Authors: Arthur Phillips
When he did, the two women were discussing his recent column about Nadja herself. "Dear John Price," she said, and patted his hand in exchange for her Rob Roy. "You made me sound rather too intriguing, I think, but that is a very petty complaint, isn't it? Far better to be too grand than too dull, yes?" She smiled at Emily. "Your friend was just claiming that she is some sort of servant to your ambassador."
"Well, not a servant precisely."
"Then what, precisely?" Nadja clinked Emily's glass with her own and her lips turned up so sharply, she seemed about to burst out laughing.
"Well, I manage his schedules, and I do run a few errands, of course."
"My dear, why would they have a lovely girl like you do such things?"
"I'm a very detail-orientated person ... I—"
"Oh, let me just speculate for an instant: You meet all sorts of fascinating people, and they are amazed that the ambassador's servant is such a charming and well-informed girl. And these fascinating people open their hearts to you all the time."
"I think I am a good listener. I really do. And I do meet some interesting people, but really it's more like arranging luncheon place-settings."
"Are you hearing this, John Price?" And Nadja did begin to laugh, leaning in to touch his hand as if they were in on the same joke. "This is too delicious." John didn't recognize any of this dialogue from his visions for the evening, suspected Nadja might already be drunk.
Emily asked Nadja about her piano training.
"We can talk about me if you want, my dear, but it won't help. Fine: I am mostly self-taught, from records, from listening to others. But"—John leaned imperceptibly closer, hoped that but was the sound of Nadja gaining strength— "but I did have one teacher when I was a girl here in Budapest, and he was an interesting man ..." John breathed deeply, recognized the majestic opening of an ancient gate, the slow revelation of great gardens within. He looked expectantly from Nadja to Emily and back again, somehow feeling that he was the indirect subject of conversation and was about to be vindicated in everyone's estimation. "He was a remarkable man, Konrad. I was ten and he was perhaps thirty-three when he began to teach to me my scales and positions and how to read the notes. He was an elegant man who came into difficult money time in the years following the First War. This would be about, I suppose, 192 5. He was a spy, you see, in the First War." She smiled at Emily, paused for interruptions, but none came. 'As a young piano student, he was living in France when the
war began. He offered his services as a teacher of children, described himself to their parents as a refugee of the wicked Hapsburgs, dreamed up some story of confiscated family land, mistreatment at the hands of jealous rivals, refused to return until his family's holdings are released, and such forth. And by the sheerest coincidence, as you can imagine, Miss Oliver, these children's papas did tend to be French military and government men. A dapper young Hungarian, slightly bohemian, a Chopin type, but still, it would seem, of good breeding and money. They took to him quickly, the parents. And, of course, one does tend to recommend good servants to friends, also military and government, of course."
Emily sipped her spritzer and listened with her charming and flattering intensity. John heard other noise in the room yield and dissipate into a faint rumble far below him.
"Konrad would keep his eyes and ears open. He peeked into desks and rubbish bins when opportunity presented. And he was able to shape allies of his little students, of course. Oh yes, the children hear things, too, and think nothing of sharing it with their friend the piano teacher. Secrets have different qualities to different people, as I'm sure you know." John was glad Nadja was making such an effort to impress Emily, felt she was granting him her approval and pulling out all her best stuff to deliver the girl's heart to him. 'And so revealing a secret has different qualities, too. Two people might reveal the same secret: For one, the revelation is a betrayal; for the other, a game. A child's game. Of course, when a child has someone else's secret, well, that is merely the currency of conversation, a few guineas to buy her some attention and respect. Konrad knew this, and he was very generous and serious in granting of attention and respect. That was his greatest gift, really, not piano playing or teaching. He was the perfect spy of children, could take the dullest child seriously, delicately. Do you know the type?" She sipped her Rob Roy and flushed a cigarette from its pack. John moved quickly to light it for her.
"Oh, I think we all know that type," John replied to the absurd question, and he was pleased that Emily laughed with him. Nadja breathed out smoke, and John watched it curl and weave itself into a net of blue-gray wisps around his circle, watched it filter and softly blur every other person in the club until they became mere color and background.
"He made the child feel important, all grown up. When little Sophie or Genevieve told Konrad that Papa—who was, say, a colonel in a particular regiment—was going to take a trip to Marseilles in a week, Konrad told her he
was duly impressed at the maturity of her conversation. And the wives! Oh yes, of course, the wives. They too found something in the handsome young artiste, the amateur of music, the disinherited and dashing nobleman. Here, again, secrecy is a variable quality. To these wives the piano instructor was a figure of great glamour, but more important, their nearly final opportunity to enjoy life in the open. For these women, married to secretive men, the idea of carrying on a secret affair was an act of candor, not secrecy. With Konrad in their beds, they could speak of anything they wished; he was just the piano teacher, what difference could it make? They did not have to maintain the boring, boring caution and discretion that made up their daily lives and drove them nearly mad with tedium and isolation, you see. These women ached to be whimsical, spontaneous, and, as I am quite sure you know, this is not at all possible if you must watch your every word, screen your every thought." She paused and tasted her Rob Roy. "Dear girl, I hope I am not boring you with things you already know?"
"Not at all," said Emily with great and surprised enthusiasm. "This is amazingly interesting. Go on, please."
