Prague: A Novel Read online

  John had only been in Budapest two days, sleeping on his brother’s floor, meandering alone through the city with a new and already out-of-date map, occasionally being introduced halfheartedly to Scott’s friends. John had only just met this group, but even he suspected that Charles had no envy of Mark’s research. Gábor had essentially just told the Canadian that he had zero interest in his life’s work, had just allowed himself the luxury of saying the obvious: To a venture capitalist, Mark’s scholarly, slobbery obsessions with the past were laughable. And Mark had even begun to laugh.

  Mark grew distracted by a waitress passing close to the table. Scott reminded him, “It’s your turn. We’re going counterclockwise.” And Mark made a small gesture of having his attention brought back to the game despite himself, a little play of candor that struck John as amateurish compared to the maestro’s opening.

  “You know,” Mark said in a Canadian-accented singsong, apparently somewhat surprised to hear himself admit it, “I’m actually beginning to warm up to those boots,” referring to the knee-high open-toe lace-up white-vinyl go-go boots that graced the feet of all Gerbeaud waitresses, women from eighteen to sixty-five, who were also condemned to yellow miniskirts and white lace aprons. All five of the Westerners were baffled that people a few months into post-Communism wouldn’t pull down their mandatory go-go boots with the same liberating fervor they had demonstrated in pulling down their tyrannical government. In any event, even the dullest novice to the game would have realized that a man writing a popular history of nostalgia, who had seen cheerleaders and style-free Canadians wearing boots just like that all his life, was probably not going to “warm up” to the look in this context.

  And yet there was Emily Oliver wagging her head back and forth, trying to decide whether to believe him. She trapped her bottom lip between her teeth and was examining Mark with visible mental energy, even said, “Hmmm.” Finally, she seemed to realize (quite transparently) that she was being quite transparent, and she went to some effort to compose her features. Everyone watched this transformation, and they all smiled with her in their communal struggle not to laugh.

  “You are a master of deception, my girl.”

  “Stop it, you! You came up with this weirdo game, so excuse me if I need a little practice. Normal people were raised to tell the truth, you know.” She set her jaw, inhaled, and prepared herself to lie.

  And John Price fell in love, five-fifteen one Friday evening in May 1990.

  Emily cocked one eyebrow in an unwitting parody of conspiracy and confessed, “I struggle with serious depression all the time. I mean, very dark periods, where I feel totally hopeless.”

  After a momentary hush, frank hilarity burst from Mark and Scott. Even Charles smiled broadly, though he tried to show the game more respect. Emily herself was forced to look at her lap. “I’ll get the hang of this,” she said. “You watch.”

  John, however, was not laughing. He was watching his life unfold at last. He was watching a woman incapable of lying, and he told himself this was one of life’s rare treasures. He saw that Emily—as her lie revealed—had never known neurotic depression and therefore lived close to the surface of life, found the soggy and eternally multiplying layers of self-consciousness and identity an easy burden to strip away. He felt a strange contraction of the muscles around his eyes, and he scraped his lower teeth against his upper lip.

  John did not savor the moment for long as, with a winning smile, Scott took his turn: “I’m really glad John tracked me down here in Budapest.” Emily nodded happily at the warm fraternal sentiment. Mark and Charles looked at their hands. “Really. Like a dream come true.”

  A gloomy waitress passed tantalizingly close to the table, and John made a hopeful wave and managed to snag her flickering attention, but he spoke not a word of Hungarian. Scott, having spent five and a half months teaching English, spoke almost as little. Mark had been submitting to private Hungarian lessons for a month, to no avail. Emily admitted that she was only able to sound out written words and carry on excruciatingly simple conversations, thanks to her daily classes at the embassy, so John turned for help to Charles Gábor, the bilingual son of Hungarians who had fled to the U.S. in 1956.

  “Ő kér egy rumkólát,” Gábor said to the stone-faced waitress. Unresponsive, she walked off.

  “Jesus. What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing.” Gábor shrugged. “I said you wanted another rum-and-Coke.”

