Prague (30 page)

By the middle of the 19 70s, he no longer slept well. He woke several times a night and each time had to wait longer before sleep would return. Having learned that changing positions did not bring relief, he forced himself to resist flipping from side to side in vain hope as the humming digital clock flipped from 2:30 to 2:31, 3:30 to 3:31,4:30. It was beneath a man of his history and purpose to moan and spin and gnash his teeth simply because sleep no longer came willingly or for long. If the world's most ridiculous tyrants could not break him, then a little lack of sleep would not reduce him to tears. He lay in bed, still but awake, for hours. Soon, mornings turned on him, grew crueler and crueler. A

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little before five, Horvath would make the first of several trips to the toilet. He would walk, at that hour, with very little of the statuesque majesty that he had acquired in his years of exile. He would wear his pajama bottoms tied under the loose and yellowing skin of his belly, and the strap of yesterday's sleeveless undershirt would fight for shoulder space with the thickets of coarse gray hair the barber arrested weekly as it attempted to creep to the level of the shirt collar. Now, though only in his sixties, he stumbled often and fell occasionally, though never with serious effect.

One morning in 1986, he came out of his apartment in his bathrobe and drank a glass of milk while enjoying the spring sun struggling through the dirty skylight over the building's courtyard. He stood at the railing of the rectangular walkway and wished his neighbors good morning as they emerged for work. A young man, a stranger, appeared, a little out of breath, from the top of the stairs to his left. He looked carefully at Imre's face, and Imre smiled. "Herr ... Rossmann?" he said after a slight hesitation. Blushing, he explained that he was supposed to meet someone here, someone he had never seen, he only had his description, and he was sorry to bother Imre, but if he was not Herr Karl Rossmann, could he show him which was Herr Karl Rossmann's apartment? Imre pointed to the door on the opposite corner of the courtyard, then entered his own apartment and, after the briefest pause, actually wept a bit, for he had been mistaken for Karl Rossmann, a very, very old man, a tremendously old man.

He grew vain. He began to require as much as ninety minutes to prepare himself in the morning, with exercises designed to tone aging muscle and complicated underclothes that shaped. He groomed and clipped and pared and filed and tweezed and powdered and tweezed again. He wore outfits that had to be composed with care, adjusted, then pressed just so with an intricate machine bought from a French company and shipped at great cost from Grasse.

In the late 1980s, as he slid deeper into his sixties, he did not think about retiring or selling the press; nor, on the other hand, did he vow to continue it at any cost or refuse to sell it under any circumstances. Months could pass without a thought for anything but commercial nuts and bolts: What was selling, can this paper be bought cheaper, why isn't this color registering properly, is Mike Steele still popular, should we increase the production of this or that or cancel this or expand that?

And then came 1989. From the first bulletins, Imre knew exactly what he was seeing, knew what would happen before it happened. Again and again, al-

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ways the same, history would repeat this gruesome dance of hope and despair: protest marches, a faint and almost funny optimism, a government confused— menacing one day, pleading the next, sputtering promises of reform (practically mispronouncing the unfamiliar word)—then the ominous crackle of the first gunshots, the rumbling, thundering approach of the inevitable, the familiar stench that would again rise from the shredded streets any day, any day now, and then . . . and then . . . nothing? This time an explosion that never came. He squinted through first one eye, then the other: he pulled his hands away from his ears, and there was no explosion. No retribution. No innocents slaughtered. No invasion from the east under cover of flimsy, insulting justifications. No tanks in the streets. No butterfly-fragile attention of the world alighting ever so briefly on the wound of Central Europe. Instead, impossible but true: an almost messianic impossibility come true, an unimaginable realignment of the very stars in the sky—the Wall down, the Iron Curtain down, the Communists down, and elections and freedom and the country free, and can such things be? Has an old man gone as mad as Lear?

And again, reading the latest papers in his cafe, watching the American cable news on the giant screen in his office, talking to his managers, he received it more strongly than ever, the strongest it had been in thirty-two years: Hurrying home from an irresponsibly long holiday came Imre's burning sense of purpose. That evening he did not pick up his habitual, latest Mike Steele novel from his bedside table. Instead, he laughed out loud. He laughed as he lay down. He put down the glass of milk and he laughed out loud at the latest unbelievable headlines from home.

He laughed because he understood. He had lived in Vienna all these years for a reason. He had maintained the press, despite his doubts, for a reason. He had been careful with his health, his appearance, and his money for a reason. He had not found a family, had not been tied down for a reason. He had found the strength not to quit for a reason—1956-1989: thirty-three years, a Christian number, and he laughed again. And now he was called home. He was called to make the press strong again, back where it belonged, and to let it serve as the memory and conscience of a people, and to make the press live into the next generation and the one after that and the one after that, and on and on, if he could be wise enough, if he could rebuild one more time, if he could find the right people to prepare and teach, people of culture and vision and strength and uncorrupted youth, if he could teach them well enough so that the importance of the press would sing to them as well, if he could write down for them

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those few diamond rules and principles that would assure the press's permanence. These new faces would provide Hungary with its memory and its conscience, and they would care enough to do important work for an entire nation and would learn, as he had learned, how to use their impermanence to build permanence.

The sharp clarity of this vision was beautiful, and Imre marveled at what had happened of its own accord: A purpose could grow over decades without your ever knowing, until the end, when a garden was laid out for you, a garden you helped plan and build without ever knowing it, and it waits for you.

That night Imre slept soundly and dreamed—not unpleasantly—of his father.

"MR.
 
