Prague Page 8

  “Well. Who agrees with—”

  “Oh, also, Scott, I am sorry.”

  “Yes, Tibor?”

  “Arcadia is not a mythological paradise as Eden. It is a real part of the Greekland.” Greece (country) “A real part of the Greece. It symbolized first, as you say, a green and perfect country life, but then we learn that Arcadians were very uneducated and violence and cruel. For smart people then after, Arcadia is a symbol of intellectual’s wrong effort to see happiness in savages.”

  Silence.

  “Okay, great. Thank you, Tibor.”

  “This is not good,” insisted Zsófi. “It is a simple question, yes? Does he think it is true, he saved us from Russians by liking to watch MTV?”

  István, a young politician from one of the new parties, who would six years hence become minister of the interior, responded, “It is Marx upside down, and I think, yes, he may be right. Capitalism provided for people better than Communism, and with strong TV signals everybody knowed it.”

  “Knew. Simple past. Know, knew, known.”

  “We all knew it.”

  XIV.

  “YOU WANT COME HOME WITH ME?”

  Mark, who had been staring at the young man from across the nearly empty bar, answered yes in a lurch. “No,” he corrected himself. “You come home with me.”

  And so it was that Mark Payton slept with his first Hungarian and later, when the need to make conversation returned, found himself in the cliché role of the spent adventurer who seeks to feel human again with the stranger in his bed.

  Early summer moonlight spilled over the bedside windowsill and onto Mark and László, both stretched out nude. László smoked a hand-rolled post-coital cigarette, a nostalgic affectation Mark found charming and atmospheric, and he read the gesture as a sign that this Hungarian stranger felt as the Canadian did about the world. The smell of the cigarette rising in the old apartment brought the building to life, made Mark’s Buda home more real to him. Such cigarettes had been rolled and smoked here during wars and revolutions, under tyrants, at moments of hope, during peaceful stretches of simple domesticity. Mark thought of his own childhood homes, of dormitories and first apartments, all modern, bare of history and therefore of peace. Here, though, was a bridge to the better past, smelling of tobacco from a plastic pouch.

  “They say the best place to learn a language is in bed.” Mark delivered this ridiculous proverb in a plausibly deniable tone but still hoped to provoke the offer of an intimate, collegial tutorial. The Hungarian made a quietly dismissive noise.

  Mark tried again; rolled over and propped his chin on his stacked fists. “Elnézést, uram, megtudná mondani mennyi az id?”

  László laughed low. “You learn in a class?”

  “Yes. Igen. And on my own. Why are you laughing? Did I say it wrong?”

  The man blew a stream of smoke at an angle just slightly away from Mark’s face. “You speak anything besides English or you like all Americans?”

  “Okay, one: Kanadai is different than amerikai. And two, yes. I read classical and church Latin and ancient Greek. I speak pretty good Quebecois. I have functional Cornish and I can speak Manx.”

  “Don’t get angry on me,” said László, flicking ash into a bedside glass of water. “I just am wanting to say that in these languages—”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Fine, okay, you not angry. But look. In English you say, ‘Hey, man, what time it is?’ Right? So where did you learn Megtudná mondani mennyi az id?”

  The scorn surprised Mark. He had learned it from a Hungarian textbook. Didn’t it mean What time is it?

  “No. It means, ‘Excuse me for bothering you, very high up sir, I am nothing, you are a big important person, we are from different classes, I am like an animal. I am guilty to bother you and you are ashameful to talk to me, but I am too poor to own a watch and too scared to go into store to look at a clock, I am dirt, but can you please, please, be good and tell me what time is it and then maybe spit on me if you like, since I am only a little faggot to you?’ ” László took one last drag, then dropped the butt into the water glass, where it made the sound of fading expectations.

  “I said all that, actually? Hungarian is awfully efficient.”

  “Man, what time it is? Mennyi az id? That’s it. Simple.”

