Prague Page 7

  “Four flights of stairs, sixty-four steps top to bottom, and in the courtyard an elm tree. The boy would be climbing it today. You hear, Károly? A tree in your—oh never mind, he’s lost in his soldiers . . .”

  “The tiles meant to look like a Byzantine mosaic . . . I’m sure some Red bastard has smashed . . .”

  As he grew up, however, none of his parents’ dictates or practices could protect him from the flood of English words and American habits. Friends, movies, school, books, television: Cleveland and Hollywood occupied far more of the known world than did that unknown faraway city, the black-and-white stories of long ago, the confusing, urgent, parochial politics, and the language none of his friends could speak but which several of them compared to a slimy alien’s gurgling in Star Wars.

  The boy handed down the sentence of banishment three years prior to its execution: At age nine he announced to his parents that he was tired of people calling him Ca-RO-lee rather than KAR-oy and therefore he would henceforth be called Charles, a dictate happily accepted by everyone he knew except his parents; but he was twelve when Hungarian words finally grew less familiar than English ones. Twelve-year-old Károly the Hungarian lived dormant inside Charles the Ohioan throughout high school, college, and business school, unnecessary, unnoticed, unwelcome.

  His Hungarian stopped developing when he was twelve but clung to him like a vestigial appendage. He spoke Hungarian only in occasional private conversations with his parents in front of third parties. And with this linguistic divide came an inevitable cultural one. His father in particular began to see Charles as a foreigner who needed education to be restored to his heritage.

  “Admiral Horthy was misunderstood,” his father lectured him after disgustedly tossing aside Charles’s eleventh-grade history textbook and its single mention of Hungary’s appearance in the Second World War, included in a sidebar list of Other Fascist Countries. “Americans have no appetite for anything other than black or white. There were more than merely bad guys and good guys. It wasn’t a cowboys-and-Indians John Wayne movie, you understand? Tell that to your ridiculous teacher. Horthy kept the Nazis out as long as he could and fought the Russians. Who else does your little school think could do that? Churchill? Incidentally, you might inform your teacher of what passes for history in this country that the proper term for that act of rape on page 465 is Trianon.”

  But having bided his time, Károly the Hungarian awoke one day. The 1989 revolutions in Central Europe and Charles’s omnipresent belief that he was destined for something better than his classmates led him to tell the recruiter, “Yes, I speak fluent Hungarian and would welcome the challenge of helping open the firm’s Budapest offices.” Suddenly Károly was again a valued and welcome member of Charles’s psychic cast and crew. Unfortunately, Károly was still twelve. As a result, the investment professional who arrived in Budapest in October 1989, after three months of peculiarly infantilizing training in New York, was a cocky, opinionated young venture capitalist of style, intelligence, and intuition who, in Hungarian, unbeknownst to his employers, spoke to the managers of potential investments very much like a twelve-year-old boy in a well-dressed man’s body.

  One morning, John sat on Charles’s office couch and photographed Charles, looking important at his desk, the picture window behind him comprising one-third Danube, one-third Castle Hill, one-third cirrus-smeared heavens. The photo, which Charles sent home to his parents, showed five stacks of files in front of him. Each stack was of a different height, and Charles explained to the semi-interested John what he did all day, most days.

  Every morning, Zsuzsa, the firm’s Hungarian office manager, nestled new files into leather covers embossed with the firm’s logo (a knight holding high a sword, looking forward into the gloom while sheltering behind him a disheveled, nearly nude maiden). This stack of files on the left—Charles tapped the tower of booklets—represented IQs, Incoming Queries: letters and materials that argued hopelessly on behalf of old state-owned Communist enterprises seeking private investors, inventors requesting seed funding, groups of young entrepreneurs wishing to form a casino, et cetera.

  Every afternoon, Zsuzsa would remove the stack on the far right, nearly equal in teetering altitude: SRs—Summary Rejections. Here were yesterday’s state-owned companies, too inefficient to merit resuscitation and with little value even as scrap; inventors too implausible to earn even an interview; and young managers whose inexperience made Charles shake his head in wonder. He had quickly concluded that virtually the entire managerial class of the country was either without experience or burdened by years of the wrong experience courtesy of Communism’s inefficiencies, irrelevancies, immoralities.