  “Well, she looks pissed off,” John said with a sigh. “It’s probably because I’m so obviously a Jew.”

  While physically his self-assessment was undeniably true, his grim assessment of anti-Semitism in Hungarian waitresses killed the mood at the table. His blond, blue-eyed, pug-nosed brother grudgingly consoled him, “No, waiters and waitresses here are all like that. They do it to me, too.”

  “Well, one way or the other, that’s my turn,” said John, and Gábor let out a small and condescending whistle of appreciation at an excellent play, for a beginner.

  Sincerity seemed to have sprung fully formed from Charles Gábor’s head, and among the younger Americans, Canadians, and Britons first trickling then flooding into Budapest in 1989–90, the game’s popularity was one of the few common interests of an otherwise unlikely society. Charles had explained the rules in October ’89, the very evening of his arrival in the city his parents had always told him was his real home. He played it late that jet-lagged night with a group of Americans in a bar near the University of Budapest, and the game spread throughout the anglophones “like a mild but incurable social disease,” in Scott’s words. The virus left the sticky table and was carried to English-as-a-Second-Language-school faculties, folk and jazz bandmates, law-firm junior partners. It was laughingly explained and daily played by embassy interns and backpacking tourists, artists and poets and screenwriters and other new (and often well-endowed) bohemians, and by the young Hungarians who befriended these invaders, voyeurs, naÏfs, social refugees. Each day, Sincerity proliferated as Budapest began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making or to cash in on a market in turmoil or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a Cold War–torn city or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic, though one sensed such a potent license would expire far too soon.

  ROUND TWO

  Charles looked sternly at John with an expression meant to convey a sense of “you’re not going to like this, but I have to speak the truth” and said, “There will come a point, after this initial post-Communist exuberance wears off, when the Hungarians will realize that you can have too much democracy. They’ll realize they need a slightly stronger hand at the helm, and they’ll make the right choice: a strong Hungary with a real national-corporatist philosophy.” He paused, gazed hard at John and Scott, and concluded, “Like they had in the early forties.”

  Mark: “As my dad always said, one’s pain should always be held in perspective. There is always someone worse off than yourself. That’s a perennial comfort.”

  Emily: “The world contains more nice people than mean people. I really believe that.” John could see she plainly did believe that, and he knew that this basic faith, rare and extraordinary, was precisely what he lacked and needed in order to live a full and important life. He also loved that the duress of telling two lies right off the bat had been too much for Emily, and now she faced the daunting prospect of producing two in a row to finish.

  Scott, not really up for the game at its highest levels, turned to bland possibilities: “I like Pest better than Buda.” He lived and worked in the Buda hills, across the Danube from Pest’s flat urban rings and grids.

  “Boring,” muttered Gábor. “Beneath the dignity of the game. You suck.”

  “Fuck you, fucker,” riposted the English teacher.

  John (whose rum-and-cola had since arrived, placed for no good reason in front of Mark by a similarly sullen but altogether different w
aitress): “Fifteen years from now people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s. That’s where real life is going on right now, not here.” He reached across the table to gather his drink but knocked Gábor’s liqueur onto Scott’s lap. Scott jumped, accepted Emily’s speedy offer of a napkin, and applied fizzing, high-sodium Carpathian water to the brown herbal goop spreading over the crotch of his running shorts.

  “Blot, don’t rub,” advised Emily with real concern.

  ROUND THREE

  “I have to admit,” Gábor said slowly when Scott was seated again,”I was briefly jealous just there when Emily took such an interest in you, Scott.” Charles raised his eyes to her, then looked away, letting his breath stream out in a flutter of the lips before adding, “And the matter of blotting your shorts,” as if the smutty coda to his comment might disguise its embarrassing inner truth.

  John stopped breathing, stunned at the sudden barriers to the life plan he had been formulating for the last half an hour. Forced to admit that there was personal history at the table of which he was unaware, he finally consoled himself with the likelihood (75 percent) that Charles had been lying. On the other hand, he recalled that while explaining the rules, Charles had cited “one of the game’s most beautiful aspects: Players sometimes don’t know themselves precisely how much truth they’re telling.”