  Mark rose from the bed and walked to the bookshelf to find his textbook and notes. “But what about being polite?”

  The naked Hungarian lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. “What I say was polite. But yours, yours was like British shit. We are not British, man. We have chance to be new now, with the Communist shit finished. What will be us now? We start from nothing, so why be British? These are rare chance now, you know?”

  The intellectual point—the idea of developing a new culture based on free elections—struck Mark as laughably ahistorical, but, relieved at least that the nude man was interested in subjects like this, Mark grasped at the chance for connection. “You can’t make new people, László. You still speak the same language. Besides, it was only the government. You still have your culture and the country and the buildings and people’s habits.” Mark disappeared into the kitchen and struck a match to light the stove, an Old World necessity he found beautiful and comforting. He put on a kettle and called into the next room, offering tea.

  László sat cross-legged on the bed and rolled another cigarette, then put on his briefs and rose to examine Mark’s shelves. He turned his head sideways to read the spines. The authors’ names nearly all ended with Ph.D. and M.Phil. The covers were colorless and the titles bisected with colons: The Devil You Know: State, Society, and Angst in Berlin, 1899–1901. Mapless, Flapless, and Hapless: Early Popular Images of Aviation. Mistakenly Thought: A Compendium of Discredited Science. You Had to Be There: Approaches to Humor, 1415–1914. Piqued in Darien: Expressions of Emotion in WASP Culture, 1973–1979, by Lisa R. Pruth, M.Phil.

  Mark returned to his bedroom holding two cups of tea. He found László wearing underwear. Two lamps were now on, and the foreigner was messing up the order of Mark’s books. The curtains were still open, and Mark was at a loss as to what to do first. Put on his own underwear? Close the curtains? Protect his belongings? He felt himself suddenly sweating, and his chest and stomach hurt. He sloshed the tea on the TV table, grabbed his own underwear and jeans, tugged them on hurriedly, and sat in the apartment’s only chair.

  “Hey, relax, man,” said László without looking up from the title page of You Had to Be There. “You read all these books?” László asked in the present tense. Mark thought the stranger’s voice carried some scorn or doubt. Only later would he wonder if it had just been the untranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions.

  “All of most of them, most of the rest of them.” Mark’s stock answer spilled out of his mouth in one sullen, toneless word—allofmostofthemmostoftherestofthem—and he watched it fall into the linguistic cracks between the two of them. A syllable or two splintered off and lodged in the Hungarian’s ear. Mark saw him wrestle with the words and was pleased he had confused this arrogant foreigner, had forced him to acknowledge his lack of what he probably valued most: English fluency.

  “All or most of the rest?”

  “Yeah. That’s right,” Mark replied. “Mostly all of rest or not within.”

  The Hungarian nodded and looked back at the book he was balancing open. He sipped his tea. “What else you learn from your book of Hungarian?”

  And as quickly as it had come, it left. Mark softened and answered with a proud smile, “Legyen szíves, uram, kérek szépen egy kávét.”

  “Man, you go and do it again, fuck Jesus. You want a coffee, just ask it. You say please fifteen times first the waiter gonna be asleep. Kávét kérek. That’s it, man.” He examined the author’s biography on the inside back cover of Piqued in Darien.

  “Yeah, but why should I trust you, László? What if everyo
ne in Hungary thinks you’re the rudest guy in the country and I learn how to speak Hungarian from you and then I’m the second rudest guy in the country, even though actually I was polite at home, even for a Canadian? Suddenly polite Mark becomes rude Mark and I never even know it.”

  “Big fuck. Who’s cared?”

  “I’m not scared. I’m just saying—”

  “Nobody’s cared.”

  “Okay, some people are scared, but so what?”

  “So, fine, one guy’s cared, but just be different and new. Be rude, man, if that’s what life and Hungary make you.”