HORVATH WILL JOIN
 
US
 
PRESENTLY. HE
 
IS APOLOGIZE
 
FOR
 
HIS
 
DELAY,

but ask we begin the coffee of us." Krisztina Toldy sat across from Charles Gabor at the long, blond-wood table of the conference room in the Vienna offices of Horvath Verlag and poured dark black into bone-white Hungarian china. The conference room, with a picture window that looked down on a large hall of silently spinning presses and blue barrels on orange forklifts, was decorated with a framed verse, paintings and photographs of Hungarian history, and engravings of the evolution of printing. Charles skimmed over the German and Hungarian captions with flickering attention: tidings of a new dawning age/And with the force of a ball from a pistol; Matyas Accepting the Peace of Breslau; Gutenberg Printing a; Kossuth Leading a; a Printing Press Circa; Imre Nagy Standing Tall Despite; a Printing Press Circa; Bank ban and the; a Printing Press Circa; maps of Budapest and Hungary 1490,1606,1848, 1914,1920, 1945, 1990.

Krisztina Toldy's spectacles hung on a thin golden chain around her neck, and her black-and-white hair was pulled back so tightly into a braid that individual hairs at the top of her forehead could be seen and counted as they emerged from their follicles. Charles counted for a while as they drank. She sipped with her eyes down, silently, and Charles pitied her slightly. There she sat, in charge of softening the money man, little knowing that everything she did amused or irritated him and little knowing that it absolutely didn't matter anyhow what she did because he had sat through enough awkward coffees in his months of venture-capital work, had heard enough slick or humorous or

stuttering assistants like Krisztina Toldy work their way through these opening acts, and nothing ever came of it. So he wished she'd get on with her spiel so that the man himself would appear on cue in a flurry of papers and hangers-on and they could talk just a minute or two longer, just long enough for Charles to find the weakness, figure out just why this whole thing was a crock of shit (which it must be if it was run by Hungarians, even Hungarians in Austria), and he could go spend the weekend in Innsbruck on the company's dime before heading back to BP on Monday to report to the Presiding Vice that this particular band of lazy Magyars wanted a billion dollars or the power of invisibility or a nuclear submarine in exchange for a 3 3 percent share in some paintings of Hungarian history and a big hall of undoubtedly outdated printing presses.

"He is great man, Mr. Gabor. You cannot imagine what he has faced against and achieved nevertheless. It is quite very remarkable." She spoke crap English (despite Charles's offer of either Hungarian or German) and with great earnestness, as if this were the first time she had found the words to say precisely what she had personally witnessed and come to believe. Charles scoffed without moving a muscle or making a sound, a skill of which he was very proud. "He save my father's life, Mr. Gabor," she continued confidently, unaware. "My father work for Mr. Horvath in Hungary. A day come when ..."

Oh great. A reminiscence. Charles felt he had heard this story before, but with different characters. Somebody had saved somebody else from some horrible disaster, but at terrible personal sacrifice and years of some sort of suffering, and yet no regret because whatever. Was this a movie he'd seen? So familiar . . . Ah yes, an old parental standby: One of Charles's distant cousins had done something not unlike this and, my God, can you even imagine the dilemma, Karoly, the sacrifice, the courage, the etcetera and the etcetera.

Charles played a private game to pass the time: He made all the facial expressions appropriate to Toldy's story but tried to do so without hearing a single word of what she was saying. To assure himself that he wasn't cheating, relying on her words to cue his sympathetic faces, he silently ran through German-language pickup lines he might need that coming weekend in Innsbruck. Occasionally, inevitably, her strident words broke through his defensive concentration. Then and only then he would allow himself the crutch of English in his mute seduction rehearsals, but only as long as was necessary to battle her back to inaudibility:

"There was only two doors and the hatch behind the main press. Very quick, Mr. Horvath push my father down into ..." I'm not trying to be pushy, but

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you remind me very much of a painting I saw today at the museum: You have that quick, raw energy and life, die wichtigste Sache...

"And there was Mr. Horvath who merely say, 'Gentlemen, what bring you to ...' " What brings you to this place? I've never seen you here before. When you see someone like you, you don't forget it. You just don't. Eine lange Zeit her ich bin gereist...

"Three and a half years! For three and a half years Mr. Horvath is forced to ..." Thirty-five schillings seems a fair price for beer this good. Do you know we can't get good Austrian beer in the States? Amerikanisches Bier ist nicht...

"They could have kill him." ft kills me not to be able to explain the effect you have. On me, of course, but on everyone. Look around you. Look at those guys at the bar; they feel it too. Ich bin nur tapfer genug Dich anzusprechen, und sie waren es nicht.

"My family is Jewish. Who was worst, my father was often ask, the Nazis or the Communists? He always say: The Nazis put me in camp and say they will destroy me; then the Communists put me in camp and say they will teach me be a better man. At least, my father say"—a broad and wisely ironic smile from her at this point, and the hair seemed even more tightly pulled back until Charles expected to see actual popping depilations from the puckered flesh—"at least the Nazis were honest with me."

Charles gave Krisztina a look that he hoped would express: his sympathy; his quiet wonder; his eagerness to speak, work with, and give vast quantities of money to such a man as saintly Imre Horvath; his hope that her father lived and prospered still and was not plagued all his life by terrible guilt for the price his employer paid on his behalf; and finally his polite and understandable desire that she shut up now and bring in the main guy so Charles could find out where and why this particular clown show would hemorrhage any money his firm transfused into it. Then Charles could stage his own daring escape in the nick of time, narrowly making the express train to Innsbruck.