  Between the pillar of Hungarian hopes and its near twin of despair lay three significantly smaller stacks. The first—Investigation Requests—was composed of those offers interesting enough to warrant further interviews, on-site visits, requests for financial data, and so forth. Charles passed these files with a strictly enforced four-line summary of his findings to the office’s managing partner, a forty-four-year-old VP from New York, burdened with not a single word of Hungarian but with nineteen years of Wall Street experience. This leader leaned inordinately on Zsuzsa and the bilingual junior members of the team. Resenting his sudden neediness, however, he would frequently and with strident machismo lecture them about “how it’s done Stateside.”

  With some excitement at first, Charles followed up on those few cases approved by the VP for further investigation—Under Reviews. But this long-awaited action usually disappointed. Charles laughed through interviews with talented young entrepreneurs willing to surrender too little control or hypothetical profit for the American dollars they sought; nerve-racking exhibitions of prototype inventions unable to perform their hypothetical tasks as despairing inventors grew first chatty then weepy; and tours of state-run factories every bit as laughable as their American P.R. agency–penned descriptions had been arousing.

  “Usually,” said Charles, sighing.

  But for every 5 percent of Investigation Requests that the VP approved and elevated to Under Reviews, perhaps 5 percent of those stood up to some scrutiny. These became the tiny little stack of HPs—Hot Prospects. These files then went back to the VP with Charles’s second report, now allowed to bloat to five lines, as a single line of Analyst Recommendations was permitted. And after nearly seven months on the job, Charles had seen exactly none of his HPs return. Some had been rejected out of hand by the VP, who expertly discovered some minute flaw in the material Gábor had naïvely collected. Others had received the VP’s endorsement only to be vetoed by the New York office for being insufficiently flashy or potentially lucrative to be the firm’s first Hungarian venture.

  “First?” John smirked.

  “Our first,” Charles repeated with disgust, “while they pour money into Prague.” Eight months after Charles’s arrival, nine to eleven months after adoring articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the Hungarian press declared a brave new world, eight months after historic meetings with the finance minister and receptions with the prime minister, eight months after the ninety-nine-year lease had been signed, handing over the former headquarters of an obscure and extravagantly nasty division of the secret police, seven months after Charles had read his first nervous and badly phrased request for money, nothing had been accomplished. “And nobody cares,” Charles said as he slumped back into his chair. The cost of running the office was a small expense for the firm; they could afford to take their time and get their P.R. just right.

  But Gábor was not going to be a junior member of the team forever, or even for very long. Eventually the Very Pathetic, the Presiding Vice, would tire of being essentially illiterate, his ache for the good old lunches at the Box Tree and the Quilted Giraffe would overwhelm him, and he would relax back to New York with tales of the quaint Hungarians (of whom, Charles said, the man knew perhaps two, including his office manager). By that point, Charles’s value to the firm would be
so evident that his promotion to head of the office, or at least to a job where decisions were made, would be a given.

  Alternately, he told John, Budapest being what it was right now, he would have no problem finding investors of his own even that very day. Raising money in Hungary was beautifully easy, he explained. The hotel lobbies were sloshing with it. You just needed a suit and a bucket. Bored rich men and the hungry, beady-eyed representatives of bored rich men occupied nearly every room of the major hotels, boldly executing “fact-finding missions,” proudly reminding one another that “since democracy requires free markets, a high-return investment is nothing less than a blow struck for liberty.” “You’d love these guys, John. You can’t swing a dead cat in the Forum lobby without knocking them down and watching money fall out of their pockets.” Charles had met a few of these capitalist pilgrims in his office, at embassy parties, in the lobbies. His conservative assessment was that in six months or less, he could raise whatever backing he needed to make a fortune on the Hot Prospect of his choice.

  XIII.

  WHO WON THE COLD WAR? WE DID. OUR GENERATION. OUR SACRIFICES broke the Communist behemoth. Yes, granted, okay: Our parents lived through the flickering black-and-white-footage days of the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam. But those of us born under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford— we are the triumphant generation. We faced Armageddon from birth; we never knew any other way but mutually assured destruction, and we never blinked. We came of age staring down Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Ustinov. We were inured to their stony silences, wrinkly faces, and short reigns. When Gorbachev peered out from his Kremlin bunker, what did he see? He saw us entering college, pretty much willing to make do with slightly smaller student loans in order to fund Star Wars, doing what had to be done, voting for Reagan.

