Prague (47 page)

IMRE
  
SELECTED
  
FOR
  
THEIR
  
MEETING
  
A
  
SMALL
  
AND
  
DINGY
  
COFFEE
  
SHOP

wafting bleach and wet cat, a mystifying, willfully weird choice of locale as far as Charles was concerned. "I signed comparable papers just there, in that build-

ing," Imre explained. He pointed across the one-way street to the pocked offices he had entered the afternoon of his father's funeral to receive the rusty keys to his crumbling kingdom.

"Did you? Well, I don't expect you'll sign anything today." Charles withdrew from his leather case the deck of papers his lawyer had delivered at the garden gala the night before. He laid them on the ringed and burned simulated marble. "Why don't you look these over at your leisure and then initial at all these little yellow tags: here, here, and here, and sign there. You date that and then another initial there and then sign the bid application there and there. Krisztina can run them over to Neville's office."

"My father's attorney became my attorney this day, you understand. It was a very strange moment." Imre sipped his coffee and, surprising Charles, thoughtfully removed his cigaresque fountain pen from an interior pocket. "I had known this moment would come, of course. I must have waited for years for this day to come. Still, one is always a bit surprised when it happens."

Charles blindly agreed. "But wouldn't you want some more time to look these over?"

"Yes, yes." The older man tapped his capped pen on the pages, but still he looked through the sun-sparkled dusty window and across the street. He poked his pastry with his fork and a crack appeared across its fitted top sheet of amber caramel. "You are in a similar position today as I was then; it is remarkable." "Of course." Charles composed his face in accord with Imre's melodrama. "How I could have been happy on such a day, I cannot now say. But I certainly was. And this city, this wreck of a ship that once was proud—I was happy to be a help rebuilding this ship. It was a wonderful time to live here, to tell the truth. Today is not so different. To rebuild. To know your role."

Through the window, Imre considered the building that had once housed his family's fortunes, and the shade of that July morning, altered from its years of wandering, appeared to him. He remembered the obvious significance that had filled the room. His father's lawyer had hesitated: Would this young man rise to the occasion? Imre had been tangibly transformed by the very act of signing; his signature itself was a voyage across an invisible frontier—the trip from the left side of the empty line to the right, leaving a curving black trail behind him. A swirl of black ink and the conclusive stabbing slash of the accent mark on Horvdth—'—made him a symbol of something important and large. Everyone in the room had understood.

Charles chafed, not for the first time, at the similarity of his and Imre's

suits, both a light tan twill this morning, though Imre's was double-breasted. It irritated Charles to be dressed similarly to anyone else in a room. It implied a slipping market value for his uniqueness and made him feel as if he were talking to a child who had just learned to annoy through mimicry.

Imre rose from the table and walked to the window, where backward letters and old webs and clots of dust cast shadows on his face. He absently carried his fork and left his pen on the table with the partnership agreement and the privatization application. "The weather comes back to me, very distinct. Sun, some clouds, terribly hot. I smelled something bad in the courtyard of the office building, old rubbish in the heat. My father's lawyer wore trousers sewed together from scraps. We all did in these days, though some of us wore them better than others, I may say to you of all people. The most important day of your life, a wonderful moment, but to know it as it happens, you feel like God Himself is holding you up in His hand. I knew the importance, that Imre the man was now secondary to the future of this... You are the same. You are learning this." He spoke with his back to the younger man, stared at the large, dark brown bricks across the street. "Each of us together—ohhh, listen to me. Show me where to sign and we will get on with it." He did not turn from the window, though.

"Good Christ, it took some strange twists and turns, but it's done," Charles told John later that day as he handed him a light blue check, the flimsy, thin equivalent of seven months' salary at BudapesToday. 'After all that, he barely read what he signed. Just challenged sections at random. But he kept misting over with memory while I told him where to initial. How the hell he managed to run anything for forty years is beyond me. Hey, did I tell you that two of my investors quoted your profile of me back to me when they signed on?"

John squinted and held the check up to the shower of glaring gold arrows shooting off the river and streaming into Charles's office. The paper cast a light blue rectangular shadow across John's eyes and nose. Its watermark—two sirens kissing the cheeks of a surprised sailor, his mouth and eyes perfect O's of astonishment—vanished and reappeared as John passed the slip back and forth between himself and the light.

"I'm going to miss this view." Charles slapped his palms against the giant window. He had succeeded, and would soon resign, revealing to his flummoxed, flabby firm that he had accomplished in his spare time what they couldn't manage during business hours. He had tricked sufficient funds from the pockets of various missionaries of money, and, with Imre's unexpected initials that morn-

IM
 
I
  
UKIHUK

ing, that consortium had become the 49 percent shareholder (with the entire 49 percent of the voting rights held by Charles) of a new Hungarian company comprising Horvath Verlag (Vienna), Charles's sizable infusion of other people's investment, and Imre's privatization vouchers (hardly a windfall, just the gesture of a proud but impoverished government). Gabor had, at the last moment, instructed his attorney to augment the company's wealth with the nearly worthless vouchers issued to his own parents for their childhood apartments. He was now the highly influential junior partner of something very real.

For two days, however, John did not cash his check—payment for "press relations consulting"—or send it to his bank in the States. Something about depositing it put him off; it was too abrupt, a farewell to the watermark, he joked to himself, that he was not yet prepared to make. Two nights the sirens kissed their sailor and John considered. Two days, he kept the paper in his wallet, and at odd times—while typing at the office, tippling at the Gerbeaud, tupping at Nicky's—he imagined the watermark—two-dimensional, pale, fluid—come to life in his pocket: the sirens' streaming hair, the soft lips on the cheeks of the startled mariner, the sailor's desire to seize them both in aqua-carnal embrace battling with his knowledge of their power, his inevitable surrender. "Kiss me, my siren," John murmured to the bald and naked woman painting by 3 A.M. lamplight on the third night. She had thought he was asleep. Trembling slightly at his voice, she coldly told him to leave and sleep at home. He liquidated his tormented sailor the next morning.

