Prague Page 5
“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?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do what my grandfather would do. I train and I work with a gun and running and digging. If an enemy attack Hungary, I would fight. But they don’t attack. You know why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because the enemy already here. They never leave after the World War Second. So I am a bad soldier. I make mistakes. I lose equipment. I take my troop into the woods and we have wine and food and we talk all day instead of doing what the Communist idiots tell to do. I have honor by fighting the enemy by not fighting. But I have no honor as they had.” He waved at his ancestors on the walls, at the headless cloth mannequin. “No honor as a true, open defender of the fatherland.”
Disgusted at the rape of tradition by corrupt ideology, Mark sought the words to express his groaning empathy (and mild envy), unaware that he had simply been hooked by a sales pitch he had never seen in Canada and now appeared as naïve as some American tourist ready to buy an Elizabeth II Jubilee commemorative shaving mug. “And what do you shop for today? I can show you maybe a nice jewelry for your girlfriend?”
IX.
UNTIL THE DAY HE LEFT, NEWLY WED AND HEADED FARTHER EAST, SCOTT Price never looked quite at home in Budapest, and he liked it that way. He was, for a start, legitimately tan and shimmeringly blond. He smiled often, easily, and, in the eyes of the average Hungarian, excessively. He favored conversation about nutrition and digestion and the politico-economic implications of both. He daily braved the toxic fumes of Trabants, Dacias, Skodas, Wartburgs, and the occasional madly stampeding Mercedes to jog over the guidebook bridges and along the parapets and paths that run alongside the Blue Danube, which was this morning, as always, the deep cerulean Matisse blue of caramel or mahogany.
In his college shorts, running shoes, tank top, and a bandanna to hold back the white-gold sheaves of his hair, he irritated the Hungarian pedestrians, who, smoking more often than not, stared at him in his froth as he stamped by. It was one thing to run with your athletic teammates, all in matching track suits, or in the countryside as part of military training, but to wear almost nothing and sweat up and down the Corsó marked one as aggressively foreign. More than one old woman, conditioned in her own way, scolded Scott as he passed. “Don’t run fast near people!” she would bluster, unable to find the words to express her dismay. Not that it mattered, since Scott only had enough Hungarian to smile and puff out “Kezét csókolom,” the standard polite greeting of men to women. “You are going to kill someone!” they hissed. “I kiss your hand!” he would say, running backward. “This is not right to do, your running!” they yell. “I kiss your hand!” he says. “No running! No running!” “I kiss your hand!” Scott told his students he found their elderly compatriots to be charmingly loquacious and delightfully supportive of young men seeking to maintain good cardiovascular health.
Scott Price, happiest when arriving or departing (in or from cities, groups, relationships), discovered a very surprising continual joy living in one place as a perfect foreigner, living without language and outside of language. For the English teacher in a Hungarian world, every day was an arrival and refreshing departures were easy to execute. This was explicable: Scott knew that hostility was a language-borne virus. If only a few people could speak your language, then the vast majority of toxins were denied access to your system. To live here knowing only English, poor Spanish, and a few phrases of melodious, biblical Hebrew was to be almost completely vaccinated. Then, to have a few Anglophone friends and a nice job, a steady stream of pretty girls eager to pay to learn a few words of your valuable language (and, as he had heard it frequently said, the best place to learn a new language was in bed), well, you couldn’t help but be happy today, and tomorrow would probably not be too different, and anything unpleasant was now all the way across a continent and an ocean and a continent again. Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes.
Across the river and through the morning haze, Castle Hill shone, its dome and spire floating high over their rippling twins on the Danube’s surface, floating just above where Charles, John, and Mark were tossing a very foreign looking ball back and forth, laughingly discussing the antique store proprietor’s eloquent nationalism and unintentional ironies, and definitively determining the future of European politics and economics. Scott turned off the riverfront and onto the narrow streets that ran between and behind the three hotels lining the Danube, past the Hyatt and the Forum, past the John Bull English Pub and the Intercontinental, past the little grocery where fruit cost twice as much as anywhere else but where you could buy American toothpastes rather than the local brands (or the West German one with the unnerving label that sported cavorting devils and yellow-toothed ogres dancing around an ultra white–toothed maiden tied to a tree). Realizing he would be late to the football game if he didn’t head back in the direction he had come, Scott turned into the middle of Váci utca, dodged the velvet ropes corralling the line of people awaiting admission to McDonald’s, ran past the similar line at the store that sold one Western-brand athletic shoe and the mysteriously empty and lineless store that sold a different Western brand of athletic shoe. The sweat fell from his face and hair as he jogged past the pastry shops that daily tempted his onceobese self; past old peasant women who sat and stood on the pavement, displaying scarves and blankets to the tourists; past young Syrian men offering to sell forints for hard currency at some magic number higher than the bank rate; past “folklore” stores (with no lines crowding their entrances) where one could buy costumes of the Hungarian countryside, traditional dolls, china, crystal, paprika. German businessmen, their dress white socks flashing from under the cuffs of their shiny suits, entered hard currency banks and hard currency stores off-limits to the gooey-currency natives. Scott passed a young American in an expensive suit telling his younger, bald colleague, “—fully serviced offices. All top-of-the-line. I know people on the city council so finagling—” Hungarian teenagers in leather jackets smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and stood like James Dean. The Andean band sang of the Paraguayan highlands and love lost under the starry skies and the condor’s wings over the hut where . . . and so on, just like the Andean bands he had heard in Palo Alto and Portland and Prague, Harvard Square and Halifax and The Hague. But this time would be different, Scott decided; he was in Budapest to stay. A little patience would be necessary before John gave up and went back, but it shouldn’t be long now, and when he finally did break, he would take with him his contagious restlessness and dissatisfaction and guilt, his little gestures and phrases and attitud
es that stank of their parents and the past, and Scott would relax again and prove to himself that he had settled all that, left it far below him.