  We were the Soviet studies majors; we skimmed all our reading on Communism and we never once doubted that dreary doctrine’s worthlessness. No Cambridge spy rings, no pink fellow travelers in our ranks. Those who went to farm stuff for the Sandinistas were laughed at, and they came home chastened. We read the CIA technothriller novels—all of them. We laughingly registered for a theoretical draft and in such numbers as to make the Kremlin quake. And never forget that we were the generation that inspired MTV and CNN; no Berlin Wall could keep them out and no red-blooded East German could look at the choice of Madonna or Erich Honecker, Miami Vice or the Stasi, and not think it was time for a change.

  My God, that was a time, that was a feeling then. You knew where you stood. You stood arm in arm with your friends, in summer internships in Washington, D.C., or backpacking through France, arguing with snot-nosed Danish kids who were certain that the Cold War was all about American imperial stubbornness.

  “Where were you when they let the satellite nations go, Grampa? Where were you on VCW Day?” These are the questions our grandchildren will ask us, and I for one will be damn proud to answer, “Me and my buddies were there, Timmy—the whole time. We were in our dorm room and we watched the whole thing, on a screen so big and with Surround Sound speakers so powerful you could practically feel the sledgehammers hitting the stone. That was freedom, Timmy. We did that for you.”

  Who brought down the Berlin Wall? You and me, Jack, you and me.

  And yet, and yet, at what cost? Who among us can say we came through it unscathed? Who among us doesn’t look back on a youth largely stolen from us? Sunny days, but not for those of us on the front. Yes, we forged friendships tested by fire. And we are men, though perhaps too soon. Our souls have seen the abyss. A blessing? A curse? Simply a fact, my friends.

  And now we are the occupying army, benevolent, offering our vanquished erstwhile foe an open hand and a fresh start: smart investment opportunities, top-notch language instruction, and a whole generation of neo-retro-hippies, bad artists, and club kids. Just like MacArthur in Japan.

  A fresh start for them, but for us? I’m afraid of the answer to that question. We must simply nurse our wounds and hope that our children and our children’s children and our former foes’ children and our former foes’ children’s children will fully bloom in this new Arcadia, paid for by our sacrifices. We must cultivate our garden.

  See you Friday night at A Házam!

  Scott put the newspaper on the desk, admitting to himself that John was at least good for a laugh if nothing else, and looked at his class. “Okay. Vocabulary questions first. Yes, Zsolt?”

  “Arcadia?” asked the young engineer.

  “Arcadia. Like paradise. Eden. A mythological reference to a green place, free of worry. Kati?”

  The woman from the travel agency moved her lips for a silent sentence before recalling the sound, “Snot-nose?”

  “Snot-nosed. A slang word. Literally, their noses are wet and running. Snot is a vulgar term for nasal fluid. Figuratively, the term means immature and arrogant simultaneously, childish in a negative way.”

  “And this word, this snot-nose—”

  “Snot-nosed,” accentuated Scott. “It’s adjectival.” Over the previous forty-five minutes Scott’s handwriting had materialized in different colors on the white board: Your hair color changes as often as my wife’s/Your hair color changes as often as my wives. Dafter law/daughter laugh. Cough. Rough. Plough. Thorough. Through. (Good luck, Magyars!) And now he added: snot-nosed.

  “Yes, okay, this snot-noseduh, it is only for the Danish?”

  “Are only the Danish snot-nosed? No, but a good question. The writer does refer to Danes here, but perhaps not literally. Perhaps he refers to a generic type of mid-eighties, reflexively leftist Western European youth. I think the writer could just as easily have used Norwegian. I’d say this is a good example of synecdoche as we discussed yesterday.”

  “Who is this writer?” asked Ferenc, a lawyer working for one of the large new Western firms.

  Scott answered that the piece was drawn from the previous day’s BudapesToday and labeled as the first of a new column, “Notes from the New World Order.”

