Prague (51 page)

"I just mean—"

"Really. 1 have to paint."

"I know, but—"

"Hey. Hey. Really."

He dressed. She kissed him on the threshold of the open door, handed him his backpack with Mark's journals in it. She had the thick plaid blanket wrapped around her torso, her bare arms and shoulders blanched silver-white by the humped moon that washed the courtyard and the doorway. She had also put on a fake-feather headdress, the key element of a Bulgarian-made "American Red Indian Chief" costume she had found in a scavenging trip to a peculiarly Hungarian toy store. It was hard to take anything too seriously with a bald, seminudc American Red Indian Chief girl. Still, he wanted to say something, she could see that, and so she stroked his cheek and smiled, then turned her back, stepped into the apartment, let her blanket fall and her trailing headdress brush its lowest fake feathers against the rounding of her naked hips, and closed the door behind her.

(8» JOHN SUBMITTED TO EDITOR his tirst installment of the series "Hungarians You Need to Know but Should Not Try to (Blatantly) Bribe." To cover his tracks, he began with someone unrelated to Charles Gabor's business: the elderly guard who worked the front door of the U.S. embassy, the man responsible for waving a handheld metal detector over a Danube of visa seekers, businessmen, visiting government officials. John's profile of Old Peter ran in the company of an extreme close-up of the guard (PHOTO: N. MANKIEWILICTKI-POBIIUZIEJ), stressing the deep canyons in his face, the softness of his squashed-lip, squinting smile, the furry wattles that flapped from his chin and fell into the open collar of his Romanian polo shirt. The caption: WELCOME TO TIIE EMBASSY OF THE LEADER OF THE

FREE WORLD, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Their simultaneously translated interview (Old Peter knew only employee names, titles, and floor numbers in English) took place after hours at the embassy (vibrating with the constant and constantly disappointed promise of an approaching Emily) while an obese, whiskered Hungarian woman scrubbed the lobby steps on her hands and knees. John learned from Old Peter that three of the marines he had met in July (including "the giant Negro boy") had traded

in embassy blues for desert khaki and were now somewhere in the Persian Gulf, preparing to fight the Arab Hitler. "Hussein Saddam boom!" slurped Old Peter. "U.S. marines!" He sprayed the room with machine-gun sound effects. The cleaning lady paid him no attention, only churned her rags again into the bucket of steam at her side and sloshed the floor with both hands.

Two days later, John submitted the series' second installment: "Psst, Buddy, You Wanna Buy a Paprika Factory?" The prodigiously complimentary column profiled a subdirector in charge of midsize enterprise denationalization for the State Privatization Agency. John described the bureaucrat as "a key architect of a new world" but also "a defender of Hungary's entrepreneurial past." John hailed the man's answers to repeated questions about the importance of restoring Hungarian commerce into Hungarian hands as hallmarks of "twenty-first-century brilliance" and "one of the many reasons this man's name is constantly bubbling to the top of conversations about candidates for ministry portfolios."

"And exactly which conversations are those?" Charles asked John the evening of the piece's publication.

"Well, this one right now, for example."

John listened proudly as Charles read the entire piece over the phone to Imre, laughed from time to time, and answered the old man's questions in liquid Hungarian. "We're closing in, Imre," he said in English. "Closing in."

"It seems a scandal," John had mentioned in the course of the interview, "that foreigners look upon the privatization process as a discount sale and not, as it of course should be, the restoration of justice and logic to an economy battered by injustice and illogic. Why should an American or a Frenchman or a, a, a South Sea islander buy a Hungarian business when there are Hungarians eager and qualified to run them? Why is a foreigner—a carpetbagger—any better than keeping it in the state's hands?"

The bureaucrat's answer, though balanced, grappling with the complexities he felt the young reporter's question had missed, nevertheless won him yet more praise: an understanding that his job is more than simply that of an estate auctioneer but is closer to that of a wise overseer of an enormous garden, entrusting the appropriate natives with the tools and knowledge to make this country blossom again.

"You think he meant Gabor has won the bid?" Harvey asked the next morning.

"I don't know. I didn't want to push. But he was clear that there was a desire, at the very highest levels of the government, to keep the nation's historic

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legacy in the proper hands—at least in the initial stage of unloading the heavily symbolic stuff to the private sector. After that, let the market do what it will, but the government certainly isn't missing the public relations issues at stake."

Now Harvey read the article over the phone to an unknown auditor, answered questions curtly, then replied, in a tone that implied special access (which John appreciated), "Because the reporter's right here in the room with me. that's how."

"So who's got the best bid for the Horvalh Press?" John couldn't resist asking the shy man behind the metal desk at the tail end of the interview. The quiet economist, only twenty-nine, had all through college studied the official Marxist economics he knew were absurd and written term papers extolling (or only delicately cajoling) the latest five-year plan. Then every afternoon he read Adam Smith and Milton Friedman in the library of the U.S. embassy, took copious notes on the secret religion he knew explained the universe.

"Mr. Price," he answered. "You are aware. I hope, that I cannot tell you of this. You are a journalist, no? This bidding process is completely ominous. You ask ominous information." And John remembered for years the unpleasant sensation in his stomach that he had pushed too far, until he realized the man had only meant to say anonymous.

