Prague (60 page)

334 1
 
ARTHUR
 
PHILLIPS

(a proudly vague explanation of what U.S. Special Forces had accomplished behind the Iraqi lines), Krisztina struck Imre across the face. She had been virtually living in two hospital rooms since the end of January, and now. after the short-lived exhilaration of the hand squeeze, no matter how loudly, sweetly, seductively she said it, his name was no longer producing any results at all. She had drunk a little that night, and some small measure of self-pity had seeped into her blood with the alcohol. Her usually homogenized feelings had curdled slighlly and. to her confusion, she was angry at Imre. She slapped him that night, twice, while pleading with him a little nonsensically. She struck him out of anger and frustration and also because it might be the desperate, unconventional, but successful tactic guided by feelings surer and deeper than complacent Swiss medicine. Either way, he did not open his eyes, and, having turned up the volume of the television ("these boys each carried what we call a 'hot ball.' and the less said about that, the better"), she sal heavily in the contoured chair next to the bed and allowed herself to weep, slightly and with great control.

"I'M SORRY TO HEAR IT. I had high hopes for the music myself. Please keep me informed. No, no, of course not, it's quite all right. By all means stay there. Operations here will suffer on wilhout you. Oh. not at all, you're quite welcome." Charles hung up. "The thing is. Krisztina really is an asset to the organization. You should keep her on—not to tell you your game. I'm sure you have plenty of your own people like this, but she's a local, and that can really help." Returned down an Australian cigarette.

; KNOW I'M JUST one of the, parasites, but sometimes we have the best view of our host body. Frankly, from whew I've latched on, the thought of Hungary and its post-Communist chums suddenly becoming quasi-NATO members has the feel of being introduced to your dad's new wife's kids, your new crap stepsiblings, who move in and start playing with your stuff and call your dad "Dad." Yet whose heart doesn't go out to the Maggies, the new kid in a big school.' Like the last tyke to be picked when choosing sides for a game of kickball, Hungary stood sheepishly on the sidelines until President Rush finally said, "Aw heck, come on, Zsolt! We sure could use your spunk!" Or, as Lieutenant Pal, my host at mortar practice, so eloquently explained, "J am not altogether entirely certain that our mortars would be very effective in a desert situation. So we were happier and also more confident in being help by sending the medical personnel. " Well, water flows under the bridge faster than it used to, and this particular

epochal war seems to have become a memory before we even got the chance to ration. or do middle-of-the-night civil guard duty, or sleep with soldiers' ieft.--be.hind wives. It's hard to keep track of the passing epochs nowadays, as a friend of mine once pointed out. It's early March, so that puts us in the delirium and exuberance of the postwar period. Of course, a war that starts with Churchillian calls for blood, sweat, and tears, victory at any cost, the salvation of the free world but then ends with the military equivalent of a violent retarded child suddenly forgetting why he is in the middle of throttling this particular gerbil and then tossing it aside while it's still able to catch its breath. ..

-YD, CALL ME when you get in. I just had my islanders in again. These guys move. I love watching efficient people in action. I'd forgollen what they looked like. I've lived here so long. Loved your Gulf War thing, by the way. Call when you have a minute to talk about real work, okay?"

