Prague (5 page)

The old man rose and turned. Hair grew from his ears, and he hadn't

shaved that day; whiskers lodged in deep diagonal furrows. He nodded and moved his lips in the way that had seemed so unpleasant the night before but was now somehow different; the action no longer disgusted John. It now seemed to reflect something other than a need to adjust dentures or savor brandy. John imagined words caught behind the lips; he felt certain Szabo was trying or hoping to say something. He stared with an expression John took to be one of longing, but after a moment the old man just went to the sofa and lay down on his stomach, his head tucked under his arm, turned away from the room.

The son found the new subtenant on the balcony, leaning against the rail, facing into the apartment, watching the old man apparently asleep. "Okay, Janos! Good," the younger Dezso pronounced. He shook John's hand, then re-entered to poke his father in the ribs. The old man mumbled in Hungarian and sat up sluggishly but did not stand. The son spoke briskly, gestured to John and the door, obviously time to go. The father responded angrily: He stared at the floor but now shouted his responses. The tone changed rapidly to an argument, which swelled and darkened into a storm front with a speed that surprised John. He remained leaning backward out over traffic, as far as he could be from the squall without leaving the apartment. He did consider leaving, but that would have required passing right by the raging Magyars on the way to the door, making a show of his departure while they argued, which they might read as an effort to make them feel bad for impinging on the "wealthy" American's time, so he stayed where he was, leaned against the balustrade, stared at the men in uncomprehending embarrassment.

The son raised his arms in exasperation and made the sound of air being let out of a tire. He half turned toward the balcony and yelled, "Okay. 'Bye-bye, Janos. Phone if needs," and tossed John the keys: a small apartment key and a two-and-a-half-pound skeleton key for the building's converted carriage door. The old man did not move as his son left. John heard the enormous front door of the building open beneath him. Over his railing he saw the man stride to his green Trabant, lean against its hood, and light a cigarette.

Behind John, the old man was up and off the sofa, pulling something off the wardrobe's top shelf. He yelled, "Amerikai, fur Sie," and then some Hungarian. John stood on the threshold of the French doors, shrugging the apologetic shrug he had mastered whenever someone insisted on speaking to him in Hungarian. The old man held two framed pictures. After a deliberation, he placed one on top of the cable box and the other on the bedside table next to

the lamp. He stretched his arms out to the two pictures, his fingers spread wide and his palms facing the frames, clearly to say: Leave them like that.
"Igen? IgenP

"Ja. Igen."

He shook John's hand without looking at him and left. John retreated from the closing door back to the railing, even more uncomfortable in the empty apartment than during the packing or the fighting. The echo of the front door rose again from the street. The old man shuffled down the sidewalk and folded himself into his son's passenger seat. The Trabant burped and choked, slowly joined the boulevard's traffic. Cartoon clouds of black smoke marked its path from curbside to disappearance.

John examined the decorations he had agreed to maintain. On the cable box, a black-and-white photograph in a size format he had never seen before: a baby, no more than two or three weeks old, in a bundle of blankets, photographed from above, crying, its eyes shut tight, tiny fists flailing. Next to the sofa, again in an odd size and in black and white, a gold-painted wooden frame embracing a young woman in a white dress. No great beauty, no aura of magic or romance. Just a woman standing in front of a tree, her hands behind her back, her dress probably not fashionable at any period or in any country.

THE
  
PARTY
  
HAD
  
STARTED
  
AT
  
THE
  
GERBEAUD
  
AND
  
THEN
  
ROLLED
  
INTO
  
A

restaurant, the Hungarian name of which was slippery now, burrowing slickly under the surface of John's memory as he lay on the still-folded sofa bed.

Emily had sat squeezed between two of Scott's students, at the far splinters of the long wooden table. Hungarian folk musicians careened in and away, so John could rarely hear her, but a visionary director had framed her with Hungarian diners and wandering waiters and posters of caped horsemen and garlands of smoke and the noise of foreign talk and foreign music, and every time he raised his eyes, she had just discovered some never-before-seen and heartbreakingly charming gesture or facial expression. She leaned back laughing, caught him watching her, and waved, the first of many times.

"So what was our Scott like when he was boy?" a student asked John.

"I was six hundred pounds," Scott replied before the same answer could be given seriously, and the crowd laughed at the impossibility. John would have protected him, resented the unnecessary maneuver.

"He was like a god to me," John said, watching Emily. "Like a god of war, unfortunately."

"Right after I was born, I urged my mother to have her tubes tied, but to no avail."

Charles explained to Scott's Hungarians why their country was doomed to eternal poverty, conquest, betrayal, and the students nodded and mashed out their cigarettes and rolled new ones and absolutely agreed, liked Charles for understanding how things really were, despite being American. "Oh come on, no," Emily insisted, and John's heart spun on its axis. "Don't you listen to that kind of talk." Hungary had an opportunity it had never had before, a totally new and unique moment in human history. John seconded her, happy to share with her Charles's and the Hungarians' condescension.

There had been a peculiar salad, lettuce tossed with a mixture of unlikely or unrecognizable components, then the ubiquitous paprikas and vineyards of Hungarian wine. Gabor simply kept ordering more. It wasn't bad, and only 118 forints a bottle, somewhere under two dollars, a price John found more and more hilarious as the evening progressed. He discoursed on the uncanny symbolism of Americans taking advantage of post-Communist exchange rates to drink too much Hungarian wine. The significant details of that symbolism, insightful and amusing to his drinking audience, subsequently grew wings and escaped, could not be recaptured. Later, at A Hazam, a nightclub, Mark had called John a genius, but it was not clear why.