MARK'S
  
ABSENCE,
  
AFTER
  
TEN
  
DAYS
  
AND
  
SIX
   
UNRETURNED
  
PHONE
   
MES-

sages, John diagnosed as unmistakable stage-two Visiting Family Syndrome. The symptoms were now easily recognizable in the plague-ravaged community. Stage one: murmured references to "a busy week ahead," increasing quietness, sporadic personality aberrations (irritability, childishness, hysteria, isolation). Stage two: total disappearance for five to fourteen days, except (possibly) for hurried introductions of friends to jet-lagged, shy, elderly people with peculiar or nonexistent senses of humor. Stage three: sudden and boisterous return to society with exaggerated ubiquity and gluttonous appetite for drinking, dancing, and romance; and a twitchy, logorrheic rhapsodizing over the joys of living single in Budapest.

John would have much to report when Mark recuperated. Charles Gabor had quit his job, to the dumb amazement of the Presiding Vice, and now had fifteen days to move out of the bungalow his firm had bought him. In depositing his check, John had added nicely to his annual income, but could not think of anything to acquire except perhaps a rocket pack with which to soar high over Budapest, orange cones of flame propelling him—a legend of the expat-journo scene—on his cometlike way. He would consult with Mark on how best to be rich, since the Canadian carried it off with such aplomb. And Mark would learn Charles had also soared high above the rooftops, courtesy of John, Ted Win-ston, a squadron of felonious gentlemen on Wall Street, and the insatiable appetite and daffy logic of the American news machine, which in this case John himself had tickled into action with a series of pieces as the deal heated up:

... Finally, for those of you following my ongoing coverage of the capitalist who saved Hungarian culture, my sources tell me the Gdbor-Horvdth bid to reclaim the ancestral institution is in to the government, and the money-famished Maggies find it extremely compelling. Other bidders should think twice or three times before bothering to challenge these zealots. "There are lots of marvelous other properties to be bid at," 1 was told by one highly placed representative of the State Privatization Agency, sounding very much like an ungrammatical used-car salesman gearing up for a holiday weekend...

. . . If such a thing were possible, the news is even more humiliating from some of their overseas ventures. In Budapest, for example, after several months of apparent paralysis, during which time the firm seemed unable to kickstart any projects, a junior associate of the firm has now resigned in unmistakable frustration with his do-nothing employers and is leading his own efforts at rejuvenating an old Hungarian publishing house. This story, carried in the local English-language paper for several weeks, came to international attention in light of recent investigations of the firm's U.S. dealings by the federal prosecutor's office, led by an attorney whose political aspirations are hardly a closely guarded...

. . . And, on a lighter note, one of our own young Cleveland men is showing what's possible with a little imagination, some money, some nerve, and a whole bunch of American-style idealism and Lake Erie can-do. Carl Maxwell has the story from the fine old city of Budapest, the capital of the nation of Hungary, located far away in Eastern Europe. Carl?...

And, in expectation of continued payments, John strove, inside his column and out, to keep Charles's success churning along. He swallowed hard and played the role of hearty networker on Charles's behalf, harvesting rich

people and Hungarian government officials unearthed in the course of interviews and stories. More entertainingly, he prepared descriptions for Mark's amusement of these inane introductions and repetitive conversations, of the faux-macho manner and the coy behavior. "I turn out to be a very gifted pimp," John planned to tell his friend. "It's a noble profession, with a great history."

But Scott's wedding day arrived, and that evening Charles reported to the uninvited John that Mark had been notably absent from the small ceremony. Charles, in an attack of sensitivity John found almost funny, did not mention John's absence but produced instead an amusing edition of the nuptials, highlights selected especially for him: Emily had worn a broad, round straw hat, a sundress, and sandals that crisscrossed her brown ankles. "In other words, she looked like she was auditioning for a douche ad." The church was scarcely occupied: Charles and Emily, a few English teachers, a half dozen of his students, a quartet of Maria's sultry friends, and seven of her relatives. The groom, wearing traditional Hungarian formalwear, stood between Maria's brothers, two fire hydrants wrapped in Hungarian Army dress uniform. "It looked like a capital punishment trial." The Catholic ceremony was aggressively lengthy. Hymns swelled and rolled infinitely on like symphonies, sermons droned like college lectures, blessings passed like merger-and-acquisition negotiations. The congregation rose and stood until Charles's legs ached and shook and he struggled to straighten his spine. The congregation sat immobile until his buttocks melted away against the smooth wooden bench transubstantiated into steaming concrete. Some hours and one kiss later, they were directed just next door, to the Hilton's patio. Under a yellow-striped canopy supported by metal poles flaking white paint and sporting little Hungarian flags on their ends, four tables were set with lunch, slightly to one side of identical tables serving identical lunch to tourists intimidated and exhilarated by the sudden apparition of verifiably non-tourist life.

And that was all John ever learned of his brother's wedding. He had not spoken to the groom or seen him since the engagement was announced a month earlier. He certainly hadn't received a written invitation as others had. But he also had failed to congratulate his brother after the purple-mustache fiasco, and perhaps that's all it would have required. But now, after so many years of pursuit, that had been more than he could muster. It didn't matter. Seriousness was certainly elsewhere.