"HEY HO, IT'S THE KING of 1991! Long time no screw, your majesty. How's the Price of Lover" She pecked his cheek and led him by the hand to the clothesline loosely stretched outside the black curtains that formed her darkroom. Clothespin-supported, there hung, still slightly damp, ten enlargements she had just spawned—goats in a field, the statue of Vorosmarty. classical French paintings of nude goddesses in varied poses, each ham-hock thigh more generous than the last. There were also pictures, still streaked with reflective and evaporating liquid, of events in which he was a star but that had never even made the short trip to his short-term memory. He gazed at them in amazement, wondered if perhaps they were collages, but they seemed too normal for Nicky to have bothered, and they did tickle, ever so delicately, if not memory, exactly, at least a sense of personal plausibility: a piano bench supporting him and Nadja. Dexter Gordon smoking on the wall just behind them; a bar stool he seemed to be kissing on its leg, two puzzled faces above him; his face sharply top-lit, on the Blue Jazz stage, holding the microphone, his eyes sleepily half shut, his lips curled into a rascally, lascivious semi-smile; his top half in a booth at the Blue Jazz, his head propped sloppily in both hands, a little line of drool catching a blue light, the only filament of color in the black-and-white composition. "Will you come with me?" he finally managed to ask. and even wheedled a little, to erode her unexpected, nonspecific resistance. "For art's sake. You might find it. you know, artsy. I could use the company. I've walked by it for the last three days. I think you'd just, you know, for curiosity's sake." Some very

small part of him wondered quietly if this might not be the long-approaching moment when she would just come to him.

KRISZTINA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP, at three in the afternoon of all times, on the contoured chair, her arms crossed, her heels hooked underneath her on the chair's crossbar, and her head hanging heavily, nearly to her lap. Even through sleep the soreness of her neck persisted, and in her semi-slumber she could feel the sickly space between each vertebra, clotted and hot and almost audibly starchy. She tossed her head from side to side in search of the pillow that for weeks she'd known only in dreams, and her eyes opened for a moment, and she saw Imre staring at her. Before the thought had registered, her eyes had shut again, and it took her several seconds to fight upward, to break the surprisingly thick surface and emerge into full wakefulness. Even then, she lost another second or two trying to focus her gaze. His eyes were shut. It might have been a dream. She took his hand and stroked his brow and chanted, chastened.

-HE'S MUCH THE SAME," Charles responded. "Thank you for asking. We're always hoping for news of progress."

''And so his position in regards to this agreement?"

"Unchanged," Neville answered.

HER BUILDING'S CONCIERGE—a mustachioed, athletic-looking man in a shiny red tracksuit—smiled broadly as soon as he peered at John and Nicky through the lace curtains of his apartment door, just inside the archway leading to the courtyard. He had known with a glance that they were foreigners, and he opened his door already apologizing, "Nem English, nem Deutsch."

John said simply, "Nadja," and made a face to express that he wasn't expecting lo be led to a live woman's door. His ignorance of her family name struck him only then.

"Igen." The man nodded sympathetically.

John mimed turning a key. "Igcnf" he asked. The man shrugged broadly and looked down to the floor as his eyebrows rose in a bilingual display of hesitation. "My grandmother," John said in English, then managed in Hungarian, "My mother on my mother." The Hungarian touched his slickcd-back hair in confusion, and so John held his two hands flat, one above the other, to simulate a family tree. "My mother," he said, and moved the bottom hand. 'And

my mother," he said, and moved the top hand: "Nadja." The superintendent shrugged, locked his door behind him, and walked them up four flights of stairs, his athletic sandals slapping rhythmically. John imagined his poor elderly friend trudging up and down all these stairs, every day.

"Amerikai?" the man asked them as they stopped for breath at the top. "Yoowessay?"

"Igen."

The super nodded with admiring significance, lofty-browed. "Igen, igen, yoowcssay. yoowessay, nagyon jo." He led them to a short, dark hallway off the main corridor. He paused in front of the last door at the hall's underlit terminus, and he absently jangled the keys. "Jo. New York City," he offered conversationally.

"Yes. New York City." agreed John.

'Ah! California." suggested the man, nodding.

"Yes, yes," John concurred. "California."

At last he unlocked it and held it open for the Americans. "Okay," he said, almost sadly, perhaps hoping lo be invited in. "Okay." Finally he retreated, leaving the deceased woman's family alone in the apartment. The sound of a sliding deadbolt gave him a moment's pause.

"PLEASE PLEASE, IMRE. Please, Imre. Please, Imre. I saw you before, didn't I, Imre? Now please again, Imre."