Scott arrived on the playing field on Margaret Island, the giant green trowel set face-up in the cloud-smudged river. His brother and friends were already there, and—dismissing as ironic John’s unironic awe at Scott’s outstanding physical condition—happily joined the opposing team, wishing only that it were tackle, not touch.
X.
FRAMED MAPS OF BUDAPEST AND THE COUNTRYSIDE; PHOTOS OF THE EDItor shaking hands with presumably famous people (each with that nimbus of celebrity, but none of the faces familiar to John); an old advertising poster for a Hungarian liqueur showing a man on a scaffold, a rope around his neck, licking his smiling lips in appreciation of his last-wish cordial; a doctored photograph of kangaroos and koalas frolicking onstage at the Sydney opera house; the first issue (2-18-89) of BudapesToday under glass; dunes and bluffs of paper eroding everywhere, on the desk, on chairs, on cabinets, on the floors, trembling as if sound might knock them over, yellowing into obsolescence while John waited for the man’s intimidatingly withheld attention.
“These words weren’t placed here at random, by God.” The editor’s Australian mutter had emerged at last, though he did not look up from the pages he was ferociously marking. “No sir, an intelligence, an almost human intelligence, placed these words in this order to achieve some kind of sense.” He examined John. “Though what fucking kind of sense it was certainly escapes me, I must say.”
“No good?” John asked, but the editor was scrabbling in one of his desk drawers.
“Where the fuck did I put that fucker, Mistah Proyce?” he asked, stooped, invisible behind piled papers.
“Which fucker, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir, Proyce. I’m only thirty. Call me chief. Ha! There’s the fucker!” The editor, bearing a rubber stamp at least three inches long, hove into view from behind the cresting tides. He pounded the stamp into the moist red embrace of an open ink pad and slammed it down twice on what he had been reading. “That’s the fucker I wanted, John boy!” He held up the sheet, stamped twice with the words WASTE OF MY INK & MY TIME. “And, olé, that’s the fucker, isn’t it, Proyce?”
“Yes, chief. That is evidently the fucker.”
The editor opened another drawer with nearly enough force to pull it clear of the desk. “Look at this one. I just got this one. People fax me inane shit all the time now, John-o, so look at this.” Another rubber stamp. The editor pushed a button on his fax machine, and a broad tongue of blank white emerged from between its lips. “Okay, okay, so let’s say that this is some unsolicited piece of shit faxed to me by some tosser, right? Right. Okay, here it comes: piece of shit, piece of shit, piece of shit.” He tore the paper from the machine’s maw and gave the black device a little pat of gratitude on its top panel. “Okay then, I read it and it’s some, let’s say, junior exec at a local branch of an investment bank who wishes he were a journalist instead, so he’s going to try to get his start by getting published on my pages, right? Right, Proyce?”
“Right, chief.”
“Wrong, you little bastard. No sir. I read it, this wanker’s best efforts”—the editor mimed reading the blank sheet of fax paper— “and he’s got, ‘blahblahblahblahblah’ and lovely, absolutely marvelous, it turns out that he has submitted his wisdom about—what a shocker—American investment bankers and Hungarian girls, and he even tells us the best place to learn Hungarian is in bed, isn’t he a great wit, and of course his piece sucks, mate, as I think you Yanks say. It sucks, right, Proyce, right? Right?”
“Sucks, chief.”
“So what do I do, John? I take this” —the new stamp—“and whammo!”—into the ink—“and blammo!” —onto the sad investment banker’s stumbling first efforts at prose—“and voilà, John boy, voi-fucking-là.” The editor held up the fax paper, blank but for the bright red words YOU ARE WASTING MY TONER. PLEASE RE-IMBURSE.
The editor looked John in the eye and breathed very deeply three or four times. “All right then, Mistah Proyce. You aren’t going to waste my time or my ink or my toner, are you, mate?”
“No, chief.”