(9) FRIDAY THE THIRTIETH, the last hours of November, some American kid vomiting against the base of an apartment block across the street, and from the large window of the new Thai restaurant next to the bar, a wedge of yellow light fell on the dark road. Charles pulled open the bar's heavy wooden door, under the dull orange nautical lanterns. "Now some entertainment, please," one of them said ("Ten minutes maximum here if it sucks"). John, Charles, and Harvey (a tenacious social barnacle since John had introduced him to Charles, who later declared him "possibly a gold mine, possibly full of shit") all descended into the old bar. shaped like a frigate. Everything about the place whispered to these experienced customers that only a few more weeks remained before the end, before the old haunt tipped irreparably and became fully Westernized, unacceptable to any self-respecting expat.

Overhearing two American women, John spoke with a very slight Hungarian accent to the less pretty one. "I am sorry to be interrupting you." he began. "I know you must be told this all of the time. I do not mean to boiher you, but 1 want to tell you very much I like your movies. I am the very big fan of you."

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She played along for a bit, but soon set him straight and explained to the poor Hungarian that he had mixed her up with someone else. He pretended to be embarrassed, she was flattered at the error, and a few drinks and a couple of dances later, immediately after she had crunched and swallowed an ice cube coaled with the last remnants of her sweet vermouth, they were kissing, and her tongue felt corpsely cold but humanly soft. The ice had raised little bumps on its buds, and she tasted of the sweet-and-spicy aperitif. He was amazed he had succeeded in his ploy, but a few drinks later, as ihey walked to his apartment (his Hungarian accent forgotten back in the frigate, along with Charles and Harvey's quiet business tete-a-tete), she said something—he couldn't quite remember what—that made him understand she had never believed his line, never believed he was even Hungarian, and, realizing this, as the sofa bed voiced its first creaking complaint, he wished he had not aimed so low but had complimented the prettier of the two women instead. The next morning, a cursory, throbbing investigation revealed that the now-anonymous girl had stolen not money but his dental floss, his only belt, and the backpack filled with Mark Payton's notebooks, a loss he took very, very hard.

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yer's office late in the afternoon of the sixth of December: The State Privatization Agency had accepted Horvath Holdings' bid (combined cash and restitution vouchers) and the company was now the owner of both Horvath Verlag (Vienna) and the salable remnants (some improved, some dilapidated) of the Ilorvath Kiado (Budapest): reasonably modern printing facilities: decrepit trucks and tolerable warehouses; a staff of forty-eight (fully 50 percent superfluous); a catalog of textbooks and old, Parly-approved writers: partnerships with two newspapers and two magazines; and two floors of a grimly unashamed, squattingly ugly office block in the Pesti suburban wastelands. For Imre, the right to profit from his own name in his native country, unopposed. And for Charles, 49/51 splits aside, the chance to run something real.

The next day, Charles spent his morning organizing a celebration of their victory, and that evening the tribute opened with the last guest's arrival inside the warm Gerbeaud. Before John had finished brushing snow from his shoulders. Charles slood up and recapped for his audience the relevant details of Imre Horvath's story: heir to tradition, victim and survivor of Communism, in-

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defatigable protector of a people's memory, visionary, hero. Krisztina smiled ceaselessly while Imre himself pursed his lips in majestic calm and lowered his eyes, but not his head, to examine the tiny glass of golden liqueur on the table in front of him. Charles lifted his own cordial to "my mentor, my second father. my conscience, a hero of Hungary." The old man, never more imposing, more etched and girded by history, rose to embrace his partner, and the other five applauded and touched drinks.

Around the corner from the Gerbeaud, on the soft, fresh snow, they found two fuming, humming limousines, patiently wailing and commissioned to ferry the party from past to future. In each of their womby interiors, two back-scats faced each other and, next to each, a collection of half-filled crystal decanters sat snugly clinched in formed black velvet holders. In the lead car. Charles solemnly poured short drinks for Imre. Kriszlina, and himself, while in the Irailing limo. Harvey, his sax-playing assislant, the English lawyer, and John started giggling like schoolboys as they topped up tall, textured tumblers with a little of this, a little of that, a bit of the clear one, and—voila—that's called a Long Island Iced Tea. Neville. Oh, is it?

At their next stop, as the two groups reconvened, two distinct moods met and bounced away, like two weather fronts crunching into each olher: "My God. this is ... good Lord, you have the key," Imre was murmuring in quiet Hungarian as Harvey emerged from the other car asserting that the best place to learn a foreign language is in bed.

"I do. We are the owners, after all. It was simply a very kind gesture on a friend's part to advance me a copy for tonight." Charles put the key in the lock but did not turn it. Instead, he wailed until his audience had quieted itself on the snow-dusty loading dock, and then he recited in English. "This is. of course, a warehouse now, and it is one of the properties thai Horvath Holdings acquired yesterday. It was, more relevantly, the stage for a piece of hislory of which this nation should be aware and proud. A little more than thirty-four years ago. when our country fought futilely for its freedom, our friend Imre stood in the middle of the storm, standing for truth. From this dock where we now stand, he tired broadsides of trulh against tyranny, and for Ihirteen days he reclaimed his Horvath Kiado from its captors." Charles turned the key, heaved up and open the rolling metal door, and, inside, pushed a button on a rectangular box dangling from the invisible ceiling on a Ihick black cable. After two fluorescent stullers of surprise, all the pieces of a sparsely stocked, high-ceilinged hall with cracked concrete floors showered into order.

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"My God, how did you know?" Imre asked his partner, his voice thickening and moistening.

"I said to him only what my father said to me," replied Krisztina Toldy.