Prague (18 page)

'A Rob Roy would be a small thrill," she smiled on him. "You are very kind."

Scott, though, rose and seized the excuse to leave her company. Her odd, old-fashioned, upper-class English spiced with the vague accents of Central Europe irritated him. John's clowning irritated him. Her dress irritated him and her drink order irritated him. John liking her irritated him. Anything that would keep John in Budapest one more minute irritated him. Scott would leave the club as soon as possible; he could do without these weekly fraternal tortures anyhow; maybe tonight would mark the end of that forced labor. He returned with his mineral water, John's Unicum, and—after the bartender had angrily consulted a little booklet tied on a chain to the back of the bar—a Rob Roy. He slumped into his seat and managed, "That's a nice ring."

The ancient hand encircling the light orange highball was weighted by a large green-and-silver barnacle. "You are very dear, Scott, to mention it. A gift from a time unspeakably long ago. It has been stolen from me, recovered, used as a bribe, and recovered again. What else? Let's see ... It was very many years ago at the center of a blackmail situation. And it appears on the hand of a French countess in a terribly mediocre painting from two and a half centuries ago, which you can still see in a very crowded room in the Louvre. This I know sounds a bit of a shaggy dog, but I am told it is true, on an exquisite authority." She held out her hand and gave the ring an appraising look. "It is in horrid taste, isn't it?"

And a strange pause in conversation. She smiled at the two young men, something less of condescension than of invitation, watched them weather her onslaught of improbability. The brothers both laughed—two very different sounds—and she quickly knew from the dissonant tones which of them would provide her more conversational pleasure this evening even before John said, "Why do I suspect you were doing the blackmail?"

"John Price, you are a cheeky young man and I think I am going to like you enormously. Perhaps I will answer your question after we have dined."

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"I am very glad you will do us the honor."

'A man of the press," she said over the paprikas and champagne. "Are you a brave foreign correspondent itching to dispatch from the front lines during our next inevitable Soviet invasion?"

"More of a society columnist, to be honest. A historian of the moment."

"Delightful. And Prince Hamlet?"

"I teach English to the local savages."

"And we are savages, are we not?" Nadja twirled a strand of gray hair around a long and wrinkled finger, a gesture half the men at the table found grotesque while the other half found it inexplicably enchanting.

She said she was half Hungarian, born in Budapest, in the palace on Castle Hill, in fact, though no more details were forthcoming. "I have lived elsewhere, however, for long stretches, as you Americans say. We have a most unfortunate habit of jollying up to rather the wrong side of world wars, haven't we? And then being invaded by our Russian friends to pay for our sins. I have been forced, from time to time again, to join the sorority of refugees. Yet I come back. And now we are invaded by handsome young men of the West, who come to write in the paper about us and to teach us their guttural, overly complex tongue and sell us better athletic equipment. To our invaders." She lifted a flute of the champagne she had suggested to John.

"To your invaders." One of the invading horde clinked glasses with her.

Scott decided that Nadja was like a hostess in a gentlemen's club, that she received a commission on overpriced drinks and food she charmed guests into ordering. Yet as bait, she seemed so microscopically specific a taste, he wondered how she could possibly earn. He watched his brother's face when she spoke, and vice versa.

"I, with various members of various families, left my country in 1919, returned in 192 3, left again in... 1944, returned in 194 6, left again—yes again, quite an addictive habit, isn't it?—in 1956 and returned only last year. And I think that is more than enough roaming the globe for one life."

"Did you lose everything each time?" John asked with undisguised awe.

"Money could be moved or hidden, even in those dark ages, John Price... But once"—she quietly laughed and gently skewered a cube of chicken paprikas—"once, I hoped to save—oh, this is a long and silly story. I must begin a little further back. In 19 56,1 was living in Budapest for ten years. I was married to a gentleman of great breeding and cultivation, but he had allowed himself to become embroiled in the anti-Soviet violence of that year. When the

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Soviets decided to finish us once and for all, my husband and I opted for a hasty departure. We had left it rather late, incurable optimists that we were." She sipped her champagne. "We needed to get to the Austrian border with some speed, but how much speed was not completely clear. The potential loss of money did not worry us; I could always play piano. We hadn't so very much to lose, quand meme. And I am not a sentimental woman, John Price, so the loss of old photos or mantelpiece gewgaws did not reduce me to sniveling. No, my husband and I had only one regret. We had collected in our years together a sizable library of books and a large set of record albums, neither of which were readily available in those days. Guests had brought us gifts discreetly, knowing our tastes. We had friends who worked in bookstores, one who managed the symphony and traveled with them, others made for us jazz recordings taken from the American radio. We were very proud of our home: books in Hungarian, English, German, French, recordings of classical and jazz musics." A pearl string of bubbles swerved and danced as she tapped on the side of her glass. "We could never, and certainly not at this late date, hope to carry our treasures out of the country with us. Hungary was closing its every border, every gap in its skin, with terrible speed. We had to accept this fate, that our treasure would be stolen from us, and there was terrible regret over this. But my beautiful husband was clever to the very end. He had an idea, you see, because ... well, I lied about not being sentimental, I'm afraid. I am really an incurable liar, John Price. It is a terrible character flaw and I must correct it. I will soon. You will help me. But in the meantime you must never believe a word I say. So, yes, he saw me weeping—it is ridiculous to say now—over Alice in Wonderland. Not the Bible, not Petofi or Arany or Kis, not even Tolstoy. I could not bear to lose my Alice. He saw me on the floor, holding it like a baby—and this is why I was begun to weep—holding it and a record of Charlie Parker called "Blues for Alice." First I was laughing—I had never noticed the two of them together before. I joked to myself that the song was about the book, and then I was crying, and my husband, gathering clothes for our escape, found me, acting a very foolish little girl. He did not scold me for wasting time. He understood at once why I was crying, and he told me what we would do, and we did it. We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene, John Price, for it was very beautiful. There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home. Where you grew up, where you and our Scott were boys. Where you fell in love and kissed your first little girlfriends.