“Where’d I put your fucking résumé, John-o?” He burrowed again into the shifting tectonic surfaces of his desk. “Voilà, my child. We have your life here.” As John waited, the editor read, moving his lips furiously but in no apparent relation to the text. He dropped the résumé onto the desk, from where it glided to the floor. “Give it to me straight, John. What do you really want to be doing?”
“Doing? This job? I was hired. Already. That’s why I’m here.” Pause for understanding response. “In this country.”
“Yes, Proyce, I know. Now, answer. What do you really want to be doing?”
“I suppose whatever needs, you know, doing.”
“No, fuck a sheep, John. I mean what is it? Are you a poet? Scripting a movie about a journalist at an English-language daily in an unnamed Central European capital, are we? Planning a hip documentary video about the crazy ways American kids are getting laid in Hungary? Secret business scheme? What’s the plan, kiddo?”
John wondered if the correct answer was to deny any interests outside of the newspaper or to confess to some deep but unachievable goal. The latter. “Yes, I chisel—”
“Fine. We’ve got that out in the open then, don’t we? No sin. Wish you all the best. Hemingway settles abroad, tired and cynical but ambitious, writes dispatches and jots down The Sun Also Rises in his spare time. Lovely. Wonderful career path. Hope things pan out for you and the rest of your lost generation here in Paris on the Danube. You heard that one yet, John-o? BP is Paris on the Danube? Reliving Paris in the twenties, all that?”
“No, chief.”
“Good. Ear to the ground. I like that in a cub reporter. Listen here, you don’t have any Hungarian, do you, mate?”
“No, I didn’t claim in my letter that—”
“John. Please. Shut up. I’m just confirming the situation. You don’t need Hungarian to do the job I’ve got in mind for you. You’re going to love this job. No worries, mate, you’ll soon have screenplays pouring out your arse.”
“Great. That sounds nice.”
“BudapesToday is my baby, and while I admit she’s no Prague Post, I’m going to let you play with her. You write me a column twice a week on just about whatever the hell you feel like as long as it’s about Budapest. Learn Hungarian—it can’t hurt, though in five years there won’t be a human soul outside the distant fucking Hungarian hinterlands who will speak it and nothing else. As they say in Latin, English is going to be the French language around here, and we are going to be the French-language daily, get me?” The editor had stepped from behind the desk and was walking in circles around John, punctuating his well-practiced speech with barks of “right?” and “get me?” and occasionally kneading John’s shoulders fiercely. “Now then, mate, when you’re done writing your poetry that will make you no money, you’ll wish you had worked harder for me so that you could cash in with me and go live in the fucking Greek islands instead of this God-forsaken paprika-stained Austrian test market. Get me? Write me expatriate and local color. Make it punchy, snide, modern. Do that long enough and well enough and we’ll find other tasks for you to perform and then you’ll get rich with me, yes?”
John asked about reporting, had thought he was hired as a reporter.
“Mistah Proyce, I have bilingual Hungarians. I have a wire service. Don’t go loitering around the prime minister’s office looking for a scoop. Just give my paper some style and I’ll be content.” He sat again and fondled his rubber stamps, red ink invading the crevices of his fingers. “One other thing. Don’t write screenplays in this building or on my time or on my word processors. Don’t piss off our advertisers. Don’t lie in print—not that anyone would sue us, not that this country even has libel laws right now as best as my lawyer can unearth them. Don’t forget you don’t speak Hungarian
and you probably cannot get any other job that pays even the pittance I’m going to. Don’t forget that if you went into real journalism at home, perhaps after thirty years you’d get an opportunity this good. Never forget that would-be Hemingways and Fitzgeralds are being airlifted into this country on C-141 transport planes and are night-parachuting into all the good cafés by the lost generation–load. So.” The seated editor offered John his red-blotched hand. “Don’t fuck up, mate. You are highly replaceable. First column for Thursday, please. G’day.”
And John was back in the “newsroom,” a tiny office space filled with writing and design equipment spanning sixty years of manufacture, with ten employees of three different nationalities, each with a desk, and every other desk’s bottom drawer containing an unfinished screenplay about life on an Englishlanguage daily in an unnamed Central European capital under the command of a colorful Australian editor-proprietor.
XI.
WHEN THE MONDAY SUN HOISTED ITS FIRST YOLK-YELLOW ARC OVER AN eastern hill of Buda, Emily Oliver was already waiting for it on the broad balcony of the newly built bungalow she shared with two other ambassa-babes (as one of the marine guards had dubbed Emily, Julie, and Julie). She was in the third part of a five-part high-impact-aerobics workout that she had done every morning since her first day at the University of Nebraska. No matter how late the night preceding, no matter the latitude or the longitude, no matter daylight savings or the season, she began the routine before sunrise and at the first glimpse of the sun, she would say, “Boo!” just as her father had done every morning in Nebraska, holding little Emily on his lap on a porch swing or at the kitchen table. “Quiet now, Emmy. This time we’ll surprise it and we’ll scare it and it’ll go back down and we can all go back to bed and get some sleep until tomorrow, when it’ll try to sneak up in the west.”