Prague: A Novel Read online

  “So what was our Scott like when he was boy?” a student asked John.

  “I was six hundred pounds,” Scott replied before the same answer could be given seriously, and the crowd laughed at the impossibility. John would have protected him, resented the unnecessary maneuver.

  “He was like a god to me,” John said, watching Emily. “Like a god of war, unfortunately.”

  “Right after I was born, I urged my mother to have her tubes tied, but to no avail.”

  Charles explained to Scott’s Hungarians why their country was doomed to eternal poverty, conquest, betrayal, and the students nodded and mashed out their cigarettes and rolled new ones and absolutely agreed, liked Charles for understanding how things really were, despite being American. “Oh come on, no,” Emily insisted, and John’s heart spun on its axis. “Don’t you listen to that kind of talk.” Hungary had an opportunity it had never had before, a totally new and unique moment in human history. John seconded her, happy to share with her Charles’s and the Hungarians’ condescension.

  There had been a peculiar salad, lettuce tossed with a mixture of unlikely or unrecognizable components, then the ubiquitous paprikás and vineyards of Hungarian wine. Gábor simply kept ordering more. It wasn’t bad, and only 118 forints a bottle, somewhere under two dollars, a price John found more and more hilarious as the evening progressed. He discoursed on the uncanny symbolism of Americans taking advantage of post-Communist exchange rates to drink too much Hungarian wine. The significant details of that symbolism, insightful and amusing to his drinking audience, subsequently grew wings and escaped, could not be recaptured. Later, at A Házam, a nightclub, Mark had called John a genius, but it was not clear why.

  Now, in his new apartment, as he lay for the first time on the old man’s sofa bed, and horns and motors vibrated the air from three stories down, John had no recollection whatsoever of the dance club, could only recall that Emily was with them for a while and then was not. He had a vague notion that Mark had walked him home, had made him take two aspirin and drink an entire glass of water in a single go. John had slept fitfully, spinning a few revolutions on his way in and out of slumber, to which he now returned.

  He dreamed of the woman on his bedside table. She stood in front of her tree, and Hungarian folk musicians were visible off in the distance, in an open field. She rocked a bundle of blankets in her arms and smiled at John with infinite tenderness and love. He knew that all was well in his life, knew his life would be happy and satisfying forever now that it was beginning at last, and he walked to her, each step marking an irrevocable commitment and commencement. She inclined her head to the blankets. “Amerikai. Für sie,” she said. “Igen,” John said. “Ja.” She handed him the bundle. Carefully cradling it, he parted the blankets at the head, but found he was holding only the photo of the crying baby. He was surprised that he was not greatly surprised. He tickled the chin of the child in the photo and rocked the bundle lovingly, though he wondered if his actions would make the woman love him less or more. He was nervous to look at her lest he discover that all was not still well in his life, but finally he could not put off the moment any longer. He looked up, ready to kiss her, but she had left.

  VII.

  Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient.

  “Extraordinary creativity in research methodology” was a professor’s assessment of Payton’s doctoral work. The excitable professor had been referring to Mark’s scholarly visits to museum gift shops, art-house and revival movie theaters, travel agencies, postcard and poster manufacturers, the airless and depressing conventions of collectors of sundry valuable and valueless oddities, and antique stores, among other outlets of nostalgia. There was not an antique shop in Toronto or Montreal that had not received the peculiar letter, requesting highly specific information: “. . . categorized records of old orders and sales, organized by year . . . shifts in popularity of certain items/eras as listed below . . . sudden spikes in demand for particular styles . . . paintings organized by subject, rather than artist . . . the enclosed checklist comparing sales of specified items in ten-year intervals . . .” The letters were followed by visits from a pale, overweight, jarringly eager red-haired student with a slight tic in his left eyelid.

