Prague (56 page)

instead of going home to drink protein shakes and critique slow-motion videos of old races and fall asleep early and alone.

MTV played a pop tune—that song, the one that seemed to be everywhere that season, the song that got under John's skin so that even though he couldn't quite hum it, each time he heard it. he recognized it with the keen sensation of bumping into a well-loved old friend. A lush, romantic composition, its lyrics were hard to understand, but something about loss and rescue caught and stuck in John's head. The music seemed to have been written and recorded solely to reach John in moments of happiness or sadness, camaraderie or solitude, until anything at all memorable about the whole season was accompanied by these sounds crooned by a sultry, six-foot-tall Greenlander, reminding him that rescue was possible, imminent.

And it played the next morning on a radio in the newsroom as he was battling the boredom of an uninspired first paragraph and a snotlily blinking cursor—

As the old joke goes, "Who was that woman I saw you with last night?" "That was no woman: that was a member of the East German women's swim team," The chunky, steroidal mystique of those East Bloc Amazons who haw whupped the be-hinds of our dainty little-girl athletes for the last forty years of international competition is now open to closer investigation, and after being granted unprecedented access \ \ \ \

—when Charles called from the hospital.

25(Q)(!M)-
   
IF
   
DURING
  
THE
   
TERM
   
OF
  
THIS
   
AGREEMENT,
   
EITHER
   
PARTNER

should become disabled so that he is unable to carry out or conduct normal activities and, in consequence, to fulfill the duties or to communicate to others his wishes for the fulfillment of the duties required of him under this agreement, then in such an event ("Incapacity"), the non-disabled Partner or any such other representative as the disabled Partner has previously delegated in writing shall be entitled to have complete authority in the management and operation of the Partnership's affairs, to make all operational decisions in connection with the business of the Partnership without consulting the disabled partner if such consultation is impossible due to Incapacity. Incapacity must be confirmed in writing by an attending or examining physician in the presence of both the non-disabled Partner and the undersigned designated attorney for the

Partnership. Third parties dealing with the Partnership during either Partner's Incapacity are entitled to rely on the signature of the non-disabled Partner, or expressly delegated representative.

JANUARY
 
DIED
 
AND
 
FEBRUARY WAS
 
BORN
 
IN
 
A
 
HOSPITAL THAT
 
FOR
 
ALL
 
ITS

sprawl may as well have been nothing more than a single, echoing, nearly win-dowless corridor and a semi-private, steamy, entirely windowless room, both tiled in dirty white, both smelling strongly then weakly then strongly again of chilling antiseptics and, under thai, something persistently, irredeemably, gleefully septic.

"It's a terrible time for this to happen."

"There is a good time, Mr. Gabor?" Krisztina Toldy did not look at the junior partner.

"Obviously, 1 don't mean to say—"

"We rely on your confidence and knowledge to sustain us for a time. Yes."

"Of course. I merely meant—" In the hallway's erratic fluorescence, her skin was the color of moonlight and the whites of her eyes a bacterial yellow. Charles wished she wore some makeup, even a single flesh-tone smear across the forehead.

Neville interrupted. "I understand his closest family is a distant cousin in Canada. Is that correct. Karoly?"

"Ms. Toldy would know better than I."

Plainly uninterested in the question, she made impatient gestures with her head and feet, eager to return to the invalid's room. "He has no direct family member at all. His will is with the lawyer in Vienna. He has no contacts of the Canadian cousin."

"No heirs," Charles confirmed. "He always spoke to me of Krisztina here as his closest family."

"Speaks, Mr. Gabor. He is not died yet."

"I didn't mean to imply—"

She re-entered Irnre's room.

The hospital was set back from the street, a ring of decrepit brick wards huddled together for warmth around a snowy courtyard with slushy shoveled paths over which bulky male nurses in short-sleeved shirts wheeled stretchers

and chairs from building to building. The compound resembled a nineteenth-century model reformatory that, a century later, had long since grown up and abandoned the ideals of its designers, now reforming none but imprisoning plenty. When John had wandered far enough and asked enough semi-bilingual people and misunderstood enough answers that he finally arrived in the right building, he found Charles seated handsomely on a wooden folding chair in the long corridor immediately outside Horvath's room. The junior partner was examining a sheaf of financial tables supported on a leather portfolio. He touched the capped tip of his pen to the papers with a rhythmic bounce, and his lips moved slightly in silent review of the numerical battalions parading under his command. To his side, between his shoulder and the door frame of Imre's room, a mop sprouted out of a stained white plastic bucket and rested against the tiles, peering nonchalantly over Charles's shoulder, occasionally sliding coquettishly along the wall into him.

John, knowing it was a foolish question, pronounced if like the foolish question it was: "So. are you okay?"

"What? Yeah, whatever. I mean, obviously, you know, it's a terrible thing."

"True."

'And the quality of care here, my God. I think animal-rights people negotiate better hygiene for lab rats. I wouldn't get my hair cut in these conditions, f feel like I might catch a stroke just sitting here. Honest to God. these people."

Halfway down the long, straight corridor (resembling an art student's exercise in Renaissance perspective), a nurse behind a desk quietly sang that song—John's song—and the Hungarian-accented lyrics trickled all the way to him in sporadic whispers: canchoo see. .. therr iss no ans-ser buhchoo. .. we coot be in heh-venn... so losst forr so lung, too menny... She had misheard "I walk all night long, and think only of being us," however, and the words reached John with a key consonant vertically inverted: I wohk oil night lung, end tink only uff

peen-uss.