Now, in his new apartment, as he lay for the first time on the old man's sofa bed, and horns and motors vibrated the air from three stories down, John had no recollection whatsoever of the dance club, could only recall that Emily was with them for a while and then was not. He had a vague notion that Mark had walked him home, had made him take two aspirin and drink an entire glass of water in a single go. John had slept fitfully, spinning a few revolutions on his way in and out of slumber, to which he now returned.

He dreamed of the woman on his bedside table. She stood in front of her tree, and Hungarian folk musicians were visible off in the distance, in an open field. She rocked a bundle of blankets in her arms and smiled at John with infinite tenderness and love. He knew that all was well in his life, knew his life would be happy and satisfying forever now that it was beginning at last, and he walked to her, each step marking an irrevocable commitment and commencement. She inclined her head to the blankets. "Amerikai. Fur sie," she said. "Igen," John said. "Ja." She handed him the bundle. Carefully cradling it, he parted the

blankets at the head, but found he was holding only the photo of the crying baby. He was surprised that he was not greatly surprised. He tickled the chin of the child in the photo and rocked the bundle lovingly, though he wondered if his actions would make the woman love him less or more. He was nervous to look at her lest he discover that all was not still well in his life, but finally he could not put off the moment any longer. He looked up, ready to kiss her, but she had left.

WHATEVER
  
SAFETY
  
PRECAUTIONS
  
MARK
  
PAYTON
  
HAD TAKEN
  
IN
  
GRADUATE

school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient.

"Extraordinary creativity in research methodology" was a professor's assessment of Payton's doctoral work. The excitable professor had been referring to Mark's scholarly visits to museum gift shops, art-house and revival movie theaters, travel agencies, postcard and poster manufacturers, the airless and depressing conventions of collectors of sundry valuable and valueless oddities, and antique stores, among other outlets of nostalgia. There was not an antique shop in Toronto or Montreal that had not received the peculiar letter, requesting highly specific information: ". . . categorized records of old orders and sales, organized by year . . . shifts in popularity of certain items/eras as listed below ... sudden spikes in demand for particular styles ... paintings organized by subject, rather than artist... the enclosed checklist comparing sales of specified items in ten-year intervals ..." The letters were followed by visits from a pale, overweight, jarringly eager red-haired student with a slight tic in his left eyelid.

In this fieldwork, Mark had grown familiar with all the major Canadian species of antiquarian: rude, barely literate pawnbrokers who seemed to hate their buyers, their sellers, and their business but who wore old-fashioned visors and vests that were marks of nostalgia in themselves; reflexively, calibratedly untruthful jewelers with wrinkles around only one eye, a professional hazard from hours and weeks and years of squinting through loupes; furniture refin-ishers, as chummy as used-car salesmen, who spoke in broad accents about the Second Umpire and Louie Cans; matrons with two hundred years of regal and fanciful china patterns archived in their memories, driving from their heads the names of their own husbands, children, grandchildren; buxom, middle-aged

divorcees who had invested their savings and alimony payments in a long-held dream but a bad idea and so ended up running discomfortingly clean but bizarrely stocked shops with names like The Den of Antiquity, Ancient Chinese Secret, Bea's Hive, and Mother's Attic; dust-covered booksellers, their skin like vellum paper, their eyes compensating for the aridity of their shops with excessive wetness; statue specialists, little round men distinguishable from the plaster Cupids that made up their stock only by their waistcoats and their ability to walk and speak.

The questions Mark asked of this core sampling of history merchants brought him overflowing data, which filled notebooks and computer diskettes by the hogshead, by the peck, by the avoirdupois ounce.

To quantify nostalgia, to graph it backward into the misty and sweet-smelling past, to enumerate its causes and its expressions and its costs, to determine the nature of societies and personalities most affected by the disorder—these were Mark Payton's obsessions, and he wove academic laurels from their leaves. He strained to establish laws as measurable and irrefutable as the laws of physics or meteorology. He strove, for example, to determine whether there was, within a given population, a ratio, p/c, that could predict the relationship between individuals with a "strong" or "very strong" leaning to Personal Nostalgia (i.e., nostalgia for events within one's own past) and those with a commensurate leaning to Collective Nostalgia (i.e., nostalgia for eras or styles or places that were outside of one's personal experience). In other words, if you were likely to be affected by recollections of your Hungarian grandmother's sour cherry soup served in the Herend bowl with the ladybug at the bottom, were you more or less likely to feel fondness for movies that treated with tender, nearly eroticized affection the life of English aristocrats in their country houses prior to the First World War? Payton felt certain he could arrive at a predictable ratio p/m, the relationship between a strong tendency to Personal Nostalgia and the possession of an objectively good Memory. Either hypothesis (that the relationship was direct, or that it was inverse) seemed feasible to him. Finally, the ratio c/h, the relationship of an individual's propensity to Collective Nostalgia and his or her actual Historical Knowledge of the place-era for which he or she felt this nostalgia, was theoretically determinable, and here the scholar strongly suspected an inverse proportion: The less you knew about life in those country houses, the more you wished you had lived there.

His research produced more questions than answers, but he had been

forced by finicky academia to restrain his noisy and intrusive curiosity for the sake of a degree; his dissertation was necessarily limited to issues of methodology and quantifiable measurement in Vacillations of Collective Popular Retrospective Urges in Urban Anglophone Canada, 1980-1988. But now he was free to answer everything. The work that had brought him to Europe would sate the ravenous why that lurked behind his tangible discoveries.