  In this fieldwork, Mark had grown familiar with all the major Canadian species of antiquarian: rude, barely literate pawnbrokers who seemed to hate their buyers, their sellers, and their business but who wore old-fashioned visors and vests that were marks of nostalgia in themselves; reflexively, calibratedly untruthful jewelers with wrinkles around only one eye, a professional hazard from hours and weeks and years of squinting through loupes; furniture refinishers, as chummy as used-car salesmen, who spoke in broad accents about the Second Umpire and Louie Cans; matrons with two hundred years of regal and fanciful china patterns archived in their memories, driving from their heads the names of their own husbands, children, grandchildren; buxom, middle-aged divorcées who had invested their savings and alimony payments in a long-held dream but a bad idea and so ended up running discomfortingly clean but bizarrely stocked shops with names like The Den of Antiquity, Ancient Chinese Secret, Bea’s Hive, and Mother’s Attic; dust-covered booksellers, their skin like vellum paper, their eyes compensating for the aridity of their shops with excessive wetness; statue specialists, little round men distinguishable from the plaster Cupids that made up their stock only by their waistcoats and their ability to walk and speak.

  The questions Mark asked of this core sampling of history merchants brought him overflowing data, which filled notebooks and computer diskettes by the hogshead, by the peck, by the avoirdupois ounce.

  To quantify nostalgia, to graph it backward into the misty and sweet-smelling past, to enumerate its causes and its expressions and its costs, to determine the nature of societies and personalities most affected by the disorder—these were Mark Payton’s obsessions, and he wove academic laurels from their leaves. He strained to establish laws as measurable and irrefutable as the laws of physics or meteorology. He strove, for example, to determine whether there was, within a given population, a ratio, p/c, that could predict the relationship between individuals with a “strong” or “very strong” leaning to Personal Nostalgia (i.e., nostalgia for events within one’s own past) and those with a commensurate leaning to Collective Nostalgia (i.e., nostalgia for eras or styles or places that were outside of one’s personal experience). In other words, if you were likely to be affected by recollections of your Hungarian grandmother’s sour cherry soup served in the Herend bowl with the ladybug at the bottom, were you more or less likely to feel fondness for movies that treated with tender, nearly eroticized affection the life of English aristocrats in their country houses prior to the First World War? Payton felt certain he could arrive at a predictable ratio p/m, the relationship between a strong tendency to Personal Nostalgia and the possession of an objectively good Memory. Either hypothesis (that the relationship was direct, or that it was inverse) seemed feasible to him. Finally, the ratio c/h, the relationship of an individual’s propensity to Collective Nostalgia and his or her actual Historical Knowledge of the place-era for which he or she felt this nostalgia, was theoretically determinable, and here the scholar strongly suspected an inverse proportion: The less you knew about life in those country houses, the more you wished you had lived there.

  His research produced more questions than answers, but he had been forced by finicky academia to restrain his noisy and intrusive curiosity for the sake of a degree; his dissertation was necessarily limited to issues of methodology and quantifiable measurement in Vacillations of Collective Popular Retrospective Urges in Urban Anglophone Canada, 1980–1988. But now he was free to answer everything. The work that had brought him to Europe would sate the ravenous why that lurked behind his tangible discoveries.

  Why, according to one of Mark’s surveys, did fully 48 percent of the entering freshma
n girls at McGill University bring with them from home a framed copy of Robert Doisneau’s photograph The Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville, an icon of interwar Paris (cataloged Nostalgipathic Place-Era #163). Another 29 percent of the girls bought the print within six months of matriculation.

  Why, according to publicly available sales data from the publishers, did prints of that beloved poster vastly outsell Alfred Eisenstadt’s thematically indistinguishable VJ Day Kiss, Times Square, even in Paris, where a measurable level of cross-cultural envy should have hoisted the American past Doisneau? Or, conversely, if you didn’t buy that, then why didn’t familiarity and ethnic pride nudge Eisenstadt’s numbers over the Frenchman’s in New York sales?

  Why was there a sudden upsurge from 1984 to 1986 in orders placed with Ontario’s specialty furniture manufacturers for Victorian daybeds, a popularity far too large to be attributed solely to the period films that appeared in a crinkly crinoline rush from 1982 to 1985?