"What's funny?" Charles squinted at him. "Whatever. They are funny, I suppose, the little things your life hangs from, you know?" Charles ran his hands through his hair, an exotic gesture of tiredness John had never seen Charles allow himself.

"fdo," said John. "These things make you realize it. Are you okay?" He put his hand on the seated man's shoulder.

"I mean, my God. A little, tiny blood vessel bursts and suddenly my young

UK i n UK
 
rn ruin

working days are spent bored to tears here in the scummy, tiled bowels of Boris Karloff Memorial." He fluttered his lips. "Just kidding." John bounced the mop handle from hand to hand.

The stroke had raped and rampaged unnoticed, or at least unreported, for perhaps two days before Horvalh had been found. Tests showed it had probably set to work in earnest the previous Friday. Krisztina had been visiting family in Gyor; Charles had been in Vienna on press business; Imre, alone in Budapest, had most likely suffered all weekend from symptoms he chose not to take seriously. By the lime he was tripped over by Charles on Monday morning, at least some of the opportunities to forestall neurological damage had been lost. The doctors were vague; Charles grumbled that their artful evasions would have gotten them booed out of a first-year case study discussion section. In hurried, hushed conferences, the physicians warmed one another with a spirited discussion on the likelihood of potential "damage to speech" as opposed to "damage to language," a distinction Charles would have found obscure even if Imre were not now comatose for the third consecutive day. "He'll wake up when he is ready, we think," offered one of the doctors, gently placing a reassuring hand on Charles's biceps. "Yes, of course." Charles had cooed, patting the pale and furry paw on his arm. "Growing boys need lots of sleep."

"The poor old guy," he sighed to John. "Honest to Cod, what a mess for him. I almost feel like I should have known. Do you think I should've known? He was telling me a story the other night in the office and he didn't remember he'd already told it to me. like, the day before." Charles drafted John to fill his hall seat for a few afternoons while he steered the press on his own. John was to call Gabor's mobile phone if anything at all should change. Over the following days, when bored, John did phone in reports on lightbulbs being replaced and the disappointing progress of the abandoned mop. Once Harvey answered the phone, and though he put John right through to Charles. John forgot his joke and didn't call again.

Attempting to balance on the back legs of the folding chair, John slowly realized he was expected to maintain his respect ful orbit and not stray too close to the flickering sun. As a Karoly proxy, he was allowed to sit on Karoly's wooden chair in the hall and listen helplessly to doctors conferring in Hungarian. Krisztina Toldy, however, sat inside the room by Imre's bed, consulted actively with the doctors, and said little or (more often) nothing to John as she entered and exited the patient's room and very delicately closed the door behind her.

HMU U L
     
1
     
J If

He read. He jotted notes for columns. He wandered to the very end of the telescoping hall to look out the single dirty window, through the chain-link barrier just beyond its glass, onto Ihe courtyard and the shuttered, smoke-stacked factory across the street. Every day when he turned the corner and approached the hospital, he tried to calculate from the ground where this window was. The building did not seem long enough to contain the hall; the walk from wooden chair to window required a conscious mustering of boredom-inspired energy. When he returned from these cheerless treks, he would look at his watch, then close his eyes and try to guess when thirty seconds or a minute had passed. He was rarely even close; his internal time mechanism seemed to be made of rusty springs and sticky, rickety joints turning gelatinous cogs. How many golf balls could you fit in this hall? And Krisztina Toldy would come out of Imre's room and John would raise his eyebrows to ask, What news? And she would pass down the hall without making eye contact, and he would suddenly feel accused of dark misdeeds, would imagine she thought all he wanted was the news of Imre's death at last, as if he were there for nothing else and Charles wanted nothing more than the old man's demise reported quick-quick over the mobile phone.

After five afternoons the mop still had not changed position, and John wondered whether its operator had quit or if the families of post-Communist patients were expected to pitch in and mop the halls a bit for the length of their loved ones' visits. It finally occurred to John, looking at the bucket water, which had darkened in his days of surveillance, that he could write a column on this little outpost of authentic Hungariana where no comfortable expat would ever have cause to visit. It would be a burning expose of a scandalous situation, and belter yet, it would be an impassioned plea for Western help in resuscitating the once strapping medical establishment of plucky, unlucky Hungary. This would debut a startling new direction in his work. Purified in the while flame of protest and sizzling with emotion, he would join his generation in improving the world. lie opened his notebook and tapped his pen against his teeth. Sometime later, Krisztina emerged and mutely glided down the hall toward the ele-valor; it was not a bathroom or telephone trip. She would be gone awhile.

Smocked Imre lay on top of the covers; a smoothly folded blanket draped across his feet and lower legs. Fluids traveled at different speeds along a network of predictable tubes. No television chattered, only elderly machines that blinked and beeped unobtrusively. John was surprised to sit on just another folding wooden chair: he had assumed a better place back here. From the other

M n i n u it

side of a stained white curtain floated other beeps, half a heartbeat slower than Imrc's. The two machines—Trnre's and the shrouded unknown's—beeped twice in unison, then the hidden one fell slightly behind, a little more each time (beep-p... beep-eep... beep-beep... beep—beep... beep——beep ... beep— ———bee-beep) until it had fallen so far behind that it collided into Imre's oncoming beep and merged slowly again into temporary unison.