  Ferenc asked, “Is this a view that—I do not know the word. Do Americans believe like this? What he is writing here?”

  “Do Americans believe it? I don’t know. I suppose some might.”

  “Do you?” asked Zsófi from the medical school. There was a sharpness in her question that irritated Scott; he recognized with distaste her usual ambivalence to ambiguity.

  “Do I?” Scott walked around to the front of his desk, hoisted himself up, and let his heels bounce a few times off its dented steel apron. “Well, how about this. Do you think the writer believes it?”

  Scott Price’s Advanced Conversation, Comprehension, and Analysis Class, students aged twenty-eight to forty-six, did not immediately respond. The class’s discomfort grew palpable—something more than the Beginners’ shyness or the Intermediates’ struggle for vocabulary—a feeling Scott took as a good sign, hard thinking.

  “Why does he write it down on the newspaper—”

  “In the newspaper, Ildikó.”

  “Yes. Why does he write it down in the newspaper if he is not believing—”

  “To believe is a state of mind verb, Ildi, remember.”

  “Okay. Yes. Why does he write it down in the newspaper if he does not believe it?” Ildikó, her grammar in order, looked at Scott as if she deserved an answer.

  “Why does he write it in the paper if he doesn’t believe it? I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it, Ildi. I don’t know if he does or not. What clues are there in the text? What’s under the words? That’s really the only thing that matters. Pull it apart. What can you find? That’s my question to you guys.”

  “I am thinking maybe it is not a good question, Scott,” said Zsófi, the medical researcher.

  “To think: state-of-mind verb,” he replied. “In the world of science you may be right, Zsófi. But what do I say about English? Tibor?”

  Tibor spoke very slowly and with a trace of the British accent imprinted on him by his first English teacher. He stroked his unruly black beard as he ta
lked. “English is a matter of attitude as much as vocabulary, you say, Scott. I know you say this. It does seem to be more true than of Hungarian or German. Your slang changes more rapid, and your culture style has encouraged more, mmmmph, more shattering? Shattering of the tongue into groups of speakers?”

  A few attempts were necessary to untangle the linguistic wiring of Tibor’s thought, but he and Scott finally succeeded, and Tibor continued as Scott printed the new vocabulary on the white board. “Yes, to splinter into subcultures, each with their own language. Yes. Exactly.”

  Tibor had a Ph.D. in Hungarian literature, spoke fluent German, read Latin and Greek, was a published author on the work of the nineteenth-century Hungarian revolutionary poets Sándor Petfi and Boldizsár Kis, and was expecting a university appointment for the approaching term. Scott, as he told the students the first day, “spoke flawless English vernacular, a product of twenty-seven-odd years of rigorously enforced linguistic immersion in an Anglophone culture.”

  His pupil proceeded: “It is my belief that irony is the tool of culture between creative high periods. It is the necessary fertilizer of the culture when it is, how does one—mi az angolul, hogy parlagon hever?”

  Zsófi, though entirely at a loss as to what Tibor was getting at, was the fastest with the Magyar-Angol dictionary. “To lie fallow,” she reported proudly.

  And Scott was back at the white board writing in red erasable marker: To lie fallow. Fallow (adj. agr.) Tibor continued to massage the mass of twisted black hair falling from his chin. “Fallow. Yes,” he began again. “American culture lies fallow now. There is nothing living, only things waiting. And the earth gives off only a smell. This smell, not pleasant, is irony. Like this newspaper writer. Very self-knowing.” Self-conscious (adj. psych.) “Yes. This is the self-conscious newspaperman’s place in the world, I am thinking. It is the role now of your writers and thinkers in your culture to absorb what have come before, to filter the last good harvest, and to throw off the—the bad wheat.” Chaff (n. agr.) “To throw off the chaff. To clear the land. Put in fertilizer. Put the good grain in the tall barn.” Silo (n. agr.) “In the sheelo. To throw off the chaff, put good grain in the sheelo, put the bad-smell irony everywhere, and wait for new seasons.” Tibor stroked his beard. The rest of the class looked to Scott as the day’s curriculum had unexpectedly delved deeply into agricultural questions.