  Why did the years immediately following World War One show a drop-off in all manner of antique sales in Toronto except for military equipment and pictures?

  Why was the videocassette of the film Casablanca rented three times more often in Quebecois video stores than in Ontarian outlets, even after statistical corrections for VCR-owning populations and the number of available dubbed copies were made?

  Why did the past (and, more often than not in Canada’s case, someone else’s past) do this to us?

  Like a dying man railing against an unfair God, Mark kept asking, “Why?” And every academic question was merely a restatement of a more pressing personal one, one he had been asking nearly as long as he could remember thinking, one he was embarrassed to ask even as he kept asking it despite himself, one he would only share with a friend while drunk or laughing: Why am I unhappy in the era and the place I was given?

  It did not take a very long acquaintanceship before Charles labeled Mark “sad beyond help, unfit even for commodities trading.” Scott, in turn, had identified the Canadian as “prematurely elderly.”

  VIII.

  Mark was vaguely expecting some Hungarianized version of one of his familiar Canadian antiquarians the morning he walked between the two matching cannons that guarded the entrance of the Gellért Hill shop. Having thus far spent his European research time in libraries, this was his return to fieldwork and he was prepared to meet, in this city of renamed and re-renamed streets, another odd soul making a fair to poor living selling off the histories of others.

  The door closed behind him with the predictable tinkling of a bell, the shape and placement of which he knew without looking. After the bright sun, he stood for a blind moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the shop’s intentionally dim light and, he knew, allowing the still invisible owner to inspect him and assess his likelihood to buy.

  “American? Deutsch? Français?”

  The voice was the Hungarian male drone, and Mark answered before he could locate its owner. “Kanadai. Beszél angolul?” He rashly used all three of his Hungarian words at once.

  “Yes, yes, of course. But you talk very good Hungarian. We should do that.” And the voice behind a desk, behind a gold floor lamp, had a face: thick black hair, thick and drooping black mustache, pale, bags under the eyes, the head tilted slightly back, polo shirt and a gold-link bracelet.

  “Oh no, no,” Mark said politely, still at the door, the bell just fading away. “Nem, I mean,” he said, now truly exhausting his Magyar vocabulary. “I only know how to ask Beszél angolul.”

  “Canada, you say? Your mama and papa are Hungarian, of course.”

  “No, actually. Irish. And English. Some French and German. Cherokee, claims one grandmother. I’m a mongrel.”

  “So how do you talk Hungarian so nice? You have the Hungarian girlfriend, I think.”

  “Actually, ah, no. I just came last month.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  “Yes, but actually, no.”

  “You find them pretty, though, yes? Our Hungarian girls? The most pretty anywhere? Like French girls?”

  “Yes, sure. Very pretty.”

  “Well, you know what is true. The best place to learn a language is in the bed.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard it said.” The Hungarian looked down at some papers on his desk and Mark looked away, ready for the inevitable shaving mugs, the incomplete sets of silverware, the refuse of dead people’s mantels.

  Instead, his eye snagged on a photograph on the man’s desk, a small framed picture of a group of soldiers, vintage World War II. Payton could not identify the uniforms, but he did recognize almost instantly the pale soldier squatting in the front row, second from the right, staring at the camera with sleepy eyes and a droopy black mustache. “You were a soldier?” As soon as he spoke, Mark knew the question was foolish; this man would not have been more than a child.

  “Yes, how do you know this of me? Oh, I see. No, that is my father. Many say we have similar looks. It was with friends who joined together, this picture. Right when they start. He had to shave his mustache soon after this. This was a farewell-to-mustaches picture.” Mark picked up the photograph and stared at the antiquer’s absolute double (but for the fatigues), the soldier’s head thrown back, allowing him to look down his nose with ironic martial bravado. “Come to look here.” He led Payton to a corner of the store, where oil paintings in golden frames lined the walls and leaned against each other on the floor. “My grandfather.”