  “You’re not Hungary, László. You’re just you. You’re just—”

  “Yes, nice working. You catch me. I trick you. The secret police pay me to make foreign men act rude. You’re a genius from reading all your books.” He tossed the book on the bed, kicked his jeans up off the floor and into his hands.

  Mark saw in the collection of the jeans the clear first step to the door. Thinking only slightly, he stood up, placed his tea on the table, took off his own jeans, and lay back down on the sofa bed. “Hey, don’t go. Tell me about the new, about what the new Hungarians will be like. Tell me about that.” The words crowded their way out of Mark’s mouth, but László kept dressing.

  The Hungarian pulled on his Rolling Stones concert tour T-shirt and slumped into the chair to put on his socks and Nikes. “What the hell, man? What is that—a question for some study book? I just say we aren’t British or German or old Communists. We will just be people now. You are not understanding what I mean, but”—he stood and put on his varsity-style letter jacket as Mark lifted his own hips and slid off his boxer shorts—“but that’s your thing, I think. Ciao.”

  “Ciao,” said Mark quietly, naked. László turned away: 1972 FREE MY VALUE TIGERS it said in English on the back of his jacket in the swooping sewn-on typeface of American high school sports teams. The door closed and Mark listened to László walk past the window, alongside the courtyard, down the steps.

  Mark Payton lay on his back, and though he cried until the pillow collected two wet spots on either side of his head, he also had to admit that he found the whole thing very, very funny. He struggled to remember the exact wording of the ludicrous jacket; that would be essential for retelling.

  XV.

  BY THE END OF JUNE, HIS PRIMARY REASON FOR HAVING MOVED TO BUDAPEST growing increasingly unattainable and more and more ridiculous to him anyhow, John Price had developed a habit of saying good night to his wife and child before bed. Sober or drunk, he would stop to visit with them at their permanent positions atop the cable box and on the bedside table. He would kiss his fingers and place them on their lips or brows. When he was sober, the entire ritual was, of course, a comedy. “Sleep well and dream of me, doll face,” he would say to the woman in the dress. “Tomorrow is another day, tiger,” he told the incurably unhappy baby.

  When he was drunk, however, the ritual was more complicated. To an observer (of which there were none) it would not have been absolutely clear that John understood these photographs were not truly of his family. There would be no irony in his tone as he described his day to the black-and-white photograph of the woman in front of the tree. He might sit in the chair across from her and lean forward with his legs apart in an effort to stay awake. He might doze for a minute, then half open his eyes with a muttered apology. He might say he had made a mistake in moving to this foreign city—it had seemed like a good idea in California, but now where else could he go? He would explain in grim detail how Scott had been an intolerable and intolerant figure for much of his youth, how Scott was disappointing him every day now and seemed to be enjoying it, then quickly laugh and do imitations of his editor or other people at the paper, trying to make her laugh, knowing it was only a photograph and yet still speaking to her as if a relationship existed, or perhaps just practicing for Emily. Hours might pass in which he slept in the chair and then he might awaken, some degree closer to sober, and as his eyes opened slowly and painfully, he would see her picture spotlit under the bedside lamp, just a few feet away from him in the darkness, like the end of a long journey just now in view, just a little farther on, and he would smile. “Are you still awake?” he might ask in the intimate whisper of 3 A.M. lovers who half arise, warm and happy, to find they have been in someone’s company during all those lost hours of sleep. And he would stumble to the still folded sofa bed.

  The next mornings, none of this remained, no memory, no idea, no anger toward Scott, no warmth of having slept in another’s company, only the tired ache and sour stomach, the dry gums and eyes and balled-up tissues, the warm and suspect spring water in plastic bottles, the cracked porcelain of the ancient sink, the fruitless search for an interesting cable channel, the first cigarette on the balcony and the accompanying first thought about Emily.

  JOHN HELD NOT ONE religious belief, was not a painfully closeted homosexual, boasted no particular physical deformities. Intelligent enough, interested in the world around him, not raised under any particular regime of antisexuality, not matrimony-mad, attracted to women in general and some women in particular, John Price was a virgin.