  “You’re a bad person, aren’t you, Charlie?” Emily wagged a finger.

  Charles looked away, hoping to disguise something he had revealed, or to reveal something he only wanted to appear to disguise, and so he tricked another waitress into coming to the table, and before she was able to realize the trap, she found herself taking orders for replacement drinks and food. “Poor woman,” he said as she wound her sour way back into the café. “She’ll never survive the new economy. This whole country needs its ass kicked.”

  “You can’t take two turns, Charles.”

  “No, I know. That was just my opinion.”

  Mark was nodding. “I guarantee there was never sullen service in this café when it was founded. You’re up, Em.”

  “Oh, jeez. Do we have to go on with this? This isn’t the way normal people should spend their time. Okay, okay, gimme a sec. . . . I think I could live in Hungary forever. I don’t ever want to move back to the States.”

  John smiled at the idea of this most American of girls slowing and settling into a Central European permanence, raising her Hungarian children to be the first trusting and cheerful nonsmokers in the nation’s history.

  Scott’s third-round offering: “English is harder than Hungarian.”

  And John’s: “Scott is our parents’ favorite.”

  One could always feel the same sense of malaise creep over games of Sincerity near round four, a peculiar discomfort just out of range of consciousness, a wave of sleepiness or spaciness. Nongame conversation would proliferate, but also grow testy, as players were commonly exerting a great deal of energy trying to remember what they had already said and what of that had been ostensibly true. That evening in May, it looked as if only Charles Gábor and, perhaps, Emily had not lost their sparkle. As it edged toward six o’clock, everyone but Scott, an avid nutritionist, had consumed too much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. Scott was leaning back in his wrought-iron chair to stare at the softening sky filtered through overhanging branches. John was feeling that dull disappointment and heaviness in the legs of stepping up onto an immobile escalator. Mark had gotten drunk off Unicum, the rough herbal liqueur beloved of the Hungarian nation, and, as he tended to grow maudlin under the influence, was massaging a tendril of red hair and gazing at the dusty airline office with a wistful pucker of the lips and a sorrowful tilt of his brow.

  ROUND FOUR

  Charles swirled an espresso between thumb and middle finger, peered for inspiration at the brown arcs he made on the white cup’s inside surface. “I think raising children is probably the single highest-return investment on offer, to reap the profit of self-awareness and self-expression, that would be the essence of existence.”

  “I suppose it’s not entirely out of the question there are MBAs who believe that,” Mark said. Wasting a turn but enjoying himself greatly, he added, “Financial jobs are profoundly creative and are vitally important to the well-being of culture and human happiness. Particularly venture capital.”

  Emily: “Dishonesty comes so easily to me that it sometimes worries me.”

  Scott Price: “I was adopted. Or John was.”

  “That’s better, Scottie,” Charles said. “Though technically a verifiable statement of fact. We’ll let it stand for amusement’s sake.”

  John offered, “I can certainly see why everyone here are such good friends.”

  “Is such good friends,” corrected the English teacher, leaning back with closed eyes, his two swaying chair legs a tempting target.

  Over a round of Unicums, the players revealed their truths and tallied the score. Charles Gábor scored a very solid seven out of eight, though he was visibly disgusted at his poor showing. Each of his first three statements was picked as true by a competitor: Emily believed he envied Mark’s research, Mark believed he envied Emily’s attentions to Scott, and John believed (and not without an edge to his voice) his endorsement of a refreshed fascist Hungary. But it was his fourth statement—the glories of child rearing couched in financial terminology—that he declared to be sincere. Scott, having suspected that Charles would at least claim its sincerity, scored a hit.

  Charles also received four points for correctly identifying truth in each of the others. Mark was certain that moody service was an invention of the late twentieth century. Emily did indeed believe that the world’s nice people outnumbered its nasty ones. Charles knew that Scott, despite not yet having learned Hungarian, did not believe it to be as difficult as his native tongue. And John, in his two days in Budapest, had already pegged the city as being less epochally and culturally promising than Prague, where he had spent sixteen formative hours on his way into town.