  High on a yellow wall hung the same man’s face again. Here, his mustache was slightly longer and his hair swept back. He wore a blue cavalry uniform with golden braiding on the shoulders, and he stared, in three-quarters view, from out of the dark background tones. The haughty officer’s eyes, from a head thrown slightly back, followed Mark’s with military frankness as the scholar walked back and forth in front of the painting.

  “He wears the uniform of the emperor’s guard. We have it still, there.” The man waved across the shop at a headless cloth mannequin in a braided blue jacket, matching tight trousers, and spurred black leather boots. “I do not sell these, of course. For now.” The shopkeeper returned to the desk and riffled through more paintings leaning against the back wall. “Here, we find it,” he exclaimed, and turned to face Mark with another golden frame, this one smaller. Two Hungarian hunting dogs, vizslas, lay awake on a floor of chessboard black-and-white tiles. A young boy knelt beside them and rested one hand on the head of each dog. He wore short pants, a velvet shirt, and a lace collar. A woman, presumably his mother, wore her dark hair loose, and it fell over her shoulders and blood-red dress. She smiled slightly from within the embrace of a large ornate chair. She held a baby in flowing baptismal clothes. Standing beside her, his hand on her shoulder, in front of half-open French doors revealing a green park, stood—yet again, to Mark’s delight—a man with the shop owner’s face. Now he wore an expression of serene, paternal pride, his head again tilted slightly back. His uniform featured long tails over tight white trousers. An eyebrow was slightly cocked. He wore no mustache and his long black hair was held in a short ponytail, but the resemblance was otherwise total.

  “This,” the owner said as his finger hovered near the baby in the baptismal gown, “is my great-grandfather, the father of him.” He gestured toward the headless mannequin. “This boy, soon after this”—he pointed to the elder child with the dogs—“died. This is lucky, I think. For my line. The picture is done in 1822. The boy with the dogs, who is dead, is five here. His father, my great-great-grand, I think is born in 1794. He was a nobleman, you can see.”

  “All the men in your family serve in the military?” The antique dealer clicked his tasseled-loafer heels, and Mark asked if there was a picture of the man himself in uniform.

  “Of course, of course,” he replied, and his English began to grow oddly worse: “But is not of pride. It only, you must know, tradition one way and desire another.” Mark nodded encouragingly. “I have a picture, but I find it very little.” He brought out a small plast
ic photo album, turned a few of its pages, and pointed to a black-and-white snapshot glued under a cellophane sheet. “This is when I am twenty. I am in a base near Győr and we train against Austrian invasion. A ridiculous idea, you know, to think we fight Austrians in 1970.”

  The photograph showed a young crew-cut soldier in green fatigues, staring at the camera, holding his floppy cap. His head was angled slightly downward, and his broad smile appeared almost shy as a result. His eyes wrinkled up tightly as if he were facing bright sunlight. His face was tanned and clean-shaven. “This one here is you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. But it is not like my father or grandfather, is it?” The man was not referring to any physical dissimilarity. “I am not a free man here who fights for his people, am I? No. I am here a boy who has no choices. To fight in that Hungarian army was like to be a slave for Russia. It was like the Hungarian Legion of the Russian Soviet Imperial Army. My father fought for Hungary. My grandfather fought for his emperor. My great-grandfather and his father—these were proud men. And they carry arms for their people and their families and their land, for Magyarország, for Hungary. And I?” He stared hard at Mark, his resemblance to his painted ancestors growing. “In 1970 I must join a conqueror’s army. I should be an officer, a cavalry officer to be commanding, but I am instead a slave, or a trophy, like when my family’s land becomes a collective farm. And I can never be a high officer, because my family history make me a class criminal, you understand. What must I do? Hey? What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A soldier fights, but a Hungarian cannot accept this lie of an empire, this Russian shit. What do I do? Do I fight like a brave man or do I say no like a brave man?”