  A healthy American male, born in 1966, navigated adolescence and coeducational college and reached July 1, 1990, age twenty-four, a virgin?

  From well before puberty, from well before the first time he noticed a girl’s distinctive shape and perfume, from well before his first horrifying playground misinformation about the pertinent mechanics, from well before his first pounding, merciless erection, which threatened to drain the blood from his brain until he passed out, John Price had liked to read.

  An avid and precocious reader like his brother before him, from books he extracted pithy life lessons, which he kept in a small notebook, whose cover bore a picture of Willie Stargell, the charismatic captain and first baseman of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Opening in the sloppy printing of an eight-year-old, advancing to the cautious cursive of a ten-year-old, developing into the reckless swoops of a twelve-year-old trying to mimic his father’s hand, and then arriving at the sloppy printing of a college freshman, John inscribed lessons such as:

  age 8: avoid sea travel (Treasure Island)

  age 9: as you get older, it’s harder to have any fun (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

  age 9: don’t go looking for trouble (The Hobbit)

  age 10: it takes a lot of money to get out of trouble (The Count of Monte Cristo)

  age 11: sometimes it’s better to just leave well enough alone (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

  age 12: if you’re not really, really careful, you’ll grow up bitter (Moby-Dick)

  age 13: always know where your escape routes are and what you can use as a weapon in case of trouble (Heart of Darkness)

  age 13: don’t read too much (Don Quixote)

  age 15: it’s better to die, even to die slowly, than to get married (War and Peace)

  age 15: a lot of people feel like I do, but they’ve learned to hide it (The Stranger), because they’re phonies (The Catcher in the Rye)

  age 16: I want to live inside a glowing circle of love and romance (title never included; entry violently scratched out with black ink shortly after being written)

  age 17: once it’s past, forget it; it won’t help to think about it (The Great Gatsby)

  age 19, last entry, freshman year of college: No one cares. And why should they? (No Exit, Nausea)

  Some of these lessons were forgotten, consciously rejected, quietly outgrown, or modified for later use. But some weren’t. In his tattered notebook, among more than two hundred entries, one maintained vigorous control of John’s behavior for many years.

  It was written at age eleven, just about the same time he was forced to share Scott’s bed, because their father had been exiled to John’s on his way out the door for the first of many times: “Sex makes men behave how it wants, not how they want. Sex turns men into idiots and should be avoided, though this seems to be difficult.” (The supporting examples were en
tered over several years, in all those different handwriting styles: Mike Steele and the Cleanest Killer, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes’ A Scandal in Bohemia, Ivanhoe, Genesis, Lolita, Exodus, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Deuteronomy, Swann’s Way, and so on, through his freshman year of college.)

  There was something about that creepy Mike Steele thriller, something about the betrayals, fumblings, and uncertainties of d’Artagnan and Athos a year later, something about Sherlock (trusted, solid Sherlock!) mooning around after that ridiculous Irene Adler, not to mention Mr. Price. Somehow, at age eleven, and with some real pride, John Price had perceived, entirely on his own, what he took to be his first observed law of human nature. In book after book, story after story, sex corrupted principles, derailed careers, intruded into peace, tempted heroes into idleness and silliness. For a while, reading became literally sickening to him as hero after hero turned into buffoon, as nearly every book mapped the same tragic terrain. The eleven-year-old boy knew willpower would have to be engaged and sacrifices made, but he was ready: He would not have any of this sex.

  He had derived a very comprehensive plan by the time he was fourteen: Despite countless efforts to protect themselves with little “moralities” and “guidelines,” people (not least his parents and, lately, gargantuan Scott) continued to make fools of themselves; therefore, the only safely dignified sexual behavior, the only moral behavior—if you insisted on that word—was complete, uncompromising, lifelong no-sex-at-all.