Nadja laughed. "These women lived under this terrible burden of their silly husbands' state secrets, and secret burdens, you know, of course, make you old very quickly. These women were reaching that terrible point where youth is harder and harder to see in the mirror. It requires special lights and long coaxing to draw it out from its ever more numerous hiding places. Those are very bad years. You will not like them, Miss Oliver. You know the French words Un secret, c'est une ride? Every secret is a wrinkle. With Konrad, they would cast them all off and they would feel young again. They wished to hold the attention of this young man who could have his choice of women. And they think to themselves, Why should he bother with me, an aging wife of a bureaucrat in the naval ministry? Because she could interest him with funny stories about her husband's colleagues or cynical stories about their incompetent projects and stubborn superiors or disgusted stories of how badly certain elements of the fleet were equipped. Of course, these women were not really disgusted with such things; they merely repeated their husbands' talk. Husbands' secrets became wives' coin for conversation became secrets again for Konrad to dispatch to Vienna, to become coin for him."
Nadja apologized for not doing so earlier and offered Emily a cigarette. The girl shook her head and asked, "So Konrad"—her Midwestern accent produced a decidedly un-Magyar Conrad—"told you all this sexy psychology when you were ten?"
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"No, no, my dear. I learned all of this over quite a spell. We were friends for many years, and more than friends for a brief and very happy period."
"Of course, of course," murmured John, happy to have returned to Nadja's world, where things happened. Nothing (at least nothing serious) happened in his world. He listened to Nadja's past and wished he could reach Emily's hand from where he sat. The lightest touch of her fingers in this air, at this altitude, would burn him and leave a mark forever.
"Did he help the war effort?"
"Your question is a good one, my girl, but only if, as I suspect, you already know the answer: He was of very little use, I would think. Not much accomplished. He always felt his information should have been put to better use, but the empire that paid him was already crumbling, even before the war. His little tidbits snatched from talentless children and unhappy wives could not begin to change that. He certainly didn't change the outcome of the war, did he? I don't know if his carefully coded messages ever saved a Hungarian life, or won a battle, or even improved those ghastly terms of surrender. That is always the plight of the spy: How clever they can be, but how little they can do," she added with a sharp gust of laughter. "They are always surrounded by lovers, though, interestingly. It is only natural, but a terrible cock-up of nature. They are like some infertile animal with beautiful coloring. They attract only because they seem to have a purpose, but they are really the most useless species. It is a terribly silly way to waste one's good years."
John watched Emily's eyes fill with sympathy. "That's kind of terrible. Was he sad when you knew him? Not to have helped more with the war?"
"Sad?" Nadja granted the question a moment's silent attention. "For being a failed spy? No, I shouldn't think so. Dear, the smartest of them grow to realize it is hardly worth bothering with, and he was rather smart. He was sad, I suppose, for some things. He was always unhappy about money. I know he feared growing old. He feared losing piano dexterity and his good looks, which I must say he never did do. He hated the French to the end of his days. People used to call Pest the Paris of the East, you know, and whenever he heard this, he would scowl and bellow, 'Paris should be so lucky!' But to be sad because he did not save his world from destruction by sleeping with middle-aged women and digging in the trash and giving candy to children? Really, Miss Oliver, do you find this sad?"
"Oh, please call me Emily."
The band that evening was entirely Hungarian, older men, professors of
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the music academy. The trumpeter wore a long beard, like a Russian Orthodox monk; from the nose to the chest, he resembled a hand puppet. He murmured something Hungarian into the microphone, and some of the crowd laughed. John—feeling abnormally alert to every vibration around him, awake to every nuance in the room—swirled his Unicum; the twirled liqueur painted melting Romanesque arches on the inside of the glass. The bandleader counted off a tune. It was jazz, but distinctly Hungarian; its rhythm sparkled with shards of something foreign, kicks of Hungarian folk music, the sound of caped horsemen. The melody was in a minor key, with the strange intervals and mournful feel of Eastern European dances, but with the rapid swinging bursts and twisting lines of bebop jazz. John watched the obese pianist perspire to produce this strange new music. He felt that his connection to other people, even to objects, had become, if only temporarily, close but beautiful, not at all constricting. Even his understanding that this feeling was temporary felt like heightened clarity.
"Oh, of course, yes, I've known several spies over the years. They don't have to tell me, though some did. They are not usually difficult to spot, paradoxically. I have always found them—Konrad too—to be rather... well, it is difficult work, I suppose, but it is not for people who wish to live a full life, with closeness to others and to experience. I think they are all a little strange. A little sad, to use your word."
"I suppose so," said Emily. "I suppose that must be true."
John, his eyes on the ceiling, blew a column of smoke directly upward and nodded: true, true, difficult work, strange and sad. Emily sipped her drink and listened to the band, then asked Nadja if she had ever visited the United States. "Oh yes. I lived for many years in San Francisco, playing piano and— very much like I am to believe you do for your ambassador—I was organizing the social calendar of a South Vietnamese general who was living there in a strangely giddy exile after your war. He threw so many, many parties. I remember once ..." John grinned at Emily: Nadja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbable but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nadja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.
And so, having wished Nadja good night and complimented her interlude playing, accepted her thanks for the drinks and the column, having been enclosed by the thick and sticky July midnight, John was surprised and saddened