz. As he recounted the old woman's adventures— her escape from Budapest, her bohemian life in the United States, her affair with a world-renowned concert pianist, her outrageous dealings with lesser European royalty—he kept his tone skeptical, amused, reflexively suspecting that the scholarly Mark would find her implausible, even as he hoped that the nostalgic Mark would find her elegantly incontrovertible. In this tone, he imagined himself in the stories he was retelling. Sometimes he was the supporting character—young Nadja's cultivated and heroic husband or the concert pianist making slow Chopin-accompanied love to a vaguely Emilyesque woman. In other stories, he was the leading character herself: He sprinted—frightened, alone, and literally listless—across the Austrian border; he dined with the seedy viscount in the dark and freezing dining room there was not money enough to heat; he sailed the world and grew slowly bored on a billionaire's yacht.