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Now that road is shredded, torn in pieces, because tanks are very heavy, you see, much heavier than regular motors. These tanks are in your road, and there are boys not much older than children, younger by far than you are now, throwing bottles of gasoline at tanks! There are explosions echoing down the streets where you once played—what would you have played? Is it baseball? And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper. Listen to us: I am reciting as fast as he can write, sometimes he is abbreviating and I kiss him and swear I will kill him if he cannot read his little shorthands when we are in our new home. I am reciting and making the piles of books and records as he writes them. I still remember even some of the words I said, titles I will never forget. They still come to me at times for no reason: Bach, Brandenburg Concerti, six discs, 1939, Berlin Philharmonic, von Kara-jan conducting. Louis Armstrong Hot Sevens, 1927: "Willie the Weeper," "Wild Man Blues," 'Alligator Crawl," "Potato Head Blues," "Melancholy," "Weary Blues," "Twelfth Street Rag." Beethoven's Complete Music for Cello and Piano, Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals in Prades, France, 1953, three discs. What do you think of that, John Price? One hundred and thirty-one record albums, every song noted, conductors, dates, performers, places. Fourteen reel-to-reel tapes of radio broadcasts: Die Fledermaus, Metropolitan Opera, 1950, Ormandy—a Hungarian, you know—conducting. Adele sung by Lily Pons; Alfred, by Richard Tucker. Madame Butterfly, 19 52 at La Scala, Tullio Serafin conducting, Renata Tebaldi singing Cho-Cho-San. Art Tatum at the Esquire Concert in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, USA, in 1944 with Oscar Pettiford and Sid Catlett: "Sweet Lorraine," "Cocktails for Two," "Indiana," "Poor Butterfly." Dvorak's "Cello Concerto in B Minor," Pierre Fournier with Vienna Philharmonic, Rafael Kubelik conducts, 1952. My God, they still come to me so easily! And then three hundred and four books. Every author, the title of every story or poem in anthologies. Goethe's Faustus in two volumes and Young Werther, in German. Chekhov, stories in Hungarian. Every title, publisher, edition, description of covers, each—"

"That's ridiculous. This is completely ridiculous," Scott said, and immediately stood up. "It's impossible. It would have been suicidal. I'm afraid you're mis—" But he just shook his head and walked away from the table before he finished, wisely and healthfully refusing conflict.

Nadj a smiled at her remaining listener and accepted a light from him. "Well, you know, I must agree with your brother. Particularly as I listen to my-

self reciting those records. It is impossible. The story is quite absurd. I mustn't spout such fairy stories."

"Not at all, please. Ignore him. We're not even really brothers." "Tosh! Do not ever be polite to me just because I am as old as an antique vase, John Price. Of course my story is ridiculous. Scott is far cleverer than you, I think. No wonder you dislike him so. Yes, you do. But he is right: What sane person would believe that another sane person, while bombs explode and hours matter, as they rarely ever do, would write down the words"—she closed her eyes—"The Iliad, Pope's translation into English, cloth cover with golden floral design, 1933." She reopened her eyes and patted the back of John's hand. "Your brother is completely correct. Do not believe an old woman who tells such ludicrous stories. She is a menace to your happiness, John Price." She breathed out smoke, and John wished for all the world that Nadj a were twenty-four. "Yet there we were, and we did it. We knew there was a risk, of course, we were not fools, we were merely excited and sure that this was worth it and that we would survive and have this tale to tell later, elsewhere, to very impressed admirers like you and that we would have the pleasure of rebuilding this collection. Bombs are exploding down the street and we are writing our catalogue raisonne. We do not know what is the situation in the countryside. We do not know if we have one hour or one week to reach Austria. But we do it. By only candlelight, now my husband—my beautiful husband"—John was sincerely, momentarily jealous—"stands at the bookcase and seizes the books, reads titles as fast as I can write. I do not have his shorthands. He kisses favorite books even as he places them onto the floor for the last time. We are laughing sometimes at what we do. We were laughing when we finished our scribbling. He kissed me. We were laughing, John Price. We had won! We rescued our life—not just our silly bodies like the other refugees would do, but our very life together too. We spoke of when we will remake our home in London or Paris or Amsterdam or even your New York City. Every day we will do this: We will together pass our new, free days in searching in music and bookstores with our list and find our records and buy our books until the list jumps to life. We were laughing because we were escaping with the blue plans, the design for our happiness, and if they exploded our building, if they burned our books, if they melted our records with their flame-shooters, if they fouled my piano, they will still not hurt us.

"We left our home, finally, with the clothes we were wearing and our precious lists. Memory is peculiar: I can remember those descriptions of books and

records in details, but I am not at all certain how many pages we carry. I remember a group of papers, perhaps twenty pages. But I sometimes can feel the weight of hundreds of pages. I dreamt for many years of running with a single sheet between us, both of our hands necessary to support its heaviness. I can see that clearly as a memory, but I know this is not true."

The bartender, doubling as an announcer, introduced the evening's headline band. Scott returned with a drink and a refreshed smile, turned to watch five musicians take the stage. Three of them had played behind Billie Fitzgerald; John and Emily had bought them drinks—the Russian twins and the Hungarian pianist. Fitzgerald, though, was replaced now by two young American men in business suits and with shaven heads—a black singer and a white saxophonist. As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."