NEVILLE DISTRIBUTED FOUR copiEs of the document and opened his own to page 6. "We do have two points still to discuss. I'm terribly sorry to bring them up now. but perhaps we can reach a quick accord and initial the agreements as necessary. I think we can still have everyone out by four. Your flight is when?"

TWO ROOMS—A NARROW rectangle entering one side of a small square— suggested the very first, teasing chambers of a pharaonic tomb, though not as well lit. John fumbled for lamps. Nicky reached the far side of the square room and swept from the single window the stained, thin, pea-green curtain, John walked the perimeter of the rooms slowly; he could smell the unmistakable aroma of unoccupancy. A pivoting, warped, discolored metal rod jutted from the wall just over the foot of the tiny bed, and from it dangled Nadja's red dress on a hanger. The bed was unmade; the sheets were thin in places. On the bed-

side table lay a paperback romance novel, facedown, opened a little past halfway. On its upside-down cover, under the title in English and the author's name, a muscled, shirtless man with a rapier squeezed the arms of a woman, who tossed back her head and lifted up her leg. Next to the book sat a battered, unidirectional English-Hungarian dictionary and a notebook filled with closely written Hungarian, the romance novel's in-progress translation. A small cassette player sat on Ihe floor, two unlabeled tapes on top of it. On a hook over the tiny stove hung a garland of pointy dried red peppers, a diabolic lei. In Nadja's tiny bathroom (a closet off the entry way rectangle), John found a teeming garden of perfume bottles, a collection without any logic for either daily use or obscure investment, do/ens of bottles, balanced on the sink and on a rickety, wickery table and on the sporadically tiled floor, most of the bottles with just a final few spittly bubbles of scent remaining in their bellies, golden and clear and light blue liquids just deep enough to envelop the tips of their spray-hose stamens. Underwear—painfully old, old, old—molded itself to the edge of the cracked and caulk-flailing tub.

He found Nicky still standing by the window, holding a small framed picture to the light. "Look what she kept." she said happily. "I can't say I approve of the frame." She showed him Ihe New Year's photo at the piano, under the mu-ralized, smoking Dexter Gordon, the only picture in the apartment. There were no posters on the walls, no letters, no scraps of this or that, no medals, no proofs. He slumped on the bed. "There's nothing here. Nothing," he muttered, amazed to unearth no evidence in the dwarfish chest of drawers, nothing beyond the few clothes and forint coins, the comb and brush. "This isn't her life." he said sadly. Perhaps someone had already come by and taken personal items away while John dithered on the street in the March wind and tickle sun. "It's a good picture." Nicky said, "if I do say. She was so happy when I brought her a batch to choose from. It was very flattering. And sweet. She was very funny about you." John noticed, as Ihe surviving sunlight licked them, how delicate and beautiful were Nicky's hands. Despite the paint stains, despite the bitten nails and the raggedy, ridged cuticles, her long fingers curved gracefully and she held the photo to the window's light with a gentleness he found touching, even if il was an act of self-love. She, too, could be a pianist with those fingers. He pulled Ihe Ilimsy, stained curtain off the battered peg; it swept in front of the little window again. He imagined the two of them in this small apartment, in Ihe enforced darkness of a wartime blackout, in the menacingly un-

predictable electrical power of a crisis, a coup, a counterattack. Tanks rolled down the street, his street, where he had lived all these years in peace with her. He laid the photo on the little table, covered the romance novel with it, took her hands.

"NOW LOOK HERE, Mr. Howard. I'm sure Mr. Melchior hasn't come all this way to be told you have any significant changes to the agreement at this point in time."

"Let it be, Kyle." The monotone again, the eyes anywhere but on another human face.

'As I mentioned, they aren't major changes, but I cannot in good conscience advise Charles to—"

"Maybe let's not sweat the small stuff. Nev. Huberl's come a long way to get this done."