  Scott pulled off a six. He received Emily’s vote that he must be happy to have John in Budapest, a vote which so tickled John that he did not brood for long over the implications of the original lie. Scott also won two votes in favor of his provocative adoption play. Yes, two: Even John thought it fit too many observable facts not to be true, and would perhaps explain his inability to jump-start a permanent adult relationship with his elder brother. Scott also easily identified John’s Prague envy and Emily’s chipper worldview but stumbled with Mark, believing his drivel about keeping one’s pain in perspective.

  Mark placed third, with a very respectable four: He called Emily’s truth and culled three points for his boot-strappy theory of pain. “My dad is just the same,” Emily had consoled him. “Actually, no,” Mark admitted. “My dad began complaining about his life back in about 1973 and hasn’t yet stopped.” However, Mark voted for John’s anti-Semitic waitress ploy and Scott’s adoption.

  John, therefore, scored a three. Emily, telling him not to feel bad about it, said that it’s hard to be the favorite child, too, sometimes even harder. (“To be honest,” John replied, “ours is a scientifically unique family in that neither child is the favorite.”) He in turn spotted Emily’s faith in mankind, not without a quiet intake of breath and happy recognition of fate’s turning wheels.

  Special Assistant Emily Oliver, displaying a congenital inability to lie or sense dishonesty, therefore scored zero. She sipped her second Unicum, unconsciously grimacing after every taste. Her cheeks began to flush in the cool evening air and from the hot tickle of the herbal liqueur. “This game is sick, Charlie.”

  Of course, the game is fundamentally flawed. One never actually knows if players tell the truth at the end, or if they even know the truth (“one of the game’s most beautiful aspects”).

  IV.

  John Price’s decision to emigrate from Los Angeles to Hungary had required eight minutes. He reread his big brother’s postca
rd and sensed their time had finally come. He recalled a newspaper article praising Hungary’s nascent “potential.” He savored his approaching resignation from the Committee to Bring the 2008 Olympics to L.A., for which he had been mistyping press releases and making Xerox copies of his butt.

  He admitted that Scott would be of two minds, at most, about their reunion. He had tracked Scott down before to solder an essential brotherly bond, appearing hopeful and eager at his college dorms twice. And at Scott’s first tiny apartment in San Francisco. On the fishing boat just before Scott set off for Alaska. Again in Portland. And Seattle. And each time, Scott ironically, even amusingly, rebuffed him, deflated him (even as Scott had begun his own steady physical deflation).

  Scott had persistently believed, to John’s repeated amazement, that their tritely unpleasant childhood had mattered, that it somehow mattered still, and, most of all—never spoken but quite clear—that John himself was not a victim of their family (as Scott was) but one of the oppressive ruling junta itself, a belief John could neither dislodge nor comprehend. After each defeated, angry return to L.A., some months were necessary before John would convince himself again that this time would be different, that enough healing had occurred for a fraternal future to begin.

  And now Budapest. After so many false starts, the two brothers would shed everything old and ugly and shine upon each other. In that unimaginable city, far from everything familiar, they would dig past the past, burst through to the essential something that would render John whole and strong, untouchable and wise. Old barriers would crumble to reveal manicured gardens.

  Wanting to give some—but not too much—warning of his arrival, John planned to appear in Budapest about a week after an eloquent and nuanced explanatory letter. He had, however, overestimated post-Communist postal commitment. One Wednesday night, displaying the brittle optimism of the frequently disappointed, he had knocked on Scott’s door in Buda and confronted surprise and rage, uneasily battling for dominance. “Huh,” Scott managed to say, looking at the matching suitcase and hanging bag floating in the May moonlight. “So where are you staying?” Conversation that night fractured and seeped, no one being in the mood to produce the necessary caulking jokes. Scott made John repeat the story of how he had found his address.